"Atheist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was Rousseau. He was not a mocker, or a leveller, or a satirist, or an atheist. He resembled Voltaire only in one respect—in egotism. He was not so learned as Voltaire, did not write so much, was not so highly honored or esteemed. But he had more genius, and exercised a greater influence on posterity. His influence was more subtle ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... course a good deal of Zaluski's character, because my own existence and growth pointed out what he was not. Still, to study a man by a process of negation is tedious, and though I knew that he was not a Nihilist, or a free-lover, or an atheist, or an unprincipled fellow with a dangerous temper, yet I was curious to see ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... I was delivering a lecture at the Cathedral Hall of Westminster, in the course of the questioning which took place at the termination of the discourse, which was on vitalism, I was asked by one who signed his paper, "So and So, Atheist," "What would you say if you saw a duck come out of a hen's egg?" I recognised at once the idea at the back of the question and appreciated the fact that it had been asked by one who, as some one has said, "called himself an advanced free-thinker, but was really a very ignorant and vulgar person ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... are entirely with this that he speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He will make no pretence, therefore, to impartiality and detachment. He will do his best to be as fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the reader must reckon with this bias. He has found this faith growing ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... spoken word, but silent as to the mental conception also. It will be difficult to distinguish the follower of this religion from the follower of none, and the man who declines either to assert or to deny the existence of God, is practically in the position of an atheist. For theism enjoins the cultivation of sentiments of love and devotion to God, and the practice of their external expression. Atheism forbids both, while the simply non-theist abstains in conformity with the prohibition of the atheist and thus practically ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... Assembly in my brother's case, it was likely I might, if I stay'd, soon bring myself into scrapes; and farther, that my indiscrete disputations about religion began to make me pointed at with horror by good people as an infidel or atheist. I determin'd on the point, but my father now siding with my brother, I was sensible that, if I attempted to go openly, means would be used to prevent me. My friend Collins, therefore, undertook to manage a little for me. He agreed ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... maintained, and with a considerable degree of truth, that the principles of Pope's poem if pushed to their logical conclusion were destructive to religion and would rank their author rather among atheists than defenders of the faith. The very word "atheist" was at that day sufficient to put the man to whom it was applied beyond the pale of polite society, and Pope, who quite lacked the ability to refute in logical argument the attack of de Crousaz, was proportionately delighted when Warburton came forward ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... were a little better instructed in what it ought to stand for; and that they would not perswade themselves a Man is really and truly a Free-thinker in any tolerable Sense, meerly by virtue of his being an Atheist, or an Infidel of any other Distinction. It may be doubted, with good Reason, whether there ever was in Nature a more abject, slavish, and bigotted Generation than the Tribe of Beaux Esprits, at present so prevailing in this Island. ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the severest attacks. The small group of skeptics, which is hardly perceptible under Louis XIV, has obtained its recruits in the dark; in 1698 the Palatine, the mother of the Regent, writes that "we scarcely meet a young man now who is not ambitious of being an atheist."[4215] Under the Regency, unbelief comes out into open daylight. "I doubt," says this lady again, in 1722, "if; in all Paris, a hundred individuals can be found, either ecclesiastics or laymen, who ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... atheist, but traditionally pragmatic and eclectic; most important elements of religion are Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism; Muslim 2-3%, Christian ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... clergy and quality. As for religion, Brown never professed any, and used to say, that he understood the world better than to have the imputation of righteousness laid to his charge: and the world, to be even with him, really thought him an Atheist. But though Brown never made any professions of religion, yet it proceeded more from affectation than conviction. When he came upon his death-bed, he expressed remorse for his past life, and discovered at that period, sentiments which he had never ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... questions I could find no satisfactory answer. I became dissatisfied and finally ceased attending church. I could not accept the idea of God taught there, and at last my friends looked sadly upon me as an atheist. There I stood until I learned to know God as revealed in Science and Health, and then all my questionings were answered. In my girlhood I had always prayed to the God I held in mind, and when the shadows of sickness pain, and death came to my family, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... fire, newly hatched from death, had caught some of the conversation between his wife and the assistant who had recovered him to life. So she was gone, that brave, beautiful atheist girl—gone to test the truth. And she ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... may call an atheist anybody whose ideas about the Deity do not correspond with your own, is so largely acted upon by persons who are certainly not of Hume's way of thinking and, probably, so far from having read him, would shudder to open any book bearing ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... well marked in these lines: he was an excellent poet, but of abandoned morals, and of the most impious principles; a complete libertine and an avowed atheist. He lost his life in a riotous fray; for, detecting his servant with his mistress, he rushed into the room with a dagger in order to stab him, but the man warded off the blow by seizing Marlowe's wrist, and turned the dagger into ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... in its simple severity, could not even attempt to slake it. But on its simplicity a priesthood shook parures. Its severity was cloaked with mantles of gold. The founder, an atheist who had denied the gods, was transformed into one. About him a host of divinities was strung. The most violently nihilistic of doctrines was fanned into an idolatry puerile and meek. Nirvana became Elysium, and a religion which began as a heresy ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... true that there is in blasphemy a certain discharge of power which solaces the burdened heart. When an atheist, drawing his watch, gave God a quarter of an hour in which to strike him dead, it is certain that it was a quarter of an hour of wrath and of atrocious joy. It was the paroxysm of despair, a nameless appeal to all celestial powers; it was ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... Beethoven, praised the Septett of the latter; upon which the young man exclaimed, deprecatingly, "Ah, it is far from being a 'Creation'!" To which Haydn replied, "That you could not have written, for you are an atheist!" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... He held correspondence with and influenced most of the crowned heads of Europe. He became the hero of his countrymen. Christianity, and especially Catholicism, served only too often as his subjects of assault, but he was never, as his enemies called him, an atheist. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... When I told him all about it he shook his head doubtingly, and said he believed that all witchcraft was nothing but lies and deceit; whereat I was struck with great horror, inasmuch as I had hitherto held the young lord to be a wiser man, and now could not but see that he was an atheist. He guessed what my thoughts were, and with a smile he answered me by asking whether I had ever read Johannes Wierus, [Footnote: A Netherland physician, who, long before Spee or Thomasius, attacked the wicked follies of the belief in witchcraft prevalent in ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... principle; he confessed to me that he did not believe in anything. At the point of death he would not hear talk of God. He said, speaking of himself, "Let this carcass alone, it is now good for nothing." He would steal, lie and swear; he was an atheist and..... ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... are swayed chiefly by material interests and are blind to the force of ideas and the value of culture. Leslie Stephen, who is always ready to plead the cause of the Philistine, remarks: "As a clergyman always calls every one from whom he differs an atheist, and a bargee has one or two favorite but unmentionable expressions for the same purpose, so a prig always calls his adversary a Philistine." Mr. Matthew Arnold and the Church of ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... pay much attention to the opinions of others when they do not agree with his own views and interests, or coincide with his plans of reform or innovation; but having in his public career professed himself by turns an atheist and an infidel, the worshipper of Christ and of Mahomet, he could not decently silence those who, after deserting or denying the God of their forefathers and of their youth, continued constant and firm in their apostasy. Of those who deliberated concerning the restoration ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... search the Scriptures for yourselves; for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of the Lord, of that Eternal Son of whom the second Psalm speaks, in words which mobs and tyrants, the atheist and the superstitious, ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... home which counteracts the influence of the school, the child becomes a personage who is never educated at all. He is in like case with a child who in the family itself receives lessons, and what is more important, example, from a mother who is religious and from a father who is an atheist. He is not educated, he has had no sort of education. The only real education, that is to say, the only transmission to the children of the ideas of their parents consists of an education at home which is ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... across all classes. But it is absolutely necessary for the capitalist (who presides at a Licensing Committee, and also at a large dinner), it is absolutely necessary for him, to make a distinction between gin and champagne. The Atheist veto upon all miracles cuts across all classes. But it is absolutely necessary for the capitalist to make a distinction between his wife (who is an aristocrat and consults crystal gazers and star gazers in the West End), and vulgar miracles claimed by gipsies or travelling ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... naturally possessed by curiosity, knowing his master's opinions, and being himself a rabid follower of Cabanis (Cabaniste en dyable, with the y, which in Rabelais seems to convey an intensity of devilry)—Bianchon stole into the church, and was not a little astonished to see the great Desplein, the atheist, who had no mercy on the angels—who give no work to the lancet, and cannot suffer from fistula or gastritis—in short, this audacious scoffer kneeling humbly, and where? In the Lady Chapel, where he ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... certain Abbe Sergi was exciting the peasants against the French, and especially against Bonaparte; that he was preaching sedition and rebellion in Christ's name, and was showing to the ignorant laborers a letter, which he had received from Christ, in which it was declared that General Bonaparte was an atheist and a heretic, whom one ought to destroy and drive ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... The atheist is not so much the man who denies the existence of any god as the man to whom God is not God, who looks upon the Deity as subordinate to powers void of holiness and nobility, the man who will not ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... than you. They say he was educated in Paris, and that he is an atheist. He fought against the Turks in Candia, and is said to have distinguished himself there no less by his race-hatred and cruelty, than by ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... to his neighbors, a hopeless atheist, was unlike other Green Valley men in that he had to take a much earlier train to the city mornings and came home two trains later than the other men. Grandma Wentworth always said that it was that difference in Frank's train time that made ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... "although I have never offended against the laws of the State, of morality or of his paternal authority, merely because I do not share his blind reverence for the Catholic Church and her Ministers. On that account he looks upon me, not merely as Latitudinarian, but as a perfect Atheist, and a faithful old manservant of ours, who is much attached to me, and who accidentally saw my father's will, told me in confidence that he had left all his property to the Jesuits. I think this is highly suspicious, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... that could be brought against him. They say he is an Atheist. Would that be any use? He gave a lecture on 'Culture as a Creed' about three months ago which made some folk mad. The other professors are Christians, and, of course, all the preachers took it up. He compared Buddha with Christ, and said—oh, I remember!—that ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... a great stir in the camp of the Atheist, the Agnostic, the Higher Critic and particularly the Evolutionist, because of this ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... take the lesson home to thine own heart of adamant! Heaven made thee wiser than thy fellows, gave thee eyes to look into the secrets of nature, a sagacious heart, and a skilful hand; but thy pride has poisoned all these fair gifts, and made an ungodly atheist of one who might have been ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... answered Pan evasively, "that you are a sensationalist, a materialist, a sceptic, a revolutionist; and if you had not sought the assistance of a god, I should have said not much better than an atheist. I also think it is time I thought about some physic for you instead of metaphysics, which are bad for my head, and for your soul." Saying this, Pan, with rough tenderness, deposited the almost fainting maiden upon a couch of fern, and, ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... Horace The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... une chambre ardente. "I am neither," he said in the same phrase which we have formerly quoted, "a philosopher nor a physician. I believe in God, and am of the religion of my father. It is not everybody who can be an atheist. I was born a Catholic, and will fulfil all the duties of the Catholic church, and receive the assistance which it administers." He then turned to Dr. Antommarchi, whom he seems to have suspected of heterodoxy, which the doctor, however, disowned. "How can you carry it so far?" he said. "Can ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... never yet seen or heard any thing serious, that was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopedists, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, all are to me but impostors in their various ways. Fame or interest is their object; and after all their parade, I think a ploughman who sows, reads his almanack, and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... now, Not constant long to either, At length an infidel does grow, And ends his journey neither. Thus many a youth I've known set out, Half Protestant, half Papist, And rambling long the world about, Turn infidel or atheist.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... sixty, if you call that young, and in his second childhood. An Atheist, too. Tom Payn, Colonel Ingersoll, Viscount Amberly—those are his gods, the pagan! I'd burn him on a tar-barrel if I had my way. It's a pity we don't stick to some customs of ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... wandered from prescribed creeds, and became a liberal in her religious ideas. She has been called an Atheist, but every line she writes, and her life of self-sacrifice, disprove this assertion. Her "one prayer," to which she says she confined herself, is, to my mind, sublime with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... misery, or to know his misery without knowing the Redeemer, who alone can deliver him from it, is alike dangerous. The one knowledge constitutes the pride of the philosopher, the other the despair of the atheist. Man must therefore have the double experience, and so it has pleased God to reveal it. This the Christian religion does; in this it consists.” Again: “Christ is the centre in which alone we find at once God and our ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... of its leafless elm-trees has a meaning for me now, since I have read Balzac, different from what it had before. Is that muffled figure in the rumbling cart which passes me so swiftly the country doctor or the village priest, summoned to the death-bed of some notorious atheist? Is the slender white hand which closes those heavy shutters in that gloomy house the hand of some heart-broken Eugenie, desolately locking herself up once more, for another lonely night, with her sick hopes ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... guest. When the Holy Father gave his blessing from his window, and more especially at his audiences in the gallery of the Louvre, which were always crowded, precautions were taken against any outbreak of the indiscretion or levity to which the French are prone. We saw the atheist Lalande himself fall at the Pontiff's feet and kiss his slipper. In the public buildings which the Pope honored with his presence he was received as a sovereign. No one dared to betray more curiosity ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... knew him; I have been present when he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred. Lucretius was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist lay by his pillow and was his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... faithful disciples still Breasting the current to do His will. The little bird on the topmost bough Merrily pipes to the Poet below, Asking an answer as gay, I trow! But he hears the surging waves without,— The atheist's scoff and the infidel's doubt, The Pharisee's cant and the sweet saint's prayer, And the piercing cry for rest from care; And tears of pity and tears of pain Ebb and flow in every strain, As he ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... other hand durst do." While at his headquarters in the house of Major Thomas Pate, in Gloucester, a few miles east of West Point, he became ill of dysentery. Bacon's enemies accused him of being an atheist, but in his last hours he called in Mr. Wadding to prepare his mind for death. "He died much dissatisfied in mind," we are told, "inquiring ever and anon after the arrival of the frigates and soldiers from England, and asking if the ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker
... specifically Christian faith, and with a direct lead to unbelief in a future state. But, whether we suppose Shakspere to have been already led, as he might be by the initiative of his colleague Marlowe, an avowed atheist, to agnostic views on immortality, or whether we suppose him to have had his first serious lead to such thought from Montaigne, we find him to all appearance carrying further the initial impetus, and proceeding from the serene semi-Stoicism ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... combyned with the Spanniards to the distruccion of the Collony; that I ame an atheist, because I carryed not a Bible with me, and because I did forbid the preacher to preache; that I affected a kingdome; that I did hide of the comon provision in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this, sunned himself in the town's displeasure. For the sake of the public furor it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist, an anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone cared greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations of his passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in Wildman's grocery store he would stand whipping them ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... Spirit more lewd 490 Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love Vice for it self: To him no Temple stood Or Altar smoak'd; yet who more oft then hee In Temples and at Altars, when the Priest Turns Atheist, as did Ely's Sons, who fill'd With lust and violence the house of God. In Courts and Palaces he also Reigns And in luxurious Cities, where the noyse Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Towrs, And injury and outrage: And when Night ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Mason is obliged, by his tenure, to obey the moral Law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious Libertine. But though in ancient Times Masons were charged in every Country to be of the Religion of that Country or Nation, whatever it was, yet, 'tis now thought more expedient ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Browning first loved was the Shelley of 'Queen Mab', the Shelley who would have remodelled the whole system of religious belief, as of human duty and rights; and the earliest result of the new development was that he became a professing atheist, and, for two years, a practising vegetarian. He returned to his natural diet when he found his eyesight becoming weak. The atheism cured itself; we do not exactly know when or how. What we do know is, that it was with him a passing ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... I fell under his influence, he stood more aloof; and this made him the more impressive to a youthful atheist. He had a keen sense of language and its imperial influence on men; language contained all the great and sound metaphysics, he was wont to say; and a word once made and generally understood, he thought a real victory of man and reason. But he never dreamed it could ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... atheist have therefore no pretence to cheerfulness, and would act very unreasonably, should they endeavor after it. It is impossible for any one to live in good humour, and enjoy his present existence, who is apprehensive either of torment or of annihilation; ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... sovereignty. Chapter VI. The Existence Of Moral Evil, Or Sin, Reconciled With The Holiness Of God. Section I. The hypothesis of the soul's preexistence. Section II. The hypothesis of the Manicheans. Section III. The hypothesis of optimism. Section IV. The argument of the atheist—The reply of Leibnitz and other theists—The insufficiency of this reply. Section V. The sophism of the atheist exploded, and a perfect agreement shown to subsist between the existence of sin and the holiness of God. Section VI. The true and only foundation ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... our system out of hatred to the Established Church, though our system is ten times less liberal than the Church of England. Some of them have really come over to us. I myself confess a baronet [Sir Charles Wolesley] who presided over the first radical meeting ever held in England—he was an atheist when he came over to us, in the hope of mortifying his own church—but he is now—ho! ho!—a real Catholic devotee—quite afraid of my threats; I made him frequently scourge himself before me. Well, Radicalism does us good service, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... you do. He wanted her to go to church with little Eileen and me this morning. She's only a child, you know, and he naturally took it for granted that she was going. We both did. But just at the last moment she absolutely refused, told him quite frankly that she was—an atheist." ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... born leader of men—writes to his wife with the passionate simplicity of an enraptured child: "I doat upon you and the babes." And his letters end thus: "Kiss the babies for me ten thousand times. God Almighty for ever bless you, my dearest life and soul." (This from the "French Atheist." I hope his traducers are heartily ashamed of themselves.) Nor is it strange. When, in the beginning of his enterprise, he is in America, preparing to go to France on his great mission, he is troubled by the thought of his defenceless ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... renegade priest, who became an atheist, Socialist, and revolutionist, and was living at Naples when Captain Fourbin arrived there ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... denied, when a love mighty as every other passion of his soul failed him, his grief, ungovernable and frenzied as his rage, overwhelmed him, and the "taint of madness which ran in his line," flooded his brain. But when the atheist became a Christian; when, in his own words, he felt "the Spirit of God was not the chimera of heated brains, nor a device of artful men to frighten and cajole the credulous, but an existence to be felt and understood as the ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... revenge upon them. This son of his, we are told, was in general of an indifferent character, and once, when enamored of a slave girl kept by a common harlot merchant, happened to hear Theodorus, the atheist, arguing in the Lyceum, that if it were a good and honorable thing to buy the freedom of a friend in the masculine, why not also of a friend in the feminine, if, for example, a master, why not also a mistress? So putting the good argument and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Doddington and the Prince of Wales and his Leicester Fields Court. For libelling Whig noblemen, in his poem called "Manners," Dodsley, Whitehead's publisher, was summoned by the Ministers, who wished to intimidate Pope, before the House of Lords. He appears to have been an atheist, and was a member of the infamous Hell-Fire Club, that held its obscene and blasphemous orgies at Medmenham Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir Francis Dashwood, where every member assumed the name of an Apostle. Later in life ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Jacobite believes in the divine right of Bishops. He that believes in the divine right of Bishops believes in the divine authority of the Christian religion. Therefore, Sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig; for Whiggism is a negation of ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... generally speaking; but I had the impression that poor old Lindau had once done his best to save the country. I don't always like his way of talking, but I know that he is one of the truest and kindest souls in the world; and he is no more an atheist than I am. He is my friend, and I can't ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of which I shall speak again later, he insists that "principles, programs, and rules are not nearly as important as that the persons who put them into execution shall have the devil in them."[5] Although an avowed and militant atheist, Bakounin could not subdue his worship of the king of devils, and, had anyone during his life said that Bakounin was not only a modern Satan incarnate, but the eight other devils as well, nothing could have delighted him more. And no doubt he ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... me, however, to be patient and peaceable, in which case he said he would endeavour to devise some plan to satisfy me. Amongst other things, he observed that the bishops hated a sectarian more than an Atheist. Whereupon I replied, that, like the Pharisees of old, they cared more for the gold of the temple than the temple itself. Throughout the whole of our interview he evidently laboured under great fear, and was continually ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the first members of our circle was Liputin, an elderly provincial official, and a great liberal, who was reputed in the town to be an atheist. He had married for the second time a young and pretty wife with a dowry, and had, besides, three grown-up daughters. He brought up his family in the fear of God, and kept a tight hand over them. He ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a mingled feeling of astonishment and respect. They are verily miracles of that divine goodness of which they are unable to pronounce the name. If there is a man on earth who ought to fall on both knees and shed burning tears of gratitude, it is the man who believes himself an atheist, and who has received from Providence so keen a taste for what is noble and pure, so strong an aversion for evil, that his sense of duty remains firm even when it has lost all its supports. But the exception does not make the rule; and ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... Concubine: All Bavaria was scandalized by her impudent and abandoned conduct. Her feasts vied in luxury with Cleopatra's, and Lindenberg became the Theatre of the most unbridled debauchery. Not satisfied with displaying the incontinence of a Prostitute, She professed herself an Atheist: She took every opportunity to scoff at her monastic vows, and loaded with ridicule the ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... "If only that meant to me what it does to you, I might risk it. I'm no blatant atheist or anti- religionist. I'm simply agnostic; I don't believe. That's all. You have faith. I haven't. I didn't wish to get rid of my faith. ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... been rightly described as a "splendid work" on Burns;[52] while M. Emile Legouis, in a minute examination of "The Prelude," has contrasted and compared the orthodox Wordsworth of maturity with the juvenile semi-atheist of Coleridge. Travelling farther afield, M. W. Thomas has devoted an exhaustive volume to Young of the Night Thoughts; M. Leon Morel, another to Thomson; and, incidentally, a flood of fresh light has been thrown upon ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... of their revelries over the memory of Burns, was unrestrained by limit, order, or degree. No nation is warmer than the Scotch in worship of its heroes when dead and buried: one perfervid enthusiast says of the former "Atheist, Deist, and Pantheist": "Carlyle is gone; his voice, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, will be heard no more": the Scotsman newspaper writes of him as "probably the greatest of modern literary men;... before the ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... bomb has fallen very successfully in America, and the list of killed and wounded is extensive. I have several quires of paper sent me every day, calling me monster, thief, atheist, deist, etc." ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... Adrian, and reaches for the whisky. 'I've never known a Dutchman a professing Atheist, but some few have been rather active Agnostics since the British sat down in Pretoria. Old man Van Zyl—he told me—had soured on religion after Bloemfontein surrendered. He was a Free Stater for ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... qualities of his genius: the few and simple lines in which his purer and nobler characters are rapidly but not roughly drawn suffice to give them all due relief and all requisite attraction. The virtuous victims of the murderous conspirator whose crimes and punishment are the groundwork of "The Atheist's Tragedy" have life and spirit enough to make them heartily interesting: and the mixed character of Sebastian, the high-hearted and gallant young libertine whose fearless frankness of generosity brushes aside and breaks away the best-laid schemes of his father, is as vividly and gracefully ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... pyrrhonism; bout &c. 485; agnosticism. atheism; deism; hylotheism[obs3]; materialism; positivism; nihilism. infidelity, freethinking, antichristianity[obs3], rationalism; neology. [person who is not religious] atheist, skeptic, unbeliever, deist, infidel, pyrrhonist; giaour[obs3], heathen, alien, gentile, Nazarene; espri fort[Fr], freethinker, latitudinarian, rationalist; materialist, positivist, nihilist, agnostic, somatist[obs3], theophobist[obs3]. V. be irreligious &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of being divided into an infinity of infinitely divisible lines; and a cube, that is, a solid, infinitely expanded, is capable of being divided into an infinity of infinitely divisible planes. In fine, metaphysic theology furnishes no argument against the infinite series of the atheist. But geology does. Every plant and animal that now lives upon earth began to be during the great Tertiary period, and had no place among the plants and animals of the great Secondary division. We can trace several of our existing quadrupeds, such as the badger, the hare, the fox, the red deer, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... away! Perform your music!" he muttered in a deep bass. "Much the Count will care for your singing! He doesn't care whether you sing with music or without. . . . For he is an atheist." ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Gradkoski. But Gronovitz, the Hebrew teacher, crypto-atheist and overt revolutionary, who read a Hebrew edition of the "Pickwick Papers" in synagogue on the Day of Atonement, was with Strelitski, and a bigot whose religion made his wife and children wretched was with the cautious Simon Gradkoski. Froom Karlkammer ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... as distinguished from respect for law—have been the ruling characteristics of the Spanish mind. Among the fatal effects of this has been the extinction of rational piety and rational patriotism. If a man was not a good Catholic he was pretty sure to be an atheist. If he did not honor the king he was an outlaw. The wretched story of Spanish dissensions beyond seas, and the loss of the vast American empire, is distinctly traceable to the exaggerated sentiment of personal honor, unrestrained by the absolute authority of the crown. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... truth. The common law thought it dangerous to allow a jury to hear any witness not under oath, nor under such an oath as implied his belief in the existence of a God, or any witness having a pecuniary interest, in the event of the cause. An atheist or an agnostic could not testify. The plaintiff and the defendant could not. These restrictions ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... Ray Kennedy as a young man of steady habits and blameless life, but she regretted that he was an atheist, and that he was not a passenger conductor with brass buttons on his coat. On the whole, she wondered what such an exemplary young man found to like in Thea. Dr. Archie she treated respectfully because of ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... think me quite an atheist," said her teacher, with a deprecatory smile and gesture. "Life, nature, the universe, with their teeming and ever-unfolding wonders tell me that there is a Force—a controlling power and intelligence behind them. We call that force 'God.' We say that God is omnipotent, all wise and good; and ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... America had won the admiration of our country. I myself admired his eloquence, his patriotism, his courage in office as Prime Minister of France; but his dying words rolled like a wintry sea over all nations, "I am lost!" Gambetta was an atheist, a man whose public indignities to womanhood were demonstrated from Paris to Berlin. Gambetta's patriotism for France could never atone for his atheism, and his infamy towards women. His death, in the dawn of 1883, was ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... replaced by his assistant, Mr. Uttley, one of the most remarkable characters I ever met with. In those days, in a northern provincial town, it required immense courage to avow religious heterodoxy of any advanced kind, yet Mr. Uttley said with the utmost simplicity that he was an atheist, and the religious world called him "Uttley the Atheist," a title which he accepted as naturally as if it implied no contempt or antagonism whatever. He was by no means devoid of physical courage also, for I remember that at one time ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... I'm no the thing I shou'd be, Nor am I even the thing I cou'd be, But twenty times, I rather wou'd be An atheist clean, Than under gospel colours hid be ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... which felt themselves injured by the creation of an unsectarian institution on so large a scale. Typical was the attack made by an eminent divine who, having been installed as president over one of the smaller colleges of the State, thought it his duty to denounce me as an "atheist,'' and to do this especially in the city where I had formerly resided, and in the church which some of my family attended. I took no notice of the charge, and pursued the even tenor of my way; but the press took it ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the less believe them deducible from these properties or these causes. Are, therefore, the philosophers atheists, because they do not reply, it is God who is the author of these effects? Is the industrious workman, who makes gunpowder, to be challenged as an atheist, because he says the terrible effects of this destructive material, which inspired the native Americans with such awe, which raised in their winds such wonder, are to be ascribed to the junction of the apparently harmless substances of nitre, charcoal and sulpher, set in activity ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... gone! oh, madness wild Dwells in that drear and Atheist doom! But death of horror is despoiled, When Heaven shines forth beyond ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... I'm no the thing I should be, Nor am I even the thing I could be, But, twenty times, I rather would be An atheist clean, Than under gospel colours hid ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... triumvirate—I fear To call you back to earth, for ye debas'd With vile impurities the comic muse, And made her delicate mouth pronounce such things As would disgust a Wilmot in full blood, Or shock an Atheist roaring o'er his cups[13] O shameful profligate abuse of powers, Indulg'd to you for higher, nobler purposes, Than to pollute the sacred fount of virtue, Which, plac'd by heaven, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... and have all the Flunkies of the Universe shouting at his heels, yet will I know well that he is an Inanity; that for him and his there is no continuance appointed, save only in Gehenna and the Pool. Alas, the Atheist world, from its utmost summits of Heaven and Westminster-Hall, downwards through poor seven-feet Hats and 'Unveracities fallen hungry,' down to the lowest cellars and neglected hunger-dens of it, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... whole thing might be happening in Wimbledon. He went to the Wesleyan Connexional School. He went to hear Moody and Sankey. "I was," he writes, "wholly unmoved by their eloquence; and felt bound to inform the public that I was, on the whole, an atheist. My letter was solemnly printed in Public Opinion, to the extreme horror of my numerous aunts and uncles." That is the philosophical atmosphere; those are the religious postulates. It could never cross the mind of a man of the Garrison ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... efforts seemed to leave my uncle cold: he kept saying, "Why do you do that?" or, "I don't need anything." He was even cooler with my aunt; besides, he paid very little attention to her. In her eyes he was an atheist, a heretic, a Voltairian (in fact, he had learned French in order to read Voltaire in the original). I found Uncle Jegor as David had described him. He was a large, heavy man, with a broad, pock-marked ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... Conrad I here describe simply a new variety of moralist, differing from the general only in the drift of the doctrine he preaches? Surely not. He is no more a moralist than an atheist is a theologian. His attitude toward all moral systems and axioms is that of a skeptic who rejects them unanimously, even including, and perhaps especially including, those to which, in moments of aesthetic detachment, he seems to give a formal and resigned sort of assent. It is ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... religious awe, Which keeps men free, and yet is man's great law! What can they but the worst of Atheists be Who, while they word it 'gainst impiety, Affront the throne of God with their false deeds? Alas! this wonder in the Atheist breeds. Are these the men that would the age reform, That Down with Superstition cry, and swarm This painted glass, that sculpture, to deface, But worship pride and avarice in their place? Religion ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... belles-lettres. She will maybe never let ye within the door, but a shilling a week of outdoor relief ye are sure of—for she sets up for being full of the milk of human kindness. She set her cap at John Home when he came home from London. She would never even allow that Davie Hume was an atheist, whilk was as clear as that I hae a nose to my face!—— Off with you to Fanny's at the Sciennes. And a long guid day to the pair of ye—ye are a disobedient regardless lassock, and ye are heapin' up wrath again the day of wrath, but for all that I'm no sayin' that I'll forget ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... second letter, "you could not have bin farther off from the truth of the thing." "What is added of Socinians and Arminians, in respect of mee, is groundless. I may as well be called a Papist, or Mahometan; Pagan or Atheist. And trulie, Sir, you are wholly mistaken in the whole course of my studies. You say you find me largelie in their Apologia; to my knowledge I never saw or heard of the book before! . . . I have not read manie ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... from the fortuitous concourse of atoms? You might as well say that Homer's Iliad, or Voltaire's Henriade, is a result of the fortuitous concourse of written characters.' Now for my part, I should be very sorry to use that reasoning to an atheist; the comparison would give him a very easy game to play. According to the laws of the analysis of chances, he would say to me, I ought not to be surprised that a thing comes to pass when it is possible, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... defender of the Nolan philosopher, went a step further, and declared pantheism itself to be "veiled atheism." Moreover, she says, "So thoroughly does pantheism strike at the root of all idea of God, as taught by theists, that we can scarce think that Bruno was unfairly judged when called atheist by his contemporaries; the conception of the pantheist cannot be called a God in the commonly accepted sense ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... last they knew how kings were made! It was decided by Jad-ben-Otho while the candidate was still a suckling babe! Wonderful! A miracle! and this divine creature in whose presence they stood knew all about it. Doubtless he even discussed such matters with their god daily. If there had been an atheist among them before, or an agnostic, there was none now, for had they not looked with their own eyes upon the ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Almost infinite power of the meanest of passions And give advice. Of that, although always a spendthrift And now the knife of another priest-led fanatic Argument in a circle Aristocracy of God's elect As with his own people, keeping no back-door open At a blow decapitated France Atheist, a tyrant, because he resisted dictation from the clergy Behead, torture, burn alive, and bury alive all heretics Better to be governed by magistrates than mobs Burning with bitter revenge for all the favours he had received Calumny is often a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... pages, is common to, and follows as the corollary from, all systems in which the personality and transcendence of God are either explicitly denied or virtually ignored. Monism, that is to say,—whether of the idealistic or the materialistic variety, whether pantheist or atheist in complexion—finds its ethical ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... excellent Thy Name, O Lord"), which is a stirring tribute of praise; an aria ("An Infant raised by Thy Command"), describing the meeting of David and Goliah; a trio, in which the Giant is pictured as the "monster atheist," striding along to the vigorous and expressive music; and three closing choruses ("The Youth inspired by Thee," "How excellent Thy Name," and a jubilant "Hallelujah"), ending in ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... that his highest desire was that there should be a monument to himself somewhere in the Alps which should be only a great stone with its face smoothed and this short inscription cut in it, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Atheist." ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... remember hearing, not long ago, in Paris, of a young Radical diplomatist who, with the good taste which characterizes the school now dominant in French politics, took occasion to mention to a well-known ecclesiastical statesman that he was an Atheist. "O de l'atheisme a votre age," said the Nuncio, with a benign smile: "pourquoi, quand l'impiete suffit et ne vous engage a rien?" But with the new signification imposed upon the word, a profession of Atheism would pledge one in quite another sense: it would ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... hostility in reference to religion and to the whole religious question; while a great many of the much-read works of belle lettres never tire of teaching the reading public that the religious question really no longer exists for the educated man, on the other hand, nobody, not even the extremest atheist and enemy of religion, wishes to renounce the reputation of having moral principles. Thus it happens that the positions taken by the Darwinians in reference to the ethical question are less varied than ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... seekest late and long A License from the Holy Book For brutal lust and fiendish wrong, Man of the Pulpit, look! Lift up those cold and atheist eyes, This ripe fruit of thy teaching see; And tell us how to heaven will rise The incense of this sacrifice— This blossom of the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Lucretia Borgia, it appears, was a grievously misunderstood woman, and Heliogabalus a most exemplary monarch; even the dog in the manger may have been a nervous animal in search of rest and quiet. As for Shakespeare, he was an atheist, a syndicate, a lawyer's clerk, an inferior writer, a Puritan, a scholar, a nom de plume, a doctor of medicine, a fool, a poacher, and another man of the same name. Information of this sort crops up on every side. Even the newspapers are infected; truth ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... earth, earths round suns, the whole host of suns wander round a greater sun, Our Father, that art thou.'' In this inexpressibly lofty verse there is essentially, and only in an extremely intensified fashion, evidence of the existence of God, and if the convinced atheist should read this verse he would, at least for the moment, believe in his existence. At the same time, a real development of evidence is neither presented nor intended. There are magnificent images, unassailable true propositions: the moon goes round about the earth, the earth about the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... she said. "When he was—all right, he was an atheist. Imagine, in this house! He had the most terrible books, Miss Blakiston. And, of course, when a man believes there is no hereafter, he is apt to lead a wicked life. There is ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... yourself perceive they are a part of health. Did you remember your cinchona this morning? Good. Cinchona also is a work of nature; it is, after all, only the bark of a tree which we might gather for ourselves if we lived in the locality. What a world is this! Though a professed atheist, I delight to bear my testimony to the world. Look at the gratuitous remedies and pleasures that surround our path! The river runs by the garden end, our bath, our fish-pond, our natural system of drainage. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one," cried the atheist. "Divinities are senseless, useless, barriers to progress and ambition, a curse to man. ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... one of America's greatest statesmen, said, 'I should have been an atheist if it had not been for one recollection—and that was the memory of the time when my departed mother used to take my little hand in hers and cause me on my knees to say, "Our Father who ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... them laugh; and believed that Jupiter himself laughed with them at the smart sayings of a poet. Mr. Collier[1], an Englishman, in his remarks upon their stage, attempts to prove that Aristophanes was an open atheist. For my part, I am not satisfied with the account either of one or the other, and think it better to venture a new system, of which I have already dropped some hints in this work. The truth is, that the Athenians ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... SUPERSTITION! not that oft Your pitiless rites have floated with man's blood The skull-pil'd Temple, not for this shall wrath Thunder against you from the Holy One! But (whether ye th' unclimbing Bigot mock With secondary Gods, or if more pleas'd Ye petrify th' imbrothell'd Atheist's heart, The Atheist your worst slave) I o'er some plain Peopled with Death, and to the silent Sun Steaming with tyrant-murder'd multitudes; Or where mid groans and shrieks loud-laughing TRADE More hideous packs ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... establish a grand "Congregation of God in the Spirit"; and now he heard, to his deep disgust, that his Brethren in Europe had lowered the ideal of the Church, and made vulgar business bargains with worldly powers. What right, he asked, had the Brethren to make terms with an Atheist King? What right had they to obtain these degrading "concessions?" The whole business, he argued, smacked of simony. If the Brethren made terms with kings at all, they should take their stand, not, forsooth, as good workmen who would help to fatten the soil, but rather as loyal ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... went their way. The doctors of divinity bade me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble myself about that either; so they called me Atheist and went their way. After them came the politician, who said there was only one purpose in Nature, and that was to get him into parliament. I told him I did not care whether he got into parliament or not; so he called ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... Church in all its ramifications the most charitable and liberal of all the forms of Christianity with which I have come in contact. No stranger is turned from the doors of a Greek convent or refused such succor as is in the power of its inmates, be he Protestant, atheist, or even of their bitterest enemies, the Roman Catholics. No questions are ever asked, and it has twice happened to me that I have lodged at a Greek convent during the most rigid fasts of the Church, when the inmates sat down to a dinner of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... of the present to all the future, the immeasurable consequence of every thought and deed, the ultimate disparition of evil, and the power of attainment to conditions of infinite memory and infinite vision,—cannot be termed either an atheist or a materialist, except by bigotry and ignorance. Profound as may be the difference between his religion and our own, in respect of symbols and modes of thought, the moral conclusions reached in either case ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... fist, Nor enter the debate an atheist; But when they say there is a God I ask Why Bartlett, then, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... atheist, who in the name of truth repudiates the word God, is really manifesting (in his own different way) the belief which he cannot escape, in the divine righteousness and its lawful claim ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... heard me tell of Ann, the girl to whom I was so devoted in Italy. I should think, uncle, that you of the cloth would find Ann a most interesting subject. Not that she's of your flock. Her mother was a passionate Catholic. Her father a relentless atheist. He wrote a famous attack on the church which Ann tells me hastened her mother's death. The conflict shows curiously in Ann. When we were together in Florence a restlessness would many times come upon her. She would say, 'You go on home, Katie, without ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... omission of a punctuation mark, which may involve claims to thousands of dollars. Even the separation of one word into two may reverse the meaning of the sentence, yet not betray itself by any oddity of phrase, as when the atheist who had asserted that "God is nowhere" found himself in print standing sponsor for the statement that "God is now here." The same trick of the types was played on an American political writer in his own paper regarding his pet reform, which he meant to assert ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... Parr. She had taken a false step, and had lived to mourn it. Neglecting the command not to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers, she had married Sir Thomas Seymour very shortly after King Henry's death. It can be no lack of charity to call a man an unbeliever, a practical Atheist at least, whose daily habit it was to swear and walk out of the house when the summons was issued for family prayers. Poor Katherine had all the piety on her own side, but she had not to bear the penalty she had brought on herself ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... Reformation, from his position as Emperor of Germany, he would soon have been diverted from any such thought by considerations drawn from his position as King of the Spains. A Mussulman, or a Hebrew, or an avowed atheist would have had a better chance of being a powerful and popular sovereign at Valladolid than a pious man who should have been inclined to look with favor upon Dr. Luther. It may be doubted if even a king could have been safe from the inquiries ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... Nature is not a thing to be deplored; it is a thing to rejoice at, when properly conceived. It awakens a kind of religious enthusiasm even in Haeckel, who clearly perceives but a limited aspect of it; yet the perception is vivid enough to cause him, this so-called Atheist, to close his Confession of Faith ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... advocate of Providence and Virtue, an old Scotch Pedlar—retired indeed from business—but still rambling about in his former haunts, and gossiping among his old customers, without his pack on his shoulders. The other persons of the drama are, a retired military chaplain, who has grown half an atheist and half a misanthrope—the wife of an unprosperous weaver—a servant girl with her infant—a parish pauper, and one or two other personages of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the speakers, a sickening sense of dismay at his heart. His ideal was the daughter of Luke Raeburn! And Luke Raeburn was an atheist leader! ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... tackled in the open sooner or later, and it is a matter of authentic history that he struggled to bring and ultimately succeeded in bringing back religious ordinances to France. He declared that no good government could exist for long without it. His traducers proclaimed him an atheist, and we hear the same claptrap from people now who have not made themselves acquainted with the real history of the man and his times. We do not say he was a saint, but he was a better Christian, both in profession ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... calm tide of uninterrupted prosperity, and rejoicing in the vigor of health, he forgets there is a God, or becomes thoughtless that the heavens do rule, and begins, like the king of Babylon, to ascribe all his success to his own power, foresight and management, and is practically an atheist. But however thoughtless men may be, yet there is a God who governs the world, and will so order and direct his providence, that every one who goes counter to the principles of rectitude is doomed, inevitably doomed, ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... more than once been misrepresented with respect to his religious views. He has been called an agnostic, an atheist, even a pagan. Passages in nearly a score of his poems must be read and compared before an opinion can properly be given on the point. That he was a doubter, and to some extent a fatalist, appears certain; but there is nothing to support the charge ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... king, if he pleases, so long as he drinks for him, and his writings will never do the government so much harm, as his drinking does it good; for true subjects will not be much perverted by his libels; but the wine-duties rise considerably by his claret. He has often called me an atheist in print; I would believe more charitably of him, and that he only goes the broad way, because the other is too narrow for him. He may see, by this, I do not delight to meddle with his course of life, and his immoralities, though I have ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... have been good and bad Men of all Sects and all Persuasions; but before we know any Thing of Men's Lives, Nothing can be worse in the Civil Society, than an Atheist, caeteris paribus. For it would be ridiculous to say, that it is less safe to trust to a Man's Principle, of whom we have some Reason to hope, that he may be with-held by the Fear of Something, than it is to trust to one who ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... 1826. Ultimately he passed nine years in jail, and showed unflinching courage in maintaining the liberty of speech. The Utilitarians, as Professor Bain believes, helped him during his imprisonments, and John Mill's first publication was a protest against his prosecution.[21] A 'republican, an atheist, and Malthusian,' he was specially hated by the respectable, and had in all these capacities claims upon the sympathy of the Utilitarians. One of Carlile's first employments was to circulate the Black Dwarf, edited by Thomas Jonathan Wooler ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... was their Rector, and could not be removed, and were glad that theirs was no common Vicar like that of Coldingham, dependent on the caprices of others. For, with the exception of two bad characters and one atheist, the whole village, Conservatives or Liberals (there were Liberals now that they were beginning to believe that the ballot was really secret), were believers in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wind Shrieks in the solitary aisles. When he Who gives his life to guilt, and laughs at all The laws that God or man has made, and round Hedges his seat with power, and shines in wealth,— Lifts up his atheist front to scoff at Heaven, And celebrates his shame in open day, Thou, in the pride of all his crimes, cutt'st off The horrible example. Touched by thine, The extortioner's hard hand foregoes the gold Wrung from the o'er-worn ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... 201: Khaffer (singular number) is an Arabic term, applied to all who are not Muhamedans; all Pagans, Jews, and Christians, are called Khaffer, K'fer (plural) Kaffir billa, an atheist: hence Caffraria, the name of the country near ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... father objects to me specially because I am a Jew. If I were an atheist he might, perhaps, say nothing on the subject of religion. On this matter as well as on others it seems to me that your father has hardly kept pace with the movements of the age. Fifty years ago, whatever claim ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... like to avail very little when they come upon their trials." "The parson," he continued, "will believe nothing of all this; so that the whole town cries out: 'Shame! that one of his cast should be such an atheist.'"[26] ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... mind, though in a lesser degree, about the fate of the remainder of the Russian colony. Were they not all her brothers and sisters—these laughing, round-cheeked primitives? The magistrate, that caricature of a man, that vindictive and corrupt atheist, that tiger in human form, was doubtless thirsting for the blood of those still at liberty on Nepenthe. How much longer would Peter escape his malice? The dear boy! Her lambkin, her little soul—she had learnt to babble a few words of Russian—her ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the full cry is against you, you shan't have fair play for your life. If you can't be fairly run down by the hounds, you will be treacherously shot by the huntsmen. No, turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but poet. A modern poet is worse, more servile, timorous, and fawning, than any I have named: without you could retrieve the ancient honours of the name, recall the stage of Athens, and be allowed the force ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... had, of course, the accredited weapons of their party wherewith to attack the adversary, and Stopford was called everything, from Radical up to Atheist. Thus the battle began, and fiercely was it fought; but suffice it to say, that all the usual means for obtaining the independent suffrage of freeborn Englishmen were put in requisition. Voters suddenly emerged from corners wherein no freeholds had been previously dreamed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... we can do any good to an atheist? Besides, we have to consider our reputation. Whatever good we might do, it would be believed that the ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... He asked puzzling questions, and brought forward arguments which seemed to savor of something different from pure Lutheranism. The King suspected that his son was inclined to be a heretic of some sort or other, whether Calvinist or Atheist his Majesty did not very well know. The ordinary malignity of Frederic William was bad enough. He now thought malignity a part of his duty as a Christian man, and all the conscience that he had stimulated his hatred. The flute was broken; ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... impiety and avarice have stained the virtues or the reputation of Tribonian. In a bigoted and persecuting court the principal minister was accused of a secret aversion to the Christian faith, and was supposed to entertain the sentiments of an atheist and a pagan, which have been imputed, inconsistently enough, to the last philosophers of Greece. His avarice was more clearly proved and more sensibly felt. If he were swayed by gifts in the administration of justice, the example of Bacon will again occur: nor can the merit of Tribonian ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... after all the fact that a number of men draw the same inference from given facts does not show that it is not an inference. You will sometimes find Metaphysicians contending that nobody is really an Atheist, since everybody necessarily supposes himself to be in contact with an Other of which he is nevertheless a part. I do not deny that, if you water down the idea of God to the notion of a vague 'something not ourselves,' you may possibly make out that everybody is explicitly or implicitly ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... Holoptychius Nobilissimus,—fast locked up in its red sandstone rock,—laid by, as it were, for ever,—will be seen, if we but set ourselves to unravel its texture, to form such an instance of nice adaptation of means to an end as might of itself be sufficient to confound the atheist. Let me attempt placing one of these scales before the reader, in its character as a flat counter of bone, of a nearly circular form, an inch and a half in diameter, and an eighth-part of an inch in thickness; and then ask him to bethink himself of the various means by which ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... denounced as "atheist" and "infidel"—epithets that do not frighten us much now, since they have been applied to most of the really great and good men who have ever lived. But then such words set fire to masses of inflammable prejudices, and there were conflagrations of wrath ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... who believe there is a GOD, and acknowledge the debt of homage which mankind owes to the supreme Governor of the World, doubt the existence of the Devil, except here and there one, whom we call practical Atheists; and 'tis the character of an Atheist, if there is such a creature on Earth, that like my Lord Duke, he believes ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... sermon on the "Duty of forgiving one's enemies." What did the preacher know about it? He called to mind the look on his mother's face, the agony of her voice; he realised the bitter years she had spent in silence and misery, and remembered who was responsible for it all. Thus Paul became a kind of atheist. He was not yet old enough to think deeply about it, but incipient unbelief was in the boy's mind and heart. It darkened his thoughts and gave a sombre hue to life. In any case he was not going to trouble about religion. He remembered the vow he had made after he had left his mother, and he determined ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... almost eludes my sight; and, losing thus in part my theory of a more perfect state, start not, my friend, if I bring forward an opinion, which at the first glance seems to be levelled against the existence of God! I am not become an Atheist, I assure you, by residing at Paris: yet I begin to fear that vice, or, if you will, evil, is the grand mobile of action, and that, when the passions are justly poized, we become harmless, and in the ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... sugar; the town-clerk, the gentleman of acrostics, a person of much amiability and a feeble constitution, who sent to the illustrated journals solutions of enigmas and rebuses; and, lastly, the veterinary surgeon of the place, the only one who, from his position of atheist and democrat, was allowed to contradict the Captain. This practitioner, a man with tufted whiskers and eye-glasses, presided over the radical committee of electors, and when the cure took up a little collection ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... that the scruples of delicacy and propriety, as relative to a common course of things, ought to yield to the extraordinary nature of the crisis. They ought not to hinder the taking of a legal and constitutional step to prevent an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... das Wesen des Gelehrten", gives the literary man the place of priest in the world, continually unfolding the Godlike to man. This was also Beethoven's aim. Haydn charged him with being an atheist, but his works as well as his life refute this charge. The Kyrie and the Agnus Dei of the Mass in D, could never have been produced had he been other than a devout, religious man. In his journals he continually addresses the Godhead. Outwardly, however, he gave no sign. "Religion ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... let us take heed to ourselves now lest he should prove a flatterer also. So he drew nearer and nearer, and at last came up to them. His name was Atheist, and he asked ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... you are a more unpractical man than I am an unpractical woman, for you don't acknowledge what really exists; you want to annihilate individual patriotism and national greatness as an atheist would annihilate God and his own ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... to everlasting torment all but a few of earth's children—a terror-inspiring God—has naturally turned the minds of many from recognition of any sort of relationship between humanity and a superior, divine and beneficent Power. The atheist glories in his disbelief, and calls exultingly upon those whose faith has become the stepping-stone to knowledge for proofs that he is not right in assuming to occupy the superior attitude of mind. Suppose for a moment, that all the world were brought to coincide with him. How would ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... in the subjugation of the senses. A true bath consists in washing the mind clean of all impurities, and charity consists in protecting all creatures.' The Yaksha asked,—'What man should be regarded as learned, and who should be called an atheist? Who also is to be called ignorant? What is called desire and what are the sources of desire? And what is envy?' Yudhishthira answered,—'He is to be called learned who knoweth his duties. An atheist ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... down material for ingenious, impertinent, and insolent fault- finding; hence no one can safely admit him. He formally renounced his mother, brothers, and sisters about forty years ago, and wrote to other persons requesting them not to count him a Newman ... because we were religious and he was an Atheist. He had all the same dear sweet influences of home as all of us; yet how unamiable and useless has he become! still loving to snarl most at the hands that feed him. Is not this an admonition not to attribute too much to the single cause of home Influences, however ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... and all Cornelius had turned away: like the "atheist" of whom Apuleius tells he had never once raised hand to lip in passing image or sanctuary, and had parted from Marius finally when the latter determined to enter the crowded doorway of a temple, on their return ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater |
