"Disputable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we must conclude that the human jaws do not afford satisfactory proof of the inheritance of the effects of use and disuse, inasmuch as the differences in their weight and shape and size can be more reasonably and consistently accounted for as the result of less disputable causes. ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... (in 1712). He lies buried in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden. If not the greatest actor of his day, Kynaston was the greatest of the 'boy-actresses.' So exalted was his reputation 'that,' says Downes, 'it has since been disputable among the judicious, whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly touched the audience ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... corrupt; that the ministry were generally guilty of gross neglect; and that the people were cursed with spiritual death. It proposed as a theological means of improvement: I. That the scholastic theology, which reigned in the academies, and was composed of the intricate and disputable doctrines and obscure and unusual forms of expression, should be totally abolished. II. That polemical divinity, which comprehended the controversies subsisting between Christians of different communions, should be ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... any first male or female in the history of any animals whatsoever, but affirmed, on the contrary that one begat another infinitely, without any beginning. This thought was so repugnant to common sense that Aristotle himself seemed to be skeptical about it, admitting it to be a disputable thing. After affirming his notion he added, "If the world had a beginning, and if men were once earth-born, then must they have been, in all probability, either generated as worms, out of putrefaction, or else out of eggs." But the question ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... at a crucial moment of the speaker's personal fortunes. Whether he would or would not have made a good bishop, and whether the Whigs were or wore not justly chargeable with cowardice[103] in not having raised him to the Episcopal Bench, are disputable points. It seems certain, from his own declarations, that in later life he would have declined the honour; but there was a time when it might have been offered, and would probably have been accepted. When he feared ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... it is not disputable that we have lived longer than they. When they talk of past poets, or politicians, or novelists, whom the young still deign to remember, of whom for once their estimate agrees with ours, we can sometimes put in a quiet, "I saw him"—or, "I talked with him"—which ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was the tentacle put out by Bocchus. The only shadow of a positive service by which he proposed to deserve the alliance of Rome, was the abandonment of a highly disputable claim to a part of Jugurtha's possessions. It was certainly time to bring the monarch to the real point at issue, and Sulla pressed it home. He began by a brief acknowledgment of the complimentary references which the king had made to himself, and then ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... like the perception of resistance, or of colour. In regard to some of the alleged intuitions at the foundation of our knowledge, as for example time and space, there is a comparative simplicity and unity, rendering their innate origin less disputable. No such simplicity can be assigned ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... years earlier, when it is tolerably certain that there was nothing at all resembling what we now call Spanish? It seems sometimes to be thought that the antiquity of the subject of a ballad comports in some strange fashion the antiquity of the ballad itself; than which nothing can be much more disputable. Indeed the very metre of the ballads themselves—which, though simple, is by no means of a very primitive character, and represents the "rubbing down" of popular dialect and unscholarly prosody for a long time against the regular ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... have to offer—in the ordinary depreciatory sense of the word—is that pages 128 to 137 seem to me to require reconsideration, partly from a substantial and partly from a tactical point of view. There is much that is disputable on the one hand, and not necessary to your argument on ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... author, they were often sufficiently successful; but, successful or not, he was always confident that the next would turn out to be all that he expected of it. With the same confidence he made up his mind upon many a disputable subject; but, be it said, never without a laborious examination of the necessary data, and the acquisition of much knowledge. In argument, of which intellectual exercise he was very fond, he was a formidable antagonist. His power of handling masses of details and ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Earl of Richmond overcame and slew King Richard III., and was hailed as King on the field of victory. But the destruction of Richard, an indubitable usurper and tyrant, was only the first step in establishing a title to the throne as disputable as ever a monarch put forward. To establish that title, however, was the primary necessity not merely for Henry himself, but in the general interest; which demanded a secure government after ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... very 'disputable' rendering of [Greek: homoousion] by consubstantial, or of one substance with, not only might have been spared, but should have been superseded. Why not—as is felt to be for the interest of science in all the physical sciences—retain the same term in all languages? Why not 'usia' ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... for granted that the average beliefs of intelligent people were such laws, and on that ground refused to examine the evidence of their validity, he was inconsistent, and his position only invited assault. As a fact, I believe that his 'intuitions' covered many most disputable propositions; and that the more clearly they were stated, the more they failed to justify his interpretations. He was not really answering the most vital and critical questions, but implicitly reserving them, and putting an arbitrary stop to investigations ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... to the question of the disputable relics of the Clyde, after discussing what science has to say about the probable date and original purpose of the wooden structures in the Clyde estuary. Nobody, it is admitted, forged them, but on the other hand Dr. Munro, the one most learned authority on "Lake Dwellings," or "Crannogs," does ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... somewhat audacious statement of the clever writer who asserted, "In the merciful scheme of nature, there are no plain women," is not as disputable as it may seem. Honest husbands, to be sure, greet the information with dissenting guffaws; gay deceivers reflect upon its truth by gallantly assenting to it, with a mocking little twinkle in their ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... to justify, and plead for it; which if we shall not condemn till all parties be agreed on the verdict, we shall never proceed to judgment, while the world stands. 2. The word must be the rule and the judge, say men what they please, pro or con. 3. And if the matter be indeed so disputable, that it lies not in my faculty to pronounce sentence, I have my dispensation to suspend, till the world ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... assumed that the Senate would concur in the amendment because ho disputable principle is involved but only a question of the method by which the suffrage is to be extended to women. There is and can be no party issue involved in it. Both of our great national parties are pledged, explicitly pledged, to equality of suffrage ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... equal, good and ill fortune in the same measure. But it is far from that; he drinks misery, and he tastes happiness; he mows misery, and he gleans happiness; he journeys in misery, he does but walk in happiness; and, which is worst, his misery is positive and dogmatical, his happiness is but disputable and problematical: all men call misery misery, but happiness changes the name by the taste of man. In this accident that befalls me, now that this sickness declares itself by spots to be a malignant and pestilential disease, if there be a ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... the seed grows in the ear; and the end is reached and God's Kingdom is a reality. Or, the knowledge of God comes like a lightning flash—sudden, illuminative, decisive. "The Son reveals" God to the simple, Jesus said (Matt. 11:27). The Son of Man may be a disputable figure—"Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him" (Matt. 12:32)—but there is no forgiveness in this world, or in any possible real world where God counts at all, for the refusal of the spirit of Truth. So he taught, and all ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... the Fall of man. Deny the truth of Genesis and the whole edifice of our faith crumbles. If we be not under the curse of God for Adam's sin, there was never a need for a Saviour, the Incarnation and the Atonement become meaningless, and our Lord is reduced to the status of a human teacher of a disputable philosophy—a peasant moralist with certain delusions of grandeur—an agitator and heretic whom the authorities of his time executed for stirring up the people. In short, the divinity of Jesus must stand or fall with the divinity of the God of Moses, and this ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... a serene voice, turning upon him eyes of such a disputable stage of colour, between brown and grey, as would have commended itself to a gallant duellist of the last century as a point on which it was absolutely necessary to take some friend's life or other. But the calmness was artificially done, and the astonishment that did not appear in Ethelberta's ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... the preamble:—" Il y a pour toute la Republique un Institut national charge de recueiller les deconvertes, de perfectionner les arts et les sciences.'' As Renan has remarked, the Institute embodied two ideas, one disputable, the other of undisputed truth—that science and art are a state concern, and that there is a solidarity between all branches of knowledge and human activities. The Institute was at first composed of 184 members resident in Paris and an equal number living ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... definitely whether we proposed to return and, if so, whether we wished again to occupy the excellent villa we had. Not knowing what answer to make to the first question, we had passed to the second—somewhat illogically. The second had proved more heatedly disputable than the first. Finally Jill had looked up from a letter to Piers and put in ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... to Men of greater Sincerity, that can and dare examine themselves? What will it do to serious and able Enquirers, that refuse to trust to Outsides, and will not be barr'd from searching into the Bottom of Things? If this was only a Matter of Speculation, a disputable Point in a Ceremony, as whether Men are to sit or to stand at the Performance of it, the Thing might easily be given up: but it plainly appears to be a Theory skilfully raised by Clergymen, to build a Practice upon in their Favour. Those ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... retention of Tobago by England in lieu of her pecuniary demand. A Government which neglected to procure the insertion of its claim to Tobago among the Preliminaries of London could certainly not hope to regain that island in exchange for a concession to France that was in any degree disputable. But the two Bonapartes and Talleyrand now took their stand solely on the preliminaries, and politely waved on one side the earlier promises of M. Otto as unauthorized and invalid, They also closely ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the hard handling of the materialist; and we sincerely regret that discredit is likely to accrue to portions of our author's well-grounded statement of real significances, once of all men understood, because these are rashly blended with his own accidental perceptions of disputable analogy. He perpetually associates the present imaginative influence of Art with its ancient hieroglyphical teaching, and mingles fancies fit only for the framework of a sonnet, with the deciphered evidence which is to establish a serious point of history; and this the more frequently ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... delayed. Why Guido should never draw another picture like that, or at all in the same style, who can tell? it certainly does unite every perfection, and every possible excellence, except choice of subject, which cannot be happy I think, when the subject itself is left disputable. ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... were actually Friedrich's reasons for venturing into this Big Game again, is not now disputable. And as to the rumor, which rose afterwards (and was denied, and could only be denied diplomatically to the ear, if even to the ear), That Friedrich by Secret Article was 'to have for himself the Three Bohemian Circles, Konigsgratz, Bunzlau, Leitmeritz, which lie between ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... these approaches is disputable. It is displeasing to many, from its formality; but we are persuaded that it is right, because it is a national style, and therefore has in all probability due connection with scene and character: and this connection we shall ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... at all. And let me say in conclusion that I can not only respect the sincerity, but understand the sentiments, of a man who says they are not worth seeing at all. Sight-seeing is a far more difficult and disputable matter than many seem to suppose; and a man refusing it altogether might be a man of sense and even a man of imagination. It was the great Wordsworth who refused to revisit Yarrow; it was only the small Wordsworth who revisited it after all. I remember the first great sight in my own entrance ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons which might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of countless chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,—barred with brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where the surf and the sand-bank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries in which we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but their results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... access; the lively imagination of the Orientals invested his character with the fascinations of fable,—in short, Haroun of Aleppo was popularly considered a magician. Wild stories were told of his powers, of his preternatural age, of his hoarded treasures. Apart from such disputable titles to homage, there seemed no question, from all I heard, that his learning was considerable, his charities extensive, his manner of life irreproachably ascetic. He appears to have resembled those Arabian sages of the Gothic age to whom modern science is largely indebted,—a ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as it were so natural to man, is the practice of violence, that our indulgence allows the slightest provocation, the most disputable right, as a sufficient ground of national hostility. But the name and nature of a holy war demands a more rigorous scrutiny; nor can we hastily believe, that the servants of the Prince of Peace would unsheathe the sword ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... government; against, too, a royal descendant of Hercules; against the general who at Plataea flattered Sparta with a renown to which her absence from Marathon, and her meditated flight from Salamis, gave but disputable pretensions?" ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... on the Vicar's, and there was something in this immoral morning which seemed to say that perhaps, after all, Bill had as much right to the biscuits as the Vicar, and would certainly enjoy them better; and anyhow it was a disputable point, and no business of mine. Nature, who had accepted me for ally, cared little who had the world's biscuits, and assuredly was not going to let any friend of hers waste his time in playing policeman ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... question to any Physiologist, whether it is disputable or not? Seems it not at least presumable, that, under his Clothes, the Tailor has bones and viscera, and other muscles than the sartorious? Which function of manhood is the Tailor not conjectured to ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Two disputable points in the above doctrine are likely at once to reveal themselves to the least critical eye. First, that doctrine would seem to check the free expression of disapproval; one of the most wholesome and indispensable duties which anybody ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... the king's just cause in his matter of matrimony had been detracted, and the incestuous and unjust [matrimony] had been set forth [and extolled]," the clergy were generally directed "to open and declare the mere verity and justice" of the matter, declaring it "neither doubtful nor disputable," but to be a thing of mere verity, and so to be allowed of all men's opinions. They were to relate in detail the pope's conduct, his many declarations in the king's favour; the first decretal, which was ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... confused &c (indistinct) 447; mystic, oracular; dazed. perplexing &c v.; enigmatic, paradoxical, apocryphal, problematical, hypothetical; experimental &c 463. unpredictable, unforeseeable (unknowable) 519. fallible, questionable, precarious, slippery, ticklish, debatable, disputable; unreliable, untrustworthy. contingent, contingent on, dependent on; subject to; dependent on circumstances; occasional; provisional. unauthentic, unauthenticated, unauthoritative; unascertained, unconfirmed; undemonstrated; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... law, we mean nothing by man but a corporeal rational creature: what the real essence or other qualities of that creature are in this case is no way considered. And, therefore, whether a child or changeling be a man, in a physical sense, may amongst the naturalists be as disputable as it will, it concerns not at all the moral man, as I may call him, which is this immovable, unchangeable idea, a corporeal rational being. For, were there a monkey, or any other creature, to be ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... seemed to have burnt up the best of their beauty; that was why no beautiful woman had ever cast this sort of spell on him before; when it was a question of wit in women he had preferred the brighter flame to the duller, without much regarding the lamp. "All this is very disputable," said his reason; and instinct answered, "Yes—except that I am under a spell"; and a deeper instinct cried out, "Away with it!" He forced his mind back to her story, and found growing swiftly in him an irrepressible ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... in Cairo on the day of the unhappy event. Rumour is correct once in a myriad times, and, in October 1678, London was humming with rumours. THIS report might get into a letter to Tixall, and, if so, Dugdale's early knowledge is accounted for; if knowledge he had, which I have shown to be disputable. ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... and futile inspiration of "The Devil's Law-case," and the stately but subdued inspiration of "Appius and Virginia." That his place was with no subordinate poet—that his station is at Shakespeare's right hand—the evidence supplied by his two great tragedies is disputable by no one who has an inkling of the qualities which confer a right to be named in the same day with the greatest writer ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... singularity, or to make their court, would find out some pretence or other to give the king a fair colour to carry the point: for if the judges but differ in opinion, the clearest thing in the world is made by that means disputable, and truth being once brought in question, the king may then take advantage to expound the law for his own profit; while the judges that stand out will be brought over, either out of fear or modesty; and they ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... scarcely believed until Burke's name, as the author, was known. But his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and Beautiful, brought him more unequivocal applause. His theory on this subject has been disputed, and is obviously disputable; but it was chiefly written at the age of nineteen; it has never been wholly superseded, and, for elegance of diction, has never been equaled. It brought him into immediate intercourse with all that may be called the fashion ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... commerce with dreams and fairies and other spirits has not all been of this evidential and disputable kind. His confessions do not convince us of his magical experiences, but his poems do. Here we have the true narrative of fairyland, the initiation into other-worldly beauty. Here we have ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... adequate expression at last. If there had not been a God, mused Percy reminiscently, it would have been necessary to invent one. He was astonished, too, at the skill with which the new cult had been framed. It moved round no disputable points; there was no possibility of divergent political tendencies to mar its success, no over-insistence on citizenship, labour and the rest, for those who were secretly individualistic and idle. Life was the one fount and centre of it all, clad in the gorgeous ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... this letter appears somewhat disputable; chiefly because Murray and his associates never mentioned it in their accusation of her before Queen ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... country, or all veracities in his own parochial creed. Each man should learn what is within him, that he may strive to mend; he must be taught what is without him, that he may be kind to others. It can never be wrong to tell him the truth; for, in his disputable state, weaving as he goes his theory of life, steering himself, cheering or reproving others, all facts are of the first importance to his conduct; and even if a fact shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that he should know it; for it is in this world as it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Bishops of England answer. "Many Catholics," they write in their joint pastoral, "are consequently in danger of forfeiting not only their faith, but even their independence, by taking for granted as venerable and true the halting and disputable judgment of some men of letters or of science which may represent no more than the wave of some popular feeling, or the views of some fashionable or dogmatising school. The bold assertions of men of science are received with awe and bated breath, the criticisms of ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... of a little knowledge of things is disputable: but beware the little knowledge of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... casualties which befel Pizarro's squadron is, for the most part, composed from intercepted letters; though, indeed, the relation of the insurrection of Orellana and his followers is founded on rather a less disputable authority; for it was taken from the mouths of an English gentleman then on board Pizarro, who often conversed with Pizarro; and it was, upon enquiry, confirmed in its principal circumstances by others who were in the ship at the same time: so that the fact, however extraordinary, is, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... experiment; but a comparison of date, the character of Clement himself, the circumstances in which he was placed, and the retrospective evidence from after events, points almost necessarily to but one interpretation. It is scarcely disputable that, frightened at the reception of Anne Boleyn in France, the pope found it necessary to pretend for a time an altered disposition towards Henry; and that the emperor, unable to feel wholly confident that a person who was false to others was true ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... difficulties which beset every attempt to trace the history of ideas in India, namely, the absence of chronology. Before 1000 A.D. materials for a connected history are hardly accessible. There are, however, many inscriptions and a mass of literature (itself of disputable date) containing historical allusions, and from these may be put together not so much a skeleton or framework as pictures of ancient life and thought which may be arranged in a ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... The one called the others godless—the others threw back the aspersion of bigotry. Then came complication. What was "religion?" Intellectual culture they could agree about—it embraced well-known areas; but this religion divided itself into many disputable fields. These brother Protestants were like country neighbors who must encounter each other at fairs, markets, meets, and balls, and smile and greet, though each, at heart, is looking savagely at the other's landmarks, ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... painters vied with each other in celebrating a battle which, disastrous as it was, had yet been honourable to their country: some, with pardonable sophistry, represented the advantage of the day as on their own side. One writer discovered a more curious, but less disputable ground of satisfaction, in the reflection that Nelson, as may be inferred from his name, was of Danish descent, and his actions therefore, the Dane argued, were attributable ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey |
