"Vitiate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... successful in eliminating diseases which they had themselves caused. There was not a little doubt in some cases about the character of the possessing spirits, and it behooved people to be careful; demons might use men as habitations, and while posing as good angels vitiate ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... made us acquainted with some of the agencies which vitiate the quality of the brain, and it is our duty to profit by its results. The principal of them is morbid action in the brain itself, producing, more or less directly, disorder and weakness. But its deteriorating ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... of noncontentious politics, of recuperation after long agitation, of constructive {23} administration, and this the Liberal-Conservative majority was for the time better able to give, even though corruption was soon to vitiate its ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... a well-used metaphor is that it should completely fulfil this function: there should be no by-products of imagery which distract from the poet's aim, and vitiate and weaken the ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... error in the Symmes diary, which is however explainable, and need not vitiate the whole of it. It has been ascertained that the drowning of Henry Jackson in Songo River by being kicked in the mouth by another boy while swimming, took place in 1828, so that the statement to that effect in the diary, must have been interpolated. As it ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... occasions to revive it. The greater part of mankind are corrupt in every condition, and differ in high and in low stations, only as they have more or fewer opportunities of gratifying their desires, or as they are more or less restrained by human censures. Many vitiate their principles in the acquisition of riches; and who can wonder that what is gained by fraud and extortion is enjoyed ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... psychology to-day can fail to realize how unconscious people often are of the seat and the nature of their own troubles. It is true that the tendency to exaggerate the importance of sex seems likely to vitiate to some extent the conclusions of psychologists like Freud and his disciples. But that they have revealed to us a mass of hitherto unknown and un-understood suffering in the minds of both women and men, arising from the continual repression ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... and descriptions are now nearly two centuries and a half old, but I do not find any real difference between his double varieties and their present representatives. So it is in other cases in which improvements by crossing or the introduction of new forms does not vitiate the evidence. Double varieties, as a rule, are exactly the same now, as they were at the time of their ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... of the law is positive, that the sheriff shall put all the enclosures into one box. How far his inattention or misconduct in this particular shall be deemed to vitiate the ballots of a county, appears to be left to the judgment of the canvassers. Were the ballots of this county subject to no other exception than that stated in the third and fourth questions, I should incline to think it one ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... she continued, "which so conduces to the habit of thoroughness as the experiments of chemistry. When one learns that even a grain of dust will, in some cases, vitiate everything, he acquires a new conception of the term 'clean' and is likely to be thorough in washing his apparatus. From this the habit grows upon him and widens its application until ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... the same sentiment eloquently expounded in the Doctor's famous passage on Iona. But there exists a grand distinction between natural feelings proper in their own place, and natural feelings permitted to enter the religious field, and vitiate the integrity of revelation. It is from the natural alone in such cases that danger is to be apprehended; seeing that what is not according to the mental constitution of man, is of necessity at once unproductive and shortlived. Let due weight be given to the associative ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... one of the twenty approaches it. One only—Griffith Gaunt—is fit to be named in the same day with it; and Griffith Gaunt is marred by an insincerity in the plot which vitiates, and is at once felt to vitiate, the whole work. On everything he wrote before and after The Cloister Reade's essential vulgarity of mind is written large. That he shook it off in that great instance is one of the miracles of literary ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... implied. But on the other hand it is a distinguishing characteristic of the Greek age that the ideal formulated by thought was the direct outcome of the facts. That absolute separation of what ought to be from what is which continues to haunt and vitiate modern life had not yet been made in ancient Greece. Plato, idealist though he be, is yet rooted in the facts of his age; his perfect republic he bases on the institutions of Sparta and Crete; his perfect man he shapes on the lines of the Greek citizen. That dislocation ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... of this sort,)—but after Caesar had said this, then this virtuous augur said that he was invested with a pontificate of that sort that he was able, by means of the auspices, either to hinder or to vitiate the comitia, just as he pleased; and he declared that he would do so. And here, in the first place, remark the incredible stupidity of the man. For what do you mean? Could you not just as well have done what you said you had now the power to do by the privileges with which that ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... to live virtuously, from which, except in moments of forgetfulness, I seldom swerved. At my uncle's, religion was far more tiresome, because they made it an employment; with my master I thought no more of it, though my sentiments continued the same: I had no companions to vitiate my morals: I became idle, careless, and obstinate, but my principles were ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Marbles[107], all that falls between the pair of dolphins (VII: VIII), is regarded as belonging to a separate composition, grouped about the single dolphin (0). But such an interpolated composition, besides having no purpose in itself, would vitiate the unity of the entire relief. For, although the circular form is less favorable to a strongly marked symmetry than is the plane, at least in compositions of small extent, still the individual figures and groups must bear some relation to a common centre, and there ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... cosmopolitan fringe of it. In a rank lower than these we have William de Morgan and John Galsworthy. The former does not seem to be inspired by it. As for John Galsworthy, the quality in him which may possibly vitiate his right to be considered a major artist is precisely his fierce animosity to this class. Major artists are seldom so cruelly hostile to anything whatever as John Galsworthy is to this class. He does in fiction what John Sargent does in paint; and their inimical observation ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... work among us. They are sometimes haughty, unsocial, and unsympathetic, and find themselves among us because there is offered better pay for less work than was found in their own neighborhoods. But these do not vitiate the schools; they are exceptions. I think, too, that the faculties of the several schools, together with the boards of trustees, should be as largely composed of competent, worthy Negroes as the interests of the institutions will allow. I am sure that such a policy would both encourage our people ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... have been perverted, and even caricatured in various ways, and, among others, by a false terminology, which of itself is able to vitiate the truth. When we have learned to substitute Indian confederacy for Indian kingdom; Teuchtli, or head war-chief, sachem, and chief, for king, prince, and lord; Indian villages in the place of "great cities"; communal houses for "palaces," and democratic for monarchic institutions; ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... thick-studded gems Declar'd to me our justice on the earth To be the effluence of that heav'n, which thou, Thyself a costly jewel, dost inlay! Therefore I pray the Sovran Mind, from whom Thy motion and thy virtue are begun, That he would look from whence the fog doth rise, To vitiate thy beam: so that once more He may put forth his hand 'gainst such, as drive Their traffic in that sanctuary, whose walls With miracles and martyrdoms were built. Ye host of heaven! whose glory I ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... it is to be observed that things are incapable of being acquired through usucapion by a purchaser in good faith, or by one who possesses on some other lawful ground, unless they are free from all flaws which vitiate the usucapion. ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... infant at the aera of his household catastrophe. And if, through such burning examples of patriotism, far remote collateral descendants entered upon the succession, was this a reproach? Was this held to vitiate or to impair the heraldic honours? A disturbance, a convulsion, that shook the house back into its primitive simplicities of standing, was that a shock to its hereditary grandeur? If it had been, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... both houses of Congress. In truth, Sir, I must say that, in my opinion, the vernacular tongue of the country has become greatly vitiated, depraved, and corrupted by the style of our Congressional debates. And if it were possible for those debates to vitiate the principles of the people as much as they have depraved their tastes, I should cry ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... mixed with water, by agitation, the inflammable air from metals; this also would not succeed with me, although I used only little inflammable air, and much water. He also observed that plants made vitiated air wholesome again. It follows from my experiments that they vitiate air. I kept plants, in the dark as well as exposed to sunlight, in a flask which was filled with vitiated air and carefully secured (which careful securing must really be attended to). I tested a little of this air every 2 days, and always ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... as well try to dip up the ocean with a spoon," said Waldron, "as try to vitiate the atmosphere of the whole world, by any means whatsoever! But even if you ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... the surface circulation of the body, and the elimination of waste matter and thus make the body capable of withstanding the causes which lead to disease, and of resisting it when formed. Grief, anguish and despair enfeeble the circulation, diminish or vitiate the secretions, favour the causes which induce disease, and impede the action of the mechanism by which the body may get rid of its maladies. An army when flushed with victory and elated with hope maintains a comparative immunity ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... Tyers said that Johnson 'in one night composed, after finishing an evening in Holborn, his Hermit of Teneriffe.' Gent. Mag. for 1784, p. 901. The high value that he set on this piece may be accounted for in his own words. 'Many causes may vitiate a writer's judgment of his own works.... What has been produced without toilsome efforts is considered with delight, as a proof of vigorous faculties and fertile invention.' Johnson's Works, vii. 110. He had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... risen during the last few decades, both in England and in the United States. All history lies if this be not an evil omen for any civilization. It means, among other things, that more effectively than ever the forces of suggestion and imitation and social pressure are being brought to bear, to vitiate the young girl's natural judgment, deceiving her into the supposition that these things which seem to make other people so happy are the first that must be sought by her. If only she had the merest inkling of what the doctor and the lawyer and the priest ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... will be made a vehicle for the freest thought, though not of random speculations; and with a generous appreciation of the various forms of truth and beauty, it will not fail to expose such instances of false sentiment, perverted taste and erroneous opinion, as may tend to vitiate the public mind or degrade the individual character. Nor will the literary department of the Harbinger be limited to criticism alone. It will receive contributions from various pens, in different spheres of thought, and, free from dogmatic exclusiveness, ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... of the command. The master drew out his scales, and desired the canonico to weigh with his own hand five ounces. He groaned and trembled: the balance was unsteady. 'Throw in another piece: it will not vitiate the agreement,' cried the master. It was done. Fear and grief are among the thirsty passions, but add little to the appetite. It seemed, however, as if every sigh had left a vacancy in the stomach of the canonico. At dinner the cook brought him a salted bonito, half ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... acknowledge it with affright. I no longer recognize myself. I have good reason to despise, to fly these wretches. Their presence, their contact affects me, in spite of myself. One would say that they have the fatal power to vitiate the atmosphere they breathe. It seems to me that I feel the corruption entering through every pore. If they absolve me from the fault I have committed, the sight, the acquaintance of honest men will fill me with confusion ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... to cases where we find people of entirely opposite tastes living lives of torture, because grouped in the same family, and forced by circumstances to stay there contrary to their wills. But that does not vitiate the law in the slightest, in each life we contract certain obligations which cannot then be fulfilled. Perhaps we have run away from a duty such as the care of an invalid relative and have met death without coming to a realization of ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... find it at all an easy matter to make test weights so alike as to differ in no other appreciable respect than in their specific gravity, and if they differ and become known apart, the knowledge so acquired will vitiate future judgments in various indirect ways. Similarity in outward shape and touch was ensured by the use of mechanically-made cartridge cases; dissimilarity through any external stain was rendered of no hindrance ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... to every man only what he himself commonly hears; and it is in the power of any man's acquaintance to vitiate the evidence which they report, and to stun him with clamours, and terrify him with apprehensions of miseries never felt, and dangers invisible. But, without such a combination, we are to remember, that most men associate with those of their own opinions, and that the rank of those ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... recent period it seemed that no man could discuss him or his time without manifesting such strong personal feeling as to vitiate his judgment and conclusions. This was partly due to the lack of perspective, but in the main to ignorance of the facts essential to a sober treatment of the theme. In this respect the last quarter of a century has seen a gradual but radical change, for a band of dispassionate scientific scholars ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the former objects of his affections to resume their influence. With earnest prayers, therefore, for the Divine Help, with jealous circumspection, and resolute self-denial, he guards against, and abstains from, whatever might be likely again to darken his enlightened judgment, or to vitiate his reformed taste; thus making it his unwearied endeavour to grow in the knowledge and love of heavenly things, and to obtain a warmer admiration, and a more cordial ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... increasing alarm the judicial construction of statutes and the Constitution itself, which all but vitiate and annul the basis of our citizenship; we have seen repeated attempts made to discredit the War amendments to the national Constitution, and some have in all seriousness gone so far even as to question their constitutionality. Every student of ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... them be criticised without mercy. The salus publica demands the sacrifice. But to make an individual ridiculous merely because he has written a foolish, if it be a harmless book, is not, I think, justifiable on any moral principle ... I repeat my principle. Whatever tends to vitiate our literary taste, our morals, our religious or political principles, may be fairly at the mercy of criticism. So, whatever tends to introduce false science, false history, indeed, falsehood in any shape, exposes itself to the censor's rod. ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... volume. It was there pointed out that the sort of thinking demanded in the special sciences is not so very different from that with which we are all familiar in common life. Science is more accurate and systematic, it has a broader outlook, and it is free from the imperfections which vitiate the uncritical and fragmentary knowledge which experience of the world yields the unscientific. But, after all, the world is much the same sort of a world to the man of science and to his uncritical neighbor. The latter can, as ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... handed over to the inquisitorial brothers, for they would have burned you before you were allowed to import the odour of all the fields of Spanish onions and garlic into the Eternal City. It is a sign of the bad times that are approaching when errant cobblers are allowed to vitiate the precincts of St. Peter's with their pestilential breath. To-morrow you will be regaled with a view—mind, only a view—of his holiness's toe, and then you ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... commitment and imprisonment complained of. I am further of opinion that, even supposing the House to possess such authority, still the informality of the proceedings in the present case has been such as to vitiate them ab initio, and to render null and void everything that has been done under the ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... evolutionist, however, proceeds to assume that later things are necessarily better than what they have grown out of: and this is false altogether. This fallacy reinforces very unfortunately that inevitable esteem which people have for their own opinions, and which must always vitiate the history of philosophy when it is a philosopher that writes it. A false subordination comes to be established among systems, as if they moved in single file and all had the last, the author's system, for their secret goal. In Hegel, for instance, this conceit is conspicuous, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Guy went on. "At a children's ball, about fifteen years ago, I met my fate. She was in white muslin, with a velvet bodice (Flora shuddered visibly); for a year after I pictured to myself the angels in no other attire, and now—years vitiate one's tastes so—I can fancy nothing but a jockey in 'black body and white sleeves.' I suppose she was very pretty; let us hope so; it is my only excuse for being enchanted in ten minutes, and stupidly enslaved in half an hour. The thing ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... the December number of the 'Magazine of Art,' in which I find an engraving of my portrait of Peabody. I did not know that it would be there, but I have given Mr. Spielman a sort of general permission to use certain of the photographs. I do not know whether the appearance of the head will vitiate the interest of your proposed publication, but I hope not, as the use of it will be ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... pretermit an Observation which may perswade us, that an over-vehement stroak upon the Sensory, especially if it be naturally of a weak constitution, may make a more lasting impression than one would imagine, which impression may in some cases, as it were, mingle with, and vitiate the action of vivid objects for ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... It would, however, be rest. But, just as he was yielding to it, the thought came to him that, by the settling of the clay, washed in, the lower orifice was likely to be obstructed. All passage for the outer air would be closed. Within, the respiration of ten persons would soon vitiate the air by loading it ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... French attempt to forestall theirs. They laughed at such a thought; and, while they laughed, she did it. Henceforth the single redress for the English of this capital oversight, but which never could have redressed it effectually, was to vitiate and taint the coronation of Charles VII as the work of a witch. That policy, and not malice (as M. Michelet is so happy to believe), was the moving principle in the subsequent prosecution of Joanna. Unless they unhinged the force of the first coronation in the popular ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... days are the days appointed for their work and death. It is well to remember that many of the prophetic numbers contain a double prophecy. Thus 1,260 here may be coincident with the treading down of Jerusalem by Mahommedanism. But whether it is or not, does not vitiate the literal quantity when applied to these two witnesses. In the third place, they are called two olive trees and two candlesticks standing before the God of the whole earth. The figurative meaning will be found by finding some passage where two trees are mentioned in the interpretation ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild |
