"Negation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his hat and struggled to be heard above the general hubbud of music, voices, and battering of bronze. "Citizens," he said, "the 26th of Floreal will be memorable in our history. Thus we triumph over military despotism, that bloody negation of the rights of man. The First Empire placed the collar of servitude about our necks—it began and ended in carnage—and left us a legacy of a Second Empire, which was finally to end in the disgrace of Sedan." ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... the sunshine of God's presence and the companionship of Christ. Here, too, we have the testimony of the distinguished scientist from whom I have been quoting. In his first book—the attack on Theism—he says: (page 29, "Thoughts on Religion") "I am not ashamed to confess that with this virtual negation of God the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness; and, although from henceforth the precept to 'Work while it is day' will doubtless gain an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words that 'the night cometh ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... war as the negation of all that is good," said Mr. Whitehouse tonight, "I desired to see what its ravages were in a country exposed to all its fury, and what steps were possible to mitigate them. I do not think that any one here has realized ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... curdling and thickening in the frost. No sound came across the outspread country. There were no roads near Undern except its own cart track; there were no railways within miles. Nothing moved except the snow-flakes, fulfilling their relentless destiny of negation. She saw them only, and heard only the raised voices in the ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... indescribable, unforgettable, the effluvia of the battlefield. The palate savoured brass, and there was not a man of those thousands who was not thirsty—oh, very, very thirsty! Time went in waves with hollows between of negation. A movement took hours—surely we have been at it since last year! Another passed in a lightning flash. We were there beneath the pines, on the ground red-breeched Zouaves and United States Marines, above us a noisy shell, the voice of the general coming ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... No, he will not fight with windmills, he does not believe in giants ... but he would not have attacked them even if they did exist.... And he does not believe in evil. Evil and deceit are his inveterate enemies. His scepticism is not indifferentism.... But in negation, as in fire, there is a destructive power, and how to keep it in bounds, how to tell it where to stop, when that which it must destroy, and that which it must spare are often inseparably welded together? Here it is that the often-noticed tragical ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... often produced intensity and depth, but it is, nevertheless, a mark of the limitation of this type of religion. The indescribable and undifferentiated character of mystical experience is no doubt partly responsible for the emphatic place which negation has held in mysticism. The experience itself, which seems like "a flight of the alone to the Alone," can be told in no words except those of negation. "The mortal limit of the self" seems loosed, and the soul seems merged into that which it forever seeks but which having found it cannot utter. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... such absolute claim to them that she has created in her own favor a sort of right. It cannot be that this arbitrary confiscation shall endure forever. To prevent it we have not to perform an act of negation or demolition: let us leave to the chapels their statues and their relics, and far from belittling the saints, let us make their true grandeur ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... pure and simple, she was extremely vague. She was a Christian and a Heathen with equal sincerity, a Christian with her overflowing warm-heartedness, with her honest inclination to believe, a Heathen in her averseness to any negation of either life or Nature. She used to say that she loved Christ and Eros equally, or rather, that to her, they both meant the same. To her, Christianity was the new, the modern, in contrast to the rationalism of a past age, so that Christianity and modern views of life in general ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... all the living undoubtedly presents many gaps and incoherences, and again it is not so mathematically one that it cannot allow each being to become individualized to a certain degree. But it forms a single whole, none the less; and we have to choose between the out-and-out negation of finality and the hypothesis which co-ordinates not only the parts of an organism with the organism itself, but also each living being with the collective whole ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... A roar of negation went up from the rear of the room, and an ominous murmur spread from man to man. Only those grouped around Peter, some Americans, the Scot, Brierly, the ex-soldier, Jesse Brown, and one or two of the Italians remained silent, but whether in awe of Peter or of his position ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... assimilated English and German ideas; but hearts too light to struggle and to suffer withered like crushed flowers. Thus the seed of death descended slowly and without shock from the head to the bowels. Instead of having the enthusiasm of evil we had only the negation of the good; instead of despair, insensibility. Children of fifteen, seated listlessly under flowering shrubs, conversed for pastime on subjects which would have made shudder with terror the still thickets of Versailles. The Communion ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... le territoire d'une nation neutre."[24] But his statement of the modern rule is conclusive: "Par contre, Heffter, Hautefeuille, Manning et d'autres auteurs modernes se sont avec juste raison eleves contre des principes dans lesquels ils entrevoient la negation implicite des droits et des devoirs stricts de la neutralite. A leur yeux, la nation neutre qui consent au passage des troupes de l'une des parties belligerantes manque a son caractere et donne a l'autre partie un juste motif de lui declarer ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell
... axiomatic or "natural." It has often been declared absurd that sex honor, especially for women, should be made to depend on a negative. It seems to make an ascetic and arbitrary standard for everyday life. In fact, however, the negation is imposed by the nature of the sex passion and by the conditions of human life. The passion tends to excess. What is "natural" is therefore evil. Negation, restraint, renunciation, are imposed by expediency. Perhaps it is ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... line, and, although she knew only the three words, CAT, EAT and MOUSE, she caught the idea. She pulled the cat away and put her on the floor, at the same time covering the box with the frame. When she read, "Do not let the cat get the mouse!" she recognized the negation in the sentence, and seemed to know that the cat must not get the mouse. GET and LET were new words. She was familiar with the words of the last sentence, and was delighted when allowed to act them out. By signs she made me understand that she wished another ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... wife. The fact that a coarseminded man found her lacking in attraction was simply another proof of her quality; yet the words sent a faint shiver through his heart. What if "niceness" carried to that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an emptiness? As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her final bull's-eye, he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... some significance in this revival of reverence for St. John Nepomuk. Owing to centuries of oppression the mind of the people of Bohemia has developed a strong "spirit of negation," "der Geist der stets verneint," as Goethe would say, to the detriment of constructive ability, so it may be that this spirit having failed to reconstruct a church of some sort, at least on national lines, is going under before the mightiest organization the world has ever known, ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... more difficult of comprehension than the other two, supposes that the consciousness may be preserved in an unconscious form. This is difficult to admit, because unconsciousness is the negation of consciousness. It is like saying that light can be preserved when darkness is produced, or that an object still exists when, by the hypothesis, it has been radically destroyed. This idea conveys no intelligible meaning, and there is no ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... and one half makes out that some low-lurking instinct, some vague foreboding of what awaited him, on his own side the globe, in the air of so-called civilisation, prompted him to drain to the last drop the whole perfect negation of the acrid. He might have been waiting for the tide of the insipid to begin to flow again, as it seems ever doomed to do when the acrid, the saving acrid, has already ebbed; at any rate his holiday ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... which burst upon him when, as the restoring clay left his eyes, the light of the world invaded his astonished soul? The very idea may well make one tremble. Blackness of darkness—not an invading stranger, but the home-companion always there—the negation never understood because the assertion was unknown—creation not erased and treasured in the memory, but to his eyes uncreated!—Blackness of darkness!.... The glory of the celestial blue! The towers of ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... what extent this distinction goes; you suppose me to be contending for some minute and subtle shades of difference; so far from that, I mean to affirm that the one law is the direct, formal, and diametrical negation of the other: I assert in the most peremptory manner that he who says, "The value of A is to the value of B as the quantity of labor producing A is to the quantity of labor producing B," does of necessity deny by implication that ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... words, less should be more, or wanted should be had. But Shakespeare is very uncertain in his use of negatives. It nay be necessary once to observe, that in our language two negatives did not originally affirm, but strengthen the negation. This mode of speech was in time changed, but as the change was made in opposition to long custom, it proceeded gradually, and uniformity was not obtained but through an ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... followed from these two distinct and opposed theories of government. The one gave us the dominion, but also the decline and fall of, Rome. It followed the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, with the negation of those rights in the oppression of the Reign of Terror, the despotism of Napoleon, the popular submission to the second empire and the subservience of the individual citizen to official superiority which still prevails so widely on the continent of Europe. The tremendous ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... revels in life care for an art of abstractions? How, having raised good sense to the power of genius, should France quite approve aesthetic fanaticism? What would Poussin have said to so passionate a negation of common sense? Well, happily, we know ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... negation, and his dark-brown eyes commanded hers, but still deferentially, as he said: "You know of what I was thinking. You will be forever young, but yours was always—will always be—the wisdom of the wise. I'd like to have been as clever ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in the escape from self. The doctrine of Christ is a negation of life, that of Nietzsche an affirmation; it seems to me much easier to attain to sublimity with ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... not negate the moral idea, what does it matter that the piece affirms it? The negation of the individual factors must be so very decided, precisely in order to give emphasis to the affirmation of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... from the whirling ball the ions darted through the cylinder to two bands of a peculiar metal affixed to the base of the vehicles somewhat like skids of a sled. Impinging upon these they produced a partial negation of gravity, lifting the shell slightly, and at the same time creating a powerful repulsive force or thrust that could be directed backward, forward, or sidewise at the will of the driver. The creation of this energy and the mechanism of its ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... for baiting a bird-trap: and that touches us closely, for the very foundation of our being in these parts is oatmeal. Even their beautiful devotion to vegetables of all sorts cannot, we feel, compensate for their attitude of negation towards this very staple of existence. There is a strong party among us bent on their conversion. We hope with all our hearts that they will be comfortable and contented among us till the day comes when they can return ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... personality of negation. Her manner on the court is negative, her shots alone are positive. She is never flustered, ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... found nothing?" he said, and when Curtis made a sign of negation continued: "How did you get so many of the ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... exactly know when or how. What we do know is, that it was with him a passing state of moral or imaginative rebellion, and not one of rational doubt. His mind was not so constituted that such doubt could fasten itself upon it; nor did he ever in after-life speak of this period of negation except as an access of boyish folly, with which his maturer self could have no concern. The return to religious belief did not shake his faith in his new prophet. It only made him willing to admit that he had ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... irresistible cogency that there is no such thing as real, objective evil. Sin, if the term be retained at all, can at most be only a blunder. Evil is only an inexact description of a lesser good, or good in the making. Indeed, properly considered—i.e., from the monistic standpoint—evil is a mere negation, a shadow where light should be; or to be quite logical, evil is that which is not—in other words, there is no evil, except to deluded minds, whose business is to get quit of their delusion. The one and only cosmic will being declared good, it follows that ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... that rate be the greatest artist. A house or sign painter might instantly enter the lists with Michael Angelo, and might look down on the little, dry, hard manner of Raphael. But grandeur depends on a distinct principle of its own, not on a negation of the parts; and as it does not arise from their omission, so neither is it incompatible with their insertion or the highest finishing. In fact, an artist may give the minute particulars of any object one by one and with the utmost care, and totally neglect the proportions, arrangement, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... resolve was, and where he was going, whether to High or Low, to Rome or Islington, to Church or Dissent, or even to Mohammed or Theosophy, or what not, or nothing, nobody asked. Such a foundation had struck many devoted followers of the Founder as little better than a negation or an abdication. The Founder thought otherwise. "If forms and words are of any use to him, a man will never come," he said; "if he comes, let him alone." And it may be that this difference between the Founder ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... the earth, and let you have the benefit of their thought and experience. One of the most enlightened foreign students of our Government has rightly said that 'America is the most undemocratic of democratic countries.' We have been living under a Government of negation, a Government with an executive with more power than any monarch, a Government having a Supreme Court, clothed with greater authority than any similar body on earth; therefore, we have lagged behind other nations in democracy. Our Government ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... conception of the infinite would be more truly described, in our way of speaking, as the indefinite. To us, the notion of infinity is subsequent rather than prior to the finite, expressing not absolute vacancy or negation, but only the removal of limit or restraint, which we suppose to exist not before but after we have already set bounds to thought and matter, and divided them after their kinds. From different points of view, either the finite ...
— Philebus • Plato
... years,—till his death,—and was full of interest, of satisfaction, and, I may add, of sadness. The main thing to be said with regard to it, is that I had a secret from him. I believe he never suspected it, though of this I am not absolutely sure. If he did, the line he had taken, the line of absolute negation of the matter to himself, shows an immense effort of the will. I may tell my secret now, giving it for what it is worth, now that Mark Ambient has gone, that he has begun to be alluded to as one of the famous early dead, and that his wife does not survive ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... morals.[139] Ammanati wrote an abject apology to the Accademia del Disegno for the very frank nudity of his statues.[140] Some of the work of Bandinelli and Bronzino had to be removed. What was a rational and healthy protest has survived in grotesque and ill-fitting drapery made of tin—very negation of propriety. Although needed for biblical imagery, the nude in Italy was always exotic; in Greece it was indigenous. From the time of Homer there had been a worship of physical perfection. The Palaestra, the cultivation of athletics in a nation of soldiers, the religions of the country, with ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... eternal judgment, trembling for its estate before divine Almightiness, and, on pain of banishment from every immortal good, forced to condition and dispose itself according to the clear revelations of God. It was not mere negation to an oppressive hierarchy, except as it was first positive and evangelic touching the direct and indefeasible relations and obligations of the soul to its Maker. Only when the hierarchy claimed to qualify these direct relations and ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... or her people to belong to the middle class. How it was it is not quite easy to say—perhaps the tone of implied contempt with which the father spoke of the lower classes, and the quiet negation with which the mother would allude to shopkeepers, may have had to do with it—but the young people all imagined themselves to belong to the upper classes! It was a pity there was no title in the family—but any of the girls might well ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... Powers now, who had come back and stood facing her in one of those superb poses of hers, her yellow braids heavy as gold. It was Brunhilda talking to Leonardo da Vinci's Ste. Anne. No, heavens no! Not a saint, a musty, penitential negation like a saint! Only of course, the Ste. Anne wasn't a saint either, but da Vinci's glorious Renaissance stunt at showing what an endlessly desirable woman he could make if he put his mind ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of the head was decided enough to settle any question, but Belasez fancied she caught a momentary flash in her eyes which was by no means a negation. ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... on Saturday, says M. Jules Favre, will be a "negation of the Commune." By this I presume he means that the elected Mayors and their adjuncts will only exercise power in their respective arrondissements, but that their collective action will not be recognised. As, however, they will be the only legally elected body in Paris, and as, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... his hands above his head in shocked negation of this injustice—but there came from the street the thin wail of a trumpet; another joined it, and a third; the three sounds executed a triple convolution and died away one by one. Holding his thin hand out for silence and better hearing, ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... the court and ministers of Louis Philippe. His friends wished him to omit these pieces from the new edition of his works, which was about to be published; but he would not consent to do so. "I must give my works," he said, "just as they were composed; their suppression would be a negation of myself, and an act of adulation unworthy of any true-minded man." Accordingly they remained in ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... don't mean to say I think he's got any idee of sich a thing, Bildad," replied Bildad himself, who took great delight in mystifying people, and who sometimes, in order to express the most unqualified negation, was accustomed to employ this apparently ambiguous form of speech. "I said for my part, Miss Prouty,—for my part. As for the Doctor, he'll prob'bly have his own notions, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... Considine. This had made me take everything else for granted, and the noisy American world had deafened my ears to possible contradictions. Her spectacles were at present a direct contradiction; they seemed a negation not only of new relationships but of every old one as well. I remember nevertheless that when after a moment she walked beside me on the grass I found myself nervously hoping she wouldn't as yet at any rate tell me anything very dreadful; so that to stave off this ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... sat crumpled up in his chair, listening to the flames crackling in his heart. The old negation was fighting for its own, and he was weary and broken and sick as with a palsy of the soul. For everything in him trembled. There was no solid ground under him. He had visited his material kingdom in the City, and had seen its strong fortresses and had tried all of its locks and doors, and found ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... uncovered in a wild confusion of scattered bed-clothes; and his arms and body were jerking as a dog's that dreams. She saw a sort of convulsion pinch and pucker his face; then he made some inarticulate sounds—as it were a frantic negation; and then the noise of his own cry awakened him. He looked wildly round and lifted his hands as though he expected to ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... death of Parflete opened out other possibilities of action. He was not a man, however, whom one could order to be this, that, or the other; still less could one reproach him for not being this, that, or the other. It was his faith to believe that salvation rests on the negation and renunciation of personality. He pushed this to the complete suppression of his Will, tenderly considered. I need not detain you on the familiar dogmas of Christianity with regard to the reign of nature and the reign of grace. Your view may be ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... and of all the Egos merely AS Egos towards each other. LOVE cannot be felt towards others AS others. Love is the expression of individual suitability and preference, its positive existence in some cases implies its absolute negation in others. Hence Love can never be the essential and root of social feeling, and hence the necessity for the instinct of abstract justice which takes no account of preferences or aversions. And here I may say that all application of the word LOVE to unknown, distant creatures, to mere ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... indeed, "to be gathered," but never "to be carried off" The Mazoreths would read [Hebrew: la] for [Hebrew: lv]: "And that Israel might be gathered to Him." Thus it is rendered, among the ancient translators, by Aquila and the Chaldee; while Symmachus, Theodoret, and the Vulgate express the negation. Most of the modern interpreters have followed the Mazoreths. But the assumption of several of these, that [Hebrew: la] is only a different writing for [Hebrew: lv], is altogether without foundation, compare the remarks on chap. ix. 2; and the reading of the Mazoreths ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... that between the Civil War and the crusade that is now upon us, we were under the evil spell of materialism. Now materialism is the very negation of democracy, which is a government by the demos, or over-soul; it is equally the negation of joy, the negation of reverence, and it is without conviction because it cannot believe even in itself. Reflecting thus, he can scarcely fail to realize that materialism, everywhere entrenched, was ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... recognized its value. In grammar and arithmetic, as with astronomy, they seemed not to have advanced greatly, if at all, upon the Egyptians. One field in which they stand out in startling pre-eminence is the field of astrology; but this, in the estimate of modern thought, is the very negation of science. Babylonia impressed her superstitions on the Western world, and when we consider the baleful influence of these superstitions, we may almost question whether we might not reverse Canon Rawlinson's estimate and say that perhaps but for Babylonia real civilization, based on ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... who may fairly be called Schopenhauer's pupil, takes up the tale. He suggests that it is conceivable that a universal negation of the will may be obtained, if the preponderating part of the actual World-Will should come to be contained in the conscious minds that resolve to will no more. This he thinks may neutralize the whole, and put ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... new truth, he has merely strayed on to the track of a buried illusion. In the case I have named, for the poet to have taught us more than experience teaches, he should have ventured still further, perhaps, in the negation of justice. But whatever our opinion may be on this point, it at least is clear that the poet who desires his hypotheses to be legitimate, and of service, must take heed that they be not too manifestly contrary to ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of converting religion into outward actions has its root in us all, and is not annihilated by our rejection of an elaborate ceremonial. There is much significance in the double negation of my text, 'Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision.' If the Judaisers were tempted to insist on the former, as indispensable, their antagonists were as much tempted to insist on the latter. The one were saying, 'A man cannot be a Christian unless he be circumcised.' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... countryside, with subtle flickers of laughter running athwart its wonted contortions, more weird and sinister in this ghastly glare than by day? And what significance might attend these strange machinations? Revolving the idea, he presently shook his head in conclusive negation as he rode along. The approach of raiders was silent and noiseless and secret. Whatever the mystery might portend it was not thus that they would advertise their presence, promoting the escape of the objects of their search. Hite's open and candid mind could ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... attend the house; and when this was negatived, he moved an address to his majesty, praying that the house might be acquainted at what time reparation was first demanded from Spain, which likewise received a negation. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Machiavelli, a Nietzsche, a Stendhal, a Gobineau. Liberty and equality are terms mutually destructive, they cannot exist together; for, given liberty, the strong instantly look to it that equality shall perish. And rightly so. Equality is a war cry for fools—a negation of nature, an abortion. The very ants know better. Doubtless you view with considerable distrust the growing spirit of democracy, or what ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... may be taken in two ways: first, by way of pure negation, so that a man be called an unbeliever, merely because he has not the faith. Secondly, unbelief may be taken by way of opposition to the faith; in which sense a man refuses to hear the faith, or despises it, according ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of a simple, wandering life. These symbols were compounded to form ideographs, as aleph a, and lamed l, being the first and last of the zodiacal circle, were employed for the name of the Creator, the reverse of these, la, signifying non-existence, negation, privation. In course of time a language and a literature would be evolved, but from the simple elements of a nomadic life. Knowledge came to them by action and the use of the physical sense. They had no other or more appropriate confession of this than ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... rediscover. Well, then, suppose that this force does live and act again; we have chemical unity. Organic and inorganic nature would apparently then rest on four essential principles,—in fact, if we could decompose nitrogen which we ought to consider a negation, we should have but three. This brings us at once close upon the great Ternary of the ancients and of the alchemists of the Middle Ages, whom we do wrong to scorn. Modern chemistry is nothing more than ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... would be if this infinite were by negative privation or privative negation of the end, as it is for a more positive affirmation of the ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... of primeval forests, but to develop his mental and moral faculties, just so certainly he needs education, and only by means of it will he become what he ought to become,—man, in the highest sense of the word. Ignorance is not simply the negation of knowledge, it is the misdirection of the mind. "One step in knowledge," says Bulwer, "is one step from sin; one step from sin is one ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... their heritage from the Hebrew, whilst the modern astrologer claims that the astrology of to-day is once more a revelation of the Chaldean and Assyrian religions. But polytheism—whether in its gross form of many gods, of planetary angels, or in the more subtle form of pantheism,—is the very negation of sane religion; and astrology is the ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... Christian; he had replied that he himself had no difficulty about it. When he was called a Platonist, or a Christian, or a Republican, he welcomed it. It did not bind him to what he did not like. What is the use of going about and setting up a flag of negation?'" ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... ultra—more beyond. This the demonstrated truth demanded. Thus the discovery of America took the ne off of their proud motto, thus teaching them a lesson which should be a lesson to the world. Their negation was changed to an affirmation. Their boasted limit of creation was changed to an acknowledgment of the unknown beyond. Thus it has ever been in man's proud history. Thus it will doubtless continue to be till ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... now disappeared. The publication of the papers discovered in the Tuileries has stripped despotism of its tinsel, and has revealed the vile and contemptible arts by which a gallant nation has been enslaved. The Government of Napoleon, as Mr. Gladstone said of that of Bomba, "was a negation of God upon earth." His councillors were bold bad men, ever plotting against each other, and united alone in a common conspiracy to grow rich at the expense of their country, creverunt in exitio patriae. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... sexual impulse connected with a definite sexual object. In the second case it is a question whether the manifold accidental influences suffice to explain the acquisition unless there is something in the individual to meet them half way. The negation of this last factor is inadmissible according to our ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... late king of Naples was said to have erected the negation of God into a system of government, not a few eager investigators seem to have assumed it as a basis of science. And so we reach out by worship 'mostly of the silent sort' toward the unknown and unknowable, the 'reservoir of organic force, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... present form of the Trinity is, that it is not only scholastic, or purely intellectual, but that it is also negative. It is not even a positive doctrine. It is often charged against Unitarianism, that it is a mere negation; and, in one sense, the charge is well founded. Unitarianism is a negation, so far as it is a mere piece of reasoning against Orthodoxy; but, as asserting the divine Unity, it is very positive, But the doctrine ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... teaching for the seizure of political power by a small class, consisting of about 6 per cent. of the population, and the imposition by force of its rule upon the majority of the population that is either unwilling or passive. That is the negation of Marxian Socialism. It is the essence of Marx's teaching that the social revolution must come as a historical necessity when the proletariat itself comprises an overwhelming majority ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... made this discovery, a revulsion carries their minds to the second position of which we spoke. This is, namely, the position of extreme denial. It is an attitude of negation toward revelation, such as prevailed in the barren and trivial rationalism of the end of the eighteenth century. The reason having been long repressed revenges itself, usurping everything. The explanation of the rise of positive ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... terms'; quite interchangeable with nescio quo modo; cf. 82. A. 334, e; G. 469, Rem. 2; H. 529, 5, 3). — ADHUC NON: purposely put for nondum, because more emphasis is thus thrown both on the time-word and on the negation. The common view that nondum was avoided because it would have implied that Cato expected to lose the canorum is certainly wrong. — ET VIDETIS: 'though you see my years'. The adversative use of et for autem or tamen after the negative is not very uncommon in Cicero, but there ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... to fear death for the simple reason that she died in a sure and certain faith and in strict obedience to the commands of the Gospel. Her whole life had been one of pure, disinterested love, of utter self-negation. Had her convictions been of a more enlightened order, her life directed to a higher aim, would that pure soul have been the more worthy of love and reverence? She accomplished the highest and best achievement in this world: she died without fear ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... conditions in their ideal conditions, and the direct enforcement of their ideal conditions they have almost outlived in the opinion of neighbouring nations. Consequently the practical political party in Germany properly demands the negation of philosophy. Its error consists not in the demand, but in sticking to the demand, which seriously it neither does nor can enforce. It believes it can accomplish this negation by turning its back on philosophy, the while its averted head utters a few irritable ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... bearing stout booms of great chained logs, with grassy clearings and little settlements at each side, curving into lilied bays, or breaking musically upon yellow beaches, a River of Life indeed, and no longer a river of Death and Negation! ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... affliction; but the King of Sulaco had words enough to give him all the mysterious weight of a taciturn force. His silences, backed by the power of speech, had as many shades of significance as uttered words in the way of assent, of doubt, of negation—even of simple comment. Some seemed to say plainly, "Think it over"; others meant clearly, "Go ahead"; a simple, low "I see," with an affirmative nod, at the end of a patient listening half-hour was the equivalent of a ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... that lameness of the shoulder will in many cases disappear with no other prescription than that of rest. Provided the lesions occasioning it are not too severe, time is all that is required. But the negation of letting alone is seldom accepted as a means of doing good, in the place of the active and the positive forms of treatment. This is in accordance with a trait of human nature which is universal, and is unlimited in its applications; hence something must be done. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... conflicts by the mutual contradictoriness of concepts, 91. Criticism of his attempt to transcend ordinary logic, 92. Examples of the 'dialectic' constitution of things, 95. The rationalistic ideal: propositions self-securing by means of double negation, 101. Sublimity of the conception, 104. Criticism of Hegel's account: it involves vicious intellectualism, 105. Hegel is a seer rather than a reasoner, 107. 'The Absolute' and 'God' are two different notions, 110. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... frames in spite of a touch, of this influence. Rodin, the emancipator of modern sculpture, and a notorious anarchist as regards architecture, is not always applicable. The imitation of his style induces a negation of modeling only in evidence in one ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... loves—it never seems to have entered a house, but since birth to have been roaming the air, in rain and sun, or visiting the trees and the grass. I not only disbelieve utterly, but intensely dislike, the doctrine of metempsychosis, which, if I understand it aright, seems the negation of the creative impulse, an apotheosis of staleness—nothing quite new in the world, never anything quite new—not even the soul of a baby; and so I am not prepared to entertain the whim that a bird was one of his remote incarnations; still, in sweep ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... thus, well, not, [Footnote: It may be worth remarking that while there are many negative nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and conjunctions in oar language, negation is more frequently expressed in English by the adverb than by any other part of speech—than by all other parts of speech. A very large per cent of these adverbs modify the verb. That is to say, it is largely through ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... Absolute, once learned, was never forgotten. It was a philosophic touchstone, understood by the boy, applied by the man. With the Absolute, an entity stripped of perceptible qualities, an "hypostatized negation," he could have no traffic. The Cartesian motto of thought as the essence of existence became another fixed point for him, and his last questioning phrase half suggests the line of reasoning which, as he afterwards put it, asserts that, philosophically ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... both afterward evolved into their successive forms in accordance with the initial creative impulse. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that these theories, by rendering the idea of causality more and more inflexible and universal, lead necessarily to the negation of God, since there always remains this question: And God, who created him? And if it is replied that God has always existed, the same reply may be flung back by asserting that the universe has always existed. To use the phrase of Ardigo, human thought is only able to conceive ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... this negative clause can be translated literally into English, and it is the usual form of negation with ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... have heard. There, revealed, was the defect of a life, a problem to be worked out by the analytic student of mankind. Was it to introduce a little saving recklessness, the redeeming truth of honesty and justice to self, or the neutralizing of self-negation by the acceptance of merited worth! Even through our weaknesses are we sometimes healed. If any reason existed which could merit one self-accusing thought, the doctor found it when he uncovered the resentment ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... her loving sympathy, her simplicity, her keen interest in all around her, her sense of humour and love of fun endearing her to all. The entire negation of self which she evinced was remarkable, as well as her childlike faith and devotion to her Master and to His service. A lady was heard to say, "Well, after talking to Miss Slessor I am converted to foreign ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... way. The upper character with two wings is Landa's ma, except that the circular wings contain the lines or strokes which the bishop has omitted, and which appear to indicate the m sound and are observed in the Imix symbol. Colonel Mallery, comparing this with the sign of negation made by the Indians and that of the Egyptians given by Champollion (our plate LXIV, 15), concludes that it is derived from the symmetrically extended arms with the hands curved slightly downward. This will furnish an explanation of the strokes in the terminal circles. ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... no solid reasoning; as, This is a kingdom, therefore it is England; this is a city, therefore it is London; the apostle mentions government in the primitive Church, therefore they are ruling elders: this were an absurd kind of reasoning. 2. By way of negation. Our reasoning from this text for the ruling elder, is not from the general to a special affirmatively—there are governments in the Church, therefore ruling elders: but this is our arguing—these governments here mentioned in 1 ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... a great deal of harm in the world," she said, this same afternoon, as Dyce and she drank tea together. "The jingo impulse, and all sorts of forces making for animalism, will get strength from him, directly or indirectly. It's the negation of all we are working for, ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... range with them the charming uncertain ones, like M. Renan and his melodious disciples, the sombre and nihilistic Buddhists; all those to whom the law of the completion of man through the good is indeed foolish and chimerical, since their lives imply the negation of it: I mean to say the immense multitude of those who live in any kind of way, good easy people, refined possibly, from caprice, coquetry or laziness, but ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... which he read it. He had more than time to read it, but still he said nothing; he stood staring at it. "Where is the original?" asked Madame de Bellegarde, in a voice which was really a consummate negation of impatience. ...
— The American • Henry James
... but the residuum or feints. Take a friend's advice, therefore, and retrograde out of all society and connection wid the villains I have described; or if you superciliously overlook this warning, book it down as a fact that admits of no negation, that you will be denuded of reputation, of honesty, and of any pecuniary contingencies that you may happen to possess. This is a ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... chest, and he bent, turning the key in the ornamental brass lock. He could reconsider the disposal of the opium to-morrow; there was no hurry; he had no intention of becoming a victim to the drug. That would be an inconceivable stupidity, the negation of all the philosophy he had ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of Van Laer held in them a shallowness and murderous cruelty, an expression of negation and coldness combined with mind such as one finds nowhere in the animal kingdom, save that branch of it which prides itself on its likeness to God. His thumbs were cruelly shaped and enormous. A man may disguise his soul, he may disguise his ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... lower classes and children are supposed to practice. It is only as we follow Jesus Christ and sublimate this code in love (Matt. 22:37-40) that we rise to the full significance and divine content of morality. The Christian code rests not in negation, but commands a life of outgoing, active love. A lofty altruism must permeate his every act and give colouring to his whole life. Christ not only introduced and emphasized this golden rule; He taught that it was absolutely necessary (John ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... picture-paper. He surveyed its illustrations with studious intentness for five minutes, and then laid the paper on the seat beside him. Miss Clarkson again fled to sanctuary in her novel, wondering how long pure negation could ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... effort, but it was the only positive result he could ever trace to the influence of Harvard College, and he had grave doubts whether Harvard College influenced even that. Negative results in plenty he could trace, but he tended towards negation on his own account, as one side of the New England mind had always done, and even there he could never feel sure that Harvard College had more than reflected a weakness. In his opinion the education was not serious, but in truth hardly ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... a-na-pi-a[n]? When I am out of hearing, where am I? [The lines extending from the ears denote hearing; the arms directed toward the right and left, being the gesture of negation, usually made by throwing the hands outward and away from the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... to make myself dream a continuation of it. How many times I have called up the faces of those I love just before falling asleep; but my thoughts wander and carry me off elsewhere, and I prefer that a hundred times over to the absolute negation of thought. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... duty of the Portuguese Government. "Nor," he continued, "ought the Government oL Portugal to stop here. It ought, as we have said, to go further; because from what his countrymen say of Livingstone—and to which he only answers by a mere vain negation,—from what he unhesitatingly declares of himself and his intentions, and from what must be known to the Government by private information from, their delegates, it is obvious that such men as Livingstone may become extremely ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... negation, but she dropped into a seat, and sat stooping, with her head bowed over her knees as if she were dreadfully tired. Euergetes turned his back on her, and spoke to his brother of indifferent subjects, while she drew lines, some straight and some crooked, with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... for yourselves what an intensity of the negation of the faculty of sculpture this implies in the national mind! What measure can be assigned to the gulf of incapacity, which can deliberately swallow up in the gorge of it the teaching and example of three thousand years, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... man of his degree in Europe. With Coventry and Salt, Peter Pierson often perambulated the terrace, with hands folded behind him. Contemporary with these was Daines Barrington, a burly, square man. Lamb also mentions Burton, "a jolly negation," who drew up the bills of fare for the parliament chamber, where the benchers dined; thin, fragile Wharry, who used to spitefully pinch his cat's ears when anything offended him; and Jackson, the musician, to whom the cook once ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... haughtily schemed on the heights of official self-complacency—changes which were not justified by any intimate acquaintance with the country, nor by a living faith in any ideal, not even in one of negation, and in illustration of this he adduced his own education. He demanded before every thing else that the true spirit of the nation should be recognized, and that it should be looked up to with that humility without which no courage ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... of affirmation and negation ran up and down the long table. Dan tapped with his knife again. "You hear me," he warned. "Thirty year I've been ridin' John Cardigan's log-carriages; thirty year I've been gettin' everythin' out of a log it's ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... predicates, for in this way alone can we form for ourselves some conception, however inadequate, of His Being. Strictly, God is unconditioned, and cannot be the subject of predication, for all determination involves negation, and hence in one aspect He is not conceivable nor describable, nor nameable.[178] Siegfried and Zeller press this negative attitude to the Deity, and find that there is an inherent contradiction in Philo's system, which ruins it, ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... little, here)—that his words, "because you did not apply them," contained the gist of the whole matter;—that the application of them, or any other things, was precisely the essence of design; the non- application, or wrong application, the negation of design: that his use of the poor materials was in this case admirable; and that if he could explain to me, in clear words, the principles on which he had so used them, he would be doing a very great service to all ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... retire at his approach. After a while such words as "impracticable" and "impossible" lose their absoluteness and become only synonyms for the relatively difficult. He has so often found a way out, where humanly speaking there was none, that he no longer looks upon a logical dilemma as a final negation of effort. ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... he, "she may be at heart a revolutionnaire." Then, as he noticed the negation in her look, he added softly: "The least clue as to her present refuge would make me greatly ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... brief for suffering nor for well-being either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the "Palace of Crystal" it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a "palace of crystal" if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... against him from the first, he thought, and there flashed through his mind the dark panorama, the accumulating disasters of the night. A negation lay upon his existence that would not be lifted. It had followed him like a sinister shadow for years to this obscure, black smother of water, to the Gar reeling crazily forward under an impotent hand. The yacht was behaving ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... angry with him for loving Wordsworth. "Wordsworth," I used to say, "is against you, no doubt, in the battle which you are now waging, but after you have won, the world will need more than ever those qualities which Wordsworth is keeping alive and nourishing." In his youth mere negation of religion was a firm bond of union, social and otherwise, between men who ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... she loves me, though with scorn She treats my adoration; I know she loves me, though my suit She checks with strong negation. ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... one method of minimising the internal warring of factions in the Northern Country. Had Somerset been prepared to follow up his campaign by an effective military occupation, his plans might have been dignified with the name of a policy. In practice, they amounted almost to a negation of policy. A month after the battle the only effective result for Scotland was a renewed and intensified bitterness of hatred to England, and a corresponding inclination to amity with France. The practical reply to the invasion ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil. There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' And this is the perpetual burden of his teaching. 'Satan's empire is the empire of nothing'; there is no such thing as evil—it is a mere 'negation.' And the 'moral virtues,' which attempt to discriminate between right and wrong, are the idlest of delusions; they are merely 'allegories and dissimulations,' they 'do not exist.' Such was one of the most fundamental ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... an early hour, retired to bed, Vane and Du——-e fell into speculative conversation upon the nature of man. Vane's philosophy was of a quiet and passive scepticism; the physician dared more boldly, and rushed from doubt to negation. The attention of Trevylyan, as he sat apart and musing, was arrested in despite of himself. He listened to an argument in which he took no share, but which suddenly inspired him with an interest in that awful subject which, in the heat of youth and the occupations of the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... revealed to her innocent consciousness the girl had flown to his arms when he came to the hut. And that was all their love-making, two blissful moments of delirium wrenched from a time of a gaunt tragedy, and followed by a few hours of self-negation. Yet they sufficed—to the man—and the woman is never too ready to count the cost when her ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... inspirations of life. It was as though some modern Endymion gazing up at the round and prosaic surface of the moon, and refusing to admit that there entered into its composition anything even of so low a vitality as green cheese—it was as though such an one had seen the affirmed negation suddenly take to itself life and form, and disclose from afar a whole heaven of thoughts, beauties, and aspirations which he had not believed existent. And then, having seen that gracious form so well defined that it must for ever remain ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... {Negation.} Negation in sentences is expressed by {ne} ({en, n}) before the verb, and {niht} after it: {[e:]r enist guot}, he is not good. {niht} is frequently omitted, especially after the preterite presents, the verbs {wellen}, {l[a]n}, sentences containing negative pronouns ...
— A Middle High German Primer - Third Edition • Joseph Wright
... outlines the one issue for which it was launched,—stanch against any attack which might endanger the carrying on of life. Feeling the force of this instinctive urge, she braces herself against precipitancy in response by what seems almost a negation. ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... insight and self-negation (a rare quality with teachers) enough to act up to his theory, and give free play to the natural tendencies of his pupil's powers. That this was really the case is seen from his reply to one who blamed Frederick's disregard ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... extracts from ancient history. This was the Convent de la Visitation. Its pious nuns had taken the vow never to look upon the face of man. If, as they paced under the great oaks of their close, or the stately length of their cloisters telling their beads, or meditating on the negation of earthly existence and the perfect joys of the future, they heard an echo of the conflict that was shaking Europe, it was only to utter a prayer that the souls of those who had obeyed the call of their country and fallen ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... they sometimes look down upon us. It was thus, if the parallel is not exaggerated, that Arnold regarded the author of The Victim of Virtue. His attitude was quite taken before the orchestra ceased playing; it was made of negation rather than criticism, on the basis that he had no concern with, and no knowledge of, such things. Deliberately he gave his mind a surface which should shed promiscuous invitation, and folded his lips as it were, against the rising of the curtain. He thought of Hilda separately, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... the difficulties that suggest themselves to the mind of my friend from Virginia. Look at that third section, which has been the subject of his particular criticism. Every part and portion of it is a negation of power to Congress, and nothing else; and yet he has argued as if it gave Congress power; as if it conferred more power upon Congress. It leaves to the States all the rights they now have; all the ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... wealth have themselves been responsible for a portion of the conditions against which Bryanism is in ignorant revolt. I do not believe that it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby showing that, whereas the Populists, Socialists, and others really do not correct the evils at all, or else only do ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the picture. Leon Ploszowski belongs unmistakably to our own times. His doubts and his dilettanteism are our own. His fine aesthetic sense, his pessimism, his self-probings, his weariness, his overstrung nerves, his whole philosophy of negation,—these are qualities belonging to this century, the outcome of ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... "fame" never signifies simply notoriety. The meaning of the direct term may be seen from its negation or opposite, for only the meanest of men are called infamous. They are utterly without fame, utterly nameless; but if fame implied only notoriety then infamous would possess no marked significance. Fame is an undertaker that pays but little attention to the living, but who bedizens the dead, ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... him, a gesture that conveyed the full strength of negation. "We are on opposite sides of a line across which friendship is impossible. I could not be your friend without being false to myself. You couldn't be mine unless you were by some accident flung into the working class and forced to adopt it as your own. ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... compelled to this negation of extrinsic art by the problem he had set before himself,—first, to arouse, to suggest, rather than to finish or elaborate, less to display any theme or thought than "to bring the reader into the atmosphere of the theme ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... tantalize me by talking like that, you are much mistaken! Let him be as late as he will—or stay away altogether—I don't care,' said Sally. But a tender, minute quaver in the negation showed that there was something forced in ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... his head, his eyes closed in quite an ecstasy of negation. "You cain't git Jep Turrentine in the trap as easy as all that," he said half contemptuously. "Why, he'd know what you was at a leetle ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... another, where "Thou shalt commit adultery" was printed, omitting the negation; which occasioned the archbishop to lay one of the heaviest penalties on the Company of Stationers that was ever recorded in the annals of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... prove to that tough bunch that there is no possible advance in learning through a combination of Astronomy, Medicine, and Psychology, he'll make it on that basis. It's just as important to close a door as it is to open one, you know. But it's one rough deal to prove negation. Maybe we'll have James the Holden on our hands for another semester. Martha will ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... The evil and the peril became far greater still when, in the fourteenth century, there arose between France and England, between Philip de Valois and Edward III., a question touching the succession to the throne of France and the application or negation of the Salic law. Then there commenced, between the two crowns and the two peoples, that war which was to last more than a hundred years, was to bring upon France the saddest days of her history, and was to be ended only by the inspired heroism of a young girl who, alone, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... I also require less of you.... So much less that father will scarcely expect me to play any more accompaniments to your 'necklaces of precious tones'—so much less that the minimum of my interest in you vanishes to absolute negation.... So I shall ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... they are beyond the range of language and perception: they have no signs of distinction but possess absolute sameness (samata). From this totality of things nothing can be excluded and to it nothing can be added. Yet it is also sunyata, negation or the void, because it cannot be said to possess any of the attributes of the world we live in: neither existence nor non-existence, nor unity nor plurality can be predicted of it. According to the celebrated ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... meanness of the suburban working colony, uncircumscribed by any pressure of surrounding life, and sunk into blank acceptance of its isolation, its banishment from beauty and variety and surprise, seemed to Amherst the very negation of ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... naturally and properly employed a variety of phrases to bring his meaning more forcibly home, he will, I presume, allow that they are all equivalent; and that what he means by a necessary truth, would be sufficiently defined, a proposition the negation of which is not only false, but inconceivable. I am unable to find in any of Mr Whewell's expressions, turn them what way you will, a meaning beyond this, and I do not believe he would contend that they mean any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... for the inherent might of the Gospel that, in spite of the object-lessons continually provided for the natives by white men of the negation of all good, that it has stricken its roots so deeply into the soil of the Pacific islands. Just as the best proof of the reality of the Gospel here in England is that it survives the incessant assaults ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... more land, is a thief who has stolen a triangle. A man with the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden meets Smith's garden; the hedge where his farm touches Brown's. He cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his neighbor's. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... endowed with two or three senses, if not five. There was no distinction between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything within the horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as a positive entity rather than as the mere negation of noise. It was broken by the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... series of emanations from God. Emanation is not an arbitrary act of divine will; it is a necessary consequence of the nature of the One. God must negate Himself, and the process is creation. The further the process of negation is carried, the less reality does the created object possess. Last in the scale comes matter, which has no self-subsistence, but is the absolute self-negation of God. We referred in the last chapter to Plotinus' favourite illustration. We may be allowed, ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... did not answer at once; she seemed to be trying to divine his meaning. Then she waved her hand—a curious movement, which he took to be a gesture of negation—her broadening smile disclosing teeth that were small, even, and ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... willing in any way which is now possible to us. But how things would appear to us if we were not human is, to a man, a question of no importance. Even, the mystic to whom the definite constitution of his own mind is so hateful, can only paralyze without transcending his faculties. A passionate negation, the motive of which, although morbid, is in spite of itself perfectly human, absorbs all his energies, and his ultimate triumph is to attain ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... reality; during the second, which is definitive, it is deprived of its objectivity, reduced to a completely internal event, through the effect of other states of consciousness which oppose and finally annihilate its objective character. There is an affirmation, then negation; ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... According to the Philosopher (Ethic. vi, 2) affirmation and negation in the intellect correspond to search and avoidance in the appetite; while truth and falsehood in the intellect correspond to good and evil in the appetite. Consequently every appetitive movement which is conformed to a true intellect, is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the right way of dealing with one another is defective. Thus your Buddhism seems to me more mesmeric than satisfying. It is a way men have of murdering themselves, while continuing to live, into peace and oblivion. There is a surrender, a negation of life, a denial of total responsibilities, or human obligations, which to my mind indicates a monstrous selfishness, none the less real because its manifestations are passive and dignified by a philosophic pose. You see ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... illusion to which the ancient philosophers were subject, and against which Plato in his later dialogues seems to be struggling—the tendency to mere abstractions; not perceiving that pure abstraction is only negation, they thought that the greater the abstraction the greater the truth. Behind any pair of ideas a new idea which comprehended them—the (Greek), as it was technically termed—began at once to appear. Two are truer than three, one than two. ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... sutras, are, The Middle Book, The Hundred, and The Book of Twelve Gates. Other books of the canon are also studied and valued by this sect, but all of them are apt to be perused from a particular point of view; i.e., that of Pyrronism or infinite negation. ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... made to discover the north-eastern passage. The enthusiasm of Barendz had died with him, and it may be said that the stern negation by which this supreme attempt to solve the mystery of the pole was met was its best practical result. Certainly all visions of a circumpolar sea blessed with a gentle atmosphere and eternal tranquillity, and offering a smooth and easy passage for the world's commerce between ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... The Castle of Negation held out no longer. Ruthless battalions poured over the walls, blew up the Countess's propriety, made frightful ravages in her complexion. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... conclusion of agnosticism was reached in India twenty-four centuries ago, and Confucius expressed it exactly when he said, with reference to the future, "We do not know life; how can we know death?" This same dubious negation probably has the largest following of all types of unbelief in our time. It is not atheism: that, to the great mass of men, is unthinkable; it is easier to assume simply that "we do not know." Yet almost every form ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood |
