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More "Axiom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it more gently by their habits. All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it. This is the first axiom of the science. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... a narrow education lay the foundations of vice," Mary Astell had laid down as an axiom, and Lady Mary was always propounding this to ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... way you are right, boy. It is a plague which has paralyzed man's sense of time. You have become involved by not remembering Kant's axiom that time is purely subjective. It exists in the mind only. It and space are the only ideas inherently in our brains. They allow us to conduct ourselves among a vast collection of things-in-themselves ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... axiom in anthropology that what is needed is not discursive treatment of large subjects but the minute discussion of special themes, not a ranging at large over the peoples of the earth past and present, but a detailed ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... action is not simply a mechanical, but it is a universal axiom. The Divine Being does all things with the least possible expenditure of force; and all hearts and all minds honor men in proportion as they approach to this divine economy. As gracefulness in motion consists in moving with the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... will never surrender," he said, quietly, with the quiet of a man who enunciates a mathematical axiom. "You know that ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... expressing your opinion, you should consider what your opinion is worth." But this shaft would have glanced harmlessly from off the panoply of the stupid and self-complacent old lady of whom I am thinking. It was a fundamental axiom with her that her opinion was entirely infallible. Some people would feel as though the very world were crumbling away under their feet, if they realized the fact that they could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... open breach. That distrust of her own readiness to fight and preparation for fighting, which had for long governed the policy of Rome—a distrust, which the want of standing armies and the far from exemplary character of the collegiate rule render sufficiently intelligible—made it, as it were, an axiom of her policy to pursue every war not merely to the vanquishing, but to the annihilation of her opponent; in this point of view the Romans were from the outset as little content with the peace of Sulla, as they had formerly been with the terms which Scipio Africanus had granted to the Carthaginians. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... overstrained and false idea of equality lies at the foundation of this argument, so it will pass under review again, when we come to consider the great demonstration which the abolitionist is accustomed to deduce from the axiom that "all men ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... which will embody all that was valuable, while discarding much that was narrow and pedantic, in classical teaching. And in particular may they all realise, as many already do, what the classical teacher, however unconsciously, held as an axiom, that in order to enter into the spirit of literature, to appreciate style, to understand in any true sense the meaning of great author's, it is not enough for pupils to listen and to read, and then perhaps to write essays about what they have heard and read. They must ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... world exists. There are already, therefore, three things in which I believe: my own existence, that of God, and that of the universe. Which of these beliefs is the fundamental one? Evidently, the one not demonstrated; the axiom is that upon which one rests to demonstrate everything except itself. Now of the three things in which Descartes believed, his own existence is demonstrated by the impossibility of thinking or feeling, without feeling his own existence; the other is demonstrated by the existence ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... from the axiom of this part. For, when man is given, there is something else - say A - more powerful; when A is given, there is something else - say B - more powerful than A, and so on to infinity; thus the power of man is limited by the power of some other thing, and is infinitely ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... development of Greece, and the other the consummation of the hopes and visions of the most spiritual people that the world has ever known. Both Socrates and Jesus believed in God, and both have taught the world, with no uncertain sound, of their faith in immortal life. The latter was clearly an axiom with Jesus, for He said to His disciples in effect, "If there had been any question about it I would have told you;" and almost with his last breath Socrates compelled his disciples to think of him as immortal, for he told them that, though his body might be buried anywhere, ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... likewise know that there is no such anomaly as a perfect human being. The ability to gain a point, without apparent coercion, or a sacrifice of truth or honor, depends upon the successful qualities that go toward the building up of a complete and harmonious personality. It is an axiom in psychology that to attain the highest success, one must first understand, and, understanding, conquer the bad, and develop the good features in one's own temperament, before attempting to rule the conduct ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... Kate said that she had her work to return to, she had reckoned without her henchman Jenkins, a new broom that was sweeping very clean indeed. It is an axiom that while it requires creative genius to start an enterprise, once the momentum is gained any mediocre intelligence may keep it going. Kate learned this ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... any person objects, That if one gets drunk sometimes, one shall do it often. I deny the consequence, and say in the words of the philosopher, an axiom held by ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... of need" will supersede the law of "supply and demand." And the organizations built up during the war, if they prove efficient, will not be abolished. Hours of labour and wages in the co-operative League of Nations will gradually be equalized, and tariffs will become things of the past. "The axiom will be established," says Mr. Webb, "that the resources of every country must, be held for the benefit not only of its own people but of the world . . . . The world shortage will, for years to come, make import duties look both ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... constant habit of going to the Milburns', that his family talked of it, wondering among themselves; and Stella indulged in hopeful speculations. They did not wonder or speculate at the Milburns'. It was an axiom there that it is well to ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... high enough to exhibit this phenomenon, so the guide takes my toes out of the hole again for me, just as politely as he put them in; and forthwith leads the way up higher still—expounding as he goes, the whole art and mystery of climbing, which he condenses into this axiom:—"Never loose one hand, till you've got a grip with the other; and never scramble your toes about, where toes have no ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... had consequently entirely altered the form of everything. Other quibblers maintained that the Redeemer had had no body at all and that this expression of the holy books must be taken figuratively, while Tertullian put forth his famous, semi-materialistic axiom: "Only that which is not, has no body; everything which is, has a body fitting it." Finally, this ancient question, debated for years, demanded an answer: was Christ hanged on the cross, or was it the Trinity which had suffered as one in its triple hypostasis, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... which Would to me be such a scandal, That my blood henceforth were tainted, And my noble name were branded. If I leave him here in prison, So excessive is his sadness, So extreme his melancholy, That I fear 't will end in madness. In a word, I hold, my nephew, Hold it as a certain axiom, That these dark magician Christians Keep him bound by their enchantments; Who through hatred of my house, And my office to disparage, Now revenge themselves on me Through my only son Chrysanthus. Tell me, ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... of the universe are also divergent. According to the Bible the outer world is the creation, by God, out of nothing. To the Brahman of all times the idea of pure creation has seemed absurd. Ex nihilo nihil fit is an axiom of all their philosophies. Whether it be the Vedantin who tells us that the material universe is the result of Brahm invested with illusion, or the Sankya philosopher who attributes it to prakriti—the power of nature; or the Veisashika sage who traces it ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... well as a hit at the critics; but I am by no means sure that the god was in the right. I am by no means certain that the true limits of the critical duty are not grossly misunderstood. Excellence, in a poem especially, may be considered in the light of an axiom, which need only be properly put, to become self-evident. It is not excellence if it requires to be demonstrated as such; and thus, to point out too particularly the merits of a work of Art, is to admit that they ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... "This axiom is as immutable as the law of gravitation or the laws of the planetary system, and every device to evade it or avoid it has, by its failure, only demonstrated the universal law that specie measures all values as certainly ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... he published a political pamphlet, entitled The False Alarm[325], intended to justify the conduct of ministry and their majority in the House of Commons, for having virtually assumed it as an axiom, that the expulsion of a Member of Parliament was equivalent to exclusion, and thus having declared Colonel Lutterel to be duly elected for the county of Middlesex, notwithstanding Mr. Wilkes had a great majority of votes[326]. This being justly considered as a gross violation ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... livelihood and satisfy the public to the best of their ability, but ending in becoming great painters. One man's meat is another man's poison; one man's duty is not his neighbour's. When shall we apprehend or apply that little axiom? The Duchess of Portland killed three thousand snails in order that she might complete the shell-work for which she received so much credit; Dulcie would not have put her foot voluntarily on a single snail ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... trite axiom with the respect due one who has met and grappled successfully with his one great chance. His well-fed appearance, his genial, contented smile, gave an impression of prosperity even when his linen was frayed and his elbows glossy; now in the latest achievement of a good tailor it was difficult to ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... relation—of form and quantity—is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom fails. In the consideration of motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... writes M. de Metternich,[1245] "centered on one idea, which, unfortunately for him, had acquired in his mind the force of an axiom; he was persuaded that no man who was induced to appear on the public stage, or who was merely engaged in the active pursuits of life, governed himself, or was governed, otherwise ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... an aggravated offence. It is generally understood in families that "boys will be boys," but there is a limit to the forbearance implied in the extenuating axiom. Master Sam was condemned to the back nursery for ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... civilization is the frank recognition of the principle that certain inferior races are destined to serve the cause of mankind in those capacities for which alone they are qualified and to readjust social institutions to this axiom. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... instruction with interest and intelligence, and had apparently accepted every article of faith in God and man which had been offered for her guidance through life with unquestioning confidence; at least she had never been heard to object to any time-honoured axiom. And she did, in fact, accept them all, but only provisionally. She wanted to know. Silent, sociable, sober, and sincere, she had walked over the course of her early education and gone on far beyond it with such ease that those in authority ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... indispensable condition which alone met the problem, and which the successful steam-engine must possess. He abandoned all else for the time as superfluous, since this was the key of the position. This is the law he then laid down as an axiom—which is repeated in his specification for his first patent in 1769: "To make a perfect steam engine it was necessary that the cylinder should be always as hot as the steam which entered it, and that the steam should be cooled below 100 deg. to ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... leader of the Southern cause and now a consistent advocate of secession, in which Rhett developed a plan of close commercial alliance with England as the most favoured nation, postulating the dependence of Great Britain on the South for cotton—"upon which supposed axiom, I would remark," wrote Bunch, "all their calculations are based[660]." Such was, indeed, Southern calculation. In January, 1861, De Bow's Review contained an article declaring that "the first demonstration of blockade of the Southern ports would be swept away by the English fleets ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... hide. This was provoking, since it not only stemmed the natural flow of conversation, but prevented her imagination from decorating the reminiscence of it subsequently (which was her profound secret pleasure), besides letting in the outer world upon her. Take it as an axiom, when you utter a sentimentalism, that more than one pair of ears makes a cynical critic. A sentimentalism requires secresy. I can enjoy it, and shall treat it respectfully if you will confide it to me alone; but I and my friends must laugh ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... what we choose to call so are only different activities of the same power. Each one is just as essential as the other, on which account Education must grant to each faculty its claim to the same fostering care. If we would construe correctly the axiom a potiori fit denominatio to mean that man is distinguished from animals by thought, and that mediated will is not the same as thought, we must not forget that feeling and representing are not ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... of life seems to be an accepted axiom amongst English ladies of the upper middle class. When I hear them discussing their grievances over their afternoon tea, I wish them no worse fate than to have the management of an Australian household for a week. It ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... It is an old axiom in war, that when the personnel of armies is equal, victory is apt to rest with numbers. In the West, the United States not only had the numbers in their favor, but they were better equipped in every way; and the only ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... Besides, this does meet the question of the right of the Government, that must be settled before the emergency comes. Now, we do not believe there is sounder principle, or one that every unbiassed mind does not concede with the readiness that it does an axiom, that, if necessary to protect and save itself, a government may not only order a draft, but call out every able-bodied man in the nation. If this right does not inhere in our government, it is built on a foundation of sand, and the sooner it is ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... solemn one. On the manner in which you cross the threshold of married life depends your future happiness. It is not a small matter to lay the first stone of an edifice. A husband's first kiss"—I felt a thrill run down my back—"a husband's first kiss is like the fundamental axiom that serves as a basis for a whole volume. Be prudent, Captain. She is there beyond that wall, the fair young bride, who is awaiting you; her ear on the alert, her neck outstretched, she is listening to each of your movements. ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... once upon a time, and the time was many centuries ago, that no woman was happy until she got herself a home. It really makes no difference who first uttered this truth, the truth itself is and always has been recognized as one possessing nearly all the virtues of an axiom. ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... as people are apt to imagine, there being in societies natural causes producing their necessary effects, as well as in the earth or the air"; and one of these natural causes he had discovered in the great principle or axiom "that Empire follows the Balance of Property." The troubles and confusions In England for the last few ages were to be attributed, he thought, not so much to faults in the governors or in the governed as to a change in the balance of property, dating from the ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... customary smartness. From the bridge Captain Parkinson himself directed his ship. His face was placid: his bearing steady and confident. This in itself was sufficient earnest that the cruiser was in ticklish case. For it was an axiom of the men who sailed under Parkinson that the calmer that nervous man grew, the more cause was there for nervousness on ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... glory, you give her incensed and insane populace prudent and useful counsels, instead of offering them brilliant and specious projects. The wise say that we cannot purchase a virtue more precious than what is bought at the expense of glory. If you adopt this axiom, your character will be handed down to posterity, like that of the Duke of the Venetians, to whom I have alluded. All the world ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... infrequently, was to the effect that—in London—one might live under an umbrella if one lived under it in the right neighbourhood and on the right side of the street, which axiom is the reason that a certain child through the first six years of her life sat on certain days staring out of a window in a small, dingy room on the top floor of a slice of a house on a narrow but highly fashionable London ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... would be. Complications like this must constantly arise. What if Miss Deborah and Miss Ruth had another sister? Just see how confused a man might be. Yes, one would suppose the wisdom of experience would take the form of an axiom. But it hasn't." ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... the fundamental unity of inorganic and organic nature, as well as their genetic relation, to be an essential axiom of monism. I particularly emphasise this "article of faith" here, as there are still scientists of repute who contest it. Not only is the old mystical "vital power" brought back upon the stage again from time to ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... Thorne went on sighing and regretting, looking back to the divine right of kings as the ruling axiom of a golden age, and cherishing, low down in the bottom of her heart of hearts, a dear unmentioned wish for the restoration of some exiled Stuart. Who would deny her the luxury of her sighs, or the sweetness ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... atom each unites with two atoms of oxygen, and so down the list of all known existences,—these laws are among the assured results of scientific study. Now, the entire science of chemistry in all its branches is built upon the axiom that molecules are absolutely unalterable and that molecules of the same kind are always absolutely identical. A molecule of water is always and invariably composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. A molecule ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... to this new life-phenomenon, to keep it happy and prosperous and she cared not how plain this might become to them —she feared not to taunt and humiliate them. And they accepted her sentence meekly, they no longer tried to oppose her. Her will was become an axiom which they never disputed, which they never even discussed. No matter what might happen to them in future, the Child must ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... the soil and subsoil will frequently afford most useful indications respecting the value of land. It may be laid down as an axiom that a soil to be fertile must contain all the chemical ingredients which a plant can only obtain from the soil, and chemistry ought to be able to inform us in unproductive soils what ingredients are wanting. ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... love to padre."' Those are the kind of things that make a man thank God for having volunteered to do one's 'bit' in that particular line of life in which he has been placed. No work is grander than a chaplain's; but I must lay it down as a general axiom, that no man should undertake this particular kind of work unless he knows that he is charged with a message ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... truth of his favourite axiom, drove off at such a furious rate over great stones left in the middle of the road by carmen, who had been driving in the gudgeons of their axle-trees to hinder them from lacing, [Opening; perhaps from ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... necessity may henceforward be regarded as a demonstrated truth. This theory, which was nearly unknown to the republics of antiquity—which was introduced into the world almost by accident, like so many other great truths—and misunderstood by several modern nations, is at length become an axiom in the political ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... it is timid, silent, and bashful, as if not at home, and not sure of its right to be there at all. It is rather homely withal, having nothing in feather, feature, or form, to attract notice. It is seemingly made to be heard, not seen, reversing the old axiom addressed to children when getting voicy. Its mission is music, and it floods a thousand acres of the blue sky with it several times a day. Out of that palpitating speck of living joy there wells forth a sea of twittering ecstacy upon the morning and evening air. ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... temptation, and to-day she runs the race of disorganization as ardent as any, striving to be a leader among other leaders to ruin. Every one is astounded at the sudden and remarkable change. It is truly inexplicable, save by the fearful axiom, Quos Deus vult perdere, dementat. Hence not a few expect soon to see storms sweep over the devoted island of Great Britain, which no longer forms an exception to the universality of the evil we have ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... roll in paths like planets; they revolve This in a larger, that a narrower ring, But round they come at last to that same phase, That self-same light and shade they showed before. I learned his annual and his monthly tale, His weekly axiom and his daily phrase, I felt them coming in the laden air, And watched them laboring up to vocal breath, Even as the first-born at his father's board Knows ere he speaks the too familiar jest Is on its way, ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the power of an Army is broken, the moral to a greater degree than the physical. A second battle unless fresh favourable circumstances come into play, would lead to a complete defeat, perhaps, to destruction. This is a military axiom. According to the usual course the retreat is continued up to that point where the equilibrium of forces is restored, either by reinforcements, or by the protection of strong fortresses, or by great defensive positions ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... of the breeder is—est in equis patrum virtus—"Like produces like." But the second axiom is, "The goodness of the horse goes in at his mouth." The moral is, that like produces like only under like natural conditions. Turn out all the winners of the last ten years to breed on Dartmoor or in Shetland; what would be the betting about a colt or a ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... old axiom of philosophy, which counsels us to "think with the learned, and talk with the vulgar;" and the practical application of this axiom runs through the whole scene of human affairs. Thus the most learned astronomer ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... can be said just as well in prose, there is no excuse for not putting it in prose. That axiom should kill off half our amateur poets and rid the world of a nuisance. On the other hand, when a thought or a feeling is to be communicated from a mind profoundly stirred, exalted, filled with fervour, or from a mind tingling with exquisite perceptions, then ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... to consider the general principle of gradation throughout organic Nature,—a principle which answers in a general way to the law of continuity in the inorganic world, or rather is so analogous to it that both may fairly be expressed by the Leibnitzian axiom, Natura non agit saltatim. As an axiom or philosophical principle, used to test modal laws or hypotheses, this in strictness belongs only to physics. In the investigation of Nature at large, at least in the organic world, nobody would undertake to apply this principle as a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... the case without the Judge; or, in other words, assume the legal functions of this defaulting personage in the bag-wig who is at present engaged in distending himself illegally with our Puddin'. For mark how runs the axiom: ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... of happiness or hope, and too often embittered by terrible pangs of starvation and cold. This picture is unfortunately true in the main; at any rate, there is sufficient truth about it to account for the element of sentimental fiction escaping unnoticed, and thus it comes to be regarded as an axiom that the Chinese woman is low, very low, in the scale of humanity and civilisation. The women of the poorer classes in China have to work hard indeed for the bowl of rice and cabbage which forms their daily food, but not more so than women of their own station in other countries ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... pretext. Ignorance makes it easy, and interest makes it necessary, to represent the native race as savages outside the pale of law and morals, against whom any violence and treachery is justifiable. The legend grows and becomes a permanent political axiom, distorting and abasing the character of those who act on it and those who, suffering from it, and retaliating against its consequences, construct their counter-legend of the inherent wickedness of the dominant race. ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... for us; but he prayed pardon if we asked him to believe in us. "Conduct," he said once, "is the outcome of selfishness limited by self-conceit." It was his way so to put things as to strip them of friendly, decent covering; had he said self-interest limited by self-respect, the axiom would have been more accepted and less quoted. A superficial person used to exclaim to me, "And yet he is so kind!" A man without ideals finds kindness the easiest thing in the world. In truth he was kind, and in a confidential sort of way ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... visiting theatres and enjoying himself in his own way generally. All the advance that Field had made in journalism before the year 1883 was due to native aptitude, an unfailing fund of humor and an inherited turn for literary expression. Without ever having read that author, he followed Pope's axiom that "the proper study of mankind is man." This he construed to include women and children. The latter he had every opportunity to study early and often in his own household, and most thoroughly did he avail himself thereof. As for books, his acquaintance with them for literary pleasure ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... are in the right, and yet there is this to be said. The Greeks of whose painting, truly, we have next to nothing. In all the work of theirs known to us did what lay before them as well as ever they could. They stayed not to theorise over this axiom and that, that formula and this. They said rather, 'You wish for the presentment of a man with a boil on his leg? Well.' And they ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... him with a twinkle in his eyes. "Now," he observed, "you've hit the reason the first time. When you've done it once, you'll do it again. You have to. Perhaps it's Nature's protest against your axiom that man's chief business is dollar-making. Still, I'm admitting that this is a blamed curious place for Nasmyth to figure on killing a wapiti in. Say, are you going to ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... mind by those whose material interests were all on the side of the maintenance of the existing system—that a change of religion necessarily involves a change of government. We shall hear much during the century of this lying political axiom. When Francis, in his irritation at the Pope, suggested, on one occasion, to the Nuncio, that he might be compelled to follow the example Henry the Eighth, of England, had set him, and permit the spread of the "Lutheran" religion in France, the astute prelate replied: "Sire, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Word are set beside the evolutionary philosophy, and after it begins to dawn on the thinking mind how utterly irreconcilable they are, the absolute impossibility of a consistent evolutionist believing in an inspired, inerrant, and infallible Bible becomes well nigh an axiom. It is no wonder that Dr. W. ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... Mexico, as well as Peru, at Caracas as in the island of Cuba, a bare-footed fellow with a white skin, is often heard to exclaim: "Does that rich man think himself whiter than I am?" The population which Europe pours into America being very considerable, it may easily be supposed, that the axiom, 'every white man is noble' (todo blanco es caballero), must singularly wound the pretensions of many ancient and illustrious European families. But it may be further observed, that the truth of this axiom has long since been acknowledged in Spain, among a people justly celebrated for ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... families, her favourite object would have been, in either case, equally secure. Here was a plain, easy road to her object; but it was too direct for Mrs. Beaumont. With all her abilities, she could never comprehend the axiom that a right line is the shortest possible line between any two points:—an axiom equally true in morals and in mathematics. No, the serpentine line was, in her opinion, not only the most beautiful, but the most expeditious, safe, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... years been changing to a storage for trunks instead of vegetables. The old-fashioned housewife exclaims at the lack of storage in the house of to-day, and we are eliminating it still more. A twentieth-century axiom is, "Throw or give away everything you have not immediate or prospective use for." It is as true of household furniture as of books; only the very best is of any value second-hand. Our young people may have heirlooms, but they will buy ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... of man's being took no delight in him? Without this the first man could never have commanded the use of words. Here we have the "Arriere pensee" clue, that is, the clue in mental reservation; and here we meet the axiom. The clear is the true, and the "Ariadne," the clue that leads us out of the labyrinth. Language at the first must have been specific. This, in the nature of the case, must have been true; that is, each and every ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... "let us go to her now." Alfred started at once to his feet. Drawn and wan Though his face, he look'd more than his wont was—a man. Strong for once, in his weakness. Uplifted, fill'd through With a manly resolve. If that axiom be true Of the "Sum quia cogito," I must opine That "id sum quod cogito;"—that which, in fine A man thinks and feels, with his whole force of thought And feeling, the man is himself. He had fought With himself, and rose up from his self-overthrow The survivor of much ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... because they together present us with the other side of the thought to that which I have elsewhere considered, that man's true treasure is in God. That great axiom of the religious consciousness, which pervades the whole of Scripture, is rapturously expressed in many a psalm, and never more assuredly than in that one which struggles up from the miry clay in which the Psalmist's 'steps had well-nigh slipped' and soars and sings thus: 'The Lord is the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... his debt to the Church if he has recited by mistake an office other than the one assigned in the calendar of the day. Theologians teach that such a recitation fulfils the debt. The Church does not wish to impose a second recitation, and her axiom "officium pro officio valet" holds, provided always that the order of the psalms as laid down in the new psaltery is followed. This order is necessary always for validity. However, if the substituted office be very much shorter than the omitted office, it is advised to equalise them by reciting ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... Calatafimi, several miles from the battlefield. We ceased our pursuit a short distance from the entrance to the town, which is very strongly situated. If one gives battle, one ought to be sure of victory; this axiom is very true under all circumstances, but especially at the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... which in its weight and amplitude of trimmings seemed to frown into evanescence the sprightly half-ounce head gearing of today. Paying for what they get and giving a good price for it when they have a chance is evidently an axiom with the believers in St. James's. There is at present a demand for seats worth from 7s. to 10s. each; but those which can be obtained for 1s. are not much thought of, and nobody will look on one side at the pews which are offered for nothing. That which is not ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... are easily frightened, the females of which will rush from their places of concealment even before they are prepared to start on the mission of ovipositing. The converse of this rule, that female insects captured on the wing are almost invariably impregnated, may be taken as an axiom, at least so far as the moth ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... much of the twentieth century, and were not going to bear with a dull old maid, merely because she was their aunt and had been kind to them. As one of them expressed it, "Never put yourself out for a relation, however distant. That's an axiom." ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... something more than superstition in the old axiom that the third time is charm, perhaps three efforts are required for the training of the human will; but however that may be, at the third striking together of the metal and the flint the Sunrise Council fire sprang into life, stick by stick it blazed forth, until at last a tongue ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... were sent to me— most of them trite, many of them foolish. One, a genuine document, I remember. It came from a girl who for six years had been assistant to a fashionable dressmaker. She was rather tired of the axiom that all women, at all times, are perfection. She suggested that poets and novelists should take service for a year in any large drapery or millinery establishment where they would have an opportunity of studying woman in her natural state, so ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... yes!" the Cardinal resumed with increasing passion. "He told you, no doubt, as he tells others, that whilst in substance he will make no surrender, he will readily yield in matters of form! It's a deplorable axiom, an equivocal form of diplomacy even when it isn't so much low hypocrisy! My soul revolts at the thought of that Opportunism, that Jesuitism which makes artifice its weapon, and only serves to cast doubt among true believers, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... an axiom in mathematics with me at that time, though not found in Euclid, that wherever I could enter my head, my whole body might follow. As a practical illustration of this proposition, I applied my head to the arched hole of the hen-house door, and by scraping away a little dirt, contrived ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the noble bird and attending his movements. "Are those its young?" asked a gentleman by my side. How much did that man know—not about eagles, but about Nature? If he had been familiar with geese or hens, or with donkeys, he would not have asked that question. The ancients had an axiom that he who knew one truth knew all truths; so much else becomes knowable when one vital fact is thoroughly known. You have a key, a standard, and cannot be deceived. Chemistry, geology, astronomy, natural history, all admit one ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... none. Axiom, or self-evident points, neither can nor need be proved. Away with him! [Pehr is ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... Way to). Fox, afterwards bishop of Hereford, said to Henry VIII., The surest way to peace is a constant preparation for war. The Romans had the axiom, Si vis pacem, para bellum. It was said of Edgar, surnamed "the Peaceful," king of England, that he preserved peace in those turbulent times "by being always prepared for war" ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... was such pretty serving," said Mrs. Van Alstyne, afterward. "Where did they get such people?—And beautiful serving," she went on, reverting to her favorite axiom, "is, after all, ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... any thing in the cause of Science, or indeed in any other cause, they might as well do their best while they have a chance. This is an axiom of social economy which is ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... raising and paying troops in Germany and the Low Countries. Even if we are capable of beating off invasion, it is always wise policy to keep the war out of our own country, and not trust to such miracles as the dispersion of the Armada. In war, Defoe says, repeating a favourite axiom of his, "it is not the longest sword but the longest purse that conquers," and if the French get the Spanish crown, they get the richest trade in the world into their hands. The French would prove better husbands of the ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... caused her death. Laertes calls him a poor demented one, exclaims over his lack of moral sense, and winds up by bidding the crazy Prince leave the cemetery. Quand on finit par folie, c'est qu'on a commence par le cabotinage. (Which is a consoling axiom for an actor.) Hamlet with his ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... except Sir Thomas Browne, has done, in small compass, a service to his memory which is not easily to be paralleled. Lamb's specimens from Fuller, most of which are only two or three lines long, and none a pageful, for once contradict the axiom quoted above as to a brick and a house. So perfectly has the genius of selector and author coincided, that not having myself gone through the verification of them, I should hardly be surprised to find that Lamb had used his faculty of invention. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Laura Bridgman's soul because he began with the belief that he could reach it. English jurists had said that the deaf-blind were idiots in the eyes of the law. Behold what the optimist does. He controverts a hard legal axiom; he looks behind the dull impassive clay and sees a human soul in bondage, and quietly, resolutely sets about its deliverance. His efforts are victorious. He creates intelligence out of idiocy and proves to the law that the deaf-blind man is a ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... development and action. And if the same rule be applied to us, my readers; if every man is mentally a screw, in whose intellectual and moral development a sharp eye can detect something not right in the play of the machinery or the formation of it; then I fancy that we may safely lay it down as an axiom, that there is not upon the face of the earth a perfectly sane man. A sane mind means a healthy mind; that is, a mind that is exactly what it ought to be. Where shall we discover such a one? My reader, you have not got it. I have not got it. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... asserts; as at one time in Scotland it was esteemed as proof that a clergyman preached unsound doctrine, if he made use of the Lord's Prayer. But, understanding it simply as meaning that the Judge of all the Earth will do right, it appears to me an axiom beyond all question. And I take it as putting in a compact form the spirit of what I have been arguing for,—to wit, that, though human law must of necessity hold all rational beings as alike responsible, yet in the eye of God the difference may be immense. The graceful vase, that stands ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... wear it thou! and call aloud This axiom undoubted— Would thou hae Nobles' patronage? First learn ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... while these moods were on him, has been held up as an authority that may be relied upon as to the doings and sayings of Napoleon and his immediate followers at the "Abode of Darkness." It is a well-known axiom that persons who speak or write anything while jealousy or temper holds them in its grip may not be counted as reliable people to follow, and that is exactly what happened in Gourgaud's case. He was ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... appearance or creation of only a few forms of life, or of some one form alone. It has been maintained by several authors that it is as easy to believe in the creation of a million beings as of one; but Maupertuis's philosophical axiom "of least action" leads the mind more willingly to admit the smaller number; and certainly we ought not to believe that innumerable beings within each great class have been created with plain, but deceptive, marks of descent from a ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... practice of all the actions useful to it; and because all the other virtues, under the denominations of charity, humanity, probity, love of one's country, sincerity, generosity, simplicity of manners, and modesty, are only varied forms and diversified applications of the axiom, "Do not to another what you do not wish to be done to yourself," which is ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... theory, which was nearly unknown to the republics of antiquity—which was introduced into the world almost by accident, like so many other great truths—and misunderstood by several modern nations, is at length become an axiom in the political science of the ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... be ranked as the seat of the Unitarians, as Baltimore is that of the Roman Catholics, and Philadelphia that of the Quakers.... No axiom is more applicable to the pensive, serious, scrutinizing inhabitant of the New England States than this: 'What I do not understand, I reject as worthless and false;' so said one of the most learned men of Boston to me. 'Why occupy the mind with that which is incomprehensible? Have we not ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... something which according to our past experience we ought to find no difficulty in doing, then we may guess what a bee must feel as it goes flying up and down a window-pane. Then we have doubts thrown upon the fundamental axiom of life, i.e. that like antecedents will be followed by like consequents. On this we go mad and die in a ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the axiom before mentioned, that architectural design should express and emphasize the practical requirements and physical conditions of the building, let us look a little more in detail into the manner in which this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... be too hard on her. We never know what we may be brought to ourselves." For it was Aunt Tipping's unformulated axiom that, whatever cock-and-bull stories misfortune may tell, there is always some truth in ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... sketch was symptomatic. Mrs. Maiden's house had been considered perfect, up to the time of her death. Rachel had at first been even intimidated by it; Louis had sincerely praised it. And indeed its perfection was an axiom of drawing-room conversation. But as soon as Louis and Rachel began to look on the house with the eye of inhabitants, the axiom fell to a dogma, and the dogma was exploded. The dreadful truth came out that Mrs. Maldon had shown a strange indifference to certain aspects ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the only indisputable axiom in philosophy; there are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons and unnecessary spaces: in the most imperfect creatures, and such as were not preserved in the ark, but, having their seeds and principles in the womb of nature, are everywhere where ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... hast misrepresented thy teacher, and as thou seemest to set an equal value on eloquence and on reasoning, I shall attend to thee awhile on each of these matters, first inquiring of thee whether the axiom is Socratic, that it is never becoming to get drunk, unless in ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... of his favourite axiom, drove off at such a furious rate over great stones left in the middle of the road by carmen, who had been driving in the gudgeons of their axle-trees to hinder them from lacing, [Opening; perhaps from LACHER, to loosen.] that Lord Colambre thought ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... for the crops," said Pearl, thinking of the twenty acres of wheat in front of the house and of the oat-field behind the bluff; "and, besides," quoting a favourite axiom of her mother's, "he ain't sugar or salt, and ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... place here. It is an old story, and, like other old stories accepted by the multitude, has become almost of no effect; passive acceptance mentally, absolute rejection physically, seeming to be the portion of much of the gospel of health. "Cleanliness is next to godliness," is almost an axiom. I am disposed to amend it, and assert that cleanliness is godliness, or a form of godliness. At any rate, the man or woman who demands cleanliness without and within, this cleanliness meaning pure air, ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... any kind, and pointed out that in any case his acquaintance with Cuba was altogether too recent to have enabled him to form even the most elementary opinion on the question, at the same time mentioning as a general axiom that Englishmen were usually regarded as cherishing a weakness in favour of good government and the maintenance ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... with the gesture of a great man, "what is the use of all these discussions? What do they prove?—the eternal verity of one axiom: All things are true, all things are false. Moral truths as well as human beings change their aspect according to their surroundings, to the point ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... intending hostess is a new-comer in London, and has not yet picked up a sufficiency of town-acquaintances, or if those whom she has are not altogether the style of folk she wishes to invite, a different course of procedure has to be adopted. It may be taken as an axiom that there are always plenty of people in society who are ready to go anywhere (within recognized limits) to a ball, provided that some lady of acknowledged experience in such matters will stand sponsor for its probable ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... occasionally held discourse, philosophic and profound, when he and I chanced to be alone together in the office, say that all first-rate thieves were sober, and of well-regulated morals, their bodily passions being kept in abeyance by their love of gain; but this axiom could scarcely hold good with respect to these women—however thievish they might be, they did care for something besides gain: they cared for their husbands. If they did thieve, they merely thieved for their husbands; ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... to the feet of learned Jesuit teachers long before Yale was founded, has recently been paved with concrete, transformed into a tennis court, and now echoes to the shouts of students to whom Dr. Giesecke, the successful president, is teaching the truth of the ancient axiom, "Mens ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... e'er a sup at all in the house?" said Mat; "if there is, let me get it; for there's an ould proverb, though it's a most unmathematical axiom as ever was invinted—'try a hair of the same dog that bit you;' give me a glass, Nancy, an' you can go for Father Connell after. Oh, by the sowl of Isaac, that invented fluxions, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... civilization are always the result of the application of primitive ideas. Thought is invariably the point of departure and the goal of all social existence. The history of Montegnac is a proof of that axiom of social science. When at last the administration was able to concern itself with the needs and the material prosperity of this region of country, it cut down this strip of forest, and stationed a detachment of gendarmerie near ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... as a new axiom—the more exercise the less fool. Strong, able muscles, steady nerves (and let us remember that nerves depend for their tone on the muscular condition), a clean skin open at all its pores and doing its eliminative work thoroughly, and clean strong vitals make up the kind of beauty within ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... he was talking about. But this is only Phase One of the plan. A corollary is based upon the axiom that one disabled automobile is equal to ...
— "To Invade New York...." • Irwin Lewis
... efforts to circumstances. Sooner or later they need new great principles. Then they obliterate the old ones. The old jingle of words no longer wins a response. The doctrine is dead. In 1776 it seemed to every Whig in America that it was a pure axiom to say that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. They clung to this as a sacred dogma for over a hundred years, because it did not affect unfavorably any interest. It is untrue. Governments get their powers from the historical fact ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... presented with a copy of Lindley Murray's Grammar, by the aid of which he gained some knowledge of the structural rules of English. He had already become acquainted with Paradise Lost, and was another proof of Matthew Prior's axiom, 'Who often reads will sometimes want to write,' for he had begun to write verse when only 'a bonnie pit lad.' For more than forty years of his life he laboured in 'the coal-dark underground,' and is now the caretaker ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... with the hobby,[1] lest you fall with the lark, nor attempt not with Phaeton, lest you drown with Icarus. Fortune, when she wills you to fly, tempers your plumes with wax; and therefore either sit still and make no wing, or else beware the sun, and hold Daedalus' axiom authentical, medium tenere tutissimum. Low shrubs have deep roots, and poor cottages great patience. Fortune looks ever upward, and envy aspireth to nestle with dignity. Take heed, my sons, the mean is sweetest melody; where ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... The famous axiom, laissez faire, and laissez passer, the subversive tendencies of which people affect to condemn, was not invented by Quesnay. He only gave a scientific bearing to what was the inspiration of a merchant called Legendre. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... ourselves to having books by our bedside? Ought not 'early to bed and early to rise' to be the motto of every well-conducted person, and is not reading in bed calculated to render the carrying out of that axiom virtually impossible? This is the problem we have first to solve, and it may be said at once that this discourse does not apply virginibus puerisque. Girls and boys, young men and young women, are hereby solemnly exhorted to abjure all nocturnal or matutinal ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... shall be met by many with the squeamish proverb, De mortuis nil nisi bonum; though I am not disposed at this moment to enter on a discussion of the merits of this received axiom. Shakspeare tells us "The evil that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... holiness but what is holy; this is a sort of axiom," said Charles; "if the fruits are holy, faith, which is ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... a civilian, the whole front of the bar was full of soldiers, all apparently drinking, and drinking again, and drinking yet again, nibbling cheese, crackers and smoked-beef meanwhile, apparently to keep up the necessary thirst. "Fire and fall back!" seemed to be a military axiom not always observed by the rank and file of the Two Hundredth, as many of them kept their places and went on with their guzzling, with a determination worthy of a much better cause. But it was occasionally observed, after all, for there were a few who had been overcome ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... nation of fifty millions thinks of one of them, at any rate; for if the mutual verdict of the top of an empire and the bottom of it does not establish for good and all the judgment of the entire nation concerning that book, then the axiom that we can get a sure estimate of a thing by arriving at a general average of all the opinions ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... we shall see, the avowed axiom of Strauss; he even acknowledges, that if it be not true, he would not think it worth while to discredit the history of the Evangelists; that is, the history must be discredited, because he has resolved that a miracle is an ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... maid over to them. Thus, if the two old bachelors had not been kept asunder by the two political systems of which they each offered a living expression, their private rivalry would still have made them enemies. Epochs put their mark on men. These two individuals proved the truth of that axiom by the opposing historic tints that were visible in their faces, in their conversation, in their ideas, and in their clothes. One, abrupt, energetic, with loud, brusque manners, curt, rude speech, dark in tone, in hair, in ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... is lost in space, So nothing spiritual can man efface; Exemplifying thus the axiom sure, That conquering love, truth, justice ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... morning I slept late, until past seven in fact. It had ever been an axiom with us that the indolence attributed to the "artistic temperament" was a foolish tradition. Creative power undoubtedly comes late in the day and in the still night-watches; often I had planned a whole book while in bed; but there are many things to do in ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Doctor, testily. "The origin of the muscle, or place where it arises, is the first thing to be described. The use comes afterwards. It is an axiom of ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... sweeping exemplification of the axiom last alluded to, as to parallel changes, is Comte's so-called law of the three states of civilisation. Under this law, he asserts, the whole historical evolution can be summed up. It is as certain as the law of gravitation. Everything in human society ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... have had a divine book-revelation to tell him that a divine book-revelation was impossible. Great as is my admiration of Mr. Newman, I should, myself, have preferred having God's word for it. However, let us lay it down as an axiom that a human book-revelation, showing you that 'a divine book-revelation is impossible,' is not impossible; and really, considering the almost universal error of man on this subject,—now happily exploded,—the book-revelation which convinces man of ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... had caught pilfering, and it was said that she had starved him to death amid the plunder he had gathered, and had afterwards had his body flung without burial into the river. Whether there was more than rumour in such a gruesome tale none could now say, but it had long become an acknowledged axiom that Lady Scrope's goods had ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... '"It was an axiom with Menabrea, with Nigra, with Corti, that Italy and England herself could do nothing in the Mediterranean without France, still less do anything against France. The last conversation of Corti with Crispi shows ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... nothing away. The newspaper placards announced what seemed to be equivalent to the end of the existing social order; but Frinton apparently did not blench nor tremble; it went calmly and powerfully forward into the day (which was Saturday), relying upon the great British axiom: "To ignore is to destroy." It ignored the end of the existing social order, and lo! there was no end. Up and down various long and infinitely correct avenues of sheltered homes drove Mr. Prohack, and was everywhere baffled in his human desire to meet Frinton half-way. He stopped the car at ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... friends, and with nearly all the newspapers that I see; but the Morning Chronicle and the Daily News, of which I have only seen one article for a long time back, appeared to be maintaining what I hold. That we ought to be strictly neutral (not armed and threatening neutrals) seems to be an axiom; but at the same time I look at the crisis with much hope and little or no fear. To declaim against L. N.'s treachery is only a way of playing into the wrong hands, i.e. supporting Austria. He has pledged himself ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... listened to the trite axiom with the respect due one who has met and grappled successfully with his one great chance. His well-fed appearance, his genial, contented smile, gave an impression of prosperity even when his linen was frayed and his elbows glossy; now in the latest achievement ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... (1596-1650) elaborated his system of philosophy, in creating a new method of philosophizing. The leading peculiarity of his system was the attempt to deduce all moral and religious truth from self- consciousness. I think, therefore I am, was the famous axiom on which the whole was built. From this he inferred the existence of two distinct natures in man, the mental and the physical, and the existence of certain ideas which he called innate in the mind, and serving to ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... been only the product of the evil days when "judgment had fled to brutish beasts, and men had lost their reason." Possibly at no time or place in our history has there been more emphatic verification of the axiom, "In the midst of ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... philosophy, and after it begins to dawn on the thinking mind how utterly irreconcilable they are, the absolute impossibility of a consistent evolutionist believing in an inspired, inerrant, and infallible Bible becomes well nigh an axiom. It is no wonder that Dr. W. B. ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... application of this principle, and tries to prove geometrically the dogmas defined in the Creed. This bold attempt is entirely factitious and verbal, and it is only his employment of various terms not generally used in such a connexion (axiom, theorem, corollary, etc.) that gives his treatise its apparent originality. Alain de Lille has often been confounded with other persons named Alain, in particular with Alain, archbishop of Auxerre, Alan, abbot of Tewkesbury, Alain de Podio, etc. Certain ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... should be. The first principle, on which the theory of a science of history can be plausibly argued, is that all actions whatsoever arise from self-interest. It may be enlightened self-interest, it may be unenlightened; but it is assumed as an axiom that every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something which he considers will promote his happiness. His conduct is not determined by his will; it is determined by the object of his desire. Adam Smith, in laying the foundations of political economy, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... into possession of her own soul. She claims the toga virilis, and all the strengthening burdens of freedom. Now it is difficult to represent such a demand in terms of argument. Liberty is no mere conclusion of linked logic long-drawn out: it is an axiom, a flaming avatar. The arguments by which it is defended are important, but they bear to it much the same relation that a table of the wave-lengths of various rays of light bears to the immediate glory of a sunrise. There is another obstacle. Self-government, like other spiritual realities, say ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... "An axiom," said I, "not to be disputed; but now that we are safe, and have time to think about it, are you not slightly of opinion that we behaved somewhat scurvily to our better half, in leaving it so quietly in ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which he claims that the Jugo-Slavs of the Balkans, his countrymen, are about half Celtic; the product of the fusion of Slavic in-comers, perhaps conquerors, with an original Celtic population. Bohemia was once the land of the Celtic Boii; and we may take it as an axiom, that no conquest, no racial incursion, ever succeeds in wiping out the conquered people; unless there is such wide disparity, racial and cultural, as existed, for example, between the white settlers ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... "confessedly the ablest man of business in the House of Commons." The Governors of the Bank of England, very efficient men certainly, held it a great point in the minister's favor that they "could never do business with any man with the same ease they had done it with him." Undoubtedly the first axiom of business is that one's accounts should be kept straight, one's books nicely balanced; the second, that one's assets should exceed one's liabilities. Mr. Grenville, accordingly, "had studied the revenues with professional assiduity, and something of professional ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... this view, the natural classification would eventually be found to stand upon a basis of physiology. Therefore all the systems of classification up to the earlier part of the present century went upon the apparent axiom, that characters which are of most importance to the organisms presenting them must be characters most indicative of natural affinities. But the truth of the matter was eventually found to be otherwise. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... his demonstration, he winds round it and round it, adding proof to proof, but never escaping the same vicious circle: substance exists because it exists, and the ultimate experience of existence, so far from being of that clear kind which can be accepted as an axiom, is the most confused of all our sensations. What is existence? and what is that something which we say exists? Things—essences— existences; these are but the vague names with which faculties, constructed only to deal with conditional phenomena, disguise their incapacity. The world ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... soul because he began with the belief that he could reach it. English jurists had said that the deaf-blind were idiots in the eyes of the law. Behold what the optimist does. He controverts a hard legal axiom; he looks behind the dull impassive clay and sees a human soul in bondage, and quietly, resolutely sets about its deliverance. His efforts are victorious. He creates intelligence out of idiocy and proves to the law that the deaf-blind man ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... is the result of the consultations of the most eminent Russian generals. They also have studied Macchiavelli, and found that significant axiom, 'He who knows how to resist will conquer in the end.' The Russians, therefore, will resist, ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... passion, forms the groundwork of the drama. Now, admitting the axiom of Rochefoucauld, that there is but one love, though a thousand different copies, yet the true sentiment itself has as many different aspects as the human soul of which it forms a part. It is not only modified by the individual ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... supremacy to the English Legislature were unnecessary, as it is an axiom of constitutional law that a sovereign Legislature, such as the Queen and two Houses of Parliament in England, cannot bind their successors, and consequently can repeal or alter any law, however fundamental, and annul any restrictions ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... wine in old bottles, daughter," he said sadly, as he glanced down into the valley. The car was running smoothly, slowly and noiselessly around a sharp curve, and the Reverend Mr. Goodloe both heard and answered the sad axiom. ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... each judge for himself. A tolerably long digression of this kind will seem all too short; and ninety out of every hundred readers shall seize with avidity upon details that possess all the piquancy of novelty, thus establishing yet once again the trust of the well-known axiom, that there is nothing so little known as that which everybody is supposed to know—the Law of the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... did not, it is true, aim at any fanciful ideal, or adopt any fantastic shibboleths. He was only a utilitarian. He believed in no inspiration but that of experience. He had no other creed or dogma or gospel than Bentham's axiom,—"The greatest happiness of the greatest number." But many will think that herein was the chief of all his claims to the honor of all men, and the best evidence of his worth. At any rate, he set a notable example of the way in which a man, making the best use in his power of merely ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... old man's faggot, in the bond. For the harmony of a science, supporting each part the other, is and ought to be the true and brief confutation and suppression of all the smaller sort of objections. But, on the other side, if you take out every axiom, as the sticks of the faggot, one by one, you may quarrel with them and bend them and break them at your pleasure: so that, as was said of Seneca, Verborum minutiis rerum frangit pondera, so a man may truly say of the schoolmen, Quaestionum minutiis scientiarum frangunt soliditatem. ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... gather in cities demands the upbuilding influences of trips into the open in order to equip the child mentally and physically to face the world and its work with the strength and tenacity characteristic of the country-bred. Moreover, the study of objects rather than books is an axiom in modern education and here, too, we can readily see that the best way to study trees is to take the pupil to the trees. Such studies are more lasting than book study because they emphasize the spirit and the goal rather ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... discharged. By securing this judgment Granville Sharp effectually abolished the Slave Trade until then carried on openly in the streets of Liverpool and London. But he also firmly established the glorious axiom, that as soon as any slave sets his foot on English ground, that moment he becomes free; and there can be no doubt that this great decision of Lord Mansfield was mainly owing to Mr. Sharp's firm, resolute, and ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... this head by mentioning two examples among others which he brings to explain the better what he means by his first philosophy. The first is this axiom, "If to unequals you add equals, all will be unequal." This, he says, is an axiom of justice as well as of mathematics; and he asks whether there is not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion. But I ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... instincts of the poor. But among the fragments of advice also occurs the following suggestive and even alluring remark: "Every man over forty is a scoundrel." On the first personal opportunity I asked the author of this remarkable axiom what it meant. I gathered that what it really meant was something like this: that every man over forty had been all the essential use that he was likely to be, and was therefore in a manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect that Bernard Shaw has sufficiently ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... their commercial intercourse. They trade with the Indians, with the fur companies, the whalers and among themselves across Bering straits. Many of them are veritable Shylocks, having a through comprehension of the axiom in political economy regarding the regulation of the price of ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... examining glance. They were not Shawnees or Miamis, but certain features of paint and dress showed him that they were Wyandots, a small tribe, but the bravest that white men ever faced on the North American Continent. It became an axiom in the Ohio Valley that a Wyandot might be killed in battle, but he could not be taken prisoner. Thirteen Wyandot chiefs were in the allied Indian army that was beaten by Wayne at the Fallen Timbers; the bodies of twelve ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... point, he first frames these examples: "The men who are here, the man who is here; the cocks that crow, the cock that crows;" and then asks, "Now, if the relative be the nominative, why do the verbs change, seeing that here is no change in the relative?" He seems ignorant of the axiom, that two things severally equal to a third, are also equal to each other: and accordingly, to answer his own question, resorts to a new principle: "The verb is continually varying. Why does it vary? Because it disregards the relative and goes and finds the antecedent, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... his body, freed from external pressure, would burst him like a shell, or like a balloon that suddenly rises to too great a height in the air! A scaphander would have been a fatal gift. Don't regret its absence, friend Michael; never forget this axiom: As long as we are floating in empty space, the only spot where safety is possible is inside ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... consumption of the whole. At first, indeed, he ferreted for the parliament, but since he hath got off his cope he set up for himself. He lives upon the sins of the people, and that is a good standing dish too. He verifies the axiom, lisdem nutritur ex quibus componitur; his diet is suitable to his constitution. I have wondered often why the plundered countrymen should repair to him for succour, certainly it is under the same notion, as one whose pockets are picked goes to Moll Cutpurse, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... to attack the rooms of one with whom he is not in the habit of intimacy. From ignorance of this axiom I had near got a horse-whipping, and was kicked down stairs for going to a wrong oak, whose tenant was not in the habit of taking jokes of this kind.—The ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... we rightly assert that a form of imaginative life is clearly pathologic? In my opinion, the answer must be sought in the nature and degree of belief accompanying the labor of creating. It is an axiom unchallenged by anyone—whether idealist or realist of any shade of belief—that nothing has existence for us save through the consciousness we have of it; but for realism—and experimental psychology ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... scale is set for the most distant of land views, beach scenes and boats in the middle distance off-shore. You will learn by costly overexposures that water views require much less light than landscapes. Photographers have an axiom that "water is as bright as the sky itself." So at "64," which is proper exposure for the most distant of land panoramas, you begin ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... one to leave Cortina, there are several ways of departure. We selected the main highway for our trunks, but for ourselves the Pass of the Three Crosses; the Deacon and the Deaconess in a mountain waggon, and I on foot. It should be written as an axiom in the philosophy of travel that the easiest way is best for your luggage, and the hardest ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... ah, yes!" the Cardinal resumed with increasing passion. "He told you, no doubt, as he tells others, that whilst in substance he will make no surrender, he will readily yield in matters of form! It's a deplorable axiom, an equivocal form of diplomacy even when it isn't so much low hypocrisy! My soul revolts at the thought of that Opportunism, that Jesuitism which makes artifice its weapon, and only serves to cast doubt among true believers, the confusion of a ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... theories of the universe are also divergent. According to the Bible the outer world is the creation, by God, out of nothing. To the Brahman of all times the idea of pure creation has seemed absurd. Ex nihilo nihil fit is an axiom of all their philosophies. Whether it be the Vedantin who tells us that the material universe is the result of Brahm invested with illusion, or the Sankya philosopher who attributes it to prakriti—the power of nature; or the Veisashika sage who traces it to eternal atoms; ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... a horse might beget a calf or a sow have a litter of puppies, which is never the case,—for in all time we find repeated in the offspring the structure, the instincts and all the general characteristics of the parents, and never those of another species. Such is the law of nature and hence the axiom that "like produces like." But while experience teaches the constancy of hereditary transmission, it teaches just as plainly that the constancy is not absolute and perfect, and this introduces us to another ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... matter she did not understand. "Madam," said the moralist, "before expressing your opinion, you should consider what your opinion is worth." But this shaft would have glanced harmlessly from off the panoply of the stupid and self-complacent old lady of whom I am thinking. It was a fundamental axiom with her that her opinion was entirely infallible. Some people would feel as though the very world were crumbling away under their feet, if they realized the fact ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... other races; indeed, for centuries they were distinct rather for their weakness in multiplying power and number. Many other races have exceeded them in this particular. But no sooner do we come abreast of the latter day time than we find the laws of centuries changed. In thermal science it is an axiom that heat expands all bodies, and of course that cold contracts them. But to this general rule there is one beautiful and benevolent exception: it is in water; for if we start with water at thirty-two degrees, we find the remarkable phenomenon of ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... in some way, and gave ourselves up. For the nonce, however, three weeks would pass, and with them all our woes. The idea of eighteen weeks occurred to nobody; it would have been too farcical, too puerile. That starvation must have killed us long ere the period had fled, would have been our axiom, if it were pertinent to the issue, when the 'pros' and 'cons' of the situation were being eagerly discussed on the opening days of a Siege that was to send the fame of the Diamond City farther than ever did its diamonds. A few weeks would terminate the trouble; and if, in the interim, ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... now; but the enormous development of various sciences and the wide spread of popular 'knowledge' had, in the first flush, distracted attention from that which is now, in all civilized countries, simply an axiom of thought, viz., that a Revelation of God must be embodied in a living authority safeguarded by God. Further, at that time science and exact knowledge generally had not reached the point which they reached a little later—of corroborating in particular ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... spiritual people that the world has ever known. Both Socrates and Jesus believed in God, and both have taught the world, with no uncertain sound, of their faith in immortal life. The latter was clearly an axiom with Jesus, for He said to His disciples in effect, "If there had been any question about it I would have told you;" and almost with his last breath Socrates compelled his disciples to think of him as immortal, for he told them that, though his body might be buried anywhere, he defied both ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... ground is not to fly, my little chevalier," replied the captain; "it is an axiom of the art which I advise you to consider; besides, I am not sorry to study your play. Ah! you are a pupil of Berthelot, apparently; he is a good master, but he has one great fault: it is not teaching to parry. ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... the crown by right of birth, assumed the insignia of royalty on the death of his father, and claimed to be acknowledged as monarch. But Mebodes, the Grand Vizier, interposed with the assertion of a constitutional axiom, that no one had the right of taking the Persian crown until it was assigned to him by the assembly of the nobles. Kaoses, who thought he might count on the goodwill of the nobles, acquiesced; and the assembly being convened, his claims were submitted to it. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... MEMBER FOR SARK, in pursuance of his favourite axiom that there is nothing new under the sun, calls attention to two conversations in which he discovers singularly close parallel in tone and temper. The first will be found in official report of Parliamentary debate. It took ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... Christianity, slavery was an established institution in all countries.[478] Some pagan philosophers, like Seneca, maintained that all men are by nature free and equal, still by the law of nations slavery was upheld in all lands; and it was an axiom among the ruling classes, that "the human race exists for the sake of the few." Aristotle held that no perfect household could exist without slaves and freemen and that the natural law, as well as the law of nations, makes a distinction between bond and free.[479] Plato ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... with this little axiom and passed a whole week in delight, grouping around this harmless epigram the crowd of ideas which came to him unconsciously and which he was astonished to find that he possessed. His humorous mood yielded ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... to one's temper never helps in a contest of strength or skill. Agnes herself was trying to prove that axiom; but Trix had never tried ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... standpoint of military law should be referred to in Herr Zimmermann's defense. In the official textbook of the General Staff of the German Army the definite policy of terrorizing a conquered country is proclaimed as a military theory. Its leading axiom is that ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... have heard. He is starting on a pilgrimage of manhood toward God. He saw the bishop; now he sees God, and here is hope; for so is God the secret of all good and worth, a thing to be set down as the axiom of religion and life. A conscience long dormant is now become regnant. Jean Valjean is ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... come at the vacancy of the Imperial throne. Ferdinand of Aragon was dead, and Naples passed to the King of undivided Spain. It was the unswerving policy of Rome that it should not be united with the Empire, and against that fixed axiom the strongest dynasty of emperors went to pieces. The Reformation had just begun in Germany, and Leo wished one of the Northern Electors to be chosen as Maximilian's successor. In conformity with the political situation, he would have preferred Frederic of Saxony, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... his mind a legitimate wish to be there, and so might do him a very special and peculiar injury. In fact, gentlemen, it has been doubted whether this grave offence of obstruction is not always being committed by everybody, as a corollary to the well- known axiom in physics that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at one and the same time. So much, gentlemen, for the lesser accusation. As to the far more serious one, I scarcely know in what words to impress upon you the gravity of the accusation. ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... the shadow of my finger. I concede that talent is not necessary to usefulness, and a woman may fulfill every duty of her station without it. But our question is of comparative usefulness; and there I have something to say. It is an axiom that knowledge is power; and, if it is, the greater the knowledge, the greater should be the power of doing good. To men, superior intelligence gives power to dispose, control, and govern the fortunes of others. To women, it gives influence over their minds. The greater knowledge ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... appeared in your paper some days ago, {164} in which it is stated that, in the course of some remarks addressed to the Playgoers' Club on the occasion of my taking the chair at their last meeting, I laid it down as an axiom that the stage is only 'a frame furnished with a set ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... comprehend, aware that he had no wound of the trunk. His useless arms made all effort vain, and the left foot under the weight of the horse began to feel numb. The position struck him as past help until our people charged. He thought of Francis's axiom that there was nothing so entirely tragic as to be without some marginalia of humour. The lad smiled at his use of the word. His own situation appealed to him as ridiculous—a man with a horse on him waiting for an ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... should be allowed to stand in the way of it! The senior partner of Hatch & Buckley had been quick to note this condition of mind and to reap the profits that came therefrom. Monomania means money, was a business axiom in that gentleman's office, but he had pumped the stream dry and Von Barwig was now at the end of his resources. By some strange process of thought, Von Barwig recognised this fact, but it seemed to him to mean that because his money had come to an end his search had ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... ourselves holding an intermediate position between true First Cause, on the one hand, and the world of secondary causes on the other, and in order to understand the nature of this position, we must fall back on the axiom that the Universal can only work on the plane of the Particular through the individual. Then we see that the function of the individual is to DIFFERENTIATE the undistributed flow of the Universal into suitable directions for starting ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... more important than the individual. But there is nothing gained by thinking in this way, except a very illusory kind of pleasure; since it is impossible that the folk should ever be a poet. This indisputable axiom has been ignored more in theories about ballads—about epic material—than in theories about the epics themselves. But the belief in a real folk-origin for ballads, untenable though it be in a little ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... Geoffrey would gladly have laid his honours down in payment for one year of her dear and unforgotten presence. She was too unselfish; she did not think that a man could thus prize a woman's love, and took it for an axiom that to succeed in life was his one real object—a thing to which so divine a gift as she had given Geoffrey is as nothing. It was therefore this Juggernaut of her lover's career that Beatrice would cast down her life, little knowing that thereby she must turn the worldly and temporal success, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... in us. "Conduct," he said once, "is the outcome of selfishness limited by self-conceit." It was his way so to put things as to strip them of friendly, decent covering; had he said self-interest limited by self-respect, the axiom would have been more accepted and less quoted. A superficial person used to exclaim to me, "And yet he is so kind!" A man without ideals finds kindness the easiest thing in the world. In truth he was kind, and ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... such dynamical elements of Christianity. The doctrine of the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection was put before the world by Darwin in 1859, and within the half century has been accepted almost as an axiom by the whole civilised world. Undoubtedly that doctrine has proved itself dynamical. On the other hand, a few years earlier than the publication of The Origin of Species, another body of new doctrine was propounded to Britain and the world, and strongly urged by its upholders, namely, the doctrine ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... The fundamental problem is whether a thing which is by hypothesis infinite can in any sense be defined, and if it is not defined, whether it can be said to be cognized or thought. It would appear to be almost an axiom that anything which by hypothesis transcends the intellect (i.e. by including subject and object, knowing and known) is ipso facto beyond the limits of the knower. Only an Absolute can cognize ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was this morality and proverbial wisdom, and although this last axiom was very characteristic of my friend Hop Sing, who was that most sombre of all humorists, a Chinese philosopher, I must confess, that, even after a very free translation, I was at a loss to make any ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... the whole matter to a conclusion. It may be taken as a safe axiom that to make gold mining in the mine as distinct from mining on the Stock Exchange really profitable the same system of economy, of practical supervision, and scientific knowledge which is now adopted in all other businesses must be applied ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... we may assume it as an axiom with regard to actions acquired after birth, that we never do them automatically save as the result of long practice, and after having thus acquired perfect mastery over ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... sure,' interposed the horse-dealer, with whose notions of bargain and sale the axiom perfectly coincided, 'so should I.' The young gentleman, who had given rise to these observations, was on the point of offering a rather angry reply to these sneers, but the rising of the young man before noticed, and of the female who ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... 1770 he published a political pamphlet, entitled The False Alarm[325], intended to justify the conduct of ministry and their majority in the House of Commons, for having virtually assumed it as an axiom, that the expulsion of a Member of Parliament was equivalent to exclusion, and thus having declared Colonel Lutterel to be duly elected for the county of Middlesex, notwithstanding Mr. Wilkes had a great majority of votes[326]. This being justly considered ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... strange, that intelligent and learned men, should be compelled to rely on such puerilities, as arguments and truly supporting such tremendous conclusions? But they say it was his name in conjunction with the curse, that made him and his descendants the negro we now find on earth. It is an axiom in logic, that, that which is not in the constituent, can not be in the constituted. We have seen, that the making of Ham a negro, is not in the name, which is one of the constituents, now let us see, if it is in the other constituent, the curse. ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne
... knew The sunny street that holds the sifted few. It can't be helped, though, if we're taken young, We gain some freedom of the lips and tongue; But school and college often try in vain To break the padlock of our boyhood's chain One stubborn word will prove this axiom true,— No quondam rustic ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of all the problems that were connected with such pseudo-propositions. All the problems that Russell's 'axiom of infinity' brings with it can be solved at this point. What the axiom of infinity is intended to say would express itself in language through the existence of infinitely many ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
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