"First principle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at the beginning and I will lay down this first principle, that religion and the full meaning of things has nowhere more disappeared from the modern world than in ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... himself) by his wider views on civilisation, it might be suspected that it is of him that Condorcet was chiefly thinking. Yet we need not limit the scope of his statement when we remember that as a sect the Economists assumed as their first principle the eudaemonic value of civilisation, declared that temporal happiness is attainable, and threw all their weight into the scales against the doctrine of Regress which had found a ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... woman, with meows and spitting! And mind, all foolery and making faces The childish simpleness of Vice disgraces. Thou shouldst—to-day I speak emphatically— Speak naturally and not unnaturally, For the first principle in every art, Since earliest times, was ...
— Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) - A Tragedy in Four Acts • Frank Wedekind
... day he looked into it, ceased to mystify him, for he goes always to the ground of things, touches bottom, where first principles lie, and first principles are simple as two and two. It was because he had discovered a first principle that he escaped from Colmoor. And he is as nimble as six twisting minnows: what you or I learned in a year he learns in an hour, and if he does not know the usual way, not an instant does he hesitate ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... when this happens it may reasonably be expected that efforts will be made on the part of the majority to rectify this injurious operation of their institutions. But although no evil of this character should result from such a perversion of the first principle of our system—that the majority is to govern—it must be very certain that a President elected by a minority can not enjoy the confidence necessary to the successful discharge of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... come to the way in which we are to try to draw other souls to Christ, the souls of our children, of our servants, of our companions, of our fellow-workers. The first principle of success ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... in the school, as low could be; that after eight weeks of induction into the elements of Political Economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler three feet high, for returning to the question, 'What is the first principle of this science?' the absurd answer, 'To do unto others as I would that they should do ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... developed into an unscrupulous power to ruin their lives. How was it possible to weigh one's personal preferences against an irresistible force which was actuated simply and solely by the desire for one's good? Who could withstand a virtue which had encased itself in the first principle of religion—which gave all things and demanded nothing except the sacrifice of one's ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage,—the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think. No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... the remote, the subtle, the involved, the metaphysical and the terrible—the representation of which things has its due place, even its necessity—it is well to think of that quiet truth, and to keep it as a first principle in the judgment of the arts. Indeed, the recovery of the natural, simple and universal ways of acting and feeling in men and women who love as the finest subjects of the arts has always regenerated ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... enthusiasm of the passion. The welfare and happiness of the beloved object is the first and inviolate sentiment that pervades my soul; and whatever pleasures I might wish for, or whatever might be the raptures they would give me, yet, if they interfere with that first principle, it is having these pleasures at a dishonest price; and justice forbids and generosity disdains ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham |
