"Atheist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Young's morality in the early part of his life may, perhaps, be wrong; but Tindal could not err in his opinion of Young's warmth and ability in the cause of religion. Tindal used to spend much of his time at All Souls. "The other boys," said the atheist, "I can always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually pestering me ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Handel's "Along the Monster Atheist strode."[52] The movements of this second piece are similar in structure and character to those of the first. Next we have a piece of lighter character in two movements, and, apparently, for one cembalo: there is, of course, only one bass part (figured). ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... light and darkness are the two great principles of existence, the one of animate, the other of inanimate nature. He held that soul and life are every day shed from the sun upon all objects open to his beams. For such doctrines as these he was denounced as practically an atheist! Fortunately the times have changed, though we have still much to learn in the way of rational ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... Though, now and then, God sees some faithful disciples still Breasting the current to do His will. The little bird on the topmost bough Merrily pipes to the Poet below, Asking an answer as gay, I trow! But he hears the surging waves without,— The atheist's scoff and the infidel's doubt, The Pharisee's cant and the sweet saint's prayer, And the piercing cry for rest from care; And tears of pity and tears of pain Ebb and flow in every strain, As he ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... (the general tenor of which is certainly not very edifying), called down violent clamors upon the imprudent author; some critics went so far as to invoke the spiritual censure and the doom of the civil magistrate on Moliere as the atheist of his own "Festin de Pierre." He was, however, on this as on other occasions, supported by the decided favor of the king, who then allowed Moliere's company to take the title of "Comediens du Roi," and bestowed on them a pension of 7,000 livres, thereby ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Confuse themselves. You see lads walk the street Sixty the minute; what's to note in that? You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack; Him you must watch—he's sure to fall, yet stands! Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist, demirep That loves and saves her soul in new French books— We watch while these in equilibrium keep The giddy line midway: one step aside, They're classed and done with. I, then, keep the line ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... of conspiring to establish Popery, to dethrone the King, and to put the crown on the head of Arabella Stewart. Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney-General, led the accusation, and disgraced himself by heaping on Raleigh's head every foul epithet, calling him 'viper,' 'damnable atheist,' 'monster,' 'traitor,' 'spider of hell,' &c., and by his violence, although to his own surprise, as he never expected to gain his cause in full, he browbeat the jury to bring in a verdict ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... most remarkable characters I ever met with. In those days, in a northern provincial town, it required immense courage to avow religious heterodoxy of any advanced kind, yet Mr. Uttley said with the utmost simplicity that he was an atheist, and the religious world called him "Uttley the Atheist," a title which he accepted as naturally as if it implied no contempt or antagonism whatever. He was by no means devoid of physical courage also, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... with lager beer And the devil himself was the engineer; The passengers were a most motley crew,— Church member, atheist, Gentile, ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... the King and a determination to have popular assemblies; a great sense of the rights of the white individual together with African slavery; a practical, easy-going, debonair naturalism side by side with an Established Church penalizing alike Papist, Puritan, and atheist. Even so early as this, the social tone was set that was to hold for many and many a year. The suave climate was somehow to foster alike a sense of caste and good neighborliness—class ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... religion wages constant war with the predominance or even presence of selfish aims. Self-love is the first and rudest form of the instinct of preservation. It is sublimed and sacrificed on the altar of holy passion. "Self," exclaims the fervid William Law, "is both atheist and idolater; atheist, because it rejects God; idolater, because it is its own idol." Even when this lowest expression of the preservative instinct rises but to the height of sex-love, it renounces self, and rejoices ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... Desplein The Atheist's Mass Cousin Pons Lost Illusions The Government Clerks Pierrette A Bachelor's Establishment The Seamy Side of History Modeste Mignon Scenes from ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... humility, and of reverence for antiquity—begins. The true university man, born and bred in the century, not in the years, in the race halls, not those alone in his Alma Mater, is neither a scoffer nor an atheist, nor a critic, sceptic, or cynic. He is a man of simple and exalted faith. God, who hath brought such great things to pass in science, nature, and art, in human character, in the destiny of nations, and the history of humble men and women, is a God before ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... not poems about little children who win good-conduct prizes. They are poems of the agonies of life, poems about tragic severance, poems about failure. They range through the virtues and the vices with the magnificent boldness of Dostoevsky's novels. The madman, the atheist, the adulterer, the traitor, the murderer, the beast, are portrayed in them side by side with the hero, the saint, and the perfect woman. There is every sort of rogue here half-way between good and evil, and every sort of half-hero who is either worse than his virtue ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... manacles fastened upon the minds of those who believe in it. It is vain for us to look for aid from the Church and Christianity. It might be supposed that a hungry Christian would rebel against his hunger as readily as a hungry Atheist. But ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... people who are in revolt. And in the present state of things, I think all men are revolting in that sense; except a few who are revolting in the other sense. But the warning to Socialists and other revolutionaries is this: that as sure as fate, if they use any argument which is atheist or materialistic, that argument will always be turned against them at last by the tyrant and the slave. To-day I saw one too common Socialist argument turned Tory, so to speak, in a manner quite startling and insane. I mean that modern doctrine, taught, I believe, by most followers of Karl ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... about Europe, studying the diseases of every country, and writing his books, which were none of them published till after his death. His enemies joyfully trampled on the fallen man. He was a "dull rustic, a monster, an atheist, a quack, a maker of gold, a magician." When he was drunk, one Wetter, his servant, told Erastus (one of his enemies) that he used to offer to call up legions of devils to prove his skill, while Wetter, in abject terror of his spells, entreated him to leave the ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... deism of the pagan and Christian world, without any colour of specifically Christian faith, and with a direct lead to unbelief in a future state. But, whether we suppose Shakspere to have been already led, as he might be by the initiative of his colleague Marlowe, an avowed atheist, to agnostic views on immortality, or whether we suppose him to have had his first serious lead to such thought from Montaigne, we find him to all appearance carrying further the initial impetus, and proceeding from the serene semi-Stoicism of the essayist to a deeper and ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... Pantheisticon (1720). The outcry raised by the orthodox party against the "poor gentleman" who had "to beg for half- crowns," and "ran into debt for his wigs, clothes, and lodging," together with his own vanity and conceit, changed him from being a somewhat free- thinking Christian into an infidel and atheist or Pantheist. He died in extreme poverty ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... when he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred. Lucretius was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist lay by his pillow and was his companion ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... for the Atheist not only to assert, but to prove this to be the fact, if he would convince himself, or any other person, that the universe had no Creator, but exists by the necessity of its own nature; for that which exists ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... and, if that fails, turn atheist! We might fall foul of the four Gospels, get our book burned by the hangman, and then it would sell ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... constitutes "Piety" in Athens.—Of course there have been some famous prosecutions for "impiety." Socrates was the most conspicuous victim; but Socrates was a notable worshipper of the gods, and certainly all the charges of his being an "atheist" broke down. What he was actually attacked with was "corrupting the youth of Athens," i.e. giving the young men such warped ideas of their private and public duties that they ceased to be moral and useful citizens. But even Socrates was convicted only with difficulty[*]; a generation has passed since ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... prayer, but from her rosy youth, So full of life, to gray old age's time, Prays on with faith half ignorant, half sublime. Yes, commonplace! But if I spoil this common faith, when all is done Can deist, pantheist or atheist invent a better one? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... emotion as is not pleasant to feel nor expedient to speak about. It was too real, too heart-rending, too awful. I hate, I abhor myself for feeling things so acutely. I wish I were a skeptic, a scoffer, an atheist. I wish I could put my mind on the mechanism of the play. I wish I could believe that it all took place two thousand years ago. I wish I didn't know that this suffering on the stage was all actual. I wish I thought these people were really Tyrolese peasants, wood-carvers and ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... hens to the acre. They die by dozens mysteriously.... I am more than doubtful concerning my Maker. Why has the Lord afflicted me? What a return for all my endeavour— Not to mention the L. S. D.! I am an atheist now and for ever, Because this God ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... was that rara avis an atheist, and that he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he had never, for a moment, felt that there could be any other life than this earth-life. Few people believed him. There are few people who can believe in ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... pluggers canonized—I wouldn't bring you here just for me. For I'm not worthy of you. No, sir-ree! Don't you know I'm no good—didn't you see that yesterday? Why, Old Samuel Terwilliger said I'm an atheist because I quoted Ingersoll's graveside oration—said no Christian would repeat anything that man ever said, even if his watch is a bargain at ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... preceding the Revolution in France no one was ever persecuted for being an atheist, deist, infidel or Roman catholic, but all of these united in suppressing the general use of the Bible and the presence of Bible readers, to the great injury of the public welfare. If that country had not foolishly and wickedly exterminated ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... of the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this, sunned himself in the town's displeasure. For the sake of the public furor it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist, an anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone cared greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations of his passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in Wildman's grocery store he would stand whipping them into a frenzy by declaring ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... hast thou ever stood to see The Holly-tree? The eye that contemplates it well perceives Its glossy leaves Ordered by an Intelligence so wise As might confound the Atheist's sophistries. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... elm-trees has a meaning for me now, since I have read Balzac, different from what it had before. Is that muffled figure in the rumbling cart which passes me so swiftly the country doctor or the village priest, summoned to the death-bed of some notorious atheist? Is the slender white hand which closes those heavy shutters in that gloomy house the hand of some heart-broken Eugenie, desolately locking herself up once more, for another lonely night, with her sick hopes and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... that famous Atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, entered the House of Commons, it is said that a fellow member approached him with the remark, "Good God, Bradlaugh, what does it matter whether there is a God or not?" Bradlaugh's answer is ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... street corners. Yet his instinct was right. Many of the crowd were muttering. These New Englanders had no love to spare for a Collector of Customs, a fine gentlemen from Old England and (rumour said) an atheist to boot. They resented this ostent of entry; the men more sullenly than the women, some of whom in their hearts could not help admiring ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Haydn, meeting Beethoven, praised the Septett of the latter; upon which the young man exclaimed, deprecatingly, "Ah, it is far from being a 'Creation'!" To which Haydn replied, "That you could not have written, for you are an atheist!" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... at the altar and take the loving hand, and say, "With all my worldly goods I thee endow!" A woman that could not make a loaf of bread to save her life will swear to cherish and obey. A Christian will marry an atheist, and that always makes conjoined wretchedness; for if a man does not believe there is a God, he is neither to be trusted with a dollar nor with ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... of legal learning, was no common man. His knowledge was great and various: his parts were quick; and his eloquence was singularly ready and graceful. To sanctity he made no pretensions. Indeed Episcopalians and Presbyterians agreed in regarding him as little better than an atheist. During some months Sir John at Edinburgh affected to condemn the disloyalty of his unhappy parent Sir James; and Sir James at Leyden told his Puritan friends how deeply he lamented the wicked compliances of his ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is a theological novel. It is, without any doubt, the most brilliant of Chesterton's novels; it is an argument between a Christian ass and a very decent atheist. Atheists, if they are sincere, are on the way to becoming good Christians; Christians, if they are insincere, are on ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... his plans providence did that which no other hand durst do." While at his headquarters in the house of Major Thomas Pate, in Gloucester, a few miles east of West Point, he became ill of dysentery. Bacon's enemies accused him of being an atheist, but in his last hours he called in Mr. Wadding to prepare his mind for death. "He died much dissatisfied in mind," we are told, "inquiring ever and anon after the arrival of the frigates and soldiers from England, and asking if the guards ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker
... Rodolphe, "don't you see, you wretch, that he is talking of 'tin'? Is there nothing sacred for you, atheist ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those honest Catholics of Turin whose helpful donation of twenty francs had marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found again. He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist, and if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant than he was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child of Protestantism. It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholic tradition and observance, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the fence pickets between them with both hands. "It will do good! Didn't I tell you there was missionary work to be done right here? Is that why you've been so stand-offish with me the last few years, because you thought I was an atheist?" ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... Richard T., Lieutenant of the Brill, served in the Low Countries, and was sec. to Sir Edward Cecil in his unsuccessful expedition to Cadiz, returning from which he was disembarked with the sick at Kinsale, where he d. He wrote two dramas, The Revenger's Tragedy (pr. 1607), and The Atheist's Tragedy (pr. 1611), in both of which, especially the former, every kind of guilt and horror is piled up, the author displaying, however, great intensity of tragic power. Of The Revenger Lamb said that it made his ears tingle. Another play ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... before you were born; that you are a renegade Jew and an Italian Jesuit, that for 30 years you were a Baptist preacher, but were bounced out of the ministry for drunkenness and immorality; that you have been a blasphemous Atheist from your youth up; that you deserted from the federal army in the same year that you were four years old; that you have been discharged from all the Texas dailies for incompetency, and are the author of editorials in the Chicago Inter-Ocean ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... view of things, than the religion of the layman, as just now defined. For Browne, in spite of his profession of boisterous doubt, has no real difficulties, and his religion, certainly, nothing of the character of a concession. He holds that there has never existed an atheist. Not that he is credulous; but that his religion is only the correlative of himself, his peculiar character and education, a religion of manifold association. For him, the wonders of religion, its supernatural events ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Shelley of 'Queen Mab', the Shelley who would have remodelled the whole system of religious belief, as of human duty and rights; and the earliest result of the new development was that he became a professing atheist, and, for two years, a practising vegetarian. He returned to his natural diet when he found his eyesight becoming weak. The atheism cured itself; we do not exactly know when or how. What we do know is, that it was with him ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... man with his back toward Zion, and he is coming to meet us. So he drew nearer and nearer, and at last came up to them. His name was Atheist, and he asked them whither they were going? We are going to the Mount Zion, they answered. Then Atheist fell into a very great laughter. What is the meaning of your laughter? they asked. I laugh to see what ignorant persons you are to take upon you so tedious a journey, ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... on the heads of Jeff Farnum and Captain Chunn. They were rebels, blackmailers, and anarchists. Jeff's life was held up to public scorn as dissolute and licentious. He had been expelled from college and consorted only with companions of the lowest sort. A free thinker and an atheist, he wanted to tear down the pillars which upheld society. Unless Verden and the state repudiated him and his gang of trouble breeders the poison of their opinions would infect the healthy ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... advanced, and beheld a spectacle of such agony as can only be conceived by those who have looked on the grief which takes no fortitude from reason, no consolation from conscience,—the grief which tells us what would be the earth were man abandoned to his passions, and the Chance of the atheist reigned alone in the merciless heavens. Pride humbled to the dust; ambition shivered into fragments; love (or the passion mistaken for it) blasted into ashes; life, at the first onset, bereaved of its holiest ties, forsaken by its truest guide; shame that writhed ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... used in it are worth examining. They are very easily examined, for they are to be found on all the battlefields of science; but on that field they were used with more effect than on almost any other. These weapons are the epithets "infidel" and "atheist." They have been used against almost every man who has ever done anything new for his fellow-men. The list of those who have been denounced as "infidel" and "atheist" includes almost all great men of science, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... in our casual comments on Shelley's life we have been blind to its evil side. That, however, is not the case. We see clearly that he committed grave sins, and one cruel crime; but we remember also that he was an Atheist from his boyhood; we reflect how gross must have been the moral neglect in the training of a child who could be an Atheist from his boyhood: and we decline to judge so unhappy a being by the rules which we should apply to a Catholic. It seems to us that Shelley was struggling—blindly, ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... professing Christians to be females, is in my own view one of the highest praises of the sex. I rejoice that their hearts are more susceptible than ours, and that they do not war so strongly against that religion which their nature demands. I have met with but one female, whom I knew to be an avowed atheist. ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... 115.) Yet the general experience of Eton must have been painful; and it is sad to read of this gentle and pure spirit being goaded by his coarser comrades into fury, or coaxed to curse his father and the king for their amusement. It may be worth mentioning that he was called "the Atheist" at Eton; and though Hogg explains this by saying that "the Atheist" was an official character among the boys, selected from time to time for his defiance of authority, yet it is not improbable that Shelley's ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture. Enjoy, sir, your insensibility of feeling and reflecting. It is the prerogative of animals. And no man will envy you these honors, in which a savage only can be your rival and a ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of zeal! I've seen the Atheist in terror start, Awed to contrition by the strong appeal That waked conviction in ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... Rupert. "A tinsmith, I think he told me. He was a tough old citizen, though—an atheist or something like that. Very profane. ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... dangerous edge of things, The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist, demireps That love and save their souls in new French books— We watch while these in equilibrium keep The giddy line midway: one step aside, They're classed ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... a proof of the great consideration which Britton acquired, that he was called "Sir;" and many persons, unable to believe that a man of that class and of such a business could arrive by natural means to be called "Sir," took him for a magician, an atheist, and ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... State, of morality or of his paternal authority, merely because I do not share his blind reverence for the Catholic Church and her Ministers. On that account he looks upon me, not merely as Latitudinarian, but as a perfect Atheist, and a faithful old manservant of ours, who is much attached to me, and who accidentally saw my father's will, told me in confidence that he had left all his property to the Jesuits. I think this is highly suspicious, and I fear ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... you know of the Nunc Dimittis?" he asked at last, with a half-smile. "You might as well say PATER NOSTER,—both canticle and prayer would be equally unmeaning to you! For poet as you are,—or let me say as you WERE,—inasmuch as no atheist was ever a ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... surer death? Grown old in villany, and dead to grace, Hell in his heart, and Tyburn in his face, Behold, a parson at thy elbow stands, Lowering damnation, and with open hands, Ripe to betray his Saviour for reward, The Atheist chaplain of an Atheist lord![176] 340 Bred to the church, and for the gown decreed, Ere it was known that I should learn to read; Though that was nothing, for my friends, who knew What mighty Dulness of itself could do, Never design'd me for a working priest, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... are entirely with this that he speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He will make no pretence, therefore, to impartiality and detachment. He will do his best to be as fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the reader must reckon with this bias. He has found ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... chiefly by material interests and are blind to the force of ideas and the value of culture. Leslie Stephen, who is always ready to plead the cause of the Philistine, remarks: "As a clergyman always calls every one from whom he differs an atheist, and a bargee has one or two favorite but unmentionable expressions for the same purpose, so a prig always calls his adversary a Philistine." Mr. Matthew Arnold and the Church of England, Fraser's ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... is only a product of matter, only a reflex of organization, such a doctrine would not only not afford no basis on which to rest any argument for a God, but, on the contrary, would positively warrant the atheist in denying His existence. For if, as the materialist maintains, the only intelligence of which we have any experience be a consequent of matter,—on this hypothesis, he not only cannot assume this ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... leper island in the South Seas, where he would be buried alive for the remainder of his life. All he had was an ideal, but it flooded his soul with light. Another was a Russian Nihilist, a girl in years and yet an atheist and a revolutionist in thought, and her unbelief was in its way as beautiful as the religion of my priest. To return to Russia meant death; she knew, and yet she went back, devoted and exalted, to lay down her life for an illusion. So it seems, when one looks about ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... different man was Rousseau. He was not a mocker, or a leveller, or a satirist, or an atheist. He resembled Voltaire only in one respect—in egotism. He was not so learned as Voltaire, did not write so much, was not so highly honored or esteemed. But he had more genius, and exercised a greater influence on posterity. His influence was more subtle and more dangerous, for he led ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Radicalism, as they call it, has been making in this neighbourhood. It is quite dreadful. Everybody, down to the poorest, claiming a right to think for himself, and set his betters right! There's one worse than any of the rest—but he's no better than an atheist—a carpenter of the name of Weir, always talking to his neighbours against the proprietors and the magistrates, and the clergy too, Mr Walton, and the game-laws; and what not? And if you once show them that you are afraid of them by going a step out of your way for THEIR ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... no "good soul," and not an atheist, but an English gentleman, I hope, who loves his mother, mankind, and his country. I have not time to write more at present, and beg you ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... thee thou arguest like an atheist and a beast, and standest in this full flat against the Son of God (Mark 7:9-13). Must a gift, and a little of the glory of the butterfly, make thee that thou shalt not do for, and honour to, thy father and mother? 'A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... in whom you put your trust? A. Agreeably to the laws of our ancient institution, no Atheist could be made a Mason; it was, therefore, necessary that I should believe in Deity; otherwise, no oath or obligation could ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... against the imputation. It is undesirable to enter at length into any such matters here. It need only be said that Allen, one of the founders of the Edinburgh, and always a kind of standing counsel to it, is now acknowledged to have been something uncommonly like an atheist, that Sydney Smith (as I believe most unjustly) was often, and is sometimes still, regarded as standing towards his profession very much in the attitude of a French abbe of the eighteenth century, that almost the whole staff of the Review, including Jeffrey, had, as every ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... busy-looking active little fellow, with bright dark eyes. (He had the name of being an atheist, I learned afterwards.) ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... upper hand of these headaches and nervous attacks; but these sublime creatures are rare. Faithful disciples of the blessed St. Thomas, who wished to put his finger into the wound, they are endowed with an incredulity worthy of an atheist. Imperturbable in the midst of all these fraudulent headaches and all these traps set by neurosis, they concentrate their attention on the comedy which is being played before them, they examine the actress, they search for one of the springs that ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Chinese (singular and plural) adjective: Chinese Ethnic divisions: Han Chinese 91.9%, Zhuang, Uygur, Hui, Yi, Tibetan, Miao, Manchu, Mongol, Buyi, Korean, and other nationalities 8.1% Religions: Daoism (Taoism), Buddhism, Muslim 2-3%, Christian 1% (est.) note: officially atheist, but traditionally pragmatic and eclectic Languages: Standard Chinese (Putonghua) or Mandarin (based on the Beijing dialect), Yue (Cantonese), Wu (Shanghainese), Minbei (Fuzhou), Minnan (Hokkien-Taiwanese), Xiang, Gan, Hakka dialects, minority languages (see Ethnic ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the religion wrong. I simply couldn't think what you were, so I said an atheist, and he said as the Congregational clergyman hadn't a full house to-night we'd better go to him. Lord, what would the Mater say? She wouldn't think it legal unless you were married in church with the 'Voice that breathed o'er ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... opposing such a torrent, as knowing that in so doing they shall be sure to meet with opposition to the utmost, from the many, both of Magistrates, Ministers, and people; and the name of Sadducee, atheist, and perhaps witch too, cast upon them, most liberally, by men of the highest profession in godliness; and, if not so learned as some of themselves, then accounted only fit to be trampled on, and their arguments (though both rational and scriptural) as fit only for contempt. But though this ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... highest desire was that there should be a monument to himself somewhere in the Alps which should be only a great stone with its face smoothed and this short inscription cut in it, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Atheist." ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... induce us to acknowledge the being of the Gods. This is not only a weak, but a false, argument; for, first of all, how do you know the opinions of all nations? I really believe there are many people so savage that they have no thoughts of a Deity. What think you of Diagoras, who was called the atheist; and of Theodorus after him? Did not they plainly deny the very essence of a Deity? Protagoras of Abdera, whom you just now mentioned, the greatest sophist of his age, was banished by order of the Athenians from their city and territories, and ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... every copy circulated, but the action must be initiated by the Attorney-General, and our Christian Government refuses to punish when the offence is committed by one of their own creed, and the sufferer is only an Atheist. ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... it, and excludes it if it happens to run counter to the opinions of all the members. The result is that his opinions are not worth considering. A churchman who never reads The Freethinker very soon has no more real religion than the atheist who never reads The Church Times. The attitude is the same in both cases: they want to hear nothing good of their enemies; consequently they remain enemies and suffer from bad blood all their lives; whereas men who know their ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... and St. Patrick. The whole thing might be happening in Wimbledon. He went to the Wesleyan Connexional School. He went to hear Moody and Sankey. "I was," he writes, "wholly unmoved by their eloquence; and felt bound to inform the public that I was, on the whole, an atheist. My letter was solemnly printed in Public Opinion, to the extreme horror of my numerous aunts and uncles." That is the philosophical atmosphere; those are the religious postulates. It could never cross the mind ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... to my fair mistress. 'Twas a chance I saw you, lady, so intent was I On chiding hence these graceless serving-men, Who cannot break their fast at morning meals Without debauch and mis-timed riotings. This house hath been a scene of nothing else But atheist riot and profane excess, Since my old master quitted ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... ethical responsibility of the present to all the future, the immeasurable consequence of every thought and deed, the ultimate disparition of evil, and the power of attainment to conditions of infinite memory and infinite vision,—cannot be termed either an atheist or a materialist, except by bigotry and ignorance. Profound as may be the difference between his religion and our own, in respect of symbols and modes of thought, the moral conclusions reached in either case are ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... pretended philosophers of Holland, who understood him no better; and who, having a nearer view of his glory, hated his person the more, so that he was obliged to leave Utrecht. Descartes was injuriously accused of being an atheist, the last refuge of religious scandal: and he who had employed all the sagacity and penetration of his genius, in searching for new proofs of the existence of a God, was suspected to believe there ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... within which he could affirm with impunity that Dr. Chalmers was, in virtue of his Establishment views, little better than a Papist, or that Robert Hall, seeing he was a Voluntary, must have been an unconscious atheist at bottom. ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... I was cursed for writing! When it came out no word was bad enough for me! I was a blackguard, a ruffian and an atheist! You will live to have as great a contempt for literary critics and the public as I ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... dissatisfaction. The people were irritated by certain direct taxes such as the tax upon matches, and because every Protestant in Prussia was compelled to pay a tax for the support of the church, unless he made a declaration that he was an atheist. ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... heart was denied, when a love mighty as every other passion of his soul failed him, his grief, ungovernable and frenzied as his rage, overwhelmed him, and the "taint of madness which ran in his line," flooded his brain. But when the atheist became a Christian; when, in his own words, he felt "the Spirit of God was not the chimera of heated brains, nor a device of artful men to frighten and cajole the credulous, but an existence to be felt and understood as the whisperings of one's own heart;" his prayer of, "Lord! I believe, help thou ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... "subscribed under their handes, to depose the President; sayeing they thought him very unworthy to be eyther President or of the Councell, and therefore discharged him of both".[19] They accused him of misappropriating funds, of improper division of the public stores, of being an atheist, of plotting to desert Virginia in the pinnace left at Jamestown by Captain Newport, of combining with the Spaniards for the destruction of the colony. Wingfield, when he returned to England, made a vigorous defense of his conduct, but it is now impossible to determine whether ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... such a person should be called. Whether revolutionise, atheist, Bright (I said him), or Un-English. Miss Piff screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... His hot displeasure against foolish men, That live an atheist life; involves the heaven In tempests; quits his grasp upon the winds, And gives them all their fury; bids a plague Kindle a fiery boil upon the shin, And putrefy the breath of blooming health. He calls for famine, and the meagre fiend Blows mildew from between his shrivelled lips, And taints ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... his emotions left him with an emptied mind on the same spot. And it was in a mood of mere idle investigation that he happened to come to a standstill opposite the office of The Atheist. He did not see the word "atheist", or if he did, it is quite possible that he did not know the meaning of the word. Even as it was, the document would not have shocked even the innocent Highlander, but for the troublesome and quite unforeseen fact that the innocent Highlander ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Hunsden, you are a more unpractical man than I am an unpractical woman, for you don't acknowledge what really exists; you want to annihilate individual patriotism and national greatness as an atheist would annihilate God and his own ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... ignoring the great mass of paganism in the world around him—not all of it, or even most of it, self-conscious and self-confessed, but none the less real on that account? He makes a curious remark as to the personage whom he calls "the benevolent atheist," which is, I take it, his nickname for the man who is not much interested in midway Gods between himself and the Veiled Being. This hapless fellow-creature, says Mr. Wells, "has not really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... they who value themselves upon that conceited Title were a little better instructed in what it ought to stand for; and that they would not perswade themselves a Man is really and truly a Free-thinker in any tolerable Sense, meerly by virtue of his being an Atheist, or an Infidel of any other Distinction. It may be doubted, with good Reason, whether there ever was in Nature a more abject, slavish, and bigotted Generation than the Tribe of Beaux Esprits, at present so prevailing in this Island. Their Pretension to be Free-thinkers, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... that Parson Down preached with peculiar power at the winter revival; and upon this preaching old Bill Bull, the atheist of Out-of-the-Way, attended with scoffing regularity, sitting in the seat of the scorner. It was observed presently—no eyes so keen for such weather as the eyes of Out-of-the-Way—that Bill Bull was coming under conviction of his conscience; and when this ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... his aunt, smiling with very little spontaneity. "You have insulted us, you great atheist! but we forgive you. I am well aware that my daughter and myself are two rustics who are incapable of soaring to the regions of mathematics where you dwell, but for all that it is possible that you may one day get ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... three months I was an atheist! These are easy words to write, but terrible to realize. No one but those who know can tell the terror of a man who has given up belief in an Eternal Goodness, in a living God that cares ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... to secure for me Bandello's Italian Novels at the sale to-morrow. To me they will be nuts. Redde a satire on myself, called 'Anti-Byron,' and told Murray to publish it if he liked. The object of the author is to prove me an atheist and a systematic conspirator against law and government. Some of the verse is good; the prose I don't quite understand. He asserts that my 'deleterious works' have had 'an effect upon civil society, which requires,' &c. &c. &c. and his own poetry. It is ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... religion need not be so very disdainful of others with a more rationalistic taste. The old joke that the Greek sects only differed about a single letter is about the lamest and most illogical joke in the world. An atheist and a theist only differ by a single letter; yet theologians are so subtle as to distinguish definitely between the two. But though I do not in any case allow that it is idle to be concerned about theology, as a matter ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... said to an old farmer in his neighborhood, "they tell me you are an Atheist. Don't you believe in the being ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... government so much harm, as his drinking does it good; for true subjects will not be much perverted by his libels; but the wine-duties rise considerably by his claret. He has often called me an atheist in print; I would believe more charitably of him, and that he only goes the broad way, because the other is too narrow for him. He may see, by this, I do not delight to meddle with his course of ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... religion, is a positive evil, all these consequences follow. Yet surely they are consequences from which every sane mind must recoil. It is a great evil, no doubt, that a man should be a heretic or an atheist. But I am quite at a loss to understand how this evil is mitigated by his not knowing that the earth moves round the sun, that by the help of a lever, a small power will lift a great weight, that Virginia is a republic, or that Paris ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thought that the execution of Thurtell ought to have produced a "favourable change in his mode of thinking"—as if prize fighting and murder were not far more common among Christians than atheists. But if Borrow had never met Taylor he would have met someone else, atheist or religious enthusiast, who would have lured him from the straight, smooth, flowery path of orthodoxy; otherwise he might have been a clergyman or he might have been Dr. Knapp, but he would not have been George Borrow. "What is truth?" he asked. "Would ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... force to the working man that trade unions were inimical to his true welfare, and none had succeeded, so stupid was he. The British Army had been employed to put reason into the noddle of a town called Northampton which was furious because an atheist had not been elected to Parliament. Pullman cars, "The Pirates of Penzance," Henry Irving's "Hamlet," spelling-bees, and Captain Webb's channel swim had all proved that there were novelties under the sun. Bishops, archbishops, and dissenting ministers had ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... continue as its sign and memorial. Had the Sabbath been universally kept, man's thoughts and affections would have been led to the Creator as the object of reverence and worship, and there would never have been an idolater, an atheist, or an infidel. The keeping of the Sabbath is a sign of loyalty to the true God, "Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters." It follows that the message which commands men to worship God ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... no the thing I shou'd be, Nor am I even the thing I cou'd be, But twenty times, I rather wou'd be An atheist clean, Than under gospel colours hid be Just ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham |
