"Philosophic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attention was strangely arrested by the faces of both the mother and the child. His first glance at the woman's face made him flash an inward light on the memory of Jean Jacques' face in the witness- box, and a look of reflective irony came into his own. The face of Carmen Dolores, wife of the philosophic miller and money-master, did not belong to the world where she was placed—not because she was so unlike the habitant women, or even the wives of the big farmers, or the sister of the Cure, or the ladies of the military and commercial exiles ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to all the miserable consequences of a conquered people, living without the common defences against hunger and cold, rather appearing like spectres than men? I am apt to think, that seeing his fellow creatures in ruin like this, it would have put him past all patience for philosophic reflection. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... Independence, and founded on a similar list of grievances as those which provoked and justified the Revolutionary war. Especially will you note the speech of a woman there, hardly thirty years of age, which for philosophic comprehension of the great truths of liberty and responsibility, for patriotism and eloquence, has not been surpassed in the history of our country. This alone should be sufficient to send the name of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, side by side ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... by being poor,' said Robert; 'nobody can have a motive for over-reaching me'—which was philosophic consolation. ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... quiet for a while, except when some obscure movement overhead roused him from his philosophic calm. Towards midnight Mrs. Wilcox came to the door and spoke to him for a minute. After that he became thoughtful. "I don't quite like the look of it," said he; "he's sent for Baker of Drayton—I suppose it means that the idiot has just sense enough not to trust his own ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... called, was in but low spirits. This made Oswald's and Dicky's task easier. When people are sunk in gloomy despair about one thing, they will agree to almost anything about something else. (Remarks like this are called philosophic generalizations, Albert's uncle says.) ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... Sir Kenelm Digby's philosophic reputation his name has not become obscure. It stands, vaguely perhaps, but permanently, for something versatile and brilliant and romantic. He remains a perpetual type of the hero of romance, the double hero, in the field of action and the ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... the afternoon when Satan sometimes finds a joint in the protective armour of the domestic servant. After the luncheon dishes are washed and put away, and before five-o'clock tea and toast are served, cook and housemaid enjoy a period of philosophic contemplation or siesta. Even in the most docile and kitchen-broken breast thoughts of roses and romance may linger; dreams of moving pictures or the coming cotillion of the Icemen's Social Harmony. Usually this critical time is whiled away by the fiction of Nat Gould or Bertha ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... serve, by imprudent management, to foster a predominant inclination, and push the mind, with more determined resolution, towards that side which already draws too much, by the bias and propensity of the natural temper. It is certain that, while we aspire to the magnanimous firmness of the philosophic sage, and endeavour to confine our pleasures altogether within our own minds, we may, at last, render our philosophy like that of Epictetus, and other Stoics, only a more refined system of selfishness, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... crisply curling wavelets, stirred up by a light southerly breeze. Everything gave promise of a continuance of fine weather, and so, like two pachas, we sat on the deck, calmly contemplating with philosophic indifference all sublunary affairs. Not another sail was to be seen within the circle of our horizon besides our two small craft, so that as we had nothing else with which to compare ourselves, we were content to believe that we were two very important personages indeed. We ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... England must consent to peace. And yet she still stood bravely up, presenting a bold front to each new enemy: a grand spectacle in one light, for there is always something grand in indomitable courage; but a sad one in the true light, and one from which a hundred years hence the philosophic historian will turn with a shudder, when, summing up all these events, and asking what all this blood was shed for, he shows that the only principle at stake on her part was that pernicious claim to control the industry of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... ability. Since his retirement from business life, at the age of forty-eight, Mr. Nasmyth's principal pursuit has been Astronomy. His Monograph on "The Moon," published in 1874, exhibits his ardent and philosophic love for science in one of its sublimest aspects. His splendid astronomical instruments, for the most part made entirely by his own hands, have enabled him to detect the "willow leaf-shaped" objects which form the structural element of the Sun's luminous surface. The discovery was shortly ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... and an expose of the weakness of infidelity and skepticism, and is considered one of the most ingenious and excellent performances of the kind in the English tongue.] He made this system "the most powerful instrument of philosophic teaching ever known in the history of the human intellect." The philosopher was an enthusiastic lover of Athens, and he looked upon the whole city as his school. There alone he found instruction and occupation, and ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... audible speech. It seemed to him, as his eyes rested on this scene of Mr. Tryan's labours, that he could understand the clergyman's self-privation without resorting to Mr. Stickney's theory of defective spiritual enlightenment. Do not philosophic doctors tell us that we are unable to discern so much as a tree, except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that in the dark we can hardly taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... society, the distinction between good and evil. Christianity is vindicated by the virtues of Lee. He is the most brilliant and cogent argument in favor of a system illustrated by such a man; he is the type of the reign of law in the moral order—that reign of law which the philosophic Duke of Argyll has so recently and so ably discussed as pervading the natural as well as the supernatural world. One of the chief characteristics of the Christian is duty. Throughout a checkered life the conscientious performance of duty seems to have been the mainspring ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... part in its administration in the West. He was still a young man, but the happenings and circumstances of his life had made for thoughtfulness, and association with his firebrand brother-in-law was turning that thought into more definite channels than formerly. Ishmael was becoming less a philosophic dreamer, and he began to feel within himself the stirring of desire to do things. Not that he had ever been idle, but his own little corner of the world and the definite work he had had to do in it had hitherto filled the practical part of life for him. Now that Cloom was so far set upon ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... in the great field of energy is daily becoming more exalted in the estimation of philosophic minds. His labors are being revealed to us with a distinctness never before conceived. He it is that stored the coal in the bosom of the earth, and piled up the polar ice. He it is that aids the chemist, drives the engine, ripens ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... said "Oh," and let go of her wrist. She turned and went back to the rail again, after flashing him the most de luxe smile so far. Farmer came out of a philosophic haze to notice she was ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... the oneness of his predominant passion are the main cause of the strength of Unamuno's philosophic work. They remain his main asset, yet become also the principal cause of his weakness, as a creative artist. Great art can only flourish in the temperate zone of the passions, on the return journey from the torrid. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... I proposed wearing a mask wherever I went, but my friends assured me the effect would be so marked that it would attract to me an embarrassing amount of attention. I have trained myself to bear the repulsion involuntarily exhibited by all I meet and have taught myself to take a philosophic, if somewhat cynical, view of my facial blemishes; yet in this work I can see how a mask might be merciful to my patients. I will experiment a bit along this line, if you will help me, and we'll see what ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... panted a little later, resisting Martin's effort to relieve him of the two demijohns. "Norton's an idealist—a Harvard man. Prodigious memory. Idealism led him to philosophic anarchy, and his family threw him off. Father's a railroad president and many times millionnaire, but the son's starving in 'Frisco, editing an anarchist sheet for twenty-five ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... was too angry to be philosophic. Alvina knew it was useless to be either angry or otherwise emotional. None the less, she also felt as if she had been knocked down. And she almost envied poor Miss Pinnegar the prospect of a little, day-by-day haberdashery ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... commanders of our battle-ships that captured the Mississippi River and made it possible for Lincoln to say, "Once more the Father of Waters goes unvexed to the sea," were Southern men. The South also, through Kentucky, gave us the great President, Abraham Lincoln. It was, therefore, in large measure, a philosophic contest. The Union forces were the disciples of Daniel Webster, whose spirit invisible rode upon the wings of the wind, and whose arm bore the gorgeous ensign, on which were written the words, "Liberty and Union." On the other hand, the Confederate forces ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... dread of the gods; and in order to remove such apprehensions, he would prove that no divinity ever interposed in the affairs of the earth, either as creator or director. The Romans were not, as we have had occasion to observe, inclined to philosophic pursuits, and Lucretius certainly labored with all the force of an extraordinary genius to lead them into such studies. He brought to bear upon his task the power of sublime and graceful verse, and it has been said that but for him "we could never have formed an ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... wished to travel and see something of the world. A much longed-for opportunity to visit Berlin came to him the following year. An old friend of his father's, Dr. Jarocki, Professor in the Warsaw University, was invited to attend a Philosophic Congress, presided over by Alexander von Humboldt, to be held in that city. The good Professor was willing to take his friend's son under his wing, and Frederic was quite beside himself with joy, for now he believed ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... argued superiorly, with the philosophic impartiality of a man well accustomed to the calm unravelling of crime, "there may be other burglars in the land beside just those three." He would not willingly allow the theory of burglars to crumble. Its ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... ignorance, and deluded, in every possible way; yet, that all this while, the ruffian—HEEP—was professing unbounded gratitude to, and unbounded friendship for, that much-abused gentleman. This was bad enough; but, as the philosophic Dane observes, with that universal applicability which distinguishes the illustrious ornament of the Elizabethan Era, worse ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... dislike of vulgarity is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is impossible without a share of vulgarity); and even if you could acquire the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources without troubling me. So I took it that you demanded a Don Juan in the philosophic sense. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... may fancy that after all he found it not an easy one; in fact his "Conclusion" is a kind of apology for not having made out a better case. But this he believes he has proven, "that with all their superstition, with all their ignorance, their blindness to philosophic light—the monks of old were hearty lovers of books; that they encouraged learning, fostered it, and transcribed repeatedly the books which they had rescued from the destruction of war and time; and so kindly cherished and husbanded them as intellectual food for posterity. Such being ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... also charged with having drawn largely from Nietzsche. The fact is, that, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the most original thinkers of many countries were quite independently, though less clearly, evolving the same philosophic principals that the master mind of Nietzsche was radiating in the almost blinding ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... they turned out at daybreak. Joe had seen to this. He had put them off with an invention of his fertile imagination which satisfied them. Then, having hurried through his own immediate morning duties, he waited, with that philosophic patience which he applied now in his declining years to all the greater issues of his ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... side, he screamed louder than ever, and after running back and forth in vain search for a way of escape, he would return to the brink of the crevasse above the bridge, moaning and wailing as if in the bitterness of death. Could this be the silent, philosophic Stickeen? I shouted encouragement, telling him the bridge was not so bad as it looked, that I had left it flat and safe for his feet, and he could walk it easily. But he was afraid to try. Strange so small an animal should be capable of such big, wise fears. I called again and again in a ...
— Stickeen • John Muir
... philosophic spirit, and, under most circumstances, could wait patiently. Swartboy and the Makololo were in want of rest, to enable them to recover from their last night's debauch. The cattle and horses were in need of the grass that grew luxuriantly on the banks of the stream. All, ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... for the purpose of vegetation, the perishable soil is as much as possible preserved by the protection of those solid parts; and these consolidated masses are resolved in so slow a manner, that nothing but the most philosophic eye, by reasoning upon a chain of facts, is able to discover it. Thus it may be concluded, that the apparent permanency of this earth is not real or absolute; and that the fertility of its surface, like the healthy state of animal bodies, must have its period, and ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... of Collie, all things went well with White Fang. He had learned control and poise, and he knew the law. He achieved a staidness, and calmness, and philosophic tolerance. He no longer lived in a hostile environment. Danger and hurt and death did not lurk everywhere about him. In time, the unknown, as a thing of terror and menace ever impending, faded away. Life was soft ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... to Eli's door a pageant brave to the eye of sense, and to the vulgar judgment noble, but to the philosophic, pitiable more or less. ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... and high-church clerk; if thou art in thy grave the better for thee; thou wert fitted to adore a bygone time, when loyalty was in vogue, and smiling content lay like a sunbeam upon the land, but thou wouldst be sadly out of place in these days of cold philosophic latitudinarian doctrine, universal tolerism, and half-concealed rebellion—rare times, no doubt, for papists and dissenters, but which would assuredly have broken the heart of the loyal soldier of George the Third, and the dignified ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... to analyse the theories of man's place in nature expressed in the ignorant language of this Romany heathen, they seemed to me only another mode of expressing the mysticism of the religious enthusiast Wilderspin, the more learned and philosophic mysticism of my father, and the views ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... This piece and the sketch of French materialism are extracted from Die Heilige Familie (The Holy Family), a comprehensive work of satirical criticism, in which Marx and Engels (whose share in writing the book was a very small one), settled accounts with their philosophic conscience. ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... a division made by Plotinus, has distributed the poets into three classes, which he calls the musical, the amatorial, and the philosophic. In the first, he places those who are studious of softness and harmony in their numbers; in the second, such as content themselves with describing accurately the outward appearances of real or fanciful objects; ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... been found. They have fallen from the heavens at different places, and at different periods. The largest known aerolite is that which fell in Brazil, and was no less than eight feet in length. These huge solid masses of iron, discharged from the clouds in a burning state, may well set the brains of philosophic men to work, to unravel the splendid mystery that contrives laboratories high up in the air, from which dense tons of pure iron are discharged upon our earth. Humboldt, discarding the Laplaceian theory that aerolites ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... practice, adhere to the doctrine of this preface. Many of his most admired poems, such as the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, the great Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, the Sonnets, and many parts of his longest poems, The Excursion and The Prelude, deal with philosophic thought and highly intellectualized emotions. In all of these and in many others the language is rich, stately, involved, and as remote from the "real language" of Westmoreland shepherds, as is the epic blank verse of Milton. On the other hand, in those of his poems ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Government of England, for whose interest exclusively this island was to be ruled. Provided this result was secured, it did not matter much, at the other side of the Channel, how the Irish people were treated. Indeed, they were not recognised as the people of Ireland, or any part thereof. Even philosophic liberals, like Lord Charlemont, were shocked at the idea of a Papist getting into the Irish House of Commons; and the volunteer system was shattered by this insane animosity of the ruling race against the subject nation. The antipathy was as strong as the antipathy between the whites and the negroes ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... Well, then, I should be hanged, perhaps, which is a consideration; then Madame de Maintenon would be regent of France! What a joke! What then, indeed! To think that a philosophic prince should utter such naivetes! Oh, Marcus Aurelius! was it not he who said, 'Populos esse demum felices si reges philosophi forent, aut philosophi reges?' Here is ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... the immense relief of the honest and conservative dog, that had growled himself hoarse, Haldane gave the room its finishing touches, and betook himself to the woodpile again. The cat watched his departure with philosophic composure. Like many fair ladies, she had thought chiefly of herself during the interview with the stranger, from whom she had managed to secure a little agreeable attention without giving anything in return; and, now that it was over, she complacently purred ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... and mystical reveries of the ancients are still law in a great part of the philosophic world; and being adopted by modern theology, it is heresy to abandon them. They tell us "of aerial beings, of spirits, angels, demons, genii," and other phantoms, which are the object of their meditations, and serve as the basis of metaphysics, an abstract and futile science, which ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... natural in a man to whom all material things seemed unessential, must have sorely tried her patience. But Socrates bore her scolding with resignation. Indeed, he seemed to regard it as furnishing an opportunity to practice the philosophic patience ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... where the builder's art, Grandeur and elegance at once had join'd; While due proportion, reign'd in every part, And simple grace, with solid strength combin'd. In such a temple's wall, sat perch'd on high, A solemn, thoughtful, philosophic fly. For flies, an air so grave, of wisdom take, And on one leg, the head will often hold, And into wrinkles, oft the forehead fold, Only because they deep reflection's make; And to the bottom dive to know, The source of all ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... at Vienna some two years after his departure, I had occasion to read most of his dispatches, which exhibited a mastery of the subjects of which they treated, with much of the clear perception, the scholarly and philosophic tone and decided judgment, which, supplemented by his picturesque description, full of life and color, have given character to his histories. They are features which might well have served to extend the remark of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sundry new systems of thought—is a tendency which, in education also, has caused divisions and the accumulation of methods. As external consequences of the same internal change, these processes have necessarily been more or less simultaneous. The decline of authority, whether papal, philosophic, kingly, or tutorial, is essentially one phenomenon; in each of its aspects a leaning towards free action is seen alike in the working out of the change itself, and in the new forms of theory and practice to which the change has ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... cease to think altogether, we must think anthropomorphically," we may be pardoned for declining to believe that "the further progress of thought must force men hereafter" to "cease to think altogether." Such a suicide of thought would furnish an odd comment upon philosophic "progress." We shall, of course, continue to think anthropomorphically of God; our thought will thus inevitably fall short of the Reality, but it will be truer than if we did not think of Him at all. Again, Divine Personality is declared to be ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... put in place. By the time the fire was roaring and the boy had turned, he found the bandages had been taken from the body of the stranger and his grandfather was studying the smeared naked torso with a sort of detached, philosophic interest. With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he was pressing deeply into ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... seated with Lavinia his daughter. I saw that Brutus who drove out Tarquin; Lucretia, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia; and alone, apart, I saw the Saladin. When I raised my brow a little more, I saw the Master of those who know, seated amid the philosophic family; all regard him, all do him honor. Here I saw both Socrates and Plato, who before the others stand nearest to him; Democritus, who ascribes the world to chance; Diogenes, Anaxagoras, and Thales, Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Zeno; ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... Being. Boethius, life; the first scholastic; an independent philosopher; his philosophic ambition; his achievement; a Christian; perhaps a martyr; son-in-law of Symmachus; his wife; his sons; early training; youthful poetry; premature old age; his learning; his library; his lofty position; his principles; the champion of the oppressed; of the Senate; his accusers; ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... annals of Broadmoor began to dribble to me, overlaid too frequently for my taste with philosophic reflections at large upon what a lone, defenceless woman could expect in this world—irrelevant, pointed wonderings as to whether a party letting on he was a good ranch hand really expected to perform any labour for his fifty a month, or just set round smoking his head off and see which ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... reponam?" "Will no one wake up this unhappily lethargic mass, and by forcing the weapons of knowledge and reason into their hands provoke them and enable them to meet the enemy at the gate?" Every other interest, philosophic, romantic, religious, fell away from me for the time. Wherever I was, whether in London or country houses—for in these respects my habits remained much what they had been—I had with me the works of economists, statistical reports, multitudes of current speeches, all bearing on ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... meaning of these figures, and with whatever view they were traced upon granite, they merit the examination of those who direct their attention to the philosophic history of our species. In travelling from the coast of Caracas towards the equator, we are at first led to believe that monuments of this kind are peculiar to the mountain-chain of Encaramada; they are found at the port ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... agitation.' Through Glenshiel, Glenmorison, Auchnasheal, they passed on to the inn at Glenelg. They made beds for themselves with fresh hay, and, like Wolfe at Quebec, they had their 'choice of difficulties;' but the philosophic Rambler maintained they might have been worse on the hillside, and buttoning himself up in his greatcoat he lay down, while Boswell had his sheets spread on the hay, and his clothes and greatcoat laid over him by way ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... science of form. The enormous mass of various empirical material, which had been accumulated by descriptive systematists and by the dissections of zootomists since the time of Linnaeus and Pallas, had already been abundantly matured and utilised in many ways for philosophic purposes by the synthetic principles of comparative anatomy. But even the most important universal laws of organisation—of which the old system of comparative anatomy was one—had to take refuge in mystical ideas of a plan of structure and of creative final causes ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... launched out against the enlightenment of domestics. [The ancestors of our present footmen, if we may believe Sir William Temple, seem to have been to the full as intellectual as their descendants. "I have had," observes the philosophic statesman, "several servants far gone in divinity, others in poetry; have known, in the families of some friends; a keeper deep in the Rosicrucian mysteries and a laundress firm in ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... protecting the wheat to prevent us from eating it, to which she answered angrily that hares must live somehow, especially when they had young ones to nurse. My father replied that men did not seem to think so, and perhaps they had young ones also. I see now that my father was a philosophic hare. But are ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... endeavor to show that the conflicting passages in the Scriptures are capable of interpretation so as to harmonize with each other and with the results of rational speculation. To be sure, it was felt that the doctrine of freedom is fundamental to the spirit of Judaism, and the philosophic analyses led to the same result though in differing form, sometimes dangerously approaching a thorough determinism, as in ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... honoured the toast, I scooted back with the glass, leaving him wiping the beads off his beard-bristles. He was in his philosophic mood when I rejoined him at ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... "A few days later she died," caught on his ear. So he called all the sorrow and reverence he could into his eyes, sighed, and raised his eyebrows expressing such philosophic resignation in our mortal lot as might suffice to excuse a ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... never entirely to have lost sight of them in the midst of the busiest occupations. But the times were times for action, rather than for contemplation. The country was to be defended, and to be saved, before it could be enjoyed. Philosophic leisure and literary pursuits, and even the objects of professional attention, wher all necessarily postponed to the urgent calls of the public service. The exigency of the country made the same demand on Mr. Jefferson that it made on others who had the ability and the disposition ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... equally applicable to the heavenly bodies. The grand discovery by Kepler of the true relationship of the Sun to the Planets, and the telescopic discoveries of Galileo and of those who followed him, spread a spirit of inquiry and philosophic thought throughout Europe, and once more did astronomy rise in estimation; and the irresistible logic of its mathematical process of reasoning soon placed it in the position it has ever since occupied as the ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... every event matrimony is a tragedy, but in the case of spiders it is a catastrophe. Spiders are a very sour and pessimistic people who live in walls, corners of hotel bedrooms and holes generally, in which places they weave very delicate webs, and sit for a long period in a state of philosophic ecstasy, contemplating the infinite. Their principal pastimes are killing flies and committing suicide—both of which games should be encouraged. Like so many other unhappy creatures they are born with a gender from which there ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... philosophic ingenuity of London, this evening, produce such a scene? The gardens no doubt will be glorious, but the groundwork is also God's; but why say I that in particular? All is his; the very notes that warble through so many guilty throats are his creation; all the art of ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... noiselessly that he seemed unconscious of his great gifts. Men in high places, often opulent and happy in their ease, deferred to him with the confidence of pupils to a beloved teacher. But he possessed more than philosophic wisdom. He was sleepless and tireless. It was his custom to attend political gatherings in all parts of the State, and to make the acquaintance of men in that "inner circle," who controlled the affairs of party ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... viewing the march of human evolution, the philosophic mind should look upon humanity as one man, and not ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... startled at these reports of philosophers? Are we ready to cry out in a transport of surprise, "How mighty is the Being who kindled such a prodigious fire, and keeps alive from age to age such an enormous mass of flame!" Let us attend our philosophic guides, and we shall be brought acquainted with speculations more enlarged and more inflaming. The sun, with all its attendant planets, is but a very little part of the grand machine of the universe; ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... against Jovinianus, makes Theophrastus set forth in great detail the intolerable annoyances and the endless disturbances of married life, demonstrating with the most convincing arguments that no wise man should ever have a wife, and concluding his reasons for this philosophic exhortation with these words: "Who among Christians would not be overwhelmed by such arguments ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... get much new woman excitement out here in Harpeth Valley, Uncle Tucker," laughed Rose Mary, glad to see him rise once more from the depth of his depression to his usual philosophic level. "You wouldn't call—er—er Mrs. Poteet a modern woman, ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... wastefully and thanklessly through a rarefied atmosphere; underfoot the hot, black clay, thirsting for spring rain, and bare except for inedible roley-poleys, coarse tussocks, and the woody stubble of close-eaten salt-bush; between sky and earth, a solitary wayfarer, wisely lapt in philosophic torpor. Ten yards behind the grey saddle-horse follows a black pack-horse, lightly loaded; and three yards behind the pack-horse ambles listlessly a tall, slate-coloured kangaroo dog, furnished with the usual poison muzzle—a light wire ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... not tiresome. To the philosophic mind, Dr. Frampton, there should be no such thing as tedium, boredom, ennui, and I trust that mine is philosophic. You were much in my thoughts, sir, between the attacks of sea-sickness. By frequent perusal I had committed your two epistles to memory, and while silently ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... dangerous. She wished as much as possible to see all aspects of the premier race meeting. Indeed, meeting a friend of Lady Feenix's, a good-natured young peer who halted irresolute between four worlds—the philosophic, the political, the philanthropic, and the sporting, she introduced herself as "David Williams"—hoping no Bencher was within hearing—said "Dare say you remember me? Lady Feenix's? Been much abroad lately—really feel quite strange on an English race course," ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... "I am not philosophic enough to resolve such difficult questions," she answered, smiling; "but, yonder are the musicians, waiting to sooth us with the melody of sweet sounds; we are all prepared for a dance, and here is my hand, if you will look a little more ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... thinking of the France of his youth; but France had changed. In 1765, Horace Walpole was depressed by the solemnity and austerity of French society. Their style of conversation was serious, pedantic, and seldom animated except by a dispute on some philosophic subject.[375] In fact, Chesterfield was admiring the France of Louis the Fourteenth long after "Le Soleil" had set, and the country was sombre. It was the eve of the day when France was to imitate the democratic ideals of England. England, at last, instead of being on the outskirts of civilization, ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... the name implies, are merely plays that are short. They partake of the nature of the long play and are simply short because the philosophic speeches are few and the number of scenes that have been inserted are not many. The short play may have sub-plots; it may have incidents that do not affect the main design; its characters may be many and some may ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... twelfth had always found him settled decorously with his wife in some seaside villa. He had not fretted, for he was content with dreams. He was always a little tired, too, when the holidays came, and his wife told him he was growing old. He consoled himself with tags from the more philosophic of his authors, but he scarcely needed consolation. For he had large stores ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... miracle differing from the popish transubstantiation only in the element of time, but in its essential nature equally supernatural. The dogma excited great discussion for centuries, and produced as many theories of transubstantiation as we now observe of evolution, keeping philosophic minds and pens busy till the dawn of modern science after ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Morse, whose philosophic and useful labors have rendered his name illustrious in two worlds, the homage of the high and affectionate ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... of these stories—and they are only taken at random from a great number—it will be seen that the spirit of almost all of them is the same. But when we go lower in the scale, and leave the class of philosophic novels, we find their tales of life and manners still more absurd in their total untrueness than the others were hateful in their design. There is a novel just now appearing in one of the most widely-circulated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... more sober work than his previous writings on religion. In this book he raises the well known difficulties with belief in miracles and brings a great deal of real learning and logic to bear on the question. The entire work is in a reasonable and philosophic spirit. His conclusion is that "une vraie religion doit avoir au dfaut de bonnes raisons, des preuves sensibles, capables de faire impression sur tout ceux qui la cherchent de bonne foi. Ce ne sont pas les miracles." The same year he published two serious but somewhat ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... Woodberry, "not as a source, but as a presence. In Tennyson, Keats, and Shelley there was Greek influence, but in them the result was modern. In Arnold the antiquity remains—remains in mood, just as in Landor it remains in form. The Greek twilight broods over all his poetry. It is pagan in philosophic spirit, not Attic, but of later and stoical time; with the patience, endurance, suffering, not in the Christian types, but as they now seem to a post-Christian imagination, looking back to the past." Even when his poems treat of modern or romantic ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... Idea of Freedom first got a national expression on the Fourth of July, 1776. Here it is. I put it in a philosophic form. There ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... the friends of the mission in England it seemed as though the angels' songs over a repentant nation could be almost heard. Their orators, like Hugh Stowell, indulged in rhapsodies over the isle "now lovely in grace as she is beauteous in nature"; and even a philosophic thinker like Julius Hare could give it as his deliberate opinion that, for many centuries to come, historians would look back to the establishment of a Christian empire in New Zealand as the greatest achievement of the first part of the ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... close, the reader should wish there were a third. To create this desire is, after all, the very perfection of the art of novel-writing. The novelist who does not make the reader "wish as there was more on it," according to the philosophic dictum of Sam Weller on the art of epistolary correspondence, has failed. Henceforth this novel of Mr. CRAWFORD's goes forth to the world with the Baron's best imprimatur. This poor little cigarette-maker requires ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... talk of how he and I were changed from the quiet Quaker lads we had been, and did I remember our first fight, and Colonel Rupert Forest, and Master Dove? That greater master, War, since then had educated and broadened us. He was more philosophic than I, and liked thus to speculate; but of Darthea he said never a word, though we spoke of many things that ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... classification of the gods into those who help and those who hinder the fruition of desire. Light and darkness typify the contrast. Divinity thus conceived under numerical separateness. Monotheisms do not escape this. The triune nature of single gods. The truly religious and only philosophic notion of divinity is under logical, not mathematical unity. This ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... weighty query, and at the philosophic demeanour of his visitor, our hero made shift to bid him welcome and to demand his name and quality. As the old man answered him his voice rose and fell in musical cadences, like the sighing of the east wind, while an ethereal and ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Peace-makers, such as Mr. Robert Blair of St. Andrews and Mr. James Durham of Glasgow, negociated between the two sides; and Mr. Robert Leighton, in his Edinburgh Principalship, looked on with saintly and philosophic indifference. He hoped that, while so many brethren "preached to the times," one brother might be allowed "to preach on eternity" and that the differences on earth would "make heaven the sweeter." In fact, however, the controversy was not merely ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... vulgarity burst over him, sunk his head lower and lower, and wished that the earth would swallow him up. He was only used to Cambridge, and to a very small corner of that. He and his friends there believed in free speech. But they spoke freely about generalities. They were scientific and philosophic. They would have shrunk from the empirical freedom that results from a ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... in self-interest as rivers lose themselves in the sea;" "In the adversity of our best friends we always find something which does not displease us"—such are the moral comments on life graven in ineffaceable lines by La Rochefoucauld. He is not a philosophic thinker, but he is a penetrating and remorseless critic, who remains at one fixed point of view; self-interest is assuredly a large factor in human conduct, and he exposes much that is real in the heart of man; much also that is not universally ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... diction is nervous, rich, and elegant; but splendid language, and melodious numbers, will make a fine poem—not a tragedy. The sentiments are beautiful, always happily expressed, but seldom appropriated to the character, and generally too philosophic. What Johnson has said of the tragedy of Cato, may be applied to Irene: "It is rather a poem in dialogue than a drama; rather a succession of just sentiments, in elegant language, than a representation of natural affections. Nothing excites ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... from the kind of faint into which he had fallen and opening his eyes, looked about him. The first person they fell on was old Billali who stood stroking his white beard and contemplating the scene with an air which was at once philosophic and satisfied. This seemed to anger Umslopogaas, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... the Eastern mystic who approached so closely to the Christian ideal of a later age, for the Buddha's spiritual experiences became the inspiration of unnumbered hearts, and exercised a purifying influence over every creed of the philosophic East. The social life of ancient Java, comprising public ceremonials, domestic occupations, architecture, agriculture, navigation, drama and music, is memorialised by succeeding terraces of the igneous rock which sufficed for the old-world sculptor as the medium of his Art. An unknown King ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... time for philosophic reflection; already those outside were beating at the door. He flung it open, and the foremost men started in surprise at the sight of him. But Bryce bent forward to Mitchington—anxious to play a part to ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... into a slow saunter, philosophic fancies coming to interweave themselves with his thoughts; and, when he awoke again from a long reverie, the road had grown narrow, rough and stony. He stumbled along till at length he again made out the castle in the distance, perched ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... as a beautiful song might resemble the voice of an angel," said Stephanus somewhat drily. "He who plunges into the depths of philosophic systems—" ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... or else that created things can be or be conceived without God; or else, as is more probably the case, they hold inconsistent doctrines. I think the cause for such confusion is mainly, that they do not keep to the proper order of philosophic thinking. The nature of God, which should be reflected on first, inasmuch as it is prior both in the order of knowledge and the order of nature, they have taken to be last in the order of knowledge, and have put into the first place what they call the objects ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... seen the editor and his family only during Prince Kropotkin's stay at Hull-House, when they had come to visit him several times. The editor had impressed me as a quiet, scholarly man, challenging the social order by the philosophic touchstone of Bakunin and of Herbert Spencer, somewhat startled by the radicalism of his fiery young son and much comforted by the German domesticity of his wife and daughter. Perhaps it was but my hysterical symptom of the universal excitement, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... reserve as to cases which may arise similar to such as HAVE arisen, where a merciful bloodshed [Footnote: "Merciful bloodshed"—In reading either the later religious wars of the Jewish people under the Maccabees, or the earlier under Joshua, every philosophic reader will have felt the true and transcendent spirit of mercy which resides virtually in such wars, as maintaining the unity of God against Polytheism and, by trampling on cruel idolatries, as ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... affairs. But, except in sheer moral discipline, those years had done nothing to supply the special training which he had previously lacked, for high executive office. In such office at such a time ready decision in an obscure and passing situation may often be a not less requisite than philosophic grasp either of the popular mind or of eternal laws. The powers which he had hitherto shown would still be needful to him, but so too would other powers which he had never practised in any comparable position, and which nature does not in a moment supply. Any attempt to judge of Lincoln's ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... evidently written with a view to effect, and so as to excite rather than to subdue the vague appetite for the mysterious and the horrible which such a case, under any circumstances, is sure to awaken—but apart from this there is nothing to deter a philosophic mind from further inquiries regarding it. It is a matter entirely for testimony. [So it is.] Under this view we shall take steps to procure from some of the most intelligent and influential citizens of New York all the evidence that can be had upon the subject. No steamer ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... not look to the end in view, lest I should become indifferent to the lawfulness of the means. Let us discard from this high constitutional question all those extrinsic considerations which have been forced into its discussion. Let us endeavor to approach it with a philosophic impartiality of temper—with a sincere desire to ascertain the boundaries of our authority, and a determination to keep our wishes in subjection to ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... to feel than to state—in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought. The importance of time is rather practical than theoretical, rather in relation to our desires than in relation to truth. A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... about that time in the great agony of its strife, was thrown into squares; and under that arrangement, which condensed and contracted its apparent numbers within a few black geometrical diagrams, how frightfully narrow—how spectral did its slender lines appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it seems, might exist, in the case of a ghostly war ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... skeleton armed with a whip, who acts as plowboy to the old laborer, and running along through the furrow beside the terrified horses, goads them on. This is the specter Death, whom Holbein has introduced allegorically into that series of religious and philosophic subjects, at once melancholy and grotesque, entitled ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... years had elapsed since the death of Copernicus, his theory of the solar system did not find many supporters, and the old forms of astronomical belief still retained their hold on the minds of the majority of philosophic thinkers. This can be partly accounted for, as many of the Ptolemaic doctrines were at first associated with the Copernican theory, nor was it until a later period that they were eliminated from ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... PHILOSOPHIC Sages have generally been careless of their personal appearance. Soap and water has not been their strong point. The exception is DIOGENES, who was seldom out ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... fire on every subject spoke, But chief he loved the gay immoral joke; The words most sacred, stole from holy writ, He gave a newer form, and called them wit. Vice never had a more sincere ally, So bold no sinner, yet no saint so sly; Learn'd, but not wise, and without virtue brave, A gay, deluding, philosophic knave. When Bacchus' joys his airy fancy fire, They stir a new, but still a false desire; And to the comfort of each untaught fool, Horace in English vindicates the bowl. "The man," says Timon, "who is drunk is blest, No fears disturb, no cares ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... of the Golden Age, and the philosophic fictions of a State of Nature, equally adopt the same fundamental assumption; in the one, justice was unnecessary, in the other, it was inadmissible. So, if there were a race of creatures so completely ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... Creation's charms around combine, Amidst the store should thankless pride repine? Say, should the philosophic mind disdain That good which makes each humbler bosom vain? 40 Let school-taught pride dissemble all it can,[5] These little things are great to little man; And wiser he, whose sympathetic mind Exults in all the good of all mankind. Ye glitt'ring ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... such an epic as he designed. His strong predilections on the one hand, and his violent antipathies on the other, swayed his choice of subjects, narrowed his field of vision, and influenced his manner of presentment. The series cannot therefore pretend to philosophic completeness. It is a gallery of pictures painted by a master-hand, and pervaded by a certain spirit of unity, yet devoid of any strict arrangement, and formed on no carefully maintained principle. It is a set of cameos, loosely strung upon a thread, a structure with countless beautiful parts, ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... about literature, to dislike Scotchmen, and to be insensible to the merits of David Hume, was a combination of iniquities on the part of the English nation, which would have been amply sufficient to ruffle the temper of the philosophic historian, who, without being foolishly vain, had certainly no need of what has been said to be the one form of prayer in which his countrymen, torn as they are by theological differences, agree; "Lord! gie us a gude conceit o' oursels." But when, to all this, these same Southrons added a ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... centuries, and even now there is no absolute uniformity although conditions are much better than they were even twenty-five years ago. Scientists use what is known as the "scientific standard" (sometimes called the "philosophic standard"), viz., 256 double vibrations for "middle C." This pitch is not in actual use for musical purposes, but is retained for theoretical purposes because of its convenience of computation (being ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... The cultivation of philosophic reflection was a new experience for me. Peg ambled along contentedly and the dog trailed under Parnassus where I had tied him. I read "Vanity Fair" and thought about all sorts of things. Once I got out to pick some scarlet maple leaves that attracted ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley |
