"Sceptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a matter of course, in the mind of Mitri; and he was by no means prepared to receive it, since the priest, for the triumph of his congregation, was certain to demand a public ceremony, and Iskender feared the scorn of his Emir, whom he imagined to be something of a sceptic. ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... self-centred. His chief purpose in life was not to know himself, but to give pleasure to his friends. If he was bored by Montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity. Like Montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in his literary tastes. That he was no sceptic but a disciple as regards Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Gray suggests, on the other hand, how foolish it is to regard him as being ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... who could not sympathise with his views, it will be seen that Herbert, in attempting to fulfil them, became not merely passively noxious from his example, but actively mischievous from his exertions. A mere sceptic, he would have been perhaps merely pitied; a sceptic with a peculiar faith of his own, which he was resolved to promulgate, Herbert became odious. A solitary votary of obnoxious opinions, Herbert would have been looked upon only as a madman; ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... considerations on physical suffering, the case between a theist and a sceptic as to the question of divine beneficence is seen to be a case of extreme simplicity. The theist believes in such beneficence by purposely concealing from his mind all adverse evidence—feeling, on the one side, that to entertain ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... Christ's teaching is the case) the righteous society to be established upon earth, then they all have a plain and beautiful meaning; a meaning well summed up in that saying so often quoted against us by the sceptic and the atheist, 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you;' or, in other words, 'Live,' Christ said, 'all of you together, not each of you by ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... straight, If bread and butter wanted weight; And wisely tell what hour o' th' day The clock does strike by algebra. Beside, he was a shrewd philosopher, And had read ev'ry text and gloss over; Whate'er the crabbed'st author hath, He understood b' implicit faith: Whatever sceptic could inquire for, For every why he had a wherefore, Knew more than forty of them do, As far as words and terms could go. All which he understood by rote, And as occasion serv'd, would quote: No matter whether right or wrong, They must be ...
— English Satires • Various
... me! the laurel wreath that Murder rears, Blood-nursed, and watered by the widow's tears, Seems not so foul, so tainted, and so dread, As waves the nightshade round the sceptic head. ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... nearly a week afterwards, and was perfectly astounded when told by his wife and family what he had been doing on that particular evening; and, although previous to that date he was a thorough sceptic as to clairvoyance, he frankly admitted that my clairvoyant was perfectly correct in every particular. He also informed us that the book referred to was a new one, which he had purchased after he had left his home, so that there was no possibility ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... they ne'er were chilled, By sceptic spell were never stilled; Take me to that far-offshore, Where lovers meet to part no more; There doubt, and fear and sin are o'er, The star of love shall ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... They are believed to exist in subtile forms. (Really, if a belief in deities divested of gross material forms does no violence to their reason, why should the existence of an immaterial Soul alone do their reason such violence)? Another argument against the sceptic is that his proposition implies a destruction of acts (for if body and Soul die together, the acts also of this life would perish,—a conclusion which no man can possibly come to if he is to explain the inequalities or condition witnessed in the universe).[805] These ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... witchcraft, than to procure the enlargement of the accused persons whose cause they had nominally espoused. At this period it was indeed dangerous to be a wizard, but it was perhaps still more dangerous to pose as an avowed sceptic of witchcraft. At the end of the fifteenth century the frequency of executions for sorcery in the north of Italy had provoked a strong outburst of popular feeling against this wanton bloodshed; but Spina, writing in the interest of orthodox religion, deplores that ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... great measure on this lady, assisted by her daughter; and, it must be said, that if any one could have doubted the antiquity of this honourable race after an hour's conversation with this enthusiastic pair he must have been a sceptic indeed! Family pride is a common weakness, but one could almost call it the stronghold of Mrs. Rice Rice, just as the various archaeological and historical glories of Wales and the Welsh was the fortress of ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... was living in furnished lodgings in an alley off the Rue St. Pierre, and living by borrowing. The gentlemanly sceptic owed his landlady a good deal of money; his clothes were aged past wearing, and his tailor had long ago broken off all relations with him. The Marquis d'Aubremel was within a hairsbreadth of that utterly crushed state that ends ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... of Christianity, and manifesting a contempt for Moslem virtues. While he drank wine—and in many other breaches of the teachings of the sacred book provoked the faithful—his proclamations breathed a most orthodox and fanatical spirit. He was a sceptic; neither Mussulman nor Christian, but surprisingly inconsistent and capricious. His, we fear, were 'hangman's hands,' and 'not ordained to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Heaven forbid, (cry'd the Father) sure 'tis impossible. All Things are so to the Incredulous. Look you, Sir, (continu'd she, seeing Lewis's Servant come in) do you remember his French Servant Albert, whom he took some Months before he left England?—There he is. Humh! (said the old Sceptic) I think verily 'tis the same. Ay, Sir, (said the Servant) I am the same, at your Service. How does your Master? (ask'd Sir Henry) Almost as bad as when the 'Squire your Son left him, (reply'd Albert) only I have stopp'd the Bleeding, and he is now dozing ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... pleasure to see how Pentaur's life contradicted the belief in a just and beneficent ordering of the destinies of men; and the more he and the poet were oppressed, the more bitter was the irony, often amounting to extravagance, with which the mocking sceptic attacked him. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... age man has been apt to dream uneasily, rolling from side to side, beating against imaginary bars, unless, tired out, he has sunk into indifference or scepticism. Religious minds prefer scepticism. The true saint is a profound sceptic; a total disbeliever in human reason, who has more than once joined hands on this ground with some who were at best sinners. Bernard was a total disbeliever in Scholasticism; so was Voltaire. Bernard brought the society of his time to share his scepticism, but could give the society ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... compassion which she, the young condottiera of Algeria, showed with so tender a charity to the soldier of Bonaparte. To him, moreover, her fiery imperious voice was gentle as the dove, her wayward dominant will was pliant as the reed, her contemptuous sceptic spirit was reverent as a child's before an altar. In her sight the survivor of the Army of Italy was sacred; sacred the eyes which, when full of light, had seen the sun glitter on the breastplates of the Hussars of Murat, the Dragoons of Kellerman, the Cuirassiers ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... stable. Sent by his father to Lausanne, in Switzerland, to be under the religious training of a Protestant minister, he changed his opinions, and became again a Protestant. His convictions, however, were once more shaken, and, at the last, he became a man of no creed, a sceptic of the school of Voltaire, a creature of the age of illumination. Many passages of his history display a sneering unbelief, which moves some persons more powerfully than the subtlest argument. This modern Platonist, beginning with sensation, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... something of scorn. "Naturally! Are you still so much of a sceptic that you think an ANGEL would have bidden you seek a place that had no existence? Oh, yes! I see you are inclined to treat your ethereal adventure as a mere dream,— but I know it was a reality, more real than anything ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... remains some sceptic, who doubts of our primary truth, and of all deductions we make, taking such truth as our standard, he must either be arguing in bad faith, or we must confess that there are men in complete mental blindness either innate or due to misconceptions - that is, to some external influence. (2) ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... devout mind which such a study requires) the youth found himself at the end of one month a Papist, and was about to proclaim his faith; the next month a Protestant, with Chillingworth; and the third a sceptic, with Hobbes and Bayle. Whereas honest Tom Tusher never permitted his mind to stray out of the prescribed University path, accepted the Thirty-nine Articles with all his heart, and would have signed and sworn to other nine-and-thirty with entire obedience. Harry's wilfulness in this ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... again ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres (bread and wine) may be translated literally by the modern Protestant; and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed, the modern sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to destroy an idol, when another, or the same in another form, takes immediate ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... as if she had been his own child. His love transformed him from a mere student of men to a man like all others. He who had always been, so far as his emotional nature was concerned, apart from the rest of his kind, was, in the end, one with them. From being a sceptic on the subject, he was converted into a firm believer in human passion. With the zeal usually attributed to converts, he became as warm in his praise of the emotions as he had before been indifferent in his estimation of them. This change is greatly to Mary's ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... "Representative Men," makes Montaigne stand for The Sceptic. Sceptic Montaigne was. He questioned, he considered, he doubted. He stood poised in equilibrium, in indifference, between contrary opinions. He saw reasons on this side, but he saw reasons also on that, and he did not clear his mind. "Que scai-je?" was his ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... that thought he became aware that it was familiar to him already in all its consequences. This circumstance strengthened his conviction immensely, but also augmented his indignation. Somebody, he felt, ought to be punished for it—punished with great severity. Being no sceptic, but a moral creature, he was in a manner at the ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Roman Emperor to sail for New Zealand. I had said them the night before and doubted not that I was always going to say them as I always had done hitherto. That night, I suppose, the sense of change was so great that it shook them quietly off. I was not then a sceptic; I had got as far as disbelief in infant baptism but no further. I felt no compunction of conscience, however, about leaving off my morning and evening prayers—simply I could no longer ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... be a textbook for young ladies studying English in a convent. 'Candide' is a marvel of clearness and vivacity; whereas to read 'Rasselas' is about as exhilarating as to wade knee-deep through a sandy desert. Voltaire and Johnson, however, the great sceptic and the last of the true old Tories, coincide pretty well in their view of the world, and in the remedy which they suggest. The world is, they agree, full of misery, and the optimism which would deny the reality of the misery is childish. Il faut cultiver notre jardin is the last ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... your proposed publication, and read it with the pleasure which every thing gives me from your pen. Although much of a sceptic in the practice of medicine, I read with pleasure ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... power. Piety, sanctity, and moral good, were impossible in any form, he thought, if the divine government of the universe were denied[109]. It went to Cicero's heart that Carneades should have found it necessary to oppose the beautiful Stoic theology, and he defends the great sceptic by the plea that his one aim was to arouse men to the investigation of the truth[110]. At the same time, while really following the Stoics in physics, Cicero often believed himself to be following Aristotle. This partly arose ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... failed them, heart and feeling took the place of strength; and their truth and their tenderness went straight to the heart of their young world, as only the highest perfection of illusion could appeal to the eyes of the critical, half-sceptic generation ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... me then once again Show to thy sceptic eye the very streams And currents of this all-inhering Power, And ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... story," the sceptic may say. No doubt it is to us, but a man must live in his own age, and there was nought absurd or improbable to ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... That never superhuman cause Could e'er control their course; And, three days since, had judged your aim Was but to make your guest your game. But I have seen, since passed the Tweed, What much has changed my sceptic creed, And made me credit aught." He stayed, And seemed to wish his words unsaid: But, by that strong emotion pressed, Which prompts us to unload our breast, E'en when discovery's pain, To Lindesay did at length unfold The tale his village ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... dreadful sceptic, prince," he continued, after a moment's silence. "I have observed of late that you have grown sceptical about everything. You don't seem to believe in people as you did, and are always attributing motives and so on—am I using the word 'sceptic' in ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... discussion breaks out between a Sceptic and a Spiritualist, who, with half-a-dozen interested auditors, have been putting their heads ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various
... of crimes or criminals? What makes the Glasgow Observatory so peculiarly interesting, is its position, connected with and overlooking so vast a city, having more than three hundred thousand inhabitants, (in spite of an American sceptic,) nearly all children of toil; and a city, too, which, from the necessities of its circumstances, draws so deeply upon that fountain of misery and guilt which some ordinance, as ancient as 'our father Jacob,' with his ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the eighteenth century of the nature-worshipping humanists of the Renaissance, without discovering that you differ from them twice as much as you differ from the Pope. You are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are always telling me that I ignore the cruelty of nature. If you had been an eighteenth-century sceptic you would have told me that I ignore the kindness and benevolence of nature. You are an atheist, and you praise ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the spirit of doubt, the spirit of the eighteenth century; and it is not Werther only that the insect has stung—it is Goethe himself. Goethe belongs to the eighteenth century; he is its disciple, its heir; he is, like it, the sceptic, but he is also the poet. It is this which conceals his universal doubt. Besides, as he perceived, with that admirable tact which accompanies his genius, that his scepticism would injure his poetry, he has laboured to correct its influence, and, for this purpose, has called to his aid all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... entitled "Our Roman Catholic Brethren," published in the Atlantic Monthly for April and May, 1868. The entire article is full of admiration for the Catholic Church and of yearning towards her, though written by a typical sceptic of this era: ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... hats, in climbing ladders, in putting his little limbs out of joint in posturing. He had lived in an atmosphere of trickery and deception. He had learned to look upon mankind as dupes of their senses: in fine, if he had thought at all, he would have been a sceptic; if he had been a little older, he would have been a cynic; if he had been older still, he would have been a philosopher. As it was, he was a little imp. A good-natured imp it was, too,—an imp whose moral nature had never been awakened,—an imp up for a holiday, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... I suppose, except to confirm him in that gospel of the sceptic: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... though he had been living in that house for weeks, although, as a fact, he had just driven up, after a long and tiresome journey, in an ancient cab through the pouring rain. The Archdeacon gazed at his son in a bewildered, confused amaze, as though he, a convinced sceptic, were suddenly confronted, in broad daylight, with an ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... it in that cut-and-dried way, I must plead guilty: in fact, I should owe you some sort of apology, only'—with a stress on the word—'my speech was not intended for the house-top. I am rather a sceptic about female missions, Miss Garston, and do not always measure my words when I am discussing abstract theories with a friend. In my opinion Cunliffe is the one you ought to blame, though if the speech rankles I will ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... days later my friend and I went again to an evening seance at the same house, different people being present on this occasion. A stupid, "unintelligent sceptic" woman put us all out of harmony by making inane suggestions, always declaring that "she would not for the world interfere with the conditions," but doing so all the same. The "Angel Mother" came again, and rather ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... rustling of a leaf alarms the lord Of Christendom. You quake at every virtue; He, not to mar the glorious form of Freedom, Suffers that the hideous hosts of Evil Should run riot in his fair Creation. Him the maker we behold not; calm He veils himself in everlasting laws, Which and not Him the sceptic seeing exclaims, 'Wherefore a God? The World itself is God.' And never did a Christian's adoration So praise him as this ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Corny, and said nothing more. The sceptic read the paper out loud, and of course that settled the question. There was no room for a doubt after the ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... Don Juan the sceptic shut the flask again in the secret drawer in the Gothic table—he meant to run no more risks of ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... "News!" exclaimed the crushed sceptic through his iands. "Ay, news enough, Captain Johns. Who will be able to deny the awfulness, the genuineness? Another man would have dropped dead. You want to know what I had seen. All I can tell you is that since I've seen it my hair ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... spet upon his grave, for all the good we shall do en by what we lift up, now he's got so far,' said Notton, the clarionet man and professed sceptic of the choir. 'But I'm ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Burble was a great shock to me. It seemed clear from his answers to the sceptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxy and all that faded and by no means awful hereafter, which I had hitherto accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poor one, and to hammer home that idea the ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... proving the find, set to work to crush pieces of the boulder into a fine powder. By the time Palmer Billy returned with the dish half-full of water, they had a handful of the powdered stone ready, and he, with much solemnity, as became a sceptic, emptied it into the water, and slowly swished it to and fro, gradually spilling the water, and with it the finer dust of the stone, until only a little wet sand remained in the bottom of the dish. With his head on one ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... "[]" at the points where they are cited in the text. Some spellings were altered. "To-day" and "To-morrow" are spelled "today" and "tomorrow." Some words containing the letters "ise" in the original text, such as "idealise," had these letters changed to "ize," such as "idealize." "Sceptic" was changed to "skeptic." ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... always occurred in obscure places, and in the presence of people who, one has reason to believe, were both hysterical and imaginative, and therefore predisposed to see wonders. So says this order of sceptic, and, to my mind, he says a great deal more than his facts justify; for although contemporary writers generally are agreed that a large percentage of those people who voluntarily confessed they were werwolves were mere dissemblers, there is no recorded conclusive testimony to show ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... myself had fled to the door of the church, where we stationed ourselves in a convenient place for a start when the occasion might require it. We had not been there long when we saw Father Xavier—the sceptic I told the signor about—enter the church with two assistants armed with crowbars and pickaxes, and proceed immediately to the crypt, where no doubt could exist as to the noises at that moment, as the yellings, scamperings and scramblings were loud enough in all conscience. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... and I used to tell him so. He acknowledged that I was right, and when taking up a new plate he used to say playfully: "Now this is going to be a good etching; you don't believe it because you are a little sceptic, but you'll see—I mean not to carry it far." Then before biting he showed it me with "Look at it before it is spoilt." It was rarely spoilt in the biting, but by subsequent work. Many charming proofs I greatly ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... which the doctor let him take, and held it for a moment seeming to collect himself; then with his other hand he took that of the woman sitting in the arm-chair and placed the hand of the doctor in it, making a sign to the old sceptic to seat himself beside this oracle without a tripod. Minoret observed a slight tremor on the absolutely calm features of the woman when their hands were thus united by the Swedenborgian, but the action, though marvelous in its ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... opinion of her in the end we do not know; but we do know that he was not readily credulous. When, for instance, he heard that the stigmata were alleged to have appeared upon the body of Lucia di Narni he did what might be expected of a sceptic of our own times rather than of a churchman of his superstitious age—he sent his physicians ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... corporate imagination required even to imagine this. They only think of a mob as a thing that breaks things—even if they admit it is right to break them. But the mob made these things. An artist mocked as many-headed, an artist with many eyes and hands, created these masterpieces. And if the modern sceptic, in his detestation of the democratic ideal, complains of my calling them masterpieces, a simple answer will for the moment serve. It is enough to reply that the very word "masterpiece" is borrowed from the terminology of the mediaeval craftsmen. But such points in the Guild ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... illiberal because we are Christians? If he owes this excellent quality to a vice, is that any reason why we may not owe it to a virtue? Toleration is a great good, and a good to be imitated, let it come from whom it will. If a sceptic is tolerant, it only shows that he is not foolish in practice as well as erroneous in theory. If a religious man is tolerant, it evinces that he is religious from thought and inquiry, because he ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... Another sceptic was the Montreal Transcript, which declared that the fertile spots in the territory were small and separated by immense distances, and described the Red River region as an oasis in the midst of a desert, "a vast treeless prairie ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... little sceptic! Dost thou still doubt? What I most prize in woman Is her affections, not her intellect! The intellect is finite; but the affections Are infinite, and cannot be exhausted. Compare me with the great men of the earth; What am I? Why, a pygmy among giants! But if thou ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... they rose from table, "a wonder has come to pass since you deserted us. Look, sceptic that you are!" and she led him to the window, and, lifting a glass shade which protected a flower-pot, showed him a green spike peeping ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... is the consensus gentium theory applied to the Virgin Mary. In defence of this thesis, the book has been made to bristle with quotations; they stand out like quills upon the porcupine, ready to impale the adventurous sceptic. Pliny and Virgil and the Druids and Balaam's Ass are invoked as foretelling Her birth; the Old Testament—that venerable sufferer, as Huxley called it—is twisted into dire convulsions for the same purpose; much evidence is also drawn ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... to religion as a philosophical repose; and its contempt for hypocrites is increased till it has generated a toleration, if not a partiality of licentiousness and immorality. Infidelity (a sin unknown to our forefathers) has lately appeared among us, not like a solitary, restless sceptic, affecting a wish for conviction, nor in the bashful form of an untried novelty, cautiously stealing upon public favour—but under the licence long allowed to opinions however blasphemous or immoral, a party has arisen, calling themselves free-thinkers, who not only deride every ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... above. Students, whose temptations lie fully as much in their intellects as in their senses, should buy (for a few pence) Halyburton's Memoirs. "With Halyburton," says Dr. John Duncan, "I feel great intellectual congruity. Halyburton was naturally a sceptic, but God ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... the oft-told tale of how the latter, just seventy years ago to-day, walking at twilight by the churchyard-wall, saw the figure of himself sitting on a grave-stone, and died five weeks later riving with the pangs of hell. Whereat the sceptic showed his ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... however devout a Christian he may be, likes to question himself as to his beliefs about these matters, or would like to have to define accurately where his faith ended and his doubts began. If he is assailed in discussion by a sceptic and his combativeness roused, he will probably proclaim himself an implicit and literal acceptor of the gospel narratives; but he will not be able to maintain this mental attitude alone in his own room. The effort that ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... I am a sceptic as well as Helvetius, but of a more moderate complexion. There is no harm in telling mankind that there is not so much divinity in the Aeneid as they imagine; but, (Even if I thought so,) I would not preach that virtue and friendship are ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... philosophy can no longer claim 'the prize,' we must not refuse to acknowledge the great benefits conferred by it on the world. All philosophies are refuted in their turn, says the sceptic, and he looks forward to all future systems sharing the fate of the past. All philosophies remain, says the thinker; they have done a great work in their own day, and they supply posterity with aspects of the truth and with instruments of thought. ...
— Philebus • Plato
... the operation had been performed—we could see at a glance—and in a bloody fashion. The pictures were lying about the vast room as if they had been spat at. Uncle Ezra smiled wanly at us, with the courage of the patient who is a sceptic about physicians. ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... explained religion as founded in utility, Critias derived it from statecraft. They argued that if religion was founded in human nature, all men would worship the same gods. This view became popular in Greece at the time of the Peloponnesian War. Euripides, as we have seen, was a sceptic. Those who denied the popular gods were persecuted by the Athenians, but the sceptical spirit was not checked by this course.[247] Anaxagoras escaped with his life only through the powerful protection of Pericles. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... imperturbable in mind, athletic in body, unconquerable, and immortal. Such individuals meet in comradeship, and pass together along the open roads of the world. No one is excluded because of his poverty or his sins; there is room in the ideal America for everybody except the doubter and sceptic. Whitman does not linger over the smaller groups of human society, like the family. He is not a fireside poet. He passes directly from his strong persons, meeting freely on the open road, to his conception of ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... able to come close to its shores, much less land upon them, but it has been so often seen on the west coast, that a doubt of its existence, if expressed in the company of coast fishermen, will at once establish for the sceptic a reputation for ignorance of the common ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... should have torn himself from her with such harsh bravado; that he should have cut deep into his own being in order to leave her; that he had fled, leaving for Italy with a craving desire for solitude and forgetfulness! Eh! yes, Marianne had been his true love, the true love of this blase Parisian sceptic and braggart, and he sought, while again looking at the lovely girl, to recover some of the sensations that had flown, to recall some of those reminiscences which more than once had agreeably ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... inherit all the narrowness and self-sufficiency of British conservatism, are frequently impelled to utter expressions which would lead the reader to think them persons of liberal and progressive minds. Such expressions we find in the writings of Dr. Holmes, a thorough medical bigot and sceptic; R. W. Emerson, who closed his eyes against modern spiritual science, and adored the ignorance of Greece; Col. Higginson, the most intolerant and scornful opponent of psychic science; Dr. F. H. Hedge and President Elliot, who represent the status of Harvard College. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... disillusioned man, then a sceptuik, and that is still worse." (Mikhalevitch's pronunciation still smacked of his native Little Russia.) "And what right hast thou to be a sceptic? Thou hast had bad luck in life, granted; that was no fault of thine: thou wert born with a passionate, loving soul, and thou wert forcibly kept away from women: the first woman that came in thy way was ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... quite got it out of his blood. There is much truth in this metaphor. Burns was, in religious matters, one of a very large class. Many men rid their intellects of a superstition, without being able to resist its power over their feelings. Even so profound a sceptic as Renan has admitted that his life is guided by a faith he no longer possesses. And we are all familiar with ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... profane jests are most common when it is the strongest. What they show is a want of control of feeling, or a deficiency in taste, so that people do not regard such things as either injurious or important. A sceptic at the present day is generally less profane than a religious man was in the last century. Such is the result of civilization, although unbelief in itself inclines to ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... and deep Of him who pines among the swarm of men, At once a new thought's king and prisoner, Feeling the truer life within his life, The fountain of his spirit's prophecy, Sinking away and wasting, drop by drop, 210 In the ungrateful sands of sceptic ears. He in the palace-aisles of untrod woods Doth walk a king; for him the pent-up cell Widens beyond the circles of the stars, And all the sceptred spirits of the past Come thronging in to greet him as their peer; But in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... been conscious of such a vacuum. I was a sceptic from my youth up. No doubt those who were nurtured in superstition, when reason at last conquers and they break away, may experience a temporary blank; but the wonders of nature and the achievements of man and the demands of the suffering ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... deceived," exclaims the more candid separatist or sceptic, taking up the argument declined by his scoffing brother. Catholics, it is supposed, are under the dominion of so abject a superstition, that the moment the subject of their religion is introduced, they cease to exert their ordinary common sense and powers of criticism, and believe any thing ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... pleasant hour hooking shiners and chub, and an occasional perch that looked at a distance like a trout. The dominie, apropos of his friend's braces, told Alphonse Karr's story of the bretellier in the Jardin des Plantes, and the credulous sceptic who did not believe that a suspender tree existed. He knew that cotton grew on a shrub, and that caoutchouc exuded from a tree, and admitted the possibility of their natural combination, but thought his deceivers had reference ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... such," he continued, with growing enthusiasm; "man is essentially a religious creature—a looker beyond the grave, from the very constitution of his mind; and the sceptic who denies it is untrue not merely to the Being who has made and who preserves him, but to the entire scope and bent of his own nature besides. Wherever man is—whether he be a wanderer of the wild forest or still wilder desert, a dweller in some lone isle of the sea, or the tutored and full-minded ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... you follow Hume in representing Raleigh as an infidel? For Heaven's sake, dear Sir, look to his preface to his History of the World; look at his Letters, in a little 18mo., and here, but here only, you will find a tract [entitled The Sceptic], which led Hume to talk of Raleigh as an unbeliever. It is an epitome of the principles of the old sceptics; and to me, who, like Dr. Clarke and Mr. Hume, am a reader {268} of Sextus Empiricus, it is very intelligible. Indeed, Mr. Butler, it is a most ingenious performance. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... mainly defensive on the part of Frederic. In the exhaustion of his resources he could see no means of continuing the struggle. "It is only Fortune," says the royal sceptic, "that can extricate me from the situation I am in. I escape out of it by looking at the universe on the great scale like an observer from some distant planet. All then seems to be so infinitely small that I could almost pity my enemies for giving ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... join the Theosophists and kiss Buddha's big toe, did you? I tried to get into their set once, but they cast me out for a sceptic without a chance of improving my poor ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... character, charity, duckherd, blockhead, Dutchess, gather, success, suggest, or suggest, or suggest, or suggest, haov, rij, [w]heg and who, come, on, you know what I mean, as well as [h]orses. War rod: scepter, sceptic, syllables, bless, access, axes, oxen, Christ-cross, beaux, beauty, ancre, kernel, acres, craz'd, threatned, knead, bootes, Bootes, winged, gnaw'd: th is cut of from with, cum, after another of ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... gentleman, a native of France, whom it was alleged, when in a state of mental incapacity, was induced by a priest named Holdstock to make a testament of his property in favour of the Church of Rome, and of certain charities favoured by that church. It was given in evidence that the man had been a sceptic nearly all his life, hated priests, and was especially prejudiced against the peculiar disposition of his property, which the priests alleged that he had actually made upon his death-bed. A Roman Catholic physician, one Gasquet, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... distant country, at a remote period, we could not have told what peculiar circumstances there might have been to render probable what seems to us most strange; and yet in that case every philosophical sceptic, every free-thinking speculator, would instantly have rejected such a history, as utterly unworthy of credit. What, for instance, would the great Hume, or any of the philosophers of his school, have said, if they had found in the antique records ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... existence and maturity of this faculty in early childhood is a most wise and beneficent provision of nature. How slow and tedious would be the first steps in knowledge, were the child born, as some teachers seem trying to make him, a sceptic, that is, with a mind which refuses to receive anything as true, except what it has first proved by experience and reason! On the contrary, how much is the acquisition of knowledge expedited, during these ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... that this spot was really the centre of the earth, a sceptic once paid well for the privilege of ascending to the dome of the church to see if the sun gave him a shadow at noon. He came down perfectly convinced. The day was very cloudy and the sun threw no shadows at all; but the man was satisfied that if the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hornes, a taile, and eies as big as a bason."[1] Scot, however, was one of a very small minority in his opinion as to the carnal-mindedness of such a belief. He in his day, like those in every age and country who dare to hold convictions opposed to the creed of the majority, was a dangerous sceptic; his book was publicly burnt by the common hangman;[2] and not long afterwards a royal author wrote a treatise "against the damnable doctrines of two principally in our age; whereof the one, called Scot, an Englishman, is not ashamed in public print to deny that there can be ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... brought up from his babyhood upward on the strong meat of the agnostic philosophers, he should fall back in his manhood on the milk for babes administered to him by orthodox theology! The simple-minded old sceptic could hardly credit it, now that Arthur told him so with his own lips, though he had more than once suspected it when he heard him playing sacred music with that last touch of earnestness in his execution which only the sincerest conviction and most intimate realisation of its import ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... writings show his delicately critical analysis of passion, at first playfully tender in its irony, but later, under the influence of his critical antagonism to Brunetiere, growing keener, stronger, and more bitter. In 'Thais' he has undertaken to show the bond of sympathy that unites the pessimistic sceptic to the Christian ascetic, since both despise the world. In 'Lys Rouge', his greatest novel, he traces the perilously narrow line that separates love from hate; in 'Opinions de M. l'Abbe Jerome Coignard' he has given us the most radical breviary of scepticism ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... that is in peril of a breakdown. Also people might remember of what sort of man Dryden was talking. He was not talking of any unworldly visionary like Vaughan or George Herbert. He was talking of a cynical man of the world, a sceptic, a diplomatist, a great practical politician. Such men are indeed to madness near allied. Their incessant calculation of their own brains and other people's brains is a dangerous trade. It is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind. A flippant person has asked ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Chaussee-d'Antin,—her birth, and her connections, had their power of influence. Her irregularities were covered as with a veil, in consideration of her genius. Indeed, Mademoiselle des Touches had more than one lover: a gallant about 1817; then an original mind, a sceptic, the real creator of Camille Maupin; and next Gennaro Conti, whom she knew in Rome, and Claude Vignon, a critic of reputation. [Beatrix. Lost Illusions. A Distinguished Provincial at Paris.] Felicite was a patron of Joseph Bridau, the romantic painter, ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... "What a little sceptic it is! Look at her small face, Mrs. Pryor, scarcely larger than the palm of my hand, alive with acuteness and eagerness." To Caroline—"She had the trouble of bringing you into the world at any rate. Mind you show your duty to her by quickly getting ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... published fulminatory articles; flaming protests were made in the clubs against the surreptitious propaganda of Rome. The ultramontane party leaders rejoiced and made capital out of the marvellous return of such a sceptic to the bosom of the Church which alone can save the souls of men: they used the case as a bait for fresh recruits and as a means to fill the old regulars with greater fire and enthusiasm. Through the homes blew a breath of a tyrannical priesthood ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... fervor and zeal of these young apostles of missions the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. However many were their fears and doubts, they dared not, as they loved the cross, place a single obstacle in the way of the accomplishment of such a lofty purpose; and when the question was asked by the sceptic, "Who is sufficient for these things?" the awful response, "The sufficiency is of God," came ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... had its fitting climax of horror at the exact moment foretold to him by a ghostly visitor. Various and somewhat conflicting accounts are given of this singular tragedy; but in them all the chief incidents stand out so clear and unassailable that even such a hard-headed sceptic as Dr Johnson declared, "I am so glad to have evidence of the spiritual world that I am willing ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... Being a determined sceptic in the matter of prospectuses, I determined to go and see for myself the working of this scheme, which looked so well on paper. The Institution occupies a large house exactly opposite Dr. Punshon's chapel: and there is no chance ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... lie. The evil of Cashel's capture was measurable, the evil of a lie beyond all measure. She felt none the less assured of that evil because she could not foresee one bad consequence likely to ensue from what she had done. Her misgivings pressed heavily upon her; for her father, a determined sceptic, had taught her his own views, and she was, therefore, destitute of the consolations which religion has for the wrongdoer. It was plainly her duty to send for the policeman and clear up the deception she had practised on ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the history of human knowledge. It is a mistake, however, to suppose that he was the first to infuse even into Roman story that element of doubt which has changed the whole fabric of historical science. If Niebuhr was a mere sceptic, he would be only the humble follower of Bayle, Lesurgnes de Pouilly, and other writers of the last century; but his merit lies in reconstruction—in the jealous care with which he distinguishes between the true monuments of history and the mass ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... solace grief and restore happiness Is he a dwarf or a giant Men doubted everything: the young men denied everything Of all the sisters of love, the most beautiful is pity Perfection does not exist Resorted to exaggeration in order to appear original Sceptic regrets the faith he has lost the power to regain Seven who are always the same: the first is called hope St. Augustine Ticking of which (our arteries) can be heard only at night When passion sways man, reason follows him weeping and ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... anticipated that frankness, nor was the idea which it expressed uppermost in his mind when he said, "but, but—" There were many buts all very confused, struggling through his mind as he spoke. However, he answered as a Parisian sceptic, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... story-root may be as prolific of heterogeneous offspring as a word-root. Just as we find the root spak, "to look," begetting words so various as sceptic, bishop, speculate, conspicsuous, species, and spice, we must expect to find a simple representation of the diurnal course of the sun, like those lyrically given in the Veda, branching off into stories as diversified as those of Oidipous, Herakles, ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... out now what to call you," cried the same Mihalevitch, at three o'clock in the morning. "You are not a sceptic, nor a pessimist, nor a Voltairean, you are a loafer, and you are a vicious loafer, a conscious loafer, not a simple loafer. Simple loafers lie on the stove and do nothing because they don't know how to do ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... kept his mind continually fixed on an Almighty judge and an eternal reward. And hence he acquired their contempt of external circumstances, their fortitude, their tranquillity, their inflexible resolution. But not the coolest sceptic or the most profane scoffer was more perfectly free from the contagion of their frantic delusions, their savage manners, their ludicrous jargon, their scorn of science, and their aversion to pleasure. Hating tyranny with a perfect ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... completest tragedy has its compensations for some one. The pitiable arrival of Mr Levinski at "The Duke's Head," unrecognized and with his fur coat slightly ruffled, might make a sceptic of the most devout optimist, and yet Eustace Merrowby can never look back upon that evening without a sigh of thankfulness; for to him it was the beginning of his career. The story has often been told since—in ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... Appleplex returned to their rooms: Appleplex entered the results of his inquiries into large notebooks, filed according to the nature of the case, from A (adultery) to Y (yeggmen). Eeldrop smoked reflectively. It may be added that Eeldrop was a sceptic, with a taste for mysticism, and Appleplex a materialist with a leaning toward scepticism; that Eeldrop was learned in theology, and that Appleplex studied the ...
— Eeldrop and Appleplex • T.S. Eliot
... sex. The judge is an old man such as dear Nikolay used to draw; he walks bent double, coughs, and is fond of facetious subjects. The prosecutor is a man of forty-three, dissatisfied with life, a liberal, a sceptic, and a very good-natured fellow. All the journey these gentlemen have been occupied in eating, settling mighty questions and eating, reading and eating. There is a library on the steamer, and I saw the prosecutor reading my "In the Twilight." They began talking ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... no sceptic with regard to the nature of things, so neither am I as to their existence. That a thing should be really perceived by my senses, and at the same time not really exist is to me a plain contradiction; since I cannot prescind or abstract even in thought, the existence of a sensible thing from ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... when I was a happy undergraduate." (Audrey could not imagine Langley Wyndham ever being an undergraduate; it seemed to her that he must always have been a Master of Arts.) "I knew the real Flaxman Reed, and he was as logical a sceptic as you or I. There was an epidemic of ideas in our time, and the poor fellow was frightened, so he took it—badly. Of course he made up his mind that he was going to die, and he was horribly afraid of dying. So instead of talking about his interesting symptoms, as ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair |
