"Truism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that though knowledge be power, it is only one of the powers of the world; that there are others as strong, and often much stronger; and the assertion either means but a barren truism, not worth so frequent a repetition, or it means something that you would find ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... not the shadow of a doubt that he would carry out his purpose. He had come downstairs smarting under the impression of Sir William's last words when they were discussing the new Governor. Then he recovered, and reminded himself of the obvious truism that the man occupied with politics must school himself to have his opinions contradicted by his opponents, and must make up his mind that there are as many people opposed to his way of thinking in the world as agreeing with it. But it is one thing to engage in a ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... is that they write too much—or rather, publish too much. A writer should be very glad to accept a small income for many years; he should deliberately keep his fortunes within bounds; and take his time. All this would have been a truism fifty years ago; the machinery for the other thing didn't exist, and something in the way of a natural condition kept him in the simple path. But I don't find fault with the machinery; the wider field and the larger figures ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... one is tempted to add a note even on a Theological truism like that in the text,—"Esto igitur, inquies; fuerit Deus, qui in Veteri Testamento, sive per Angelum, sive sub angelic reprsentatione sanctis viris apparuit et locutus est; at qu demum ratione adducti crediderunt doctores, fuisse DEI FILIUM? Respondeo: Ratione, ni ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... as this truism is, it is constantly violated in teaching reading in the rural school. For the course in reading usually consists of a series of five readers, expected to cover seven or eight years of study. These ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... nations: He nurtureth the nations. This is throughout the teaching of the Psalms. "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture;" for this I take to be the true bearing of that glorious national hymn the 100th Psalm, and not merely the old truism that men did not create themselves, when it exhorts ALL nations to praise God because it is He that hath made them nations, and not they themselves. The Psalms set forth the Son of God as the King of all nations. In Him, my friends,—in Him all the nations of the ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... "But I never heard any preacher, in any country, tell his congregation anything else. And people always listen with attention. In countries where rain is entirely unknown, it is not a truism to say that 'when it rains it is damp.' On the contrary, in such countries that statement would be regarded as requiring demonstration, and once demonstrated, it would be treasured and taught as an interesting scientific fact. Now it is precisely the same with congregations ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... it at any cost; but we have not found for it a definite place in a philosophy of life. Superficial though he be, our friend has indicated a need: we must take the question philosophically—but in the great and true sense. It is a truism of philosophy and science that the world is a harmonious whole, and that with the increase of knowledge, laws can be discovered to explain the order and the unity of the universe. Accordingly, if we are ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... doubted whether the originality of the phrase "Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi" is, after all, worth speculating upon. In the sense in which Lord Bacon used it, it is rather a naked truism than a wise aphorism. It does not even necessarily convey the intended meaning; nor, if unaccompanied by an explanation, would it be safe from a widely different interpretation. A previous correspondent of "NOTES AND QUERIES" had termed it "this fine aphoristic expression;" and yet, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 54, November 9, 1850 • Various
... Thus, if I declare that by special attention to a subject, earnestly turning it over and thinking deeply into it, very remarkable results may be produced, as regards result in knowledge, every human being will assent to it as the veriest truism ever uttered; in the fullest belief that he or ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... contriving? Can the classic distinction between East and West, that venerable mother of trite reflections and bad arguments, be, after all, mutable? Is the unchanging East changeable? Is Mr. Kipling's thrilling line no more than the statement of a geographical truism? England they tell us was once a tropical forest; London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world, while Asia—rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police regulations, glorious in all material ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... been Protestant. Swift and Addison, the most native and natural of our writers, Hooker and Milton, the most elaborate, never can become our co-religionists; and, though this is but the enunciation of a truism, it is not on that account ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... answered this question with a truism, not always as applicable as in this case,—"A brave, able, self-respecting manhood is fair profit for any man's first ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... call its spirit; and therefore the more fully we enter into the spirit of all with which we are concerned, the more thoroughly do we become alive. The more completely we do this the more we shall find that we are penetrating into the great secret of Life. It may seem a truism, but the great secret of Life is its Livingness, and it is just more of this quality of Livingness that we want to get hold of; it is that good thing of which we ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... poetry, which attest the cultivation of the audience no less than the genius of the author; a people, in a word, whom the stagirite unconsciously individualized when he laid down a general proposition, which nowhere else can be received as a truism—that the common people are the most exquisite judges of whatever in art is graceful, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... very necessity of this truism, that if our painters and sculptors would not be mere imitators of the exponents of another age, there would be soon established a national school of art. We do not mean by this a mere conventional type in finish and mode of treatment, but certain marked, characteristic ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... end, illuminated from the outside, as it were, by Francesca Campodonico's faithful friendship and sweet influence. All causes of disagreement, considered as forces in married life, are relative in their value to the comparative solidity of the characters on which they act—a truism which ought to be the foundation of social charity, but is not. Reanda could not be blamed for his brittle sensitivenesses, nor Gloria for a certain coarse-grained streak of cruelty, which she had inherited from her father, and which had ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... Louis wondered whether Marksedge would serve no purpose save the elucidation of this truism, and presently another ensued. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... system to be touched, as with a rod, when necessary—a rod that is held over them always in terrorem! We all talk about morality; but try some measure of reform, and you will find that every man sees the necessity of it for his neighbour only. Goodness is happiness, and sin is disease. The truism is as old as the hills, and as evident; but if men were in earnest, do you suppose they would go on for ever choosing sin and its ghastly companion as they do? Do you know, there are moments when I think that even their ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... may be rated a truism—it being evidently true that a thing or Being, which has existed from eternity without any eternal cause of its existence, must be self-existent: but of course that dogma leaves the disputed question, namely, whether matter, or something not matter, is self-existent, ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... you on a more serious subject. Pardon me if I tell you that I think you are a happy man, and excuse me if I add, that if you do not keep yourself so I shall not think you a wise one. A good wife is better than a good-for-nothing mistress.—A self-evident proposition!—A stupid truism! Yes; but if every man who knows a self-evident proposition when he sees it on paper, always acted as if he knew it, this would be a very wise and a very happy world; and I should not have occasion ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... truism that those who offer the excuse that they have not the time are really the ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... in art counts, next to actual genius, heavier than all other qualities, is such a truism that it is often forgotten. In the enormous mass of mediocre work which is turned out annually by artists of technical talent seldom is there encountered a strong, well-defined personality. Imitation has been called the bane of originality; suppress it as a factor, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... you expect?" he demanded. "I tell you, Cicily," he continued, in the tone of one arguing with labored patience to convince a child of some truism, "that business is too big, too serious, too strong for a woman ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... a quick, sparkling glance of affirmation, as if she had lately had some trouble to maintain that ancient truism. She was going to speak again, but the Doctor waved his hand downward soothingly toward the ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... the whole case of Pacifism: we shall not improve except at the price of using our reason in these matters; of understanding them better. Surely it is a truism that that is the price of all progress; saner conceptions—man's recognition of his mistakes, whether those mistakes take the form of cannibalism, slavery, torture, superstition, tyranny, false laws, or what you will. The veriest savage, or for that matter the ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... a truism to say that we ought to look at life in the light of eternity. Only then does the true significance of the meanest action in life appear. Life is redeemed from triviality and vulgarity. So far from worldly possessions losing their value, and ordinary occupations ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... of cure, and of artificial preparations for the improvements of the sight, the hearing, the appetite, false teeth, false hair, respiration, massage, and so on, there can be no salvation. That people who do not make use of these perfected preparations are stronger and healthier, has become such a truism, that advertisements are printed in the newspapers of stomach-powders for the wealthy, under the heading, "Blessings for the poor," {252} in which it is stated that only the poor are possessed of proper digestive powers, and that the rich require assistance, and, among other various ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... bonne a imiter, mais non pas jusgu'a l'ennui"—and the author of Pamela has plainly disregarded this useful law. On the other hand, the tedium and elaboration of his style have tended, in these less leisurely days, to condemn his work to a neglect which it does not deserve. Few writers—it is a truism to say so—have excelled him in minute analysis of motive, and knowledge of the human heart. About the final morality of his heroine's long-drawn defence of her chastity it may, however, be permitted to doubt; and, in contrasting ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... and foretold the straits to which the country would be reduced in the event of war with a great European Power, he concluded these forebodings with the habitual remark, "Well, what I says is, them as lives longest will see the most." A truism, no doubt, but, as time has proved, by ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... cost of production is false. I will say that it is true; in fact, that is just as true as that two and two make four: exactly as true as that, but let it be noted most profoundly, only as true as that. In other words, it is a truism, mere equation in terms, telling nothing whatever. When I say that two and two make four I find, after deep thought, that I have really said nothing, or nothing that was not already said at the moment I defined two and defined ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... each of whom, in a great or a small way, affected his life. I do not believe that you could understand his actions in the sequel without knowing the details of those situations through which he had passed before. We are largely influenced by little things and little events. The statement is a truism in the eyes of the moralist, but the truth is, unfortunately, too often forgotten in real life. The man who falls down-stairs and breaks his leg has not noticed the tiny spot of candle grease which made the polished step so slippery ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... guidance of its distinguished Founder and Principal, Dr. Booker T. Washington, and that I have striven, from the first day until now, to put into practise the lessons taught me by him and his excellent body of teachers. At Tuskegee we were taught the truism, "If you can not find a way, make one." I hope I am not immodest in saying that I think I have, in ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... article taken from the Saturday Review, December 13th, 1879:—"It has been repeated until the remark has become accepted as a sort of truism that the Gipsies are a mysterious race, and that nothing is known of their origin. And a few years ago this was true; but within those years so much has been discovered that at present there is really no ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... This truism, which is in the mouths of thousands while it is in the hearts of scarcely any, was well meant by Sir Wycherly, however plainly expressed. It merely drew from the youth the simple answer that—"he was born ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in novel and bewitching patterns. To this end he must have two things: a fine sense, in the first place, of the sound, value, meaning, and associations of individual words, and next, a sense of harmony, proportion, and effect in their combination. It is amazing what nobility a mere truism is often found to possess when it is clad with ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... distinction between one man and another; and it is by the aggregation of such men that a nation becomes prosperous. It must never therefore be forgotten, that it is not the possession of knowledge, but the use which we make of it, that confers distinction. For no truism is more incontrovertible than this, that knowledge which we cannot or do ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... a truth a truism is too often regarded as equivalent to placing it in the category of the negligible. It is precisely the salient obviousness, which makes a truth a truism, that places it in the direst peril of oblivion in the stress of modern life. Such a truth was well stated ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... novels have taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught: that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies, and ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield
... that. I don't quite understand that. But it has nothing to do with my present purpose. When I said that we were neither of us so young as we once were, I uttered what was a stupid platitude,—a foolish truism.' ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... which made its speedy realization hopeless, thus affording a superfluous illustration of the truth that the one deadly evil to be shunned by those who would remain philanthropists is a practical knowledge of men, and of the truism that the statesman's bane is an ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... seem to have any acquaintance with it. Yet grammar is not a difficult study, nor a lengthy one, and an understanding knowledge of its principles is of the greatest assistance in the formation of a good literary style. This is a truism: that is why it needs ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... happen, I confine myself to facts, eschewing imputations. It is a truism that life is full of coincidences, but whether these events comprised a coincidence, or not, each reader must decide for himself, according to his cynicism or his ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... is absolutely essential to a successful surprise. This is a military truism all the world over, but applies with special force amongst the Pathan tribes on the North-West Frontier of India, as indeed it did amongst the Boers, and for probably a very similar reason. They were not always professional spies whom the Boers ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... an illustration of the "pleasures of hope;" but an attempt to show the young reader that what we most desire, in moral and spiritual, as well as worldly things, we labor the hardest to obtain—a truism adopted by the heroine in the form of the principal title of the volume, Hope ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... singular assurance, has declared poetry the most philosophical of all writings—but it required a Wordsworth to pronounce it the most metaphysical. He seems to think that the end of poetry is, or should be, instruction; yet it is a truism that the end of our existence is happiness; if so, the end of every separate part of our existence, everything connected with our existence, should be still happiness. Therefore the end of instruction should be happiness; and happiness is another name for pleasure;—therefore the end ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... longer a question of defining or denying a simple central power, but of balancing the brain in a bewilderment of new powers which seem to overlap and might even conflict. Nature herself has become unnatural. The wind is blowing from the other side of the desert, not now with noble truism "There is no God but God," but rather with that other motto out of the deeper anarchy of Asia, drawn out by Mr. Kipling, in the shape of a native proverb, in the very story already mentioned; "Your gods and my gods, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... excellent in themselves, and indeed absolutely essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately applied they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science. From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... living, than any other land pretending to civilization. It is a fact that outside of Shanghai, Canton, Pekin and Tientsin, the people do not want many of the products of the outer world; but it is a truism that much profit accrues from teaching Asiatics to ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... "and for the last time, we were forcibly reminded of the old truism that a 'fleet' is created by long practice at sea in time of peace (cruising, not remaining in port), and that a collection of ships of various types hastily collected, which have only learned to sail together on the way to the theatre of operations, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... we should come to grief.' This was no barren truism, for I was ready with a plan of my own, though reluctant ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... a profound hush in the Executive Chamber. The feet of those who entered made no sound on the thick carpet. Those who were in the chamber offered evidence of the truism that there are situations where words fail to do ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... was born of politics. The victim of that outrage, and the hero of that terrible night, is happily with us to-day.... I will not offend him with any words of praise. But may I not say in the market-place what is the truism of the committee-room ... that when this gentleman did what he did, he brought to Reform the sympathy which ... has ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... critic, with a philosophic bias, is inclined to quarrel with the obvious human congruity of Shakespeare's utterances. What is the use of this constant repetition of the obvious truism: "When we are born we cry that we are come to this great ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... the occasion of this universal edifice. "Nothing, not God," he says, "is greater to one than oneself is;" a statement with an irreligious smack at the first sight; but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second. He will give effect to his own character without apology; he sees "that the elementary laws never apologise." "I reckon," he adds, with quaint colloquial arrogance, "I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all." The level follows the law ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 'I never make paradoxes; I wish I could. I merely said that a man may have an exquisite taste in Romanee Conti, and yet never have even smelt four ale. That's all, and it's more like a truism than a paradox, isn't it? Your surprise at my remark is due to the fact that you haven't realized what sin is. Oh, yes, there is a sort of connexion between Sin with the capital letter, and actions which are commonly called sinful: with murder, ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... begin with a truism. It is universally admitted that poetry, like each of the fine arts, has a field of its own. To run a surveyor's line accurately around the borders of this field, determining what belongs to it rather than to the neighboring arts, is always ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... a hackneyed truism," Dick said. "There can be no love that is not free. Always, please, remember the point of view is that of the higher types. And the point of view answers you, Dar. The vast majority of individuals must be held to law ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... of ethics. Any one who adds a general principle to knowledge has been a benefactor to the world. But there is a danger that, in his first enthusiasm, he may not recognize the proportions or limitations to which his truth is subjected; he does not see how far he has given birth to a truism, or how that which is a truth to him is a truism to the rest of the world; or may degenerate in the next generation. He believes that to be the whole which is only a part,—to be the necessary foundation which is really only ...
— Philebus • Plato
... it is asserted with great probability that The Prince has had a more direct action upon real life than any other book in the world, and a larger share in breaking the chains and lighting the dark places of the Middle Ages. It is a truism to say that Machiavellism existed before Machiavelli. The politics of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, of Louis XI. of France, of Ferdinand of Spain, of the Papacy, of Venice, might have been dictated by the author of The Prince. But Machiavelli was the first to observe, to compare, to diagnose, ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... truism wellnigh as musty as Hamlet's half cited proverb, to enlarge upon the evidence given in King Lear of a sympathy with the mass of social misery more wide and deep and direct and bitter and tender than ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... truism that the farther north the land, the greater the fertility, if there be any fertility at all. There is first the supply of unfailing moisture, with a yearly subsoiling of humus unknown to arid lands. Canada is super-sensitive ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... who have represented Shakspeare as the greatest borrower, plagiarist, and imitator that all time has brought forth. This, however, did not shake his faith in the poet's greatness; and to reconcile what to some would appear contradictory positions, he proposes the fact, I might say the truism, that the greatest man is not the most original, but the "most indebted" man. This, in the sense in which it is true, is saying no more than that the educated man is better than the savage; but, in the apologetic sense intended, it is equivalent to affirming that ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... happened because the corruption of the best is the worst. I always want to remind people of this truism when they have first come into contact with sex in some horrible and shameful way. That is one of the greatest misfortunes that can happen to any of us, and unfortunately it happens to many. Boys and girls are allowed to grow up in ignorance. The girls perhaps ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... who has eaten too much jam and feels that too much of a good thing is a truism is rather like the philosopher who, having studied everything, comes to the sad conviction that there is something wrong with the world. The child finds that large quantities of jam are a delusion; the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... a truism, but it is worth attention. Unlike the rest of us, labouring people are unable to shirk any of life's discomforts by "getting a man" or "a woman," as we say, to do the disagreeable or risky jobs which continually need to be done. If a ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... printed books. The vaster proportion of what is printed is not literature. It may be statements of fact and items of information; it may be sound science and unimpeachable record; it may be truism; it may be platitude; it is often sheer bathos or doggerel. We do not count these things as literature. A good deal of singing, piano-beating and tin-whistling is not music. It is only in virtue ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... is the best nurse of talent has long been a most humiliating truism; and the fountain of the Muses, bursting from a barren rock, is but too apt an emblem of the hard source from which much of the genius of this world has issued. How strongly the young translators of Aristaenetus were under the influence of this sort ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... things, have united in ascribing to the human mind everywhere certain possibilities. But one class of men have dissented from this view—the slave-holders of all ages. A justification of slavery has been sought in the alleged belief of the inferiority of the persons enslaved; while the broad truism of the possibilities of the human mind was confessed in all legislation that sought to prevent slaves from acquiring knowledge. So the slave-holder asserted his belief in the mental inferiority of the Negro, and then advertised ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... that "Washington had no power to control the nature of man." It may be, as he observes, a very simple remark; but, at all events, it has one advantage over his own, which is, that it is a very true one. Miss Martineau makes an observation in her book, which is quite as great a truism as mine; for she also says that "Human nature is ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... seems no subject escaped that eternal scribbler's attention; and if his abilities had equalled his disposition, he would probably have become the Juvenal of his age. Upon this occasion, however, he appears to have soared on rather a higher wing than usual; and the moral of his lay is the truism which has since been so beautifully expressed, ...
— A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 • Anonymous
... until the period of modern reform, this fact of human life was not merely an unconscious truism, it was consciously admitted. And it was ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... sentences as these occur over and over again—'And every man with whom was found' so-and-so 'brought it'; 'And all the women did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun'; 'And the rulers brought' so-and- so. Such statements embody the very plain truism that what we have settles what we are bound to give. Or, to put it into grander words, capacity is the measure of duty. Our work is cut out for us by the faculties and opportunities that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... been so often said, that from a proverb it has become a truism; but it must continue to be the refrain of those who write upon art. The subject is so long, and its ramifications are so intricate, that it is difficult to include ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... reply, but Mark understood that she assented to his truism, and they walked on as silent as the long shadows that followed them. A quarter of a mile from the high road the path reached the edge of the wold and dipped over into a wood which was sparse just below the brow, but which grew denser down the slope ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... sharp criticism passed in the House of Commons on the smallness of the recognition, the Prime Minister replied that Nelson's glory did not depend upon the rank to which he might be raised in the peerage; a truism too palpable and inapplicable for serious utterance, the question before the House being, not the measure of Nelson's glory, but that of the national acknowledgment. As Hood justly said, "All remunerations should be proportionate to the service done to the public;" and ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... feeling that the literal and naive reading of the analogy was probably after all nearer Aristotle's meaning, we may accept the words of Professor Butcher as its modern formulation. They sound, indeed, all but a truism: yet they are seen on examination to glide lightly over some psychological difficulties. Firstly, the step is a long one from the pity and fear felt by the Greek toward or about the actors, to a sharing of their emotion. The one is a definite external relation, limited to two emotions; ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... Bernald made a faint motion of acquiescence, which she instantly swept aside. "At least I think I can make you see why. (If you're sure he can't hear?) Why, it's just this—Pellerinism is in danger of becoming a truism. Oh, it's an awful thing to say! But then I'm not afraid of saying awful things! I rather believe it's my mission. What I mean is, that we're getting into the way of taking Pellerin for granted—as we do the air we breathe. We don't sufficiently lead ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... politician, addicted to extravagances and irregularity in private life. He gives more space to William Adolphus than to Wetter! So difficult it is even for superior minds to remain altogether unaffected by the lustre of rank; the old truism could not be ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... though it were a self-evident truism, that we cannot know that anything exists which we do not know. It is inferred that whatever can in any way be relevant to our experience must be at least capable of being known by us; whence it follows that if matter were ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... gives utterance to a truism, which the present scribe at least can most gratefully countersign, that "it takes a great deal of providence to bring a man to threescore years and ten." Not only are we in peril every time we take breath, both from the action of ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... irreverence. But all these qualities have characterized other schools of humor. There is the same element of surprise in De Quincey's anti-climax, "Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other which, perhaps, at the time he thought little of," as in Artemus's truism that "a comic paper ought to publish a joke now and then." The violation of logic which makes us laugh at an Irish bull is likewise the source of the humor in Artemus's saying of Jeff Davis, that "it would have been better than ten dollars in his pocket if he had never been ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... before that period has arrived, other results, no less surprising than incredible to the uninitiated will have ensued to give our neophyte courage and consolation in his difficult task. It would be but a truism to repeat what has been again alleged (in ignorance of its real rationale) by hundreds and hundreds of writers as to the happiness and content conferred by a life of innocence and purity. But often at the very commencement of the process some real physical result, unexpected and unthought ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... choking and swallowing all the time that she thought about it. She tried to comfort herself with the idea, that what he imagined her to be, did not alter the fact of what she was. But it was a truism, a phantom, and broke down under the weight of her regret. She had twenty questions on the tip of her tongue to ask Mr. Bell, but not one of them did she utter. Mr. Bell thought that she was tired, and sent her early to her room, where she sate long ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... cursed with a facility and an unhappy command of words, that makes them the prime nuisances of the society they affect. They try to cover their absence of matter by an unwholesome vitality of delivery. They look triumphantly round the room, as if courting applause, after a torrent of diluted truism. They talk in a circle, harping on the same dull round of argument, and returning again and again to the same remark with the same sprightliness, the same irritating ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perhaps noisily and indignantly, to so obvious a truism; but our own efforts in the same direction will not bear us out. Able men in England employ themselves in matters of a more practical character; and while we refuse to avail ourselves of what has been done elsewhere, no book, or books, which we produce on the interpretation of Scripture ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Barry-Smith descended to a truism. "It is usually better not to," said she, with the air of an authority. And latterly, addressing the facade of Notre Dame, "You see, Mr. Barry-Smith being so much older ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... play? Oh, the play be zephyr'd! The play is not the thing. In other words, the play is nothing. Point is to prepare immense assortment of entirely irrelevant epigrams. "Epigram, my dear Duke, is the refuge of the dullard, who imagines that he obtains truth by inverting a truism." That sounds well; must lay it by for use. Take "Virtue," for instance. "Virtue" offers a fine field for paradox, brought strictly up to date. Must jot down stray thoughts. (Good idea in the expression "Stray Thoughts." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... be a truism to declare that human nature is about as complicated a piece of machinery as could be found in the human world. And yet I do not know why it should be considered so. All things and all men do not run in grooves. A man to be a criminal need not be hopelessly bad in every other sense. I have ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... in themselves the best possible preventives against worry. They dignify life above worry. Worry is undignified, petty, paltry. Where you know you have something to do worth doing, you are conscious of the Divine Benediction, and who can worry when the smile of God rests upon him? This is a truism almost to triteness, and yet how few fully realize it. It is the unworthy potterers with life, the dabblers in life-stuff, those who blind themselves to their high estate, those who are unsure of their footing who worry. The true aristocrat is never ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... what they had not," they are men who, with average advantages, might have been famous in their day. God thought it better for them to "hide them in his tabernacle from the strife of tongues;" and—seldom believed truism—He knows best. Alexander shall not, according to his early dreams, "earn nine hundred pounds by writing a book, like Burns," even though his ideal method of spending be to buy all the boys in the parish "new shoes with iron tackets and heels," and send ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... ambitious of starting the most specious novelty, unless I imagine I have reason on my side. Originality implies independence of opinion; but differs as widely from mere singularity as from the tritest truism. It consists in seeing and thinking for one's-self: whereas singularity is only the affectation of saying something to contradict other people, without having any real opinion of one's own upon the matter. Mr. Burke was an original, though an extravagant ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... others are as good as I, and as well able to think, and as much entitled to their conclusions. Thirdly, even if I did regret, I should be ashamed to put my name to bad chemistry made to do duty for good reasoning. The declaration is an awkward attempt to saturate sophism with truism; but the sophism is left largely ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... spider-webs —but so quickly was she multiplied in real life that she seemed to have stepped from the book and the frame, ready-made, into the street and the drawing-room. And there is nothing wonderful about this. It is a truism to say that the genuine creations in fiction take their places in general apprehension with historical characters, and sometimes they live more vividly on the printed page and on canvas than the others ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... "There are many particulars relating to the construction of instruments which are unknown to modern artificers, as, namely, that the best strings are made when the north and the worst when the south wind blows," a truism well understood by experienced string manufacturers. Thomas Mace, in his curious book on the Lute, enters at some length into the question of strings, and speaks in glowing terms of his Venetian Catlins. The above references to strings, met with in the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... its time-honoured methods. Occasionally she is at pains to explain the feasibility of coincidences employed to secure dramatic interest. They are certainly never of an impossible kind, and no one would deny the truism that real life abounds in them. But has not a distinguished writer aptly pointed out that there are matters in which fiction cannot compete with life? As a rule, however, where a few such weaknesses exist, they do not count for much with the average reader when the principal scenes are as finely ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... Darwin and Wallace would not be worthy of notice were it not for the weight of authority of the names (i.e. Lyell's and yours), under whose auspices it has been brought forward. If it means what it says, it is a truism; if it means anything more, it is contrary ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... means both the fleshy member of the body, called the tongue, and also language or speech, just like our word "tongue," which has both significations. In the former sense it applies alike to man and beast; in the latter it is mere truism to say that it applies to man only. Jibh, in Hindi and Hindustani, means the tongue only in the sense of the member of the body, never in the sense of speech; hence it is equally applicable to man or brute. Ask any physician who has practised in India the Hindustani for "show the ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... all sublunary things is a truism so trite that I do not mean to insult the reader's understanding by attempting to prove it. I merely refer to it in order to say that the great Nor'-west is not exempt from that general rule ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... It is a truism to say that the "social question," the question how best to organize society, is as old as society itself. Great thinkers all down the ages, from Plato to Sir Thomas More, from More to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Rousseau to Saint Simon, Fourier, Louis Blanc, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... young," she said vaguely; but, after all, there was scant consolation in this truism, for the young suffer very keenly; a sense of impatience, of injustice, aggravates their pain. The old accept their sorrows more meekly; their reason comes to their aid. "Man is born to trouble," they say, and the philosophy enables them to endure ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... not this enough, and much more than enough, to make it a tyranny to them, and a detriment to society, that they should not be allowed to compete with men for the exercise of these functions? Is it not a mere truism to say, that such functions are often filled by men far less fit for them than numbers of women, and who would be beaten by women in any fair field of competition? What difference does it make that ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... It may seem a truism to say that the whole is made up of its parts, but all the same we often lose sight of this in our outlook ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... and meagre in others. Connections are omitted, passages of real and rare beauty jostling with long passages of the most common-place rhetoric. His platitudes, however, to myself who knew him, have a genuine ring about them; he never admitted a truism into his writing till it had become his own by vivid realization. As he ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... think, at least as well to conversation as to literature. The one thing needful is to have something to say. The way of saying it may best be left to take care of itself. A young man about town once remarked to me, in the tone of one who utters an accepted truism: "It is so much more interesting to talk about people than things." The sentiment was highly characteristic of the mental calibre and associations of the speaker; and certainly the habitual talk—for it is not conversation—of that section ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... reductions in hours of work has become a truism among trade unionists, who recognize that any reduction of hours of work eventually, though not perhaps immediately, results in a readjustment of wages, whether week-workers or piece-workers or both be ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... doing this is by means of bold challenge. The speaker offers to deposit a large sum of money with the local mayor to be paid over to a deserving charity, if any opponent of the speaker can, to the satisfaction of twelve honourable men, generally named, disprove some quite irrelevant truism, or can prove to the satisfaction of the same twelve men the falsity of some universally accepted platitude. This method is very popular with orators, and invariably carries ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all countries and in all ages, as authorizing the opinion, (deduced from all the foregoing,) that in every import of the word essential, which would not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be an essential difference between the language of prose and ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... ridiculed by Greece and Rome. The result of this would be that the condition of our social, civil, and political affairs would be incalculably improved. The Salic law would be unnecessary; it would be a superfluous truism. The European lady, strictly speaking, is a creature who should not exist at all; but there ought to be housekeepers, and young girls who hope to become such; and they should be brought up not to be arrogant, but to be domesticated and submissive. ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... follow him. The preceding will be a good lesson to any young sportsman, firstly, as to the value of not following up a wounded animal at once, and, secondly, as to taking every kind of precaution when you do. How often is sport spoiled from the want of appreciating the truism that a wall is no stronger than its weakest point. The importance of carefully guarding and refusing to be decoyed away from the pass into the main forest is of such consequence that I proceed to ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... often been stated that no two well-designed sewerage schemes are alike, and although this truism is usually applied to inland towns, it applies with far greater force to schemes for coastal towns and towns situated on the banks of our large rivers where the sewage is discharged into tidal waters. The essence of good designing is that every detail shall be carefully ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams
... call Happiness the Chief Good is a mere truism, and what is wanted is some clearer account of its real nature. Now this object may be easily attained, when we have discovered what is the work of man; for as in the case of flute-player, statuary, or artisan of any kind, or, more generally, all ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... at when it is considered that these men were his rivals, either as poets or prose-writers, and it is well known that such are generally as jealous of each other as are the ladies who are handsome of those who desire to be considered so. It is an old truism, and as true as it is old, that in the multitude of counsellors there is safety. I therefore will show you my opinion of this gifted but unfortunate genius: it may be estimated as worth little, but it has this merit: it comes from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... conventional economic truism that American industrialism is guaranteeing to some half of the forty millions of our industrial population a life of such limited happiness, of such restrictions on personal development, and of such misery and desolation when sickness ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... factors of modesty are numerous. To attempt to explain modesty by dismissing it as merely an example of psychic paralysis, of Stauung, is to elude the problem by the statement of what is little more than a truism. Modesty is a complexus of emotions with their concomitant ideas which we must unravel ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... wide question put into the mouth of a person despised and rebuked by the best characters in the play, is not likely to contain any cautiously formed and cherished opinion of the dramatist. At first sight this may seem almost a truism; but we have only to remind our readers that one of the passages oftenest quoted with admiration, and indeed separately printed and illuminated, is "The Seven Ages of Man," a passage full of inhuman contempt for humanity ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... would be a truism to say that I have always been interested in transportation. It has always been a subject of keen interest to me, I presume, because I was born with it. By the fortune of birth I came to live in a region where transportation has been through every one of its stages in this country. ...
— Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highway Transport Committee Council of National Defence • US Government
... mechanical imitators. I have assured you of this fact about fifteen years ago, and I expect to hammer away at it for the next fifteen years if my health and your amiability endure. The Chopin music is written for the piano—a truism!—so why in writing of it are not critics practical? It is the practical Chopin I am interested in nowadays, not the poetic—for the latter quality will ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... utterance of this truism, amid which arose from the other end of the table the piping tones of Mlle Remanjon's voice ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... man so much that he loses his unique personality. In the Southern States, however, he can be found in all his original glory. Here he can be regarded as a survival of preceding generations. In the South, before the war, the truism that there is dignity in toil was scarcely appreciated at its full worth. The negro understood, as if by instinct, that he ought to work for his white master, and that duties of every kind in the field, on the road and in the house, should ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... this century are for the most part so completely the commonplaces of the English-speaking world at the close of the century, that when we open the Heroes again it is apt to seem obvious, connu, the emphatic assertion of a truism that no one disputes. How infinitely better do we now, in 1895, know Dante and Shakespeare, Cromwell and Napoleon, than did our grandfathers in 1840! Who, nowadays, imagines Mahomet to have been an impostor, or Burns to have been a mere tipsy song-writer? What a copious literature has ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... This obvious truism is often forgotten by those who look on finance as an independent influence that can make money power out of nothing; and those who forget it are very likely to find themselves entangled in a maze of error. We can make the matter a little clearer if we go back to the original saver, ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... a truism, but one that has a peculiar truth in aviation, to say that history repeats itself. To-day we find large numbers of people who still cherish the opinion that—save perhaps when on service in war—it is nothing less than criminal foolishness for men to ascend in aeroplanes. That attitude ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... manner is aped by those who find an easy path to notoriety in imitation; the belief he held near his heart is worn as a creed like a badge; the truth he promulgated is distorted in a room of mirrors, half of it is a truism, the other half a falsism. That which began as a denunciation of tea-table morality, is itself the tea-table morality of the next generation: an outcry against cant may become the quintessence of cant; a revolt from tyranny the basis of a new tyranny; the condemnation ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... point in political economy. Malthus's opponents, as Mr. Bonar remarks,[217] attacked him alternately for propounding a truism and for maintaining a paradox. A 'truism' is not useless so long as its truth is not admitted. It would be the greatest of achievements to enunciate a law self-evident as soon as formulated, and yet previously ignored or denied. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... originate in the mind. But, if people would consider the nature of substance, they would have no doubt about the truth of Prop. vii. In fact, this proposition would be a universal axiom, and accounted a truism. For, by substance, would be understood that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself—that is, something of which the conception requires not the conception of anything else; whereas modifications exist in something external to themselves, and a conception ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... the captain, with that solemn deliberation which he was wont to assume when about to deliver a palpable truism. "W'en you've come to live as long as me you'll find that everything turns out different from what people have bin led to expect. ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... a truism to suggest that dramatic instinct and dramatic power of expression are naturally the first essentials for success in the art of story-telling, and that, without these, no story-teller would go very far; but I ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... Jewish and Christian sacred books, substituting for Jupiter flinging his thunderbolts the Almighty wrapped in thunder and sending forth his lightnings. Through the Middle Ages this was fostered until it came to be accepted as a mere truism, entering into all medieval thinking, and was still further developed by an attempt to specify the particular sins which were thus punished. Thus even the rational Florentine historian Villani ascribed floods and fires to the "too great pride of the city of Florence and the ingratitude of the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... on the sciences, and impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture." Which is only to say, that industry, frugality, and discretion, the three foundations of economy, are moral qualities, and cannot be attained without moral discipline: a flat truism, the reader may think, thus stated, yet a truism which is denied both vociferously, and in all endeavour, by the entire populace of Europe; who are at present hopeful of obtaining wealth by tricks of trade, without industry; who, possessing wealth, have lost in the use of it even ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... less than another', is universal, and a plain contradiction of Christ speaking of Himself as the co-eternal Son; 'My Father is greater than I'. Speaking of himself as the co-eternal Son, I say;—for how superfluous would it have been, a truism how unworthy of our Lord, to have said in effect, that "a creature is less than God!" And after all, Creeds assuredly are not to be imposed 'ad libitum'—a new Creed, or at least a new form and choice of articles ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... condition of commercial and industrial well-being is financial confidence. If the Public Exchequer of a country lacks confidence, it is a truism to say that consequently commercial confidence must be gravely impaired. The magnates of Lombard Street and Wall Street would view their Irish clients with unpleasant reserve. Irish bankers would in turn restrict advances to their customers, and these again would limit the credit of those ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... of the individual to the community, the purpose is being gradually lost sight of. To borrow from scientific phraseology, the tendency of the unit to remaining an "idiot" (in the Greek sense of the word!) varies directly as the magnitude of the mass. And this is a truism that public schools do not help to abolish. Although "school patriotism" is invariably quoted as a denial of this, there prevails in modern schools a definite inclination towards unsentimental cynicism in the ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... not saying it is the case among intelligent thinkers," explained the Philosopher, "but in popular literature the convention still lingers. To woman's face no man cares to protest against it; and woman, to her harm, has come to accept it as a truism. 'What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all that's nice.' In more or less varied form the idea has entered into her blood, shutting out from her hope of improvement. The girl is discouraged from asking herself the occasionally needful question: Am I on the ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... like," retorted the other. "Skoke is as good a name as Ascashe." A truism which the other did not seem disposed to question—the one meaning a snake, the other a spider, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... ROBINSON, author of The Plan of Campaign. It is rather a long tale to tell, for it takes 432 pages in the unravelling. It ends with a beautiful avowal that "the heart is no more unchanging than the mind, and that love's not immortal, but an illusion." As the utterer of this truism is a young married woman, it would seem that the foundation is laid for a sequel to Disenchantment that might be appropriately ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... lucid. Hengstenberg's difficulty is, that the subject is not about the sleep, but the gain. But is not sleep a gain? Can we forget the [Greek: hupnou doron] of Homer? that is, sufficient, undisturbed sleep, rest. Hengstenberg's remark, that all, even the beloved, must labour, is a mere truism. The Psalmist evidently opposes excessive and over-anxious labours, interfering with natural rest, to ordinary labour accompanied with refreshing sleep. The object of his censure is precisely the [Greek: merimna] which forms the subject of our Lord's warning; ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... some degree of surprise was justified. It is a truism of social life that far more distinctiveness is attached to the seemingly democratic severity of evening dress than to any other class of masculine garniture. Medenham now looked exactly what he was—a man born and bred ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy |
