"Spiritualist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not mean that they are unreal: I believe in ghosts. So does Mr. Henry James; he has written some of his very finest literature about the little habits of these creatures. He is in the deep sense of a dishonoured word, a Spiritualist if ever there was one. But Meredith was a materialist as well. The difference is that a ghost is a disembodied spirit; while a god (to be worth worrying about) must be an embodied spirit. The presence of soul and substance together involves one of the two or three things ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... attachment much as a planter valued the affection of his slaves, knowing they would work the better for it. He did all her errands; fetched and carried for her; took her to church on evenings when she did not care to stay at home. One of the few amusements Saul Matchin indulged in was that of attending spiritualist lectures and seances, whenever a noted medium visited the place. Saul had been an unbeliever in his youth, and this grotesque superstition had rushed in at the first opportunity to fill the vacuum of faith in his mind. He had never succeeded, however, in thoroughly indoctrinating his daughter. ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... not to the intellectual, worship of Nature, which moderns define to be an unscientific and imaginary synonym for the sum total of observed phenomena. Consequently he holds to the dark and degrading doctrines of the Materialist, the Hylotheist; in opposition to the spiritualist, a distinction far more marked in the West than in the East. Europe draws a hard, dry line between Spirit ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... asked is this—How does it happen that in ages and societies so distant and so various identical stories are current? What is the pressure that makes neoplatonic gossips of the fourth century circulate the same marvels as spiritualist gossips of the nineteenth? How does it happen that the mediaeval saint, the Indian medicine-man, the Siberian shaman (a suggestive term), have nearly identical wonders attributed to them? If people wanted merely to tell "a good square lie," as the American slang has it, invention does not ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... spite of her scoffing, Myrtella was impressed. For many years she had considered a visit to a spiritualist, or clairvoyant, one of her wildest and most extravagant dissipations. The possibility of having a medium in the family was a luxury ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our "spiritualist's" paper in the Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what I shall find when ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... farmhouse that breaks all bounds to his loquacity: he tells everything he knows of foreign lands, as well as news of what is going on in ten counties round. Two only of the vagrant tribe the boy dislikes, the colporteur and the travelling Spiritualist—two cold, shabby, sniffling beings, each wrapped in a shawl and each driving an old horse afflicted with poll-evil. Whenever the boy goes to put up one of these men's horses he wants to break his wagon and whip, and he does give ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... earnest champion of spiritualism, for it was at his house that the most wonderful phenomena were realized, when invisible spirits carried on their pranks with the furniture like human beings. Dr. Phelps was a thorough spiritualist, and introduced the spiritual doctrine into his sermons, though exercising the worldly wisdom of not ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... its loosest sense, is a man's mental and moral attitude in regard to real or imaginary superhuman beings—a definition which includes pantheism, polytheism, monotheism; moral, non-moral, and immoral religions; which prescinds from materialist or spiritualist conceptions of the universe. And by a religion in the objective sense, so far as true or false can be predicated of it, we mean a body of beliefs intended to regulate and correct man's subjective religion. It is to such systems and their parts that we think the above test of "adaptability" ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... commune, I am not therefore to be supposed to hold with any of them. For instance, I thought it interesting to give some space to the very singular phenomena called "spiritual manifestations" among the Shakers; but I am not what is commonly called a "Spiritualist." ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... question is, if they care enough for their own Mystery to buy it of this ancient Gentleman. If they do not, he will shame them by Publishing it to all the world. Frederick Tennyson, who has long been a Swedenborgian, a Spiritualist, and is now even himself a Medium, is quite grand and sincere in this as in all else: with the Faith of a Gigantic Child—pathetic and yet humorous to consider ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... Mgr. Fountain Conf. Co., Savannah. Credit A1. Likes a decent show. No legs. Moony about wife and family when away from home. Spiritualist. Wife a blonde who likes to think she's reforming lower classes. Grandfather old cuss named Poindexter who was defeated for Congress by but seventeen votes. P. S. Nov. 5, great grandmother a Fairfax of which ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... conduct of the Howard Athenaeum and the Hollis Street Theater. Rich was a character in his way. He had been a printer in Bangor, Maine, had sold tickets in a New Orleans theater, and had already amassed a fortune in his Boston enterprises. He was an ardent spiritualist, and financed and gave much time to a spiritualistic publication of Boston called The Banner of Light. One of his theatrical associates at that time, John Stetson, ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... a noted spiritualist, born near Edinburgh; became widely known as a "medium," was presented at Courts and to the Pope; was expelled from the Catholic Church for spiritualistic practices, and latterly became involved in a lawsuit with a Mrs. Lyon, who had bestowed upon him L60,000 and forced him to return it; he is supposed ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the spirits of the dead have not only the power of revisiting this earth at their will, but that, when here, they have the power of action, or rather, of exciting to action? Let me put a definite case. A spiritualist friend of mine, a sensible and by no means imaginative man, once told me that a table, through the medium of which the spirit of a friend had been in the habit of communicating with him, came slowly across the room towards him, of its own accord, ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... ill, and could not leave his berth for a good many days. He became a convinced spiritualist, not enthusiastically—that could hardly have been expected from him—but in a grim, unshakable way. He could not be called exactly friendly to the disembodied inhabitants of our globe, as Captain Johns was. But he was now a firm, if gloomy, ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... guidance the conversation almost immediately—how and why I cannot remember—turned to the subject of Spiritualism, and he soon was gravely informing us that, of all the signs of the times, none was more sinister than the multiplication of Spiritualist seances, which were, according to him, neither more nor less than revivals of black magic. He went on to assert, as a fact supported by ample evidence, that the devil at such meetings assumed a corporeal form—sometimes that of a man, sometimes that of a beautiful and ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... is that of the seer, the poet, the spiritualist, of all such as have an eye for the deeper essences and first principles of things. Concede intellectual power, or the spiritual element, then add this temperament, and there follows a certain subtile, penetrative, radical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Now, after all that has been said of Rome and the corruptions of Roman government, I do not know anything so decidedly damnatory as the fact, to which allusion was lately made in Parliament, that the Papal Government had ordered Mr Home, the spiritualist, to quit the city and the States of his Holiness, and not ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... appended to the accompanying statement are the best-known of the eight who were present,—men whose testimony in a court of law would be accepted without question. Dr. Frank Collins is, or was, President of the Osteopaths' Association, a Spiritualist, student of Astrology and mystical subjects, and a member of the Council of the California Psychical Research Society. Dr. J. C. Anthony is a well and favorably known physician, who has practised here for many years, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... element for a man of his calibre: he did not become a spiritualist, nor was he so intolerant as to object to the use of brandy for cooking purposes; but he published an injudicious and even intemperate letter to the chief-justice of Massachusetts and the president of Harvard College, arraigning them for drinking wine at a public banquet. He exerted ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... the truth. They do all these tricks—and then come derangements of the digestive organs, pressure on the liver, nerves, and all sorts of things, and one has to come and patch them up. It's just awful! [Laughs] And you? You are also a spiritualist ...
— Fruits of Culture • Leo Tolstoy
... D'Assoucy, Count Zintzendorff, the Grand Conde, Marquis de Villette, Pierre Louis Farnese, Duc de la Valliere, De Soleinne, Count D'Avaray, Saint Megrin, D'Epernon, Admiral de la Susse La Roche-Pouchin Rochfort S. Louis, Henne (the Spiritualist), Comte Horace de Viel Castel, Lerminin, Fievee, Theodore Leclerc, Archi-Chancellier Cambaceres, Marquis de Custine, Sainte-Beuve and Count D'Orsay. For others refer to the three volumes of Pisanus Fraxi, Index Librorum Prohibitorum (London, 1877), Centuria Librorum Absconditorum ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Quimby, the itinerant spiritualist and healer, became successful and renowned by the application of the natural methods of cure. At first his favorite methods were water, massage, magnetic and mental treatment. Gradually he concentrated his efforts on metaphysical methods of cure, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... in the hovel of the murdered wizard revealed the numerous applications by lovers, wives, and other anxious inquirers. Amongst other recent revivals of the 'Black Art' in Southern Europe already referred to, the inquisition at Rome upon a well-known English or American 'spiritualist,' when, as we learn from himself, he was compelled to make a solemn abjuration that he had not surrendered his soul to ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... another farce, another amusement for you, another sacrilege against human dignity, and nothing more. Why, you don't believe in the monks' God; you've a God of your own in your heart, whom you've evolved for yourself at spiritualist seances. You look with condescension upon the ritual of the Church; you don't go to mass or vespers; you sleep till midday. . . . Why do you come here? . . . You come with a God of your own into a monastery you have nothing to do with, and you imagine that the monks ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the Continent. We saw her, and a more unempress-looking empress I cannot imagine. To convince a skeptic she displayed her leg to show how well it had succeeded in taking on flesh. I have no patience with people who believe such nonsense. The famous spiritualist Poster is also here in Washington. He is clever in a way, and has made many converts simply by putting two and two together. We went, of course, to see him, and came away astounded, but not convinced. He produced a slate on which ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... to the human race is that of teachers, guardians and directors. They superintend human evolution. But this does not mean in the very least the relationship that is expressed in the term "spirit guides" so frequently use by the spiritualist. That is a totally different thing. They seem to imply that the "spirit guide" gives direct instructions or orders to the person known as a "medium." If we were all thus controlled and directed what would become of free will? Evolution can proceed only if we ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... sorts of fool things. They have a mystic alchemy, prepare spells and incantations, and claim to hold communion with the dead. It is said that worthless foreigners travel about in the disguise of Taoist priests, just for the money there is in it, as fake spiritualist mediums travel ...
— Boy Scouts on Motorcycles - With the Flying Squadron • G. Harvey Ralphson
... written to me, sending a cutting of an advertisement of a month back of a spiritualist from Abville, which he thinks may be my husband's. I am sure it is, I know the Greek idiom put into English. It decides me on what I had thought of before. I shall offer my services as nurse or physician, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... years I have had a most faithful, intimate, and useful friend, whom I have constantly worn next my heart. I do not know him for a Spiritualist, but by some mysterious sympathy he hears the incessant, ghostly foot-falls of Time, and repeats them accurately to my ear. While I wake he tells me how Time is passing. While I sleep he is still marking his steps, so that sometimes I have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... indeed, we regard it as determined by God: it cannot directly control the passions, but it can indirectly modify them with the aid of imagination; it is the supreme mistress of action, however the passions may oppose its fiat. Spiritualist as he was, Descartes was not disposed to be the martyr of thought. Warned by the example of Galileo, he did not desire to expose himself to the dangers attending heretical opinions. He separated the province of faith ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... psychic experiences, which he related to the London Spiritualist Alliance on May 7, in the salon of the Royal Society of British Artists, cover a very wide field, and they ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... uncomfortable if she broke a looking-glass or saw the new moon over her left shoulder. She has a most amazing fund of common-sense and is "down" on Spiritualism to a degree. It is one of Bayport's pet yarns, that at the Harniss Spiritualist camp-meeting when the "test medium" announced from the platform that he had a message for a lady named Hephzibah C—he "seemed to get the name Hephzibah C"—Hephzy got up and walked out. "Any dead relations I've got," she declared, "who send messages through a longhaired ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Spiritualist paper in America.... Mr. Bundy has earned the respect of all lovers of the truth, by his sincerity and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... Presbyterian, then the Methodist, the Baptist, even the Spiritualist expounded and sermonized upon the several beauties of the Protestant faith. Their principal ammunition, however, was expended in besieging, battering and anathematizing the ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... honest, and bid him depart in peace. For me he is no longer an individual. He belongs to a class of minds which we are bound to be patient with if their Maker sees fit to indulge them with existence. We must accept the conjuring ultra-ritualist, the dreamy second adventist, the erratic spiritualist, the fantastic homoeopathist, as not unworthy of philosophic study; not more unworthy of it than the squarers of the circle and the inventors of perpetual motion, and the other whimsical visionaries to whom De Morgan has devoted his most instructive and entertaining ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... about racial solidarity, and socialistic religion. Therein are found earthly music chanted in space,—songs of Saturn and Jupiter dictated under the influence of Alyre Bureau, who was the musician for the spiritualist society of Allan-Kardec. Here we have disembodied spirits of all ranks, and this is ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... with Debby was more or less of a question. She'd kept poorhouse for years, and had no other home nor no relations to go to. Everybody liked her, too—that is, everybody but Cap'n Benijah. He was down on her 'cause she was a Spiritualist and believed in fortune tellers and such. The cap'n, bein' a deacon of the Come-Outer persuasion, was naturally down on folks who wasn't broad-minded enough to see that his partic'lar crack in the roof was the only way to ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln |
