"Negation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fear death for the simple reason that she died in a sure and certain faith and in strict obedience to the commands of the Gospel. Her whole life had been one of pure, disinterested love, of utter self-negation. Had her convictions been of a more enlightened order, her life directed to a higher aim, would that pure soul have been the more worthy of love and reverence? She accomplished the highest and best achievement in this world: she died without fear ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... to the personality of the Absolute as involving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Person, he argues, is no contradiction in terms, unless "finition or limitation" be regarded as identical with "negation" (which, when applied to a hypothetical Infinite, one would surely think it is); and an Absolute Will is not the less absolute from being self-determined ab intra. For how, he asks, can any Will which ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... electric current furnishes to the seminal secretion, bear a share in the improvement that takes place, permanent beneficial results must be looked upon as chiefly the expression of improved nutrition and tonization of the system at large. I do not mean to be understood as wishing to put in negation the beneficial results that the local influence of electricity is capable of sometimes accomplishing in the sexual sphere. These results, however, are not of a physiological, but rather of a purely therapeutic nature, and are obtained there only where ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... Bismarck has been really complimentary to the useful phantom of the autocratic might. There is an awe-inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word Neant—and in Russia there is no idea. She is not a Neant, she is and has been simply the negation of everything worth living for. She is not an empty void, she is a yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration towards personal dignity, towards freedom, towards knowledge, every ennobling desire of the ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... himself a bubble of gas instead of the son of a god, he would not have changed the face of the world. Negation cannot be the parent of heroism, though it will produce an indifference that counterfeits it not ill, since Petronius died quite as serenely as ever did the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... seen that the Victorian age, as presented by Matthew Arnold, was a period of doubt and negation. Browning, however, was not overcome by this wave of doubt. Although he recognized fully the difficulties of religious faith in an age just awakening to scientific inquiry, yet he retained a strong, fearless trust in God and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... possibly, he will refuse it because his conscience will not allow him to accept it, but he will go murdering you by night and walking off with your cashbox, with a clear conscience! He does not call it a dishonest action but 'the impulse of a noble despair'; 'a negation'; or the devil knows what! Bah! everything is upside down, everyone walks head downwards. A young girl, brought up at home, suddenly jumps into a cab in the middle of the street, saying: 'Good-bye, mother, I married Karlitch, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... though she followed attentively what he had to say, it was only because she was drawn on by the ardent desire to find the reality that lay behind Mark's extraordinary and audacious personality. Mark displayed his unsparing negation, enmity and scorn against all that men believe, love and hope for; Vera did not agree with all she heard, because she observed the malady that lay concealed behind the teaching, even if she could not discover where it ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... scepticism, had been about to plunge into the depths of bottomless negation when the Colonel rose punctually at ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... at least according to the present, use of words, less should be more, or wanted should be had. But Shakespeare is very uncertain in his use of negatives. It nay be necessary once to observe, that in our language two negatives did not originally affirm, but strengthen the negation. This mode of speech was in time changed, but as the change was made in opposition to long custom, it proceeded gradually, and uniformity was not obtained but through ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... mass of mankind. It is thus a return towards the most common individualism, advocated by all the would-be superior minorities, to which indeed man owes in his history precisely the state and the rest, which these individualists combat. Their individualism goes so far as to end in a negation of their own starting-point,—to say nothing of the impossibility for the individual to attain a really full development in the conditions of oppression of the masses by the "beautiful aristocracies.'' His development would remain uni-lateral. This is why this direction of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... that," said he, "she may be at heart a revolutionnaire." Then, as he noticed the negation in her look, he added softly: "The least clue as to her present refuge would make me greatly ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... modern Endymion gazing up at the round and prosaic surface of the moon, and refusing to admit that there entered into its composition anything even of so low a vitality as green cheese—it was as though such an one had seen the affirmed negation suddenly take to itself life and form, and disclose from afar a whole heaven of thoughts, beauties, and aspirations which he had not believed existent. And then, having seen that gracious form so well defined that it ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... do not negate the moral idea, what does it matter that the piece affirms it? The negation of the individual factors must be so very decided, precisely in order to give emphasis to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... during which he read it. He had more than time to read it, but still he said nothing; he stood staring at it. "Where is the original?" asked Madame de Bellegarde, in a voice which was really a consummate negation of impatience. ...
— The American • Henry James
... Mr. Lewis brings against his village—and indeed against all villages—is that of being dull. "It is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... strips the Idea bare: their trespass comes through ambition, "last infirmity of noble minds," under the blinding persuasion of witchcraft, which (an actual belief in Shakespeare's time) is a direct negation of the moral law, and puts Satan ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... incoherences, and again it is not so mathematically one that it cannot allow each being to become individualized to a certain degree. But it forms a single whole, none the less; and we have to choose between the out-and-out negation of finality and the hypothesis which co-ordinates not only the parts of an organism with the organism itself, but also each living being with the collective ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... "Thou shalt commit adultery" was printed, omitting the negation; which occasioned the archbishop to lay one of the heaviest penalties on the Company of Stationers that was ever recorded in the annals ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought and, although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation. ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... is not determined by a point without it, and then it must flow back again on itself, that is, there arises a cyclical line, which does enclose a space. If the straight line be assumed as the positive, the cyclical is then the negation of the straight. It is a line, which at no point strikes out into the straight, but changes its direction continuously. But if the primary line be conceived as undetermined, and the straight line as determined ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... yet perceive to what extent this distinction goes; you suppose me to be contending for some minute and subtle shades of difference; so far from that, I mean to affirm that the one law is the direct, formal, and diametrical negation of the other: I assert in the most peremptory manner that he who says, "The value of A is to the value of B as the quantity of labor producing A is to the quantity of labor producing B," does of necessity deny by implication that ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... nature is subject to fluctuations; circumstances play upon us, and 'nothing continueth in one stay.' Change is the condition of life. It means growth and happiness; it belongs to the perfection of creatures. But the unchangeableness of God is the negation of all imperfection, it is the negation of all dependence on circumstances, it is the negation of all possibility of decay or exhaustion, it is the negation of all caprice. It is the assurance that His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... rather than from his heart. Whatever may be, in other respects, the superiority of the Realistic over the Romantic school of fiction, it is inferior in this, viz., that its emotiveness tends to the negation, not to the affirmation, of action. One cannot but recollect to the novelist's disadvantage, as applying to this reference, the following statement he made to Madame Hanska for another purpose: "I have never in my life confused the thoughts ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... idea of God, they move in a direction different from any hitherto followed. Monotheism may in order of time follow upon polytheism, but it is not polytheism under another name, any more than prayer is spell under another name. It is something very different: it is the negation of polytheism, not another form of it. It strikes at the roots of polytheism; and it does so because it goes back not to polytheism but to that from which polytheism springs, the idea of God; and starts ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... mother at a distance—the child expresses by crowing sounds, which have become stronger and higher than they were, but which, can not be clearly designated; the nearest approach to a representation of them is [)a]hij[)a]. Affirmation and negation may already be recognized by the tone of voice alone. The signification of the cooing and the grunting sounds remains the same. The former indicates desire of food; the latter the need of relieving the bowels. As if to exercise the vocal cords, extraordinarily high tones are now produced, ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... in old frames in spite of a touch, of this influence. Rodin, the emancipator of modern sculpture, and a notorious anarchist as regards architecture, is not always applicable. The imitation of his style induces a negation of modeling only in evidence in one ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... for yourselves what an intensity of the negation of the faculty of sculpture this implies in the national mind! What measure can be assigned to the gulf of incapacity, which can deliberately swallow up in the gorge of it the teaching and example of three thousand years, and produce, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Zealander—it would appear that the education of this susceptibility is at least as important as the susceptibility itself, if not more so; for without the susceptibility itself, we should simply have no notion of music, beauty, or religion; and between such negation and that notion of all these which New Zealanders and Hottentots possess, not a few of our species would probably prefer the former. It is in vain then to tell us to look into the 'depths of our own nature' (as some vaguely say), and to judge thence ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... about nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a paradox. Their sterile heads take naturally to the path of negation; so they begin to deny truths that have long been admitted—the vital power, for example, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio equivoca, Bichat's distinction between the working of the passions and the working of intelligence; or else they want us to ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... great chained logs, with grassy clearings and little settlements at each side, curving into lilied bays, or breaking musically upon yellow beaches, a River of Life indeed, and no longer a river of Death and Negation! ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... intelligence it was not, and could not be by evolution, for creation by evolution could not, and can not be; because that which is not in a thing can not be evolved out of it, unless you can get more out of a thing than there is in it; which is absurd. So evolution is a negation of the doctrine of a creation. And the doctrine that there is nothing but matter, and that matter is eternal, is a denial of creation by intelligence or otherwise. The infidel says, life began to be; for there was a time when there was no life. But they say matter is eternal. And life is ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... had its surface shades. To be dumb is merely a fatal affliction; but the King of Sulaco had words enough to give him all the mysterious weight of a taciturn force. His silences, backed by the power of speech, had as many shades of significance as uttered words in the way of assent, of doubt, of negation—even of simple comment. Some seemed to say plainly, "Think it over"; others meant clearly, "Go ahead"; a simple, low "I see," with an affirmative nod, at the end of a patient listening half-hour was the equivalent of a verbal contract, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... cries Ethel, with a flush on her face, and tears starting in her eyes. "The Colonel went to her like a kind, dear, good brave uncle as he is. The very day I go to Newcome I'll go to see her." She caught a look of negation in her father's eye. "I will go—that is, if papa will give me leave," says Miss Ethel, adding simply, "if we had gone sooner there would not have been all this abuse of us in the papers." To which statement her worldly father and brother perforce agreeing, we may ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... way of dealing with one another is defective. Thus your Buddhism seems to me more mesmeric than satisfying. It is a way men have of murdering themselves, while continuing to live, into peace and oblivion. There is a surrender, a negation of life, a denial of total responsibilities, or human obligations, which to my mind indicates a monstrous selfishness, none the less real because its manifestations are passive and dignified by a philosophic pose. You ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... eavesdropping position, the situation was this: Bill Appleby, having carefully closed and locked the cash drawer, was braced with both arms extended against the counter, eyeing Macnooder with a look of steely negation that expressed a settled conviction to doubt instantly any statement whenever or however made. Macnooder's round capuchin body was drawn up in confidence and ease and the smile on his face was bland ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... "Gamp" at side, Her azure hose, well-darned, a world too wide For her shrunk shanks; her once sweet woman's voice, Verjuiced to Virgin-vinegarishness, Grates harshly in its sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange new-fangled history, Is sheer unwomanliness, mere sex-negation— Sans love, sans ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... far ahead to rightly estimate the contingencies in the interval. At any rate, after the withdrawal of George Eltham, it had been, in the main with him, a desperate struggle, and undoubtedly, Lord Eltham, by the very negation of his manner, by the raising of an eye-lash, or the movement of a shoulder, had made the struggle frequently harder than it ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... shall certainly be puzzled in that case to say what on earth a novel is. But the note of our age, both for good and evil, is a highly poetical and largely illogical faith in liberty. Liberty is not a negation or a piece of nonsense, as the cheap reactionaries say; it is a belief in variety and growth. But it is a purely poetic and even a merely romantic belief. The nineteenth century was an age of romance as certainly as the Middle Ages was an age of ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... there will spit on the floor and rub it with her foot.[1044] What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country. Time may be employed to more advantage from nineteen to twenty-four almost in any way than in travelling; when you set travelling against mere negation, against doing nothing, it is better to be sure; but how much more would a young man improve were he to study during those years. Indeed, if a young man is wild, and must run after women and bad company, it is better this should be done abroad, as, on his return, he can break off such connections, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... In it the world-weary age of the later renaissance sought escape from the materialism that bound it. Italy had turned its back upon mysticism in religion, and upon chivalry in love; its literature was the negation of what the northern peoples understand by romance. Yet it needed some relief from the very saneness of its rationalism, and it found the antidote to its vicious court life in the crystal springs of Castaly. What the pietism of Perugino's saints is to the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... rotting like some infernal yeast? What terrible energy, what malignant, vindictive lust infected that place? What distorted, unhappy soul first sickened there? How long ago? How long ago? Are there centres of negation? Oh, I tell you, the table-tippers are harmless beside the sickening truths, the simply incredible possibilities of this little crevice ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... it fell to Martineau and other leading Unitarians to take up a defensive attitude against the extreme forces of negation. In particular, he came to be recognized as a champion of theism against materialist evolution. Four volumes of 'Essays' contain some of his acutest writings on the subject. An address presented to him on his eighty-third birthday ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... constructs systems, it creates artificial logic, and all those formulas which we now use by the force of habit, as if they were natural to us. But spontaneous intuition is the true logic of nature,—instant, direct, and infallible. It is a primitive affirmation which implies no negation, and therefore yields positive knowledge. To reflect is to return to that which was. It is, by the aid of memory, to return to the past, and to render it present to the eye of consciousness. Reflection, therefore, creates nothing; it supposes an anterior operation ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... struggled to be heard above the general hubbud of music, voices, and battering of bronze. "Citizens," he said, "the 26th of Floreal will be memorable in our history. Thus we triumph over military despotism, that bloody negation of the rights of man. The First Empire placed the collar of servitude about our necks—it began and ended in carnage—and left us a legacy of a Second Empire, which was finally to end in the disgrace of Sedan." Much more he said, but his voice was drowned in the continued hammering of metal, ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... than turn in a circle; that where he believes that he has discovered new truth, he has merely strayed on to the track of a buried illusion. In the case I have named, for the poet to have taught us more than experience teaches, he should have ventured still further, perhaps, in the negation of justice. But whatever our opinion may be on this point, it at least is clear that the poet who desires his hypotheses to be legitimate, and of service, must take heed that they be not too manifestly contrary to ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... one thought, and that in negation only. Yonder came to claim her a man suddenly odious to her senses. It could not be. His kiss, his arms—if these were of this present time and place, then no place in all the world, even the world ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Christ risen,' says he, defying, as it were, doubt and negation, and basing himself upon the firm assurance which he possesses of that historical fact. 'Ah!' you say, 'seeing is believing; and he had evidence such as we can never have.' Well! let us see. Is it possible for us, nineteen centuries nearly after that day, to catch some echo of this assured confidence, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... turn, vulgar names with more weight than those of princes, words in small lettering which ruled the fate of millions of men;—no nightmare was ever so crushing to one in Otway's mood. The brute force of money; the negation of the individual—these, the evils of our time, found there supreme expression in the City of London. Here was opulence at home and superb; here must poverty lurk and shrink, feeling itself alive only on sufferance; the din ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... glanced at the figure of the young white man, slumped in stupor against the flag-pole. . . . A look of unutterable scorn distorted her face. Then she looked up at the White Chief shaking her head in quick negation. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... this, we had found it hard to realize that we were on the bottom of the ocean; now it came upon us suddenly and not without a touch of awe. This absence of sound and light, this unchanging motionlessness and coolness, this absolute negation—that was the bottom of the sea. It lasted only a moment, but in that moment we realized acutely the meaning and joy of sunshine and moving winds, trees, and ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... in the world than the skeleton of a house in the dawn after a fire. It is as if everything living, positive, violent, had been completely drained in the one flaming act of violence, leaving nothing but negation till the end of time. It is worse than a tomb. A monstrous stillness! Even the footfalls of the searchers can not disturb it, for they are separate and superficial. In its presence ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... so plain—so very, very plain," she said to herself, as if uttering the negation of some preceding ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... attempt was made to discover the north-eastern passage. The enthusiasm of Barendz had died with him, and it may be said that the stern negation by which this supreme attempt to solve the mystery of the pole was met was its best practical result. Certainly all visions of a circumpolar sea blessed with a gentle atmosphere and eternal tranquillity, and offering a smooth and easy passage for the world's commerce between Europe ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of many fashionable, the coldness and deadness of religion, the absence anywhere of any deep, true spiritual impulse. Think, above all, of the organised materialism of Germany, the arrogance, the heartlessness, the negation of everything which one could possibly associate with the living spirit of Christ as evident in the utterances of Catholic Bishops, like Hartmann of Cologne, as in those of Lutheran Pastors. Put all this together and say if the human race has ever presented ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... methods], "taken by themselves (you will observe the qualification, taken by themselves), so far from warranting any inference to the existence of a God, would, on the contrary, ground even an argument to his negation." Mr. Spencer, like Mr. Mill, denies the freedom of the will; and this, according to Hamilton, leads by ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... this point Mr. Jackson Wylie had spoken mainly in monosyllables; now he quit talking altogether; it was no longer necessary. He merely shook his head in negation. He ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... half makes out that some low-lurking instinct, some vague foreboding of what awaited him, on his own side the globe, in the air of so-called civilisation, prompted him to drain to the last drop the whole perfect negation of the acrid. He might have been waiting for the tide of the insipid to begin to flow again, as it seems ever doomed to do when the acrid, the saving acrid, has already ebbed; at any rate his holiday had by the end of the springtime ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... question is one of the construction, not of the verification, of facts; of prophecy for the future, rather than of bare affirmation or negation. No one can presume to determine such a question without a knowledge of how human beings have been accustomed to act under similar circumstances. Illumination of that sort Irish history and the contemporary Irish ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... her golden head in negation. They had beaten round Cape Flattery in that boat, and she had ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... it is deprived of its objectivity, reduced to a completely internal event, through the effect of other states of consciousness which oppose and finally annihilate its objective character. There is an affirmation, then negation; impulse, then inhibition. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... consider that the appearance presented by our universe negatives the hypothesis of infinitely prolonged aggregation. We base this negation upon the appearance of simultaneity presented by the heavens, contending that this simultaneity is contrary to what we would expect to find in the case of particles gathered from infinitely remote distances. Whether these ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious—all the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what a night he had ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... that they thought me a Dago circus man. I learned that neither of them believed in a mesalliance, that the question I had heard was a rhetorical question merely, one not expecting an answer, much used by orators to express a strong negation of the sentiments apparently contained in the question. But I have not yet learned which girl it was who asked the question. It is entirely immaterial and I don't think I shall try to find out, even after I am ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... winds up, in short, with the indication that, if both are completely thought out, the gospel of Faith is no more irrational than the gospel of scientific negation, and that the former can be a guide to action, whereas, if thought out completely, this is precisely what the ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... positions in Church or State during critical times. Moreover, Luther with all Christians believed in a personal and incessantly active devil. Luther's devil was not the denatured metaphysical and scientific devil of modern times, which meets us in the form of the principle of negation, or logical contradiction, or a demoralizing tendency and influence, but an energetic devil, possessed of an intelligence and will of his own, and going about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Luther accepted the teaching of the Bible that this devil is related to men's sinning, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... sense of justice and materially to enlarge the knowledge of justice. These laws emanate from the boys themselves, and are administered by the boys. That is to say, A (which on the old system is at best a mere blank, or negation, and sometimes even an absolute negative with regard to B) thus becomes a positive agent in relation to B—i. e. to one of the main purposes of the school. Again, to descend to an illustration of a lower order, in most schools arithmetic is one part of ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the permanent partition of Ireland would be," he said, "an outrage upon nature and upon history." He quoted a phrase used by Mr. Austen Chamberlain, who had described it as "the statutory negation of Ireland's national claim." But, he argued, no such sacrifice of principle had been made. The demand of Nationalists was for a Parliament for the whole of Ireland, having power to deal ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... disappeared. Strain my eyes as I would, the sensitive retina remained absolutely unaffected; the darkness had finally come, and from one to another of that desolate company ran a little, tremulous sigh, then the silence of complete negation. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... sat crumpled up in his chair, listening to the flames crackling in his heart. The old negation was fighting for its own, and he was weary and broken and sick as with a palsy of the soul. For everything in him trembled. There was no solid ground under him. He had visited his material kingdom in the City, and had seen its strong fortresses and had tried ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... when Sophia was in bed, Madame Foucault came into the room, and dropped down by the side of the bed, and begged Sophia to be her moral support for ever. She confessed herself generally. She explained how she had always hated the negation of respectability; how respectability was the one thing that she had all her life passionately desired. She said that if Sophia would be her partner in the letting of furnished rooms to respectable persons, she would obey her in everything. She gave Sophia a list of all the ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... been against him from the first, he thought, and there flashed through his mind the dark panorama, the accumulating disasters of the night. A negation lay upon his existence that would not be lifted. It had followed him like a sinister shadow for years to this obscure, black smother of water, to the Gar reeling crazily forward under an impotent hand. The yacht was behaving heroically; no other ketch could have lived so long, ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... fallacious one: it does not denote an existence, as Something does, but the end of an existence. It is in fact a negation, which must presuppose a matter once in being and possible to be denied; it is an abstraction, which cannot happen unless there be somewhat to be taken away; the idea of vacuity must be posterior to that of fullness; the idea of no tree is incompetent to be conceived ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... she could love whether deserving or not; something besides Alfieri's glory, in which she could take an interest whether other people did or did not agree? Such a connection as hers with Alfieri may have had an attraction of romance, of poetry, connected with its very illegitimacy, its very negation of normal domestic life, as long as both she and Alfieri were young and passionately in love; but where was the romance, the poetry now, and where was the humdrum married woman's happiness, at whose expense that romance, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Egos towards each other. LOVE cannot be felt towards others AS others. Love is the expression of individual suitability and preference, its positive existence in some cases implies its absolute negation in others. Hence Love can never be the essential and root of social feeling, and hence the necessity for the instinct of abstract justice which takes no account of preferences or aversions. And here I may say that ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... He waggles a negation with his head. He would intimate his position is too responsible a one for jesting, and both of us in our several ways enjoy the pleasure we poor humans have in meeting with intellectual inferiority. "The Standing Committee of Identification," he says, with an eye on a memorandum, "has remitted ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... difference between two forms of government be not worth half a guinea, it is not easy to see how Whiggism can be viler than Toryism, or the Crown can have too little power." The answer is surely obvious. Whiggism is vile, according to the doctor's phrase, because Whiggism is a "negation of all principle;" it is in his view, not so much the preference of one form to another, as an attack upon the vital condition of all government. He called Burke a "bottomless Whig" in this sense, implying that Whiggism meant anarchy; and in the next generation a good many people were ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... men of religious genius. The Church has laid such absolute claim to them that she has created in her own favor a sort of right. It cannot be that this arbitrary confiscation shall endure forever. To prevent it we have not to perform an act of negation or demolition: let us leave to the chapels their statues and their relics, and far from belittling the saints, let us make ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... point, von Hartmann, who may fairly be called Schopenhauer's pupil, takes up the tale. He suggests that it is conceivable that a universal negation of the will may be obtained, if the preponderating part of the actual World-Will should come to be contained in the conscious minds that resolve to will no more. This he thinks may neutralize the whole, and put an end to existence, which is unavoidably an evil, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... proletariat had been bled, supposedly as a measure of hygiene. The bourgeoisie, reassured, strutted about in good humor, thanks to its wealth and the contagion of its stupidity. The result of its accession to power had been the destruction of all intelligence, the negation of all honesty, the death of all art, and, in fact, the debased artists had fallen on their knees, and they eagerly kissed the dirty feet of the eminent jobbers and low satraps whose alms ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... subject to Edwin, in a tone good-naturedly informing, and when he had done Edwin could see that the shape of the hall depended on the shape of the house, and that halls had only been crushed and pulled into something long and narrow because the disposition of houses absolutely demanded this ugly negation of the very idea of a hall. Again, he had to begin to think afresh, to see afresh. He conceived a real admiration for Osmond Orgreave; not more for his original and yet common-sense manner of regarding things, than for his aristocratic deportment, his equality to every situation, and ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... smother the statement of the true God, the honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth bare, is constantly and unwittingly reproducing the divine likeness. It will be interesting here to call a witness or so to the extreme instability of absolute negation. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... were gorgeous in their deck of gold. Mrs. Stannard was dining with the Archers en famille, as she did now almost every evening, for the Archers would so have it, and Archer had been talking of Harris's proposition, and his determined stand for 'Tonio. Mrs. Archer shook her pretty head in negation. She could not see how any one who distrusted her general could himself be loyal. She had said the same of Secretary Stanton during the war, for one of that iron master's most masterly convictions was that every soldier, Southern born—even such ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... but who also feel strongly that many of these representatives of enormous corporate wealth have themselves been responsible for a portion of the conditions against which Bryanism is in ignorant revolt. I do not believe that it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby showing that, whereas the Populists, Socialists, and others really do not correct the evils at all, or else ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Pantheism is the negation of the Divine Personality in order to arrive at Unity; Polytheism is the negation of the Divine Unity, which is fractioned and divided that its multitudinous action may be conceived. The light fancy was delighted with such divisions, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... as argument against religious faith forget that a body thrown upward will continue to ascend for a time after it has parted from the propelling power. Atheism is in nowise responsible for human progress, for Atheism is nothing—a mere negation—and "out of nothing nothing comes." A belief in God affords man a basis upon which to build; it is an acknowledgment of authority, the chief prerequisite of order; but in Atheism there is no constructive element. While it may be no more immoral to deny the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... word "fame" never signifies simply notoriety. The meaning of the direct term may be seen from its negation or opposite, for only the meanest of men are called infamous. They are utterly without fame, utterly nameless; but if fame implied only notoriety, then infamous would possess no marked significance. Fame is an undertaker that pays but little attention ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... stupid,' returned Rudin, 'but he is on the wrong path. I don't know whether you will agree with me, Darya Mihailovna, but in negation—in complete and universal negation—there is no salvation to be found? Deny everything and you will easily pass for a man of ability; it's a well-known trick. Simple-hearted people are quite ready to conclude that you are worth more than what you ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... both the supposed cases, as in every one in which virtue consists of compliance with a painful duty, the pleasure arising from the practice of virtue cannot in strictness be called pleasure at all. At best it is but a partial negation of pain; more properly, indeed, the substitution of one pain for another more acute. Yet this mere negation, this ethereal inanity, is pronounced by Utilitarianism to be preferable to aught that can come into competition ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... godlike wisdom of young Oxford at some length, replying vividly to here and there a Socratic interpolation on my part. After a while I began to grow irritated. His talk, like his verse, seemed to deal with unrealities. It was a negation of everything, save the intellectual. If he and his friends had been in power, there would never have been a war; there never would have been a German menace; the lamb would have lain down in peace, outside the lion. He had an airy way ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... out before proceeding, that this position is not that of the writers on art most in view at the present day. It is the negation of the so-called scientific criticism, and also of the personal theory that reduces art to an expression of, and an appeal to, individual temperaments; it is the assertion of the sovereignty of the aesthetic conscience on exactly the same grounds as sovereignty is claimed for ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere negation. They only oblige him to abstain from doing harm. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others. They hold themselves on the defensive; they defend the equal right ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... come to perceive that between the Civil War and the crusade that is now upon us, we were under the evil spell of materialism. Now materialism is the very negation of democracy, which is a government by the demos, or over-soul; it is equally the negation of joy, the negation of reverence, and it is without conviction because it cannot believe even in itself. Reflecting ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... criticism, a perception of what is now called humbug; and it cannot be denied that, in a certain sense, he had a love of truth, but not of truth in its highest development, not of the positive, the affirmative, the real. Negation and denial suited him better, and suited the age in which he lived better; hence he was a "representative man," was an exponent of his age, and led the age. He hated the Jesuits, but chiefly because they advocated a blind authority; and he strove to crush Christianity, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... inefficiency of Japanese leadership. It would not be safe to predict that Japan will not come back as a force to be reckoned with in the internal as well as external politics of China, but it is safe to say that never again will Japan figure as superman to China. And such a negation is after all ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... objection to the present form of the Trinity is, that it is not only scholastic, or purely intellectual, but that it is also negative. It is not even a positive doctrine. It is often charged against Unitarianism, that it is a mere negation; and, in one sense, the charge is well founded. Unitarianism is a negation, so far as it is a mere piece of reasoning against Orthodoxy; but, as asserting the divine Unity, it is very positive, But the doctrine of the Trinity is a mere ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... disadvantage at which he appears when compared with the innocent cheerfulness of Shakespeare, and on the frequent and usually not unmerited blame which he drew on himself by his manifold works of negation. Said Goethe, "If Byron had had the opportunity of working off all the opposition that was in him, by delivering many strong speeches in parliament, he would have been far purer as a poet. But as he scarcely ever spoke in parliament, he kept in his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... objects seemed endowed with two or three senses, if not five. There was no distinction between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything within the horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as a positive entity rather than as the mere negation of noise. It was broken by the strumming ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... Socrates and Plato, the aspect of free-thought, as against venerated tradition and the received commonplaces of society. The assertion of the right of private judgment in matters of doctrine and belief, was, according to Grote, the greatest of all the fruits of the systematised negation begun by Zeno, and carried out in the "Search Dialogues" of Plato. In the "Exposition Dialogues" it is wanting; and in the "Topica," where Eristic is reduced to method and system by one of Aristotle's greatest ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Sambo's black throat had slain "a whole cityful." His loneliness grew upon him, until again he darted aside from the road into the bush, this time to hide from the Spectre of the Desert—the No Man. Deprived of human countenances, the face of creation was a mask without eyes, and liberty a mere negation. Not that Gibbie had ever thought about liberty; he had only enjoyed: not that he had ever thought about human faces; he had only loved them, and lived upon their smiles. "Gibbie wadna need to gang to ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... range of language and perception: they have no signs of distinction but possess absolute sameness (samata). From this totality of things nothing can be excluded and to it nothing can be added. Yet it is also sunyata, negation or the void, because it cannot be said to possess any of the attributes of the world we live in: neither existence nor non-existence, nor unity nor plurality can be predicted of it. According to the celebrated formula ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... would gladly keep the door open to any place where the shadow of Barbara might fall, and was willing therefore to pocket the offence of his causeless dismissal. But no notice was taken of Tuke's letter, and a gulf of negation seemed to yawn between ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... that lameness of the shoulder will in many cases disappear with no other prescription than that of rest. Provided the lesions occasioning it are not too severe, time is all that is required. But the negation of letting alone is seldom accepted as a means of doing good, in the place of the active and the positive forms of treatment. This is in accordance with a trait of human nature which is universal, and is unlimited in its applications; hence something must be done. In mild cases of shoulder lameness, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture |
