DICTIONARY ONE.COM • More 'Sceptical' Quotes from Famous Books

... miracles are past: and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things, supernatural and causeless.' The comma ought to have been placed after 'familiar,' the sense being this—and we have amongst us sceptical and irreligious people to represent as trivial and of daily occurrence things which in reality are supernatural and causeless (that is, not lying amongst the succession of physical causes and effects, but sent as miracles by the immediate ...

— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... by me; they went to Stockholm of their own initiative and on their own responsibility, but it is none the less true that I could have refused them their passes if I had shared the views of the Entente Governments and of numerous gentlemen in our own country. Certainly, I was at the time very sceptical as to the outcome, as I already saw that the Entente would refuse passes to their Socialists, and consequently there could be nothing but a "rump" parliament in the end. But despite all the reproaches which I had to bear, and the argument that the peace-bringing Socialists would ...

— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... "I put more of the substance on the flagging than I need to have done. A few drops would have answered quite as well, but I wanted to make sure. You were very sceptical, you know." ...

— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr

... unquestioningly, just as he had believed in the history or the science that had been taught him. But in this society he met young men—and older men too, for several of the Dons were members—who were rationalists, materialists, and definitely sceptical. It dawned on his mind for the first time that, while all other sciences were of a deductive kind, endeavouring to approach principles from the observation and classification of phenomena, from the scrutiny of evidence, that theology was a science ...

— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... men's dinner party, and they were sitting over their cigars and brandy and discussing magnetism. Donato's tricks and Charcot's experiments. Presently, the sceptical, easy-going men, who cared nothing for religion of any sort, began telling stories of strange occurrences, incredible things which, nevertheless, had really occurred, so they said, falling back into superstitious beliefs, clinging ...

— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found in progress at Geneva in 1754,[338] was distinctly the outcome in a more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with reference to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were one or two extraordinary outbursts during ...

— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... unfortunate in our weather during our stay at St. Louis, and I had no opportunity of seeing the beauties of the neighbourhood, which we hear much extolled, but respecting which we are rather sceptical. The only drive we took, was to a new park being made outside the town, called Lafayette Park, which gave us anything but a pleasant impression of the entourage of St. Louis; we must admit, however, that a very short distance by railway brought us into a very pretty country, ...

— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter

... crossed the equator on the forenoon of the 15th, in longitude 19 degrees 45 minutes West, where we endeavoured to obtain soundings with 2000 fathoms of line, which parted at 1600 fathoms. Respecting deep-sea soundings, there are some sceptical persons who, in consequence of the bottom not being brought up from the great depths reported to have been found, are inclined to doubt that soundings were ...

— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... indeed, Clarke and M'Arthur, say, that at this time the treatment he received disgusted him with his profession, and that he had even determined never to set his foot again on board a king's ship, but resign his commission at once. But Sir Harris Nicolas very justly is sceptical as to the truth of this anecdote, from the fact, that there is no allusion to any intention of the kind in his correspondence. And from what we see of his disposition in all his letters, we feel ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various

... or such monotony of scenery or occupation. Although I am leaving this country, probably for good, I would not wish it to be thought that I have no faith in it, for the late developments and marvellous returns from the goldfields should convert the most sceptical. Nor have the other sources of wealth to the Colony failed to impress their importance on me. . . Every one is glad to return to his home, and I am no exception; but however happy I am at the prospect of again seeing my native land, yet I cannot say goodbye ...

— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... wild little torch with a quick movement, as if of shame. "Let me carry your lantern," he said; "it is heavy." He recovered with a spring; and in a moment, from the awe-stricken spectator he had been, became himself, sceptical and cynical. "I should like to ask you a question," he said. "Do you believe in Purgatory, Doctor? It's not in the tenets of the Church, so far as ...

— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant

... The Sceptical Philosophy of the Ancients has been no less misrepresented than the Epicurean. Pyrrho may perhaps have carried it to rather an irrational excess;—but we must not believe with Beattie all the absurdities imputed to this philosopher; and it appears to me that the ...

— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... Government, Department of Justice, I had studied investigations into the relation of a low wage to the life of immorality. These had shown me that many factors in the home, in the training, in the mental condition, often contributed to the result. I had grown sceptical of the "plain" statement of a complex matter, and peculiarly hesitant in accepting accounts of outrage and cruelty. It was in this spirit that I crossed to Belgium. To this extent, I had ...

— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason

... of the family, the society, the State; he thinks and acts more in a minute than a hundred writers can describe and explain in a year; he is a laughing, weeping, money-making, clothes-wearing, lying, reasoning, worshipping, amorous, credulous, sceptical, imitative, combative, gregarious, prehensile, two-legged animal. He does not cease to be all this and more, merely because he happens to be at one of his thousand tricks, and you catch him in the act. How do ...

— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... abroad with O. G. Spence's heir! He had the scientific detachment to pull out his watch and furtively note the hour. Yes—it was exactly forty minutes since he had rung the Spence door-bell and handed his card to a gelid footman, who, openly sceptical of his claim to be received, had left him unceremoniously planted on the ...

— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton

... a prudent little boy, with a sceptical look in his small countenance. "And where's the water?" he would have added if he ...

— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker

... assertion that four more moving bodies had to be added to the planetary system. They scoffed at the notion; they said the satellites may have been in the telescope, but that they were not in the sky. One sceptical philosopher is reported to have affirmed, that even if he saw the moons of Jupiter himself he would not believe in them, as their existence was contrary to ...

— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... Browning, I want the spring according to the new 'style' (mine), and not the old one of you and the rest of the poets. To me unhappily, the snowdrop is much the same as the snow—it feels as cold underfoot—and I have grown sceptical about 'the voice of the turtle,' the east winds blow so loud. April is a Parthian with a dart, and May (at least the early part of it) a spy in the camp. That is my idea of what you call spring; mine, ...

— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... merely by asking questions—unless he can answer the questions. Asking questions is already the fashionable and aristocratic sport which has brought most of us into the bankruptcy court. The note of our age is a note of interrogation. And the final point is so plain; no sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon. "Am I a boy?—Why am I a boy?—Why aren't I a chair?—What is a chair?" A child will sometimes ask questions ...

— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... right to touch upon this well-known sceptical topic; but to insist much upon it is not a sign of good sense. The works of Herschel, Whewell, and Jevons should be consulted for the various methods of correcting observations, by repeating them, averaging them, verifying one experimental process by another, always refining the ...

— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... confession! Well, there has been tea up there. I had some. If you hurry on after Yakovlitch, instead of wasting your time with such an unsatisfactory sceptical person as myself, you may find the ghost of it—the cold ghost of it—still lingering in the temple. But as to you being tired I can hardly believe it. We are not supposed to be. We mustn't, We can't. The other day I read in some paper or other an alarmist article ...

— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... automatic mimicry which shows itself in greater persistence of customs. For customs adopted by each generation from the last without thought or inquiry, imply a tendency to imitate which overmasters critical and sceptical tendencies: so maintaining habits for which no reasons can be given. The decrease of this irrational mimicry, strongest in the lowest savage and feeblest in the highest of the civilized, should be studied along with the successively higher stages of social life, as being at once an aid ...

— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... wife, reading aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet, now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of Queen Mab. Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical; and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from the room by his light playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the end forced a priest into his room, but the priest ...

— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant

... The sceptical insurrection of the eighteenth century made a terrific noise and frightened not a few worthy people out of their wits; but cool judges might have foreseen, at the outset, that the efforts of the later rebels were no more likely than those of the earlier, to furnish permanent resting-places ...

— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... important Petersburg review, "Russkoe Bogatsvo;" a year later, other publications equally well known published, "Konovalov," "Malva," and "Anxiety." These works brought Gorky into the literary world, where he soon became one of the favorite writers. The critics, at first sceptical, soon joined their voices with the enthusiastic clamor ...

— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... carrying great weight. Equally important is the evidence of Tatian. This remarkable Syrian wrote a harmony of the Gospels near A.D. 160. Allusions to this harmony, called the Diatessaron, were known to exist in several ancient writers, but until recently it was strenuously maintained by sceptical writers that there was not sufficient evidence to prove that the Diatessaron was composed of our present Gospels. It was suggested that it might have been drawn from other Gospels more or less resembling those which we now possess. This idea has now been dispelled. A great Syrian father, Ephraim, ...

— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... was too polite, it seemed, to be sceptical, and by his attitude expressed a readiness to be convinced as much from indifference as ...

— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman

... sorry to say that yellow journalism is not only not unknown in Japan, but is apparently in a very flourishing condition there. I regret the fact all the more because the people of Japan are not yet sufficiently educated or enlightened to receive what they read in the newspaper in a sceptical spirit. That educational and enlightening process is only effected by a long course of newspaper reading. Even in this country we can remember the time when any statement was implicitly believed because it was "in the papers." ...

— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... Oriental anecdotes written in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it something stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in its presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees the immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the way of a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that the dark sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may, indeed, contain in themselves the revolutions of which we ...

— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... prophets?" said Leicester. "I thought thou wert sceptical in all such matters as thou couldst neither see, hear, smell, taste, or touch, and that thy belief was limited by ...

— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... before the doctor imagined he did understand the boy; and indeed, sceptical as both his knowledge of himself and of the world had made him, he did so far understand him as to believe him as innocent of evil as the day he was born. His eyes could not shine so, his mouth could not have that childlike—the doctor called it ...

— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... that Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched a cockatrice. Erasmus resented deeply such an account of his work; but it was true after all. The sceptical philosophy is the most powerful of solvents, but it has no principle of organic life in it; and what of truth there was in Erasmus's teaching had to assume a far other form before it was available for the reinvigoration ...

— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... even if he had been merely Yorick, Sterne would have had manifold opportunities of giving offence and causing scandal. But lie was not only a humorist with "a thousand little sceptical notions to defend," but he was a sentimentalist as well. Those two characteristics he was constantly mingling, or trying to mingle, since sentimentality and humour are in reality like oil and wine. He would exasperate his readers by throwing his wig in their faces at the moment when they were ...

— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... while this prodigious moonshine is concocting?" demanded Zeus, who had become the most sceptical ...

— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... just heard? Wilford replied that he was sure his lordship fully believed in the truth of what he had just stated; but, for his own part, he had so often found impossibilities of this nature yield to a little courage and determination, that he confessed he was somewhat sceptical. Now, it so happened that Foxington, soon after he bought the mare, had thought just as Wilford did, and determined that he would put the bridle on. Accordingly he attempted it, and the matter ended by his getting regularly ...

— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... spiritual things. Material relief tests us too. If we give it believing that, in itself, it can carry any blessing to the poor, we are taking a grossly material view of human life. If, on the other hand, our knowledge of the mischief done by reckless giving makes us morbidly sceptical of all material assistance, we are losing a valuable tool; for relief at the right time, and given in the right way, may be made an incentive to renewed exertion, and a help to a ...

— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond

... outline what he intended to do when I could see from the commissioner's face that he was very sceptical ...

— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve

... prejudice, or a passion for freedom as an illusion. The cosmopolitan or international idea which such teachers as Cobden have tried to impress on our stubborn islanders, would have found in Macaulay not lukewarm or sceptical adherence, but point-blank opposition and denial. He believed as stoutly in the supremacy of Great Britain in the history of the good causes of Europe, as M. Thiers believes in the supremacy of France, or Mazzini believed in that of Italy. The thought of the prodigious industry, the inventiveness, ...

— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley

... expansive heraldries: at times the whole world almost seemed buried thus—made and re-made of the dead—its entire fabric of politics, of art, of custom, being essentially heraldic "achievements," dead men's mementoes such as those. You see he was a sceptical young man, and his kinsmen dead and gone had passed certainly, in his imaginations of them, into no other world, save, perhaps, into some stiffer, slower, sleepier, and more pompous phase of ceremony—the last degree of court etiquette—as they lay ...

— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater

... the grass belt above. But what may be above this grass belt I know not yet, for our view ends at the top of the wall of the great S.E. crater. My men say there are devils and gold up beyond, but the German authorities do not support this view. Those Germans are so sceptical. This station is evidently on a ledge, for behind it the ground falls steeply, and you get an uninterrupted panoramic view of the Cameroon estuary and the great stretches of low swamp lands with the Mungo and the Bimbia rivers, and their many creeks ...

— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... glaring without them in the summer months, for it has undoubtedly proved its claim to be the sunniest south coast resort; a claim at one time or other put forth by all. The most convincing proof to the sceptical stranger will be the miles of glass houses for the culture of the tomato with which the town is surrounded. Its chief attraction lies in the number of interesting places which can easily be reached in a short time and with little trouble. The Downs here are farther off than those at Brighton, but ...

— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes

... simply does what the green-grocer does when he arranges his apples and plums in his shop window. He may tell me a magnum bonum from a Victoria, or a Baldwin from a Newtown Pippin. But he does not help me to eat it. His information is useful, and for scientific horticulture essential. Should a sceptical pomologist deny that there was such a thing as a Baldwin, or mistake it for a Newtown Pippin, we should be glad to refer to him; but if we were hungry, and an orchard were handy, we should not trouble him. Truth in the Bible is an orchard rather than ...

— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... busy with its own suggestions, is always liable. The night season, simply because it excludes the external, is prolific in such. The more of the marvellous any one may have experienced in the course of his history, the more sceptical ought he to become, for he is the more exposed to delusion. None have made more blunders in the course of their revelations than genuine seers. Was it any wonder that, as I sat at midnight beside the woman of a hundred years, who had voluntarily died for a time that she might discover ...

— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald

... shadow of change among its members. This is what the New Testament, a code of philosophy fertile in new ideas, first introduced under the name of scandal; that is, any occasion of serious offence ministered to the weak or to the sceptical by differences irreconcilable in the acts or the opinions of those whom they are bound to regard as spiritual authorities. Now here in Scotland, is a feud past all arbitration: here is a schism no longer theoretic, neither beginning ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various

... account of their freeing of an imprisoned comrade and their grappling with problems arising out of such modern inventions as carbolic acid and tramways, we need not feel surprised if an observer accustomed to scrutinise the animal world so closely feels sceptical on the subject of "instinct" viewed as a mysterious entity antithetically opposed to "reason" and supposed to act as its substitute in the ...

— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt

... what I am doing. I suppose I am naturally sceptical; but I want to put aside all that stands on insecure evidence, and all the sham terminology that comes from a muddled delight in the supernatural. I want to give up and clear away all that is not certain—material ...

— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson

... who has witnessed such scenes all the years of his childhood and youth, can deny that among the disciples of Christ are to be reckoned especially the negro race; who bear His blessed cross in our day, amid the jeers of a sceptical world, just as in His own day upon earth the negro Simon of Cyrene bore to the Mount of Calvary the cross on which ...

— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... are hardly any good and distinctive appreciations in print of Borrow's works. While other great names in the great literature of the Victorian Period have been praised by a hundred pens, there has scarcely been any notable and worthy praise of Borrow, and if I were in an audience that was at all sceptical as to Borrow's supreme merits, which happily I am not; if I were among those who declared that they could see but small merit in Borrow themselves, but were prepared to accept him if only I could bring good authority that he was a very great writer, I should be ...

— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter

... impressed them badly.[80] It is in the highest degree improbable that they attached any importance to his few slips. He speaks of having a naturally weak memory which, so he declares, had grown worse while he was in prison,[81] and he was frankly sceptical as to the possibility of any man's recalling every incident in squabbles that happened years before.[82] As it happens, his memory seems to have been excellent. No doubt it failed him now and then; but seldom did it mislead him on any essential point.[83] It is conceivable ...

— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

... they executed their high commission. Depending alone on God, and inspired by his grace, they labored on, amid all the doubts and sneers of others, until their holy lives and correct deportment challenged the approbation of the most sceptical,—until God honored their work by great success,—until men, hardened ...

— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy

... the church. It is filled, and even the sceptical De Breze is impressed and awed by the sight. An intense fervour pervades the congregation. The majority, it is true, are women, many of them in deep mourning, and many of their faces mourning deeper than the dress. Everywhere may be seen gushing tears, ...

— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... "As you know, I am sceptical by nature, and want all evidence carefully sifted. I daresay I am too critical, and that is a fault. But fancy getting in touch with a friend of Dante's! What would one not give? Tell me: what is this Princess like? Is she the sort of person one ...

— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... 1. The most sceptical criticism is obliged to respect the truth of this extraordinary fact, and the integrity of this celebrated passage of Tacitus. The former is confirmed by the diligent and accurate Suetonius, who mentions the punishment which Nero inflicted on the ...

— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... certainly not a great teacher, but he has the power to ask awkward questions so characteristic of Andreev, Artsybashev, and indeed of all Russian novelists. We cannot answer him with a shrug of the shoulders or a sceptical smile. He shakes the foundations of our fancied security by boldly questioning what we had come to regard as axioms. As the late M. de Vogue remarked, when little children sit on our knee and pelt us with questions that go to the roots of our philosophy, we get rid of ...

— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... her. Mrs. Beecher thought that one volume would be enough just at first, but Mrs. Hunt Mortimer said that it was better to have a wide choice. Maude went home and told Frank in the evening. He was pleased, but rather sceptical. ...

— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle

... he would say from the confidence he has in the immutable love and faithfulness of the Holy Being, who has wrought so great a work in him. And let philosophers cavil and doubt, if they must; but this man's example is a refutation in fact of a thousand of their sceptical theories. He is a new man, and the change was effected chiefly before discipline, or example, had time to work it. He is an honest man, and soberly asserts that to his certain knowledge he did not perform the work himself. But where is the example to be found of such ...

— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... an extravagant fancy, but it is a sentiment which strikes home to my very soul: though sceptical in some points of our current belief, yet, I think, I have every evidence for the reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence; if so, then, how should I, in the presence of that tremendous ...

— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... neglected, I interpreted so far as to say that perhaps at that moment the flames were catching hold of our worthy brother and inside passenger, Ucalegon. The coachman made no answer,—which is my own way when a stranger addresses me either in Syriac or in Coptic; but by his faint sceptical smile he seemed to insinuate that he knew better,—for that Ucalegon, as it happened, was not in the way-bill, and therefore could not have ...

— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... qualities to their favourite animals; the lion of the Old World thus came to be regarded as brave and I magnanimous above all beasts of the field—the Bayard of the four-footed kind, a reputation which these prosaic and sceptical times have not suffered it to keep. Precisely the contrary has happened with the puma of literature; for, although to those personally acquainted with the habits of this lesser lion of the New World it is known to possess a marvellous courage and daring, ...

— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... "And this from our sceptical disbeliever, boys!" struck in Tony West, raising his hands in mock horror. "Nigel, m'lad, you've made an early conversion. The good doctor has a sneaking belief in the story. How now, son? What's your ...

— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew

... received articles of the Christian Creed. The work attracted some share of public attention. A poetical effusion in verse was addressed to Blair in reply by a minister of the Protestant Church; and an Anabaptist minister also entered the lists with a pamphlet nearly as sceptical as the one he professed ...

— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... against the world Miss Miniver assembled a small but energetic minority, the Children of Light—people she described as "being in the van," or "altogether in the van," about whom Ann Veronica's mind was disposed to be more sceptical. ...

— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... locality as to remember where he was, and the whole furniture of the Green Chamber was depicted to his slumbering eye. And here, once more, let me protest, that if there should be so much old-fashioned faith left among this shrewd and sceptical generation, as to suppose that what follows was an impression conveyed rather by the eye than by the imagination, I do not impugn their doctrine. He was, then, or imagined himself, broad awake in the Green Chamber, gazing upon the ...

— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... System or Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774-76), Observations on the Plain of Troy (1795), and Dissertation concerning the Wars of Troy (1796). In the last two he endeavoured to show that the existence of Troy and the Greek expedition were fabulous. Though so sceptical on these points he was an implicit believer in the authenticity of the Rowley authorship of Chatterton's fabrications. He also wrote ...

— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... without some effort of his own, to read the paper which follows and Dr. Butts's reflections upon it. If he has no curiosity in the direction of these chapters, he can afford to leave them to such as relish a slight flavor of science. But if he does so leave them he will very probably remain sceptical as to the truth of the story to which they are meant to furnish ...

— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... was pleased to call him; but the old body herself came, and entreated of papa not to try and entice him to accompany us; for it seems that papa's cool and determined manner had made a great impression on Griffy, who, perhaps, got more sceptical on these matters, on account of it. Mrs. Davis was so importunate on the subject, that she obtained the desired assurance, viz., that Griffeth Davis should not be directly or indirectly tempted to encounter the ghost or ghosts, as the case ...

— A Book For The Young • Sarah French

... from behind a hedge in our own day, and, alas! in some parts of our own land. As in the highest good, so in the deepest evil, there are diversities of operation by the same spirit. When we take into account the changes of fashion which occur both in clothing and in crime, we have no reason to be sceptical as to the ancient fact, and no difficulty in obtaining a ...

— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... been speaking of the intellectual region, and I would sum it up by saying that I think that the duty of every thoughtful person, who desires to avoid egotism in the intellectual region, is to cultivate what may be called the scientific, or even the sceptical spirit, to weigh evidence, and not to form conclusions without evidence. Thus one avoids the dangers of egotism best, because egotism is the frame of mind of the man who says credo quia credo. Whereas the aim of the philosopher should be to take nothing for ...

— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson

... philosopher, was born at Cnossus in Crete and taught at Alexandria, probably during the first century B.C. He was the leader of what is sometimes known as the third sceptical school and revived to a great extent the doctrine of Pyrrho and Timon. His chief work was the Pyrrhonian Principles addressed to Lucius Tubero. His philosophy consisted of four main parts, the reasons for scepticism and doubt, the attack on causality and truth, a physical theory and ...

— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... perils of transgressing this ring. Whether the threatened danger was material or spiritual I never fully understood, but a great fear used to possess me. I had read in the Ramayana of the tribulations of Sita for having left the ring drawn by Lakshman, so it was not possible for me to be sceptical of its potency. ...

— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

... a little sceptical, but put me to the proof. If you could manage to slip out unobserved, I would engage to disguise you in such a manner that no one ...

— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... for his rival, and not sit down and examine his own tongue in the chimney Bass, or write his own prescription at his study-table? I throw out these queries for intelligent readers to answer, who know, at once, how credulous we are, and how sceptical, how soft and how obstinate, how firm for others and how diffident about ourselves: meanwhile, it is certain that our friend William Dobbin, who was personally of so complying a disposition that if his parents had pressed him much, it is probable he would have stepped down ...

— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Nan, coldly sceptical, eyed de Spain. "And do you try to tell me"—she pointed to Sassoon's unbound hands—"that he is riding out of here, a free ...

— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman

... channels, from above downwards and from below upwards: it is reached through the reason and through the imagination and senses. By the latter channel it often receives evil impressions, undoubtedly, but not unfrequently by the former also. Reason may be inconsiderate, vain, haughty, mutinous, unduly sceptical. The abuse is no justification for closing either channel. Now the channel of the senses and of the imagination is the wider, and in many cases affords the better passage of the two. The will that is hardly reached by reason, is approached and won by a pathetic sight, a cry of enthusiasm, ...

— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... education. All of them are well educated; two or three of them are smart. The school, which has an average attendance of 550, is in a high state of efficiency; is, in fact, one of the best to the country. The sceptical can refer to Government reports if they wish for absolute proof. Still further on there is another school, set apart for the instruction of middle class boys, and in charge of three Xavierian brothers. About 90 boys attend it, and they are well disciplined. ...

— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... frankly stated by Mr. Gardiner, was that nothing less than occupancy carried the right to territorial dominion; and it had been declared to him that the locality of the Mine was not occupied by Spaniards. He was sceptical of the existence of the Mine, and he was mistrustful of Ralegh's disposition to comply with the compact. The national eagerness, however, for the adventure, and the confidence of Ralegh's well-wishers, overpowered his reluctance. He was moved also by the venial hope of a vast influx of innocent ...

— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... scientific fact. But when a theory has been raised to such a level of probability as this, it is, for all practical purposes, as good as a demonstration. Thus, in the particular instance before us, even if the sceptical demand for evidence, which from the nature of the case is clearly impossible, were granted, and if we could actually observe the transmutation of species, the fact would not exert any further influence on the progress of science than is ...

— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes

... leavings from the feast",—he writes to Cassius. He would have had their daggers turned on Antony, at all events, as well as on Caesar. He wishes that "the gods may damn Caesar after he is dead;" professing on this occasion a belief in a future retribution, on which at other times he was sceptical. It is but right to remember all this, when the popular tide turned, and he himself came to be denounced to political vengeance. The levity with which he continually speaks of the assassination of Caesar—a man who had never treated him, at any rate, with anything but a noble ...

— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins

... solitudes of the kitchen level were awfully dark, and this sceptical kitchen-wench was the only person now up and about the house. She hummed tunes to herself, for a time; and then stopped and listened; and then resumed her work again. At last, she was destined to be more terrified than ...

— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... street of Blakeney. Ten minutes later, when the car followed, a mob of men so completely blocked the water-front that Ford was forced to stop. His head-lights illuminated hundreds of faces, anxious, sceptical, eager. A gentleman with a white mustache and a look of a retired army officer pushed his way toward Ford, the crowd making room for him, and ...

— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis

... brought together, and many ingenious commentaries on them. But there are great chasms in his facts, and consequently in his reasoning. These he fills up by suppositions, which may be as reasonably denied as granted. A sceptical reader therefore, like myself, is left in the lurch. I acknowledge, however, he makes more use of fact, than any other writer on a theory of the earth. But I give one answer to all these theorists. That is as follows. They all suppose the earth a created existence. ...

— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... bore through it. The ship, however, was never altogether arrested, though often much retarded. I recollect, while thus surrounded, filling a bucket with water from a pool on the ice, to see whether it was fresh or not, as I had been rather sceptical upon this point. It was excellent, and might almost compete with the water from the famous spring of Crawley. In a few days we got out of the ice altogether; and in this, as the ships are frequently detained for weeks in the straits, we ...

— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne

... transformation is inevitable. When it shall take place, when the struggle shall burst forth at twenty places at once, when the old combat between fact and right is decided, the peoples will remember that England had stood by, an inert, immovable, sceptical witness of their sufferings and efforts.... England will find herself some day a third-rate power, and to this she is being brought by a want of foresight in her statesmen. The nation must rouse herself and shake off the torpor ...

— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... surely we're not to class our dear medical men as poisoners and murderers on that account. It's just the same with any abnormal or extraordinary facts that set up a new theory for investigation. Impostors are sure to creep in, and the lazy and the indifferent and the sceptical call their exposure 'results.' Depend on it we don't half investigate subjects now-a-days, and we suffer for it by giving place and opportunity for the development of a certain class of beings who prey ...

— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)

... was among "the loudest bagpipes of the squeaking train." Even amongst the really earnest Puritans prosperity disclosed a pride, a worldliness, a selfish hardness which had been hidden in the hour of persecution. What was yet more significant was the irreligious and sceptical temper of the younger generation which had grown up amidst the storms of the Civil War. The children even of the leading Puritans stood aloof from Puritanism. The eldest of Cromwell's sons made small pretensions to religion. ...

— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green

... suggestion for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal, or perhaps greater, distinction of form, and, through the use of a fresh medium of expression, make differently beautiful and more perfect. Well, you seemed to be a little sceptical about the theory. ...

— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... are right, but sixty-nine or ninety-nine, I am inclined to be a little sceptical about that record myself; there is one thing in its favor, however, and that is, that he made it an even nine hundred and ninety-nine, and not one thousand. Of course, you know there are plenty of people living ...

— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory

... pleasure could be apart from yours. The child is so like Robert that I can believe in the other likeness, and may the inner nature indeed, as you say, be after that pure image! He is so fat and rosy and strong that almost I am sceptical of his being my child. I suppose he is, after all. May God bless you, both of you. I am ashamed to send all these letters, but Robert makes me. He is better, but still much depressed sometimes, and over your letters he drops heavy ...

— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... A doctrine held by a follower of Pyrrho, a Greek philosopher of the third century before Christ, who founded the sceptical school. He taught that it is impossible to attain truth, and that men should be ...

— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... the whole, tolerably content to plunge his swallows, or a good proportion of them, into the mud and deposit them for the winter at the bottom of a pond. Professionally conservative, as a fine old Church-of-England clergyman, though constitutionally sceptical, as became one of the earliest of really observant naturalists, he was loath to break flatly with the consensus of contemporary opinion, rustic and philosophic, and found a modus vivendi in the theory that a great many, perhaps a majority, of the swifts and barn-swallows did go to Africa. He had ...

— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... it, pray, a couple of girls like themselves? She scowled quite fiercely at the General as she put the question, but he only chuckled in reply, having already been treated to the history of Nan's first 'At Home' from the lips of an historian more sceptical than sympathetic. ...

— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey

... and pursuits. Their motive, for all this, we need not pause, in this place, to examine. But a distinction may be made between the melancholy of the heart, and the melancholy of the mind: while the latter is sceptical, sour, and misanthropic, the former is passionate, tender, and religious. Those who are under the influence of the one, become inactive, morose, or heedless: detecting the follies of the wisest and the frailties of the best, they scoff at the very name of virtue; they spurn, as visionary and ...

— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... To be sure, some sceptical persons told the whole story very differently. According, to their account, Miss Sarah had been the mistress of M. de Kergrist, and, seeing him utterly ruined, had sent him off one fine morning. They stated, that, the evening ...

— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau

... mornings. His locks are brown and his face ruddy. In half-an- hour he returns with his face blue, his nose frost-bitten, and his locks white—the latter effect being produced by his breath congealing on his hair and breast, until both are covered with hoar- frost. Perhaps he is of a sceptical nature, prejudiced it may be, in favour of old habits and customs; so that, although told by those who ought to know that it is absolutely necessary to wear moccasins in winter, he prefers the leather boots to which he has been accustomed ...

— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application to the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a ...

— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... hundred and fifty-eight pieces, of which thirteen were Italian operas, many of which were successful.[11] The famous contest between Handel and Buononcini in Italian composition was decided in favour of the former by public acclamation. Those who are sceptical on the score of his composing in Italian, are referred to the well-known air, 'Lord, remember David,' which is to be found in the opera of Sosarmes, commencing with ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various

... Musset was the first who found favor with her heart, it appears; and they were inseparably associated for about three years. This brilliant young poet, so sceptical, so sad, so audacious, so dissolute, was the first of this famous coterie of men to become madly infatuated with George Sand,—but far from the last. It is asserted that each in turn, and many more besides, were the victims of her luring wiles. For many years the ...

— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... man determined to stand firmly on the side of the supernatural with the priest. He went further, and blamed his scepticism. It had cost the world a valuable life. He could not, indeed, be censured for that in any court of inquiry. Sceptical men would doubtless say that he had done rightly in refusing Mr. May his experiment. But Sir Walter now convinced himself that he had done wrongly. At such a time, with landmarks vanishing and all accepted ...

— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... glance in the clear light satisfied us that the superhuman beauty we almost worshipped, and the splendor that seemed too lavish to be real, were no mere glamor of lamplight or moonlight, but surpassed in the reality all that our stunted, sceptical, Western imaginations, even stimulated as they were, ...

— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various

... been melted by intense heat, pass muster easily with children and sailor folk for the genuine thunderbolts. But the grand upholder of the belief, the one true undeniable reality which has kept alive the thunderbolt even in a wicked and sceptical age, is, beyond all question, the occasional falling of meteoric stones. Your meteor is an incontrovertible fact; there is no getting over him; in the British Museum itself you will find him duly classified ...

— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... curious pictures among the bas-reliefs at Deir el-Bahari. On their return, after a three years' absence, they reported that they had sailed to a country named Ophir, and produced in support of their statement a freight well calculated to convince the most sceptical, consisting as it did of four hundred and twenty talents of gold. The success of this first venture encouraged Solomon to persevere in such expeditions: he sent his fleet on several voyages to Ophir, and procured from thence a rich harvest of gold and silver, ...

— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... on which he was genuine and emphatic was common to the middle ages; a deep and somewhat snivelling conviction of the transitory nature of this life and the pity and horror of death. Old age and the grave, with some dark and yet half-sceptical terror of an after-world—these were ideas that clung about his bones like a disease. An old ape, as he says, may play all the tricks in its repertory, and none of them will tickle an audience into good humour. "Tousjours vieil synge est desplaisant." ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... through those gateways? Surely on his head and not on mine should rest the burden of my deeds; yet he prospered all his life, and I have been told that his death was happy and painless. This man's career furnishes one of the few arguments that to my sceptical mind suggest the existence of a place of future reward and punishment, for how is it possible that so great a villain should reap no fruit from his rich sowing of villainy? If it is possible, then verily this world is the ...

— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard

... time in going about to balls, theatres, and operas." On the other hand, the London quidnuncs make my seclusion a matter of wonder, and devise twenty romantic fictions to account for it. Formerly I used to listen to report with interest and a certain credulity; I am now grown deaf and sceptical. Experience has taught me how absolutely devoid of ...

— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... As to the first, that of finding a qualified tutor; we must not expect so much perfection, I doubt, as he lays down as necessary. What, therefore, I humbly conceive is best to be done, will be to avoid choosing a man of bigoted and narrow principles; who yet shall not be tainted with sceptical or heterodox notions, nor a mere scholar or pedant; who has travelled, and yet preserved his moral character untainted; and whose behaviour and carriage is easy, unaffected, unformal, and genteel, as well acquiredly as naturally ...

— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... that what she said was quite true—there was an unmistakable winding-sheet in the wax, and it emphatically pointed in her direction. Nor were her surmisings in vain, for the next morning she received a telegram to say her brother Tom had died suddenly. I am sceptical with regard to some manifestations, but I certainly do believe in this one, and I often regard my candle anxiously, fearing that I may ...

— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... what used to be Mr. Harrison's grocery-store, eoliths beyond all count are on view, which he has managed to amass in his rare moments of leisure. As he lovingly cons the stones over, and shows off their points, his enthusiasm is likely to prove catching. But the visitor, we shall suppose, is sceptical. Very good; it is not far, though a stiffish pull, to Ash on the top of the North Downs. Hereabouts are Mr. Harrison's hunting-grounds. Over these stony tracts he has conducted Sir Joseph Prestwich and Sir John Evans, to convince the one authority, but not the ...

— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... round of applause was not wanting, but on this point Mrs. Kobbe was visibly sceptical: she received her lord ...

— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... subject of human speculation, but when they are plain and obvious. To substitute vain conjectures, instead of the designs of Providence, on subjects where those designs are beyond our reach, serves only to furnish matter for the cavils of the sceptical, and the sneers of ...

— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... as a form of God's joy, is deathless. For his joy is amritham, eternal. This it is in us which makes us sceptical of death, even when the fact of death cannot be doubted. In reconcilement of this contradiction in us we come to the truth that in the dualism of death and life there is a harmony. We know that the life of a soul, which is finite in its expression ...

— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore

... the Watson family suddenly changed, and in such a remarkable way it would convince the most sceptical of the existence of good working fairies. A letter came to Pearl, the eldest girl, from the Old Country, and ...

— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung

... publishers were sceptical as to the practical value of this novel invention, but Mr. John Walter, the proprietor of the London Times, with better foresight than the others, and needing increased facilities for printing his paper, contracted for two presses, each to have two impression cylinders. These were constructed ...

— The Building of a Book • Various

... distrust and doubt can erect all sorts of difficulties, and perhaps none is more common and specious than what is called by the sceptical men 'the logic of proportion'. This argument says, 'In a universe so vast, what is man? As a speck of dust is to a planet, and as a star is to the vast universe, so is man to the world in which he lives'. Well, it certainly is not strange that the mind should stagger ...

— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard

... occurred to me that I might be more successful perhaps with a publisher of whom I had heard, who published and sold books of a sceptical turn. To him I accordingly went, and although I had no introductions or recommendatory letters, I was received, if not with a cordiality, at least with an interest which surprised me. He took me into ...

— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford

... Crusades were regarded by the world, and treated by historians, as the mere ebullition of frenzied fanaticism—as a useless and deplorable effusion of human blood. It may be conceived with what satisfaction these views were received by Voltaire, and the whole sceptical writers of France, and how completely, in consequence, they deluded more than one generation. Robertson was the first who pointed out some of the important consequences which the Crusades had on the structure of society, ...

— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... contend with the reproach which is everywhere prepared for those who dare venture to dissent from the received opinions of their country or party? And where is the man to be found that can patiently prepare himself to bear the name of whimsical, sceptical, or atheist; which he is sure to meet with, who does in the least scruple any of the common opinions? And he will be much more afraid to question those principles, when he shall think them, as most men do, the standards set up by God in his mind, to be the rule and touchstone of all other opinions. ...

— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... of the scene in the museum, of Sir Philip's tale, of the implied identity of the youthful Margrave with the aged Grayle, of the elixir of life, and of magic arts? I—I tell such a romance! I,—the noted adversary of all pretended mysticism; I,—I a sceptical practitioner of medicine! Had that manuscript of Sir Philip's been available,—a substantial record of marvellous events by a man of repute for intellect and learning,—I might perhaps have ventured to startle the solicitor ...

— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of whose sudden overthrow, they needs must hear. But the secrets that men hear today, and by hearing of which are made silent, are the secrets of lives being lived, of hearts being broken, of intentions so noble and failures so bitter as to make men sceptical whether God keeps watch over the passing events on ...

— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... about—that the intellectual standard is very low in Mexico. The Holy Office, too, has had its word to say in the matter. This institution had not much work to do in burning Indians, who were anything but sceptical in their turn of mind, and, indeed, were too much like Theodore Hook, and would believe "forty, if you pleased." They even went further, and were apt to believe not only what the missionaries taught them, but to cherish the memory of their old gods into the bargain. It was ...

— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... vigour and intensity where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay. And the uncanny part of it was that some horrid unwholesome power seemed to be distilled from their spite and their cursings. No amount of sceptical explanation could remove the undoubted fact that neither kettle nor saucepan would come to boiling-point over the hottest fire. Crefton clung as long as possible to the theory of some defect in the coals, ...

— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki

... Goethe accepts religion and uses it, but between it and the depths of his own mind remains forever an inviolable film of sceptical "white light." This "qualified assent" is precisely what excites the fury of such individualistic thinkers as Tolstoi and Bernard Shaw. It were amusing to note the difference between the "humour" of this latter and the "humour" of Shakespeare. Shaw's humour consists in emphasizing ...

— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... said to have been discovered by the Germans. I am sceptical on this point, having never yet found a place that was discovered by them. An English eccentric or two is sure to have lived and died here all by himself; though doubtless, once on the spot, they did their best to popularise and vulgarise it. In this matter, ...

— Alone • Norman Douglas

... recalled to the English people the inherent blessings of their old free monarchy, and painted in immortal hues his picture of a patriot king, the spirit that he raised at length touched the heart of Carteret born a whig, yet sceptical of the advantages of that patrician constitution which made the Duke of Newcastle the most incompetent of men, but the chosen leader of the Venetian party, virtually sovereign of England. Lord Carteret had many brilliant qualities: ...

— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... asked nothing further; he was still plainly impatient about the handkerchief evidence, if not wholly sceptical, and he waved Mrs. Marriner away. But Cotman ...

— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

... consciousness of locality as to remember where he was, and the whole furniture of the Green Chamber was depicted to his slumbering eye. And here, once more, let me protest, that if there should be so much old-fashioned faith left among this shrewd and sceptical generation, as to suppose that what follows was an impression conveyed rather by the eye than by the imagination, I do not impugn their doctrine. He was, then, or imagined himself, broad awake in the Green Chamber, gazing upon the flickering and occasional flame which the unconsumed ...

— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... Macaulay professes to deduce from Mill's principles he really holds himself, and he holds it because he argues, as indeed everybody has to argue, pretty much on Mill's method. He does not really remain in the purely sceptical position which would correspond to his version of 'Baconian induction.' He argues, just as Mill would have argued, from general rules about human nature. Selfish and ignorant people will, he thinks, be naturally ...

— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... the predictions of fortune-tellers. "The minds of all at this period were still imbued with those superstitious feelings, of which many of the most illustrious persons had given ample proof even in the preceding reign. We have become either more wicked or more sceptical, whichever you please to term it; but this is certain, that many of the things predicted were accomplished with an exact punctuality, which might serve to overthrow the finest arguments of the greatest philosophers, and which has indeed destroyed many ...

— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon

... of the slums of crime. Had some merciful angel leaned from the parapets of heaven and warned her; or did her father's spirit, in mysterious communion of deathless love and prescient guardianship, stir her soul to oppose her mother's scheme? Sceptical and heedless Tarquins are we all, whom our patient Sibylline intuitions finally abandon to the woes ...

— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... are genuine in the sense which makes them so attractive—that is to say, as literally authentic pictures of a great man's interior life, of his actual words and behaviour as witnessed by his intimates—must always remain doubtful to the sceptical mind. True reminiscences are naturally somewhat cloudy in outline, hanging loose together with gaps and interruptions; whereas these are all coherent, clear-cut, and written in a style that gives superior polish and setting to every ...

— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... highest possible. On one hand to wallow in easy loves, rest in traditional formulae, or enjoy a "moving type of devotion" which makes no intellectual demand. On the other, to accept without criticism the sceptical attitude of our neighbours, and keep safely in the furrow of ...

— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... one John Borrow of St. Cleer in Cornwall, who died before this child was born, and is described by his grandson[3] as the scion 'of an ancient but reduced Cornish family, tracing descent from the de Burghs, and entitled to carry their arms.' This claim, of which I am thoroughly sceptical, is endorsed by Dr. Knapp,[4] who, however, could find no trace of the family earlier than 1678, the old parish registers having been destroyed. When Thomas Borrow was born the family were in any case nothing more than small farmers, and Thomas ...

— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... complete comprehension of the Universe and of all the phenomena produced in it. They point out that all our sensations correspond to changes of energy, and that everything apparent to our senses is, in truth, energy. The famous experiment of the blows with a stick by which it was demonstrated to a sceptical philosopher that an outer world existed, only proves, in reality, the existence of energy, and not that of matter. The stick in itself is inoffensive, as Professor Ostwald remarks, and it is its vis viva, its kinetic energy, which is painful ...

— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... said, expressing her thoughts for her, with a smile, "you are a trifle sceptical. What you are saying to yourself is, 'How far does that lover of adventures want to make me go? It is quite obvious that I attract him; and sooner or later he would not be sorry to receive payment for his services.' You are quite right. We must have ...

— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc

... he would have done it without hesitation, but since he had been there he had learned to be suspicious, sceptical. He restrained himself therefore and listened to the end, standing in the same spot, having in his heart an unconfessed desire to know more of the man in whose service he was. As for the Nabob, the perfectly unconscious ...

— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... middle. He, Saurez, would be famous, and his sons and grandsons would have copies of the book in their houses to show visitors and the priest. Ah, it would be well to have the priest witness Saurez' signature, then sceptical people would know indeed that the stories were Saurez' own accounts. So ...

— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd

... This venal trespass on the truth, though it has been occasionally played off by some pseudo marquis, baronet, and other illustrious foreigner, in our land of good-natured credulity, has been completely discountenanced in this sceptical, matter-of-fact age; and I even question whether any tender virgin, who was accidentally and unaccountably enriched with a bantling, would save her character at parlor firesides and evening tea-parties by ascribing the phenomenon ...

— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... On the whole the conflicting results ought to be as puzzling to those who may attribute them to a universal tendency to inherit the exact condition of parents as they are to those who, like myself, are sceptical as to the existence of such a law ...

— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball

... went to Petersburg, and was then sent out again. He was quite clear as to his dates, and put them on paper; but as he was perfectly ignorant of any French, "not even the names of the commonest articles," though he had been such a long time amongst French people, Cook was again inclined to be sceptical. He stayed all night, dining with Clerke, and returned again on the 19th, with charts, which he permitted to be copied, and some manuscripts. One chart showed the Asiatic coast as far as 41 degrees North, with the Kurile Islands and ...

— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson

... effect no entry. It is not quite certain whether Spinoza was born in Amsterdam. He must, at all events, have come there in his early youth. He may have been a pupil of Manasseh, but his mind was nurtured on the philosophical treatises of Maimonides and Crescas. His thought became sceptical, and though he was "intoxicated with a sense of God," he had no love for any positive religion. He learned Latin, and found new avenues opened to him in the writings of Descartes. His associations with the representatives of the ...

— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams

... metaphysics, have as little to do with the power of his poetry over us, as the imputed Arianism or any other aspect of the theology of Paradise Lost has to do with the strength and the sublimity of Milton, and his claim to a high perpetual place in the hearts of men. It is best to be entirely sceptical as to the existence of system and ordered philosophy in Wordsworth. When he tells us that "one impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good, than all the sages can," such a proposition cannot be seriously taken as ...

— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... charm, the whole poem is inimitably graceful and piquant. The gay humour, the demure horror of the witchcraft, the terrible seriousness of the battle, wonderfully realize the mock-heroic gigantesque; and while there is not the minute accuracy of Gulliver in Lilliput, Drayton did not write for a sceptical or too-prying audience; quite half his readers believed more or less in fairies. In the metre of the poem Drayton again echoes that of the older romances, as he did in Dowsabel. In the Quest of Cinthia, ...

— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... room these gentlemen go to work with the most serious mien; at the opera they deem it becoming to put on a nonchalant, sceptical, cleverly-frivolous air. They concede with a smile that they are not quite at home in the opera, and do not profess to understand much about things which they do not particularly esteem. Accordingly, they are very ...

— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)

... noting the arrival of Miss Nina Saville of the New Centreville Opera House we quoted rather extensively from our esteemed contemporary, the Mendocino Times and commented upon the quotation. Shortly afterwards, it may also be remembered, we made a very direct and decided apology for the sceptical levity which inspired those remarks, and expressed our hearty sympathy with the honest, if somewhat effusive, enthusiasm with which the dramatic critic of Mendocino greeted the sweet and dainty little ...

— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various

... speak circumspectly, and undoubtedly mathematics and physics, at least, demand such close attention and such firm reasoning as to render them an essential part of any disciplinary education. But there are good grounds for being sceptical of the effect of the non-mathematical sciences on the immature mind. Any one who has spent a considerable portion of his undergraduate time in a chemical laboratory, for example, as the present writer has done, and has ...

— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... went to France, and in them the N.C.O.'s plant esprit de corps and the fear of God. The missing identity discs arrive, and a fourth Date is fixed—July 21. And the dwellers in the blinking hole, having been wolfed several times, are sceptical, and treat the latest report as a ...

— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... was received, announcing the ratification of the Treaty by the Prince Regent." We assume then, that on the 22d of January, such intelligence was received of the Peace at New-Orleans, as might, and should have satisfied the most sceptical military caution, of its truth, at least to the extent required for our examination ...

— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... a conceited English painter who went to Rome, and when he got into the Sistine Chapel, turning to his companion, said, "Egad, George, we're bit!" Our own tendency is, because of our ignorance, to be sceptical and suspicious as to foreign works of art, especially of a kind that are novel and daring. No one is so hard to please as a simpleton. We are so afraid of being taken in, that we are reluctant to commit ourselves in favor of any new thing until we have heard from headquarters; but it appears to ...

— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various

... Mr. Wilson's plans for mediation, they are meanwhile meeting with vigorous opposition in England. If they are rejected by England, the result cannot but be favorable to us, for we are naturally sceptical of mediation on the part of a statesman so partial to England, and at the same time so naive as President Wilson. This necessarily follows on the consideration that the President would primarily be concerned ...

— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff

... exhibition of the least glimmer of personal initiative. At the bottom of the social ladder the system creates an army of proletarians discontented with their lot and always ready to revolt, while at the summit it brings into being a frivolous bourgeoisie, at once sceptical and credulous, having a superstitious confidence in the State, whom it regards as a sort of Providence, but without forgetting to display towards it a ceaseless hostility, always laying its own faults to the door of the Government, ...

— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... my would-be sceptical companion had his troubles too. But of these I knew nothing yet. One night, for a wonder, I was sleeping soundly, when I was roused by a step on the lobby outside my room, followed by the loud clang of what turned out to be a large brass candlestick, flung with all his force by poor Tom Ludlow over ...

— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... an insuperable resistance It is n't strategists that are wanted so much as believers John Quincy Adams Kindly shadow of oblivion Manner in which an insult shall be dealt with Mediocrity is at a premium Misanthropical, sceptical philosopher Most entirely truthful child whe had ever seen Motley was twice sacrificed to personal feelings Nearsighted liberalism No great man can reach the highest position in our government No ...

— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... East, scholars were not at all agreed as to the site of the town which was so long besieged by the Greeks; and certain sceptical spirits even went so far as to deny that there ever was such a person as Homer at all, or that if there were, he wrote the epic poem which has borne his . name so long. Tradition, however, was pretty constant ...

— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... no master, no pontiff in the arts. Palizzi bore rule at Grez—urbane, superior rule—his memory rich in anecdotes of the great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories; sceptical, composed, and venerable to the eye; and yet beneath these outworks, all twittering with Italian superstition, his eye scouting for omens, and the whole fabric of his manners giving way on the appearance of a hunchback. Cernay had Pelouse, the admirable, ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... very sceptical of everybody's faculty of description. He made us describe people, and specially his own children and others whom he knew well, again and again, and his unwillingness to accept any description as being good rested no doubt upon the wide divergence ...

— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland

... amongst the really earnest Puritans prosperity disclosed a pride, a worldliness, a selfish hardness which had been hidden in the hour of persecution. What was yet more significant was the irreligious and sceptical temper of the younger generation which had grown up amidst the storms of the Civil War. The children even of the leading Puritans stood aloof from Puritanism. The eldest of Cromwell's sons made small pretensions to religion. Milton's ...

— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green

... suppress eccentricity than to arouse enthusiasm; it was eminently respectable, but at the very antipodes of the heroic. Could he then lean to Rome? He could not do so without damning the men he most loved, even could his keen and in some ways sceptical intellect have consented to commit suicide. Or to the Romanising party in the Church? The movement sprang from the cloister, and he had breathed the bracing air of secular life. He was far too clear-headed not to see whither they were tending. To him they appeared to be simply feeble ...

— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... reflected the watcher affectionately, intolerant, plus Calviniste que Calvin meme—sceptical of the world, with up-twisted eyebrows that seemed to signify a perpetual interrogation, yet faithful unto death to his duty and his own ideals. He minded well assisting to dig Ringan out of a snowdrift wherein he was seated, calmly tending a ewe ...

— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... to the deistical movement which Rousseau found in progress at Geneva in 1754,[338] was distinctly the outcome in a more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with reference to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the middle ages, to mark the ...

— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... weak stick of a creature with a smattering of medicine, grew sceptical. He insisted that jacketing, no matter how prolonged, could never kill me; and his insistence was a challenge to the ...

— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... for cleaning dresses and furs and for preserving them from moths, and instructions for removing stains and grease spots. The Menagier gives seven recipes for taking out grease spots, but he is rather sceptical about one or two of them, which he has evidently copied from a book without trying them for himself. 'To get rid of stains on a dress of silk, satin, camlet, damask cloth or another,' runs one of these, 'dip and wash the stain in verjuice and the stain will ...

— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... Mr. Markham? I'm not given to 'jollying' newspaper reporters. Here's a copy of the telegram I sent this morning, if you are still sceptical. Really, I don't see why you think it so impossible. Don't you consider Mr. Huntington a ...

— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell

... however, never take this view. Shakespeare's contemporaries thought him a mighty clever fellow and no more. Why, even Wordsworth was well persuaded he could write like Shakespeare had he been so minded. Mr. Arnold remained all his life honestly indifferent to and sceptical about the fame of both Tennyson and Browning. Great living lawyers and doctors do not invariably idolize each other, nor do the lawyers and doctors in a small way of business always speak well of those in a big ...

— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... of view. Julius and Raphael are the emblems of his own fears and his own hopes; their Philosophic Letters unfold to us many a gloomy conflict that had passed in the secret chambers of their author's soul. Sceptical doubts on the most important of all subjects were natural to such an understanding as Schiller's; but his heart was not of a temper to rest satisfied with doubts; or to draw a sorry compensation for them from the pride ...

— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... vanishing of this cloud at my uncle's approach—what is the inference to be drawn from these facts? Their truth cannot be doubted. My uncle's testimony is peculiarly worthy of credit, because no man's temper is more sceptical, and his belief is ...

— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown

... the Lakes of Killarney, give me Innisfallen— "sweet Innisfallen," as the melodious Moore calls it. It is in truth a fairy isle, although I have no fairy story to tell you about it; and if I had, these are such unbelieving times, and people of late have grown so sceptical, that they only smile at my stories ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various

... Grown sceptical of life. Power? Power? For what? And over what? And toward what? Not a power Over myself or pain or loneliness Or ignorance or evil; not a strength To bid the near-world cease, and in its place Instate my visions beautiful and pale, Nearer the heart's desire. No, you would give ...

— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke

... actually commands an interest—(by the by, this is referring generally, and nothing personal to myself.) I philosophically refer it all to the balance of nature. Now I know some very ugly places that have a degree of interest, and here again I fancy a lady's sceptical ejaculation, "Indeed!" Ay, but it is so; and let us go no further than Covent Garden. Enter it from Russell-street. What can be more unsightly,—with its piles of cabbages in the street, and basket-measures on the roofs of the shops—narrow alleys, wooden buildings, rotting vegetables "undique," ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various

... first youth, wearing the crown and wielding the sceptre, had become un fait accompli and the news spread over the length and breadth of the land. We have seen how it touched the oldest statesmen, to whom State ceremonials had become hackneyed—who were perhaps a little sceptical of virtue in high places. It may be imagined, then, how the knowledge, with each striking and picturesque detail, thrilled and engrossed all the sensitive, romantic young hearts in the Queen's dominions. It seemed as if womanhood and girlhood were exalted ...

— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler

... Ridinghood was a stranger even by name. So far as my 'dedication' was concerned, I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in ...

— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... of your claptrap with me: I'm too sceptical for it. I'm not at all convinced that the world wouldnt be a better world if everybody behaved as Dubedat does than it is now that everybody behaves as ...

— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw

... progress of physical astronomy up to the time when very striking proofs of the universality of the law of gravitation convinced the most sceptical, it must still be borne in mind that, while gravitation is certainly the principal force governing the motions of the heavenly bodies, there may yet be a resisting medium in space, and there may be electric and magnetic forces to deal with. There may, further, ...

— History of Astronomy • George Forbes

... "For the best of reasons, my husband preferred going without me—but I hoped he would send for me perhaps at the end of the Congress." He told me Lady Salisbury was there with her husband. He seemed rather sceptical as to the peaceful issue of the negotiations—thought so many unforeseen questions would come ...

— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington

... historically tenable, and what not; and may faithfully shape her teaching by the learning of this world, though it may have been gathered together for the express purpose of overthrowing her. Atheistic scholars may be quoted in her councils; and supercilious and sceptical philologists, could they live another hundred years, might perhaps recognise their discoveries, even their words and phrases, embodied in an ecclesiastical definition. To the outer world such a definition would seem to be a mere natural production. But in the eyes ...

— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock

... Carlyle, and everyone wrote turgid, involved, twisted and breakneck sentences, each noun with as many verbs as Brigham Young had wives. Then followed a romantic craze, and everyone struggled to combine religion and romance, with frequent punches at religion, and we prided ourselves on being sceptical and independent in our literary tastes. My advice was simply to make up one's mind what to read, and then read it. Life is short, and books are many. Instead of making your mind a garret crowded with rubbish, make it a parlour, substantially furnished, beautifully arranged, ...

— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... other efforts, over the telephone a strange voice offered to deliver the murderer, Rumson was sceptical. He motioned the girl to switch to the ...

— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis

... peasants. While in the rest of Europe men were floundering among the stagnant ideas and crumbling institutions of the effete Middle Ages, with but a vague half-consciousness of their own nature, the Italians walked calmly through a life as well arranged as their great towns, bold, inquisitive, and sceptical: modern administrators, modern soldiers, modern politicians, modern financiers, scholars, and thinkers. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, Italy seemed to have obtained the philosophic, literary, and artistic inheritance of Greece; the administrative, legal, and military inheritance of Rome, ...

— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... disgraced, or to which any portion of the Church has been subjected in modern times. This minister, who may be truly described as the political scourge of Germany, is as fanatical in religion as he is coarse and sceptical in politics. He abandoned his party, and became, or feigned to become, a liberal in order to gratify his hatred of the Catholic Church. He belongs to that branch of Protestantism which is called "orthodox" (lucus a non lucendo). On occasion of the ...

— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... 'You are sceptical at last,' he sneered. 'I have the missing portions of the papyrus here with me. You can have them for a song. I was afraid to leave the roll too complete, lest I should invite detection. It would be a pity to let them go ...

— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... physicians certified that I had only one lung; but as the other has served me faithfully for sixty-nine years, I am rather sceptical as to ...

— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey

... manner associated with "desolation," is presumably the right interpretation of the blind impulse. [6] And perhaps this is one of the commonest subjective assurances of faith, namely, that our faith grows and declines with what we know intuitively to be our better moods; that when lax we are sceptical, and ...

— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... Eastern Midlands were like fifty years ago and they do not. They are thinking of Eastthorpe of the present day, of its schoolgirls who are examined in Keats and Shelley, of the Sunday morning walks there, and of the, so to speak, smelling acquaintance with sceptical books and theories which half the population now boasts. But Eastthorpe, when Mr. Cardew was at Abchurch, was totally different. It knew what it was for parsons to go wrong. It had not forgotten a former rector and the young woman at the Bell. ...

— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford

... that Socrates knows something; and as he cannot know and not know, he cannot know some things and not know others, and therefore he knows all things: he and Dionysodorus and all other men know all things. 'Do they know shoemaking, etc?' 'Yes.' The sceptical Ctesippus would like to have some evidence of this extraordinary statement: he will believe if Euthydemus will tell him how many teeth Dionysodorus has, and if Dionysodorus will give him a like piece of information about Euthydemus. Even Socrates is incredulous, and indulges ...

— Euthydemus • Plato

... elusiveness of "mysticism" arises out of the fact that it is not a creed, but a state of mind. It is formulated into no dogmas, but, in so far as it is communicable, it is conveyed, or sought to be conveyed, by symbols. These symbols to a sceptical or an unsympathetic person will say nothing, but the presumption among those who are inclined towards the cult is that if these symbols convey anything at all, that thing is mysticism. The mystics are ...

— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman

... do not believe in Dr. Argure quite as fully as some less sceptical members of his congregation do, Deacon Goodsole believes in him most implicitly. Deacon Goodsole is a believer—not I mean in anything in particular, but generally. He likes to believe; he enjoys it; he does it, not ...

— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott

... as yet, developed no genius in any degree comparable to that of George Eliot and George Sand in the present, or a dozen other as familiar names of the past. One at least of our prominent literary journals has formulated this reproach, and is even sceptical as to the probability of any future of this ...

— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... opposite the governor; and two lines of soldiers, forming two sides of a square, closed the intervening space. Among the officers was La Hontan, a spectator of the whole proceeding. He may be called a man in advance of his time; for he had the caustic, sceptical, and mocking spirit which a century later marked the approach of the great revolution, but which was not a characteristic of the reign of Louis XIV. He usually told the truth when he had no motive to do otherwise, and yet was capable at times of prodigious mendacity. ...

— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... reason, so long the apparent contradictions, which encumber the attempt to conceive the unconditioned, must be regarded as inherent in the constitution of the reason itself, and as the result of its legitimate exercise on its proper objects. This sceptical conclusion Hamilton endeavoured to avoid by rejecting the distinction between the understanding and the reason as separate faculties, regarding the one as the legitimate and positive, the other as the illegitimate ...

— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel

... not always amenable to politic suggestion. Douglass's style and vocabulary and logic improved so rapidly that people began to question his having been a slave. His appearance, speech, and manner differed so little in material particulars from those of his excellent exemplars that many people were sceptical of his antecedents. Douglass had, since his escape from slavery, carefully kept silent about the place he came from and his master's name and the manner of his escape, for the very good reason that their revelation would have informed his master ...

— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... Sophists, he relegates the more important principles of ethics to custom and probability. But crude and unmeaning as this philosophy is, it exercised a great influence on his successors, not unlike that which Locke exercised upon Berkeley and Berkeley upon Hume himself. All three were both sceptical and ideal in almost equal degrees. Neither they nor their predecessors had any true conception of language or of the history of philosophy. Hume's paradox has been forgotten by the world, and did not any more than the scepticism ...

— Meno • Plato

... which have made the enjoyment of them in our times the greatest blessing we possess. It was a new spirit that had arisen in our world to break the fetters which centuries of fraud and superstition and injustice had forged,—a spirit scornful of old authorities, yet not sceptical, with disgust of the past and hope for the future, penetrating even the hamlets of the poor, and kindling the enthusiasm of princes and nobles, producing learned men in every country of Europe, whose original investigations ...

— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord

... impossible not to see in this description, a spring-tide thunderstorm. But to make it more evident that the untaught mind did regard such a storm as a dragon, I think the following quotation from John of Brompton's Chronicle will convince the most sceptical: "Another remarkable thing is this, that took place during a certain month in the Gulf of Satalia (on the coast of Pamphylia). There appeared a great and black dragon which came in clouds, and let down his head into the water, whilst his tail seemed ...

— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... not," said the professor, recovering himself now. "I was startled for the moment by that false alarm. No, there is nothing to mind, even if the other chiefs are sceptical. You have knowledge enough ...

— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn

... that the most sceptical will agree that I did quite right in seeking whatever support I could get before crossing swords with a man ...

— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... Philosophy which Regarded Matter as Non-existent. David Hume: Sceptical Philosophy. The Scottish School: Philosophy ...

— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... guns "as much like each other as the successive impressions of a copper-plate engraving," he was laughed to scorn by the ordnance officers of France and England. "Even the Washington officials," says Roe, "were sceptical and became uneasy at advancing so much money without a single gun having been completed, and Whitney went to Washington, taking with him ten pieces of each part of a musket. He exhibited these to the Secretary of War and the army ...

— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson

... the war one heard a great many tales of spies and spying, but many of them were so palpably absurd and there was as yet such a total lack of evidence to support any one of them, that I—like a good many other people—felt sceptical of the whole thing. The distinguished General in German pay, the well known member of the Cabinet in hourly communication with the Kaiser, the group of German strategists working in the cellars of a West End London mansion, and all ...

— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston

... the date of the inscription describing them have been the subject of much discussion. Some authorities think that this stupa may be one of those erected over a portion of the Buddha's ashes after his funeral. Even Barth, a most cautious and sceptical scholar, admitted[58] first that the inscription is not later than Asoka, secondly that the vase is a reliquary containing what were believed to be bones of the Buddha. Thus in the time of Asoka the worship of the Buddha's relics was well known and I ...

— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... experience and acquaintance with the canine family, was rather sceptical as regards the memory of this animal, having been, on one occasion, entirely forgotten by a favourite dog from whom he was separated some considerable time, and in fact was most savagely assailed by him, when on his return he attempted to caress ...

— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... recitative will form an important part of every singer's education. Another common objection is, that we cannot acquire the purity of pronunciation required by the refined audience of the King's Theatre. I trust it is no heresy to say that I am somewhat sceptical as to the powers of euphoniacal criticism which that audience possesses. If one in ten, even of the box company, can really distinguish the true bocca romana from the patois of the Venetian gondolieri or the Neapolitan lazzaroni, it is, I am persuaded, as ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various

... trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake ...

— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson

... sceptical. He and another rustic functionary, of whom we shall speak presently, the grave-digger, are always the esprits forts of the place. They are so much in the habit of talking of ghosts, and are so well acquainted with all the tricks of which these evil spirits are capable, ...

— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various

... blizzard obscured our view till March 23. "'Land in sight' was reported this morning. We were sceptical, but this afternoon it showed up unmistakably to the west, and there can be no further doubt about it. It is Joinville Island, and its serrated mountain ranges, all snow- clad, are just visible on the horizon. This barren, inhospitable- looking land would be a haven of ...

— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... it upon the authority of William Blades that books breathe; however, the testimony of experts is not needed upon this point, for if anybody be sceptical, all he has to do to convince himself is to open a door of a bookcase at any time and his olfactories will be greeted by an outrush of odors that will prove to him beyond all doubt that books do actually ...

— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... unable to distinguish it from piety. Regarding the unconscious purity of woman's love see Moll, 3, and Paget, Clinical Lectures, which discuss the loss in women of instinctive sexual knowledge. Cf. Ribot, 251, and Moreau, Psychologie Morbide, 264-278. Ribot is sceptical, because the ultimate goal is the possession of the beloved. But that has nothing to do with the question, for what he refers to is unconscious and instinctive. Here we are considering love as a conscious feeling and ideal, and as such it is as spotless and sinless ...

— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... so much deteriorated as these gentlemen think?" said the Princesse de Cadignan, addressing the women with a smile at once sceptical and ironical. "Because, in these days, under a regime which makes everything small, you prefer small dishes, small rooms, small pictures, small articles, small newspapers, small books, does that prove that women too have grown smaller? Why ...

— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac

... certainty of another change ahead; but now we mean to find a real home, where we can take refuge, with all our possessions around us. Mother and I have talked about it until we can see every nook and corner, and it is waiting for us somewhere—I know it is! So don't be sceptical, and pretend that it is not! We won't talk about houses any more, but you shall tell me your own news. It is four years since I saw Rob and Rosalind, as they were abroad for the year before I left England. But you have been ...

— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey

... people say he is used to it, and is only acting—playing off upon you a melancholy joke, that he may judge how it will tell at night. Thus, when misfortune takes a benefit, charity seldom takes tickets; for she is always sceptical about the so-called miseries of the most giddy, volatile, jolly, careless, uncomplaining (where managers and bad parts are not concerned) vainest, and apparently, happiest possible members of the community, who are so completely associated with fiction, that they are hardly believed when ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... vocation which he practised in Wall Street. Early on the following afternoon, while returning from there, he sat wedged between a gunman and a Hun. He was unconscious of either. The uncertain market; the slump, momentarily undiscernible, but mathematically inevitable; customers, credulous or sceptical, but always avid; the pulse of the feverish street which the ticker indifferently registered; the atmosphere of tobacco and greed; the trailing announcements; "Steel, three-fourths; Pennsy, a half," ...

— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... appears to a man to incline in a certain direction, when this probability is called in question, the whole body of this organised system of thought rises in opposition to the questioning, and being individually conscious of this strong feeling of subjective opposition, the man declares the sceptical propositions to be more inconceivable to him than are the counter-propositions. And in so saying he is, of course, perfectly right. Hence I conceive that the acceptance or the rejection of metaphysical teleology ...

— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... in the individual body, due to some change in "nurture." There is no secure evidence that any such individual gain or loss can be transmitted as such, or in any representative degree. How does this affect our estimate of the value of "nurture"? How should the sceptical or negative answer, which we believe to be the scientific one, affect our practice in regard to education, physical culture, amelioration of function, improvement of environment, and so on? Let us give a practical point to what we have ...

— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... be otherwise, inasmuch as the art of writing must have been quite unknown in Greece until after the alleged age of the traditional Homer, whose date had been variously estimated at from 1000 to 800 B.C. by less sceptical generations. It had come to be a current belief that the Iliad was first committed to writing in the age of Peisistratus. A prominent controversialist, F.A. Paley, even went so far as to doubt whether a single written ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... observe that all their goods are in common, and that, although the sexes mix together, they profess the vows of celibacy and chastity. Their lands are in excellent order, and they are said to be very rich. [I should be very sorry to take away the character of any community, but, as I was a little sceptical as to the possibility of the vow of chastity being observed under circumstances above alluded to, I made some inquiries, and having met with one who had seceded from the fraternity, I discovered that my opinion of human nature was correct, and the conduct of the Shakers ...

— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... then sends up great tongues into the grass belt above. But what may be above this grass belt I know not yet, for our view ends at the top of the wall of the great S.E. crater. My men say there are devils and gold up beyond, but the German authorities do not support this view. Those Germans are so sceptical. This station is evidently on a ledge, for behind it the ground falls steeply, and you get an uninterrupted panoramic view of the Cameroon estuary and the great stretches of low swamp lands with ...

— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... annoying them in every possible way, haunting the hawk like its evil genius: it is most singular that so small a creature should thus overcome one that is the formidable enemy of so many of the feathered race. I should have been somewhat sceptical on the subject, had I not myself been an eyewitness to the fact. I was looking out of my window one bright summer-day, when I noticed a hawk of a large description flying heavily along the lake, uttering cries of distress; within ...

— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill

... society at that period in Spanish America, that a reader the most credulous would at times be startled with doubts upon what seems so unvarying a tenor of danger and lawless violence. But, on the other hand, it is also undeniable that a reader the most obstinately sceptical would be equally startled in the very opposite direction, on remarking that the incidents are far from being such as a romance-writer would have been likely to invent; since, if striking, tragic, and even appalling, they are ...

— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... of both. The son of Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, he was born at Lismore in 1626, lived in literary retirement at Oxford from 1654, and later in Cambridge, and died, 1692, in London, president of the Royal Society. His principal work, The Sceptical Chemist (Works, vol. i. p. 290 seq.), appeared in 1661, the tract, De Ipsa Natura, in 1682.[1] By his introduction of the atomic conception he founded an epoch in chemistry, which, now for the first, was freed from bondage to the ideas of Aristotle and the alchemists. Atomism, however, was ...

— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... some, that this truth is so plain and obvious, as to require no further illustration or enforcement.—We sincerely wish that it were so. But long experience justifies us in being sceptical on the point. And as the establishment of this principle, and a thorough knowledge of its working, are perhaps of more value than any other truth in the whole range of educational science, we shall offer a few remarks on its validity and importance, before proceeding to examine ...

— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall

... subsequent guilt and final impenitence. The present state of our knowledge, or rather ignorance of the philosophy of the human mind, may not supply us with a satisfactory answer for those, who, in a cavilling or sceptical spirit, ask, "How can these things be?" But it is the doctrine of the Scriptures and of the Church, and it is perplexed with fewer difficulties than will be found to press upon every ...

— On Calvinism • William Hull

... transformation." This titled publicist declares himself an opponent of the Jews as they are at present. He shares the popular dread of their multiplication, the fear of a "Jewish Poland," and is somewhat sceptical about their being corrigible. Nevertheless he proposes liberal methods of correction, such as the encouragement of big Jewish capital, the promotion of agriculture and handicrafts among the Jewish masses, ...

— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... narrator, Peter Walker, though an enthusiast, was a man of credit, and does not even affect to have seen the wonders, the reality of which he unscrupulously adopts on the testimony of others, to whose eyes he trusted rather than to his own. The conversion of the sceptical gentleman of whom he speaks is highly illustrative of popular credulity carried away into enthusiasm, or into imposture, by the evidence of those around, and at once shows the imperfection of such a general testimony, and the ease with which it is procured, since the general excitement ...

— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... the peculiar turn of Arnold's mind, at once religious and sceptical, philosophical and emotional. It is one of his most ...

— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold

... Amphitryon recounting the story of his evil days the faces of his hearers expressed curiosity. Some appeared shocked, Monpavon especially. For him, this exposure of rags was in execrable taste, an absolute breach of good manners. Cardailhac, sceptical and dainty, an enemy to scenes of emotion, with face set as if it were hypnotized, sliced a fruit on the end of his fork into wafers as thin as ...

— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... Minucius Felix.[405] Whilst, in the case of the Greek Apologists, the acknowledgment of revelation appears conditioned by philosophical scepticism on the one hand, and by the strong impression of the dominion of the demons on the other, the sceptical element is not only wanting in the Latin Apologists, but the Christian truth is even placed in direct opposition to the sceptical philosophy and on the side of philosophical dogmatism, i.e., Stoicism.[406] Nevertheless the observations of Tertullian and Minucius Felix with regard to ...

— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... have had great work in getting in, my dear! They failed to recognize me at the gates, Being sceptical at my poor hackney-coach And poorer baggage. I had to show my face In a fierce light ere they would let me pass, And even then they doubted till I spoke.— What think you, dear, of such a tramp-like spouse? [He warms his hands at the fire.] Ha—it is much ...

— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... Brougham's. His Lordship was not reckoned precisely a veracious man; on the other hand, this was not the kind of fable he was likely to tell. He was brought up under the regime of common-sense. "On all such subjects my father was very sceptical," he says. To disbelieve Lord Brougham we must suppose either that he wilfully made a false entry in his diary in 1799, or that in preparing his Autobiography in 1862, he deliberately added a falsehood—and then explained his own ...

— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang

... else was sceptical as to the possibility of coals being carried from the midland counties to London, and sold there at a price to compete with those which were seaborne, he declared his firm conviction that the time was fast ...

— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles