"Negative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found that the men of the Infanterie Coloniale, in their dirty-blue suits, had pushed up as close as possible to overhear what was being said, and now surrounded us. One private indeed boldly asked the officers whether they were going to be able to enter the Palace at once; and when he got an angry negative, he and his comrades took to such cursing and swearing, that it seemed incredible that this was a disciplined army. The men wanted to know why they had been dragged forward like animals in this burning heat and stifling dust, day after ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... topical or historical, or documentary or actual. It is also necessarily an effect of fine shades, delicate values, vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence, suggestion. It is also absolute, unrelated—it is positive or negative or superlative—it is never comparative. Well, the Anglo-Saxon public is totally insensible to such things. They can no more feel them, than a blind worm can feel the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... to electricity, is not identical with it. We find it absent in a room that has been recently plastered, and is not quite dry. Sleeping in such a room is positively dangerous. We find the same negative depressing condition wherever evaporation has been going on in the absence of sunlight, which appears ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... whole fabric of our reasoning rests, is an assumption; inevitable, it may be, yet an assumption. Thus English philosophy, which seemed to be so settled and positive in Bacon, ended in the most unsettled and negative skepticism in Hume; and it was only through Kant that, according to the Germans, the great problem was solved at last, and men ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... (al lucero, etc.): even. The negative is intruded from the underlying negative psychologic notion: Ramon would not have suffered an affront—not even from, etc. Cf. note ni, p. 99, 3. lucero del alba: the planet Venus, bearing (as morning star) the name Lucifer. For ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... bench, the commanders of our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits the conduct of its best interests, profane and sacred, what do we see to be the principles which guide our selection? How entirely do they lie beside and beyond the negative tests? and how little respect do we pay to the breach of this or that commandment in comparison with ability? So wholly impossible is it to apply the received opinions on such matters to practice, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... the same time brave and virtuous? Must pluck and piety be for ever divorced in the female character? Shall I never be able to keep the straight path in life because I can turn an awkward corner with four horses at a trot? Female voices answer volubly in the negative, and I give in. ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... pas, point, jamais, plus, guere, rien, personne, pas un, que, aucun, nul, ni.-Order of negative particles with infinitive.—Omission of pas after savoir, pouvoir, cesser, oser.—Que introducing oui, non, etc., after verbs of saying, thinking and the like.—Idioms: aller chercher, envoyer chercher, vouloir ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann
... theory which, denying the independent existence of spirit, resolves everything within the sphere of being into matter, or into the operation and the effect of the operation of forces latent in it, or into the negative and positive interaction of mere material forces, to the exclusion of intelligent ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Beltravers, for, depend upon it, he will never do. If he had made a bold stroke for a reputation, like a great original, and sported some deed without a name, to work upon the wonder-loving imagination of the credulous English public, one might have thought something of him. But this cowardly, negative sin, not honouring his father and mother! so commonplace, too, neutral tint—no effect. Quite a failure, one cannot even stare, and you know, Granville, the object of all these strange speeches is merely to make fools stare. To be ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... like these, not in order to throw ridicule upon the Celt-lovers,—on the contrary, I feel a great deal of sympathy with them,—but rather, to make it clear what an immense advantage the Celt-haters, the negative side, have in the controversy about Celtic antiquity; how much a clear-headed sceptic, like Mr. Nash, may utterly demolish, and, in demolishing, give himself the appearance of having won an entire victory. ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... is, if viewed on its negative side, the ridicule of heathen mythology and of Christian doctrines and habits; and on its positive, the proclamation of one God as the object of worship. The work exhibits internal evidence of a knowledge ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... suggested to his majesty that a demand should be made of a hundred thousand a-year for his maintenance. The king, however, disliked the prince's connexion with his present ministers, and therefore, he put his decided negative upon this proposal; asserting that he could not think of burthening his people with so large a grant, and encouraging his son in his extravagant habits. Ministers had bound themselves to procure ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... be spiritual, in order that we may be in the highest and truest sense moral." Then at last I saw, that the deficiency of "mere moral men" is, that their morality is apt to be too external or merely negative, and therefore incomplete: that the man who worships a fiend for a God may be in some sense spiritual, but his spirituality will be a devilish fanaticism, having nothing in it to admire or approve: that the moral man deserves approval or love for all the ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... Kerber an injustice I shall be the first to ask his pardon," said Fenshawe. "At present, I have every cause to doubt the man's motives in leaving us, and I want more than negative proof to acquit him of dishonesty. By the way, Irene, have you told Royson ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... meet pain. At last the aching became so intolerable that it was scarcely to be endured; and after ringing twenty times to inquire whether Randall was come home, and uttering a heavy imprecation each time he was answered in the negative; what between pain and impatience he became so fevered that he really seemed quite ill, and his sufferings were evidently more than he could well endure. Poor Mrs. Melwyn, helpless and feeble, dared not propose to do any thing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... negative pole of industry had come from all civilized countries; their tongues were familiar with many forms of utterance, that of each racial group or type being unintelligible in its subtler variations, if not entirely, to the rest. But the language of meum and tuum ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... do so; and in defending this position Marshall observed that the Constitution defined the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court over cases brought there in the first instance, and that in this clause of the Constitution affirmative words had the force of negative words so far as to exclude jurisdiction over any other cases than those specifically mentioned. In the second case this observation was relied on by Virginia to defeat the power of the court to review a State judgment. But, said the ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... however, obliged to him for preventing others from levying contributions upon us in this new region. The Tuaricks here—all the strangers—are very civil; on account, I believe, of our being with the old man. He is of great negative utility. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... help, guaranteeing the solvency and permanence of her new partnership in glib and pleasant phrase, wherein her angry fancy suspected at once the note of irony. But Mrs. Jellison held firm, embroidering her negative, indeed, with her usual cheerful chatter, but sticking to it all the same. At last there was no way of saving dignity but to talk of something else and go—above all, to talk of something else before going, lest the would-be benefactor should be ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... side, and a tooth projecting downward at one end, operated on by the type, and a metallic fork, also projecting downward, over two mercury cups; and a short circuit of wire embracing the helices of the electro-magnet connected with the positive and negative poles of the battery and terminating ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... against the dogmatic schools[251]. Catulus evidently concerned himself more with the system of the later than with that of the earlier sceptic. It is also exceedingly probable that he touched only very lightly on the negative Academic arguments, while he developed fully that positive teaching about the [Greek: pithanon] which was so distinctive of Carneades. All the counter arguments of Lucullus which concern the destructive side ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... for my final answer to the question this moment being asked by so many young Americans, "Shall I go to college," I answer in the affirmative, I do so admitting that a negative answer has been given by men whose opinions are entitled to ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... strengthened into intimacy. Shelby had never dreamed of making friends with a clergyman. The sectarian college had put him out of joint with priestery. But North was in a class by himself. He had no sacerdotal air or jargon—that negative virtue was his earliest passport; and he was from crown to sole a robust manly man. The governor took to dropping into the canon's book-lined study near the cathedral after office hours, and North would come to the executive mansion and smoke half the night away; for the canon was a judge of tobacco ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... being more disquieted than she wished to acknowledge, she went forth to search the neighboring wood-paths and the sea-shore. When she returned, Rosa ran out with the eager inquiry, "Is she anywhere in sight?" In reply to the negative answer, she said: "I don't know what to make of it. Have you ever seen anybody with Floracita since ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... me about it," he went on, disregarding the final quality of her negative. "And I find it very good. It is that Tommy should live much with—you—when you are married. Your mother does not know how to bring him up; he is delicate and high-strung, and Theo ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... foe to instinct is reason. They are the negative and positive of mental volition. The man who retains the animal gift of unreasoning divination, preserving that clear power against the handicaps which mind training and education impose, is necessarily psychic, or, as they say in certain Celtic ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... the audience were departing more in sadness than in anger, I could not help asking myself the question, Had the advantages obtained in witnessing the performance balanced the expense incurred in securing a seat? I am forced to reply in the negative, as I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... of nationalism in folk song is almost a negative quality, its distinguishing mark being mere simplicity, a simplicity which is affected, or possibly assimilated, by the writer of such a song; for German folk song proper is a made thing, springing not from the people, but from the many composers, both ancient and modern, who have tried their ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... conversation with Prince Andrew and quite agreed with him, though he understood Prince Andrew's thoughts somewhat differently. Prince Andrew had thought and said that happiness could only be negative, but had said it with a shade of bitterness and irony as though he was really saying that all desire for positive happiness is implanted in us merely to torment us and never be satisfied. But Pierre believed it without any mental reservation. The absence of suffering, the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... operative kind is usually useless, if not dangerous. We have little faith in the method of extirpation except under very special conditions, among which that of diminutive size has been named; this seems in itself to constitute a sufficient negative argument. Even in such a case a resort to the knife or the gouge could scarcely find a justification, since no operative procedure is ever without a degree of hazard, to say nothing of the considerations which are always forcibly negative ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... is nothing in that to worry mother, and soon I shall have good news for her." (If he had seen its reception, he would have learned his mistake. The intuitions of love are keen, and this formal negative note in the constrained hand told more of his disappointment than any words could have done. While he knew it not, his mother was suffering with him. In reply she wrote a letter full of general sympathy, intending to be more specific when he gave ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... you and Sir George, and myself," observed Mr. Dodge, glancing obliquely and pointedly at the rest of the party, as if he thought they were in a decided minority; "but in this instance, I feel constrained to record my vote in the negative. I believe America has as good a climate, and as good general digestion as commonly falls to the lot of mortals: more than this I do not claim for the country, and less than this I should be reluctant to maintain. I have travelled a little, gentlemen, not as much, perhaps, as the Messrs. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... the action of Life, as a tendency to individuation, is here designated polarity; for instance, the power termed magnetism (not meaning that there is necessarily an actual tangible magnet in the case) has two poles, the negative, answering to attraction, rest, carbon, &c., and the positive, answering to repulsion, mobility, azote, &c.; and as the magnetic needle which points to the north necessarily indicates thereby the south, so the power disposing to rest has necessarily a counteracting influence ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... These negative results led me to try many more experiments, by placing particles on the surface of the drops of secretion, observing, as carefully as I could, whether they penetrated it and touched the surface of the glands. The secretion, from its weight, generally forms ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... grain of sand called "Earth"—or, in modern parlance, "Sol Three," or "Tellus of Sol", or simply "Tellus"—the affair was of negligible importance. One man had died; but, in dying, he had added one more page to the thick bulk of negative results already on file. That Mrs. Cloud and her children had perished was merely unfortunate. The vortex itself was not yet a real threat to Tellus. It was a "new" one, and thus it would be a long time before it would become other than a local menace. And well before that could happen—before ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... fond of attitudes and ceremonies, and that her most earnest wish was to remember it as little as possible. He felt that even if Mrs. Draper hadn't told him she was unhappy he would have guessed it, and yet that he couldn't have pointed to his proof. The evidence was chiefly negative—she never alluded to her husband. Beyond this it seemed to him simply that her whole being was pitched in a lower key than harmonious Nature had designed; she was like a powerful singer who had lost ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... hung in the corners, one a large grey photograph of a very young man in uniform, another a red chalk sketch of two long-haired boys. Asked by Flambeau whether the soldierly person was the prince, the butler answered shortly in the negative; it was the prince's younger brother, Captain Stephen Saradine, he said. And with that the old man seemed to dry up suddenly and lose ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... suppressing all motives of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of difficulty, permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps somewhat wearisome calm. In effect, such a conception of Greek art and poetry leaves in the central expressions of Greek culture none but negative qualities; and the legend of Demeter and Persephone, perhaps the most popular of all Greek legends, is sufficient to show that the "worship of sorrow" was not without its function in Greek religion; ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... inhabitants of Shepperton, two years or more after Mr. Barton's arrival among them, you shall hear, if you will accompany me to Cross Farm, and to the fireside of Mrs. Patten, a childless old lady, who had got rich chiefly by the negative process of spending nothing. Mrs. Patten's passive accumulation of wealth, through all sorts of 'bad times', on the farm of which she had been sole tenant since her husband's death, her epigrammatic neighbour, Mrs. Hackit, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... upon the continent of Europe, and he tried not to think that this was the way of living into which the sweetest, tenderest, most beautiful woman in the world had been trapped. He avoided looking at her until he felt it was becoming conspicuous, a negative stare. Why had she come back again? Fragmentary phrases she had used downstairs came drifting through his mind. "I never think of it. I never read of it." And she so made for beautiful love and a beautiful life! He recalled Lady Beach-Mandarin's ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... This need of constant urging extends to religious as well as other matters, and is inconsistent with M. Groen van Prinsterer's assertion that the question was for Maurice above all religious, and for Barneveld above all political. Whether its negative evidence can be considered as neutralizing that which is adduced by Mr. Motley to show the Stadholder's hatred of the Advocate may be left to the reader who has just risen from the account of the mock trial and the swift execution of the great ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... great fragment of the chalk cliff fell down one stormy winter on the beach, and that many people found swallows among the rubbish; but on my questioning him whether he saw any of those birds himself, to my no small disappointment, he answered me in the negative; but that others ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... electrostatic units and produces a magnetic field in a plane perpendicular to the direction of its motion. This brings us to the atom, which may be described as a number of electrons positive and negative in stable equilibrium, this condition being brought about by the mutual repulsion of the like and attraction for the opposite electrification so arranged as to nullify each other. Having thus established the law of the equilibrium of electrons, corpuscles, atoms, and molecules, I found that the ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... my irksome discomfort, it was with difficulty I could keep my countenance at this question, which I was forced to negative. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... white hair and side whiskers. The other two were young and well dressed. The girl was of our best patrician type—the type that may know little, think little, say little, and generally amount to little, and yet carry its negative qualities with so used an air of polite society as to raise them by sheer force to the dignity of positive virtues. From head to foot she was faultlessly groomed. From eye to attitude she was languidly superior—the impolitic would say ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... the negative, he said: "If I had time I would prove to you that it is, only unfortunately my brother will be home presently and I must go to meet him." ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... perhaps in a less degree, of one-volume works, although we have no means of showing it directly. Among the readers of every book, then, there are generally some who, for one reason or other, do not read it to the end. Our question, "Do readers read?" is thus answered in the negative for a large number of cases. The supplementary question, "Why do not readers read?" occurs at once, but an attempt to answer it would take us rather too deeply into psychology. Whether this tendency to leave the latter part of books unread is increasing or not we can tell only by repeating the ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... only three were seized with the complaint;" he gets out of favour at once, and his observation is called "unlucky," being but a negative proof, and Dr. Macmichael adds, what everybody must agree with him in, that positive instances of contagion must outweigh all negative proofs:—to be sure:—but Dr. Macmichael's saying this, does not show that positive proofs exist. Give us but positive proofs, give even but a few, which surely may be done, if the disease be really communicable, and where contagion has been so ardently sought after by all sorts of attaches ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... they were not in the current of good times that the other girls and boys of their ages were having. If she suggested brightly that they go over to the Parmalees' or the Morans' and see if the young people were playing tennis, she knew that Charlotte would delicately negative the idea: "They've got their sets all made up, M'ma, and one hates to, unless they specially ask one, don't you know?" They might go, of course, and greet their friends decorously, and watch the game smilingly for a while. Then they would come home with Fraulein, not ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... Taylor was inaccurate in this statement. The emphasis should be equally upon shalt and not, as both concur to form the negative injunction; and false witness, like the other acts prohibited in the Decalogue, should not be marked by any peculiar emphasis, but only ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... peculiar back-handed shake of the right forefinger which is the most expressive negative ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the garden-gate, in company with a huge nosegay, regularly every Sunday morning. In spite of the complying temper of old Cossu in other respects when Nathalie gave her advice, he seemed obstinately bent on choosing his own son-in-law. Parents are oftener correct than romancers will allow, in their negative opinions on this delicate subject, but I cannot say as much for them when they undertake to ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... with Gen. Patterson, that he was not to do so; and when, notwithstanding such stipulation, he was called upon for that service, he positively refused, although threatened with confinement. Besides, both Moultrie and Ramsey assert he did not serve with the British; and as far as negative proof can go, this should be conclusive. But the fact that he bore arms with the British is not charged against him; his accusation was, "being at his own request received as a British subject." Then Col. Hayne neither came within the letter, nor the penalty of the order issued by ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... baptism on conforming if they had not previously been baptized within the Church? Was baptism outside the unity of the Church valid? Rome answered in the affirmative, admitting conforming schismatics without distinguishing as to where they had been baptized; North Africa answered in the negative and required not, indeed, a second baptism, but claimed that the Church's baptism was alone valid, and that if the person conforming had been baptized in schism he had not been baptized at all. This view was shared by at least some churches in Asia Minor (cf. ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... Her husband thought she was wavering in her decision, but on that point he was entirely mistaken. She was doing what Nehemiah did when he "prayed to the God of heaven" between the King's question and his answer. Well she knew that to reply in the negative might lead to reproach, prison, torture, even death. Yet that was the path of God's commandments, and no flowery By-path Meadow must tempt her to stray from it. In her heart she said to Him who ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... not a very important argument, because our knowledge of those classes of animals in which natural selection could act is even now very incomplete; and our knowledge of their past history is still more limited, so that we are not in a condition to prove a negative. But in such a case as this the onus of proof should surely lie on the other side. It is for those who would assert the theory to bring forward positive proof of it. There is, however, one point in Mr. Darwin's view of domesticated animals which tells against his theory. The cat remains unchanged, ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... up and hurrying to the table. 'You must excuse me!' I wrote Romaine's address. 'There is my reference, Mr. Gilchrist. Until you have written to him, and received his negative answer, I have a right to be treated, and I shall see that you treat me, as a gentleman.' He was brought up with a ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the lads against self-abuse. They used all kinds of colored slides and fearful examples to impress on the boy the horror of the act, and very often inflamed the boy to exactly the thing they were shooing him from. But today we are learning the fact that the positive is of more force than the negative, and that the "thou shalt" is better than the "thou shalt not." There is a real reason why the later adolescent boy should give no attention to the "thou shalt not," and so fall into the snare of the negative; ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... time before the vote was taken the Congressional Committee reported to the National Board that our minimum vote would be 168. In fact, 174 favorable votes were cast and 11 favorable pairs were registered. The negative votes were 204.... ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... Sydney had rejected the honourable young rector of the next parish, and was in the course of administering rebuffs to the county member, who was so persuaded that he and Miss Evelyn were the only fit match for one another, that no implied negative was accepted by him. Her brother, whom he was coaching in his county duties, was far too much inclined to bring him home to luncheon; and in the clash and crisis, without any one's quite knowing how it happened, it turned out that Mrs. Evelyn had been ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... housekeeper a sign which silenced her at once. But Panna had heard enough. She quickened her pace to reach home quickly, put down her hoe, and ascertained that her father was already in the house. Her voice betrayed no trace of excitement as she asked if he was going out again, which he answered in the negative. Then she went to her room, put on a warm woollen shawl, slipped the few florins she still possessed into her pocket, and went away, telling her father to go to sleep, ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... boiler is placed, by means of piles of a certain power, in reciprocal communication, the current passing at one end through positive, and at the other through negative, wires. In incrusted steam boilers, at a temperature ranging from 212 deg. to 300 deg. Fahr., and a pressure of from 30 to 90 lb. to the square inch, the current thus engendered decomposes the accumulated salts, and precipitates them, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... lines to it become. And the difficulty of determining the parallax was just this, that the more accurately the observations were made, the more nearly parallel did those lines become. The angle was, in fact, just as likely to turn out negative as positive—an absurd result, of course, to be attributed ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... seems to me. Love lightly roused is held as lightly, and one loses one's respect for even the passion in the abstract. Of what value can a thing be which springs into life for a trick of manner, an atom or two more of that negative quality called personal magnetism, while wiser and better men pass by unnoticed? One naturally asks, What is love? A spiritual enthusiasm which a cold-blooded analyst would call sentimentality, or its correlative, a fever of ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... written or declared in the words of Charles Lamb:* 'If Christ entered the room I should fall on my knees;' and again, in those of Napoleon: 'I am an understander of men, and he was no man.' He has even added: 'If he had been, he would have been an impostor.' But the arguments, in great part negative, set forth in 'La Saisiaz' for the immortality of the soul, leave no place for the idea, however indefinite, of a Christian revelation on the subject. Christ remained for Mr. Browning a mystery and a message of Divine Love, but no messenger ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... one day out riding, was flung from his horse, and fell upon his face in the middle of the road. A countryman, who saw the occurrence, ran hastily up, raised the sergeant from the mire, and asked him if he was much hurt. The sergeant replied in the negative. "I zee, zur," said the rustic, grinning, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... could have spoken. I think it was the spirit of the place that kept her silent, for there were those eager eyes. She might have been expected also to show a bad temper, but I never saw a sign of such. To me she was always kind; chiefly, I allow, in a negative way, leaving me to do very much as I pleased. I doubt if she felt any great tenderness for me, although I had been dependent upon her care from infancy. In after-years I came to the conclusion that she was in love with my uncle; and perhaps the sense that he was indifferent to her ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... name of "Black Beaver," who was in my party, on arriving at a particular point, suddenly halted, and, turning to me, asked if I recognized the country before us. Seeing no familiar objects, I replied in the negative. He put the same question to the other white men of the party, all of whom gave the same answers, whereupon he smiled, and in his quaint vernacular said, "Injun he don't know nothing. Injun big fool. White man mighty smart; he know heap." ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... certainly genuine, for that he had heard a great part of it repeated in the original,' Dr. Johnson indignantly asked him whether he understood the original; to which an answer being given in the negative, 'Why then, (said Dr. Johnson,) we see to what this testimony ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Marett, On the Threshold of Religion, p. 137 foll. "In taboo the mystic thing is not to be lightly approached (negative aspect); qua mana, it is instinct with mystic power (positive aspect)": so Mr. Marett states the ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... of a peace restored, we must pray that out of the epic experience of the great conflict something more than the stern negative of our victory shall be preserved for the time to come, something positive of good, something of that divine light of men's heroic sacrifice which shone out in the darkest hour, something of new strength and understanding of life ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... his or her hypnotizer, even when numerous attempts at inducing sleep have failed. However this may be, the impossibility some individuals find in inducing sleep in trained subjects, proves at least the existence of a negative force." ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... and at the end of his life was "sending round the hat." Lamartine boldly proclaimed that he hated arithmetic, "that negative of every noble thought." He was accordingly driven to very shabby shifts to live. The Cours de Litterature alone brought him in 200,000 francs a year, yet 'the money ran through his hands like quicksilver. His debts are said ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... in his choice of language, and his method of argiment is such that when he is up on the affirmative of a question, the negative is delighted, for they know he will bring victery to their side of the question. Now, he didn't mean to speak right out about men's usual way of bossin' wimmen round. It was only his unfortunate ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... were an idle exercise of a force intrinsically fine, and she wanted to protest, to let him know how truly it was a sad misuse of his free bold spirit to count on her. She was not to be counted on; she was a vague soft negative being who had never decided anything and never would, who had not even the merit of knowing how to flirt and who only asked to be let alone. She made him stop at last, telling him, while she leaned against ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... dismounting, I beckoned to 'Mfuni, related what we had seen, and asked him whether he had ever heard of such creatures as those men, or monkeys, that Piet and I had beheld fighting. But 'Mfuni shook his head and replied in the negative; he had never before been anything like so far north, and his knowledge of the Bandokolo country, it appeared, was even less than that which ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... impossible, will rather argue the contrary way, and say, 'If Mr. Newman can do so much, what might not God do by the very same method?' If he can thus break the spiritual yoke of his fellow-men by only teaching them negative truth, surely it may be possible for God to be as useful in teaching positive truth. I almost tremble, I assure you, lest, by his most conspicuous success in imparting to you such important truth, and reclaiming you from such a fundamental error, which lay at the very threshold of your 'spiritual' ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... circumstance, and the ties of happy social and domestic relations,—it cannot be that anybody ought to have all this, and yet do nothing for it; nor do I believe that any one's duties are bounded by the half-animal instincts of loving husband, wife, or children, and the negative virtue of wronging no man: besides we are villainously wronging many men.... What would I not give to be able to awaken in others my own feeling ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... minute succeeded. Then the lookout aloft shook his head in the negative, as if unwilling to speak. Winchester glanced at Cuffe, who turned anxiously, mounted a gun, and strained his eyes in a ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of Peter's keys—still the Rock on which the City of God rested? Had there been one particle of truth in that 28th canon which a certain party attempted to pass at the Council of Chalcedon, and which St. Leo peremptorily annulled, a negative answer to this must now have followed. That canon asserted "that the Fathers justly gave its prerogatives to the see of the elder Rome because that was the imperial city". Rome had ceased to be the ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... be likened to a photographic film, seven hundred and ninety-eight days long. Each impression seems to have been made in a negative way and then, in a fraction of a second, miraculously developed and made positive. Of hundreds of impressions made during that depressed period I had not before been conscious, but from the moment my mind, if not my full reason, ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... Major Belwether told me that he had thought of Howard as an anchor for her. It seemed a pity—Howard with all his cold, heavy negative inertia. ... I said I'd do it. I did. And now I don't know; I wish, almost wish ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... thumb. Multiple enchondromata are most peculiar, and may attain enormous sizes. Whittaker describes a farmer of forty who exhibited peculiar tumors of the fingers, which he calls multiple osteoecchondromata. His family history was negative. He stated that at an early age he received a stroke of lightning, which rendered him unconscious for some time. He knows of nothing else that could be in possible relation with his present condition. Nine months after this accident ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... emancipation of this sphere would appear to be the general self-emancipation. In order that one class should be the class of emancipation par excellence, another class must contrariwise be the class of manifest subjugation. The negative-general significance of the French nobility and the French clergy was the condition of the positive-general significance of the class of the bourgeoisie, which was immediately encroaching upon and ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... would support it, not against the crown or the aristocratic party only, but against the representatives of the people themselves. This was not a government of balances. It would be a strange thing if two hundred peers should have it in their power to defeat by their negative what had been done by the people of England. I have taken my part in political connections and political quarrels for the purpose of advancing justice and the dominion of reason, and I hope I shall never prefer the means, or any feelings growing out of the use of those means, to the great ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... idea of the entire abnegation of self. But a self-denial that is undertaken, not for God, and in God for man, but merely to secure one's own peace and well-being—what is this but selfishness after all? Enjoining a rule of life that is essentially negative—the natural product of that blank despair of the world and of human nature which led to the Great Renunciation—Buddhism, as a religious system, has yielded but scanty fruits of positive holiness, of active benevolence. And yet,—wholly inadequate as such a system as this, ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... up in the way bits of metal, suddenly charged positive and negative, would fly apart. I leaned back again and snapped on the white lights. We all sat there a few seconds, blinking in ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... I quietly closed the window and sat down as if I had not heard her; but I was so furious with rage that I could hardly restrain myself. That cold silence, that negative force, exasperated me to the last point. Had I been really deceived and convinced of the guilt of a woman I loved I could not have suffered more. As I had condemned myself to remain in Paris, I reflected that I must compel Brigitte to speak at any price. In vain I tried ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... arrival, the next day, he set off to Mezer the photographer, taking with him the straw-like girl Bella, and had pictures taken in various poses together with her; at which for every negative he received three roubles, while he gave the woman a rouble. After that he rode off ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... with the hose, a big bristly brush, and much carbolic soap, the lather of which got into and stung his eyes and nose, causing him to weep copiously and sneeze violently. Apprehensive of what might at any moment happen to him, but by this time aware that the youth was neither positive nor negative for kindness or harm, Michael continued to endure without further battling, until, clean and comfortable, he was put away into a pen, sweet and wholesome, where he slept and for the time being forgot. The place ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... consternation. Pericles, observing the pilot of his own galley to be frightened and confused, took his cloak and placed it before his eyes, asking him at the same time if he found any thing alarming, or of evil presage, in what he then did? and upon his answering in the negative: "Where then is the difference," said Pericles, "between this covering and the other, except that something of greater extent than my cloak deprives us of the light of the sun?" Nor can it be doubted that Alexander when, on a like occasion, previous to the battle of Arbla, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... people have associated with the term a mass of very different, and often very absurd, ideas, and have attempted to solve the difficulty by the crudest experiments. The real doctrine of the spontaneous generation of life cannot possibly be refuted by experiments. Every experiment that has a negative result only proves that no organism has been formed out of inorganic matter in the conditions—highly artificial conditions—we have established. On the other hand, it would be exceedingly difficult to prove the theory by way of experiment; and even if Monera were still formed daily by spontaneous ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... first, the apostles' mission in its sphere and manner (vs. 5-8). They are told where to go and what to do there. Mark that the negative prohibition precedes the positive injunction, as if the apostles were already so imbued with the spirit of universalism that they would probably have overpassed the bounds which for the present were needful. The restriction was transient. It continued in the line ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Grieg was eager to meet Gade, and an opportunity soon occurred. Gade expressed a willingness to look at some of his compositions, and asked if he had anything to show him. Edward modestly answered in the negative. "Go home and write a symphony," was the retort. This the young composer started obediently to do, but the work was never finished in this form. It became later Two Symphonic Pieces for ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... the constitution, quite a number of delegates, and still a larger number of persons who are their friends, and I have received the same answer from every one of them. . . . They say if they allowed a negative vote the constitution would have been voted down by an overwhelming majority, and hence the fellows should not be allowed to vote at all." He denounced it as "a trick, a fraud upon the ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... When they found the money which the providence of Jean Gordon had made him retain, they held a consultation if they should take it or no; but the smallness of. the booty, and the vehemence of Jean's remonstrances, determined them in the negative. They caroused and went to rest. As soon as day dawned, Jean roused her guest, produced his horse, which she had accommodated behind the hallan, and guided him for some miles, till he was on the high-road to Lochside. She then restored his whole property; nor could his earnest ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... up the refrain, but the general tone was negative. It was not so much a question of upholding anything as of throwing down that ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... that he can, with impunity, affirm that for which he can adduce no evidence. It was a curious intellectual experience to listen day after day to the lectures of Oken, while following at the same time Schelling's courses, where he was shifting the whole ground of his philosophy from its negative foundation as an a priori doctrine to a positive basis, as an historical science. He unfolded his views in a succession of exquisite lectures, delivered ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... question, which was uttered in a sharp, strained voice, a little startled Walter. He replied shortly in the negative, and was about to spur onward, when the horseman continued—and there was something in his voice and manner that compelled attention: "And I am in doubt whether I have a child or not.—By G—! it is a bitter gnawing state ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
