"Sceptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I bet you do a jolly rank paper too,' I said, remembering that the sceptic is sometimes vouchsafed revelations to which the most devout believer may not aspire. It is, for instance, always the young man who scoffs at ghosts that the family spectre chooses as his audience. But it required more than a ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... indeed soon did perceive, but when the disenchantment came, his blood was already poisoned; his very being was eaten into by doubt, and almost to the very end of his days Turgenef remained a fatalistic sceptic, a godless pessimist; not till his old age did he espy the promised land. It was only when he witnessed with his own eyes the boundless self-sacrifice of the revolutionists, when the old man was moved by ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... Minister of Napoleon III. I made a visit there late in the summer, and found him busy with his canvass, on lines of respect for personal liberty and the right of men to think their own thoughts as to life and death, which would have commanded the cordial sympathy of the great Gascon sceptic. The tower, the study, the bedroom of Montaigne are preserved by him with religious care. The inscriptions on the walls which John Sterling copied so lovingly half a century ago are there still, and if indeed there be a life of ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... pinchers pincers plow plough poney pony potatoe potato quere query recognize recognise reindeer raindeer reinforce re-enforce restive restiff ribbon riband rince rinse sadler saddler sallad salad sceptic skeptic sceptical skeptical scepticism skepticism segar cigar seignor seignior serjeant sergeant shoar shore soothe sooth staunch stanch streight straight suitor suiter sythe scythe tatler tattler thresh thrash thwak thwack tipler tippler tranquility tranquillity tripthong triphthong trissyllable ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... is usually conceited, obstinate, puffed up with pride, a great talker, always shallow and fickle, skipping from one subject to another without even thoroughly examining a single one. At one moment he is a Deist, at another a Materialist, then he is a Sceptic, and again an Atheist; always changing his views, but always a slave of his passions, always ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... Sceptic—(an apostate, and an undoubted male)—another view was preferable. He held that George Eliot had carried what he called the 'Death's-Head Style' of art a trifle too far. He read her books in much the same spirit and to much the same purpose that he went to the gymnasium and diverted ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... the Saviour. His doings as described by Philostratus are extraordinary and incredible, and he was put forward by the Eclectics in opposition to the unique powers claimed by Christ and believed in by His followers. Apollonius is said to have studied the philosophy of the Platonic, Sceptic, Epicurean, Peripatetic and Pythagorean schools, and to have adopted that of Pythagoras. He schooled himself in early manhood in the asceticism of that philosophy. He abstained from animal food and strong drink, wore white linen garments and sandals made of bark, and let his hair grow long. For ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... field in which he excelled; it was not long before he discovered another. His serious satires, 'Corruption' (1808), 'Intolerance' (1808), and 'The Sceptic' (1809), failed. His nature was neither deep enough nor strong enough for success in such themes. In the ephemeral strife of party politics he found his real province. Nothing can be better of their kind than the metrical lampoons collected ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... The sceptic might begin by questioning the fact itself; but I think it now so well established that argument on this score is unnecessary. Further, the deeper the trance, ceteris paribus, the better the phenomena. There is no denying that fact. While certain striking results are often obtained while the ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... all ages. But that peril was averted, and the further history of the case was this: By the year 1820, much discussion having passed to and fro, serious doubts had arisen in many quarters; scepticism had begun to arm itself against the sceptic; the economist of 1800 was no longer quite sure of his ground. He was now suspected of being fallible; and what seemed of worse augury, he was beginning himself to suspect as much. To one capital blunder he was ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... Reformation itself did not escape this misappreciation and discouragement of its age; and nowhere do they crop out in a more striking manner than in Montaigne. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Rabelais is a satirist and a cynic, he is no sceptic; there is felt circulating through his book a glowing sap of confidence and hope; fifty years later, Montaigne, on the contrary, expresses, in spite of his happy nature, in vivid, picturesque, exuberant language, only the lassitude of an antiquated age. Henry IV. was still ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... 'I can plead guilty to neither; but I find you very much more of a sceptic than becomes your cloth. If you care to know about the dark lane you might do worse than ask my housekeeper that lived at the other end of it when she was a child.' 'Yes,' said I, 'and the old women in the almshouse and the children in the kennel. If I were you, I would send to your brother Quinn ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... mind, surveyed his position. He had pledged his love to one who could never return it on earth. He would walk alone until his release. Joy in anticipation of their reunion was sufficient for him. True, he felt there was a great disparity in their relative positions—she a mighty priestess, he a sceptic of her faith. But what of that? He believed in Saronia, and she believed in him. Let the faiths go to the winds! If he found not a new god that he might worship—well, then he would make Saronia the goddess of his soul, and worship her with a love that would raise the ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... been an easy, and a popular expedient, of late years, to deny the personal or real existence of men and things whose life and condition were too much for our belief. This system—which has often comforted the religious sceptic, and substituted the consolations of Strauss for those of the New Testament—has been of incalculable value to the historical theorists of the last and present centuries. To question the existence of Alexander the Great, would ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... the tender, weeping child is made the callous, heartless man; of the all-believing child, the sneering sceptic; of the beautiful and modest, the shameless and abandoned; and this is what the world ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... which he believed as he believed in existence, and he had come to love this truth precisely because he believed it. There was in his face, therefore, such a power of convincing as truth itself has. And Vinicius, who had been a sceptic, who did not wish to yield to the charm of the old man, yielded, however, to a certain feverish curiosity to know what would flow from the lips of that companion of the mysterious "Christus," and what that teaching was of which Lygia ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... every little thing can hold one larger." I therefore humbly propose, that there should be at least an edge of foliage round the outskirts of the said wig; and that its curls should not exceed in number the leaves of the tree. There is also another practice almost equally prevalent, of which I am sceptic enough to doubt the propriety. I own, I cannot think it by any means conducive to the more effectual concealment of his Majesty, that there should be three Regal Crowns stuck on three different branches of ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... forgery and imitation, the age of Ossian and Chatterton, Horace Walpole and Bishop Percy. Lastly, the poets enrolled themselves in the new school, and an original literature, suggested by the old, was created by Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge, and Keats. It was the temper of the antiquary and the sceptic, in the age of Gibbon and Hume, that begot the Romantic Revival; and the rebellion of the younger age against the spirit of the eighteenth century was the rebellion of a child ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... said Mildred, when they rose from table, "a wonder has come to pass since you deserted us. Look, sceptic that you are!" and she led him to the window, and, lifting a glass shade which protected a flower-pot, showed him a green spike peeping ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... happy undergraduate." (Audrey could not imagine Langley Wyndham ever being an undergraduate; it seemed to her that he must always have been a Master of Arts.) "I knew the real Flaxman Reed, and he was as logical a sceptic as you or I. There was an epidemic of ideas in our time, and the poor fellow was frightened, so he took it—badly. Of course he made up his mind that he was going to die, and he was horribly afraid of dying. So instead of talking about his interesting symptoms, as you or I might do" ("You ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... ladies and all the beau-monde took an interest in the labours of the critic. He wreathed the rod of criticism with roses. Yet even BAYLE, who declared himself to be a reporter, and not a judge, BAYLE, the discreet sceptic, could not long satisfy his readers. His panegyric was thought somewhat prodigal; his fluency of style somewhat too familiar; and others affected not to relish his gaiety. In his latter volumes, to still the clamour, he assumed the cold sobriety of an historian: ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... spoken aloud in all good faith, in the course of after-dinner talk in which nothing, not even the point which the speaker wished to carry, was sacred from epigram; nothing taken for granted, nothing built up except on ruins, nothing reverenced save the sceptic's adopted article of belief—the omnipotence, omniscience, and ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... books, newspapers and manuscripts. But as these books and papers existed, and were known to exist, before the occurrence of the visions, it is obvious that the matter of the visions may have been derived from the books and so forth, or at least, a sceptic will vastly prefer this explanation. What we need is a dream or vision of the unknown past, corroborated by a document not known to exist at the time when the vision took place and was recorded. Probably there is no such instance, but the following tale, picturesque in itself, ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... quote the rest of the passage, though I cannot refrain from observing that the recommendation which it contains, that a "man of letters" should become a philosophical sceptic as "the first and most essential step towards being a sound believing Christian," though adopted and largely acted upon by many a champion of orthodoxy in these days, is questionable in taste, if it be meant as a jest, and more than questionable in morality, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... kept his mind continually fixed on the Almighty Judge and an eternal reward. And hence he acquired their contempt of external circumstances, their fortitude, their tranquillity, their inflexible resolution. But not the coolest sceptic or the most profane scoffer was more perfectly free from the contagion of their frantic delusions, their savage manners, their ludicrous jargon, their scorn of science, and their aversion to pleasure. Hating tyranny with a perfect hatred, he had nevertheless all ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... childhood in America, but was sent back to England for his education, which he received at Rugby and Oxf. While at the Univ., where he was tutor and Fellow of Oriel, he fell under the influence of Newman, but afterwards became a sceptic and resigned his Fellowship in 1848. In the same year he pub. his poem, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, written in hexameters. After travelling on the Continent for a year, he was in 1849 appointed Warden of Univ. Hall, London. In 1849 appeared Amours ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... one, this compassion which she, the young condottiera of Algeria, showed with so tender a charity to the soldier of Bonaparte. To him, moreover, her fiery imperious voice was gentle as the dove, her wayward dominant will was pliant as the reed, her contemptuous sceptic spirit was reverent as a child's before an altar. In her sight the survivor of the Army of Italy was sacred; sacred the eyes which, when full of light, had seen the sun glitter on the breastplates of the Hussars of Murat, the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... from our sight, And what shall I say of him more?— Give me rather John Littlewit's questionless faith, To illume my lone path through the valley of death— The arm that he leaned on, the mansion of light That burst through the gloom on his kindling sight, And I'll leave the poor sceptic his lore!— Let me know only this—I was lost and undone, But am saved by the blood of the Crucified One, And I'm wise although knowing ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... news came of Gordon's death; Millais was much affected, and Gladstone said, 'Why? IT IS THE MAN'S OWN TEMERITY!' Voila le Bourgeois! le voila nu! But why should I blame Gladstone, when I too am a Bourgeois? when I have held my peace? Why did I hold my peace? Because I am a sceptic: I.E. a Bourgeois. We believe in nothing, Symonds; you don't, and I don't; and these are two reasons, out of a handful of millions, why England stands before the world dripping with blood and daubed with dishonour. I will first try to take ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the history of human knowledge. It is a mistake, however, to suppose that he was the first to infuse even into Roman story that element of doubt which has changed the whole fabric of historical science. If Niebuhr was a mere sceptic, he would be only the humble follower of Bayle, Lesurgnes de Pouilly, and other writers of the last century; but his merit lies in reconstruction—in the jealous care with which he distinguishes between ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... to Him, the glory of His face will be reflected in ours, and we shall be changed more and more into His image.[87] I have frequently told the story of the jurist who lived in our middle-west country two generations ago, a confirmed but honest sceptic, and who was converted by the face of a fellow townsman. The sceptic became thoroughly convinced that the thing in his neighbour's face which so attracted him was his Christian faith, and it was this that led the sceptic to accept Christ. Last year, I met out in the Orient a kinswoman ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... often found in the manuscripts written with the surname, as for example at the end of Logic II.[4] In other places it is found written without the surname, as Fabricius testifies, where Sextus is mentioned as a Sceptic ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... Men," makes Montaigne stand for The Sceptic. Sceptic Montaigne was. He questioned, he considered, he doubted. He stood poised in equilibrium, in indifference, between contrary opinions. He saw reasons on this side, but he saw reasons also on that, and he did not clear his mind. "Que scai-je?" ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... out of his blood. There is much truth in this metaphor. Burns was, in religious matters, one of a very large class. Many men rid their intellects of a superstition, without being able to resist its power over their feelings. Even so profound a sceptic as Renan has admitted that his life is guided by a faith he no longer possesses. And we are all familiar with instances of ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... rate, when his remains were safely on board the Venetian ship, and a man in another ship scoffed at the idea that they were authentic, the Venetian ship instantly and mysteriously made for the one containing this sceptic, stove its side in, and continued to ram it until he took back his doubts. And later, when, undismayed by this event, one of the sailors on S. Mark's own ship also denied that the body was genuine, he was possessed of a devil until ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... either harsh or contemptuous. I do not accept—I mean to say I am unable to accept—your faith. I confess that my mind refuses to entertain the postulates of what Clarke considers a religion. I must be honest. I am a 'sceptic,' so far as your faith goes, but that does not mean that I do not believe in the sincerity of your mother; and as to your own powers—I do not wish to dogmatize, for the physical universe is a very large and complicate thing, and, young as I am"—here ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... idea, but had filled his head with doubts, which, as a natural consequence with such a character, had almost found an unfortunate road to his heart. In a word, he had entered this labyrinth as a credulous enthusiast, had left it as a sceptic, and at ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... is English, avowing that the present Anglo-Boer War has been the outcome of preparations during the past thirty years. That letter is not all suitable reading for the tender sex, but should serve as evidence to the still unconvinced sceptic that the Boers are fighting for something more than their mere independence and liberty, viz., for conquest and the domination of Afrikanerdom. His Excellency Dr. Leyds may deny all those too previous ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... believed in his message, Wordsworth does. And though I cannot follow him in his veneration for the Thirty-nine Articles, the way in which he does makes me half wish I could. . . . It was full of wisdom and the beauty of holiness, which even I, poor sceptic and outcast, could recognise and appreciate. After all, he didn't get it from the Articles, but from his own human heart, which, he told us, was deceitful ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... figures in Spanish Mahommedan history. He had a striking resemblance to the Italian princes of the later middle ages and the early renaissance, of the stamp of Fiiipo Maria Visconti. El Motaddid was a poet and a lover of letters, who was also a poisoner, a drinker of wine, a sceptic and treacherous to the utmost degree. Though he waged war all through his reign he very rarely appeared in the field, but directed the generals, whom he never trusted, from his "lair'' in the fortified ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... only the vices of Christianity, and manifesting a contempt for Moslem virtues. While he drank wine—and in many other breaches of the teachings of the sacred book provoked the faithful—his proclamations breathed a most orthodox and fanatical spirit. He was a sceptic; neither Mussulman nor Christian, but surprisingly inconsistent and capricious. His, we fear, were 'hangman's hands,' and 'not ordained to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... exploded mediaeval superstitions! How incredible that, after having been brought up from his babyhood upward on the strong meat of the agnostic philosophers, he should fall back in his manhood on the milk for babes administered to him by orthodox theology! The simple-minded old sceptic could hardly credit it, now that Arthur told him so with his own lips, though he had more than once suspected it when he heard him playing sacred music with that last touch of earnestness in his execution which only the sincerest conviction and most intimate realisation of ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... The pentecostal charism, I believe, exhausted itself amongst the earliest disciples. Yet any one who has had to attend, as I have done, to copious objurgations, strewn with such appellations as "infidel" and "coward," must be a hardened sceptic indeed if he doubts the existence of a "gift of tongues" in the Churches of our time; unless, indeed, it should occur to him that some of these outpourings may have taken place after "the third hour of the day." I am far from thinking that it is worth while ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... liberal newspapers published fulminatory articles; flaming protests were made in the clubs against the surreptitious propaganda of Rome. The ultramontane party leaders rejoiced and made capital out of the marvellous return of such a sceptic to the bosom of the Church which alone can save the souls of men: they used the case as a bait for fresh recruits and as a means to fill the old regulars with greater fire and enthusiasm. Through the homes blew a breath of a tyrannical priesthood ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... is often a sceptic on the surface and a believer underneath. Pascal has called Montaigne 'un pur pyrrhonien'; but Pascal himself has been accused of scepticism. Living in an age when the crimes daily committed in the name of religion might so easily have inspired a hater of violence like Montaigne with a horror ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... the fight is unequal for the old philosophical reason: that the universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece of its mind to fight with. One curious result of this divergence in the two types of sceptic is this: that when these two brilliant novelists break down or blow up or otherwise lose for a moment their artistic self-command, they are both equally wild, but wild in opposite directions. Meredith shows an extravagance in comedy which, if it were not so complicated, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the wealth and wisdom of this world would I weaken the faith of the humblest Christian in his Divine Lord and Saviour; but if, by the grace of God, I could convert a single sceptic to a child-like faith in him, who lived and died for me and for all, I would feel that I had not lived ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... is an error on the face of it. The credulous bigot shudders at the idea of altering anything in 'time-hallowed' institutions; and under this cant phrase can bring himself to tolerate any knavery or any folly, the Inquisition, Holy Oil, the Right Divine, etc.;—the more refined sceptic will laugh in your face at the idea of retaining anything which has the damning stamp of custom upon it, and is for abating all former precedents, 'all trivial, fond records,' the whole frame and fabric ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Heaven-guarded, too, no Envy entrance found; Nor numerous wants, that vex advancing age, Nor Flattery's silver tale, nor Sorrow's sage; Frugal Affliction kept each growing dart, To o'erwhelm in future days the bleeding heart. No sceptic art veil'd Pride in Truth's disguise, But prayer unsoil'd of doubt besieged the skies; Ambition, avarice, care, to man retired, Nor came desires more quick than joys desired. A summer morn there was, and passing fair, Still was the breeze, and health perfumed the air; The ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... correctness and acumen, who doubted about acknowledging the French republic. I do not mean that the Christmas Carol is quite as brilliant or self-evident as the sun at noonday; but it is so spread over England by this time, that no sceptic, no Fraser's Magazine,—no, not even the godlike and ancient Quarterly itself (venerable, Saturnian, big-wigged dynasty!) could review it down. "Unhappy people! deluded race!" One hears the cauliflowered god exclaim, mournfully shaking the powder ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... what do you believe? Indignation can solace grief and restore happiness Is he a dwarf or a giant Men doubted everything: the young men denied everything Of all the sisters of love, the most beautiful is pity Perfection does not exist Resorted to exaggeration in order to appear original Sceptic regrets the faith he has lost the power to regain Seven who are always the same: the first is called hope St. Augustine Ticking of which (our arteries) can be heard only at night When passion sways man, reason follows him weeping and warning Wine suffuses ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... Athens is not certain; but the time came when he had made himself in some way objectionable to the Athenian populace through his teachings. Filled with the spirit of the investigator, he could not accept the current conceptions as to the gods. He was a sceptic, an innovator. Such men are never welcome; they are the chief factors in the progress of thought, but they must look always to posterity for recognition of their worth; from their contemporaries they receive, not thanks, but persecution. Sometimes this persecution takes one form, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... before through voiceless woods to the sound of noisy breakers on a foreign shore. He saw again the brake nod in a little air of wind as if a form was harboured, and the pagan rose in him—not the sceptic but the child of nature, early and remote, lost in lands of silence and of omen in dim-peopled and fantastic woods upon the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... build a hut in which to pass the night. They are recognizable, from Hawthorne's description, as the man of one idea, who has spent his whole life seeking the gem; a scientific experimenter who wishes to grind it up for the benefit of his crucible; a cynical sceptic who has come to disprove the existence of the great gem; a greedy speculator who seeks the carbuncle as he would prospect for a silver-mine; an English lord who wishes to add it to his hereditary possessions; and finally a young ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... not the only sceptic. The Cardinal de Gondi, Archbishop of Paris, charged the most eminent physicians of the city, and among them Riolan, to report upon the case. Various examinations were made, and the verdict was that Martha was simply ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasoning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... self-centred. His chief purpose in life was not to know himself, but to give pleasure to his friends. If he was bored by Montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity. Like Montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in his literary tastes. That he was no sceptic but a disciple as regards Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Gray suggests, on the other hand, how foolish it is to regard him as being critically ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... accepted by Stewart. Briefly it comes to this. No one can doubt that we believe, as a fact, in an external world. We believe that there are sun and moon, stones, sticks, and human bodies. This belief is accepted by the sceptic as well as by the dogmatist, although the sceptic reduces it to a mere blind custom or 'association of ideas.' Now Reid argues that the belief, whatever its nature, is not and cannot be derived from the sensations. We do not construct the visible and tangible ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Festin de Pierre, a piece in which a nobleman—who is a libertine as well as a sceptic and a hypocrite—is brought upon the stage, was first acted in February, 1665, and raised such an outcry that it was also forbidden to be played. In spite of failing health and serious depression of spirits, Moliere continued to produce play after play; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... was short and swarthy, a Savoyard, the son of an Italian doctor at St. Jean de Maurienne. He was a sceptic; he believed in Jeanne, but not in the ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... that so many perfect things could come to her at once. For Laura, in spite of her happiness, remained a sceptic at heart. She went cautiously, dreading the irony of ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... its irony, but later, under the influence of his critical antagonism to Brunetiere, growing keener, stronger, and more bitter. In 'Thais' he has undertaken to show the bond of sympathy that unites the pessimistic sceptic to the Christian ascetic, since both despise the world. In 'Lys Rouge', his greatest novel, he traces the perilously narrow line that separates love from hate; in 'Opinions de M. l'Abbe Jerome Coignard' he has given ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... twenty-five. The strength of the tendency to question the grounds of belief must be great indeed to bear away with it a youth like this, formed by Nature to believe. John Randolph had no more intellectual right to be a sceptic, than he had a moral right to be a republican. A person whose imagination is quick and warm, whose feelings are acute, and whose intellect is wholly untrained, can find no comfort except in belief. His scepticism is a mere freak of vanity or self-will. ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... consternation, White, who was a decent self-respecting sceptic, read these last clamberings of Benham's spirit. They were written in pencil; they were unfinished when ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... "Mr. Bates," I append a narrative given me verbally by Miss Hartly, who, like Mr. Bates, had, up to the time of her experience, posed as a pronounced and somewhat bitter sceptic. She was an emphatic freethinker, and had then no belief whatsoever in a future life. Now she believes "a sight" ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... accountability of man, without attacking the doctrine on which it is founded? If we can meet this argument at all, it must be either by showing that no such consequence flows from the scheme of necessity, or by showing that the scheme itself is false. We cannot meet the sceptic, who seeks to excuse his sins, and to cast dishonour on God, and expose his sophistry, unless we can show that his premises are unsound, or that his conclusions are false. We must do the one or the ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... who maintain that profane jests are most common when it is the strongest. What they show is a want of control of feeling, or a deficiency in taste, so that people do not regard such things as either injurious or important. A sceptic at the present day is generally less profane than a religious man was in the last century. Such is the result of civilization, although unbelief in itself inclines to profanity, and faith ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... one of Robertson's greatest sermons. The preacher traces it to four sources: indecision; falseness to his own convictions; the taint of the worldly temper of his day; and that priestly bigotry which forbids inquiry, and makes doubt a crime. Pilate is the typical sceptic, who is worlds removed from the "honest" doubter. Serious doubt, which is pained and anxious in the search of truth, is in essence belief, for it believes in the value of truth, if only truth can ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... who surrounded that strange host as he told the story of his evil days were a curious spectacle. Some seemed disgusted, especially Monpavon. That display of old rags seemed to him in execrable taste, and to denote utter lack of breeding. Cardailhac, that sceptic and man of refined taste, a foe to all emotional scenes, sat with staring eyes and as if hypnotized, cutting a piece of fruit with the end of his fork into strips as thin as cigarette papers. The Governor, on the contrary, went through ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... hour o' th' day The clock does strike by algebra. Beside, he was a shrewd philosopher, And had read ev'ry text and gloss over; Whate'er the crabbed'st author hath, He understood b' implicit faith: Whatever sceptic could inquire for, For every why he had a wherefore, Knew more than forty of them do, As far as words and terms could go. All which he understood by rote, And as occasion serv'd, would quote: No matter ...
— English Satires • Various
... didn't join the Theosophists and kiss Buddha's big toe, did you? I tried to get into their set once, but they cast me out for a sceptic without a chance of improving my poor little ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... life exactly spans the interval between the old world and the new. His family, which belonged to the magistracy of Grenoble, preserved the living tradition of the eighteenth century. His grandfather was a polite, amiable, periwigged sceptic after the manner of Fontenelle, who always spoke of 'M. de Voltaire' with a smile 'melange de respect et d'affection'; and when the Terror came, two representatives of the people were sent down to Grenoble, with the result that Beyle's father was pronounced (with a hundred and fifty ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... too 'generous and free from all contriving' to 'peruse the foils.' To the very end, his soul, however sick and tortured it may be, answers instantaneously when good and evil are presented to it, loving the one and hating the other. He is called a sceptic who has no firm belief in anything, but he is ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... a very pleasant hour hooking shiners and chub, and an occasional perch that looked at a distance like a trout. The dominie, apropos of his friend's braces, told Alphonse Karr's story of the bretellier in the Jardin des Plantes, and the credulous sceptic who did not believe that a suspender tree existed. He knew that cotton grew on a shrub, and that caoutchouc exuded from a tree, and admitted the possibility of their natural combination, but thought his deceivers had reference to braces ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... for that purpose by natural and physical causes; by its deep caverns, beds of sulphur, and numero is volcanoes, of which those of Aetna, of Vesuvius, and of Lipari, exhibit a very imperfect representation. The calmest and most intrepid sceptic could not refuse to acknowledge that the destruction of the present system of the world by fire, was in itself extremely probable. The Christian, who founded his belief much less on the fallacious arguments of reason than on the authority of tradition ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... his father is a sceptic. I can't go while I've got no clothes—nothing better than this, miss; and I always was used to go decent and respectable. Besides, I couldn't nohow take he into the seat with me, as Master Pucklechurch would say I was upsetting ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... altered. "To-day" and "To-morrow" are spelled "today" and "tomorrow." Some words containing the letters "ise" in the original text, such as "idealise," had these letters changed to "ize," such as "idealize." "Sceptic" ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... sort of philosophic theory because the conditions of the age demanded it. The one source of enlightenment when he wrote was Hume; but for some uncertain reason, perhaps his piety, Blackstone makes no reference to the great sceptic's speculations. So that he was driven back upon notions he felt to be false, without a proper realization of their falsity. His use of Montesquieu shows rather how dangerous a weapon a great idea can be in the hands of one incompetent to understand it, than the fertility it contained. The merit of ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... squared with Luther's exaggerations about the impotence of reason in fallen man, and Pascal had given his own highly personal twist to it. Bayle has been hailed as a forerunner of Voltairean scepticism. It would be truer to say that a Voltairean sceptic could read Bayle's discussions in his own sense and for his own purposes if he wished. But Bayle was not a sceptic. It is hard to say what he was; his whole position as between faith and reason is hopelessly confused. He was a scholar, a wit, and a philosophical sparring-partner ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... they amused his fancy and exercised his ingenuity, they never once disturbed his vanity, his levity, or indifference. His mind was the antithesis of strength and grandeur; its power was the power of indifference. He had none of the enthusiasm of poetry: he was in poetry what the sceptic ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Thro' various periods of our vital day; Now as his manly figure struck my sight, When first I heard his voice, with new delight, Imparting science, or celestial truth, With Latin eloquence, to English youth; And now, as when, o'erpowering sceptic strife In his mild vigor of maturer life: His liberal spirit gain'd the world's applause, The mitred champion of the Christian cause! Oh ever friendly to a guileless bard, Whose pure ambition sought thy kind regard; ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... Etna." The fraud, it was said, was detected by one of his shoes being cast up from the crater. Whatever the manner of his end, the Etna story may probably be taken as an ill-natured joke of some sceptic wit; and it is certain that no such story was believed by his fellow-citizens, who rendered in after years divine honours to ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... "He would indeed be a sceptic who should venture to entertain the shadow of a doubt in the face of proof so complete in all respects as that which has been vouchsafed ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... Miss Meredith, and convince the sceptic that General O'Hara, though Irish, is yet ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... eyes, pale face, and 'nose of taste.' He was assuming yet moderate, sarcastic yet genial, with a smattering of everything and mastery of nothing; affecting the dictator, the poet, the politician, the critic, and the sceptic, whichever would, at the moment, give him the air, to inferior minds, of a very superior man.' Although Haydon disliked Hunt's 'Cockney peculiarities,' and disapproved of his republican principles, yet the fearless honesty of his opinions, the unhesitating sacrifice ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... is open war among men, in which each must take a part, and side either with dogmatism or scepticism. For he who thinks to remain neutral is above all a sceptic. This neutrality is the essence of the sect; he who is not against them is essentially for them. [In this appears their advantage.] They are not for themselves; they are neutral, indifferent, in suspense as to all things, even themselves being ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... language. Mr. Peck having lost his wife by consumption, and Georgiana being his only child, he loved her too dearly to say more, even if he felt displeased. A silence followed this exhortation from the young Christian. But her remarks had done a noble work. The father's heart was touched; and the sceptic, for the first time, was viewing Christianity in its ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... Genius burn Within that ample brow? Or some patient spirit yearn For things that are not now? Hidden in the over-soul Of the Future, to be born When the world has ceased its scorn, When the sceptic's heart will ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... and of reverence for antiquity—begins. The true university man, born and bred in the century, not in the years, in the race halls, not those alone in his Alma Mater, is neither a scoffer nor an atheist, nor a critic, sceptic, or cynic. He is a man of simple and exalted faith. God, who hath brought such great things to pass in science, nature, and art, in human character, in the destiny of nations, and the history of humble ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... she sailed, for the first time quickened her conscience. She speedily learned English, that she might join the missionaries in public worship. The barren orthodoxy of the Lutheranism in which she had been brought up had made her a sceptic. This soon gave way to the evangelical teaching of the same apostle who had brought Luther himself to Christ. She became a keen student of the Scriptures, then an ardent follower ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... the wall behind his chair. It was only about the size of a fox's skin, but it seemed to fill the deep shadows of the place with such brilliant rays that it looked like a small comet, an appearance at first sight inexplicable. The young sceptic went up to this so-called talisman, which was to rescue him from all points of view, and he soon found out the cause of its singular brilliancy. The dark grain of the leather had been so carefully burnished and polished, the striped markings of the graining were so sharp and ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... inspection. This is the invariable history of its appearance. No one has ever been able to come close to its shores, much less land upon them, but it has been so often seen on the west coast, that a doubt of its existence, if expressed in the company of coast fishermen, will at once establish for the sceptic a reputation for ignorance of the common affairs ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... English "Men of the Time" for 1856, and which led to a serious lawsuit against the publishers. The printer had mixed the biographies of the Bishop of Oxford and Robert Owen the Socialist in such a way that Bishop Wilberforce was called "a sceptic as it regards religious revelation." The mistake occurred in locking up the forms. Doubtless both biographies had been approved by their subjects, but apparently no proof was read after the fatal telescoping of the ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... of this kind could commend itself neither to the dogmatist who maintains the certainty of his theories, nor to the sceptic who regards them as both meaningless and useless. I have dwelt upon them so long because they seem to me to represent a substantially logical and coherent view which commended itself to a man of very ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... that the whited sepulchre of his religious observances had concealed a mass of putrefaction. The sceptic confessed that his refusal of religion was largely due to his hatred of the demands of God's holy law. The multitudes confessed that they had been selfish and sensual, shutting up their compassions, and refusing clothing and food to the needy. The publican confessed that he had ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... a great shock to me. It seemed clear from his answers to the sceptic that the case for doctrinal orthodoxy and all that faded and by no means awful hereafter, which I had hitherto accepted as I accepted the sun, was an extremely poor one, and to hammer home that idea ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Cashel's capture was measurable, the evil of a lie beyond all measure. She felt none the less assured of that evil because she could not foresee one bad consequence likely to ensue from what she had done. Her misgivings pressed heavily upon her; for her father, a determined sceptic, had taught her his own views, and she was, therefore, destitute of the consolations which religion has for the wrongdoer. It was plainly her duty to send for the policeman and clear up the deception she ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... thoroughly corrupt ones, to have been so deeply impressed with a woman's capacity for evil. In "Virgin Soil," when he introduces Mashurina to the reader, he says: "She was a single woman . . . and a very chaste single woman. Nothing wonderful in that, some sceptic will say, remembering what has been said of her exterior. Something wonderful and rare, let us be permitted to say." It is significant that in not one of Turgenev's seven novels is the villain of the story a man. Women simply must play the leading role in his books, for ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... of a theoretical sceptic, but simply of a man who prided himself on being 'practical,' and left all talk about such abstractions to dreamers. The limitations of the Roman intellect and its characteristic over-estimate of deeds and contempt for pure thought, as well as the spirit ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... entangled in what, at the close of another era, shall seem again ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres (bread and wine) may be translated literally by the modern Protestant; and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed, the modern sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to destroy an idol, when another, or the same in another form, takes immediate possession of ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... But, sir, that of which my ex-associates are ignorant, and which doubtless will astonish you, is that I have been many other things,—in religion, by turns a Protestant, a Papist, an Arian and Semi-Arian, a Manichean, a Gnostic, an Adamite even and a Pre-Adamite, a Sceptic, a Pelagian, a Socinian, an Anti-Trinitarian, and a Neo-Christian; [72] in philosophy and politics, an Idealist, a Pantheist, a Platonist, a Cartesian, an Eclectic (that is, a sort of juste-milieu), a Monarchist, an Aristocrat, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... for anything that may seem too personal in the following statement which I feel it almost necessary to make on the subject of my own "psychic" creed. I am so often asked if I believe this or that, if I am "orthodox," if I am a sceptic, materialist or agnostic, that I should like, if possible, to make things clear between myself and these enquirers. Therefore I may say at once that my belief in God and the immortality of the Soul is absolute,—but ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... used boldly to express his disbelief of a Supreme Deity, and state that he could not credit the existence of a Being, whose power was said to extend every where, but whom he had not yet seen, although he was now an old man. The aged sceptic is not a little conceited, as the following exordium to one of his speeches evinces: "It is very strange that I never meet with any one who is equal in sense to myself." The same old man, in one of his communicative moods, related to us the ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... and sound form, even organic form at all. How can you put into form that thought which is by its very nature formless? How can you group words round a central idea when you do not possess a central idea? Shakespeare in his one sceptic tragedy has to desert the pure tragic form, and Hamlet remains the beau-ideal of "the poetry of doubt." But what would a tragedy be in which the actors were all Hamlets, or rather scraps of Hamlets? A drama of Hamlet ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Fullarton, the brave and young; Hence, Dempster's zeal-inspired tongue; Hence, sweet, harmonious Beattie sung His 'Minstrel lays'; Or tore, with noble ardour stung, The sceptic's bays. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... you sure your father wouldn't object?' I asked of my companion—a most bright and amusing Eton boy—to whom I was playing bear leader. 'Not a bit,' replied he; 'my father is a naturalist and Darwinian; not a sceptic, but Agnosticus suavis or Verecundus, ordo compositae, you know. "Hunt the ghost by all means," said he, when I suggested a ghost "worry," and then as he does sometimes over coffee and a cigarette after dinner he talked with a real ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... faint morn Of life, the thirst for bliss Deep in man's heart is born; And, sceptic as he is, He fails not to judge clear if this be quench'd ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold |
