"Conjectural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... celebrated through the whole neighbourhood, for his ingenuity in the carving of tobacco-stoppers, and a variety of other accomplishments. Some of the peasants even mistook him for a conjuror. If I might be allowed in the conjectural licence of an editor, I should be inclined to ascribe the following composition to this celebrated ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... Wilhelm's in the KUNSTKAMMER or Museum of Berlin, pipes which no rational smoker, not compelled to it, would have used, awaken just doubt as to the cicerones; and you leave the Locality of the Tabagie a thing conjectural. In summer season, at Potsdam and in country situations, Tabagie could be held under a tent: we expressly know, his Majesty held Tabagie at Wusterhausen nightly on the Steps of the big Fountain, in the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... clean truth, As clean as blood of babes, as white as milk: O Merlin, may this earth, if ever I, If these unwitty wandering wits of mine, Even in the jumbled rubbish of a dream, Have tript on such conjectural treachery— May this hard earth cleave to the Nadir hell Down, down, and close again, and nip me flat, If I be such a traitress. Yield my boon, Till which I scarce can yield you all I am; And grant my re-reiterated wish, The great proof of ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... and still conjectural paths of archaeology, let us turn to the history of Lundy. Here again we are confronted with facts which a conscientious historian would hesitate to assert, save as legend. For this singular land, where the King's writ does not run, which is not assimilated even yet to municipal ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... resulted occasionally in one that will bear the test of examination after it has been placed aside, and carefully considered when the impression of novelty has worn off. I think we may safely appeal to all critics who occupy themselves much with conjectural criticism, and ask them if TIME does not frequently impair the complacency with which they regard their efforts on their ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... predaceous cephalopods and the highly organized crustaceous are among the oldest fossils. Such appears to be the order of nature as evidenced by facts, and it must be admitted, however repugnant to preconceived notions or mere mortal conjectural amendments. ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... go down to the forest," says Gilgamesh, if the conjectural restoration of the line in question (l. 126) is correct. Enkidu replies by again drawing a lurid picture of what will happen "When we go (together) to the forest......." This speech of Enkidu is continued on the reverse. In reply Gilgamesh emphasizes his reliance upon the ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... even a conjectural solution of the problems involved in the differences thus shown to exist between populations that are ethnologically identical, or that stand at nearly the same level of educational culture and economic ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... hard now to estimate. The chroniclers talk of a hundred thousand people going out from Flanders to England between the defeat of the Armada in 1588 and the repulse of the French from before Valenciennes in 1656. But the numbers are obviously conjectural. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... strange glances; no one addressed her, and even her greetings were scarcely returned. It was only Marianne's peculiar disposition that prevented her from noticing this. And indeed, if any one did speak to her and was drawn on to say anything about John's death, it was done in the conjectural and soothing way to which she had been accustomed for years; and Marianne did not believe it now any more than she had formerly, because nobody ever said anything definite about the report of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... ambition with the alarm generally entertained of that encroaching and immense power. He even thinks that, even if she possessed Constantinople, she could not long retain it. As all this is future, and of course conjectural, we may legitimately express our doubts of any authority on the subject. That Russia does not think with the Marquis is evident, for all her real movements for the last fifty years have been but preliminaries to the seizure of Turkey. Her ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... dates are, of course, conjectural; but those given are accepted by high authorities. Paul was about forty-four at the ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... before I abandoned it, and was so fortunate as to get him to admit a degree of improvement such as led to his desiring to recall his conjectural judgment on my possibilities as a sonnet-writer, but as the letters in which he characterises the advance are neither so terse in criticism, nor so interesting from the exposition of principles, as the one quoted, I pass them by. With more confidence in my ultimate comparative ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... dreamer replies at last, "your reductions and your constructions are too easy-going, too conjectural, too much dominated by prepossessions and the 'will to interpret.' The alleged sources or determinants for this dream may or may not have played the parts you assign to them; the mystery of the matter must remain inscrutable. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... be thus obtained, the writer will repine at no censure which the precipitate publication of mere conjectural suggestions may incur; but shall think himself fully rewarded by having excited the attention of those, who may point out the most appropriate means of relieving a tedious and most ...
— An Essay on the Shaking Palsy • James Parkinson
... reverse; remembering, above all, that we know nothing historically of the mental condition of the founders of religion, we may hesitate to accept the anthropological hypothesis en masse. At best it is conjectural, and the facts are such that opponents have more justification than is commonly admitted for regarding the bulk of savage religion as degenerate, or corrupted, from its own highest elements. I am by no means, as yet, arguing positively in favour of that ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... effective, and especially the most truth-telling, of all possible "lives." No letters indeed are likely to increase the literary repute of the author of the Confessions and of the Caesars; but they may very well clear up and fill in the hitherto rather fragmentary and conjectural notion of his character, and they may, on the other hand, confirm that idea of both which, however false it may seem to his children, and others who were united to him by ties of affection, has commended itself to careful students of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... relation of most of the facts which had come under my own inspection at the time it was written, interspersed with some conjectural observations. Since then Dr. G. Pearson has established an inquiry into the validity of my principal assertion, the result of which cannot but be highly flattering to my feelings. It contains not a single case which ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... labored for outward advantage. They taught the art of disputation, and sought systematic methods of proof. They thus prepared the way for a more perfect philosophy than that taught by the Ionians, the Pythagoreans, or the Eleatics, since they showed the vagueness of such inquiries, conjectural rather than scientific. They had no doctrines in common. They were the barristers of their age, paid to make the "worse appear the better reason;" yet not teachers of immorality any more than the lawyers of our day,—men of talents, the intellectual leaders ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... there is something vastly worse than childishness, in his insinuation as to what Omnipotence might do in preventing, not remedying evils. They breathe a spirit of malevolent disaffection, which is indeed but very imperfectly smothered in the decent language of conjectural propositions. A sounder philosophy than his own would have told Dr H. in the words of Bacon, that "the prerogative of God extendeth as well to the reason, as to the will of man;" and that therefore it became him ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... the heavens was supposed to find support upon the outlying circle of mountains. But the precise mechanism through which the observed revolution of the heavenly bodies was effected remains here, as with the Egyptian cosmology, somewhat conjectural. The simple fact would appear to be that, for the Chaldeans as for the Egyptians, despite their most careful observations of the tangible phenomena of the heavens, no really satisfactory mechanical conception of the cosmos was attainable. We shall see in due ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... delusions of imagination), the nightly forest noises, the glimpse, perhaps, through the leaves, of a painted savage face, uncertain whether of redman or Devil, but more likely of the latter, above all, that measureless mystery of the unknown and conjectural stretching away illimitable on all sides and vexing the mind, somewhat as physical darkness does, with intimation and misgiving,—under all these influences, whatever seeds of superstition had in any way got over from the Old World would find an only too congenial soil in ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... be assured of curing the mind. Man, in making a spiritual substance of his soul, has contented himself with administering to it spiritual remedies, which either have no influence over his temperament, or do it an injury. The doctrine of the spirituality of the soul has rendered morals a conjectural science, that does not furnish a knowledge of the true motives which ought to be put in activity, in order to influence man to his welfare. If, calling experience to his assistance, man sought out the elements which form ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... long a time. To this it is answered, that the little change as yet perceived, doth rather prove their newness, and that they have not continued so long; than that they will continue forever as they are. And if conjectural arguments may receive answer by conjectures; it then seemeth that some alteration may be found. For either Aristotle, Pliny, Strabo, Beda, Aquinas, and others, were grossly mistaken; or else those parts of ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot |
