"Superstition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... countryman who showed us the church, knelt reverently down at the threshold and put up a short prayer before he entered the sacred building. The general devoutness and strong faith of the Bretons is most impressive and genuine, mixed, no doubt, with great superstition; but, as Wesley says, "Heaven makes allowance for invincible ignorance, and blesses the ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... time, borrowed a wagon of a neighbor living two miles distant, through a dense forest. On the day of the total eclipse of the sun, it entered his head that it would be fine sport, knowing my my ignorance and superstition, to send me, just as the darkness was coming on, to return the borrowed wagon. I accordingly hitched the ox-team to it and started. As I proceeded through the wood, I saw, with astonishment and some alarm, that it was ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... corresponding carriages, and not suspended in slings as is the custom of the people of Mindanao. In a word, Jolo is an Island governed by a system of administration extremely vigorous and decisive; dread and superstition sustain the throne of the tyrant, and the fame of his greatness frequently brings to his feet the ulemas, or missionaries of the Koran, even as far as from the furthest margin of the Red Sea. The prince and people, unanimous ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... is constant, and resembles itself, in these particulars. To look for constancy where constancy is not to be expected, as for instance that a day which has once brought good fortune will always be a fortunate day, is justly accounted superstition. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... but how fierce a letter you wrote against Their superstition when they slander'd you For setting up a mass at Canterbury ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... affects to despise legitimate honours, seeks to vaunt itself as magnanimity; prodigality calls itself liberality, audacity imitates courage, hardhearted sternness imitates patience, bitterness justice, superstition religion, weakness of mind lenity, timidity modesty, captiousness and carping at words wishes to pass for acuteness in arguing, and an empty fluency of language for this oratorical vigour at which we are aiming. And those, too, appear akin to virtuous pursuits, which run ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... said my wife, "I believe in best china, to be kept carefully on an upper shelf, and taken down for high-days and holidays; it may be a superstition, but I believe in it. It must never be taken out except when the mistress herself can see that it is safely cared for. My mother always washed her china herself; and it was a very pretty social ceremony, after tea was over, while she sat among us washing her pretty cups, and wiping them ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... pernicious form of superstition was noticeable in the credit enjoyed by charms and incantations, not merely among illiterate rustics, but even with persons of high social station. No phase of the magic art led to the commission of more terrible crimes or revealed a worse side of human character ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Vulgar Errors (Book 2, cap. 5) discusses this curious superstition at length:—'And first we hear it in every mouth, and in many good authors read it, that a diamond, which is the hardest of stones, not yielding unto steel, emery, or any thing but its own powder, is yet made soft, or broke by the blood of a ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... at the appointment of the bishop of the diocese, to direct and animate the devotion of such a society, and to guard it from that superstition and enthusiasm which soars to wild heights in almost all nunneries, would confirm it a ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... the religion of the Way, has become steeped in superstition and has been made a reproach in all our land. Yet Lao Tze had noble sentiments and lofty thoughts that have helped generations ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... pass an old log cabin about which there hangs a ghostly superstition. At a certain hour in the night, during the time the bark is loose on the hemlock, a female form is said to steal from it and grope its way into the wilderness. The tradition runs that her lover, who was a bark-peeler and wielded the spud, was killed by his rival, who ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... golden crowns in Italy. He ought to have journeyed to Monza or to S. Ambrogio at Milan for the first, and to the Lateran in Rome for the second of these investitures. An Emperor of the Swabian House would have been compelled by precedent and superstition to observe this form. It is true that the coronation of a German prince as the successor of Lombard kings and Roman Augusti, had always been a symbolic ceremony rather than a rite which ratified genuine Imperial authority. Still ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... difficult for him to take Mr. Deeping seriously, even in death. He had, always been an absurdity; posturing, phrase-making, repellant. Death conferred a dignity, he had supposed, but death had not done this for the president. Another time-worn superstition, that: humanity had invented so many. Suppose all those old ideas should turn out, on the event, to be as threadbare, and empty? Remorse, for instance? Would one dishonesty, one violent break with the canons of honour, never repeated, oh, surely never repeated! tincture all the future with a ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... fitted, and most faithfully did they perform it." Those inevitable evils which man is destined to endure in this present state, are enough without the addition of the almost unmingled bitterness of the infusion, which superstition ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... from the Dundee column, but it was a childish superstition to imagine that the Dundee column could possibly need assistance. They had only marched thirty odd miles on Monday and Tuesday; starting at four in the morning, they would by two o'clock or so have covered the seventeen miles that would ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... closely resembles those non-European countries where the influence of nature is more prominent than that of man, and whose civilisations are consequently influenced more by the imagination than by the understanding. In Spain, superstition is encouraged by the violent energies of nature. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Spain was first engaged in a long struggle on behalf of the Arianism of the Goths against the orthodoxy of the Franks. This was followed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... explain, and for that reason the being whom he creates is portentous, but not human. To understand this, you need only compare Richard with Macbeth. In Macbeth we have a host of different forces—ambition, superstition, poetry, remorse, vacillation, affection, despair—all struggling together as they might in you or me; and it is this mingling of feelings with which we all can sympathize that makes him, in spite of all his crimes, a human being like ourselves. But in Richard there ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... in October so particularly referred to, and not perceiving any particular event, relative to the war, which happened on any of the days in that week, I thought it possible that they were marked by some astrological superstition, to which the greatest politicians have been subject. I therefore had recourse to my Rider's Almanack. There I found, indeed, something that characterized the work, and that gave directions concerning the sudden political and natural variations, and for eschewing ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 'Sermons Preached on Several Occasions,' is illumined by quaint utterances, humorous, sensible, and devout; qualities more frequently combined in those days than in our own, when the "dignity of the pulpit," a lamentable superstition, has weakened its influence, and has made religion appear to simple people ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... on the throne. The Aztecs gave themselves out as intruders in Mexico. They were a bloody and warlike race, and though they gave the Spaniards an easy victory it was rather a reception, for they were overawed by superstition as to the invaders. They stated that a few centuries before, they had been a wild tribe on the high country of the Rio Grande and Colorado, in New Mexico. The access from the Pacific up the Colorado would agree well with the hypothesis that the chief ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce
... owe you too much already, old man. Besides I had a sort of superstition that this temporary starvation—that's what it was, and it hurt— would bring me luck later. It's over and done with now, and none of the syndicate know how hard up I was. Fire away. What's the exact state of affairs as ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... we look for the Kingdom of God, Sire, if not among the German people? Consider your foes. The English are Pharisees, hypocrites. Woe to them, saith the Lord. The French are atheists. The Belgians are ignorant and priest-ridden. The Russians are sunk in mediaeval superstition. As for the Italians, half are atheists and the other half idolators. Only in Germany do you find a reasonable and progressive faith, devoid of superstition, abreast of scientific thought, and of the highest ethical value. Germany then, Sire, is the Kingdom ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... leaning back, folding his arms, smoking with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, 'of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of a wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, "Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I'll be the death of you"? Yet that ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... in order to become really popular, must contrive to touch man somewhere else besides on the purely intellectual side: it must remember that man is all heart, all hope, all fear, and all foolishness, quite as much as he is all brains. Otherwise, science can never expect to take the place of superstition, much less of religion, in mankind's affection. In order to be a really successful man of science, it is first of all indispensable to make one's self master of everything in nature and in human ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... the spark Where fell oppression's foot hath trod; Through superstition's shadow dark It flashes to the living God! From Moscow's ashes springs the Russ; In Warsaw, Poland lives again: Schamyl, on frosty Caucasus, Strikes ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... Hudson's Bay Settlement, visits Prince Rupert, difficulty with Hudson's Bay Company, goes to Port Nelson, to France and England, with Hudson's Bay Company (1685), narrative of, described, owners of, first voyage, goes fowling, superstition of, captured by Indians, treatment of, taught to sing, dressed by Indians, wrestles with an Indian, adopted, taken on a journey, meets an Algonquin and escapes, recaptured, tortured, parents protect him, foster-father, goes with the natives on the war-path, journey ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... crown which it was probable that he would himself one day wear may seem more extraordinary. For his nature was haughty and imperious; and, indeed, he continued to the very last to show, by occasional starts and struggles, his impatience of the French yoke. But he was almost as much debased by superstition as his brother by indolence and vice. James was now a Roman Catholic. Religious bigotry had become the dominant sentiment of his narrow and stubborn mind, and had so mingled itself with his love of rule, that the two passions could hardly ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... new true species by the intermixture of blood. But they might just as well try to convert iron into gold, or sulphur into carbon. In fact, evolution is the modern physiological form of the old chemical superstition, alchemy, substituting for the transmutation of metals the problem ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... There is a superstition among sportsmen that they are sure to get a fall the first day they appear in ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... and respect." "Love," says Sir Thomas Overbury, wittily, "is a superstition that doth fear the idol which itself hath made." "To reveal its complacence by gifts," says Mrs. Sigourney, "is one of the native dialects of love." "Love is never so blind as when it is to spy faults," says ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... the will in himself or some spiritual agency. But to believe in the transference of human thought, and that the nuns could influence his action at three thousand miles distance, seemed as if he were dropping into some base superstition. Between sleeping and waking a thought emerged which kept him awake till morning: "Why had Evelyn returned to the stage?" When he saw her last at Thornton Grange her retirement seemed to be definitely ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... contained. Seeing a box which contained a chalice Kirke tried to seize it, but Father Masse interfered, and said to him: "This is a sacred object, do not profane it, if you please." "Why," said Kirke, "we have no faith in your superstition," and so saying he took the chalice in his hands, braving the Jesuit's advice. The Catholics were also denied the privilege of praying in public. This intolerant action was condemned by Champlain. During their stay at Tadousac Champlain and the admiral went ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... superstitious ideas of his countrymen, either because he deemed it impolitic to affect scepticism on a matter of general belief, or more probably because, ike most men who do not think deeply or accurately on such subjects, he had in his mind a reserve of superstition which balanced the freedom of his expressions and practice upon other occasions. Waverley made no commentary, therefore, on the manner of the treatment, but rewarded the professor of medicine with a liberality beyond the utmost conception of his wildest ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... mountainous parts of India, there are tribes who differ little from those we call Kanisians and Jelidians and who are addicted to all manner of superstition and vice; between whom, and the inhabitants of the people on the coast, there subsists great emulation, each daring the others to imitate them in the performance of strange superstitious tortures. There ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... Nazarene. Anything might have happened in the eerie days of old; the critic must do more than deny the historicity of Jesus and the inspiration of the Bible. To be convincing he must derive from the scriptures in which Christians believe whatever proof can be deduced to unveil the superstition of ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... the contrary, promoting it. This feeling in most individuals is much inferior in strength to their selfish feelings, and is often wanting altogether. But to those who have it, it possesses all the characters of a natural feeling. It does not present itself to their minds as a superstition of education, or a law despotically imposed by the power of society, but as an attribute which it would not be well for them to be without. This conviction is the ultimate sanction of the greatest-happiness morality. This it is which makes any mind, of well-developed feelings, work with, and ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... of jets of hot steam find vent through the mud, and make the waters of the river bubble. Above Fort Norman, on the Mackenzie, in several spots the banks give out smoke and occasionally flames. These fires have existed for ages, and are regarded with the greatest awe and superstition by the Indians. A little higher up the river there are hot springs and a small Solfaferra, like the larger one near Naples.], when a sound was heard which caused the three men simultaneously to stop their paddling and listen. It occurred again ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas
... number of Mahars among our prisoners, and so fearful were our own people of them that they would not approach them unless completely covered from the sight of the reptiles by a piece of skin. Even Dian shared the popular superstition regarding the evil effects of exposure to the eyes of angry Mahars, and though I laughed at her fears I was willing enough to humor them if it would relieve her apprehension in any degree, and so she sat apart from the prospector, near which the Mahars had been ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with the heathenism of the Indians, accepted their gods of wood and stone as saints, set up the crucifix side by side with the images of the sun and moon, formerly worshipped; and while in Europe the sun of the Reformation arose and dispelled the terrible night of religious error and superstition, South America sank from bad to worse. Thus the anomaly presented itself of the old, effete lands throwing off the yoke of religious domination while the younger ones were for centuries to be content with sinking lower and lower. [Footnote: History is repeating itself, for here in Canada ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... hopes appear to you too bold,—I read it in your doubting countenances; but listen to me whilst I explain. Religious disagreements will give rise to these frenzies. Then first will Fanaticism, the wild son of Hatred and Superstition, untie all the bonds of nature and humanity. The father will murder the son, and the son the father; kings will joyfully dip their fingers in the blood of their subjects, and place the sword in the hands of bigots, in order that they may slaughter their brothers by thousands, because ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... attention and your gowns refold, Who thirst for fame, grow yellow after gold, Victims to luxury, superstition blind, Or other ailment natural to the mind: Come close to me and listen, while I teach That you're a pack of madmen, all ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... as Professor Bury observes, accustomed 'to take little and to give much'. They built up their civilization for themselves. We must listen with due attention to the critics who have pointed out all the remnants of savagery and superstition that they find in Greece: the slave-driver, the fetish-worshipper and the medicine-man, the trampler on women, the bloodthirsty hater of all outside his own town and party. But it is not those people that constitute Greece; those people can be found all over the historical world, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... by Dalzell, who determined to capture him with his own hands. Accordingly he charged forward, presenting his pistols. Paton fired, but the balls hopped off Dalzell's buff coat and fell into his boot. With the superstition peculiar to his age, the Nonconformist concluded that his adversary was rendered bullet-proof by enchantment, and, pulling some small silver coins from his pocket, charged his pistol therewith. Dalzell, seeing this, and supposing, it is likely, that Paton ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... child, and that is all ye seem to see. Keep to that superstition if you must, but you perceive that this child understands this complex game of war as well as any of you; and if you want my opinion without the trouble of asking for it, here you have it without ruffles or embroidery—by God, I think she can teach the best of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a freckled man with red hair. Contrary to superstition, he didn't have a fiery temper. He was forty and had already built up a seniority of twenty years in deep space. He was captain of his ship and wanted nothing more. Sure, it was only a three-man crew—himself, a flight engineer, an astronavigator. But it was an E ship, which meant that he outranked ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... world would call a great genius, like Napoleon; but he was a man of great sagacity, untiring industry, and respectable attainments. He was cautious, cold, and selfish; had but little faith in human virtue, and was a slave, in his latter days, to superstition. He was neither affable nor courteous, but was sincere in his attachments, and munificent in rewarding his generals and friends. He was not envious nor cruel, but inordinately ambitious, and intent on aggrandizing his family. This was his characteristic ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... many Malay peoples, but we know, as a historical fact, that it was introduced among them after the discovery of America, not very many generations ago. Superstition is universal among some peoples, but we see the superstitious beliefs and practices taught by the older to the younger generation. Similarly with any specific language. It may very well be true in such cases that the universal practice appeals to some native tendency ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... they may not. As a general thing these Plain Injins are not fond of night attacks; it's part superstition, no doubt, and part because they are much more at home on horseback than on foot. Still there's never no saying with an Injin; but I should say, lad, that they ain't likely to do that yet. They will try other ways fust. They knows as how they have got plenty of time, and can choose their opportunity, ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... passing through the streets, and as they passed the people paid reverence. Surely the little procession, illegal though it was, must have been successful, for there were no further shocks. We found here a most interesting superstition, which we had not met before, but which we heard several times later, in other districts. We were assured that the earthquake was but one of many signs that the world was coming to an end. We discovered that thousands of the people expected the ending ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... it, and your "inspiration" was merely a flush of vanity. "As for trusting to the 'inspired moment,' or waiting for it, or deploring its delay, he (the young author) should take heed how he permits any such folly or superstition to clutch him in its vitiating grasp. 'Inspiration' either means, with a writer, good mental and physical health, or it has no meaning whatever.... Late hours and stimulants are especially fatal to the young writer when both are employed in ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... has in view the addition made to our enjoyments or our sufferings by the respective predominance of hope or of fear in the mind. Allowing for constitutional bias, he recognizes, as the two great sources of a desponding imagination, Superstition and Scepticism, whose evils he descants upon at length. He also dwells on the influence of casual associations on happiness, and commends this subject to the care of educators; giving, as an example, the tendency of associations with Greece and Rome to add to the courage ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... (Long Legs), of Tomi, who raised an army and resisted the landing of the invaders. It was in the battle that ensued at this place that Prince Itsu-se, the elder brother, received a wound in his hand from an arrow shot by Prince Nagasune. The reason given reveals a curious superstition which seems to have prevailed from this early time. The Japanese prince on receiving the wound exclaims, "It is not right for me, an august child of the Sun Goddess, to fight facing the sun. It is for this reason that I am stricken by the wretched villain's ...
— Japan • David Murray
... capable of enormities which a poor, unpretending human creature [homuncio] would have disdained. Many times the ideal of the divine nature, as adopted by pagan races, fell under the contempt, not only of men superior to the national superstition, but of men partaking in that superstition. Yet, with all those drawbacks, an ideal was an ideal. The being set up for adoration as god, was such upon the whole to the worshipper; since, if there had been any higher mode of excellence conceivable for him, that higher mode would have ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... introduction to were-wolves, and the circumstance of finding the superstition still so prevalent, first gave me the idea of investigating the history and the habits of ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... being killed for the market, and it was killing for the market that threatened their extermination. So far as I have ever been able to learn, these sheep range, or did range, on all the mountains to the north, west, and south of Tucson, within a hundred miles or so. I know of them in the Superstition Mountains, about a hundred miles to the north; in the Quijotoas Mountains, a like distance to the southwest, and in the mountains intermediate; I have no positive proof of their existence in the Santa Ritas, but about twenty-three years ago I saw a pair of old and weather-beaten ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... kind consideration and respect of foreigners. They may possess much intrinsic worth, but it is so covered with, or concealed beneath a cloak of arrogance and self-esteem, among the higher classes, and of ignorance, superstition, incivility, and knavery among the lower, that it is difficult to appreciate it. Of their courtesy to strangers, a little incident, which occurred to Captain Page while in Maranham, will ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... away; and how primroses used to be scattered at the door of the house to prevent the fairies from stealing in, because they could not pass that flower. But you don't hear much of that any more; for the priest said 'twas superstition, and down from the heathenish times. So the old people came to see 'twas wrong to use such charms, and the young people laughed at the old women's tales. Now on May Day the shrines in the churches are bright with flowers, of course. And as for the innocent merrymakings, instead ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... with the East was, that the travellers learned how false were the prevalent notions of a mighty Christian empire existing in Central Asia. Vulgar superstition or conviction is not, however, to be upset by evidence, and the locality of the monarchy was merely transferred by the people to Africa, and they fixed upon Abyssinia, with a show of truth, as the seat of the famous Priest-King. However, still some ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... with the woman's earlier history, except as I before told you, that her family were known to mine. But you revive some vague reminiscences to her prejudice. I will make inquiries, and inform you of their result. Still, even if we could admit the popular superstition that a person who had been either the perpetrator or the victim of dark crimes in life could revisit, as a restless spirit, the scene in which those crimes had been committed, I should observe that the house was infested by strange sights and sounds before the old woman died—you ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... thought the pained American, is the victim of that sad superstition which associates goblins with the deserted body of man, as ghosts with an abandoned house. How unlike are we made! What to me, in like case, would have been a solemn satisfaction, the bare suggestion, even, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Len,' she said, 'that my roses would grow like so many witches in a Puritan soil. I always thought that story of the Norwegians' taking rosebuds for bulbs of fire, and being terrified, was a very delicate and poetical satire upon all superstition.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... superstition that cautery is "good only in springtime," and states that "under the right conditions of the bodyaEuro(TM)s humors it could be used in all seasons."[17] Although he recommends cautery rather highly, he never minimizes the importance of treatment by drugs. Actually, he encourages the use ...
— Drawings and Pharmacy in Al-Zahrawi's 10th-Century Surgical Treatise • Sami Hamarneh
... of the lessons taught in his journal may well startle the incredulous and unbelieving spirit of our skeptical day. Those who doubt the power of prayer to bring down actual blessing, or who confound faith in God with credulity and superstition, may well wonder and perhaps stumble at such an array of facts. But, if any reader is still doubtful as to the facts, or thinks they are here arrayed in a deceptive garb or invested with an imaginative halo, he is hereby invited to ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... you in the words of a favorite author of the day. He says, 'It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of traveling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... gigantic candlesticks, colossal lotuses of gilded silver, offerings, lamps, lacquer, litany books, gongs, drums, bells, and all the mysterious symbols of a faith which is a system of morals and metaphysics to the educated and initiated, and an idolatrous superstition to the masses. In this interior the light was dim, the lamps burned low, the atmosphere was heavy with incense, and amidst its fumes shaven priests in chasubles and stoles moved noiselessly over the soft matting round the high altar on ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... place in summer for eating and such heating labors as ironing. When thoroughly secured from intrusion, an upper balcony furnishes the best of sleeping quarters for one wise and brave enough to scout the superstition of the bad effects of night air. Many persons of delicate health, even consumptives, have been restored to vigorous strength by sleeping in such a place, not only in summer but throughout the winter, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... interest to introduce everywhere. Thus the serpent became naturally regarded as the manifestation of the evil spirit by Christians as well as by the old Hebrews; thus, also, it became the presiding genius of the malaria and fever which arose from the fens haunted by it—a superstition which gave rise to the theory that the tales of Hercules and the Hydra, Apollo and the mud-Python, St. George and the Dragon, were sanitary-reform allegories, and the monsters whose poisonous breath destroyed cattle and young maidens only typhus and consumption. We see no reason ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... The grossest superstition then prevailed in France, as everywhere. Witches and warlocks were thoroughly believed in, far more so than belief in God and His Son. The news spread abroad that the girl was accursed and sold to the Evil One, and she was avoided by everybody. She felt herself ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... on the finger of the skeleton of an ecclesiastic, in the Cathedral of Chichester, "affording indubitable evidence that these relics were cherished in the Middle Ages by those whose express duty it was to reprove and check such gross superstition."[115-*] ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... first floor, and held a council together. "One of us must cross the river and bring Pai-ku-li" (the native minister), said Miss G——. "He is Elizabeth Aukai's guardian—she is his wife's niece—and he can control her if anybody can, and break the hold of this superstition on the girls' minds. Nothing that we can say or do will do any good while they are in this frenzy. Which of us ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... a similar effect and significance, are occurring with amazing rapidity, and the stated results are already visible to even the blindest observation. In accurate depiction of the new order of things conjecture fails, but so much we know: the woman-superstition has already received its death wound ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... to do, to look for precedents to Spain, Belgium, or South America. Why not? They assure us, in their jingling phrase, that Home Rule means Rome Rule, that the priests will be the masters, and that Irish autonomy is only another name for the reign of bigotry, superstition, and obscurantism. One of these two mutually destructive predictions has just as much to say for itself as the other, and no more. We may leave the prophets to fight it out between them while we attend to our business, and examine ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... ark and slept—a night, a month, a year, perhaps a century, for when they awoke the water was gone, the vales were filled with verdure, and bird-songs rang through the woods. The delighted couple descended the Superstition Mountains, on which the ark had rested, and went into its valleys, where they lived for a thousand years, and became the parents ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... memory, my father did not absolutely ridicule them, yet he showed, in his discourse to others, so little regard to them, and at times suggested to me motives of action so different, that I was soon weaned from opinions which I began to consider as the dreams of superstition, or the artful inventions of designing hypocrisy. My mother's books were left behind at the different quarters we removed to, and my reading was principally confined to plays, novels, and those poetical descriptions of the beauty of virtue and honour, ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... of hills near Pine Creek, on one of which is a cave, called by our boatmen L'diable au Port. This superstition of peopling dens and other dark places with the "arch fiend," is common. If the "old serpent" has given any proofs to the French boatmen of his residence here, I shall only hope that he will confine himself to this ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... take charge of his master's household. But one of the women pointed to the stain on the floor. The lantern yet burned at the head of Rice's deserted pillows. Superstition began to rise from that spot. They no longer had Angelique among them, with her atmosphere ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... up," she answered spitefully. "I said I'm damned if I see what the answer is except your answer, Bobby, that women have always been fools and dupes—dupes of religious superstition invented by men for the benefit of men and ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... Another kind of superstition is as follows. They believe the dead walk by night and feed upon guarina, a fruit resembling the quince, but unknown in Europe. These ghosts love to mix with the living and deceive women. They take on the form of a man, and seem to wish to enjoy a woman's favour, ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... gardens the prisons were emptied considerably. It is true that victims suspected of the Oriental superstition were seized yet and imprisoned, but pursuit brought in fewer and fewer persons,—barely enough for coming exhibitions, which were to follow quickly. People were sated with blood; they showed growing weariness, and increasing alarm because of the unparalleled conduct of the condemned. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... that there must doubtless have been many that returned gladder than they came, with the burden shifted a little, the shadow lessened, or at least with new strength to carry the familiar load. For of this we may be sure, that however harshly we may despise what we call superstition, or however firmly we may wave away what we hold to have been all a beautiful mistake, there is some fruitful power that dwells and lingers in places upon which the hearts of men have so concentred their ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... He was not at all ill—he only went out like a candle. His grandson brought me a bit of the meat cooked at his funeral, and begged me to eat it, that I might live to be very old, according to the superstition here. When they killed the buffalo for the Sheykh Abu-l-Hajjaj, the man who had a right to the feet kindly gave them to Omar, who wanted to make calves' foot jelly for me. I had a sort of profane feeling, as if I were eating a descendant of ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... class consider Revelation a superstition, and Jesus either an enthusiast or a deceiver. To this class belong Wuensch and Paalzow, but no divine. The second class do not allow that there was any divine operation in Christianity in any way, and refer the origin of Christianity to mere natural causes. They make ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... it. She wears also upon that occasion a pair of new boots or shoes, so that the mothers of large families patronise greatly the disciples of St. Crispin. I should much like to know if this twofold superstition is prevalent, and how ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... the filed fetters of mankind; and let us all echo the cry, nor ever forget the razed Bastilles of superstition. But there glimmers a wealth of truth in the penumbra beyond our lanterns to which science will creep too slowly without the aid of imagination. Yet this truth may be seized by swift sallies into the darkness, and assured to us as it were by ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... one of these was named the "Bosquet de Julie;" and it is remarkable that, though long ago cut down by the brutal selfishness of the monks of St. Bernard (to whom the land appertained), that the ground might be enclosed into a vineyard for the miserable drones of an execrable superstition, the inhabitants of Clarens still point out the spot where its trees stood, calling it by the name which consecrated and survived them. Rousseau has not been particularly fortunate in the preservation of the "local habitations" he has given to "airy nothings." The Prior of Great St. Bernard ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Lieutenant a grunt of approbation, as Tom intended that it should do; shrewdly arguing that the old martinet was no friend to the modern superstition, that all which is required to cast out the devil is a smattering of ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... [very seriously indeed, and even a little severely]. Don't believe any such nonsense, sir. There never was any such thing. When people talk to you about Fin McCool and the like, take no notice of them. It's all idle stories and superstition. ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... the white light of self-appointed publicity, where a single error or dereliction may ruin the prestige of years! Consider also the rank turpitude of such a lapse! Alas, women frequently do not consider these things. Some of them seem to have a superstition that a newspaper is an automaton and has a will-to-live of its own; that somehow (they know not how) it will appear, and appear fitly, with or without man's aid. They cannot imagine the possibility ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... of Midnight quench'd the scene, And wrapt the hush'd horizon.—All around, In scatter'd huts, Labor, in sleep profound, Lies stretch'd, and rosy Innocence serene Slumbers;—but creeps, with pale and starting mien, Benighted SUPERSTITION.—Fancy-found, The late self-slaughter'd Man, in earth yet green And festering, burst from his incumbent mound, Roams!—and the Slave of Terror thinks he hears A mutter'd groan!—sees the sunk eye, that glares As shoots the Meteor.—But ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... "Mine is an inherited superstition, so I will not be ashamed of it," she told him. "We have always believed that white roses bring happiness, especially if they come accidentally at a ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... them in their shoes. During and after the Reformation this now popular festival had to bear a great deal of opposition, for authors and preachers alike agreed that it was a foolish feast, and led to superstition and idolatry. Hence the decree was issued, in the year 1622, that no cakes might be baked and no Kermis held, and even the children were forbidden to put out their shoes as they were accustomed to do. But for once in a way people were sensible enough to understand that ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... evidently been made under an overflow of the most grateful feelings for the attentions shown to her child. We acquitted her, therefore, of sinister intentions; and with our feelings of jealousy, feelings in which we had been educated, towards everything that tended to superstition, we soon agreed to think her some gentle maniac or sad enthusiast, suffering under some form of morbid melancholy. Forty-eight hours, with two nights' sleep, sufficed to restore the wonted equilibrium of our spirits; ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... should bare the swords of the gentry and turn them against each other—who should give tower and cottage to the flames, and slake the embers with the blood of the indwellers?—What would he deserve who should lift up again that ancient Dagon of Superstition, whom the worthies of the time have beaten down, and who should once more make the churches of God the high ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... the ill-luck to lie in his path. Grio watched him, and watching him, grew only more puzzled—and more puzzled. He could have understood a moral shrinking from the enterprise on which they were both embarked—the betrayal of the city that gave them shelter. He could have understood—he had superstition enough—a moral distaste for alchemy and those practices of the black art which his mind connected with it. But this superiority of the scholar, this aloofness, not from the treachery, but from the ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... interest. This explains why the government of the chiefs among all the Southern Indian tribes appears so much more arbitrary than among the northern tribes. His real power was probably much the same in both cases, but superstition had surrounded his person with a great many formalities. The early explorers, acquainted only with the arbitrary governments of Europe, saw in all this despotic powers whereas there might not have been much foundation for ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... various travellers, that they have been deluded on that spot by seeing, as they imagine, herds of beasts, which on investigation prove to be merely visionary. Of course, many people look upon this as a superstition; but a very regular confirmation of the story occurred in the year 1826, when two gentlemen and two ladies were passing the spot in a post-carriage. One of these was a clergyman, and none of them had ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... not stunned. There was the invariable exception—the Island Empire of Japan. Drunken with the wine of success deep-quaffed, without superstition and without faith in aught but its own ascendant star, laughing at the wreckage of science and mad with pride of race, it went forth upon the way of war. America's fleets had been destroyed. From the battlements ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... physics, Christian Europe was practically ignorant of these sciences. Finally, one will judge still less severely of Rashi's knowledge-or lack of knowledge-if one remembers what science was in the Christian world of the middle ages-it was childish, tinged with superstition, extravagantly absurd, and fantastically naive. Rashi believed that the Nile flooded its banks once every forty years; but Joinville, who lived two centuries later, and who was in Egypt, tells even more astonishing things than this about the marvellous [marvelous ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... how much superstition and romance have clustered round the humble clover-leaf. Not one of us, perhaps, but has in childhood spent hours in looking for the four-leaved clover that was to bring untold luck. What trouble to find it! What joy when found! And what little profit beyond the joy of the search! As the old couplet ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... girl. "If his spirit could come here at all would it not come to me instead of to that brutal wretch? Oh, mammy, I don't know which is worse, your religion or your superstition. You believe in a God who lets such things happen and you can think my noble friend would come back here only to scare a man like Perkins. It's all just horrible. Oh, Allan, Allan, are you so lost to me that you can never look goodwill into my ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... morality, dignity and liberty; when some exert themselves to obtain it at any price, offering for sale what is not merchandise, and others, possessing wealth, fancy that they can purchase what no one may buy, it is time to rise against this gross and criminal superstition, and cry aloud to the imposture: "Thy money perish with thee!" The most precious things that man possesses he has almost always received gratuitously: let him ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... their searching was of no avail; no treasure was there. I was warned of my danger by seeing in the eyes of the Arabs certain covetous glances. Whereon, in order to hasten their departure, I wrought upon those fears of superstition which even in these callous men were apparent. The chief of the Bedouins ascended from the Pit to give the signal to those above to raise us; and I, not caring to remain with the men whom I mistrusted, followed him immediately. ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... and death. And the effect has been not to lower but to raise the medical profession. It has saved the doctor from one great danger—that of abusing, for the purposes of religious proselytizing, the unlimited confidence reposed in him. It has freed him from many a superstition which enfeebled and confused the physicians of the Middle Ages. It has enabled him to devote his whole intellect to physical science, till he has set his art on a sound and truly scientific foundation. It has enabled him to attack physical evil with a single-hearted ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... believe them to belong to the same nation. Odysseus ever called and thought himself free, and his family before him never own'd the dominion of the Turk, living in inaccessible holds no Turkish turbaned head was ever near them. This man tho' wild and untaught is patriotic, brave, devoid of superstition, and last and most rare among the Greeks, has an utter contempt for money. He has talents for war or peace, and the most moderate in his principles of any of them. If there is a man in Greece who ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... woman prayed that he might never be warm, is perhaps a good story for a ballad, because it is a well-known tale: but is the author certain that it is 'well authenticated?' and does not such an assertion promote the popular superstition of witchcraft? ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... time and place and number are not." [Footnote: A Defense of Poetry.] In our period, verse dealing with the Scotch bard is fondest of stressing the immemorial association of the poet and the prophet, and in much of this, the "pretense of superstition" as Shelley calls it, is kept up, that the poet can foretell specific happenings. [Footnote: See, for example, Gray, The Bard; Scott, The Lady of the Lake, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Thomas the Rhymer; Campbell, Lochiel's ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... republique!"—"Long live the French!—Long live the republic!"—soon followed, in thundering applauses, through the lines. In short, without pursuing the various scenes of the wretched farce by which these miserable devotees of superstition were betrayed into an opinion that Championet possessed nearly as much sanctity as St. Januarius himself, and was scarcely less entitled to the adoration which many of the simple souls were now weak enough to pay him; ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... expedient of the transfusion into it of blood drawn from other human beings by his semi-materialized Kamarupa, and thus postpones his final destiny by the commission of wholesale murder. As popular "superstition" again quite rightly supposes, the easiest and most effectual remedy in such a case is to exhume and burn the body, thus depriving the creature of his point d'appui. When the grave is opened the body usually appears quite fresh and healthy, ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... mark the development of primitive culture, but we have paid no attention to the influences which mark the existence of survivals in culture. For this purpose we must first ascertain what are the component parts of each custom or superstition; secondly, we must classify the various elements in each example; and thirdly, we must group the various examples into classes which associate with each ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... use it again. So it is with gin'rosity. A man starts arly in life not bein' gin'rous. He says to himsilf: "I wurruked f'r this thing an' if I give it away I lose it." He ties up his gin'rosity in bandages so that th' blood can't circylate in it. It gets to be a superstition with him that he'll have bad luck if he iver does annything f'r annybody. An' so he rakes in an' puts his private mark with his teeth on all th' movable money in th' wurruld. But th' day comes whin he sees people around him gettin' a good dale iv injyemint out ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... up the thirteen steps from the landing to the attic with trembling feet. The fact that there were exactly thirteen was the first thing that awakened her superstition. As the months crept on, she resigned to this superstition with the abandon of an inveterate voluptuary. If she chanced to put her left foot first on the bottom step and not to notice it until she was half way up, she would turn around, come down, and relinquish the pleasure ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Blackstone accounts by suggesting that the child "was presumed incapable of actual sin, and therefore needed no deodand to purchase propitiatory masses; but every adult who died in actual sin stood in need of such atonement, according to the humane superstition of the founders of the English law." Sir Matthew Hale's explanation was that the child could not take care of himself, whereon Blackstone asks why the owner should save his forfeiture on account of the imbecility of the child, which ought to have been an additional ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... gently. It does not do to slam on the armature; every time you do so, you knock some of the so-called permanent magnetism out of it. But you may pull off the armature as suddenly as you like. It does the magnet good rather than harm. There is a popular superstition that you ought never to pull off the keeper of a magnet suddenly. On investigation, it is found that the facts are just the other way. You may pull off the keeper as suddenly as you like, but you should never slam ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... garments were spoken of by name according to the motive of their designs: for instance, the "peacock garment," the "elephant chasuble," and the "lion cope." Fuller tells of the use of a pall as an ecclesiastical vestment, remarking tersely: "It is made up of lamb's wool and superstition." ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... last, and may be regarded as the platform of the reformed party. After giving a sketch of the history of the Armenian Church, its original purity of doctrine and worship, and the subsequent introduction of error and superstition, through the influence of the Greek and Roman Churches, it declares that the Armenian Church has come at last to be a mere 'satellite of Rome,' and that the time has come to assert its independence, to cast off the 'ultramontane ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... is beautiful. I wish he had illustrated that mood of mind which exaggerates, and still more, mistakes, the inward depravation, as in Bunyan, Nelson, and others, by extracts from Baxter's Life of himself. What genuine superstition is exemplified in that bandying of texts and half texts, and demi-semi-texts, just as memory happened to suggest them, or chance brought them before Bunyan's mind! His tract, entitled, "Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners"[1] is ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... copies of it, to send to their sovereigns, and it is inserted at full length in several books now in the press; among others, in the new Encyclopedie. I think it will produce considerable good even in these countries, where ignorance, superstition, poverty, and oppression of body and mind, in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can never be hoped. If all the sovereigns of Europe were to set themselves to work, to emancipate the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... creditor have never had any other power to give or withhold credit than the credit that was given to them. They exist by sufferance or superstition ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... equality, of citizenship, of wealth, of virtue, education, self-protection, dignity, independence and power—the mightiest engine yet placed in the hand of man for the uprooting of ignorance, tyranny, superstition, the overturning of thrones, altars, kings, popes, despotisms, monarchies and empires. What phantom can the sons of the Pilgrims be chasing, when they make merchandise of a power like this? Judas Iscariot, selling his Master for thirty pieces of silver, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... that the recent disclosures of his true character had done much already to weaken the faith of Kulan Tith, and that it would require but little more to turn the powerful jeddak into an avowed enemy; but so strong are the seeds of superstition that even the great Kaolian still hesitated to cut the final strand that bound him ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... return to the clergy. While the monasteries and nunneries are going to the ground in superstition-saturated Spain; while eager workmen are demolishing the last hiding-places of monkery, and letting the daylight into places that have well kept the frightful secrets of three hundred years, and turning the ancient ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... he whispered. "There is not one of them that is not a living lie. Can they help it? Think of the centuries of serfdom and superstition through which their blood has crawled. ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... rendering suggests. The word ukaman in the fourth line can be rendered as "shall perhaps float," or as "shall perhaps be saved" (in the Buddhist sense of salvation),—as there are two verbs ukami. According to an old superstition, the spirits of the drowned must continue to dwell in the waters until such time as they can lure the living to destruction. When the ghost of any drowned person succeeds in drowning somebody, it may be able to obtain rebirth, and to leave the sea forever. The exclamation ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... "Rival al-Ghayb," somewhat like the "Himalayan Brothers" of modern superstition. See Herklots (Qanoon-e-Islam) for a long and careful description of these "Mardan-i-Ghayb" (Pers.), a "class of people mounted on clouds," invisible, but moving in a circular orbit round the world, and suggesting ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... son—a mule, of the worst sort. He probably saw that to leave money to Leon was to give it to the Church, which meant that it would be spent for the further undoing of Spain and the propagation of ignorance and superstition." ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... the clouds suddenly lifted, as, for modern generations of men, the mists of superstition ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... eleven Correggios, twenty-eight Titians. What became of that collection? The journals of the House of Commons will tell you. There you may see the Puritan Parliament disposing of this Whitehall or York House collection as follows: "Ordered, that all such pictures and statues there as are without any superstition, shall be forthwith sold.... Ordered, that all such pictures there as have the representation of the Second Person in the Trinity upon them, shall be forthwith burnt. Ordered, that all such pictures there as have the representation of the Virgin Mary upon them, shall be ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... attempt to reduce a story like David's to terms of spiritual edification has been difficult above measure, ever since mankind advanced beyond the half-barbaric age in which the story was told. Judged by our standards, the ethics of the story are often low, and its religion is largely a superstition. What brings the Almighty on the scene is most frequently some great calamity, which priest or soothsayer interprets as a divine judgment. Often there is attributed to him the quality of a jealous Oriental despot. The justice he enforces is often injustice ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... old book aside; Antique and curious, I myself indeed Read it at times, but as a man should read;. A fine old work it is, and I protest I hate to hear it treated as a jest: The book has wisdom in it, if you look Wisely upon it, as another book: For superstition (as our priests of sin Are pleased to tell us) makes us blind within; Of this hereafter—we will now select Some works to please you, others to direct; Tales and romances shall your fancy feed, And reasoners form your morals and your creed." The books were ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... she said at last, in a very oracular tone, "I mean superstition. And I call that story of yours a piece of ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... that the popular prejudices and vulgar errors in regard to pestilences and wars—errors which were wont to prevail upon every appearance of a comet—were now altogether unknown. As if by some sudden convulsive exertion, reason had at once hurled superstition from her throne. The feeblest intellect had derived ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to superstition; perhaps my religion is not strong enough for that; but at that moment I could not help yielding to a full belief in the supernatural. There was no natural cause—I could think of none—that would account for the mysterious disappearance of the horse. I had ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... height,—I say nothing of devotion. I did not pretend on this occasion to join in it; I own that my thoughts as well as my eyes were roaming to other objects, and gathering around me the thousand recollections of scenic splendor, of terror, of bigotry, and superstition which were acted in sight of the very walls by which I was surrounded. Here the murder of Thomas a Becket was perpetrated; there was his miracle-working shrine, visited by pilgrims from all parts of Christendom, and enriched with the ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... supernatural, the spiritualistic, the superstitious. Boston, of all places in the world, is, perhaps, the happiest hunting-ground for the spiritualist medium, the faith healer, and the mind curer. You will find there the most advanced emancipation from theological superstition combined in the most extraordinary way with a more than half belief in the incoherences of a spiritualistic seance. The Boston Christian Scientists have just erected a handsome stone church, with chime of bells, organ, and choir ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead |
