"Philosophize" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with too much of it. In his youth he had skulked through alleys and back streets—the fear of laughter and ridicule dogging his mixed heels. Never before to have paused to philosophize over what had caused his wasted life! Too much imagination! Mental strabismus! He had let his over-sensitive imagination wreck and ruin him. A woman's laughter had given him the viewpoint of a careless world; and he had fled, and he had gone on fleeing all these years from ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... Russians commit in that latter Country make nature shudder. [Details, horrible but authentic, in Helden-Geschichte, already cited.] How happy you in your Hermitage; where you repose on your laurels, and can philosophize with a calm mind on the deliriums of men! I wish you all the happiness imaginable. If Fortune ever favor us again, count on all my gratitude. I will never forget the marks of attachment which you have given; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... philosophize with me," I said. "I am already distracted by the puzzle you offer to me. You are so young and beautiful, so fair in your ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... such test applied, for there was absolutely no struggle. He would have found it much easier to send a bullet through his brain than to put that organ to any violent exertion. Up to him, but he sometimes fancied that he saw it coming. At such times he would philosophize over himself and fate, until he had exhausted those two great subjects, and then, in a quiet and gentlemanly way, he would drown speculation in the traditional dram. He never drank anything but "Old Rye," and he flattered ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... mistress, apostrophizes the curl—opens his pocket-book, insists upon your reading his letters to her, sings you the song which he composed when he was au desespoir at their parting, asks your opinion of it, then whirls off to a discussion on the nature of love; leaves that the next moment to philosophize upon friendship, compliments you, en passant, and claims you for his friend; hopes that the connection will be perpetual, and concludes by asking you to do him the honour of telling him your name. In this manner he is perpetually occupied; ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... bail was unsuccessful, and while awaiting trial upon several charges he had plenty of time to philosophize. Thanks to the work of Bob Cranston, Chief of the Special Service Department of the Canadian Lake Shores Railway, Nickleby's past record stood revealed and there was talk ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... again, may be resolved into one more general and universal: And how far these researches may possibly be carried, it will be difficult for us, before, or even after, a careful trial, exactly to determine. This is certain, that attempts of this kind are every day made even by those who philosophize the most negligently: And nothing can be more requisite than to enter upon the enterprize with thorough care and attention; that, if it lie within the compass of human understanding, it may at last be happily achieved; if not, it may, however, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... than ordinary penetration to perceive anything but a kind of grandiose folly in Brother Hecker. The impulse to talk about the conversion of America, to plan it and advocate it, to proclaim it possible and prove it so, and to philosophize on the profoundest questions of the human reason, was irrepressible. This he did with an air of matured conviction and with the impact of conscious moral authority, but in terms as strikingly eccentric as the thoughts were lofty and inspiring, and in execrable French, the declaimer ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... the operation of the intellect upon the truths that it has seen to suffer interruption. Wherefore books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight, and therefore Aristotle, the sun of philosophic truth, in considering the principles of choice, teaches that in itself to philosophize is more desirable than to be rich, although in certain cases, as where for instance one is in need of necessaries, it may be more desirable to be rich ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... transcendent or immanent, whether he be One, the Creator, the eternal and immutable Principle, or whether he be, as say the doctors beyond the Rhine, the ideal objectivation of our Me, is not the question for the heroes of humanity. The soldier in the thick of battle does not philosophize as to how much truth or falsehood there is in the patriotic sentiment; he takes his arms and fights at the peril of his life. So the soldiers of spiritual conflicts seek for strength in prayer, in reflection, contemplation, inspiration; all, poets, ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... been received, from one end of the kingdom to the other. The censure of all the Bishops, and of both Houses of Convocation; re-echoed, as it has been, through all ranks of the community, is a great fact;—a fact which I cordially recommend to Mr. Pattison's attention, when he would philosophize on the religious tendencies ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... artificial in poetry to him came late and with difficulty. Yet it resulted from his keen relish of nature, that he was never satisfied with his art of verse till he had brought it to the confines of perfection. He did not philosophize over the animals; he sympathized with them. A philosopher would not have lost a fashionable dinner in his admiration of a common ant-hill. La Fontaine did so once, because the well-known little community was engaged in what he took to be a funeral. He ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... is, Whether at table it is allowable to philosophize? For I remember at a supper at Athens this doubt was started, whether at a merry meeting it was fit to use philosophical discourse, and how far it might be used? And Aristo presently cried out: What then, for heaven's sake, are there any that banish philosophy from company and ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... when the oblique-eyed, swarthy American of that time, pausing before some commemorative bronze or historical picture of our epoch, contemplates this stupendous spectacle of human endurance, I hope he will be able to philosophize more satisfactorily than we can now, concerning the mystery of our strength as a nation and our weakness ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... in which the author concerns himself rather with the results than the events of our recent war. This is always Mr. Smith's manner of dealing with the past; but in considering a period known in all its particulars to his audience, he has been able to philosophize history more purely and thoroughly than usual. He arrives directly and clearly at the moral of the Ilias Americana, and sees that Christianity is the life of our political system, and that this principle, without which democracy is a passing dream, and equality an idle fallacy, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... as with a velvet mantle, I marvel how the poets and artists and scholars of olden times nursed those dreams which the world calls indolence, but which are the seeds that germinate into great achievements. How did Plato philosophize without the pipe? How did gray Homer, sitting on the temple-steps in the Grecian twilights, drive from his heart the bitterness of beggary and blindness? How did Phidias charm the Cerberus of his animal nature to sleep, while his soul ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... trip the peaceful intercourse between husband and wife was interrupted. Godwin might philosophize to his heart's content about the advantages of separation, but Mary could not be so sure of them. Absence in Imlay's case had not in the end brought about very good results; and as the days went by, Godwin's letters, at least so it seemed to her, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... time for Betts Shoreham to philosophize, and speculate on female caprices and motives, John Monson making his appearance in as high evening dress as well comported with what is called "republican simplicity." John was a fine looking fellow, six feet and an inch, with large whiskers, a bushy head of hair, and particularly white ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... returned, stands regarding the outcast man with singular interest, "would make drunk the whole jail. A week in 'Mount Rascal' The upper story used for the confinement of felons. will be necessary to transmute you, as they call it, into something Christian. On 'the Mount' you will have a chance to philosophize-mollify the temperature of your nervous system-which is out ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... woman would become the mere personification of animal fury or fear. For this reason all the ordinary representations of this subject are, I think, false and cold: the artist has not heard the shrieks, nor mingled with the fugitives; he has sat down in his study to convulse features methodically, and philosophize over insanity. Not so Tintoret. Knowing, or feeling, that the expression of the human face was, in such circumstances, not to be rendered, and that the effort could only end in an ugly falsehood, he denies himself all aid from ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... round the earth, and that the earth is fixed, and further that the sun for a certain period remained still. (69) Many, who will not admit any movement in the heavenly bodies, explain away the passage till it seems to mean something quite different; others, who have learned to philosophize more correctly, and understand that the earth moves while the sun is still, or at any rate does not revolve round the earth, try with all their might to wrest this meaning from Scripture, though plainly nothing of the sort is intended. (70) Such quibblers excite my ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... of history belonging to the parish, from peer's palace to peasant's hut! What are clergymen perpetually about? Not always preaching and praying; or marrying, christening, and burying people. They ought to tell us all about it; to moralize, to poetize, to philosophize; to paint the manners living as they rise, or dead as they fall; to take Time by the forelock, and measure the marks of his footsteps; to show us the smoke curling up from embowered chimneys; or, since woods must go down, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... this dance was foolish enough to philosophize. Everybody was out for a good time, and a Scotsman from the British embassy came up to claim Lady Clifton-Wyatt's hand and body for the next dance. Davidge had been mystically attuned anew to Mamise, and he found her in a mood ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... satisfied with the result of the Civil War, and he was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history. He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that "it was not yet time" to philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must "wait till its passions had cooled," and "the clouds of strife had cleared away." He maintained that the time would never come when we should see its motives and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to ascertain them in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... artists of the world have ever shown an enthusiasm for reality. To care for notions and abstractions; to philosophize; to reason out conclusions; to care for schemes of thought, are signs in the artistic mind of secondary excellence. A Schiller, a Euripides, a Ben Jonson, cares for ideas—for the parings of the intellect, and the distillation ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... very much given to argue, or, as he called it, philosophize, about the most trifling matter, and to do him justice, I never knew anybody that was a match for him, except it was a grave-looking old gentleman who called now and then to see him, and often posed him in an argument. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... and watched the Mayor go saunteringly down the street, with his crustiness carried like a child on his shoulder, which it delighted him to have knocked off, so that he could philosophize in the restoring of it to its position, suddenly a realization of the relation of Glendale to the world in general was forced ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... see," replied the veteran commander. "If I am mistaken, so much the better; but in my opinion, without pretending to philosophize about the matter, the necessity of war lies far deeper than these honest gentlemen suppose. What! is there a field for all the petty disputes of individuals? and shall there be no great law court for the settlement of national difficulties? ...
— Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... longing for the woman did not hinder him from thinking of life. He did not philosophize about this enigma, which was already stirring a feeling of alarm in his heart; he was not able to argue, but he began to listen attentively to everything that men said of life, and he tried to remember their words. They did not make anything clear to him; nay, they ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... extraction, who, by what I can remember of him, and by all the accounts I could ever get of him, seemed not to have had one single drop of Danish blood in his whole crasis; in nine hundred years, it might possibly have all run out:—I will not philosophize one moment with you about it; for happen how it would, the fact was this:—That instead of that cold phlegm and exact regularity of sense and humours, you would have looked for, in one so extracted;—he was, on the contrary, as mercurial and sublimated ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... also in his conception of man as a being who is here developing an eternal existence under the laws of an Infinite Spirit. He, too, believes in the natural, and believes that the highest law of the soul is, to be true to every pure impulse arising within us. To calculate, to philosophize, he holds to be always to man's injury, that nature when perfectly obeyed is the only guide. He studies man as affected by all the circumstances of his existence, and as wrought upon by the great social forces which have made him what ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... whole of my being was energized. The national fever had thoroughly pervaded my blood—the national fever to win. Prosperity—writ large—demanded it, and Theodore Watling personified, incarnated the cause. I had neither the time nor the desire to philosophize on this national fever, which animated all my associates: animated, I might say, the nation, which was beginning to get into a fever about games. If I remember rightly, it was about this time that golf was introduced, tennis had become a commonplace, professional baseball was in full swing; Ham Durrett ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... but of such value in the eyes of the poet were his dearly purchased reflections on human nature and social institutions, that, instead of expressing them by the progress of the action, he exhibited them with circumstantial fulness, and made his characters philosophize more or less on themselves and others, and by that means swelled his work to a size quite ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... been entertained by the most illustrious philosophers. Anaxagoras said, that snow was black: would you endure me if I were to say the same? You would not bear even for me to express a doubt on the subject. But who is this man? is he a Sophist? for by that name were those men called, who used to philosophize for the sake of display or of profit. The glory of the gravity and genius of that man was great. Why should I speak of Democritus? Who is there whom we can compare with him for the greatness, not merely of his genius, but also ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... filches fire at the same time, Prometheus-like, from heaven, feeding men with hopes—not, as Aeschylus says, altogether "blind," ([Greek: tuphlas d eu autois eloidas katokioa)] but only blinking. Don't court, therefore, if you would philosophize wisely, too intimate an acquaintance with your brute brother, the baboon—a creature, whose nature speculative naturalists have most cunningly set forth by the theory, that it is a parody which the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... president of Monroe said, "I would enjoy hearing you philosophize, but, unfortunately, people are being killed. Crops are being ruined. There is famine in some sections of the country already. The watchbirds must ...
— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley
... "but in your own interests you would be wiser to philosophize with your books, and seek the key to the sciences, rather ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... Mr. Lenox. "It's only a trifle after all, though, to be true to her nature, Vera must needs philosophize about ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... personal consolation for the manifest evils of this war in any remote or contingent advantages that may spring from it. I am old and weak, I can bear little, and can scarce hope to see better days; nor is it any adequate compensation to know that Nature is old and strong and can bear much. Old men philosophize over the past, but the present is only a burthen and a weariness. The one lies before them like a placid evening landscape; the other is full of the vexations and anxieties of housekeeping. It may be true ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... young men had stopped to consider their life-work as a whole, some of them might have turned back. But they had no time to philosophize. They were like the boy who learns how to swim by being pushed into deep water. Once the telephone business was started, it had to be kept going; and as it grew, there came one after another a series of congestions. Two courses were open; either the business had to be kept down to suit the apparatus, ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... the States General were opened, Necker said: "We are not sure of the troops." The officers were becoming humanitarian and philosophical. The soldiers, recruited from the lowest class of the population, did not philosophize, but they no longer obeyed. In their feeble minds the ideas of equality meant simply the suppression of all leaders and masters, and therefore of all obedience. In 1790 more than twenty regiments threatened their ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... shabby garments she allotted him, he would perform her hests—in the spirit of a servant who abideth not in the house for ever. He was now six and twenty years of age, and had never dreamed of marriage, or even been troubled with a thought of its unattainable remoteness. He did not philosophize much upon life or his position in it, taking everything with a cold, hopeless kind of acceptance, and laying no claim to courage, devotion, or even bare suffering. He had a certain dull prejudice in favour of honesty, would not have ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... Dexter, in a lively manner. "Dreams in the place of realities, Miss Loring. Don't philosophize; don't speculate; don't think—at least not seriously. Your thinkers are always miserable. Take life as it is—full of beauty, full of pleasure. The sources of enjoyment are all around us. Let us drink at them ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... Lansing answered indifferently. He wandered away to his own room, leaving Strefford to philosophize ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... philosophers was to philosophize. To philosophize as a business is to miss the highest philosophy. To do a certain amount of useful work every day, and not trouble about either the past or the future, is the highest wisdom. The man who drags the past behind him, and dives into the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... him when he was languid and fretful, and the small duties of life were too heavy for his feeble energies. Dot always took a large portion of my time; his movements were slow and full of tiny perversities; he liked to stand and philosophize in an infantile way when I wanted to be downstairs helping Deborah. Dot's fidgets, as I called them, were part of the ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... which your speculation has involved you. The most erudite scholar of the age, and one of the finest metaphysical minds the world has ever known, he expressly sums up his vast philosophic researches with the humble confession: 'There are two sorts of ignorances; we philosophize to escape ignorance, and the consummation of our philosophy is ignorance; we start from the one, we repose in the other; they are the goals from which, and to which, we tend; and the pursuit of knowledge is but a course between two ignorances, as human life is itself only a traveling from grave ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... models his deportment as may best Accord with Brother, Sire, or Stranger-guest; Who takes our Laws and Worship as they are, Nor roars reform for Senate, Church, and Bar; 500 In practice, rather than loud precept, wise, Bids not his tongue, but heart, philosophize: Such is the man the Poet should rehearse, As joint exemplar of his ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... skies, Bowed like a flowering reed when May's wind heaves The reed-bed that the stream kisses and sighs, In love that shrinks and murmurs and believes What yet the wisest of the starriest wise Whom Greece might ever hear Speaks in the gentlest ear That ever heard love's lips philosophize With such deep-reasoning words As blossoms use and birds, Nor heeds Leontion lingering till they rise Far off, in no wise over far, Beneath a heaven all ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... be something young about my attitude—men smile at me. But I do not find it easy to imagine evil of men. I do not mean the crowd—I do not philosophize about the crowd. But I mean the artists. I was looking at a picture of Musset the other day; it was a noble face—the face of a man; and in the face of a man I read dignity and power—high things that I love and bow before. ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... loving; it binds us more closely together while here. Dr. Thomas Browne has argued that death is one of the necessary conditions of human happiness, and he supports his argument with great force and eloquence. But when death comes into a household, we do not philosophize—we only feel. The eyes that are full of tears do not see; though in course of time they come to see more clearly and brightly than those that have never ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... circuits through the heart, at last shall speed Of life and sense, look thorough our thin eyes And view the close wherein the cow did feed Whence they were milk'd: grosse pie crust will grow wise, And pickled cucumbers sans doubt philosophize!" ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... period above all that he felt so "lonely, abandoned, struggling against misfortune; and before one can philosophize one has ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... was shrouded in darkness, and we sallied out to the beach at the head of the bay to find relief in movement. The time passed quicker then, and at last we sat down on some wreckage there and watched the tropic night as it revealed its wealth of stars, and sitting there we began to philosophize, moralizing upon the destiny of man and his relations to things seen and unseen, upon spiritual force; most of all upon divine justice, which in the end evens up all things. But like so many other philosophers who write the style of the gods and make a pish at fortune, we failed to make ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... has this "Absolute Religion" without external revelation is much as if a man were to say that we have an "Absolute Philosophy" on the same terms, in virtue of man's having faculties which prompt him to philosophize in some way. All religions contain the Absolute Religion, says Mr. Parker: Just, I reply, as all philosophies contain the absolute philosophy. The philosophy of Plato, of Aristotle of Bacon, of Locke, of Leibnitz, of Reid, are all philosophies, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... one would not in their sense, poor things, and on compulsion,' said Louis, his words coming the slower from the exhaustion which made him philosophize, rather than exert himself. 'In a true sense, it is the war-cry of ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and those on the other correspondingly—until he reached a desirable location. Then we established ourselves according to his directions and waited. It was rather a long wait—nearly two hours—during which I had ample leisure to philosophize to the top of my bent. We had to console us Sam's assurance that it was necessary to take time by the forelock to this radical extent in order to secure satisfactory places. For the next two hours a steady stream of people poured along the two sides of the field until ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... the more precarious its worth. I do not mean that the essayist may not generalize, but his generalizations should be limited to the scope of his experience of life. I do not mean that he should not philosophize, but his philosophy should be, like Goethe's or Emerson's, an expression of intuition and faith. Properly, the literary essay is a distinct artistic genre—the expression of a concrete thinking personality, and its value consists in the living wisdom it contains. Such ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... a similar law, as Basil had just shown. Philosophize as we will, we cannot comprehend why it is so—why Nature requires the sacrifice of one of her creatures for the sustenance of another. But although we cannot understand the cause, we must not condemn the fact as it exists; nor must we suppose, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... within the narrow circle of their own ideas. They make no advance in a correct medium path. Some allow pupils to practise only staccato, and others only legato, aiming thereby at nobody knows what. Some allow them to sing too loud, others too feebly; some philosophize earnestly about beauty in the voice, and others grumble about unpleasantness in the same; some are enthusiastic about extraordinary talents, others fret about the want of talent; some have a passion for making all the sopranos sing alto, others do just the reverse; some ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... to nature's bounty and sweltered or shivered according to the weather. When night fell they sought shelter with animal instinct, for not only were activities almost completely curtailed by darkness but beyond its screen lurked many dangers. It is interesting to philosophize upon a distinction between a human being and the animal just below him in the scale, but it may serve the present purpose to distinguish the human being as that animal in whom there is an unquenchable and insatiable ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... I been screwed, yea, deaded morn and eve, Some dozen moons of this collegiate life, And not yet taught me to philosophize? Harvardiana, Vol. III. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... like a vice; it was almost a crime. He spent a very miserable time in the Fine Arts Department of the Pymantoning County Agricultural Fair; and in a kind of horrible fascination he began to review the collection in detail, to guess its causes in severalty and to philosophize ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... poet, gifted with keen and lively sensibilities, open at all pores to the delightfulness of nature, recoiling from nothing that is human. At no period of his life was he merely a solitary thinker or a student of books. When he came to philosophize, when the spiritual mistress, Sophia, absorbed all other passions in his breast, his method of exposition retained a tincture of that earlier phase of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... sanctum. When my tale was ended he let me cry all over his desk, with my head buried in a heap of galley-proofs and my tears watering his paste-pot. He sat calmly by, smoking. Finally he began gently to philosophize. "Now girl, he's prob'ly better off there than he ever was at home with his mother soused all the time. Maybe he give that warty matron friend of yours all kinds of trouble, yellin' ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... mother a simple description of this tempest, he adds:—"I have learned to philosophize during my travels, and, if I had not, what use is there ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... ideas, however inspiriting, are rather heavy diet for the young, immature minds growing quickly tired in the efforts to digest them—Damaris, having reached this happy, if partially erroneous, climax of emancipation, ceased to philosophize either consciously or unconsciously. The russet moorland and spacious landscape shut the door on her, had no more to tell her, no more to say. Or, to be strictly accurate, was it not rather perhaps that her power of response, power to interpret their ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... with a smile which was meant to express withering sarcasm, the discomfiture of the supposed scoffer. But when I proceeded to walk four or five times across the mysterious place, the rod pointing steadfastly toward the zenith all the while, our friend became grave and began to philosophize. "Well," said he, "you see, your temperament is peculiar; the conditions ain't favourable in your case; there are some people who never can work these things. But there's water below here, for all that, as you'll find, if you dig for it; ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... also because I am raging at having done what I did with your two hundred thousand crowns; but could I then imagine that I should find again, as a farmer, the son of a king who handled his diamonds by the shovelful? Ah, it is no use to philosophize here; but to find Father Griffen again if ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... myths; fables; notion of societal welfare. It is not to be understood that primitive men philosophize about their experience of life. That is our way; it was not theirs. They did not formulate any propositions about the causes, significance, or ultimate relations of things. They made myths, however, in which they often presented conceptions which are deeply philosophical, but they represented them ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... figger pale complected, with big light blue eyes that ruther stand out of her head, and a tall peaked forehead with light hair combed down smooth on both sides with scalops made in it by hand. She is good natered to a fault, you know you can kill yourself on milk porridge, and though folks don't philosophize on it you can be ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... for love and sold them for money, in a generation that preferred iron pots for utility. Every Indian woman is an artist,—sees, feels, creates, but does not philosophize about her processes. Seyavi's bowls are wonders of technical precision, inside and out, the palm finds no fault with them, but the subtlest appeal is in the sense that warns us of humanness in the way the design spreads into the flare of the bowl. There ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... and a humanity which makes him tender for the superstitions of the people. Add to this, he believes that poetry, prophecy, and the high insight, arc from a wisdom of which man is not master; that the gods never philosophize; but, by a celestial mania, these miracles are accomplished. Horsed on these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim regions, visits worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw the souls in pain; he hears the doom of the judge; he beholds the penal metempsychosis; ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... than before. Already people were remarking on his strength of will; and most of them surrendered beforehand. "The devil couldn't stand up against him!" they said. He never wavered in his faith in an ultimate victory, but went straight ahead; he did not philosophize about the other aspect of the result, but devoted all his energies to achieving it. He was actuated by sheer robust energy, and it led him the shortest way. The members of the Union followed him willingly, and willingly accepted the privations involved ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo |
