"Belief" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grateful sense of the generous aid which education in the South had received from friends in the North making for the unity and harmony of our common country. It testified to a hearty belief that there should be institutions well equipped in which provision should be made for the higher education of those called to leadership, as preachers, teachers, etc. It especially called attention to the opinion that the gifts of the North in aid of educational ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various
... every smallest change of feeling in their bodies; and from any unusual feeling, perhaps of the slightest kind, they apprehend great danger and even death itself. In respect to all these feelings and apprehensions, there is commonly the most obstinate belief and persuasion." (Quoted in Leared, ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... reigns around you. You feel that you are in the presence of your Creator, before whom you humble yourself, and not of man, before whom you clothe yourself with pride. Your very solitude seems to impress you with the belief that, though hidden from the world, you are more distinctly visible, and more individually an object of Divine protection, than any worthless atom like yourself ever could be in the midst of a multitude—a mere unit ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... forming a land party, they managed to reach a distance of one hundred and forty miles from the sea, and finding the river still of considerable size, and full of large freshwater reaches, Stokes hugged the belief that at last the highway to the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... current belief among those with whom you converse, that there are many of the fishermen who have means of their own, which they conceal ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... Terry," went on the young lieutenant. "I am not making an official investigation, and I am not looking for evidence to implicate Corporal Overton in any crime. I don't mind telling you that I haven't a particle of belief in Overton's guilt. The very idea that he would rob any one is opposed to the common sense of any one who really knows your friend ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... the Sacristan, "but the tune hangs by my memory like a bur in a beggar's rags; it mingles with the psalter—the very bells of the convent seem to repeat the words, and jingle to the tune; and were you to put me to death at this very moment, it is my belief I should die singing it—'Now swim we merrily'—it is as it were a ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... long experience had brought serenity? But the truth was that this tempest had not sprung up in his mind, it was raging in the child-like soul that he had retained, the nook of affection and dreaminess which remained within him side by side with his principles of pitiless logic and his belief in proven phenomena only. His very genius came from the duality of his nature: behind the chemist was a social dreamer, hungering for justice and capable of the greatest love. And now passion was transporting him, and he was weeping ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the world of man—her weaving and working. No one can deny that a solemn curse, spoken with a determined and haughty purpose, has often, on the very instant, accomplished its fulfilment. If this be so, why may it not work again and again? The disregarded belief of the people—that a curse floats in the air until it finds its victim, and then drops down upon him—is not so worthless as men would have us think. There is at least expressed in it, dimly and perhaps unconsciously, the inseparable union that subsists between ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... favourite authors in the course of my interpretation of them, I am not in a condition to say, and should be very unwilling to know; but I had a profound faith in them, and I had, to the best of my belief, a simple, earnest manner of narrating what I did narrate; and these qualities went a ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... the Indians' belief in spirits for his own purpose. One of his soldiers had been killed by one of the Indians. Bossu could not find out who killed the soldier, or even to what tribe the Indian that killed him belonged. He wanted to punish or frighten the murderer ...
— Stories of American Life and Adventure • Edward Eggleston
... in Blake's viewpoint. When he left Sicily the idea of a girl's devoting her life to the pursuit of her lover's assassins had seemed to him extravagant, yet not wholly unnatural. Now it struck him as beyond belief that Margherita should really do this. Aliandro ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... Upon this belief many erroneous, superstitious and dangerous systems of philosophy and religion were established. The natural philosophy of Baptista Porta, or Albertus Magnus, was founded upon the principle of sympathy. Plato applied this principle ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... you so awful and still, and the good God, if there is a God, listening, that I has promised mother that the boys Nat and Thady—the Cap'n and Gen'ral, as they're called here—shan't larn your ways, which are bad past belief; so when mother's buried, we're going away. That's all. You can go to the ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... therefore seemed to me that the representatives of the people should be promptly informed of the nature and extent of the suffering and needs of these stricken people, and I have communicated these facts in the hope and belief that the legislative branch of the Government will promptly re-enforce the work of the local authorities ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... very bad for him; her courteous belief in him encouraged him to deceive her; he thought she was rather silly; any other girl would have chaffed him, have capped his tales by others, obviously "tall" as Violet had done until he had sickened her entirely; but to Marcella's Keltic imagination there was nothing ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... punishment. The men, however, one and all, renewed their offers to me, that they would be ready and willing at all times to come forward, to undertake any service that I might propose to them; and they added the assurance of their belief, that I would never propose any thing to them that I would not join them in accomplishing. Thus ended our meeting, and at all events we had the satisfaction of having done our duty to ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... first long letter, and to me quite as interesting as long. Several things are quite new to me in it—viz., for one, your belief that there are more extra-tropical than intra-tropical species. I see that my argument from the Arctic regions is false, and I should not have tried to argue against you, had I not fancied that you thought that equability ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... hope," he said, "to carry on exactly as though Dick might walk in to-morrow and take his place again. As I hold to my belief in God, so I hold to my conviction that he will come back, and that before I—before long. But our friends will be asking where he is and what he is doing, and we would better agree on that beforehand. What we'd better say is simply that Dick was called away on business connected ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... I'm glad of it; it would not be so bad to be a 'stump orator,' or any other sort of male animal, for the older I grow the more I incline to the belief that women are fools. But go on, auntie; I believe I get 'riled' every time I hear Sybil's name. What else do ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... this mostly of gold-coloured dolichos. That species is the hypericum plant, this the 'Yue Lu' creeper. The red ones are, of course, the purple rue; the green ones consist for certain, of the green 'Chih' plant; and, to the best of my belief, these various plants are mentioned in the 'Li Sao' and 'Wen Hsuan.' These rare plants are, some of them called something or other like 'Huo Na' and 'Chiang Hui;' others again are designated something like 'Lun Tsu' and 'Tz'u Feng;' while others there are whose names ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... training made her an ass—that is, from a many-centuries-later point of view. To kill the page was no crime—it was her right; and upon her right she stood, serenely and unconscious of offense. She was a result of generations of training in the unexamined and unassailed belief that the law which permitted her to kill a subject when she chose was a perfectly ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... murder the ideas of Church independence gained what was yet wanting to them, a martyr: his death was more advantageous to them than his life could ever have been. The belief that the victim wrought miracles, which were ascribed to him in increasing measure, at first slight, then more and more surprising ones, viz. cures of incurable diseases,—who does not know the resistless nature of this illusion, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... sciences, en est, au contraire, la plus etendue et la plus feconde. Elle confine a toutes les etudes et touche a toutes les questions. Elle renferme tous les elements d'une instruction liberale.—SCHERER, Melanges, 522. The belief that the course of events and the agency of man are subject to the laws of a divine order, which it is alike impossible for any one either fully to comprehend or effectually to resist—this belief is the ground of all our hope for the future destinies ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... his offensive earlier but for his desire not to interfere with the great offensive conducted by his friends on the Westminster front. Our anti-patriots, however, are placed in a dilemma. They were bound to side with Germany, because of their rooted belief that England always must be wrong. They were bound to hail the Bolshevik self-determinators because of their entirely sound views on peace at any price. But now their two loves are fighting like cats. Hence the problem: "Which ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... (or "master-thief" if you will), because they often stound and put such persons to their shifts in towns and villages, and are the principal causes of their apprehension and taking. The force which is in them surmounteth all belief, and the fast hold which they take with their teeth exceedeth all credit: for three of them against a bear, four against a lion, are sufficient to try mastries with them. King Henry the Seventh, as the report goeth, commanded all such curs ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... OF CONCEPTION.—Very many medical authorities, distinguished in this line, have stated their belief that women never pass more than two or three days at the most beyond the forty weeks conceded to pregnancy—that is two hundred and eighty days or ten lunar months, or nine calendar months and a week. About two hundred ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... the object of crossing the Vistula was to take in the rear the great fortress of Ivangorod lower down, and then to get behind Warsaw. The Grand Duke had divined these intentions, while he concealed his own by misleading the Germans into a belief that he proposed abandoning the Polish salient and retiring on Brest. His real plan was to stand on the east bank of the Vistula save for the defence of Warsaw which lies upon the west, and to counter-attack round the north of the German left wing under the guns of the great fortress ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... owed it to his mother, who had been a singularly contented woman and had taught Billie from his earliest years the truth that, "contentment, with godliness, is great gain." Billie did not announce his belief in this truth, but he proclaimed it unwittingly by the ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... conscious effort on his part and embraced two things—the death of the gambler and a meeting with McNamara. Of the former, he had no more doubt than that the sun rising there would sink in the west. So well confirmed was this belief that the details did not engage his thought; but on the result of the other encounter he speculated with some interest. From the first McNamara had been a riddle to him, and mystery breeds curiosity. His blind, ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... was soon busy over his charts. He made some calculations and announced his belief that there was a group of islands about a hundred miles off. He could not be sure, for while they showed on the chart, he could not exactly determine the position of the ship when she struck, as no observation had been taken ...
— Bob the Castaway • Frank V. Webster
... least so much of human nature as ran counter to his purposes, yet believed with devoutness in the perfectibility of his species, and had of the future a large, calm, and noble vision. If Lewis Rand had not Jefferson's equanimity, his sane and wise belief in the satisfying power of common daylight, common pleasures, all the common relations of daily life; if some strangeness in his nature thrilled to the meteor's flight, craved the exotic, responded to clashing ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... and loud, Sure signs he neither choleric was, nor proud. His long chin proved his wit; his saint-like grace A church vermilion, and a Moses' face. His memory miraculously great, 650 Could plots, exceeding man's belief, repeat; Which therefore cannot be accounted lies, For human wit could never such devise. Some future truths are mingled in his book; But where the witness fail'd, the prophet spoke. Some things like visionary flights appear; The spirit caught him up the Lord knows where; ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... unfounded) impression that the West Indies awaited my coming. I had to go there. It was a sort of mystic conviction—something in the nature of a call. But it was difficult to state intelligibly the grounds of this belief to that man of rigorous ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... "My belief is, that these villains kept my son in their clutches for some good reason, and that they had some equally good reason for keeping her. There's some mystery about it which I can't fathom. Perhaps she knew too much about the Colonel's affairs to be allowed to go free. They might have detained ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... going to say that you do yourself no good by all those confoundedly unconventional ideas of yours. If you had your chance to-morrow, it's my belief you'd throw it away by insisting on some fantastic fad ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... replied she, with a weary sigh. "My father would have forced my heart, as the priest and the rabbi would have forced my belief. But I am free in my faith, my love, and my hate; and this freedom will sustain me to-morrow throughout the torture and shame of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Grand Duke of Tuscany followed. In imitation of his great exemplar, he promised and smiled to the last, deceiving Montanelli, the pure and sincere, at the very moment he was about to enter his carriage, into the belief that he persevered in his assent to the liberal movement. His position was certainly very difficult, but he might have left it like a gentleman, like a man of honor. 'T was pity to destroy so lightly the good opinion the Tuscans ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... it were in a dream?' he thought to himself. 'Am I out of my mind, or what? Why, it passes all belief, at last. Come, damn it, she's tired of me, come, and I've grown tired of her, come, and ... What is there out of ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... French army having effected the passage of the river, above Alba de Tormes. On the 15th, the whole of the enemy's force having passed the river, a cannonade commenced early in the day; and it was the general belief that, ere night, a second battle of Salamanca would be recorded. But, as all the French armies in Spain were now united in our front, and out-numbered us so far, Lord Wellington, seeing no decided advantage to be ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... "God has from eternity resolved to choose to eternal life those who through his grace believe in Jesus Christ," etc. According to the Seven Points, "God in his election has not looked at the belief and the repentance of the elect," etc. According to the Five Points, all good deeds must be ascribed to God's grace in Christ, but it does not work irresistibly. The language of the Seven Points implies that the elect cannot resist God's ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... indeed have fearlessly uttered it—has never been introduced by any Hellene into the religion of the people? If you were not so averse to the Hebrew nation, and if you, like my husband and myself, had diligently occupied yourself with their concerns and their belief you would be juster to them and to their scriptures, and to the great creating ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... or less fully our conduct, are apt to be somewhat impatient and inappreciative of the time given to anatomic work, and where it is given for the purpose of describing species and of synopsizing or monographing higher groups, without reference to agriculture, I am firmly of the belief that it diverts one from economic work, but where pursued for a definite economic purpose it cannot be too careful or too thorough and I know of no instances better calculated to appeal to and modify the views ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... when he read with freshened hope the promises of forgiveness in that strange New Testament. Once he had even believed that these might save him; that he was again numbered with the elect. But when this belief had grown firm, so that he could seem to rest his weight upon it, he felt it fall away to nothing under him, and the truth he had divined that day in the desert was again bared before him. He saw that how many times soever God might forgive the sins of a man, it would avail that man nothing ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... meant war, but a war that no longer could be averted, and there was nothing left for any high-minded statesman and loyal party man to do but to defend the President from those who would usurp his authority and tie his hands, to demonstrate to the world their belief in a statesmanship which was being attacked at every point by those whom his Message had disappointed, and to provide against one ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... they might be seen by the Fidelity, and even fired a gun off the mouth of a bay in which they supposed she lay, as a signal, to which they imagined that they heard another gun in answer from their consort, and continued their course in the full belief of being followed by the Fidelity. In this passage the strength of the wind drove them so fast, that they had to fasten their boat astern with two strong hawsers to preserve her, and to diminish the velocity ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... Attorney-General all the papers respecting the conspiracy of Aaron Burr which came to my hands during or before his prosecution, I might suppose the letters above requested had been delivered to him; but I must add my belief that I never received such letters, and the ground of it. I am in the habit of noting daily in the list kept for that purpose the letters I receive daily by the names of the writers, and dates of time, and place, and this has been done with such ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... her, "We have to thank you for devising a perfect climax: you could not have chosen a finer bit of plastik," there was a flush of pleasure in her face. She liked to accept as a belief what was really no more than delicate feigning. He divined that the betrayal into a passion of fear had been mortifying to her, and wished her to understand that he took it for good acting. Gwendolen cherished the idea that now he was struck with her ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... belief of the poets and the common people that nature was sympathetic towards human beings at certain great crises. Comets flared and the sun was darkened at the death of a great man. Even the death of a friend was supposed to bow nature with ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... comfort the sleep which is so long." This poor creature—pure from every suspicion of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure in senses more obvious—never once did this holy child, as regarded herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that was traveling to meet her. She might not prefigure the very manner of her death; she saw not in vision, perhaps, the aerial altitude of the fiery scaffold, the spectators without end on every road pouring into Rouen as to a coronation, the surging ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Thoroughfare to the case had originated with Mr. Bintrey. In their first long conference following the discovery, that sagacious personage had a hundred times repeated, with an obstructive shake of the head, "No Thoroughfare, Sir, No Thoroughfare. My belief is that there is no way out of this at this time of day, and my advice is, make yourself comfortable ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... of faith assumes the possibility of belief. The philosopher who does not believe is wrong, for he misuses the reason he has cultivated, and he is able to understand the truths he rejects. But the child who professes the Christian faith—what does he believe? Just what he understands; and ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... been introduced which has been so successful in enabling us to trace the sequence of cause and effect as almost to revolutionize society. The very fact that scientific method has been so successful here leads to the belief that it might be equally successful ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... that Lord Comyn was sitting up, and had been asking for me that day; that he was recovering beyond belief. But I was resolved not to go to Brook Street until the money affairs were settled on Monday with Mr. Dix, for I knew well that his Lordship would insist upon carrying out with the agent the contract ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... month the mutineers were elated with their success all over that part of India. They were intoxicated with treason and murder; and their enormous numbers in comparison with those of the British troops in the country made them not only confident of success, but arrogant in the belief that success was already assured. Gradually, however, the failure of all their attempts, even with enormously superior forces, to drive the little British force from the grip which it so tenaciously held of the hill in front of Delhi, damped the ardor of their enthusiasm. ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... stop to ascertain the advantages that he might derive from his new conquest. The accounts which he received from the interior of Russia, represented the hostile government as appropriating to itself our successes, and inculcating the belief that the loss of so many provinces was the effect of a general plan of retreat, adopted beforehand. Papers seized at Wiazma stated that Te Deum had been sung at Petersburgh for pretended victories ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... be God! and other matters. The town full of the great overthrow lately given to the Spaniards by the Portugalls, they being advanced into the very middle of Portugall. The weather wet for two or three months together beyond belief, almost not one fair day coming between till this day, which has been a very pleasant [day] and the first pleasant [day] this summer. The charge of the Navy intended to be limited to L200,000 per annum, the ordinary charge of it, and that to be settled upon the Customs. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Stevenson spoke, and only a dozen Negroes were enrolled in V-12 programs at integrated civilian colleges throughout the country.[3-74] The lack of black students in the V-12 program could be attributed in part to the belief of many black trainees that the program barred Negroes. Actually, it never had, and in December 1943 the bureau publicized this fact. It issued a circular letter emphasizing to all commanders that enlisted men were entitled to consideration for transfer ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... one reading of the riddle, consistent with the whole character of the people: they clung to the Stuarts because they were obedient to the precepts and duties of religion, and labored under the belief, however mistaken, that from the Stuarts alone could they hope for any thing like freedom. Their spiritual rulers had insisted on the duty of sustaining at all hazard the legitimate authority of the king, and they were firmly convinced that they could expect ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... self-conviction and calm reflection he proceeded to assert that among the articles of Huss some were fundamentally Christian and Evangelical, such as, for example, his statements that there was only one Universal Church (to which even Greek Christendom had always and still belonged), and that the belief in the supremacy of the Church of Rome was not necessary to salvation. No man, he added, durst impose upon a Christian an article of belief which was antiscriptural; the judgment of an individual Christian must be worth more than that of the Pope or even of ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... of other guides, but being slower of foot than a younger person, it was not difficult to slip away from the scent of her poor smoke-dried body. She was sedulous in pointing out the curiosities, which, I doubt not, she had a firm belief were not to be ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... the general conditions of the people, should, on their accession to power, have met death standing on the steps of the throne; and that only a powerless widow should have been left without much authority over her masterful son. But my firm belief is that in many of the excellent things that the Kaiser William has done for his people, he is working on the plans that had been committed to writing by the Crown Prince and Princess. Her father's memory was so dear to the Crown Princess that anything he had suggested ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... what I am not. I would not pass off somebody else's picture as my own, for instance. But I cannot sham to be moral. I could not possibly love a woman without wanting her all to myself, and I have not the slightest belief in the sanctimonious humbug of a man who plays the Platonic lover only. But I don't cheat, and I don't lie. I am what ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... as that limited revelation of the nature of things, which we call scientific knowledge, has [7] yet gone, it tends, with constantly increasing emphasis, to the belief that, not merely the world of plants, but that of animals; not merely living things, but the whole fabric of the earth; not merely our planet, but the whole solar system; not merely our star and its satellites, but the millions of similar bodies which bear witness to the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... part of the giant pit was as bizarre as the landscape of a nightmare. There were purplish trees, immense beyond belief. There were broad, smooth pools of inky black fluid that was oily and troubled in spots as though disturbed by some moving things under the surface. There were bare, rocky patches where the stones, the long drippings of ancient lava flow, were spread like bleaching gray skeletons of monsters. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... was maintained against belief founded on authority, and the laws of nature were recognised as the only bond connecting phenomena with phenomena. Man is at home in nature, and that alone passes for truth in which he finds himself at home; he is free through ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... say," having been duly presented, and the Commissioner having duly placed the Testament in Mr. Bumpkin's hands, and said to him that to the best of his knowledge and belief the contents of the "I Bumpkin" paper were true, the matter was over, and Mr. Snigger, with the valuable document in his possession, might have returned to London by the next train. But as Horatio afterwards observed to a friend, he "was ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... smitten anew by what he did now. Having filled his eyes with her as a man athirst may fill himself with water from a brook, he turned abruptly away and left her. He did not tarry to say "Thank you," that she had been almost eager in asserting her belief in his innocence. He did not go back to a futile and perhaps quarrelsome discussion with Hap Smith and old man Adams and the rest. He simply dropped everything where it was, shoved his big revolver out of sight under his left arm-pit and went to the long dining table. There, his back to the ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... dag-glans, drakarnas bdd, gold. The dwarfs and dragons had a passionate desire for gold. Dvrgarnas dag-glans is an allusion to the belief that the subterranean caves of the dwarfs were illuminated by gold. Drakarnas bdd alludes to the supposition that all great treasures in caves were guarded by fierce dragons, as ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... surrounded, was calculated to lead his mind heavenward. Under the operation of these causes, he was by the Spirit of God, induced to consecrate himself, soul, body, and spirit, to religion; and in 1820, he made a public profession of his belief and ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... Ideal The Veiled Image at Sais The Ideal and The Actual Life Genius Votive Tablets (Selections) The Maiden from Afar The Glove The Diver The Cranes of Ibycus Thee Words of Belief The Words of Error The Lay of the Bell The German Art Commencement of the New Century Cassandra ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row—is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... was afraid of his long, cat-like look. Yet she felt convinced of his ultimate good-nature. He seemed to her to be the only passionately good-natured man she had ever seen. She watched him vaguely, with strange vague trust, implicit belief in ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... rang and the girls moved from the room. As they passed down the corridor, a number of the girls spoke to Helen about the loss of her pin and expressed the belief that it had only been mislaid ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... one as on the foot of the other. Any one who is used to the woods can tell the footstep of an Indian from the footstep of a white man, whether it be made by a boot or a moccasin. It will need better evidence than this to persuade me into the belief that ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... savage instincts of the hunter and the fighter, he scarcely took count of human life. Though he respected the church through policy, he believed neither in God nor in the devil, expecting consequently in another life neither chastisement nor recompense for his acts. As his sole belief, he retained a vague philosophy composed of all the ideas of the encyclopedists of the last century; and he regarded religion as a moral sanction of the law, the one and the other having been invented by men to regulate social relations. To kill anyone in a duel, or in war, ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... to secure his precious life. One of their number, Simon Kemeny, who bore a striking resemblance to Huniades, determined to sacrifice himself for his leader. He announced that he would put on Huniades' clothes and armor. The Turks would then attack him under the belief that he was the celebrated chief, and while they were thus engaged the real Huniades would fall upon them unexpectedly and put them to flight. At first Huniades would by no means consent to this plan, as he did not wish to expose Kemeny to such mortal danger; but at last seeing the great military ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... may show itself in succeeding generations. He might hesitate, for instance, to test his polled cows by crossing them with a horned bull for fear of getting horned calves when the cows were afterwards put to a polled bull of their own breed. The belief in the power of a sire to influence subsequent generations, or telegony as it is sometimes called, is not uncommon even to-day. Nevertheless, carefully conducted experiments by more than one competent observer have failed to ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... unconscious of the extreme gravity of the situation which developed during the Great War, when the Germans were sinking an increasing volume of merchant tonnage week by week. The people of this country as a whole rose superior to many disheartening events and never lost their sure belief in final victory, but full knowledge of the supreme crisis in our history might have tended to undermine in some quarters that confidence in victory which it was essential should be maintained, and, in any event, the facts could ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... good-looking enough and clever enough to be married. They are the exceptions, and for exceptions we cannot legislate. We must take care of the average article, and let the refuse take care of itself. I have put plainly, it may be somewhat coarsely, a belief which I believe many men hold, though they are too manly to express it. But the belief itself is false. It is false even of the lower classes. Among them, the cleverest, the most prudent, the most thoughtful, are those who, either in domestic ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... contest beyond a reasonable period for the purpose of ascertaining whether he could be elected. We determined that a president should be chosen, but were willing thus far to defer to the opinions of our political friends, whose preference of Mr. Burr was founded upon a belief that he was less hostile to federal men and federal measures than Mr. Jefferson. General Morris and Mr. Dennis concurred in ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... and were it not for the services of the Church he didn't know into what barbarism the people mightn't have fallen: the tones of the organ sustaining clear voices of nuns singing a Mass by Mozart must sooner or later inspire belief in the friendliness of pure air and the beauty of flowers. Flowers are the only beautiful things within the reach of these poor people. Roses all may have, and it was pleasant to think that there is nothing more ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... and sister shrank from setting up a theory of goodness before the victim. It would have been too cruel. And it was even possible that Stevie would not have believed them. As far as Mr Verloc was concerned, nothing could stand in the way of Stevie's belief. Mr Verloc was obviously yet mysteriously good. And the grief of a ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... disparaging those who undergo great toils and run great risks to obtain magnificent results which, after all, make them no happier or able to enjoy themselves than other men. From these anecdotes we see that Alexander himself did not put any belief in the story of his divine parentage, but that he used it as a means of imposing ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... not act upon them, and they will not accept the incidents as part of their effectual belief. They will imagine, to be sure, grotesque worlds, full of admirable and interesting personages to whom strange things might have happened. So much the better: this largeness of imagination is one of the possessions that distinguish ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... Episcopalian herself, she was always observed to be employed with her needle on the evenings of Saturdays, though by no means distinguished for her ordinary industry. It was, however, a sort of manner the good lady had of exhibiting her adherence to the belief that the night of Sunday was the orthodox evening of the Sabbath. On this subject there was, in truth, a species of silent warfare between herself and the wife of the principal clergyman of the town. It resulted, happily, in no very striking marks of hostility. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... that joy! What! believe that God will shortly judge you, and yet make no preparation for it! Either say plainly, I am no Christian, I do not believe these wonderful things, I will believe nothing but what I see, or else let your hearts be affected with your belief, and live as you say you do believe. What do you think when you repeat the creed, and mention Christ's judgment ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... was swamped by the big night boat, an' he got mixed up with the paddle wheel, I don't know if ye'd call it murder, but it'd be killin', sure enough. Leastways, they never got him, an' it's my belief he was chopped up. Take a tip from me, you boys, an' look out fer the night boat, 'cause the night boat ain't a-goin' t' look ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... and there was no news of the Squire's coming back, and no fresh alarm or suggestion of the possibility of the soldiers returning to make another search, so Waller grew more and more satisfied in the belief that, however much Gusset might suspect, it was merely suspicion, and there was ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... no occult persuasions. He just sat in his rocker and smoked hard and imagined hard. He imagined the lives of his family not only as they might have been, but as they ought to have been. He was like a spectator at a play, mingling belief and make-belief inextricably, knowing it all untrue, yet weeping, laughing, thrilling as if it were the very image ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... things the matter with him, and he becomes confirmed in his belief, he finds that so long as he lives he has something the matter with him. He no sooner gets cured of one than something else attacks him. There is no medicine like air and exercise and occupation. The man who gives in to trifling ailments is in a sad plight. He is never happy unless he is ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... him," said Dan, aside to his grandfather, "and if I can bring him, or the both of them, back here, I will. It's my belief he's as bad as he ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... you to say I needn't drink it,' answered Sawkins, 'but I've paid my share an' I've got a right to express an opinion. It's my belief that 'arf the money we gives 'him is spent on penny 'orribles: 'e's always got one in 'is hand, an' to make wot tea 'e does buy last, 'e collects all the slops wot's left and biles it ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... the pretension of extending to the South Sea; and, until Europe finds it to be a settled geographical element that the United States and North America are identical, any effort on our part to reason the world out of the belief that we are an ambitious people will have no other effect than to convince them that we add to ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... already so madly overleaped the hounds of all human belief I should apologize to you now. As I know that no one—no, not even Kitty, for whom it is written as some sort of justification of my conduct—will believe me, I will go on. Mrs. Wessington spoke and I walked with her from the Sanjowlie road to the turning ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... fortified situation. It was also industriously rumoured that, as soon as they were in safety, the National Assembly would be forcibly dismissed, as the Parliament had been by Louis XIV. The reports gained universal belief when it became known that the King had ordered the Flanders regiment ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... to give way to the irresistible growing force! A change is inevitable. And the change must be to Socialism. That is the belief of the Socialists, Jonathan, which I am trying to make you understand. Mind, I do not say that the coming change will be the last change in human evolution, that there will be no further development after Socialism. I do not know what lies beyond, nor to what heights humanity ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... all parties in the church, and were looked upon in the same light as witchcraft, or any other profession definitely devilish. But it was difficult to treat as heresy, under the common law, a form of belief which had so recently been sanctioned by act ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... was purely political and committed under excitement. More than full reparation has been taken for the murders and arson. In the circumstances commonsense dictates reduction of the death sentences. The popular belief favours the view that the condemned men are innocent and have not had a fair trial. The execution has been so long delayed that hanging at this stage would give a rude shock to Indian society. Any Viceroy with imagination would have at once announced commutation of the death sentences—not so Lord ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... abhorrent enough in civilized races, but in Indian tribes, whose unrestrained, hard life abnormally develops the instincts of the tiger, it is a thing that may not be portrayed. Let us not, with the depreciatory hypocrisy, characteristic of our age, befool ourselves into any belief that barbaric practices were more humane than customs which are the flower of civilized centuries. Let us be truthful. Scientific cruelty may do its worst with intricate armaments; but the blood-thirst of the Indian assumed the ghastly earnest of victors ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... need it as a corrective of the tendency to seek the good of life in what is external, as a means of helping us to overcome our vulgar self-complacency, our satisfaction with low aims and cheap accomplishments, our belief in the sovereign potency of machines and measures. We need it to make our lives less unlovely, less hard, less material; to help us to understand the idolatry of the worship of steam and electricity, the utter insufficiency of the ideals of industrialism. But if culture is to become ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Teased me, no end. Alluded to my recent proposal. Asked me if I had intended her to be Number Four, and declared her belief that I had thirty rather than three. Finally, the aunt waked up, and wanted to know what we were laughing at. Whereupon Louie said that she was laughing at a ridiculous story of mine, about an Indian juggler who could jeep three oranges in the air at ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... results did not tempt the East India Company to continue their efforts in these latitudes. If they were productive of no good, they cost heavily in the loss of men and ships they entailed. Still Bouvet's discovery was a first blow to the existing belief in an Antarctic continent. He gave the start, and various navigators, amongst them two Frenchmen, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... For otherwise it might happen that some slow-witted persons, unaware of those other views resting on mere fallacious arguments, would imagine them possibly to be authoritative, and hence might be somewhat shaken in their belief in the Vedic doctrine. Another pada therefore is begun to the express end of refuting the theories of others. The beginning is made with the theory of Kapila, because that theory has several features, such as the view of the existence of the effect in the cause, which are ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... little I know of women, I'm sure that, if you want to come over them, you must flatter 'em up with the idea that you mean to give 'em their heads on all occasions—let 'em do just what they like. Tell a woman she should not go up the chimney, it's my belief you'd see her nose peep out of the top before ten minutes were over. Oh! that'll ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... world was made by a power infinite; and yet how it was made, it cannot teach us: and seeing the same reason and necessity make us know, that the same infinite power is everywhere in the world; and yet how everywhere, it cannot inform us: our belief hereof is not weakened, but greatly strengthened, by our ignorance, because it is the same reason that tells us, that such a nature cannot be said to be God, that can be in ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the Tract with the title: "Concerning the Power and Supremacy of the Pope, Composed by the Scholars in the Year 37 at Smalcald and Printed in the Year 38." (6, 523.) This superscription gave rise to the opinion that the German was the original text. At any rate, such seems to have been the belief of Selneccer, since he incorporated a Latin translation, based on the German text, into the Latin edition of his Book of Concord, privately published 1580. Apart from other errors this Latin version contained also the offensive misprint referred to in our article on the Book ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... the throne was responsible to his ancestors as his subjects were to theirs. "We have to do as our ancestors did," the people argued; "and since they obeyed the ancestors of our present sovereign, we have to be loyal to him." Interference with this time-honoured belief would have amounted to a rupture, as it were, in the nation's religious relations, and as long as the people looked upon the emperor as the Son of Heaven, his moral power would outweigh strong armies sent against him in rebellion. The time came soon enough ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... intelligent response, inferring, somewhat grimly, that the young, handsome, and popular poet had excited ardour in many a female breast besides her own. Nevertheless, she permitted herself to return again and again to the belief that he loved her and dreamed of her; and certainly one of his most poignant sonnets had been addressed to the unknown mate whom he had ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... simply through blind devotion to the country of their birth. I could understand," she went on, "both your uncle and I perfectly understood that their sympathies were German rather than English, but we shared a common belief that notwithstanding this they were Americans first and foremost. It was in this belief that your uncle was led into temporary association ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... deliberately. In part, his action was the unconscious means by which he held on to two conflicting values without suffering from the conflict between them. We must not think that Mr. Churchill is alone in this kind of separation of belief and practice, of splitting the church from the world. We all have our ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... belief in Christianity and a future world and human virtue. You are very weak against temptation, but there is an ugly vein of determination in your character, when you make up your mind that you are ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... to, or are actual duplicates of, the Apician precepts. They are additions to the stock of authentic Apician recipes. As such, they may not be included but be appended to the traditional text. The excerpta encourage the belief that at the time of Vinidarius (got. Vinithaharjis) about the fifth century there must have been in circulation an Apicius (collection of recipes) much more complete than the one handed down to us through Fulda. It is furthermore interesting ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... All belief which does not render more happy, more free, more loving, more active, more calm, is, I fear, an erroneous and ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... certain corporations and that the magnates of Wall Street, having decided to elect Roosevelt, were contributing generously to the Republican campaign fund. Shortly before the day for the election, Judge Parker in a series of speeches announced his belief in these reports. President Roosevelt declared that no proof for the statements could be produced, and ended as follows: "The statements made by Mr. Parker are unqualifiedly and atrociously false. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... most secluded regions of the Pennines, where vestiges of primeval forest still remain and where modern civilisation has scarcely penetrated, that he is to be met with to-day. Melsh is a dialect word for unripe, and the popular belief is that Melsh Dick keeps guard over unripe nuts; while "Melsh Dick'll catch thee, lad" was formerly a threat used to frighten children when they went a-nutting in the hazel-shaws. But we may, perhaps, take a somewhat wider view of this woodland deity and look ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... born in Boston; notorious for his belief in witchcraft, and for the persecution he provoked against those charged with it by his zeal in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... to think the child could have reached my Lady?" inquired Betty, seeing that none of the gentlemen regarded my Lady's denials as making any difference to their belief, though not one of them chose to ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Addington, brought from Reading to consult upon the case. Her husband, her daughter, and her two brothers were with her until the end, which came on Saturday, 30th September. To the last the dying woman clung to her belief in the good faith of her noble captain: "Mary has set her heart upon Cranstoun; when I am gone, let no one set you against the match," were her last words to her husband. He replied that they must wait till the ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... turn at the basin and the looking-glass if you'll come this minute. Hurry, dear, I'm keeping Eva off by strategy. You have your hair to do and I want you to hook my collar. You must have finished in mother's room, and it's my belief you two are just chattering. ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... Dyke in his work on the desert expresses the belief that thorns and spines are given to the desert plants for protection; and that if no animal were there that would eat them, they would not have these defenses. But I believe if there had never been a browsing animal in the desert the cacti ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... except in so far as they influence his literary character, his life, his humour. The most notorious sinners of all those fellow-mortals whom it is our business to discuss—Harry Fielding and Dick Steele, were especially loud, and I believe really fervent, in their expressions of belief; they belaboured freethinkers, and stoned imaginary atheists on all sorts of occasions, going out of their way to bawl their own creed, and persecute their neighbour's, and if they sinned and stumbled, as they constantly did with debt, with drink, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... to be bled to death: The surgeon had his instruments, and bled[127] Pedrillo, and so gently ebbed his breath, You hardly could perceive when he was dead. He died as born, a Catholic in faith, Like most in the belief in which they're bred, And first a little crucifix he kissed, And then held out his jugular ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... by some that the long-held belief that Gutenberg was a polisher of mirrors is erroneous and that the reference in certain of the scanty documents concerning him to business about mirrors may refer to attempts on his part to print an edition of this book, "The ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... no doubt that he understood and took full advantage of the readiness of the attacking hosts to esteem all these points as prophetic of future victory. The first feature of the French plan, therefore, was to lend color to the German belief that the armies of the Allies were disheartened and thereby to induce the attacking forces to ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... popular superstition, but also a legal practice in case of a murder when the criminal had not been discovered, or if any one was suspected. The suspected person was requested to approach the bier and touch the body, in the belief that the blood would flow afresh if the one touching the body were guilty. Our passage is the first instance of its mention in German literature. A similar one occurs in "Iwein", 1355-1364. The usage was also known in France and England. See the instances quoted by ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... is often overlooked. Many of the individuals who aid in production often become so intent upon securing their share, that they are over-ready to explain their contribution to the product, but loath to give due credit to those who have coperated with them. It is the belief that some individuals receive too little of the joint income of industry, while other individuals receive too large a share, which has given rise to the charge of injustice in the ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... all sorts,—to feel ourselves so sacred as we feel in China. Whatever we do, we are always right, no matter how wrong we may be. We always have the right of way, the privilege of walking over the Chinese, and to this privilege they must submit. Our sacredness is not due to admiration for or belief in us. Quite the contrary. It is due to a deep sense of fear of the consequences should they attempt to check or curb our activities or inclinations. The relations between a subject people and their conquerors is fundamentally ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte |
