"False witness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "He who would speak false witness," answered Gongylus, with a firmness equal to the Chian's, "can find pearls at whatsoever hour he pleases. Greeks, this man presses me to renew the charge which Pausanias generously sought to stifle. I have said. And I, Governor of Byzantium, call on the Council of the Grecian ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... declare to the contrary. I possess much knowledge, Chia'gnosi, yet I know not how I am to convince you of the truth; for he, my husband, who could verify my words, resents my rebuke and has become my most bitter and implacable enemy, and doubtless he will seek to win you over to his side by bearing false witness against me. I would that I could make you my friend, Chia'gnosi, for never have I so sorely needed a friend as now, when Anuti has turned against me and seeks to oust me from my place and become supreme in the land. And you are wise with the wisdom of the ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... cities, and gives curious details as to pains and penalties and municipal regulations. The penalty for mutilation was a corresponding mutilation unless the fine prescribed was paid. The making of false money was punished with death. The false witness, if insolvent, lost his right nostril, and his name was published as a perjurer on the stair of the communal palace. He who destroyed the property of another lost his right hand. But there was no public executioner; and ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... make unto thee a graven image. Thou shalt not take the name of Jehovah thy God in vain. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Honor thy father and thy mother. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... There is a sense of duty even among savages; in the lowest civilization there is true admiration of virtue. No sage that I ever read of enjoined immorality. No ignorance can prevent the sense of shame, of honor, or of duty. Everybody detests a liar and despises a thief. Thou shalt not bear false witness; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not kill,—these are laws written in human consciousness as well as in the code of Moses. Obedience and respect to parents are instincts as ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... of other sorts of memories occasions other functional disturbances. A patient may forget objects, and so not know how to use his penknife or to put on his shoes. He may forget events, and so give false witness as ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... satisfied me that he was only imprisoned to be examined, as it seemed plain that the secretary had arrested him on suspicion of bearing false witness. I thereupon resolved to entrust him with two letters which would do me neither good nor harm if they were delivered at their addresses, but which would be beneficial to me if the traitor gave them to the secretary as ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... God's blessings to shoot against God. Because men are unholy and heady, and make many covenants, and keep none. Because they are (as the Greek word diaboloi signifieth) devils, acting the devil's part, in accusing the brethren, and in bearing false witness one against another. Because they have a "form of godliness, denying the power thereof." Hence it is that these times are so sad and bloody. These are thy enemies, O England, that have brought thee into this ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... courts, judges, executioners, policemen, and gaolers is needed to uphold these privileges; and this array gives rise in its turn to a whole system of espionage, of false witness, of spies, of threats ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... Bluffs in 1847. His future course gives every reason to accept the correctness of this view. He served the Mormons in the East as a Jesuit would have served his order in earlier days in France or Spain. He bore false witness in regard to polygamy and to the character of men high in the church as unblushingly as a Brigham Young or a Kimball could have done. His lecture before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1850 was highly colored where ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... ruined perhaps many persons who are not innocent. But this would be no equivalent to the loss of character. I leave them, therefore, to the reproof of their own consciences. If these do not condemn them, there will yet come a day when the false witness will meet a judge who has not slept over his slanders. If the reverend Cotton Mather Smith of Shena believed this as firmly as I do, he would surely never have affirmed that 'I had obtained my property by fraud and robbery; that in one instance I had defrauded and robbed a widow and fatherless ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... sooth For all thy grace and lordliness of youth, The crown that bids men's branded foreheads bow Much more has branded and bowed down thy brow And gnawn upon it as with fire or tooth Of steel or snake so sorely, that the truth Seems here to bear false witness. Is it thou, Child? and is all the summer of all thy spring This? are the smiles that drew men's kisses down All faded and transfigured to the frown That grieves thy face? Art thou this weary thing? Then is no slave's load heavier than a crown And such a thrall no bondman ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... I but lost my earing corn And saved the cause once prized! O Saints, why such false witness had I borne When late ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... call bad, and everything which aids the operation of those laws is what we have been accustomed to think of as good. The common crimes condemned by all religions, such as theft, murder, adultery, bearing false witness, disloyalty, all these are practices which directly interfere with the natural process of evolution; and without understanding why, men have from the earliest times of real civilisation united all their power to suppress them. I think that we need not dwell upon the simple facts; they will at ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... infest the highway, So Mat may be kill'd, and his bones never found; False witness at court, and fierce tempests at sea, So Mat may yet chance to be hang'd or ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... serve under, a man that served his country by sea and land before you were whelped, ye black hypocrite. You a Christian! you? If I thought that I'd turn Atheist or anything, you poor, backbiting, tale-telling, sneaking, undermining, false witness bearing—" ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... company in which this sin is found. Learn from those offenses with which it is classed something of the enormity to which it may rise. "Out of the heart proceedeth evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies." ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... and that she did not call upon Satan, but recited a Latin carmen aloud to herself. This he would have testified at Pudgla, but, from the cause aforesaid, he had not been able: moreover, his father had laid his cousin, Claus von Nienkerken, who was there on a visit, in his bed, and made him bear false witness; for as Dom. Consul had not seen him (I mean the young lord) for many a long year, seeing he had studied in foreign parts, his father thought that he might easily be ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... golden rents and gleams that travelled steadily eastwards. Except the man with newspapers at the corner of Alexandra Grove, scarcely a sign of life showed along the vistas of Fulham Road; but the clock over the jeweller's was alive and bearing the usual false witness. From the upper open galleries of the Workhouse one or two old men and old women in uniform looked down indifferently upon the free world which they had left for ever. Then an omnibus appeared faintly advancing from the beautiful grey distance of the straight and ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... well as the personal self. Jesus again told this when he said to the man who asked him "What shall I do that I may have eternal life?" And He said unto him: "Keep the commandments" and, "Thou shalt not bear false witness:" "And the young man saith unto Him, 'All these things have I kept from my youth up; what lack I yet?'" "Jesus saith unto him: 'If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... she would have the strength and skill to do so; but now, when she saw his broad, mild, happy smile, and shining, joyful eyes, she felt that to deceive this man was as vile, as revolting, and as impossible and out of her power as to bear false witness, to steal, or to kill, and in a flash she resolved to tell him all that had happened. Letting him kiss and embrace her, she sank down on her knees before him and hid ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... "hero" either bore false witness against his neighbour, a poor artisan, or (taking his own word for it) saved the nation from great disaster and ruin by putting out a fire that no one ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... is absolutely useless if its object is to prevent false witness. Should there be any likelihood of a persecution for perjury, a two-faced Testament-kisser will be on his guard, and be very careful to tell only such lies as cannot be clearly proved against him. He dreads the prospect of daily exercise on the treadmill, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... just. The turning-point in the history of Judaism—the birth-hour of religion as it has come down to us—is marked by that great dimly-seen personality, Moses, who taught that the worship of Yahveh forbade murder, adultery, theft, false witness, covetousness. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... to believe that the poet of the "Canterbury Tales" remained master of himself to the last. He had written much which a dying man might regret; but it would be sad to have to think that, "because of humility," he bore false witness at the last against an immortal part of ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... either such as effect secrecy; as theft, adultery, poisoning, pimping, kidnapping of slaves, assassination, false witness; or accompanied with open violence; as insult, bonds, death, plundering, maiming, foul language, ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... have shown me your goodwill for a long time. To be sure there is a Commandment that forbids us to bear false witness against our neighbour— ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... things, in Him who has no other God beside Him, in Him from whom they have received commandments which they have engraved upon their minds, commandments which they observe in the faith and expectation of the world to come. Wherefore they do not commit adultery or fornication, nor bear false witness, nor covet what is held in pledge, nor covet what is not theirs. They honor father and mother and show kindness to their neighbors. If they are judges, they judge uprightly. They do not worship idols made ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... understanding; and his subtle comrade, Whose faith, observe, I never answered for, Might easily seduce him to write down More than he should;] the rack may have compelled him To say and to confess more than he knew. He hoped to save himself by this false witness, And thought it ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... right and justice, and choose rather to take harm than to do wrong in any manner of matter. For surely if a man may—as indeed he may—have great comfort in the clearness of his conscience, who hath a false crime put upon him and by false witness proved upon him, and who is falsely punished and put to worldly shame and pain for it; a hundred times more comfort may he have in his heart who, where white is called black and right is called wrong, abideth by the truth and ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... so, that the mysterious powers of the American consul at St. Kentigern had been evoked to punish mutiny on the one hand, and battery and starvation on the other; both equally attested by manifestly false witness and subornation on each side. In the exercise of his functions the consul had opened and shut some jail doors, and otherwise effected the usual sullen and deceitful compromise, and his flag was now flying, on a final visit, from the stern sheets of a smart boat alongside. It was with a feeling ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... winds for the use of all alike; they could not except individuals from the enjoyment of them. A king bestows honours upon those who deserve them, but he gives largesse to the undeserving as well. The thief, the bearer of false witness, and the adulterer, alike receive the public grant of corn, and all are placed on the register without any examination as to character; good and bad men share alike in all the other privileges which a man receives, ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... the easy-going country-town bankers. 'You may have second editions of the Apostle Paul for your cashiers,' I say, 'but every time you sign a statement of condition without close and careful audit you're bearing false witness.' And being a new broom that proposes to sweep clean, I'm tempted to poke it just as hard to slack presidents and directors as I am to an embezzling cashier who has been given plenty of rope to run as he wants! I'm on the job examining banks!" He was a vigorous man, Examiner Starr! ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... we must commit sin, and yet you admit, as you must, that there will be no sin in the body when it is dead. Where, then, does sin reside? Jesus answers this question once for all in Matthew 15:19, 20: 'For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.' It is the heart that sins; 'the soul that sinneth, it shall die,' says the prophet Ezekiel in Ezek. 18:4. The body will die and return to dust from whence it came, but these immortal souls ...
— Around Old Bethany • Robert Lee Berry
... grand jury threw out the case against one of the prisoners Walker let loose such a flood of virulent abuse that moderate men were turned against him. In the end all the accused were honourably acquitted, while McGovoch, who was proved to have been a false witness from the first, was convicted of perjury. Carleton remained absolutely impartial all through, and even dismissed Colonel Irving and another member of the Council for heading a petition on ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... more presently, partly from the craze for tracing Western Europe back to the "thrice-beaten Trojans," it pleased them to regard Homer as a late and unhistorical calumniator, whose Greek prejudices made him bear false witness; and to accept the pretensions of Dictys and Dares to be contemporaries and eyewitnesses of fact. Dictys, a companion of Idomeneus, was supposed to represent the Greek side, but more fairly than Homer; and Dares, priest of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... sir, for the last time, by keeping silence. You and I have henceforth nothing to say to each other. I am the daughter of a race of nobles, and the widow of a man of honor. You are a traitor and a false witness—a thing from which all true men and true women turn with contempt. I renounce you! Publicly, in the presence of these gentlemen, I say it—I ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... the second place, I would commit perjury and give offence to pious souls. I stand at the judgment-seat of Christ, to whom I have appealed, knowing that He will judge every man, not according to false witness, but according to the truth and each one's deserts." Against the authority of men Hus asserted the authority of his conscience enlightened by the ...
— John Hus - A brief story of the life of a martyr • William Dallmann
... these charges as being true, and if Mr. Shober does not confront me and prove these charges by a legal testimony or testimonies, what can I otherwise, agreeably to the truth, call him but a calumniator, or one who bears false witness against his neighbor? I do not believe that any man in the United States (or, at least, I have never heard of any) teaches that, if a person only is baptized and receives the Lord's Supper, [he] is safe exclusive of repentance. ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... that he was not moved by those temptations, he must be told that then they were no temptations to him, and he was not tempted; nor was his victory of more significance than that of the man who, tempted to bear false witness against his neighbour, abstains from robbing him of his goods. For human need, struggle, and hope, it bears no meaning; and we must reject the whole as a fantastic folly of crude invention; a mere stage-show; a lie for the poor sake ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... Bald Hill, where there is not a scrap of soil, and not the slightest indication, and still persisted that he found it THERE, you will understand, Sister Medliker, the incorrigibility of his conduct, and how he has added the sin of 'false witness' to his breaking the Eighth Commandment. But I leave him to your Christian discipline! Let us hope that if, through his stiff-necked obduracy, he has haply escaped the vengeance of man's law, he will not escape the rod of the ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... law: 'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' when he repulsed the desire of the wife of Potiphar. The other sons of Jacob observed the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal,' saying: 'How then should we steal out of thy lord's house silver and gold?' Abraham observed the commandment: 'Thou shalt not bear false witness,' for he was a true witness, and bore witness before all the world that Thou art the Lord of all creation. It was Abraham, also, who observed the last of the Ten Commandments 'Thou shalt not covet,' saying: 'I will not take from a thread even to a ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... soon," Allen interjected, "for he is a murderer, as well as one who bears false witness ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... of our souls escaping from some fissure of the brain. It has color, is a living thing, the thin wraith that pursues man ever to his grave. Patel was an echo. When his soul leans naked against the chill bar of heaven and bears false witness, then his echo will tell the truth about his music—this damnable reverberating Doppelgaenger which sneaks into corners and lies in wait for our guilty gliding footsteps." She began to retreat again; she feared him, feared the hypnotism of his sad voice. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... should be hanged thereon immediately after the gratification of his lust, whether he could not then control his passion; we need not be long in doubt what he would reply. Ask him, however- if his sovereign ordered him, on pain of the same immediate execution, to bear false witness against an honourable man, whom the prince might wish to destroy under a plausible pretext, would he consider it possible in that case to overcome his love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... is acquired solely by a life according to the commandments in the Word. These commandments are given in summary in the Decalogue, namely, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet the goods of others. These commandments are the commandments that are to be done, for when a man does these his works are good and his life is spiritual, and for the reason that so far as a man shuns evils and ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... break it. For true is the maxim: Gedanken sind zollfrei. (No toll is levied on thought.) When weak consciences are driven by force to lie, deceive, and say otherwise than they believe in the heart, they burden themselves also with a heavy sin; for all the lies and false witness given by such weak consciences rest ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... Grandier. She then made an urgent appeal to the bishop and to M. de Laubardemont, asking to be sequestered and placed in charge of other priests than those who had destroyed her soul, by making her bear false witness against an innocent man; but they only laughed at the pranks the devil was playing, and ordered her to be at once taken back to the house in which she was then living. When she heard this order, she darted out of the choir, trying to escape through the church door, imploring ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... his shoulders. "What has that to do with it? Because the man was rich he was not justified in ill-treating his wife. Did he not bring false accusations against her, in order that he might rob her after his death of all that of which you think so much? Did he not hear false witness against her, to his ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... Dighton, if really guilty, was scandalous; and can only be accounted for on the supposition of His being a false witness to serve ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... the Decalogue in a lump, its named sins as equivalent! In every one of you must live an inward witness that these sins do not rank equally in God's eye; that to murder, for instance, is wickeder than to misuse the Lord's name in a hasty oath; that to bear false witness against a neighbour is tenfold worse than to break the Sabbath. Yet we for ever in our Churches put these out of their right order; count ourselves righteous if we slander our neighbour, so it be on the way to worship; and in petty cruelties practice the lust of murder, interrupting it to shudder ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... feared and did not respect one another. Who keeps the tavern and makes the people drunken? A peasant. Who wastes and spends on drink the funds of the commune, of the schools, of the church? A peasant. Who stole from his neighbours, set fire to their property, gave false witness at the court for a bottle of vodka? At the meetings of the Zemstvo and other local bodies, who was the first to fall foul of the peasants? A peasant. Yes, to live with them was terrible; but yet, they were human ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... [Ps. 34:13] False witness against other persons is the worst form of lying. All lesser forms of lying are ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... trial drew to an end, we are told, the master said: [44] "Sirs, those who instructed the witnesses that they ought to perjure themselves and bear false witness against me, alike with those who listened to their instruction, must be conscious to themselves of a deep impiety and injustice. [45] But for myself, what reason have I at the present time to hold my head less high than I did before sentence was passed against me, if ...
— The Apology • Xenophon |
