"Superstition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... idea being, that, as the flax-seed grows, so the child will gradually grow stronger" (435. 278, 279); flowers and plants are sometimes associated with ill-luck and death. In Westphalia and Thuringia the superstition prevails that "any child less than a year old, who is permitted to wreathe himself with flowers, will soon die." In the region about Cockermouth, in the county of Cumberland, England, the red campion (Lychnis diurna) is known as "mother-die," ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... sip her glass, she moved away and sank into thought. I uttered a few stale commonplaces about superstition, drank half a bottle, paced up and down, and then went out ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Self-deception and superstition nowhere reign more supremely, at least in civilized communities, than among the wretched devotees of the gaming-table, who are ever promising themselves to quit the mad pursuit, ever flattering themselves that the next coup will be their last, and always expecting that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... genuine. It was like Mary to be concerned about the wedding-dress superstition. And what possible danger could there be? Miss Milligan in all probability had never heard the fatal names of opium and cocaine save as unpleasant things associated with Chinese and tooth-drawing. It was absurd to imagine ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... what {92} he is trying to explain, and for that reason the being whom he creates is portentous, but not human. To understand this, you need only compare Richard with Macbeth. In Macbeth we have a host of different forces—ambition, superstition, poetry, remorse, vacillation, affection, despair—all struggling together as they might in you or me; and it is this mingling of feelings with which we all can sympathize that makes him, in spite of all his crimes, a human being like ourselves. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... imprimatur of man's manhood. Camels kneel for the reception of their burdens, but never kneel to God. Only man has a shrine and an altar. Such things, we are told, are signs of an infantile state of civilization and superstition; but they may be boldly affirmed to be, in fact, infallible signs of the divinity of the human soul. Caliban is thinking of his god, brutal, devilish; yet he thinks of a god, and that is a possibility as far above the brute as stars are above the meadow-lands. He has a divinity. He ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... brethren, still however, as he himself maintains, with sincere respect for domestic feelings and good manners, who takes on him to deny psychology in toto, to pronounce the influence of mind in the visible world a superstition, and to account for every effect which is found in the world by the operation of physical causes. Hitherto intelligence and volition were accounted real powers; the muscles act, and their action cannot ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... came, and he must sit on, shivering and smoking, a sack across his shoulders. As the stir of nerve and blood caused by the ferreting subsided, his spirits began to sink. Mists of Celtic melancholy, perhaps of Celtic superstition, gained upon him. He found himself glancing from side to side, troubled by the noises in the wood. A sad light wind crept about the trunks like a whisper; the owls called overhead; sometimes there was a sudden sharp rustle ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... we cannot decide which of us two is the greater man. I am told that most of the professors there pass under the arch without tear; which indeed shows a wise contempt of the superstition." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... hand. The world moved, and Spain, chained to an outworn superstition, did not move with it. The treasure she drew from Mexico and Peru she poured out to prop the tottering pillars of church despotism; and the end came when, in 1588, Elizabeth's doughty captains wiped out the "invincible" armada, and dethroned ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... and eclipses there was little calculated to do harm by arousing that superstitious terror which is the worst breeding-bed of cruelty. Far otherwise was it with the belief regarding comets. During many centuries it gave rise to the direst superstition and fanaticism. The Chaldeans alone among the ancient peoples generally regarded comets without fear, and thought them bodies wandering as harmless as fishes in the sea; the Pythagoreans alone among philosophers seem to have had a vague idea of them as bodies returning at fixed periods ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... definition of liberty. You seem to believe that to be free one must have no authority or leadership or master. But I say unto you that there is no such liberty. You must be the servant of something. You must be under the authority of your law, or your superstition, or your God, or yourself. Freedom on any other terms is not freedom, it is lawlessness. {196} Indeed it may be more like slavery ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... belong to several different stocks of somewhat varying characteristics. The most common type is of medium size, well formed, coal-black in color and rather good-looking. They are intelligent and easily taught, but are extremely indolent. Their paganism takes the form of gross superstition, as seen in their constant use of gree-gree charms and in their sassa-wood ordeal. Like all the races of Africa, they are polygamists; and as the women manage the farms and do nearly all the work, a man's wealth and importance are often estimated by the number ...
— History of Liberia - Johns Hopkins University Studies In Historical And Political Science • J.H.T. McPherson
... House hill was the old cannon brought to Maryland by Lord Baltimore's colony and rescued from a protracted bath in St. Mary's River to take its place among the many relics of history which make Annapolis the repository of old stories tinged by time and fancy with a mystic coloring of superstition. He lived in the old "Carvel House," erected by Dr. Upton Scott on Shipwright Street. Not far away was the "Peggy Stewart" dwelling, overlooking the harbor where the owner of the unfortunate Peggy Stewart, named for the mistress of the mansion, was forced by the revolutionary citizens of Annapolis, ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... encompasses Assisi is the Clitumnus, the delight of philosophers and poets in the Augustan age. Near its source stands a beautiful little temple to the divinity of the stream. Although the ancients resorted hither for the loveliness of the spot, they did not bathe in the springs, a gentle superstition holding it sacrilege for the human body to lave itself in a stream ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... fellow now, thought the pained American, is the victim of that sad superstition which associates goblins with the deserted body of man, as ghosts with an abandoned house. How unlike are we made! What to me, in like case, would have been a solemn satisfaction, the bare suggestion, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... exercised on the progress of knowledge in Europe. The germ of a great number of physical truths is found in the works of the sixteenth century; and that germ would have fructified, had it not been crushed by fanaticism and superstition. We learned, at Pasto, that the column of black and thick smoke, which, in 1797, issued for several months from the volcano near that shore, disappeared at the very hour, when, sixty leagues to the south, the towns of Riobamba, Hambato, and Tacunga ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... not been expressing a wish rather than a fact? We look into our own hearts, and strife and jealousy and racial antagonism are still there. Can we expect that man who has but lately begun to think of brotherhood can already feel it in his blood; that the age-long superstition against the Jew can be obliterated with a new geographical boundary—though that boundary be indeed serene as the all-washing, all-embracing Atlantic? Oh, that "reality does not correspond to our ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... East Indies, a missionary to the Hindoos. I shall have a colleague who has been there five or six years already, and who understands their language. They are the most mild and inoffensive people in all the world, but are enveloped in the greatest superstition, and in the grossest ignorance...I hope, dear father, you may be enabled to surrender me up to the Lord for the most arduous, honourable, and important work that ever any of the sons of men were called to engage in. I have many sacrifices to make. ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... said Eugene, leaning back, folding his arms, smoking with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, 'of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of a wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, "Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I'll be the death of you"? ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... June,—a day which, if the Greek superstition still retained its influence, would be held sacred to Nemesis,—a day on which the two greatest princes of modern times were taught, by a terrible experience, that neither skill nor valor can fix ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "Superstition—superstition, Stonehouse—the most crushing, damnable chain of all, the symbol of cowardice, of greed and vanity, the enemy of truth and knowledge, the hot-bed on which we breed the miserable half-men who cumber this earth, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... wolves roamed about, for in the north quite one-third of the land had gone out of cultivation, and trade had drifted into the hands of the French or Dutch. Education had almost disappeared; and the moral decline of the people was seen in the coarsening of manners and the growth of superstition, as witnessed ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... prostrate themselves in undoubting faith before their omnipotent God. In the untrodden desert, with its mingling of sky and sand, their perfect trust and faith in Allah seemed a convincing and evident belief. At such times he forgot that these same men were the children of Superstition and that one and all of them were held in the bondage of genii. He also forgot that their performance of five prayers a day, which is the number prescribed for the devout, did not necessarily make them men of honour. A perfect trust in Allah ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... sounding contrasts are mere deceits, because if you look nearly into the results of this science of which we talk so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm the results of induction from history. Astronomy, for instance, is born of superstition; geometry from the desire of gain; physics from a futile curiosity; all of them, even morals, from human pride. Are we for ever to be the dupes of words, and to believe that these pompous names of science, philosophy, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... no influence upon the other offspring than those which he actually fertilizes within this period. The belief in the influence of the first male upon the later hatches by another male is simply a superstition. ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... that. Perhaps some religious order such as normally employ nocturnal watches and the relieving of guard would protect such a place. Perhaps it would be protected by all sorts of rituals, consecrations, or curses, which would seem to you mere raving superstition and silliness. But they do not seem to me one twentieth part so silly, from a purely rationalist point of view, as calmly making a spot hideous in ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... other—that the Bible sanctions the slavery principle itself, and applies it to woman as the divinely ordained subordinate of man—and that by making herself the great support and mainstay of instituted Christianity, woman rivets the chain of superstition on her own soul and on man's soul alike, and justifies him in obeying this religion by keeping her in subjection to himself. If Christianity and the Bible are true, woman is man's servant, and ought to be. The Bible ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... his life; it cost him five thousand francs and upset all his affairs. He had other financial troubles also, but found time and means to consult a somnambulist frequently as to his Predilecta, and regretted that he did not have one or two soothsayers, so that he might know daily about her. His superstition is seen early in their correspondence where he considered it a good omen that Madame Hanska had sent him the Imitation de Jesus-Christ while he was working on Le Medecin de Campagne. Again and again he insisted that she tell him when any of her ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... Superstition was also classed under the heading of heresy. The canonist Zanchino Ugolini tells us that he was present at the condemnation of an immoral priest, who was punished by the Inquisitors not for his licentiousness, but because he said Mass every day in a state of sin, and urged in excuse that he considered ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... more sanguinary and savage than those of Pessinus, and she had assumed or preserved a warlike character that gave her a resemblance to the Italian Bellona. The dictator Sulla, to whom this invincible goddess of combats had appeared in a dream, was prompted by his superstition to introduce her worship into Rome. The terrible ceremonies connected with it produced a deep impression. Clad in black robes, her "fanatics," as they were called, would turn round and round to the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... seen feeding voraciously upon the filthiest carrion of animals; and not unfrequently upon a human body in a state of putrefaction—the corpse of some deluded victim to the superstition of Juggernaut—which has been thrown into the so-styled sacred river, to be washed back on the beach, an object of contention between pariah dogs, vultures, and these gigantic cranes of ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... fancy had painted on the black void. In thought, she saw the picture again—the murderer hurling the Spud of the plow into the air, and setting the life or death of the woman who had deserted him on the hazard of the falling point. The infection of that terrible superstition seized on her mind as suddenly as the new day had burst on her view. The premise of release which she saw in it from the horror of her own hesitation roused the last energies of her despair. She resolved to end the struggle by setting her life or death on the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... years ago, the world, under the rule of the Caesars, exhausted itself in slavery, superstition, and voluptuousness. The people—intoxicated and, as it were, stupefied by their long-continued orgies—had lost the very notion of right and duty: war and dissipation by turns swept them away; usury and the labor of machines (that is of slaves), ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... to be a foreigner. The Greek is a liar, a base flatterer, a monster of lust, a traitor, a murderer.[723] The Jew is the sordid victim of a narrow and degrading superstition.[724] The Oriental is the defilement of Rome; worst of all are the Egyptians;[725] they even eat each other. The freedman, the nouveau riche, the parvenu[726] are hated with all a Roman's hatred. The old patriotism of the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Custom.] It is, however, more probable that the Malays brought the custom into the country. In the eastern portion of the Philippines, cock-fighting was unknown in the days of Pigafetta. The first cock-fight he met with was at Palawan. "They keep large cocks, which from a species of superstition, they never eat, but keep for fighting purposes. Heavy bets are made on the upshot of the contest, which are paid to the owner of the winning bird." [47] The sight is one extremely repulsive to Europeans. [The cockpit.] The ring around the cockpit ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... parallel in the history of the human mind. One of the most curious and significant proofs of it was the spontaneous extinction of the belief in witchcraft among the cultivated classes of Europe, as the English historian of rationalism has so judiciously pointed out. The superstition was not much attacked, and it was vigorously defended, yet it died a natural and quiet death from the changed moral climate of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... birthright from God, the glory of heaven, the teaching and example of the Prince of Peace—have been engulfed beneath oceans of ignorance and superstition through two thousand years of embittered controversy. During the dark ages coming down even to our own time the very light of truth was shut out from the eyes and hearts and minds of men. The blood of the martyrs we were assured in those early days was ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... town. Its tenant was apparently somewhat of a scandal and a stumbling-block to the reforming party. He was a disgrace, they wrote, to the city; he practised secret and wicked arts, and had sold his soul to the enemy. It was of a piece with the gross corruption and superstition of the Babylonish Church that such a viper and blood-sucking Troldmand should be patronized and harboured by the Bishop. The Bishop met these reproaches boldly; he protested his own abhorrence of all such things as ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... the happiness of those around him, proposed that the constancy of faithful Geta should be rewarded by an union with Milza. The tidings were hailed with joy; not only by the young couple, but by all the villagers. The superstition of the little damsel did indeed suggest numerous obstacles. The sixteenth of the month must on no account be chosen; one day was unlucky for a wedding, because as she returned from the fields, an ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... usually a quiet and industrious race, and are most devout in their religious worship, according to the principles, forms, and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church. They have not failed to inherit the superstition of their forefathers. Not withstanding the changes which time, with its cohorts of emigration, books, religious teachings, association with other races, mechanics, science and art, in greater or less degree, has introduced into their country, and accomplished under their ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... overwhelm their enemies and deliver them into their hands. These prophecies had a great effect upon the native allies of Cortes, who withdrew from him in immense numbers. But the general treated their superstition with cheerful contempt, and only bargained with the deserters to remain close by and see what would happen. When the ninth day came, and the city was still seen to be beset on every side, they ceased to believe in the oracle, and returned, with their anger against the Mexicans rekindled, and ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... American dependencies. For centuries, such a system of police was established by the Holy Inquisitors, that these countries resembled a vast whispering gallery, where the slightest murmur of discontent could be heard and punished. Such has been the effect of superstition and the terror of the Holy Office, upon the mind, as completely to break the pride of the Castillian noble, and make him the unresisting victim of every ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... thing as an out and out pagan hardly exists among the Indians of the North. They are all more or less Christian with a curious mingling of pagan superstition with the new faith. The Indian voyageurs may laugh but they all do it—make offerings of tobacco to the Granny Goddess of the River before setting out. In vain we threw biscuit and orange peel and nuts to the perverse-tempered deity supposed to ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... have a superstition in the East, That Allah, written on a piece of paper, Is better unction than can come of priest, Of rolling incense, and of lighted taper: Holding, that any scrap which bears that name In any characters its front impress'd on, Shall help the finder thro' the purging flame, And give his ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... documentary evidence to prove that Captivity's ancestors (both paternal and maternal) were, in the palmy colonial times, as abject slaves to superstition as could well be imagined. The Waites of Salem were famous persecutors of witches, and Sinai Higginbotham (Captivity's great-great-grandfather on her mother's side of the family) was Cotton Mather's boon ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... her face in the dew on the grass." He braved a smile and looked about on the troubled group. "She must be out somewhere upon the place," he continued, gathering courage with the thought; "she told me it was an old superstition. She has maybe wandered further than she intended, and perhaps got into some trouble. I'd better go and search for her. Is there any place near here where she would be likely to be?" He ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... play. We are right under a high, old-fashioned-looking trading ship now; do you see that great eye painted on the bows? There is another on the other side. That shows it is a Chinese ship; the men have a superstition that the ship cannot see without these eyes. They say, "No got eye, no can see; no can see, ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... the imaginative power, and a consequent necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp hay, they heat and inflame by ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... parents never trod. Whither will they lead it? We know not who never joined in the familiar chat of Ayahs and servants, but imagination "bodies forth the forms of things unseen" and shudders. Let us rejoice that a merciful superstition, which regards the climate of India as deadly to European children, will step in and save the little soul. The climate would do it no harm, but there is a moral miasma more baneful than any which rises from the pestilential swamps of the Terai, or ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... from the pile beside him. So, by rapid stages he developed into a native hakim—by creed a converted Hindu, like Rewa Gunga,—one of the men who practise yunani, or modern medicine, without a license and with a very great deal of added superstition, trickery and guesswork. ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... setting forth that for a long time they have been accustomed to make this offering, by which means they are insured protection against their enemies, that otherwise misfortune would befall them, as they are convinced by the evil spirit; and they live on in this superstition, as in many others, as we have said in other places. This done, the maker of the harangue takes the plate, and throws the tobacco into the midst of the caldron, whereupon they all together raise a loud cry. These poor ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... piety and learning, and when they lived as saints and died as martyrs. But that time had passed. The Roman church did not keep up with the spirit or the wants of the age, and moreover did not reform itself from vices which had been overlooked in ages of ignorance and superstition. In the fifteenth century, many great abuses scandalized a body of men who should have been the lights of the world; and the sacred pontiffs themselves set examples of unusual depravity. Julius II. marched at the head of armies. Alexander VI. secured his election by bribery, and reigned ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... course, by way of theatrical antithesis that Edison appeared in Paris at such a time. But the contrast was none the less striking and effective. It was felt that, after all, that which the great exposition exemplified at its best—the triumph of genius over matter, over ignorance, over superstition—met with its due recognition when Edison came to participate, and to felicitate a noble nation that could show so much in the victories of civilization and the arts, despite its long trials and its long struggle for liberty. It ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... all its power to crush the working man. Here was the old class tyranny which had created class hatreds in the old country! This was what we were coming to after having emancipated ourselves from the trammels of a dead or effete superstition! Here was a government so crassly wicked and purposely blind as to profess neutrality and yet refuse to fight our battles! What had we—the working men of New Zealand—asked for? We asked that the government should hold our enemy while we punched him; and while they traitorously ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... appearance. But the satisfaction of the clans was dashed by hearing that the ill-starred little laird was fair, like his sisters. The prophecy that a fair Lochiel should never prosper, was recalled with dismay; and, unhappily, the fears of superstition were too mournfully realized by fact. The young Cameron was named Donald: his birth was followed by the appearance of two other boys,—Archibald, afterwards the ill-fated Dr. Cameron, and John, who was called Fassefern, from an estate. "The proud prediction of their father," ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... little woman in widow's weeds, coquettishly displaying silken brown hair under the ruching of a demure bonnet. Taking her own account—"Which some reporter wrote for her no doubt," Grahame commented—she had been a sinner, a slave of Rome, a castaway bound hand and foot to degrading superstition, until rescued by the noblest of men and led by spirit into the great work of rescuing others from the grinding slavery of the Church of Rome. Very tenderly she appealed to the audience to help her. The prayers of the saints were about to be answered. God had ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... cabman and a woman who had been cleaning the door-step. The Captain went through the brief ceremonial as coolly as if it had been the settlement of a water-rate, and was angered by the tears that poor Mary Anne shed under her cheap black veil. He had forgotten the poetic superstition in favour of a wedding-ring, but he slipped a little onyx ring off his own finger, and put it on the clumsier finger of his bride. It was the last of his jewels—the rejected of the pawnbrokers, who, not being learned in antique intaglios, had condemned the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... that it was ever published. But had it been we should rarely hear it. Like Locke's music to "Macbeth" it bears an unpleasant reputation; to include it in any concert programme would be to court disaster. An idle superstition, perhaps, but there is much naivete in ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... is a type of feminine beauty that comes with years. It is found only where intellect and affection keep step with spiritual desire; and in Ireland, where it is often a crime to think, where superstition stalks, and avarice rules, and hunger crouches, it ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... of the lower Vertebrates, and the development of every child-soul is only a brief repetition of that long and complex phylogenetic process. From all these facts sound reason must conclude that the still prevalent belief in the immortality of the soul is an untenable superstition. I have shown its inconsistency with modern science in the eleventh chapter of ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... Bottazzi and his assistants brought to bear on the medium. No more worship here, no awe, no hesitation, no superstition. Among other things, he put into the cabinet a small table weighing about fifteen pounds, and on top of it arranged a hair-brush, a hen's feather, a bottle full of water, and a very thick glass. These articles ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... Mr. Howland was sincere in his professions of piety. But he was a narrow-minded man, and did much in the name of religion, that in no way harmonized with its true character. His faith was a blind faith, and he sacrificed to the god of his imagination in the unyielding spirit of a dehumanizing superstition. Of necessity, he marred everything upon which he sought to impress the form ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
... greatly inclined to idle superstition as a general thing, but the thrice-repeated saying stuck to him. The fancy came into his mind that he had been aroused thus oddly in the middle of the night on purpose that he might hear it, and have ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... forms revealing themselves amid the flaming meteors. They seemed like creatures in agony, tossing their arms, bewailing in their attitudes the awful fate that had overtaken them, and fairly chilling my blood with the pantomime of torture which they exhibited. I thought of an old superstition which I had often heard about the earth, and exclaimed: "Yes, surely, this ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... was doing an absurd thing, but the superstition of the people demanded it, and he must cater to their desires because it ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... Certainly there must have been some use and reason for such a well, else the men of long ago would never have toiled to make it. Perhaps the people of Sychar had some superstition about its water which made them prefer it. Or perhaps the stream was owned and used for other purposes, while the water of the well ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... newspapers at the time that in more than one ship's log were entered strange reports of gruesome and wholly indefinable noises heard at night in certain latitudes. Some of the crews mutinied, and there was an instance on record of more than one hand, bursting with superstition, going mad and jumping overboard. So, you see, Holmes, your 'Amusement Committee' doubly ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... of their former and more prosperous life. In many villages they have not yet built proper houses, but continue to live in mud huts thatched with grass. They consider it unlucky to inhabit a house with a cement or tiled roof; this being no doubt a superstition arising from their camp life. Their houses must also be built so that the main beams do not cross, that is, the main beam of a house must never be in such a position that if projected it would cut another main beam; but the beams may be parallel. The same rule probably governed the arrangement ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... their trade by parliament, and notwithstanding that such persecution must aggrandize the rivals of Great Britain." Now how did this language sound? It might have done in the twelfth century, when all was bigotry and superstition. But let not a mistaken humanity, in these enlightened times, furnish a colourable pretext for any injurious attack ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... that they are more impressionable than tractable causes them, it seems, to take naturally to religion, and seems a flat contradiction of Junius's assertion that "there are proselytes from atheism, but none from superstition." With some South African tribes it is unlucky to include goats amongst the animals paid by a young man's parents as the dowry for his bride; it was equally bad to pay dowry in odd numbers of cattle. The payment must be made ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... called the law of parsimony—or the law which forbids us to assume the operation of higher causes when lower ones are found sufficient to explain the observed effects—this law constitutes the only barrier between science and superstition. It is always possible to give a hypothetical explanation of any phenomenon whatsoever, by referring it immediately to the intelligence of some supernatural agent; so that the only difference between the logic of science and the logic of superstition consists in ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... which she carries to the verge of credulity, not to say superstition. Would you credit it? When he was at the Exchequer she believed in his Budgets; and when he was at the War Office she believed in his Intelligence Department; and now he is in the Lords she believes in his pedigree, culled fresh ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... and ingratitude as evil; they, too, hold as sacred the bond between parents, children, and kinsmen. It is hard to believe in the universal corruption of mankind, for, however obscured by savagery and superstition, there lies dormant in every human breast that feeling for the noble and the beautiful which is the seed of virtue, and a conscience which points out the right path. Can there be a more convincing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... of the story having to do with the strange animals. He thought it was peon superstition. But now he was sure there was a rich mine ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... extreme old age— for she was more than four score—though in many ways she manifested she had entered her second childhood, she yet retained a great deal of her original energy. As I have illustrated, though she possessed genuine piety, it was so mingled with superstition as to leave it difficult to decide which exerted ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... fullest sense, is convenient, no doubt, and beneficial to us all. It involves free trade on the broadest basis, sweeping away much of the selfishness and morbid sentimentality that constitute the superstition we call Love. She has a perfect right to change her mind, bless her! why shouldn't she? And so, no doubt, have you! Ring for fresh cards, cut again for partners, and so sit merrily down to another rubber. Thus, too, you will learn to play the game cautiously and ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... have a peculiar interest for us, just as we look with affection on the home of our ancestors even though we should not choose to dwell there. We shall not divide religions into the true one, Christianity, and the false ones, all the rest; no religion will be to us a mere superstition, nor shall we regard any as unguided by God. Feeling that we cannot understand our own religion aright without understanding those out of which it has been built up, we shall value these others for the part they have played in the great movement, and our own most of all, without ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... common bond of union. The predominance of one petty State, or military chieftain, is the signal for the semi-barbarous hordes of mingled races to combine for the purpose of destruction. Urged on by the emissaries of that colossal superstition which casts its shadow over this Republic (whose home is a foreign kingdom, and whose head is a foreign prince), the semi-barbarous hordes of mingled races in the South American States, are a prey to successive bloody revolutions, through that imbecility which is the ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... these nuts for years, and he just sent me a couple quarts of them from his tree and I have tried them on my friends with no injurious results whatever. The thing to look out for is this fetish, this superstition of poison. This is a very hard-shelled nut, very oily and resembles somewhat the Brazil nut. If a market can be made for it, and there does not seem to be any reason why there cannot, there is no reason that they cannot be grown ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... and the church in which the body of the saint was buried still remained untouched. The bands of Northmen who had invaded England had never hesitated to plunder and destroy the churches and shrines of the Christians, but hitherto some thought of superstition had kept the followers of Siegfroi from assailing ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... their thoughts to their immediate subsistence, and consequently would soon become rude and barbarous. Their worship of the eternal fire likewise implies their descent from the Phenicians; for every body knows that this superstition, which first took its rise in Egypt, was introduced by the Phenicians into all the countries that they visited. The figurative stile, and the bold and Syriac expressions in the language of the Natchez, is likewise ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... Christian civilization, doubtless will continue, until the friends of civil and religious liberty shall triumph in nominally Christian countries; and, with the wealth of the nations at command, instead of applying it to purposes of war, shall devote it to sweeping away the darkness of superstition and barbarism from the earth, by extending the knowledge of science and revelation to all the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... National Church is called an Establishment,—in other words, something that stays where it was put some time ago. The thing which ought to move first, and move continually through all the avenues of the public life, to keep them clear of the obstructions of ignorance and superstition, and prevent the great travel and intercourse of thought from stagnating, is the thing in England which is most unwilling to stir. Already a fearful accumulation of passengers and vehicles, whose patience is nearly exhausted, is anxious to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... Iceland moss sent across by Miss Emily, and brought by Mr. Sewell, whose calls were almost daily. There were custards and preserves, and every form of cake and other confections in which the housekeeping talent of the neighbors delighted, and which were sent in under the old superstition that sick people must be kept ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... people were no longer safe among their kindred, and corpses were secretly disinterred to increase the grizzly store. Superstition soon added its ready impulse to the general movement. The aged warrior could not rest in his grave till his relatives had taken a head in his name; the maiden disdained the weak-hearted suitor whose hand was not yet stained with some ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... legitimate and most Christian king, Richard the First of England, the arch-crusader and anti-jacobin by excellence,—the very type, flower, cream, pink, symbol, and mirror of all the Holy Alliances that have ever existed on earth, excepting that he seasoned his superstition and love of conquest with a certain condiment of romantic generosity and chivalrous self-devotion, with which his imitators in all other points have found it convenient to dispense. To give freely to one man what he had taken forcibly ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... only form conjectures regarding inexplicable incidents from the successive impressions that have been made upon us. This man was not at all given to love of romance or superstition, yet the easy explanation that some man, for purpose of trick or crime, had hidden in the box, did not seem to him to fit the circumstances. He could not make himself believe that the eyes he had seen belonged to a living man; on the other ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... he had two attitudes, neither of them in the least worried or paternal. When he found a thing in Europe which he did not understand, such as the Roman Catholic Church, he simply called it an old-world superstition, and sat looking at it like a moonlit ruin. When he found something that he did understand, such as luncheon baskets, he burst into carols of praise over the superior sense in our civilisation and good management to Continental ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... the winds. For the law of logic which Sir William Hamilton called the law of parsimony—or the law which forbids us to assume the operation of higher causes when lower ones are found sufficient to explain the observed effects—this law constitutes the only logical barrier between science and superstition. For it is manifest that it is always possible to give a hypothetical explanation of any phenomenon whatever, by referring it immediately to the intelligence of some supernatural agent; so that the only difference ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... the loss of sense of responsibility. So long as I can enjoy myself and get my own way, why should I vex myself with the outworn question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" No! That has gone into the limbo of effete superstition. ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... young author's nascent seriousness, and his still existing Buskbody superstition, combine to spoil the book, not merely, as in the Tristan case, to top-hamper it. Having given us eight pages of rather cheap sermonising about the poetry of youth not lasting; having requested us to imagine Manon and Des Grieux "decrepit and catarrhous," Paul and Virginie ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... many respects, opposite motives which have impelled mankind to the study of the stars, have had a singular effect in complicating and confounding the recommendation of the science. Religion, idolatry, superstition, curiosity, the thirst for knowledge, the passion for penetrating the secrets of nature, the warfare of the huntsman by night and by day against the beast of the forest and of the field, the meditations of the shepherd in the custody and wanderings of his flocks, the influence ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... without further event on board the schooner, yet in all the anxiety that might be supposed incident to men so perilously situated. Habits of long-since acquired superstition, too powerful to be easily shaken off, moreover contributed to the dejection of the mariners, among whom there were not wanting those who believed the silent steersman was in reality what their comrade had represented,—an immaterial being, sent from ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... much misery caused by wrong prenatal care teaching and by the foolish, exaggerated ideas on the subject, that I consider it my duty to say something in order to counteract those erroneous notions. I consider it my special mission to destroy error, mysticism and superstition. And the prenatal care teaching as imparted by some unfortunately partakes of ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... notice more in detail the natural prognostics of the weather, it is desirable to speak of a superstition which is widely spread among all classes, in the town as well as in the country. The superstition referred to, is that connected with St. Swithin's-day, and is well expressed in ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... satisfy his mental demands. To the one who would deal in conjectures or suppose so's, he will at once be placed in the proper category to which he belongs, which is the drift-wood that floats down the dark river that is overshadowed by the nightmare of ignorance and superstition. A seeker after truth, is a man of few words, and they are used by him only by the truths or facts discovered. He has no patience with the unmeaning records offered only to please the credulous, and by those of ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... tangible and heavy, settling noiselessly down from beneath the lofty arches of the roof. The ancient penmanship and curious contents of the faded pages before me carried my thoughts backward into the old Colonial times, with their rigid social distinctions, lofty manners, and ill-concealed superstition; and I mused upon grim old magistrates, wizened witches, stately dames, rugged Indian-fighters, and all their strange doings and sayings in the ancient days, until, between drowsiness and imagining, I fell into a tangled labyrinth of romance, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... things being frequently said by them, there is no necessity of setting down the words. Yet all do not conceive the gods to be good and favorable to us. For see what the Jews and Syrians think of the gods; consider also with how much superstition the poets are filled. But there is not any one, in a manner to speak of, that imagines God to be corruptible or to have been born. And to omit all others, Antipater the Tarsian, in his book of the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... were morbid fears. For the first time in my life I discovered that Aunt Janet had nerves! I had long had a secret belief that she was gifted, to some degree at any rate, with Second Sight, which quality, or whatever it is, skilled in the powers if not the lore of superstition, manages to keep at stretch not only the mind of its immediate pathic, but of others relevant to it. Perhaps this natural quality had received a fresh impetus from the arrival of some cases of her books sent on by Sir Colin. She appeared to read and reread these works, ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... Portuguese in Asia. The Jesuits were sent into China in 1552. Xavier, whom they call the apostle of the Indians, laboured in the East-Indies and Japan, from 1541 to 1552, and several millions of Capauchins were sent to Africa in the seventeenth century. But blind zeal, gross superstition, and infamous cruelties, so marked the appearances of religion all this time, that the professors of Christianity needed conversion, as much ...
— An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens • William Carey
... investigations of certain Italian scientists, concerning the effect of the violet and ultra-violet light rays upon the cells of the brain. He could not recollect just what the conclusions had been, but he did remember that the newspaper article spoke of the popular superstition that moonlight could cause insanity. He knew Hartmann to be a scientist of vast ability and resource, and realized that back of the elaborate preparations he had evidently made must lie ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... rioting in the flow of tipsy jollity that foreran the change; but a band of Puritans who watched the scene, invisible themselves, compared the masques to those devils and ruined souls with whom their superstition peopled the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... August, and even acquiesce in his execution five months afterwards, are relentless against the violence done to the Convention on the Thirty-first of May. We confess ourselves unable to follow this transfer of the superstition of sacrosanctity from a king to a chamber. No doubt, the sooner a nation acquires a settled government, the better for it, provided the government be efficient. But if it be not efficient, the mischief of actively suppressing it may well be fully ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... rise from his seat on the entrance of a new guest, but with such dignity, with such stately courtesy, that the guest involuntarily made him a more deferential bow. Ovsyanikov adhered to the antique usages, not from superstition (he was naturally rather independent in mind), but from habit. He did not, for instance, like carriages with springs, because he did not find them comfortable, and preferred to drive in a racing droshky, or in a pretty little trap with leather cushions, and he always ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... utterance of a mere sectarian superstition they are worthless; but if they are the statement of a great principle, then it is worth our while to enquire what that principle is. The fulfilling of anything is the bringing into complete realization of all that ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... Superstition babbles of conjuring-spells, by which, without the co-operation of the patient, the evil spirit can be summarily ejected. It would be convenient if one had that power, but, in truth, it is not so: it is ...
— Christian Gellert's Last Christmas - From "German Tales" Published by the American Publishers' Corporation • Berthold Auerbach
... like another, and one meadow a duplicate of the next to the last daffodil, I may with profit dwell upon the green-sickness lightly. It suffices that in the course of these four years I challenged superstition by adoring thirteen girls, and, worse than that, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... the reason? Isn't her failure a great deal due to this lack of sympathy from her neighbors? Discontent is easily sown, and the negro is still weighted down by superstition; the Fifteenth Amendment did not quite knock off ALL ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... "when night and morning meet," Mysterious time, to superstition dear, And superstition's guides, now passes by; Deathlike in solitude. The sentinels, In drowsy tones, from post to post, send on The signal of the passing hour. "All's well," Sounds through the camp. Alas! all is not well; Else, ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... town of which he was not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such men having little to do become credulous and talkative from indolence; and from the same cause, and other predisposing causes by which it is probable that such men may have been affected, they are prone to superstition. On which account it appeared to me proper to select a character like this to exhibit some of the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind. Superstitious men are almost always men of slow faculties ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... former of which the Greek women performed their devotions, and the men in the latter. Two doors, one on either side of the passage in which we now were, opened into a third gallery, where I was told stood the "gates of heaven and hell." They are of marble, but the origin of this superstition I could not learn. The floor of the mosque was covered with beautiful carpets, and the ornaments resembled those I saw in that of Soliman the Magnificent, which is considered a much finer building. St. Sophia is also surpassed in beauty by the mosque of Sultan Mehemet, which may be considered ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... be so or not, it was so in the case of these two Time-traveling vehicles from 2930. Larry and I think that the world of 1935 is just now shaking off the shackles of superstition, and coming to realize that what is called the supernatural is only the Unknown. Who can say, up to 1935, how many Time-traveling humans have come briefly back? Is this, perchance, what we call the phenomena ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... be obtains by teasing more than by persuasion; but a man by whom Bonaparte suffers, himself to be teased with impunity is no insignificant favourite, particularly when, like this Cardinal, he unites cunning with devotion, craft with superstition; and is as accessible to corruption ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... mixture of sincerity and hypocrisy, self-flagellation and lust, aspiration and superstition, has gone into the making of this attitude. With the development of it we have nothing to do here. What does concern us is the effect of this profanity on the Business ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... watch by night, Turn the left cheek to the smiter, smitten rudely on the right? Strong men must encounter bad men—so-called saints of latter days Have been mostly pious madmen, lusting after righteous praise— Or the thralls of superstition, doubtless worthy some reward, Since they came by their condition hardly of their free accord. 'Tis but madness, sad and solemn, that these fakir-Christians feel— Saint Stylites on his column gratified a ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... and that had so little of it. The solemn foppery, and the gross stupidity of the Scottish literati, are perfectly insupportable. I shall drop my idea of a Scots newspaper. Nothing will do in this country that has common sense in it; only cant, hypocrisy, and superstition will flourish here. A curse on the country, and all the men, women, and children ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... that he had found religion. I doubt if that is the right way to put it, for he had always had it. Men who live in the wilds know they are in the hands of God. But his old kind had been a tattered thing, more like heathen superstition, though it had always kept him humble. But now he had taken to reading the Bible and to thinking in his lonely nights, and he had got a creed of his own. I dare say it was crude enough, I am sure it was unorthodox; but if the proof of religion is that it ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Chinaman discovers a fossil bed he guards it zealously for it represents an actual gold mine to him. The bones are ground into a fine powder, mixed with an acid, and a phosphate obtained which in reality has a certain value as a tonic. When a considerable amount of faith and Chinese superstition is added its ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... in the vast Pacific, who can escape superstition? It fills the air. He took this communication as a command, and the next night he ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... reason, that Scott wholly lacked the sense of mystery, and that in this respect Mrs. Radcliffe was more modern than he.[453] Yet it was Scott who censured Mrs. Radcliffe for explaining her mysteries. He had a vein of superstition in his nature, too, about which he might have said, using the words given to a character in one of his stories,—"It soothes my imagination, without influencing my reason or conduct."[454] A liking for the wonderful and terrible, which he felt from his earliest childhood, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... gods were capable of enormities which a poor, unpretending human creature [homuncio] would have disdained. Many times the ideal of the divine nature, as adopted by pagan races, fell under the contempt, not only of men superior to the national superstition, but of men partaking in that superstition. Yet, with all those drawbacks, an ideal was an ideal. The being set up for adoration as god, was such upon the whole to the worshipper; since, if there had been any higher mode of excellence ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... deanery; they and the cathedral tower, rising above them, looked grey in the moonlight. He picked up a stone and sent it right into one of the elm trees; some of the birds, disturbed from their roost, flew out, croaking, over his head. In the old days of superstition it might have been looked upon as an evil omen, coupled with what was to follow. Ah, Charley! if you could only foresee what is before you! If Mrs. Channing, from her far-off sojourn, could but know what grievous ill is about ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... that this time, in pointing towards the house, Israel unavoidably pointed towards the advancing man. Hoping that the strangeness of this coincidence might, by operating on the man's superstition, incline him to beat an immediate retreat, Israel kept cool as he might. But the man proved to be of a braver metal than anticipated. In passing the spot where the scarecrow had stood, and perceiving, beyond the possibility of mistake, that ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... here, then, So against nature? Help me to perceive it! Oh, let not superstition's nightly goblins Subdue thy clear, bright spirit! Art thou bid To murder? with abhorred, accursed poniard, To violate the breasts that nourished thee? That were against our nature, that might aptly Make thy flesh shudder, and thy ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... about 3 a.m. it began to rain, the first rain we had had in New Guinea for five or six weeks, and that saved us, for we learned later on that about that time the Doboduras were gathering together for a rush on our camp, when the rain set in, and, odd as it may seem, we heard that they had a superstition against attacking in the rain. What their reason was, I never got to hear fully, but we were unaware of all these things as we silently waited and longed for the dawn to break. I never before so wished for daylight. It came at length, and what a load it took off our minds! We could now ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... from the touch was contracted even by inanimate objects; for whatever was touched in any way by an unclean man, became itself unclean. Wherein the Law attenuated the superstition of the Gentiles, who held that uncleanness was contracted not only by touch, but also by speech or looks, as Rabbi Moses states (Doct. Perplex. iii) of a woman in her periods. The mystical sense of this was that "to God the wicked and his wickedness ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... Muslims, it is a sin to write Jebel Mekka, "the mountain of Mekka." I have lately noticed several instances of superstition. A Moor of Fezzan, to whom I gave a small portion of camphor, showed me the paper and piece of cotton cloth in which he had wrapped it up, and swore that during the night the ginns, or evil spirits, had eaten it. Many other Moors asked me if it was possible to preserve ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... For men having been principled with an opinion, that they must not consult reason in the things of religion, however apparently contradictory to common sense and the very principles of all their knowledge, have let loose their fancies and natural superstition; and have been by them led into so strange opinions, and extravagant practices in religion, that a considerate man cannot but stand amazed, at their follies, and judge them so far from being acceptable to the great and wise God, that he cannot avoid thinking them ridiculous and offensive ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... no moral authority—merely as a moral authority—is or can be valid. Such natures are ruled only by superstition—the representative of reasoned faith in nobler beings. Rob them of their superstition, and they ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... limits of a wide clearing. And these were set with consummate accuracy at the cardinal points. Superstition demanded this setting. ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... England the bean is an obsession; it is rapidly becoming a superstition. To the stranger it is an infliction; but, bad as the bean is to the uninitiated, it is a luscious morsel compared with the flavorless cod-fish ball which lodges in the throat and stays there—a second Adam's apple—for lack of something to wash ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... listen, and the bearer followed him, but there was no sound of Rachel mewing for her children. He returned to his room, having hurled the kitten down the hillside, and wrote out the incidents of the day for the benefit of his coreligionists. Those people were so absolutely free from superstition that they ascribed anything a little out of the common to agencies. As it was their business to know all about the agencies, they were on terms of almost indecent familiarity with manifestations of every kind. Their letters dropped from the ceiling—unstamped—and spirits used to squatter ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... of the work lies in its portrayal of native customs, some of which are beautiful, some wholly barbarous and all more or less tinctured with superstition. But, when we pause to think how rife superstition still is among all so-called civilized peoples, we conclude that it is a belief hard to eradicate from human nature. Even in our own country people were hanged as witches a little ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... amusing to see one little fellow of eight years old smoking, with much gravity, his father's cigar. How the worship of the sacred plant of tobacco has spread through all Europe! I am sure that the persons who cry out against the use of it are guilty of superstition and unreason, and that it would be a proper and easy task for scientific persons to write an encomium upon the weed. In solitude it is the pleasantest companion possible, and in company never de trop. To a student it suggests all sorts of agreeable thoughts, it ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of Scottish chivalry, which the Baron told with great enthusiasm. The projecting peak of an impending crag which rose near it had acquired the name of Saint Swithin's Chair. It was the scene of a peculiar superstition, of which Mr. Rubrick mentioned some curious particulars, which reminded Waverley of a rhyme quoted by Edgar in King Lear; and Rose was called upon to sing a little legend, in which they had been interwoven by some ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... darkness on the river. Howard told me stories about the Fuegian cannibals as she reeled along, and I told him about the pilot of the Pinta steering my vessel through the storm off the coast of the Azores, and that I looked for him at the helm in a gale such as this. I do not charge Howard with superstition,—we are none of us superstitious,—but when I spoke about his returning to Montevideo on the Spray he shook his head ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... the bone of a hare (Lepus timidus) has been found at Moosseedorf. The almost universal absence of this quadruped is supposed to imply that the Swiss lake-dwellers were prevented from eating that animal by the same superstition which now prevails among the Laplanders, and which Julius Caesar found in full force amongst the ancient Britons.* (* "Commentaries" lib 5 ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... creeds was a case in point. There was quite a literature upon the subject. Many Low Churchmen, among whom may be mentioned Asplin, Hoadly, and Lord Chancellor King, contended that it was a papal or pagan superstition which ought to be wholly discontinued. The High Church writers, such as Cave, Meade, Bingham, Smallbroke, Whiston, Wesley, and Bisse, answered that it was not only the universal custom in the primitive Church, but edifying and ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton |
