"Confutation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Patrick's, neither of which exceeded the same annual amount. Yet a clamour was raised among the Whigs, on account of the multiplication of his preferments; and a charge was founded against the Lord-Lieutenant of extravagant favour to a Tory divine, which Swift judged worthy of an admirable ironical confutation in his "Vindication of Lord Carteret." It appears, from the following verses, that Delany was far from being of the same opinion with those who thought he was too amply provided for.—Scott. See the "Vindication," "Prose Works," vii, p. 244.—W. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... too distant from Africa for the Ethiopians to penetrate into America, it being at least two months sail from Ethiopia to Jucatan. He refutes the pretended traces of Christianity, which Grotius said were found in that part of America before the discovery of the Spaniards, supporting his confutation on the authority of Spanish writers; in fine, he denies that any Chinese wrecks have been found on the coasts of the Pacific Ocean, and censures, as a very great inaccuracy in Grotius, what he advances concerning the Peruvian ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... riddle on man of 1300 lines, is rather long. It seems so especially as there is no real or new light cast in it on man's nature or destiny. (We refer our readers to the notes of Dr Croly's edition for a running commentary of confutation to the "Essay on Man" distinguished by solid and unanswerable acuteness of argument.) But such an eloquent and ingenious puzzle as it is! It might have issued from the work-basket of Titania herself. It is another evidence ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... not but feel the power of Pascal in his "Provincial Letters," constantly undermining the authority of his order. His preaching, as Sainte-Beuve well says, may be considered to have been, in the preacher's intention, one prolonged confutation of Pascal's immortal indictment. We borrow of Sainte-Beuve a short extract from Bourdaloue's sermon on slander, which may serve as an instance to show with what adroitness the Jesuit retorted anonymously upon ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... depressed him to complaint. While the distributors of literary fame were endeavouring to depreciate and degrade him, he either despised or defied them, wrote on as he had written before, and never turned aside to quiet them by civility, or repress them by confutation. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... labored to show, by an examination of dates and circumstances, that this story is untrue. Such confutation was surely not needed; for the narrative is on the face of it a romance. How it found its way into Mariana's history is quite clear. He acknowledges his obligations to the ancient chronicles; and had doubtless before him the Cronica del famoso Cavallero Cid Ruy ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is altogether indifferent to Aesthetic whether the artist have had only an aspiration, or have realized that aspiration in his empirical life. All that is quite indifferent in the sphere of art. Here we also find the confutation of that false conception of sincerity, which maintains that the artist, in his volitional or practical life, should be at one with his dream, or with his incubus. Whether or no he have been so, is a matter that interests his biographer, not his critic; it belongs ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... smiled and shook his head. 'I must not forget my situation so far as to attempt a formal confutation of that opinion; but, notwithstanding your success and the valour which achieved it, you have undertaken a task to which your strength appears ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... {ant 478} confutation, refutation; answer, complete answer; disproof, conviction, redargution[obs3], invalidation; exposure, exposition; clincher; retort; reductio ad absurdum; knock down argument, tu quoque argument[Lat]; sockdolager * [obs3][U. S.]. correction &c. 527a; dissuasion &c. 616. V. confute, refute, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... intelligible statement of my poetic creed,—not as my opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established premises conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a fundamental conviction, or to receive a fundamental confutation. If I may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker, "they, unto whom we shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in their own hands to spare that labour, which they are not willing to endure." Those at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so much pains to render ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... trompett, in whiche I affirme, that to promote a woman to beare rule, or empire aboue any realme, nation or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, and a thing moste contrariouse to his reuealed and approued ordenance: and because also, that somme hath promised (as I vnderstand) a confutation of the same, I haue delayed the second blast, till such tyme as their reasons appere, by the which I either may be reformed in opinion, or els shall haue further occasion more simply and plainly to vtter ...
— The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment - of Women • John Knox
... declared that this was the supreme moment of his life; and then corrected himself by saying that that moment would arrive when, in the fulness of time, he would confront his brother Fellows of the Zoological Society with the skins of a pair of unicorns, properly prepared and set up by Ward, in confutation of the thinly veiled doubts and scepticism with which certain of them had dared to receive a former statement of his that unicorns actually existed, and that he had beheld them with his own good eyes. They had not scrupled to ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Protestant churches to join in one general resolution to extinguish the abomination, and would, as sovereign of his own dominions, prohibit his subjects to frequent so pestilential a place as the University of Leyden. To his menaces he added the terrors of his pen, and published a "Confutation of Vorstius." ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... any one of these three effusions may unquestionably mean anything that anybody chooses to read into the text; that a Luther is as safe as a Loyola, that a Renan is no safer than a Cumming, from the chance of confutation as a less than plausible exponent of its possible significance: but that, however indisputable it may be that they were meant to mean something, not many human creatures who can be trusted to go abroad without a keeper will be ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... no small part of the Levitical law; in the same code are inserted many of the Saxon institutions, though these two laws were in all respects as opposite as could possibly be imagined. These indisputable monuments of our ancient rudeness are a very sufficient confutation of the panegyrical declamations in which some persons would persuade us that the crude institutions of an unlettered people had attained an height which the united efforts of necessity, learning, inquiry, and experience can hardly reach ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... no tribe has ever yet been discovered so brutish as to be without some government, and yet so enlightened as to establish a government by common consent, it is surely unnecessary to employ any serious argument in the confutation of a doctrine that is inconsistent with reason, and unsupported by experience. But though all inquiries into the origin of government be chimerical, yet the history of its progress is curious and useful. The various stages through which it passed from savage independence, which implies every man's ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... not unfavourable to his hopes. She treated his insinuations and professions with levity; but her arguments seemed to be urged with no other view than to afford an opportunity of confutation; and, since there was no abatement of familiarity and kindness, there was room to hope that the affair would terminate agreeably ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... close the drawer when his attention was caught by a thick black note-book lying towards the back of it. He took it out, reminded by it of something he had meant to do, and carried it off with the Oldham letter to his chair. Once settled there again, he turned himself to the confutation of his pamphleteer. But not for long. The black book on his knee exercised a disturbing influence; his under-mind began to occupy itself with it, and at last the Oldham letter was hastily put down, and, taking out a pocket pen, David, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The third was the Reason of Church Government urged against the Prelacy, by Mr. John Milton, in two books. The fourth was Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus; and the fifth an Apology for a Pamphlet called, a Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrants against Smectymnuus; or as the title page is in some copies, an Apology for Smectymnuus, with the Reason of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... it would deprive the Christian world of its only infallible arbiter in questions of faith and duty, suppress the only common and inappellable tribunal; that the Bible is the only religious bond of union and ground of unity among Protestants and the like. For the confutation of this whole reasoning, it might be sufficient to ask: Has it produced these effects? Would not the contrary statement be nearer to the fact? What did the Churches of the first four centuries hold on this point? To what did they attribute the rise and multiplication ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... carping tongue, Upbraided me about the rose I wear; Saying, the sanguine colour of the leaves Did represent my master's blushing cheeks, When stubbornly he did repugn the truth About a certain question in the law Argued betwixt the Duke of York and him; With other vile and ignominious terms: In confutation of which rude reproach, And in defence of my lord's worthiness, I crave the benefit of law ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... he had heard it by such men and such meanes as he thought it hard but it should be true." This affirmation rests on the credibility of certain reporters, we do not know whom, but who we shall find were no credible reporters at all: for to proceed to the confutation. James Tirrel, a man in no secret trust with the king, and kept down by Catesby and Ratcliffe, is recommended as a proper person by a nameless page. In the first place Richard was crowned at York (after this transaction) September 8th. Edward the Fourth had not been dead four months, and Richard ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... slovenly little mansion of their race, the same with that which their parents built before themselves were hatched. The Doctor could not do away the force of that single fact, with which his system was incompatible, yet he maintained that system with philosophic sturdiness, though experience brought confutation from ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... 'Mr. Turl, how did it happen that you felt no aversion to the confutation, as you suppose, of a man for whom ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... again, distinctly here, the rule he so often claims he has himself put in practice, elsewhere, that the use of CONFUTATION in the delivery of science, ought to be very sparing; and to serve to remove strong preoccupations and prejudgments, and not to minister and excite disputations and doubts. For he says in another place, 'As Alexander Borgia was wont to say of the expedition of the French for Naples, that ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... been much employed for explaining mineral appearances, is too vague, imperfect, or unexplicit, for science, whether as the means of knowing nature, or the subject of confutation. This is not the case with that of stalactite; here is a term that implies a certain natural operation, or a most distinct process for attaining a certain end; and we know the principles upon which it proceeds, as well as the several steps ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... Confutation, have also cited against us Col. 3, 14: Charity, which is the bond of perfectness. From this they infer that love justifies because it renders men perfect. Although a reply concerning perfection could here be made in many ways, yet we will simply recite the meaning of Paul. ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... check to their rage in the course of legal proceedings, but otherwise upon occasion; and finally countenanced this people. For, his wife receiving the truth with the first, it had that influence upon his spirit, being a just and wise man, and seeing in his own wife and family a full confutation of all the popular clamours against the way of truth, that he covered them what he could, and freely opened his doors, and gave up his house to his wife and her friends; not valuing the reproach of ignorant or ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... part is not alwaies darke, and the other light of it selfe, but enough of this, I would be loth to make an enemy, that I may afterwards overcome him, or bestow time in proving that which is already granted. I suppose now, that neither of them hath any patrons, and therefore need no confutation. ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... things failed, then they would fly to this, that such or such things pleased our ancestors, and it were well for us if we could but match them. They would set up their rest on such an answer, as a sufficient confutation of all that could be said, as if it were a great misfortune that any should be found wiser than his ancestors. But though they willingly let go all the good things that were among those of former ages, yet, if better things are proposed, they cover themselves ...
— Utopia • Thomas More |
