"Atheistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Church was as usual in accord with the sword; theoretically all peace, practically all bloodshed and rapine and aggression: and anything that was not his own opinion envisaged itself always to the Dean's crystallised mind as revolutionary and atheistic. ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... pietists by Providence. They are not allowed to question that whatever has recently happened was all for the best. Now Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle. If there be no purpose, or if the purpose permits of human free will, then in either case it is almost insanely unlikely that there should be in history a period ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... illustrate some important principles, and to help on the general cause of truth, I must say that he strikes me as a very unreasonable man in much of his behavior. Our puritan fathers did not come to this wilderness with French, atheistic, idolatrous love for a goddess of liberty. They came here, it is true, for liberty of conscience and freedom to worship God. With a great sum they purchased this freedom. But infidels could as well claim ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... nothingness. It takes matter from [Page 182] the hand of the unseen power behind, and merely notes the progress of its development. It finds the clay in the hands of an intelligent potter, and sees it whirl in the process of formation into a vessel. It is not in any sense necessarily atheistic, any more than it is to affirm that a tree grows by vital processes in the sun and dew, instead of being arbitrarily and instantly created. The conclusion reached depends on the spirit of the observer. Newton could say, "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... showed hardly any inclination for aesthetics, of which he had not even heard much. We may be sure that to Chopin to whom discussions of any kind were distasteful, those of a circle in which, as in that of George Sand, democratic and socialistic, theistic and atheistic views prevailed, were particularly so. For, notwithstanding his bourgeois birth, his sympathies were with the aristocracy; and notwithstanding his neglect of ritual observances, his attachment to the Church of Rome remained unbroken. Chopin does not seem to ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... same time as that of Demeter, the poet addresses him thus:—"Other gods are either far away, or they have no ears, or they exist not, or have no care for us. But we see thee, a present deity, not of wood or stone, but real; therefore we pray to thee." It is true that such materialistic and atheistic expressions were probably reprobated by many at the time, as well as by later writers; but the mere possibility of their public enunciation shows how far the Athenians had gone from ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... The temptation to use the machinery of administrative centralization created by the greatest of despots was too great, and it was difficult not to abuse it. The result was a sort of republican imperialism on to which there had latterly been grafted an atheistic catholicism. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... became well acquainted. I remember here that Mr. Ripley had once reproved me for declaring that Lewes had really a claim to be an original philosopher or thinker; for Boston intellect always frowned on him after Margaret Fuller condemned him as "frivolous and atheistic." I remember that Tom Powell had told me how he had dined somewhere in London, where there was a man present who had really been a cannibal, owing to dire stress of shipwreck, and how Lewes, who was there, was so fascinated with the man-eater that he could think of nothing else. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... in principle between such a declaration as this and the attempt of the third Napoleon to establish an empire in Mexico by arms? In the one case we have a proselytising, atheistic Republic bent on abolishing the religion of an unquestionable majority of the French people; in the other, we have a proselytising emperor bent on organizing empire in Mexico. In the light of the doctrine that governments ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... a Protestant, William is impressed by the greatness of the role that Leo XIII might play in Christianity; and, therefore, brings all the influences at his command to bear upon him. Through all his official and officious agents he tells him that atheistic France, in the hands of laymen, can no longer be the eldest daughter of the Church; that the Holy Father is the Head of Christianity throughout the world, and that in the East and Far East he should make use of those who are most Christian; that an Emperor who is a believer, even though ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... "I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise." In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on living as before. It is written: "Give all that thou hast ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... fair example of subjective religious vigour. But my quarrel with such exhibitions is that they do not always represent objective fact. No atheistic reasoning can, I hold, dislodge religion from the human heart. Logic cannot deprive us of life, and religion is life to the religious. As an experience of consciousness it is beyond the assaults of logic. But the religious life is often projected in external ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... receive them. As the child was engaged one day in prayer, the rude soldiers of Charles XII. burst into his room. Forthwith the lad began to speak of Christ; and away the soldiers fled in awe and terror. At the age of eight he lay awake at night tormented with atheistic doubts {1708.}. But the doubts did not last long. However much he doubted with the head he never doubted with the heart; and the charm that drove the doubts away was the figure of ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... ground seems strewn with ashes, and all stars are obscured; while every withered tree and field laid waste seems to cry to him: Barren! Forsaken! Springtime is no longer possible here! He must feel as young Goethe felt when he first peered into the melancholy atheistic twilight of the Systme de la Nature; to him this book seemed so grey, so Cimmerian and deadly, that he could only endure its presence with difficulty, and shuddered at it as one shudders at ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... will generally agree. He lays stress on the delusion that to assault and overthrow the citadels of Islam and Hinduism, if such an achievement were possible, would be to lay open a clear field for the success of Christianity. 'Much more probably we should find an atheistic and materialistic India, in which Mammon, Wealth, Industrial Success, and Worldliness had become new gods.' Such attacks upon Eastern religion 'may for the moment win a Pyrrhic victory ... but they are at the same time ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... no very long reflection on the short but excellent speech of the plumed director to the ambassador of Cappadocia. The imperial ambassador was not in waiting, but they found for Austria a good Judean representation. With great judgment his highness the Grand Duke had sent the most atheistic coxcomb to be found in Florence to represent, at the bar of impiety, the house of apostolic majesty, and the descendants of the pious, though high-minded, Maria Theresa. He was sent to humble the whole race of Austria before those grim assassins, reeking ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... faith in everything and everybody, except Mrs. Asbury. Emerson's atheistic fatalism is enough to unhinge human reason; he is a great and, I believe, an honest thinker, and of his genius I have the profoundest admiration. An intellectual Titan, he wages a desperate war with received creeds, and, rising on the ruins of systems, struggles ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... encouraged to break the windows and destroy the monuments; and these outrages, which, it was previously concerted, should at first assume the appearance of popular tumult, were soon regulated and directed by the mandates of the Convention themselves. The churches were again opened, an atheistic ritual, and licentious homilies,* were substituted for the proscribed service—and an absurd and ludicrous imitation of the Greek mythology was exhibited, under the title of the Religion ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... train to Jennie's rich and haughty and painfully religious aunt in Cedar Point. All Jennie's sisters, even the one from Vermont, were to be there and Jennie did want to go to visit with the girls. She and Frank had never been invited to any semi-religious festival by this aunt, owing to Frank's atheistic tendencies. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... characteristic of nomad races, who are always on horseback or driving, added to his Asiatic look. The man was certainly not a European, a slave, a descendant of the deistic Aryans, but a scion of the atheistic hordes who had several times already almost overrun Europe, and who, instead of ideas of progress, have Nihilism buried ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... seems hardly consistent with that recognition of religious truth by the state to which we yet adhere, and without which it is highly probable that the northern and western races, after a disturbing and rapidly degrading period of atheistic anarchy, may fatally recur to their old national idolatries, modified and mythically dressed up according to the spirit of the age. It may be observed that the decline and disasters of modern communities have generally ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... the open air among gypsies. With the popish emissary it is otherwise: his portrait is the creation of Borrow's most studied hatred. Yet it must be admitted that the man in black is a triumph of complex characterisation. A joyous liver and an unscrupulous libertine, sceptical as Voltaire, as atheistic as a German professor, as practical as a Jew banker, as subtle as a Jesuit, he has as many ways of converting the folks among whom he is thrown as Panurge had of eating the corn in ear. For the simple and credulous—crosses and beads; for the hard-hearted and venal—material ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... has been called atheistic, because it is silent about the presence of a personal first Cause. It might be more truly denominated Pantheistic, not in the vague sense in which that term is applied to denote the belief in a Deity as an anima mundi, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Gengis-Khams, the Tamerlanes. The obesity, which is characteristic of the nomad races, who are always on horseback or driving, added to his Asiatic look. The man was certainly not a European, a slave, a descendant of the deistic Aryans, but a descendant of the Atheistic hordes, who had several times already almost overrun Europe, and who, instead of any ideas of progress, have the belief in nihility, at the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... method of cure discovered, or by any experience in the operation which the physicians or surgeons attained to; but it was evidently from the secret invisible hand of Him that had at first sent this disease as a judgement upon us; and let the atheistic part of mankind call my saying what they please, it is no enthusiasm; it was acknowledged at that time by all mankind. The disease was enervated and its malignity spent; and let it proceed from whencesoever it will, let the philosophers search for reasons in nature ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... future of this portion of our country is veiled in the deepest obscurity. Here we shall have the free-thinking German, the bigoted Roman Catholic, the atheistic Frenchman, and the latitudinarian Yankee, in one grand heterogeneous conglomeration of nations and ideas such as the world has never seen. Whether these diverse peculiarities will by close contact and mutual attrition, by the advancing light of education ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... providential care over it, and that under His grace there shall come the triumph of righteousness in it. I believe in Jesus Christ. To my mind, Christianity stands to-day very much as it did nearly two thousand years ago, when Jesus hung upon the cross between two thieves. The anarchy which, atheistic and reckless, would destroy all law and all property, is one of the thieves, and the devotee of the gold god of our time, who clutches his money-bags and says, "I have a right to get all the money ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... while, in unmistakable terms, they stated the situation. The Plutocracy accepted the challenge. It was the Plutocracy, weighing and balancing, that defeated us by dividing our strength. It was the Plutocracy, through its secret agents, that raised the cry that socialism was sacrilegious and atheistic; it was the Plutocracy that whipped the churches, and especially the Catholic Church, into line, and robbed us of a portion of the labor vote. And it was the Plutocracy, through its secret agents of course, that encouraged the Grange ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... to the development of life in this world. They do not believe that as a social contribution to the betterment of human life a saint is less valuable than an agnostic professor of sociology or an atheistic socialistic leader; nor does the Christian believe that strict attention to the affairs of the Kingdom of God renders him less valuable as a citizen than strict attention to a brewery or a bank. A whole-hearted Christian life ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... like the Christian Inquirer and The Independent, for instance—which have been so fully initiated into the secrets of universal truth as to regard all inquiry into such subjects either as too vulgar for a Christian gentleman, comme il faut, or as giving a "sanction to the atheistic delusion that there may be a spiritual or supernatural agency" in manifestations which are not accounted for by the New-England Primer. Mrs. Crowe, on the contrary, supposes that there may be something worthy of philosophical investigation in those singular phenomena, which, surpassing ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... demand. It might be even misleading. Buddhism, for example, has assumed an endless variety of forms—now appearing as a system of the baldest atheism, and now presenting an approximate theism. Gautama was certainly atheistic, and he virtually denied the existence of the human soul. But in the northern development of his system, theistic conceptions sprang up. A sort of trinity had appeared by the seventh century A.D., and by the tenth century a supreme and celestial Buddha had been discovered, from whom all other ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... as there is a united testimony on the part of Roman Catholicism, as to religious teaching in the schools. One County Inspector writes, that the Roman Catholic priest, in a separate school which the Inspector visited, said, "Your schools are atheistic. You don't acknowledge God." The same charge has been often repeated by the same authority against the public schools. While I have provided and contended for full provision by which the Roman Catholics could ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... be realised, in the first place, how undefined is the Hindu's religious position. From the rudest polytheism up to pantheism, and even to an atheistic philosophy, all is within the Hindu pale, like fantastic cloud shapes and vague mist and empty ether, all within the same sky. To the student of Hinduism, then, the first fact that emerges is that there are no distinctive Hindu doctrines. ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... believe. 'For my part, child, I have made myself easy in those points.' The character of a free-thinking exquisite is drawn from life without exaggeration, but with more than a touch of the bitter contempt Addison felt for the atheistic coxcomb, with whom he was too ready to confound the sincere questioner of orthodox opinion. The only passages of his in the 'Spectator' that border on intolerance are those in which he deals with the free-thinker; ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... patriotism; and with our fathers' religion, Christian virtue. These principles now only exist partially, instead of inspiring the masses, for these ideas never perish altogether. At present, to support society we have nothing but selfishness."[] Elsewhere, he laments the atheistic government, and the increase of incredulity; and longs for Christian institutions, and a strong hierarchy, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... its characteristics essentially religious in the highest sense of the term, holding truth dearer than all success in popular estimation, or than all attractions of external beauty, reverent, self-forgetting, and humble before Nature; that of the other is towards an Art Epicurean and atheistic, holding the truth as something to be used or neglected at its pleasure, and of no more value than falsehood which is equally beautiful,—making Nature, indeed, something for weak men to lean on and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... is that the character of Bois Guilbert as drawn by Scott—his habitual oath 'by earth and sea and sky!' his scorn of 'the doting scruples which fetter our free-born reason,' and his atheistic faith that to die is to be 'dispersed to the elements of which our strange forms are so mystically composed,' are all wonderful indications of insight into a type of mind differing inconceivably from the mere infidel villain of modern novels, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... noticed small detail and took a real interest in Nature, but one who had a sound, natural philosophy and a good idea of the reasonable and scientific explanation of things which so many people either ignore or look upon as "atheistic." ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... accounts of the Creation, and of multitudes of gods, good and evil, all quite as pronounced as those that are derived from the Grecian myths; and while the wildest and grossest of superstitious fancies have prevailed among the common people, skepticism and atheistic doubt are known to have been nearly universal among the learned. The poem which we give in this connection, therefore, though professedly a Hindu creation, may be accepted not only as portraying Hindu doubt and despondency, but also as a faithful picture of the anxiety, doubt, and almost utter despair, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... absurdities of current liberal philosophy had not even yet exhausted itself; and I presently supplemented that work by another—The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island, a short satirical story in the style of Voltaire's Candide. This is a story of an atheistic professor, such as Tyndall, who, together with a demimondaine, now the wife of a High Church colonial bishop, is wrecked on a desert island, and there endeavors to redeem her from the degrading superstitions of theism and to make her a partner with him in the sublime service of Humanity—of ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... our own boyhood, the World as known to the ancients was nearly all which was known to ourselves (!). We have recently become acquainted,—intimate,—with the teeming regions of the far East, and with empires, pagan or even atheistic, of which the origin runs far back beyond the historic records of Juda or of the West, and which were more populous than all Christendom now is, for many ages before the Christian era." (p. 162.) Such a statement is soon made; ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... Power, not however in a transcendental and personal God, but a cosmic, impersonal, fatalistic world-force.[109] To Philo this conception, with its denial of the Divine will and the Divine care for the individual, was as atheistic as the Epicurean "chance." Equally repulsive to his religious standpoint was the Stoic dogma, that man is, or should be, independent of all help, and that the human reason is all-powerful and can comprehend ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... Rubens had a bad habit of thinking for himself. The habit grew upon him until the whisper was passed from this one to that, that he was becoming decidedly atheistic. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... college that June before I met her and I had a lot of stuff I had taken to the country with me. Then I sent for more. I used to devour volumes about vase paintings, and classical ideals, and I read worlds of it aloud to her. Miss Eliza used to think it was atheistic, I'm quite sure. She didn't say so, but she wouldn't let me read my mythology in the house at least, aloud. Matilda and I had to go down to the Branch, so we wouldn't be heard. It was from Bulfinch, I believe, she got the ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... debates which Daddy inaugurated were, for a time at least, well attended. Secularism, like all other forms of mental energy, had lately been active in Manchester; there had been public discussions between Mr. Holyoake and Mr. Bradlaugh as to whether Secularism were necessarily atheistic or no. Some of the old newspapers of the movement, dating from Chartist days, had recently taken a new lease of life; and combined with the protest against theology was a good deal of co-operative and republican enthusiasm. Lomax, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... could hardly be expected to exclaim: 'The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is understanding.'[1] Materialism ruled the speculations no less than the conduct of the age. Pamponazzo preached an atheistic doctrine, with the plausible reservation of Salva Fide, which then covered all. The more delicate thinkers, Pico and Ficino, sought to reconcile irreconcilables by fusing philosophy and theology, while they distinguished truths of science from truths ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... more correct to say that the theory in itself is perfectly compatible with an atheistic view of the universe. That is true; but it is equally true of physical theories generally. Indeed, it is more true of the theory of gravitation, and of the nebular hypothesis, than of the hypothesis in question. The latter merely takes up a particular, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... the sage, Amida the queen of heaven, and hundred-armed Kuannon, tell of the popular faith of the masses of Japan in the gentle doctrines of the Indian sage. The student of comparative religions is interested in noticing how a code of morals founded upon atheistic humanitarianism, in its origin utterly destitute of theology, has developed into a colossal system of demonology, dogmatics, eschatology, myths and legends, with a pantheon more populous than that of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... struggles with Festus and my atheistic friend, and the partial influence of the ambient, the sincere piety of the old doctor, which dominated the life of the college, helped to strengthen the reaffirmation of my orthodox Christianity, and, for several years after, I had no ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... it, free from the least impress or overshadowing of evil? Why he permitted the beauty of the world to become disfigured, as it has been, by the dark invasion and ravages of sin? This great question has, in all ages, agitated and disturbed the human mind, and been a prolific source of atheistic doubts and scepticism. It has been, indeed, a dark and perplexing enigma to the ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... and the new, between the good will of the past and the good works of the future. He links May Day with Bank Holiday, and he does it almost alone. All the men around him, great and good as they were, were in comparison puritanical, and never so puritanical as when they were also atheistic. He is a sort of solitary pipe down which pours to the twentieth century the original river of Merry England. And although this Hard Times is, as its name implies, the hardest of his works, although there is less in it perhaps ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... he began to have decided opinions upon religious topics; and for some of his so-called atheistic tendencies, embodied in his writings, he was expelled from Oxford at the age of seventeen, without a word of friendly remonstrance upon the part of the authorities, or any attempt whatever to counteract the errors which he had imbibed from the reading of French philosophy. ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... and morbid, egoistic pessimism to take its place? Are over-culture, excessive sentiment, constant self-criticism, and all the brood of nervous curses to monopolize and inspire art? A fine alliance this they are making, the ascetic monk and the atheistic pessimist, to kill Nature! They will never effect it. It may die in many forms. It may lose its charm, as the singing of Sarsha and of Liubasha was lost among the rustling and noise of thousands of Parisian badauds in the Orangerie. But there will be stronger ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland |
