"Unproved" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of many of its noted practitioners. The itch-doctrine is treated with contempt. Infinitesimal doses are replaced by full ones whenever the fancy-practitioner chooses. Good Homoeopathic reasons can be found for employing anything that anybody wants to employ. Homoeopathy is now merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box of pellets pretending to be specifics, which, as all of us know, fail ignominiously in those cases where we would thankfully sacrifice all our prejudices and give the world to have them true to ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... strongest expression in an address that Virchow delivered at Munich four days afterwards (September 22nd), on "The freedom of science in the modern State." He spoke of the theory of evolution as an unproved hypothesis, and declared that it ought not to be taught in the schools, because it was dangerous to the State. "We must not," he said, "teach that man has descended from the ape or any other animal." When Darwin, usually so lenient in ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... meteorological beasts that all the beasts in myth were originally meteorological. Man raised a serpent to the skies, perhaps, but his interest in the animal began on earth, not in the clouds. It is excessively improbable, and quite unproved, that any race ever regarded lightning as the flashes of a mouse's teeth. The hypothesis is a jeu d'esprit, like the opposite hypothesis about the mouse of Night. In these, and all the other current theories of the Sminthian Apollo, the widely diffused worship of ordinary ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... a signed confession from the porter. The document would not be a death-bed confession—perhaps not worth anything legally—but it would be held by Owen; and he alone, as Cytherea's natural guardian, could separate them on the mere ground of an unproved probability, or what might perhaps be called the hallucination of an idiot. Edward himself, however, was as firmly convinced as the rector had been of the truth of the man's story, and paced backward ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... so many side-shows of circumstance! We watched all the mysterious preparations for the afternoon performance, so far as we were allowed, with the keenness of the wise, who recognize a special wonder and will not let it pass unproved. We surrounded Miss Lucindy, when she came away from her breakfast party, and begged for an exact account of all her entertainers had said; but she could tell us nothing. She only reiterated, with eyes sparkling anew, that they were "proper ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... France becoming dangerous. The French danger passed away, and its place was taken by a more awful menace—the pressure of German potential energy; and when Belgium in turn opened her heart (this is the unproved accusation which Germany makes to-day—Author) to England, then she has violated her neutrality and undermined the balance of power.[144] There is even a suspicion that Leopold II. renewed this treaty with Germany in 1890, in ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... issue in one brief sentence, slipped cunningly into the middle of a long one which appears to be telling all the other way, and in which the fatal assertion (of the right to rent) nestles itself, as if it had been already proved,—thus—I italicize the unproved assertion in which the venom of the entire falsehood ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... watch during these last few days that you are sure to be aware of it)—you had no right whatever to torment the—unfortunate man, and to worry my mother by your exaggerations of the affair; because the whole business is nonsense—simply a drunken freak, and nothing more, quite unproved by any evidence, and I don't believe that much of it!" (he snapped his fingers). "But you must needs spy and watch over us ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... hope, perhaps a land of refuge. The men of the lower South, also stirred and unsettled, moved in long columns to the West and Southwest, following the ancient immigration into Texas. The men of Texas, citizens of a crude empire of unproved resources, likewise cast about them restlessly. Their cattle must some day find a market. To the north of them, still unknown and alluring, lay the new upper country known ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... the medium during the propagation of light will produce a disturbance of the vortices, and the vortices, when so disturbed, may react on the medium so as to affect the propagation of the ray. The theory proposed is of a provisional kind, resting as it does on unproved hypotheses relating to the nature of molecular vortices, and the mode in which they are affected by the displacement ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... assertion, "God is love," we are left truly with no mere unproved averment regarding the existence of some abstract quality in the divine nature. "Herein," says an apostle, "perceive we THE LOVE,"—(it is added in our authorised version, "of God," but, as it has been remarked, "Our translators need ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... of the Church. What the Church does—and surely it must be clear that from her standpoint she could not do less—is to instruct Catholic men of science not to proclaim as proved facts such modern theories—and there are many of them—as still remain wholly unproved, when these theories are such as might seem to conflict with the teaching of the Church. This is very far from saying that Catholics are forbidden to study ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... "The King's Government is to be carried on"—but such continuity did not spell a corrupt collusion. If at this distance of time such a view can be held by a man of Mr. Jerrold's ability it could certainly be held at the time by the majority—and it may be that the continual assumption of an unproved fact got in the way in the fight ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... element, which is the essential part of Das Mutterrecht, is closely connected by Bachofen with the power of women. As it is his belief that, even at this early period, the religious impulse was more developed among women than men, he bases on this unproved hypothesis his theory of women's supremacy. "Wherever gynaecocracy meets us," he says, "the mystery of religion is bound up with it, and lends to motherhood an incorporation ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... woman, and who partake of a nature that is not so much human as elemental and ethereal—or might one not almost say, atmospheric? That is, though generated of flesh and blood, they are not altogether flesh and blood, but possess other untested and unproved essences mingled in their composition, of which as yet we can form no idea. We grope in utter ignorance of the greatest of mysteries—Life!—and with all our modern advancement, we are utterly unable to measure or to account for ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... is high time to point out that even if it so happened that the oldest known MS. was observed to be without these twelve concluding verses, it would still remain a thing unproved (not to say highly improbable) that from the autograph of the Evangelist himself they were also away. Supposing, further, that no Ecclesiastical writer of the iind or iiird century could be found who quoted them: even so, it would not follow that there existed no such verses for a primitive Father ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... of its residents. The drunkards and the paupers and the thieves and the idiots rather diminish than increase its respectability. It seems to me that the world would be greatly benefited by thinning out. Most of the places that I have seen would be much unproved by being decimated, not to say quinqueted or bisected. If people are stubborn and rebellious, stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, the fewer of them the better. A small population, trained to honor and virtue, to liberality ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... believed her, and there swearing at the altar that common fame and suspicion had wronged her. If a man doubted her word he had to challenge it, or keep silence for ever after. The severest censures of the Church were passed upon those who dared to repeat an unproved accusation after the oaths of Purgation and Compurgation had been taken unchallenged. It is a fine, honest ordeal, very old, good for the right, only bad for the wrong, giving strength to the weak and humbling the mighty. But ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... of the holy abbot to show him how blindly he had acted. He could see now that, however it might appear, the guilt of Marcian was quite unproved. The Syrian slave might have lied, or else have uttered a mistaken suspicion. It might be true that Marcian had been misled by some calumniator into thinking evil of his friend. And had he not heard the declaration of Veranilda, that she had suffered ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... temper, his own fashion of seeing and representing things. He loved Raspail's books and his prescriptions, full of reason and a most judicious good sense, distrusting for himself and for his family the complicated formulae and cunning remedies of an art too considered and still unproved. At Carpentras, while his first-born, mile, was hovering between life and death, and the physician who came to see him, "being at the end of his resources," did nothing more for him and soon ceased to come, thinking that the child would not last till the morrow, ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... in that grimy den of his. I once ventured to hint something of the sort to him; I suggested that something he had said was in flat contradiction to all science and all experience. 'No, Dyson,' he answered, 'not all experience, for mine counts for something. I am no dealer in unproved theories; what I say I have proved for myself, and at a terrible cost. There is a region of knowledge of which you will never know, which wise men, seeing from afar off, shun like the plague, as well they may; but into that region ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... another. Now, I must ask your lordship,—and I must beg of your lordship for a reply,—whether the periodical itself has such a character as to justify your lordship in founding a complaint against a clergyman on its unproved statements, and also whether the facts of the case, as they were known to you, were not such as to make your lordship well aware that the insinuations were false. Before these ribald words were printed, your lordship had heard all the facts of the ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... for the life of the living forms, which, by their own theory, have been evolved, and they can at present get this origin in no other way than by the Deus ex machina method, which they reject as unproved, or a spontaneous generation of living from non- living matter, which is no less foreign to their experience. As a general rule, they prefer the latter alternative. So Professor Tyndall, in his celebrated article (Nineteenth Century, November ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... are unfit for public life because—another unproved assertion—they are incapable of reasoning logically or speaking fluently. Women have had but little opportunity afforded them for public speaking; yet, even with the slight advantages which they have possessed, they have proved themselves quite as capable of arriving ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... adverse fates pursue, While sad experience, from his aching sight Sweeps the fair prospects of unproved delight, Which flattering friends and flattering fancies drew. When want assails his solitary shed, When dire distraction's horrent eye-ball glares, Seen 'midst the myriad of tumultuous cares, That shower ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... conclusion that, if Mr. Downer's report was entirely satisfactory, there would be no use in quibbling over the price you and Mr. Hooker have asked. The sum that you ask for the group of claims that you filed upon is, as you are aware, an enormous one for unproved mining properties. Still, we wish to be fair; and on Mr. Downer's glowing report we are going to take a chance. Therefore, please state your pleasure in the matter of payments, and arrangements ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... their nominal founder—these were based upon assumptions for which the seeker after reasoned evidence could find no valid support. Ten years before he coined the word "Agnostic" to label his attitude towards the unproved, whether likely or unlikely, in contradistinction to the Gnostics, who professed to "know" from within apart from external proof, Huxley described the Agnostic position he had already reached—the position of suspending judgment where actual proof is not possible; the attitude ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... admitted ambition and emulation, among the ingredients of his Commonwealth as the incentives of virtue, distinctly wishing that there should be some dispute and competition among his men of worth, and pronouncing the mere idle, uncontested, mutual compliance to unproved deserts to be but a false sort of concord. And some think Homer had an eye to this, when he introduces Agamemnon well pleased with the quarrel arising between Ulysses and Achilles, and with the "terrible words" that passed between them, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... brother, of Wanaha," this still unproved warrior went on, in an even, indifferent voice; "she who was the light of our father's eyes; she who has the wisdom of the rattlesnake, and the gentle heart ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... Beggars and flower-sellers greet her by name. It is said that a large part of her popularity is due to her work in obtaining free school lunches. Anyway, there was great grief among the people when she was thrown into jail for supposed complicity in the unproved German plot. The arrest, she said, came one Sunday night. She was walking unconcernedly from one of George Russell's weekly gatherings, when five husky constables blocked the bridge road and hurried her off to jail. At last, on account of her ill health, she was released ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... softer as I questioned—calm With mystery that like an answer moved, And from infinity there fell a balm, The old peace that God is, tho all unproved. The old faith that tho gulfs sidereal stun The soul, and knowledge drown within their deep, There is no world that wanders, no not one Of all the millions, that He ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... he then said, in a businesslike monotone, "there has emanated a serious and hitherto unproved charge against the Holy Society of Jesus. It came at a critical moment in the political strife then raging in France; and, in proportion to the attention it attracted, harm and calumny accrued to the Society. I am told that your motives were purely ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... upon bases laid down by Mr Cobden himself, but without adopting his slashing unproved totals, the extent to which colonial trade is criminally accessory to the financial burdens of the United Kingdom, (not, by the way, of the empire of which they form a component part,) it behoves us now to establish the proportion in which we are taxed for foreign trade, for there ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... as I have said," the old man added, "and among them was one Little Eagle, an orphan and a poor young man, unknown and unproved as a warrior. He was so insignificant that nobody thought much about him, and if Makatah regarded him with any favor the matter was her secret, for it is certain that she did not ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... of the earth's beginnings are as yet unproved speculations, they serve to bring to mind one of the chief lessons which geology has to teach,—that the duration of the earth in time, like the extension of the universe in space, is vastly beyond the power of the human mind to realize. Behind the history recorded in the rocks, which ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... after a manner daily displayed to us; and secondly, that the igneous agency, before considered only as originating special formations, was recognized as a universal agency, but assumed to act in an unproved way. Werner's sole process Hutton developed from the catastrophic and inexplicable into the uniform and explicable; while that antagonistic second process, of which he first adequately estimated the importance, was regarded by him as a catastrophic one, and was not assimilated to known ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... prejudice declares, "Without language, no understanding"! Subtile distinctions between understanding and reason have limited the statement to the latter term. But even in the restricted form, "Without verbal language, no reason," it is at least unproved. ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... an honest man; now ask yourself whether you are trapping a friend with false logic. We are trying to find out with whom philosophic truth lies; and you beg the question and make a present of that same truth to the Stoics; for you say (what is quite unproved) that they are the people who make twice two four; the Epicureans or Platonists would say that they bring out that result, whereas you get five or seven. Does it not amount to that, when your school ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... of William he said imprudent things is likely enough. Prudence was not one of his virtues. He was never calculatingly careful of his own welfare. But that he was ever untrue to William, or did any act, or consented to any, which could reasonably be called treacherous, is not only quite unproved, but is out of accord with the true William Penn as he is revealed in his writings and in all his life. The only fault which has been clearly established against him is that of liking James better than he liked ...
— William Penn • George Hodges |
