"Philosophizing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... There are those who consider it dispraise of a philosopher to suggest that his work has local color. However that may be, William James thought as an American as certainly as Plato thought as a Greek. His way of philosophizing was one that belonged to the land of ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... of this fiery haste remains in the book itself. The "Opus Majus" is alike wonderful in plan and detail. Bacon's main purpose, in the words of Dr. Whewell, is "to urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of philosophizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not made a greater progress, to draw back attention to sources of knowledge which had been unwisely neglected, to discover other sources which were yet wholly unknown, and to animate men to the undertaking ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... Philosophizing on this theme in later years, Mr. Barnum once said: "The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which entrances empires and secures for the gifted artist a worldwide fame which princes well might ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... while we are philosophizing and offering advice so wisely, Jane is at work—doing the best she knows how. We can't claim the honor even of making ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... and were beginning work on the walls. It was a roomy place they were building, a palace as houses went in the Bad Lands. Roosevelt worked with them for two days. Both men were excellent company, Dow a delightful spinner of yarns, witty and imaginative, Sewall full of horse sense and quiet philosophizing. Roosevelt himself was much depressed. His virtual elimination from politics, together with the tragic breaking-up of his home life, had left him for the moment aimless and without ambition. There is ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... sciences. It had to wait for the scientific method of exact investigation and the scientific principle of forming conclusions upon abundant data. Naturally, theories of society were held long before any science came into existence, but they were of value only as philosophizing. Some of these theories were published and attracted the attention of thoughtful persons, but they did not affect social life. Some of them developed into philosophies of history, based on the preconceived ideas of their authors. Now and then in the first part of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... as he walked along, and fixed a definite purpose before him to be accomplished in life. It is true it was not a very lofty or a very noble purpose, merely to be rich; but he had been obliged to do his own philosophizing. He had not yet discovered the true philosopher's stone. He had concluded, like the alchemists of old, that it was the art of turning anything into gold. The paupers, in their poverty, had talked most ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... rest. There is not one literary flourish in the whole of them, although they are done with consummate literary care; nothing but honest, if not always accurate, observation of the world of hill-slopes, waves, flowers, birds, and beasts, and honest, shrewd philosophizing as to what it all meant for him, an American. Here is a man content to take a walk, fill his mind with observation, and then come home to think. Repeat the walk, repeat or vary the observation, change or expand the thought, and you have Thoreau. No wonder he brought his first edition ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Arulenus Rusticus for being a philosopher and for calling Thrasea sacred, and Herennius Senecio because in his long career he had stood for no office after the quaestorship and because he had compiled the life of Helvidius Priscus. Many others also perished as a result of this same charge of philosophizing, and all remaining members of that profession were again driven from Rome. One Juventius Celsus, however, who had been conspicuous in conspiring with certain persons against Domitian and had been accused of it, saved his life in a remarkable way. When he was on the point of being condemned, ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... of Abelard lles in his having fixed more decisively than any one before him the scholastic manner of philosophizing, with its object of giving a formally rational expression to the received ecclesiastical doctrine . However his own particular interpretations may have been condemned, they were conceived in essentially the same spirit as the general scheme of thought afterwards elaborated in the 13th century ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... prettiness and favor and noble tragedy of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into a bawd's tale; a tale of brutal, vile lust; for such passion as he depicts is not love. He took Hamlet and transformed him from a melancholy, a philosophizing Dane into a yelling man, a man of the steppes, soaked with vodka and red-handed with butchery. Hamlet, forsooth! Those twelve strokes of the bell are the veriest melodrama. And Francesca da Rimini—who has not read of the gentle, lovelorn pair in ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... look at my little craft snugly ensconced upon the top of a pile of barrels, and smiled as I turned away, thinking how precious she had already become to me, and philosophizing upon the strange genus, man, who could so readily twine his affections about an inanimate object. Upon consideration, it did not seem so strange a thing, however, for did not this boat represent the work of brains and ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... existence of a superior Power, is it likely that they would all at once discard this belief, because there researches were unsuccessful? If they were to do this, they would do it against all the rules of philosophizing, and against the force of their own habits. I say, that analogical is a part of philosophical reasoning, and that they would rather argue, that, as such effects had been uniformly produced, so they would probably still be produced, if their researches were crowned with success. The tendency ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... in the search after truth, to have so great an ally as yourself, and one who is so great a friend of the truth itself. It is really pitiful that there are so few who seek truth, and who do not pursue a perverse method of philosophizing. But this is not the place to mourn over the miseries of our times, but to congratulate you on your splendid discoveries in confirmation of truth. I shall read your book to the end, sure of finding much that is excellent in it. I ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... convinced that the Cerceris' (A species of Digger-wasp.—Translator's Note.) cave had more fair secrets to reveal to us, that the chase of the Sphex held fresh surprises in store. But time failed me; I was alone, deserted, struggling against misfortune. Before philosophizing, one had to live. Tell them that, and they ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... first instance was, that quality of the book which was strangest at its first appearance. The mass of the public read, and enjoyed, or thought they enjoyed, when they were really only puzzled and perplexed. The wild digressions, the audacious impertinences, the burlesque philosophizing, the broad jests, the air of recondite learning, all combined to make the book a nine days' wonder; and a majority of its readers would probably have been prepared to pronounce Tristram Shandy a ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... the darkness of the room was sentient. A breath passed over my face; but I caught no sound, though I held my breath to listen for one. I moved my hands before me then, but they came in contact with nothing. My forebodings passed away, and I slept till Alice sent for me. I sat up in bed philosophizing, and examining the position of the chairs, the tops of the tables and the door. No change had taken place. But my eyes happened to fall on my handkerchief, which had dropped by the bedside. I picked it up; there was a dusty footprint upon it. ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... of them, but says "there is rarely much to be said for their work as an example of the adequate treatment of a grave and difficult investigation," and that they shared with their adversaries "to the full the fatal weakness of a priori philosophizing." [NOTE: Science and Christian Tradition, p. 18 (Lon. ed., 1894).] Professor Huxley does not name Paine, evidently because he knows nothing about him. Yet Paine represents the turning-point of the historical freethinking movement; he renounced the 'a priori' method, refused to pronounce ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of Reid's whole philosophical outlook - to the realm of human speech. For speech depends upon an inner, intelligent human activity, which, once learnt, becomes a lasting part of man's being, quite outside the realm of his philosophizing consciousness, and yet forming an ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... the night. Sleepy servants were cleaning up, but Fox vowed that they should bring us yet another bottle before going home. So down we sat about the famous old round table, Fox fingering the dents the gold had made in the board, and philosophizing; and reciting Orlando Furioso in the Italian, and Herodotus in the original Greek. Suddenly casting his eyes about, they fell upon an ungainly form stretched on a lounge, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Owen delivered himself of the sentiment that 'people's papas and mammas were very funny,' doubtless philosophizing on the inconsistency of the class in being, some so willing, some so reluctant, to leave their children behind them. Honor fully agreed with him, but did not think the discussion profitable for Robin, whom ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... damage had been done and you think twice before you kill a person in close quarters when you aren't absolutely sure you'll be able to dispose of the body. How did I know I'd be able to open the door? I remember philosophizing that Pop ought at least to have broke an arm so he'd be as badly off as Alice and me (though for that matter my right arm was fully recovered now) but he was all in one piece. There's no justice in events, ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... of America stop futile philosophizing upon the merits and demerits of each case, let them measurably cease their comment upon what each side has accomplished or failed to accomplish during the tragic four months which have traced their bloody ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... not trouble himself further about the manor. He was convinced that enough gallant cavalrymen were over yonder to entertain the fair mistress, so that she would no longer wait for any more tiresome philosophizing from him. ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... his masters and scuffle about syllables and accents with his fellow-pedant Democritus (whose principles he stole verbatim), and to tell his disciples there never was a wise man in the world besides himself, but also to put it in writing how Colotes performed adoration to him, as he was one day philosophizing, by touching his knees, and that his own brother Neocles was used from a child to say, "There neither is, nor ever was in the world, a wiser man than Epicurus," and that his mother had just so many atoms within her as, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... are past finding out. Nay, God Himself is unknown. At times, indeed, the power to love within man seems to the poet to be a clue to the nature of the Power without, and God is all but revealed in this surpassing emotion of the human heart. But, when philosophizing, he withdraws even this amount of ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... Means were easily to hand! He had only to accept from his rich disciples what was really the wage of tuition, though hitherto like the old Rabbis he had preferred to teach for Truth's sole sake. After all Carl Ludwig offered him ample freedom in philosophizing. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... his wife smiled. "You are right, my dear: it is a foolish habit," she said tranquilly, "but we are such slaves to silly habits," she added, looking at the rector and his wife in her pretty philosophizing way, while they smiled approvingly at her ready wit and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout, but especially, and, perhaps, unpleasingly, in this broad determination of ungrateful treachery in Helena, so undisguisedly avowed to herself, and this, too, after the witty cool philosophizing that precedes. The act itself is natural, and the resolve so to act is, I fear, likewise too true a picture of the lax hold which principles have on a woman's heart, when opposed to, or even separated from, passion and inclination. For women are less hypocrites to their own minds than men are, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... the Supreme Being, in his treatise on the Laws." TERTULLIAN (De Test. An. c. 1; Adv. Marc. i. 10; Ad. Scap. c. 2; Apol. c. 17), than whom no one of the Christian Fathers was more vehemently opposed to the philosophizing of the schools, earnestly contends that the doctrine of the unity of God is constitutional to the human mind. "God," he says, "proves himself to be God, and the one only God, by the very fact that He is known to all nations; for the existence of any other deity than He would ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... rest a little, now. To sit here and painstakingly spin out a scheme which imagines Mrs. Eddy, of all people, working her mind on a plane above commercialism; imagines her thinking, philosophizing, discovering majestic things; and even imagines her dealing in sincerities—to be frank, I find it a large contract But I have begun it, and I will go ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... saved me from undue philosophizing; and night found me ten miles on my seaward voyage, with the three dogs skinned and their fur wrapped around me as a coat. I also frayed a small piece of rope into oakum and mixed it with the fat from the intestines of my dogs. But, alas, I found that the matches in my ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... a good enough living." David flushed as he said it. How pitifully poor, despite all his late philosophizing, that reason sounded! "Mr. Radbourne, ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... am not convinced. I am convinced, but somehow I don't believe it! There are no real proofs, but just a kind of philosophizing—fanaticism, this and that—" ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... allusion to "the blood sacrifice," which is necessary in politics as in religion, would border on impiety; with the French it is probably a proof of religious faith. Lamartine, in his views and conceptions, in his mode of thinking and philosophizing, is much more nearly allied to the German than to the English schools; only that, instead of a philosophical system, carried through with a rigorous and unsparing logic, he indulges in philosophical reveries. As a statesman Lamartine lacks ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... the account of his way of Philosophizing, the greatest part of which is enigmatical and full of obscurity, and for that reason of no use to any but such as thoroughly perceive and understand the matter before, and then afterwards hear it from him again, or ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... the contentment of a man who had ceased to worry about the future; he was taking it easy, like a vacationer with plenty of money in the bank. On one occasion he did mention the money in the course of a bit of philosophizing on the situation: ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... hand was not able to attain to the perfection of art in carrying out the things which he imagined; for the reason that he conceived in idea difficulties so subtle and so marvellous, that they could never be expressed by the hands, be they ever so excellent. And so many were his caprices, that, philosophizing of natural things, he set himself to seek out the properties of herbs, going on even to observe the motions of the heavens, the path of the moon, and the courses of ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... on the appearance of his daughter. Lined against the opposite wall were the Celebrity and his ten red-coated followers, just rising for the figure. It was very plain that Miss Trevor was radiantly happy; she was easily the handsomest girl in the room, and I could not help philosophizing when I saw her looking up into the Celebrity's eyes upon the seeming inconsistency of nature, who has armed and warned woman against all ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... limit of study, is shown by Valerius, in his book addressed to Tiberius, by many examples. Carneades, he says, was a laborious and lifelong soldier of wisdom: after he had lived ninety years, the same day put an end to his life and his philosophizing. Isocrates in his ninety-fourth year wrote a most noble work. Sophocles did the same when nearly a hundred years old. Simonides wrote poems in his eightieth year. Aulus Gellius did not desire to live longer than ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... keep out-of-doors in England you are very well, and that is why the English, who have been philosophizing their climate for a thousand and some odd years, keep out-of-doors so much. When they go indoors they take all the outer air they can with them, instinctively realizing that they will be more comfortable ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... philosophizing better than philosophy," said Aram, coldly; "but surely, my Lord, the affections give us pain as well as pleasure. The doubt, the dread, the restlessness of love,—surely these prevent the passion from constituting a happy state of mind; to me one knowledge alone ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... matter, old top? You're as serious to-day as some bewhiskered old college professor. Stop your philosophizing and let's have some more wine. I'll match you for another ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... she said, "you are philosophizing! Let me have the results of your observations, do! What do your eyes see, that mine ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... has preceded this selection? What things are contrasted in the account? Do you think that philosophizing helped or hindered the climber? Do you know anything about the difficulties of Alpine climbing from other accounts you have read? Compare the style of this selection with "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "A ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... individuation and reproduction everywhere operative throughout the organic world." I don't know why, but that passage made me as hot as a hornet. In the background of my brain I carried some vague memory of George Eliot once catching this same philosophizing Spencer fishing with a composite fly, and, remarking on his passion for generalizations, declaring that he even fished with a generalization. So I could afford to laugh. "Spencer's idea of a tragedy," I told Dinky-Dunk, ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... this only as a hypothesis: its truth may be confirmed by future observations and experiments, or it may be refuted by them: but it is certainly capable of explaining many of the phenomena, which is one of the conditions required by Newton's first rule of philosophizing. ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... clearance, a jail-delivery of such lumber as was not Literary. These were her Erdbeben (earthquakes), which Teufelsdrockh dreaded worse than the pestilence; nevertheless, to such length he had been forced to comply. Glad would he have been to sit here philosophizing forever, or till the litter, by accumulation, drove him out of doors: but Lieschen was his right-arm, and spoon, and necessary of life, and would not be flatly gainsayed. We can still remember the ancient ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... To divert his philosophizing he busied himself in his laboratory where many "original experiments were made." He avoided the crowd. There was too great a party spirit. Indeed, there was violence, so he determined not to visit Philadelphia. He sought to escape the "rancorous abuse" which ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... here smilingly interposed, though a quickly repressed sigh arose to her lips, "I hope you are not going to involve Miss Minturn in a metaphysical discussion during this first meeting! Dorothy has acquired a habit of philosophizing and asking profound questions that are not always easily ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... intervals of half an hour she opened the door softly, looked in at him, thought he was asleep, and went softly away. But he had never been further from sleep in his life. Henrietta Hastings's harum-scarum gossiping and philosophizing happened to be just what his troubled mind needed to precipitate its clouds into a solid mass that could be clearly seen and carefully examined. Heretofore he had accepted the conventional explanations ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... philosophical poets would be commonplace if turned into prose. Verse cannot contain the refining subtle thoughts which a great prose writer embodies; the rhyme eternally cripples it; it properly deals with the common problems of human nature, which are now hackneyed, and not with the nice and philosophizing corollaries which may be drawn from them. Thus, though it would seem at first a paradox, commonplace is more the element of poetry than ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Chuck was philosophizing about the value of gathering food while it was yet day, as he sat stowing away his quart of ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... gathers size as it rolls; and I am what I am for the same reason that the wind scatter the sands of the desert—a man full of books and tangent inconsequence of ideas, without sense; a simpleton who knows a painting but does not know men; a garrulous, philosophizing, blind, old simpleton, whose pompous incompetency has betrayed a trust! Through me, men and women came here to settle and make a home! Through me they lose—to ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... have thought me hard,' he burst out at length, as they were nearing the drawing-room windows and the garden-door. 'I never can manage to express what I feel, somehow I always fall to philosophizing, but I am sorry for you. Yes, I am; it's beyond my power to help you, as far as altering facts goes, but I can feel for you, in a way which it's best not to talk about, for it can do no good. Remember how sorry I am for you! I shall often ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... competitors, that pure and sublime morality, of which He only hath given us both precept and example? The greatest wisdom was made known amongst the most bigoted fanaticism, and the simplicity of the most heroic virtues did honor to the vilest people on earth. The death of Socrates, peaceably philosophizing with his friends, appears the most agreeable that could be wished for; that of Jesus, expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, abused, insulted, and accused by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be feared. Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, blest, indeed, the weeping executioner ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... is perfectly equable. Here the question is a difficult and a remote one, and the method adopted for its solution is perfectly suitable in principle. It marks a step onward from mere observations to philosophizing upon their results. In practical astronomy, too, we note an advance. Not only are his results given, but also careful estimates of the errors to be feared in them, and a discussion of the sources of such errors. ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... empirical school, in its representative, Aristotle, met in the martyr of Nola an opponent vigilant, earnest, powerful. And while the legitimate prosecution of the former mode of philosophizing has led to deism, skepticism, atheism, and materialism, it is to those who have retained in methods, more mathematically clear and more perfectly developed than that which Bruno disseminated, but still bearing, as their key-note, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... theories in his minor writings, and in a lighter style seemed to express himself problematically upon the most weighty themes, then he still stood close enough to our friend; but when the huge system was erected, all those who had thus far gone their way poetizing and philosophizing in full freedom, were forced to see in Kant's monumental work a menacing citadel which would limit their serene excursions ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and then another. Zosephine no longer lifted to heaven a mutinous and aggrieved countenance. Bonaventure was often nigh, and his words were a deep comfort. Yet often, too, her spirit flashed impatience through her eyes when in the childish philosophizing of which he was so fond he put forward—though ever so impersonally and counting himself least of all to have attained—the precepts of self-conquest and abnegation. And then as the flash passed away, with a moisture of the eye repudiated by the pride of the ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... it? No philosophizing, please. Vodka is given us to be drunk, sturgeon to be eaten, women to be visited, snow to be walked upon. For one evening anyway live like ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... dear boy!" Ookhtishchev interrupted Foma, gently taking his arm. "That isn't right! You have just started to live and already you are philosophizing! No, that is not right! Life is given us to live! Which means—live and let others live. That's the philosophy! And that woman. Bah! Is she then the only one in the world? The world is large enough. If you wish, I'll introduce you to such ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... he were given to philosophizing he might say that the kindest thing even to the dead things was to let the new things come through. Thus life would be kept, and all the life that had ever been upon the earth perpetuated, ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... showing them living in it, instead of meditating about it with fine after-thoughts. Pamphylax describes the death of St. John in a desert cave. At first the individuals are clearly seen; but the poem soon lapses into philosophizing, and winds up with theology. Still, here is the power of reproducing the tone and sentiments of a long-buried and forgotten epoch, as if the matters involved had immediate interest and were vigorously mauled in all the newspapers. St. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... third has more the form of a treatise, and presents with some degree of symmetry the crude materials contained in the first. Having finished with his writings up to the year 1564, Cardan lapses into a philosophizing strain, and opens his discourse with the ominous words, "Sed jam ad institutum revertamur, deque ipso vitae humanae genere aliquo dicamus." He begins with a disquisition on the worthlessness of life, and repeats somewhat tediously ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... dark, and awoke refreshed, then lunched and nearly finished my last bottle of water. I had only sufficient food for two more light meals. After lunch I smoked for an hour, star-gazing and philosophizing. At 9 o'clock, emerging into the road, I started cautiously out, walking in the shadow of the jungle as much as possible. I thought the head of the inlet was about ten miles away, and expected to find a military post or at least a ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... ten times as much for you and he will pull with you—not against you. We're all human and like to be important. Remember that in handling men. It is one of the great secrets of success. Now off with you! You'll be late if you stand here philosophizing." ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... feet clad in stout new boots, and as the trunks were not brought up, there was no remedy; so having smoothed my hair as well as I could, and repeatedly twitched my obdurate collar, I proceeded to clomp down the two flights of stairs, philosophizing as I went; and with some difficulty found my way into the room where ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... don't say so. But for the theatre one can't begin practicing these effects too soon. Really, that voice puts a new complexion on Miss Blood. I have a theory to reconstruct. I have been philosophizing her as a simple country girl. I must begin on an operatic novice. I liked the other better. It gave value to the black silk; as a singer she'll wear silk as habitually as a cocoon. She will have to take some stage name; translate Blood into Italian. ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... wisdom if we intended to be reckoned among the number of men, there being nothing but his wisdom that first accused and afterwards sentenced him to the drinking of his poisoned cup. For while, as you find him in Aristophanes, philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring how far a flea could leap, and admiring that so small a creature as a fly should make so great a buzz, he meddled not with anything that concerned common life. But his master being in danger of his head, his scholar Plato is at hand, to wit that famous ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... letters. The laic confessor endeavours, before all things, to calm the impatience of this soul which is more and more ardent and more and more troubled every day. He battles with her about her mania of philosophizing, her wish to sift everything and to get to the bottom of everything. Strong in his own calmness, he kept repeating to her in a hundred different ways the words: "Be calm!" The advice was good; the only difficulty was ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... the captain who stood up in the sutler's hut without his boots." He recognized the agreeable, philosophizing voice with pleasure. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... time came when one could take them in a nearer view. Properly lived, life was too busy to admit of many questions, anyway. Always there were so many useful things to be done that scanty time remained for over much philosophizing. And, as for the man knocked down and out, whether by spiritual doubting, or black powder, it was for him to choose whether he would lie on his back and wallow limply in the dust of his emotions, or stiffen himself, ready ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... experience, in that moment saw Jean Jacques as he really was. Here was a man whose house of life was beginning to sway from an earthquake; who had been smitten in several deadly ways, and was about to receive buffetings beyond aught he had yet experienced, philosophizing on the tight-rope— Blondin and Plato in one. Yet sardonically piteous as it was, the incident had shown Jean Jacques with the germ of something big in him. He had recognized in M. Mornay, who could level him to the dust tomorrow ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... seen how he passed the night in philosophizing with M. Fouquet, but the musketeer was very weary even of feigning to fall asleep, and as soon as earliest dawn illumined with its gloomy gleams of light the sumptuous cornices of the superintendent's room, D'Artagnan rose from his armchair, arranged his sword, brushed his coat and hat with his sleeve, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Philosophizing and generalizing were, however, not in my line: I was accustomed to deal with action and definite observation, and I soon dropped the climate of the Mediterranean, and went to work on some of the soul-harrowing improvements in the Eternal City, alluding with particular warmth to the banishment ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... up the second act of the play. Banquo and Fleance enter; Macbeth has a few words with them; they depart, and after giving a servant an order, Macbeth begins another long soliloquy. He thinks he sees a dagger before him, and immediately falls to philosophizing: ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... finally gave way to faith and trust. When partial paralysis came to him at midnight, his sanity did not fail him, and knowing the worst, he yet hesitated to disturb the other members of the household, but went to sleep, philosophizing on the phenomena of the case—alert for more knowledge, as was his wont. Morning came and being speechless, he wrote on his ever-ready pad of paper and handing the sheet to his servant, watched with amused glances the perplexity and terror of the man. He next wrote to his friend, Mrs. Thrale, that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... prevailing rate paid for call loans in that historic corner), remembering that the interest on a penny compounded at this rate since the dawn of the Christian era would now represent fourteen millions of globes of eighteen-karat gold, each globe the size of our earth! We could not help philosophizing on the change which had taken place in banking principles and methods since those old days; and the whole inspection ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... between the two! Socrates, dying without a pain, without disgrace, easily sustains his part to the last. The death of Socrates, philosophizing with his friends, is the mildest that could be desired. That of Jesus, expiring in torments, injured, mocked, cursed by all the people, is the most horrible that can be feared. Socrates, taking the impoisoned cup, blesses him who presents it to him with tears. Jesus, in the midst of a frightful ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... shouted one of them to a servant, as I passed. "What! No milk?" The mingled consternation, bereavement, and indignation which struggled for full expression in the words beggar description. I can see his face and hear his tones to this day. Laughable to comedy; yet to a philosophizing turn of mind what an epitome of life! Do we not at every corner of experience meet the princess who felt the three hard peas under the fifty feather-beds? Sydney Smith's friend, who had everything else life could give, but ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... familiar with the reports of such things. The age of the trail, the haunts the red men are bound to, their object in going there, the numbers on the trail, and the tribe, or tribes to which they belong, can, in the majority of cases, be told with the greatest accuracy. It is by philosophizing on minute things, which in ordinary life would be considered mere trifles, and hardly worth a consideration, that this knowledge is arrived at. Thus, it takes but a minimum amount of wisdom to realize that a spear of grass, when trodden upon, is ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... peaceful philosophizing was interrupted by his mother, who, the moment she saw him, thought of the stone steps at home and of ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... brief quiet, then the warden said, "Well ... now that we've finished philosophizing, let's get back to the matter at hand. We can have everyone that's going ready to leave by seven tonight. Will ...
— Criminal Negligence • Jesse Francis McComas
... had his own family to support, and also that of Coleridge, who was philosophizing in Germany. Southey needed the money! Had the check not been sent in advance, Southey would have declined the commission. Southey began the work in distaste, warmed to it, got the right focus on his subject, used ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... conceptions—each branch of our knowledge—passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the theological, or fictitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; and the scientific, or positive. In other words, the human mind, by its nature, employs in its progress three methods of philosophizing, the character of which is essentially different and radically opposed: viz., the theological method, the metaphysical and the positive. Hence arise three philosophies, or general systems of conceptions on the aggregate of phenomena, each of which excludes the others. The first is the necessary ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... Shakspeare prefixed to this paper, contains probably as much as can be said of the mental, not less than the affectionate conditions, under which such a record as In Memoriam is produced, and may give us more insight into the imaginative faculty's mode of working, than all our philosophizing and analysis. It seems to let out with the fulness, simplicity, and unconsciousness of a child—"Fancy's Child"—the secret mechanism or procession of the greatest creative mind our race has produced. In itself, it has no recondite meaning, it answers fully its own sweet purpose. ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the limits of decorum; but every instant, to use a military figure, it would flash in the pan. Up on the bare rocks were the wretched, woe-begone, patched, and ragged log huts of poor Cuffee. The hour and the season were suggestive of philosophizing, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... solemn epigram. For the right understanding of the whole scene, the student must remember that Hamlet is philosophizing—following things out, curiously or otherwise—on the brink of a grave, concerning the tenant for which he has enquired—'what woman ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... these thy relations to me, the finite, I will be calm and blessed. I know immediately, only what I must do. This will I perform undisturbed and joyful, and without philosophizing. For it is thy voice which commands me, it is the ordination of the spiritual world-plan concerning me, and the power by which I perform it is thy power. Whatsoever is commanded me by that voice, whatsoever is accomplished ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... of all philosophical cognition. We must use this term in an objective sense, if we understand by it the archetype of all attempts at philosophizing, and the standard by which all subjective philosophies are to be judged. In this sense, philosophy is merely the idea of a possible science, which does not exist in concreto, but to which we endeavour in various ways ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... for the conduct of his life as for the preservation of his health and the discovery of all the arts, and that knowledge to subserve these ends must necessarily be deduced from first causes; so that in order to study the acquisition of it (which is properly called philosophizing), we must commence with the investigation of those first causes which are called PRINCIPLES. Now these principles must possess TWO CONDITIONS: in the first place, they must be so clear and evident that the human mind, ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... care of your baby while you went visiting—because these tasks had seemed worth while to her. She was more practical than either Panama or herself believed. All these years she had, without knowing that she was philosophizing, without knowing that there was a world-wide inquiry into woman's place, been trying to find work that needed her. Her father's death had freed her; had permitted her to toil for her mother, cherish her, be regarded as useful. Instantly—still ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... sociable than at Cleve. He is in very good humor; and makes less complaining about his ailments than usual. Nothing can be more frivolous than our occupations here:" mere verse-making, dancing, philosophizing, then card-playing, dining, flirting; merry as birds on the bough (and Silesia invisible, except to oneself and two others). [OEuvres de ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of merit as a painting; but some of her grateful devotees, having decorated her with a real blue silk gown, spangled with tinsel stars, and two or three crowns, one above another, of gilt foil, the effect is the oddest imaginable. As I was sitting upon a marble step, philosophizing to myself, and wondering at what seemed to me such senseless bad taste, such pitiable and ridiculous superstition, there came up a poor woman leading by the hand a pale and delicate boy, about four years old. She prostrated herself before ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... naturally lead us to conclude, that the sciences, from which they have derived all that they possess, must have been cultivated with corresponding energy. And such is the fact. Since the adoption of the inductive method of philosophizing, nearly all the sciences have been advancing rapidly and steadily; and the cause of this is to be found in adhering to the rules of induction. No science has been allowed to rest its claims upon mere theory, or authority of any kind, ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... in the sixth century B.C., may be said to have been a humanitarian or moralist instead of a mystic. Although he believed in a great first principle, or cause, which he termed Heaven, we are given to understand that in his philosophizing little mention ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... a page of philosophizing on time and eternity, immensity and space, and "monads who may develop or fulfil their destiny in other worlds than this," a reminiscence, perhaps, of the lectures on such topics at which Mr. Curtis says Isaac used to "look in," hoping to "find an answer to his questions." Such speculations ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... has been done in American mythology that very diverse opinions as to its interpretation prevail among writers. Too many of them apply to it facile generalizations, such as "heliolatry," "animism," "ancestral worship," "primitive philosophizing," and think that such a sesame will unloose all its mysteries. The result has been that while each satisfies himself, he convinces ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... is better to thank Providence for the tranquillity and happiness we enjoy in this country, in spite of the philosophizing serpents we have in our bosom, the Paines, the Tookes, and the Wollstonecrafts. I am glad you have not read the tract of the last-mentioned writer. I would not look at it, though assured it contains neither metaphysics nor politics; but as ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... eye with the complicated pattern. Where so many objects of art and virtu are to be exhibited, without this care in regulating and simplifying the ground tints, there would be no unity in the impression. This was my philosophizing on the matter, and if it is not the reason why it is done, it ought to be. It is as good a theory as most theories, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... doubtless Auerbach's best representative. 'The Villa on the Rhine' is in a lower key, with less appealing types, and less attractive local color. Moreover, it is weighted with more philosophizing, and its movement is slower. In 'On the Heights' the emotional situations are strong. In spite of sentimentality, a true feeling animates its technique. The atmosphere of a German royal residence, as he reveals it, appears almost as heavy as the real ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... understand life. Our philosophies, our explanations, our beliefs are everywhere confronted by facts, and these facts, prodigious, irrefutable, call us to order when we would deduce life from our reasonings, and would wait to act until we have ended philosophizing. It is this happy necessity that prevents the world from stopping while man questions his route. Travelers of a day, we are carried along in a vast movement to which we are called upon to contribute, but which we have not foreseen, nor ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... Greek historian Herodotus (484-424 B.C.) appears to have been the first to use the verb "to philosophize." He makes Croesus tell Solon how he has heard that he "from a desire of knowledge has, philosophizing, journeyed through many lands." The word "philosophizing" seems to indicate that Solon pursued knowledge for its own sake, and was what we call an investigator. As for the word "philosopher" (etymologically, a lover of wisdom), a certain somewhat unreliable tradition traces it back ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... when I say popular I do not mean apprehensible by villagers only. I mean apprehensible by Cabinet Ministers as well. It is unreasonable to look to the professional politician and administrator for light and leading in religion. He is neither a philosopher nor a prophet: if he were, he would be philosophizing and prophesying, and not neglecting both for the drudgery of practical government. Socrates and Coleridge did not remain soldiers, nor could John Stuart Mill remain the representative of Westminster in the House of Commons even when he was willing. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... culmination of Greek musical art upon the purely artistic and aesthetic side. Then followed a period of philosophizing, theory and mathematical deduction, which extended to the end of the Alexandrian schools, about 300 A.D. The limits of the present work do not permit tracing this course of progress with the amplitude which ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... trades unions, and in everything else by which they can protect themselves against the oppression of capitalists and employers, I say that this organization of ours is more upon the broad platform of philosophizing on the general questions of labor, and to discuss what can be done to ameliorate the ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... with the tabby cat, and ascended a step-ladder, merrily spurning Jasper's protection, to insert the circle of tapers on the crowning chandelier. There was nothing left for Dolores to do but to sit by in the window-seat, philosophizing on the remarkable effects of a handle to one's name, and feeling ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this as our necessary place in the Progressive Order of the Universe, I think it will help us to form a reasonable theory as to the reconstruction of the body. First of all, why have we any physical body at all? As a matter of fact we have one, and no amount of transcendental philosophizing will alter the fact, and so we may conclude that there is some reason for it. We have seen the truth of the maxim "Omne vivum ex vivo," and therefore that all particular forms of life are differentiations of the one Basic Life. This means a localizing of the ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... notion to the contrary is thoroughly democratic; the mob is the most ruthless of tyrants; it is always in a democratic society that heresy and felony tend to be most constantly confused. One hears without surprise of a Bismarck philosophizing placidly (at least in his old age) upon the delusion of Socialism and of a Frederick the Great playing the hose of his cynicism upon the absolutism that was almost identical with his own person, but men in the mass never brook the destructive discussion of their fundamental ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... must have been the hope of living happily, which impelled them to devote so much care and pains to that study. Now, if virtue was discovered and carried to perfection by them, and if virtue is a sufficient security for a happy life, who can avoid thinking the work of philosophizing excellently recommended by them, and undertaken by me? But if virtue, as being subject to such various and uncertain accidents, were but the slave of fortune, and were not of sufficient ability to support herself, I am afraid that it ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... may suffer at times from a dogmatic tolerance which refuses to draw lines between good and evil or between beautiful and ugly or between wise and foolish. But he gains, on the whole, as much as he loses by the magnitude of his cosmic philosophizing. These puny souls over which he broods, with so little dignity in themselves, take on a dignity from his contemplation of them. Small as they are, he has come to them from long flights, and has brought back a lifted vision ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... bitter days, I happened to read something besides those modern sycophants called pamphleteers, and who, out of regard for the public health, ought to be prevented from indulging in their crude philosophizing. Since I have referred to these good moments, let me mention one of them, they were so rare. One evening, I was reading the "Memoirs of Constant"; I came ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... it is audibly more so than the Gaelic. The words unquestionably do run into each other, in a way that, to our ears, renders it rather unintelligible; but it is contrary to all the rules of sound philosophizing, to confuse the obtuseness of our own senses with the want of any faculty in others; and they have just as good a right to maintain, and to complain of, our inarticulate mode of speaking, as we have of theirs—indeed much more—for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... she incites heresy in the rebellious mind of independent youth. She is so moral she makes one long for adventure. She would not listen to any questioning of old traditions, or any speculative philosophizing of a curious young mind, and she would be intolerant with any girl who showed an inclination ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... philosophers, not only asserted in the most pointed manner that all our knowledge must begin from experience, but also stated, in language much resembling the habitual phraseology of the most modern schools of philosophizing, that particular facts must be collected; that from these, general principles must be obtained by induction; and that these principles, when of the most general kind, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... imagine an hypothesis; we either consent to be for ever ignorant of them, or else we wait patiently until time, experience, with the progress of the human mind, shall throw them into light: is not, then, our manner of philosophizing consistent with truth? Indeed, in whatever we advance upon the subject of nature, we proceed precisely in the same manner as our opponents themselves pursue in all the other sciences, such as natural history, experimental philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, &c. We scrupulously ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... of him who seeks an ethical philosophy? To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those who are satisfied to be ethical sceptics. He will not be a sceptic; therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and renounce his original ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... a record of Thoreau's sojourn for about two years in the woods by Walden Pond. He went about two miles from his mother's door, built a little house or hut, and there lived, reading his favorite books, philosophizing, studying nature, and to a great extent avoiding society. Some people have condemned him as selfish, others have defended him. His best defense is his work. If anything so fresh and readable as Walden be the result, we might be willing to deny ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... of Pragmatic philosophy has been Darwinism. Indeed, the Pragmatic is the only philosophizing which has completely assimilated Evolution. The insight into the real fluidity of natural species ought long ago to have toned down the artificial rigidity of logical classifications. To know reality man can no ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... coordinate them with what he considered to be orthodox Christian tenets. Between him and Cyril, the Bishop or Patriarch of Alexandria, a quarrel accordingly arose. Cyril represented the paganizing, Nestor the philosophizing party of the Church. This was that Cyril who had murdered Hypatia. Cyril was determined that the worship of the Virgin as the Mother of God should be recognized, Nestor was determined that it should not. In a sermon delivered in the metropolitan church at Constantinople, he ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... girl stood on her father's verandah, gazing and philosophizing, Evan stood on the Watersea verandah at Mt. Alban, gazing also, but not reflecting. He was looking into the eyes of Julia, rather steadily for a lad of less ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... hero, that it will all come out right at the end,—that Philip will marry Charlotte, and have a good income, while the poor soul is wrestling with the res augusta domi. Dickens and Thackeray seemed to draw from each other in their later works; the former philosophizing more in his Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, and the latter attempting more of the descriptive in The Newcomes and Philip. Of minor pieces we may mention his Rebecca and Rowena, and his Kickleburys on the Rhine; his Essay on Thunder ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee |
