"Tree of knowledge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... science of true Natural History,—so Theology might also purge itself from the fond conceits which had been for a time incorporated with it, and still survive, after all superstition had passed away, as a sound and fruitful branch of the tree of knowledge. ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... the Alps, and tread the land that lies stretched out at their base, it is with a cold pulse, compared with the fever of excitement into which we are thrown by the first touch of that soil. The charm is flown; the tree of knowledge has been plucked; and never more can we taste the dreamy yet intense delight which attended the first unfolding of the gates of the Alps, and the first rising of the fair vision ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... advantages of the school. Mr. Washington held that as soon as an individual got hold of anything as useful and desirable as education he should take immediate means to hand it on to the greatest possible number of those who needed it. He had no patience with those persons who would climb the tree of knowledge and then pull the ladder up ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... and reflects that it may think and hold just what it will, that "the world is all before it where to choose," and what system to build up as its own private persuasion; when this torrent of wilful thoughts rushes over and inundates it, who will deny that the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or what the mind takes for knowledge, has made it one of the gods, with a sense of expansion and elevation,—an intoxication in reality, still, so far as the subjective state of the mind goes, an illumination? Hence the fanaticism of individuals or nations, who suddenly cast ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... ability thoroughly mastered would have been a far greater source of delight to her husband, and of satisfaction to herself, than the mere handful of unripe fruit which she had gathered from a dozen different branches of the tree of knowledge, and in the collecting of which she had, in a measure, impaired the elasticity of her mind and her bodily strength, and found no time for making herself mistress of a thousand little undemonstrative acquirements which tend to keep a steady light of joy and peace burning ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... be done by the Fellows of Colleges. In times, no doubt, when every kind of learning was in the hands of the clergy, these fellowships might seem to have been intended exclusively for the support of theological students. But when other studies, once mere germs and shoots on the tree of knowledge, separated from the old stem and assumed an independent growth, whether under the name of natural science, or history, or scholarship, or jurisprudence, afair division ought to have been made at once of the funds which, in accordance with the letter, it may be, but ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... from the first moment I encountered her like a spirit amid the ruins of our abbey. And I am one of 'the family of sacrilege.' If she knew that! And I am one of the conquering class she denounces. If also she knew that! Ah! there is much to know! Above all—the future. Away! the tree of knowledge is the tree of death. I will have no thought that is not as bright ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... Gustave Gerlach, Weehawken, New Jersey. Tree of knowledge in background. Left, kindergarten stage. Center, half-grown children. Right, man working out ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... of the key which was to unlock his bonds, and, young as he was, he knew it. It did not matter that his master, when he learned what had been done, forbade his wife to give the boy further instructions. He had already tasted of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The prohibition was useless. Neither threats nor stripes nor chains could hold the awakened ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... the millions here Be one; or he may, quite as well, Be gone to find again the Tree Of Knowledge, out ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... the promises of the remote future long before they were due,—all this made the task a grave one. But when I found myself amidst the vortices of uncounted, various, bewildering judgments, Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and liberal, scholarly from under the tree of knowledge and instinctive from over the potato-hill; the passionate enthusiasm of young adorers and the cool, if not cynical, estimate of hardened critics, all intersecting each other as they whirled, each around its own centre, I felt that it was indeed very difficult to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Here was a new complication. I had lost, of course, the best nude model I had ever seen. I looked at Tessie. Her face was scarlet. Alas! Alas! We had eaten of the tree of knowledge, and Eden and native innocence were dreams of the past—I mean ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... And ever dragging still the brutish chains, And ever slipping backward to the brute. Shall he not break the galling, brazen bonds That bind him writhing on the wheel of fate? Long ages groveling with his brother brutes, He plucked the tree of knowledge and uprose And walked erect—a god; but died the death: For knowledge brings but sadness and unrest Forever, insatiate longing and regret. Behold the brute's unerring instinct guides True as the pole-star, while ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... and no ambition. Dreaming the happy hours away—that is his idea. He knows barely enough to be aware that with much wisdom cometh much sorrow; therefore, no Pierian spring, no tree of knowledge, thank you all the same. He is right enough as he is; the perpetual sabbath of absolute negation is good enough for him. His motto is, 'Happy the bird that has no history.' Once a day, he experiences a crisp, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... unfolding of the human spirit; there is a choice of methods, but there are no "short cuts." No man can seize the fruits of culture prematurely; they are not to be had by pulling down the boughs of the tree of knowledge, so that he who runs may pluck as he pleases. Culture is not to be had by programme, by limited courses of reading, by correspondence, or by following short prescribed lines of home study. These are all good in their degree of thoroughness of method and worth of standards, but they ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... reality. His early questioning attitude gave way to a mood of mere acceptance and enjoyment. This was the primitive drama, the very essence of the male-female relationship; Adam and Eve in the Garden. Why waste time seeking the Tree of Knowledge? ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... a groggy bow.) Should we never meet again, Alice, fare thee well. Purdie, if you find the tree of knowledge in the wood bring me back ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... amalgamation of curiosity delivered of fear, that merger of systematic research and critical thinking untrammelled by social inhibitions which is the essence of modern science. Out of them has come the great Tree of Knowledge of our time, which is, too, the only Ygdrasil of Life, undying because it lives upon successive generations of ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... female created he them. And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it and to keep it; and the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shall not eat of it, for in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shall surely die." Gen. ii. 15, 17. Sin is that enemy that introduced or was the cause of death, as we may further see by considering that portion of scripture, I John. iii. 8, "He that committeth ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... of the Scriptures suddenly came back to my mind. It seemed to me that I had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, that all the mysteries were unveiled, so much did I find myself under the sway of a new, strange and irrefutable logic. And arguments, reasonings, proofs rose up in a heap before my brain only to be immediately displaced by some stronger proof, reasoning, argument. My head had, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... was God's garden"; and Eustace and Dick told of the two trees which were there, "the tree of life also, in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... existence. For she knew. She had eaten of the tree of knowledge, and the scales had fallen for ever ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... be like the Elohim, knowing good and evil," had the Serpent of Genesis said, and the Tree of Knowledge became ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... thriving bookseller's shop; Quoth he, we are both of one college, For I myself sate like a Cormorant once Upon the Tree of Knowledge. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Babylonian legend of the Temptation existed. In fact, George Smith printed a copy of the seal in his book (p. 91). But it is now known that the tablet which was believed to refer to man's eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (K. 3, 473 79-7-8, 296 R. 615) describes the banquet of the gods to which they invited Marduk. In like manner the text on K. 3657, which Smith thought referred to the Tower of Babel, is now known to ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... if they looked their numbers over, they would not find many wise, nor powerful, nor well-born people among them. Dog- fanciers tell us that performing dogs never carry their tails; such dogs have eaten of the tree of knowledge, and are convinced of sin accordingly—they know that they know things, in respect of which, therefore, they are no longer under grace, but under the law, and they have yet so much grace left as to be ashamed. So with the human clever dog; he may speak with the tongues of men and angels, but ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... rich bookseller's shop, Quoth he! we are both of one college, For I myself sate like a cormorant once, Fast by the tree of knowledge. ...
— English Satires • Various
... ordained. Out of the fertile ground he caused to grow All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste; And all amid them stood the Tree of Life, High eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit Of vegetable gold; and next to life, Our death, the Tree of Knowledge, grew fast by— Knowledge of good, bought dear by knowing ill. Southward through Eden went a river large, Nor changed his course, but through the shaggy hill Passed underneath ingulfed; for God had thrown That mountain, as his garden mould, high raised ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... had already tasted of the tree of knowledge, and the world outside beckoned to her with as fascinating a face as it ever presented to any human creature. It was during one of these returning visits to the Shoals that much of the delightful book from which I have quoted was written; ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... concord, prosody, and syntax has charms for me from habit: the rule of three is preferable to the problems of Euclid, and even the Latin grammar has its delights. In short, I have a hujus pleasure in hic, haec, hoc; [cluck cluck;] and even the flourishing of the twigs of that tree of knowledge, the birch, hath become a pleasurable occupation to me, if not to those upon whom it is inflicted. I am like an old horse, who hath so long gone round and round in a mill, that he cannot walk straight forward; ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... dream of a Garden," the strong young voice went on. "But it lies in a distant future. We dream that woman shall eat of the tree of knowledge together with man, and that side by side and hand close to hand, through ages of much toil and labor, they shall together raise about them an Eden nobler than any the Chaldean dreamed of; an Eden created by their own labor and made ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... an energetic appeal that philosophy should approach more closely to practical life. His thought aims at setting forth, not any system of knowledge, but rather a method of philosophizing; in a phrase, this method amounts to the assertion that Life is more than Logic, or, as Byron put it, "The tree of Knowledge is ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... the old professor realized that a reaction might come at almost any instant. One outlet, and that the highest one, forbidden him, he might seek other, lower ones in sheer bravado. Forbidden to climb into the Tree of Knowledge of all Good, he might, in revenge, fall greedily upon the Apples of Sodom. Left to himself, no one knew what harpies he might chance upon as comrades, nor what sights they might show him. To prevent all that, to provide him with an outlet which should be as wholesome as it was fresh and sparkling, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... there," answered Moses. "'Gittel was not a phoenix which alone ate not of the Tree of Knowledge and lives for ever. Women have no need to live as long as men, for they have not so many Mitzvahs to perform as men; and inasmuch as"—here his tones involuntarily assumed the argumentative sing-song—"their souls profit by all the Mitzvahs performed by ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... stripling, as I conjecture, there already blooms a certain prospective Paradise, cheered by some fairest Eve; nor, in the stately vistas, and flowerage and foliage of that Garden, is a Tree of Knowledge, beautiful and awful in the midst thereof, wanting. Perhaps too the whole is but the lovelier, if Cherubim and a Flaming Sword divide it from all footsteps of men; and grant him, the imaginative stripling, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Adam and his wife should eat of all the rest of the plants, but to abstain from the tree of knowledge; and foretold to them, that if they touched it, it would prove their destruction. But while all the living creatures had one language, [5] at that time the serpent, which then lived together with Adam and his wife, shewed an envious disposition, at his supposal ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... with the tenderest emotions, and caused the father and mother of Mr Briggs (whose learning, like ill-arranged luggage, was so tightly packed that he couldn't get at anything he wanted) to hide their diminished heads. The fruit laboriously gathered from the tree of knowledge by this latter young gentleman, in fact, had been subjected to so much pressure, that it had become a kind of intellectual Norfolk Biffin, and had nothing of its original form or flavour remaining. Master Bitherstone now, on whom the forcing system had the happier and not uncommon ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... over, he was induced to visit a "Friend" then confined in Banbury jail, whom he found preaching through the grates of his cell to the people in the street. On seeing Roberts he called to mind the story of Zaccheus, and declared that the word was now to all who were seeking Christ by climbing the tree of knowledge, "Come down, come down; for that which is to be known of God is manifested within." Returning home, he went soon after to the parish meeting-house, and, entering with his hat on, the priest noticed him, and, stopping short in his discourse, declared that he could not go on while one ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... which remind every traveler of the Sphinx, their grotesque ears hanging down to their shoulders, and their heads, about which plays a ring of serpents for a halo, or out of which grows the mystical three-branched Kalpa Vrich, or Tree of Knowledge. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... the desire to know. We find this in Genesis: God: i. e., the clerics, was angry because his creatures ate of these different fruits. God's comprehension of the danger of the tree of life is not wonderful, but his foreseeing of the danger of the tree of knowledge was extraordinary foreseeing, for very little of the fruit of this tree had been eaten at the time the text was written. All through the Middle Ages the clerics strove to keep men from it with tortures and burnings at the stake, and they were so anxiously striving ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... importance when weighed against the remote chance of an insignificant discovery, which would be challenged and contradicted as soon as announced by scores of his fellow- experimentalists. If torture were indeed the true method of science, then would the vaunted tree of knowledge be no other than the upas tree of oriental legend, beneath whose fatal shadow lie hecatombs of miserable victims slain by its poisonous exhalations, the odour of which is fraught with agony and death! My poodle remained with me many days. No one appeared to claim him, and ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... literally, water thy house. Canon Rawlison remarks in that connection: "There are very strong grounds for connecting HEA or Hoa, with the serpent of the Scripture, and the paradisaical traditions of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life." As the title of the god of knowledge and science, Oannes, is the lord of the abyss, or of the great deep, the intelligent fish, one of his emblems being the serpent, CAN, which occupies so conspicuous a place among the ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... pictures we see a serpent coiled around 92:12 the tree of knowledge and speaking to Adam and Eve. This represents the serpent in the act of commending to our first parents the knowl- 92:15 edge of good and evil, a knowledge gained from matter, or evil, instead of from Spirit. The portrayal is still graphically accurate, for the common ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... who know the most Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, The tree of knowledge is not that of life. Philosophy and science and the springs Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world I have essayed, and in my mind there is, A power to make ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... the fruit-tree of knowledge By woman were pluck'd, and she still wears the prize, To tempt us in theatre, senate, or college - I mean the love-apples that bloom in ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... phase of her existence. So essential a part of the Dance is the temptation of Eve, that the whole subject was concentrated into the representation of that event by a German engraver, in this singular manner:—Adam and Eve stand by the Tree of Knowledge, around which twines the serpent, from whom Eve is receiving the apple; but the trunk of the tree is formed by the twisted legs and the ribs of a skeleton, from the head and the outstretched arms of which spring the branches and the foliage. It is worthy of remark, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... his attention is called away to new and strange sights. The procession, of which Dante and his remaining companion Statius now form part, moves forward through the wood of the Earthly Paradise; the car is attached to a tree, identified with the "tree of knowledge," which since Adam's disobedience has been leafless and fruitless. After this Dante falls into a short sleep, and on waking finds that Beatrice with her attendants is alone left, as a guardian to the car. ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... existed; there she must banish Paul de Virieu from her heart and memory. Yes, there was nothing now to keep her here, in this curious place, where she had eaten, in more than one sense, of the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... who people the lower air, and cause the greater part of the evils, from which we suffer; but he surpassed all the others in ignorance and ferocity. On the contrary, the serpent with golden wings, which twined its azure coils round the tree of knowledge, was made up of light and love. A combat between these two powers—the one of light and the other of darkness—was, therefore, inevitable. It occurred soon after the creation of the world. God had hardly ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... from man, and worthy to be admired, Whose taste, too long forborne, at first assay Gave elocution to the mute, and taught The tongue not made for speech to speak thy praise: Thy praise he also who forbids thy use Conceals not from us, naming thee the Tree Of Knowledge, knowledge both of good and evil; Forbids us then to taste! but his forbidding Commends thee more, while it infers the good By thee communicated, and our want: For good unknown sure is not had, or had And yet unknown is as not had at all. In plain then, what forbids he but to know, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... which were then being made as hopeless. It then seemed still to be a mere dream of poets. Wireless telegraphy was only a matter of speculation, a thing which a few only thought of as a possibility of the future. Man has indeed plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge for his own destruction. What may be the result of another quarter of a century of like advancement of the knowledge of the means of spreading "death throughout the world and bitter woe"? It may not be, as Dr. Murray Butler says, that the strongest man will remain ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... the vast undulations of the wave-like Apennines: fertility reposes in their many folds, and woods crown the summits. The free and happy peasant, unshackled by the Austrian, bears the double harvest to the garner; and the refined citizens rear without dread the long blighted tree of knowledge in this garden of the world. We were lifted above the Alpine peaks, and from their deep and brawling ravines entered the plain of fair France, and after an airy journey of six days, we landed at Dieppe, furled the feathered wings, and closed the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... of thought in the composition, and the utmost elevation and majesty in the general treatment and execution. The third subject is not less important, representing the Fall of Man, and his Expulsion from Paradise. The tree of knowledge stands in the midst; the serpent (the upper part of the body being that of a woman) is twined around the stem; she bends down towards the guilty pair, who are in the act of plucking the forbidden fruit. The figures are nobly graceful, particularly ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... the fertile ground he caused to grow All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste; And all amid them stood the tree of life, High eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit Of vegetable gold; and next to life, Our death, the tree of knowledge, grew fast by, Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill. Southward through Eden went a river large, Nor changed his course, but through the shaggy hill Passed underneath ingulfed; for God had thrown That mountain as his garden-mould high raised Upon the ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... am older than you—wiser than you, if wisdom be the fruit of the tree of knowledge. You know but one side of the medal, Hypatia, and the fairer; I have seen its reverse as well as its obverse. Through every form of human thought, of human action, of human sin and folly, have I been wandering for years, and found no rest—as little in wisdom as in folly, in spiritual dreams ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... towards evening; an afternoon of golden lights and broken shadows, of vivid greens in shady places. It must have been on such a day as this, Ruth thought, that the Almighty walked in the garden of Eden when the sun was low, while as yet the tree of knowledge was but in blossom, while as yet autumn and its apples were far off, long before fig-leaves and ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... of the wayward children of our first parents, and with her mind's eye saw a dear little descendant of Adam, who was perfectly innocent, and yet had to share earth's sorrow with the guilty. The boy stood sadly by a hedge, and peeped over into the Lost Paradise. A white-robed angel standing by the Tree of Knowledge saw the child and was sorry for him. He broke off a branch from the tree, handed it over to the boy, and said: "Here is something for you out of Paradise. Plant the bough in the ground. It will take root and grow, and produce fresh seeds ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... aspic," who, discovering the volumes "insufficiently concealed by the protecting web of a dead spider," condemns them to be sold, and converted for her own use into silken hoods and furred gowns.[238] Eve's descendants continue, thinks the bishop, to wrongfully meddle with the tree of knowledge. ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... occurred to the Chaldaeans from the values of the signs entering into the name of the god. From the outset H. Rawlinson recognized in Ea, which he read Hea, Hoa, the divinity presiding over the abyss of waters; he compared him with the serpent of Holy Scripture, in its relation to the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, and deduced therefrom his character of lord of wisdom. His position as lord of the primordial waters, from which all things proceeded, clearly denned by Lenormant, is now fully recognized. His name was transcribed Aos by Damascius, a form which is not easily explained; ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... end in voluptuousness. For our parts, we are slow to believe that ever any man did, or could, learn the somewhat awful truth, that in a certain ruby-colored elixir, there lurked a divine power to chase away the genius of ennui, without subsequently abusing this power. To taste but once from the tree of knowledge, is fatal to the subsequent power of abstinence. True it is, that generations have used laudanum as an anodyne, (for instance, hospital patients,) who have not afterwards courted its powers as a voluptuous stimulant; ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... an optimism is one of the penalties which reflection brings. Natural life takes the goodness of things for granted; but reflection disturbs the placid contentment and sets man at variance with his world. The fruit of the tree of knowledge always reveals his nakedness to man; he is turned out of the paradise of unconsciousness and doomed to force Nature, now conceived as a step-dame, to satisfy needs which are now first felt. Optimism ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... out of nothing, and how he formed man after his own image and likeness and endowed him with power of free-will, and gave him Paradise to his enjoyment, charging him only to abstain from one thing, the tree of knowledge; and how, when man had broken his commandment, he banished him out of Paradise; and how man, fallen from union with God, stumbled into these manifold errors, becoming the slave of sins, and subject ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... Northern nations became Christian they transferred to the Cross the nobler ideas embodied in the mystic tree Igdrasil; and one of the commonest ideas of the mystical writers of the Middle Ages is the identification of the Cross as both the true tree of life and the true tree of knowledge. ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... earth produced by his revolt. He saw how God created man. He heard how God spoke to man and gave him to possess his former estate which he had lost by his rebellion. He beheld God putting man and woman into the garden of Eden. He listened when God said "Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Gen. ii:17). Then he must have been moved with envy and jealousy. He sees another in possession of his past domain. Something like this must ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... be doubted; and she would be less than a true woman who did not protest, by precept, preaching, and example, against the follies and sins of school or social life that induce such evils: but that it was eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge—"persistent brain-work" even—that furnished Dr. Clarke's cases, "chiefly clinical," an experience of teaching extending over forty years would ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... be turn'd into labours; all the fine dreams of Opinions, and universal metaphysical natures, which the luxury of subtil Brains has devis'd, would quickly vanish, and give place to solid Histories, Experiments and Works. And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor'd by the same way, not only by beholding and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural knowledge, that were ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... that analogy which speaks in proof tones to the imagination alone and to the unaided reason bears no weight—occasionally did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic, and find in the mystic parable that tells of the tree of knowledge, and of its forbidden fruit, death-producing, a distinct intimation that knowledge was not meet for man in the infant condition of his soul. And these men—the poets—living and perishing amid the scorn of the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... instance, are we told of the temptation and fall of man? How are we to understand what was meant by the Tree of Life or the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, or by the Serpent speaking and beguiling Eve? We are at a great loss to give a precise explanation, though the practical ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... surge up in her soul for her own unprotected girlhood and struggling youth; and for all they had brought her to learn of the tree of knowledge. No doubt she had been callous enough about it at the time; eager only to dare, and triumph, and achieve; but how should it have been otherwise, since no kindly guiding hand had told her she was wasting her powers and her substance to achieve an end that would never ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... against the throne, but through a grape-shot-and-canistered mutiny of the proletariat against Capital. That which it imagined to be the most revolutionary, came about as the most counter-revolutionary event. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the Tree of Knowledge, not from the ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... Usher then relates how he seriously advised the young schoolmaster to conform to the popular religion; but, as Lynch declined to comply with his wishes, he was bound over, under sureties of L400 sterling, to "forbear teaching." The tree of knowledge was, in truth, forbidden fruit, and guarded sedulously by the fiery sword of the law. I cannot do more than name a few of the other distinguished men of this century. There was Florence Conry, Archbishop of Tuam, and founder of the Irish College ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Adam tells Raphael his own experience (bk. viii.) After the departure of Raphael, Satan enters into a serpent, and, seeing Eve alone, speaks to her. Eve is astonished to hear the serpent talk, but is informed that it had tasted of "the tree of knowledge," and had become instantly endowed with both speech and wisdom. Curiosity induces Eve to taste the same fruit, and she persuades Adam to taste it also (bk. ix.). Satan now returns to hell, to tell of his success (bk. x.). Michael is sent to expel Adam and Eve from the garden (bk. xi.); and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... town[51] excited public curiosity to the utmost; and the floating crowds were repulsed by their own violence from this new paradise, where "The Tree of Knowledge" was said to be planted. At the succeeding meeting "the Restorer of Ancient Eloquence" informed "persons in chairs that they must come sooner." He first commenced by subscriptions to be raised from "persons eminent in ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... astonishing fruits of the tree of knowledge are too often regarded by both friends and enemies as the be-all and end-all of science? What wonder if some eulogise, and others revile, the new philosophy for its utilitarian ends ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... said the young man—he was slight and boyish-looking still, but on his face there was a new stamp—he had eaten of the tree of knowledge. "I have won no scholarships and taken no prizes. My grand ideas about University laurels are changed. You see, Nell, I have discovered that unless one goes into the Church a good degree helps nobody. And, of course, it ruins a man in other ways to put in ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... is Gustav Gerlach's tympanum relief "Education." The tree of knowledge is seen in the background. The kindergarten stage, the half-grown, and the mature periods are shown, the last showing the man no longer under a teacher, but working ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... concrete they will make their creeds amusingly simian. Consider the simian amorousness of Jupiter, and the brawls on Olympus. Again, in the old Jewish Bible, what tempts the first pair? The Tree of Knowledge, of course. It appealed to the curiosity of their nature, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... occupied with the trifles of lust, covetousness, and deceit. They are no worse than the sons of Penn, who became apostates to his charity and religion before the breath had left his body. So goes the human race, whether around the Tree of Knowledge or Kensington's ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... are always immoral in their tendency. From the first spiritual communication through the serpent medium in the tree of knowledge, down to the last spiritual marriage rapped out by the oracle, they are all in favor of pride, ambition, lying, lust, and murder. The oracles of God begin with a prohibition of curiosity, pride, covetousness, and theft: "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." And they are uniformly ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... beauty. When he is charged with being in love with the Canterbury maiden who is the object of his reverence, the "Little Quietude," as he calls her, he, comparing her to the Evening Star, contrasts her with the object of his burning passion, who seems to him the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... evidently is meant to be man's destiny, why, He would have made another man. But no! When God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, he took out one of his ribs, and made a woman—a being in EVERY WAY THE COMPLEMENT OF MAN. And, after they ate of the tree of knowledge, God said to the woman, 'Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall RULE over thee.' And unto Adam he said, 'Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it, cursed ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... phoenix is the most wonderful. When Eve gave all the animals some of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the phoenix was the only bird that refused to eat thereof, and he was rewarded with eternal life. When he has lived a thousand years, his body shrinks, and the feathers drop from it, until he is as small as an egg. This is the nucleus of ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... the nineteenth century, and thirty-one in the twentieth, man had never reached: always he had been baulked, baulked, by some seeming chance—some restraining Hand: and herein lay the lesson—herein the warning. Wonderfully—really wonderfully—like the Tree of Knowledge in Eden, he said, was that Pole: all the rest of earth lying open and offered to man—but That persistently veiled and 'forbidden.' It was as when a father lays a hand upon his son, with: 'Not here, my child; wheresoever ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... and the negations of God always involve necessity or truth; so that, for example, if God said to Adam that He did not wish him to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, it would have involved a contradiction that Adam should have been able to eat of it, and would therefore have been impossible that he should have so eaten, for the Divine command would have involved an eternal necessity and truth. But ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... feigning the same emotion. It must leave for the moment as apparently completed one branch of knowledge to which it may return again after developing some less mature branch on which the attention of the most learned investigators is for a time wholly concentrated. The tree of knowledge is an evergreen, and in science, no more than in arts, is there any decay. When Darwin published his great Origin of Species which was hailed as a revelation, not only by scientific men, but by intelligent ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... general notion, that if you once suffer women to eat of the tree of knowledge, the rest of the family will very soon be reduced to the same kind ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... undertakes to fill a lamp, which, being (unknown to him) already full, runs over, and his oil is spilled. It was "oleum perdidit" in another sense than the scholastic one. Complaint was made to the guardians of the orphan Gottfried of these illicit visits to the tree of knowledge. Severe prohibitory measures were recommended, which, however, judicious counsel from another quarter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... meet in the garden which one owns, and in which the other digs with the sweat of his brow. There is kindly interest on the one hand, and decent respect on the other. But all this sense of ordered righteousness is dependent on one condition. Neither must eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge that grows in the midst of the garden. A little knowledge is dangerous, a good deal of knowledge may be even more dangerous, to the relations ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... in getting a husband, and never will; though if she's got enough of it, it may keep her from ever having one. I don't hold with cleverness in a woman myself; it has always ended in mischief, from the time when the woman ate a bit of the Tree of Knowledge, and there was ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... was quite a sophisticated young woman despite the fact that all her life had been spent in two very quiet communities. The girl was acquainted through broad reading with both the good and evil fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Innocence does not mean ignorance in this day and generation, and the modern trend of thought and education can be heartily thanked for this change from the old standards, if for ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... nakedness, and through a universal peace round about him She had secured his defenceless existence. For the preservation of his kind provision was made in the sexual impulse. As plant and animal man was complete.... If, now, we regard the voice of God which forbade the tree of knowledge as simply the voice of instinct warning man away from this tree, then the eating of the fruit becomes merely a defection from instinct, that is, the first manifestation of rational independence, the origin of moral being; and this defection from ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... expostulating with my destiny: Is this thy pastime, O Nature, to put such tricks upon a silly creature, and then to take off the mask, and show him how he hath been befooled? If this is the philosophy of human nature, my soul enter thou not into her secrets. It is surely the forbidden tree of knowledge; I no sooner taste it, than I perceive myself naked, and stript of all things - yea even of my very self. I see myself, and the whole frame of nature, shrink into fleeting ideas, which, like Epicurus's ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... theism, and natural religion or ethics. If we consider the order of the sciences in their rise and progress, the first place belongs to natural philosophy, the mother of them all, or the trunk, the tree of knowledge, out of which, and in proportion to which, like so many branches, they all grow. These branches spread wide, and bear even fruits of different kinds. But the sap that made them shoot, and makes them flourish, rises from the root through the trunk, and their productions are varied according to the ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... the Biblical narrative, the sexual instinct and the beginnings of culture as symbolized by the tree of knowledge are closely associated. According to rabbinical traditions, the serpent is the symbol of ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... was greater than all, deeper than all, overcame all, forgave all? and was that what women felt and did always? Was that their lot, their destiny? Must they begin in blind faith, then be plunged into the darkness of disillusion, shaken by the storm of emotion, taste the sting in the fruit of the tree of knowledge—and go on again the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sweeter still than this, than these, than all, Is first and passionate Love—it stands alone, Like Adam's recollection of his fall; The Tree of Knowledge has been plucked—all 's known— And Life yields nothing further to recall Worthy of this ambrosial sin, so shown, No doubt in fable, as the unforgiven Fire which Prometheus filched ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... his lady's influence had changed the inner man beyond all recognition. His spirit was stamped with her nameless distinction, and all the vistas she had opened for him to the tree of knowledge he now followed up. No smallest incident of his day seemed unconnected with some thought or wish of hers—so that in truth she still guided and moulded him by the power of her ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... a rose, do you know, it grows till it overshadows the earth, Like a wonderful Tree of Knowledge, my dear, the Tree of our evil and good; But I dare not tell you the terrible vision that gave the toad-stool birth, The dream of a heart that breaks, my dear, and a Tree that ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... labouring as much as he himself ever did, about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, shaking the boughs thereof, and seeking the fruit, being for the most part unmindful of the tree of life.' O blind generation! 'tis this tree of knowledge to which the serpent has led you"—and here the boy was obliged to stop, the rest of the page being charred by the fire: and asked of the lawyer—"Shall ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... course. A ton of gunpowder would not have blown up the garden of Eden more effectually, than did her light touch upon an outside branch of the tree of knowledge. I should say Genesis was acceptable authority to a young minister ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... tree of knowledge that flamed With gold and scarlet of good and evil, her eyes Rapt on the river of life: then bright and untamed By the labour and sorrow and fear of a world that dies Your ignorant eyes looked up into mine; and ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... and wisdom, and for the manifestation of his own glory, created man in his own image, and placed him in the garden of Eden, holy and happy. And he commanded him, "of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Adam disobeyed the high mandate of heaven; he ate of the forbidden fruit, and thus he fell by transgression ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... went into a rich bookseller's shop, Quoth he! we are both of one college, For I myself sate like a cormorant once Fast by the tree of knowledge. ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... first floor only), is as nothing compared to the thirst for knowledge of the philosopher, the poet, the biologist, and the naturalist. I have always despised Adam because he had to be tempted by the woman, as she was by the serpent, before he could be induced to pluck the apple from the tree of knowledge. I should have swallowed every apple on the tree the moment the owner's back was turned. When Gray said "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," he forgot that it is godlike to be wise; and since nobody wants bliss particularly, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... must nyamee (eat) all de fruit ob de garden, but (be out, except) de tree of knowledge. And he said to Adam, "Adam! you no muss nyamee dis fruit, else you dead." De serpent come to say to Mammy Eve, "Dis fruit berry good; he make you too wise." Mammy she take lillee (little) bit, and bring de oder harf gib Daddy ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... lights, save those of their own eyes, they who were content to kiss and murmur words of passion as though they were as much alone as Adam and Eve in Eden? What did they think either of the serpent coiled about the bole of this tree of knowledge whereof they had just plucked the ripe ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... themselves to us under certain conditions in the forms of electricity, or chemical attraction, have any analogy to the power which manifests itself in growth and organization, is altogether a different question, and demands altogether a different chain of reasoning: if it be indeed a tree of knowledge, it will be known by its fruits, and these will depends not on the mere assertion, but on the inductions by which the position is supported, and by the additions which it makes to our insight into the nature of the facts ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to find it in a revision of revelation, tradition, and prejudice, so as to be able to cling to these a little longer. How should a system so local, so accidental, and so unstable as Kant's be prescribed as a sort of catechism for all humanity? The tree of knowledge has many branches, and all its fruits are not condemned to hang for ever from that one gnarled and contorted bough. M. Bergson himself "lags behind" Kant on those points on which his better insight requires it, as, for instance, on the reality of time; but with regard to ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... we be drowsy, Give our boots a grease. Homer's heroes did so, Why not such as we? What are sheets and servants? Superfluity. Pray for wives and children Safe in slumber curled, Then to chat till midnight O'er this babbling world. Of the workmen's college, Of the price of grain, Of the tree of knowledge, Of the chance of rain; If Sir A. goes Romeward, If Miss B. sings true, If the fleet comes homeward, If the mare will do,— Anything and everything— Up there in the sky Angels understand us, And no "saints" are by. Down, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... account the promise of the devil was fulfilled to the very letter. Adam and Eve did not die, and they did become as gods, knowing good and evil. The account shows, however, that the gods dreaded education and knowledge then just as they do now. The church still faithfully guards the dangerous tree of knowledge, and has exerted in all ages her utmost power to keep mankind from eating the fruit thereof. The priests have never ceased repeating the old falsehood and the old threat: "Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." From every ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... fruits of the Tree of Knowledge before they had been thoroughly disciplined in the powers of resistance and of self-denial. Hence the wholesome food was changed to poison; the sweet waters were made bitter; the stream, which in its fullness bore fertility and refreshment, burst its banks, ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... to know, for whoso seek to know They seek to rise, and best they mend their lot. Methinks, if Adam and Eve in their garden days Had scorned the serpent, and obediently Continued God's good children, He Himself Had led them to the Tree of Knowledge soon And bid them eat the fruit thereof, and yet Not find it apples ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... certainly right when it tells us that man's troubles came from a desire to know. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is bitter, and man's digestive apparatus is ill-conditioned to digest it. But still we are grateful, and good men never forget that it was woman who gave the fruit to man—men learn nothing alone. In the Garden of Eden, with everything supplied, man was an animal, but when he was turned out ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... 1: The tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. 2: Christ's body is conceived as the 'bait,' his divinity as the 'hook,' by which ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... shortcomings were ever a serious drawback to her in after-life. Besides such opportunities of improvement, she enjoyed the privilege of association with thirty girls of the upper middle-classes, and ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the fruits of which had hitherto escaped her notice. At the end of her second term, however, she was forced to forego these advantages, for Martin had left Cullerne without making any permanent ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... what other philosophical literature of the Arabs he read and was influenced by. And so he, too, the grammarian and philologist, succumbed to the allegorical and symbolical method he condemned. Without denying the historical reality of the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, he also sees in these expressions symbols of cosmological, psychological and ethical ideas. In the fashion of Philo he sees in Eden a representation of the higher world of the divinity, in the Garden the intermediate world of the spheres and Intelligences, in the river issuing ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... fancy that we have but to eat of the tree of knowledge to become gods. Some go so far as to say that we are even now a part of divinity. 'The universe—it is God;' therefore we, as a part of the universe, are a part of God. The universe God? If it is a part of God, (which it is not,) it is so small a fraction that in all mathematical ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various |
