"Age of Reason" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one's head against a wall," concludes the memorial, "as hope to convert the Indians in any other way [than that of civilizing them]; for thus far all the fruits of the missions consist in the baptism of infants who die before reaching the age of reason."[25] This was not literally true, though the results of the Jesuit missions in the west had been meagre and transient to a ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... grew to keep her thoughts to herself. Sometimes she would write them out, and then destroy them before any eyes but her own could read. Once she went to a neighbor's and saw Paine's "Age of Reason." She peeped into its pages by stealth, and then put it quickly away. The next day she went back and read some more, and among other things she read was this, "To live a life of love and usefulness—to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... every night, to dispute of the inspiration of the Scriptures and the principles of the Free Soil party, the talk sometimes turned upon the respective merits of Dickens and Thackeray, Gibbon and Macaulay, Wordsworth and Byron. There were law students who read "Noctes Ambrosianae," the 'Age of Reason', and Bailey's "Festus," as well as Blackstone's 'Commentaries;' and there was a public library in that village of six hundred people, small but very well selected, which was kept in one of the lawyers' offices, and was free to all. It seems to me now that the people ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of causing the loss of past history, conduced, on the contrary, to its preservation. For the reason why we are sometimes insufficiently instructed in the history of our ancestors, is that we have never lived long with them, and that they are often dead before we have attained the age of reason. Now, when men lived so long, children lived long with their parents. They conversed long with them. But what else could be the subject of their talk save the history of their ancestors, since to that all history was reduced, and men did not study ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... associations and buries it under new-found moral significances, which may belie the definition they conceal. This is the burden of Jeremy Bentham's quarrel with "question-begging appellatives." A clear-sighted and scrupulously veracious philosopher, abettor of the age of reason, apostle of utility, god- father of the panopticon, and donor to the English dictionary of such unimpassioned vocables as "codification" and "international," Bentham would have been glad to purify the language by purging it of those "affections of the soul" wherein Burke had found its highest ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... began the study of law, he was connected with a clique or club of young men, who made light of religion, and read books that treated it as a delusion. It was at this time that he read Paine's "Age of Reason" and Volney's "Ruins," through which he was influenced to array himself against the Bible for a time,—as much of a skeptic, almost, as any one of his boon companions. But his early religious training soon asserted itself, and we hear no more of hostility to religion as long as he lived. ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... fostered by a very efficient corps of Japanese propagandists. The resentment against the Japanese invasion of California is not confined to any class, but is a very vital issue with every white citizen of the state who has reached the age of reason and regardless of whether he was born in California or ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... all his time and thoughts. Some have good memory as regards most things, and singularly defective as to others. One does not recollect the names of his associates, which he hears every hour, yet his memory is good in other respects. One says he is THOMAS PAINE, author of the 'Age of Reason,' a work he has never read; another calls himself General WASHINGTON; and one old lady of diminutive size calls herself General SCOTT, and is never so good-natured as when thus addressed. One is always in court attending a trial, and wondering and asking when the court is to rise. ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... in Holy Land. Myth of the Great Deluge. Revelation Under the Microscope of Evolution. Chas. Darwin, What He Accomplished. Jehovah Interviewed. Church and State—by Jefferson. Mistakes of Moses—by Ingersoll. Ingersolia: Gems from R. G. Ingersoll. Age of Reason—by Thos. Paine. Ingersoll—44 Lectures. ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... serving the new commonwealth in office and with his pen, he went to France on an official mission in 1781; then returned to his native England, intent on furthering his views. In 1793 Paine wrote the first part of "The Age of Reason," which aroused a storm of indignation, but undaunted, he added a second and a third part to the work, consisting mostly of amplifications of some of the contentions advanced in the first part, in the writing of which Paine had no Bible to ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... or a piece of nonsense, as the cheap reactionaries say; it is a belief in variety and growth. But it is a purely poetic and even a merely romantic belief. The nineteenth century was an age of romance as certainly as the Middle Ages was an age of reason. Mediaevals liked to have everything defined and defensible; the modern world prefers to run some risks for the sake of spontaneity and diversity. Consequently the modern world is full of a phenomenon peculiar to itself—I mean the spectacle of small or ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton |
