"Materiality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the humourous colouring which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age, or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Boswell much the same advice. 'All this,' said Paoli, 'is melancholy. I have also studied metaphysics. I know the arguments for fate and free-will, for the materiality and immateriality of the soul, and even the subtle arguments for and against the existence of matter. Ma lasciamo queste dispute ai oziosi. But let us leave these disputes to the idle. Io tengo sempre fermo un gran pensiero. I hold always firm one great object. I never ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of the body, called the fidgets, is a disorder to which the ladies are particularly liable. A physician of my acquaintance was earnestly entreated by a female patient to give a name to her unknown complaints; this he found no difficulty to do, as he is a sturdy asserter of the materiality of our nature; he declared that her disorder was atmospherical. It was the disorder of her frame under damp weather, which was reacting on her mind; and physical means, by operating on her body, might be applied to restore her to her half-lost senses. Our imagination is higher ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Hinduism. Consequently you find amongst Roman Catholics and Hindus a definite belief that these things are still possible; and the only thing that either will say with regard to their happening is that the greater descent of the people as a whole into materiality has made the possession of these powers a far rarer qualification of a believer in one or other of the religions, than was the case in the early days of enthusiasm, and of a greater outpouring of spiritual life. There is no doubt, so far as Christianity is concerned, that the sacred ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... to act and to live. For, with it, we feel ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity no longer seems isolated in the nature that it dominates. As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places, as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... again respecting the materiality of the soul is one which I am at a loss to understand clearly, till it shall have been clearly determined what matter is. We know nothing of it, any more than of mind, except its attributes."—Whately, l.c. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... career has the simplicity and dignity of tragedy. Born in a parsonage in the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703—the year of John Wesley's birth—he is writing at the age of ten to disprove the doctrine of the materiality of the soul. At twelve he is studying "the wondrous way of the working of the spider," with a precision and enthusiasm which would have made him a great naturalist. At fourteen he begins his notes on "The Mind" and on "Natural Science." He is graduated ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... confess," he adds, "that I do not understand this exception, but the theologians know more about it than I do, and I must take their word for it."[Footnote: Voltaire, li. 356 (Letter to Thieriot, 24 Feb. 1733).] The letter to which the censor objected was principally taken up with the doctrine of the materiality of the soul. "Never," says Voltaire, "was there perhaps a wiser or a more methodical spirit, a more exact logician, than Locke." ... "Before him great philosophers had positively decided what is the soul of man; but as they knew nothing at all about it, it is ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... of ideas. That intricate and ponderously irrefutable argument that Bergson has so patiently built up by deep scientific research and unsurpassed profundity of thought and crystal-clear reason, that leads to the substantial conclusion that man has leapt the barrier of materiality only by the urge of some external pressure superior to himself, but which, by reason of infinite effort, he alone of all terrestrial beings has succeeded in utilizing in a superior manner and to ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... than an agreeable expenditure of time; and surely a home is worth careful thought. It then truly becomes YOUR home—something that you have evolved with loving effort. Dear thoughts of wife and children enter into its very materiality; walks are planned with a loving consciousness of the feet which are to tread them, and trees planted with prophetic vision of the groups that will gather beneath the shade. This could scarcely be true if the acre were turned over to architect, builders, and ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe |
