"Superstition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... toothache, every headache, every chill, every fever, every boil, and every wound, in fact, all their ailments, were attributed to such cause. Their so-called medicine practice was a horrible system of sorcery, and to such superstition human life was sacrificed on an enormous scale. The sufferers were given over to priest doctors to be tormented, bedeviled, and destroyed; and a universal and profound belief in witchcraft made them suspicious, and led to the killing of all suspected and obnoxious people, ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... soap-boiler, is a good man, and no one laughs at him or good Mrs. Bobus, as they have their dinner at one o'clock. But who will not jeer at Sir Thomas on a melting day, and Lady Bobus, at Margate, eating shrimps in a donkey-chaise? Yes, knighthood is absurd: and chivalry an idiotic superstition: and Sir Walter Manny was a zany: and Nelson, with his flaming stars and cordons, splendent upon a day of battle, was a madman: and Murat, with his crosses and orders, at the head of his squadrons charging victorious, was only ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... generally known, perhaps, that among ignorant seamen, Philanders, or Finns, as they are more commonly called, are regarded with peculiar superstition. For some reason or other, which I never could get at, they are supposed to possess the gift of second sight, and the power to wreak supernatural vengeance upon those who offend them. On this account they have great influence among sailors, and ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... inflicts an injury, as connected, as they are in a savage state, or in such portions of society as are yet undisciplined to civilization, with security that that injury will not be repeated in future. This feeling, engrafted upon superstition and confirmed by habit, at last loses sight of the only object for which it may be supposed to have been implanted, and becomes a passion and a duty to be pursued and fulfilled, even to the destruction of those ends to which it ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... gone through the lower corner of the four photographs and the glove! Peter laughed happily. "I had a gold coin in my pocket, and the bullet struck that. Who says that a luck-piece is nothing but a superstition?" ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... ground? Has earth a clod Its Maker meant not should be trod By man, the image of his God, Erect and free, Unscourged by superstition's rod To ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... tradition is reechoed by the mountains of Norway and Sweden in the ballad of "Sir Olaf and the Erl-king's Daughter," which the milkmaid of Brittany sings in the lay of the "Sieur Nann and the Korigan," and in a language radically different from the Norse,—when, here and there, the same forms of superstition meet us in the ancient popular poetry of the Servians and modern Greeks, which were familiar to the Teutonic and Cambrian races of early centuries,—must we not believe in a primeval intimate connection between ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... whether it be a narrow creek, or whether there be wide reaches, or what the shores may be like, we are ignorant. And this is all that is with certainty known concerning the origin of the inland sea of sweet water, excluding all that superstition and speculation have advanced, and setting down nothing but ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... authors and conductors of the ancient mysteries made high pretensions, just as do the modern advocates of secret societies. Perhaps the original design of the ancient mysteries was to civilize mankind and promote religion; that is, pagan superstition. But whatever may have been the design of the authors of them, it is certain that they became schools of superstition and vice. Their pernicious character and influence were so manifest that the ancient Christian writers almost universally exclaimed against them. (Leland's ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... it he would not. Such was James Cuyler. For thirty years he had stood at the Guardian's local threshold, fidelity personified, a watch-dog extraordinary that could not have been duplicated in all watchdogdom. He had but one superstition and but ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... of the soul after death seems to be an innate belief. It has been ascribed to the influence of the superstition about ghosts; but that superstition is only an unscientific form of the larger faith in the persistence of being. Where did this conviction originate? We think only of such things as have been experienced. No thought is ever entirely original. Even imagination ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... which is breeding into the world a race of cowards, weaklings and imbeciles; a race of mannikins, lacking the physical courage and mental initiative to think the thought and do the deed not inscribed in the book of practice; a race of pigmies, slaves to tradition and superstition, lacking all force of individuality and rushing, like wild maniacs, toward the treacherous eddies of that social cataclysm which has swallowed the far mightier and greater nations of the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... did the bravest thing that one could do in such a position, forcing his will to win a victory over weirdness and superstition. He crossed the shallow river and advanced boldly toward the Pyramid of the Sun. His reason told him that there were no such things as ghosts, but it told him also that Mexican peons were likely to believe in them. Hence it was probable ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... not speak of Old Nicka in a spirit of jest or levity. The bantering sense of our modern sobriquet for the Devil appears to have crept in during the decline of witchcraft. That frightful saturnalia of superstition was the Devil's heyday. He was almost omnipotent and omnipresent. But as witchcraft died out, partly through the growth of knowledge, and partly through sheer weariness on the part of its devotees, the Devil began ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... miraculous interference with the course of nature was rooted, is shown by the tenacity of the superstition about earthquakes. We can hardly believe that our Professor Winthrop, father of the old judge and the "squire," whom many of us Cambridge people remember so well, had to defend himself against the learned and excellent Dr. Prince, of the Old ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... cemented together with glue. They have also lances, and a formidable sort of club, consisting of a round stone, about two pounds in weight, fastened, by a short thong, to a wooden handle. Their defensive armour is a shield of buffalo's hide, manufactured with equal ingenuity and superstition. The skin must be the whole hide of a male buffalo, two years old, and never suffered to dry, since it was flayed off. A feast is held, to which all the warriors, old men, and jugglers, are invited. After the repast, a hole is dug in the ground, about eighteen inches deep, ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... the heaven of a Christian, cried Miss Temple; you deal now in the superstition ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... his quarters; and he spread his troops into the provinces of Maine, Beausse, and the Chartraine, which were abandoned to the fury of their devastations.[**] The only repose which France experienced was during the festival of Easter, when the king stopped the course of his ravages. For superstition can sometimes restrain the rage of men, which neither justice nor humanity ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... a Russian detachment could have been no novelty to the inhabitants of Daghestan in the year 1819; and even yet, it must be confessed, it is an event that gives them no pleasure. Superstition made them look on the Russians as eternal enemies—enemies, however, vigorous and able; and they determined, therefore, not to injure them but in secret, by concealing their hatred under a mask of amity. A buzz spread among the people ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... requiring that all the animals killed for food should be slaughtered before the door of the Tabernacle. There was a reason for this law; it was intended to guard against a debasing superstition; but how would it have been possible to obey it when the people were scattered all over the land of Palestine? It was adapted only to the time when they were dwelling in a camp in ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... distinctly the position of Louis XVIII. Marquis du Plessy had told me he was a mass of superstition. No doubt he had behaved, as Bellenger said, for the good of the royalist cause. But the sanction of heaven was not on his behavior. Bonaparte was let loose on him like the dragon from the pit. And Frenchmen, after yawning eleven months or so in the king's august face, threw ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Not a single star shone forth to illumine the track along which he stumbled. Everything around was silent and dark, and congenial with the work on which he was bent. But Wilson's heart beat a little more rapidly than usual. He is a bold enough man, as you know, but boldness goes for nothing when superstition comes into play. However, he trudged along fearlessly enough till he came to the thick woods just below the fort, into which he entered with something of a qualm. Scarcely had he set foot on the narrow track that leads to the graveyard, when he ran slap against ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... followed the initiative of the alderman and made a joint demand for the execution of the condemned priest. As he had often done before, Charles again threw over the Catholics. He announced his intention not to allow the increase of Popery or superstition in the country; he would forthwith issue a proclamation commanding Jesuits and priests to leave the kingdom within a month, and he was willing to submit the case of Goodman to the decision of both Houses.(436) Fortunately for Goodman, the City and the Commons had higher game to fly at in ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... and, with all the uncharitableness of a dogmatic faith, the spirits of children who died unbaptized, whose hard fate had thrown them into such evil company. This was the way in which that wide-spread superstition arose, which sees in the phantoms of the clouds the shapes of the Wild Huntsman and his accursed crew, and hears, in spring and autumn nights, when sea-fowl take the wing to fly either south or north, the strange accents and uncouth yells with which the chase is pressed on in upper air. Thus, ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... by over-work, of which he was slow to acknowledge the possibility. To work, indeed, he turned for one chief consolation. He refers incidentally to various significant performances. 'Last night,' he writes from Derby, April 10, 1862, 'I finished a middle at two; and to-day I finished "Superstition"' (an article in the 'Cornhill') 'in a six hours' sitting, during which I had written thirty-two MS. pages straight off. I don't feel at all the worse for it.' On Nov. 14 following he observes that he is 'in first-rate health.' He wrote all night from six till three, got up at ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... strikes a common person on first hearing this theory is that it is a very queer notion for any Christian man to invent. We are naturally curious to know how a man, educated in a Christian country, could have fallen into it. But it is, in fact, no new discovery, but an old heathen superstition. Some four hundred years before Christ, when the world had almost wholly apostatized into idolatry, Democritus, among the Greeks, became offended with the vulgar heathen gods, and set himself to invent a plan of the world without them. From Eastern ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... this, sir," he answered at last, with the shamefaced air of the intelligent laboring man who confesses to a superstition. "We Cornish are old-fashioned, and we has our ideas. The Tyrrels are new people like, in Cornwall, as we say; they came in only with Cromwell's folk, when he fought the Grenvilles; but it's well beknown in the county bad luck goes with them. You see, they're descended from that ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... make my attack on this prevalent and increasing superstition of the British need for conscription in two lines, one following the other. For, firstly, it is true that Britain at the present time is no more capable of creating such a conscript army as France or Germany possesses in the next ten years than she is of covering ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... "The superstition of the sailors about its being bad luck to kill an albatross is not by any means a new one. It is referred to by old writers, and you will find it mentioned in ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... when you reached lightspeed. It was only an arbitrary number. All else was superstition. Forget ...
— The Last Place on Earth • James Judson Harmon
... our ship. Most of them were ice-birds, blue petrels, and whale-birds, with a large admixture of albatrosses and Mother Carey's chickens. One of the passengers caught and killed one of the last-named birds, at which the captain was rather displeased, the sailors having a superstition about these birds, that it is unlucky to kill them. An ice-bird was caught, and a very pretty bird it is, almost pure white, with delicate blue feet and beak. Another caught a Cape pigeon, and I caught a stink-pot, a large ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... sacrifice it impelled, the hard life which it supported, witness to another level of being; reprove his own languor and comfort, his contentment with a merely physical mental life, and are not wholly to be accounted for in terms of superstition or ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... and character of the sons of God, you might as easily have been dozing in the smoke of a wigwam, brandishing a tomahawk, or dancing round an emboweled captive; or that you might yourself have been emboweled by the hand of superstition, and burnt on the altars of Moloch. If you remember these things, you can not but call to mind, also, who made you to differ from the miserable beings who have thus ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... himself became for the first time intelligible, he furnished the human race with what will probably be considered its most valuable key to the hidden mysteries of the mind. Freeing the dream from the superstition of olden times and from the neglect of later days, Freud was the first to discover that it is part and parcel of man's mental life, that it has a purpose and a meaning and that the meaning may be scientifically deciphered. It then invariably ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... sharp acclivities, and a Gothic church that is seen from afar and that is well worth viewing near by. These quaint edifices afford us deep delight, by their antiquity, architecture, size, and pious histories. What matters it to us how much or how little superstition may blend with the rites, when we know and feel that we are standing in a nave that has echoed with orisons to God, for a thousand years! This of Montmorency is not quite so old, however, having been rebuilt only ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... "Baras au Juzm," the two common forms of leprosy. See vol. iv. 51. Popular superstition in Syria holds that coition during the menses breeds the Juzm, Da al-Kabir (Great Evil) or Da al-Fil (Elephantine Evil), i.e. Elephantiasis and that the days between the beginning of the flow (Sabil) to that of coition shows the age when the progeny will be attacked; for instance if it take ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... The national qualities of superstition and pride made the whole cavalier class a wieldy and effective weapon in the hands of the monarch, and the use he made of them reacted upon these very traits, intensifying and ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... Granja. The only real ruler the Bourbons ever gave to Spain was Charles III., and to him Madrid owes all that it has of architecture and civic improvement. Seconded by his able and liberal minister, Count Aranda, who was educated abroad, and so free from the trammels of Spanish ignorance and superstition, he rapidly changed the ignoble town into something like a city. The greater portion of the public buildings date from this active and beneficent reign. It was he who laid out the walks and promenades which give ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... Jarvis whirled about, with revolver drawn. His own nerves were beginning to get too taut, with the tension exaggerated by the superstition and fright of ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... saw something," he thought, with a remnant of old superstition. "I do believe she thinks there's going to be bloodshed." And with a view to reassuring her, he caught up with her in the path through the belt of woods that led from the field to the road. Their horses were nose on tail, ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... suffer severely for their faith in Old France, and not a little in the new country. He had not cordially loved the English, but he felt that the larger liberty had been better for the settlement, and that education was the foe to superstition and bigotry, as well as ignorance. While he admitted to himself, and frankly to the town, the many excellencies of the priest, it was the system, that held the people in bondage and denied enlightenment, that he protested ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Bithynians worshipped on the mountains, the ancient Germans in the woods; and Diogenes, Zeno, and the Stoics, expressly condemned the erection of such edifices. The Arabians rendered homage to the sun, stars, and planets; and their religion resembled the ancient Chaldean superstition. The illustrious visitor of Solomon must, therefore, have been confounded at an architectural magnificence so superior to any thing she ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... nephews and nieces, by sisters of the deceased born of the same mother, as certainly of his blood. This rule is observed also in the order of succession in their royal families, and is a glaring proof of the strange effects of boundless superstition.[4] ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... 1770. Various causes are assigned for this, such as a ground frost, the carcasses of black-fish kept to rot in the harbor, and the like; but the most common account of the matter is,—and I find that a similar superstition with regard to the disappearance of fishes exists almost everywhere,—that, when Wellfleet began to quarrel with the neighboring towns about the right to gather them, yellow specks appeared in them, and Providence caused them to disappear. A few years ago sixty thousand bushels were annually brought ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... she would have been already leveled to the ground; and thus the citizens, who raised her again from the ashes to which Attila had reduced her, would have laboured in vain." See Paradise, Canto XVI. 44. The relic of antiquity to which the superstition of Florence attached so high an importance, was carried away by a flood, that destroyed the bridge on which it stood, in the year 1337, but without the ill effects that were apprehended from the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... small protegee in a most dainty and enticing manner. The little girl would have thought herself in an enchanted country if she had known anything about enchantment. But most of the stories she had heard were of Indian superstition, and so horrid she never wanted to recur to them. Madame Dubray was much too busy to allow her thoughts to run in fanciful channels, and really ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... and secretly preferred the old days, when her chum talked tennis instead of psychology; but the occult was paramount, and she was obliged to follow the fashion. The atmosphere of the Grange was certainly conducive to superstition. The dim passages and panelled walls looked haunted. Every accessory of the old mansion seemed a suitable background for a ghost. The juniors were frankly frightened. They did not dare to go upstairs alone. ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... became a daily occurrence, which the repeated reprobation of the Imperial power failed to check or punish. These inflammatory appeals to the ignorance and superstition of the masses, mendacious and absurd in their accusations and deeply hostile in their spirit, could not but work cumulative harm. They aimed at no particular class of foreigners; they were ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... there was no sound of Rachel mewing for her children. He returned to his room, having hurled the kitten down the hillside, and wrote out the incidents of the day for the benefit of his coreligionists. Those people were so absolutely free from superstition that they ascribed anything a little out of the common to agencies. As it was their business to know all about the agencies, they were on terms of almost indecent familiarity with manifestations of every kind. Their letters dropped from the ceiling—unstamped—and ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... recollection of the happy conjuncture of times and circumstances, under which our republic assumed its rank among the nations. The foundation of our empire was not laid in the gloomy age of ignorance and superstition, but at an epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood, and more clearly defined, than at any former period. The researches of the human mind after social happiness have been carried to a great extent; the treasures of knowledge acquired by the labours of philosophers, sages, and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain brutal fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at unearthly hours and running violently around fields for no object. Many men ruined their health in these dens of superstition, many died there. All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an asceticism, as much as the monastic rules. Men have over-strained themselves and killed themselves through English athleticism. There is one difference and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... the point of bigoted, credulous superstition. He spent long hours in prayer, and he talked freely of his special devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and his ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... been reckoned as disciples at all. There are times in the history of the Church when our Lord seems "crucified afresh, and put to an open shame," while His so-called disciples remain silent and hidden. Superstition and sin still join hands to put the Christ to death, to bury Him, and seal His sepulchre. But secret disciples are meanwhile avowing themselves; coming from the east, and the west, from the north, and from the ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... among them, as though every other chair deferred to it. This was the first article to arrest Milburn's attention, so different, so suggestive, almost a thing of superstition, poised, like a woman's instinct and will, upon nothing firm, yet, like the sphere it moved upon, traversing a greater arc than a giant's seat would fill. Purity and conquest, power and welcome, seemed to abide within it, like the empty throne ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... my Vindication of the 'Book of the Church,' in which though scarcely half of what was intended to be comprised, enough is done to prove the charge of superstition, impostures, and wickedness, upon the Romish Church. Whether I shall pursue the subject, in that form, depends on circumstances. I have employment enough in other ways, and would rather present my historical recollections in any form than that of controversy.... The revelations of sister Nativity ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... you ever know an Indian to have a reason for anything? He acts from instinct or superstition, and the latter is what ails Sconda now. Klota has been telling him some bosh about a presentiment she had, that something terrible is going to happen to us out here in ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... prove conclusively that ages elapsed before human beings were rash enough, or sufficiently blinded by falsehood and superstition, to attempt to construct a creative force unaided by the female principle. Just here it may not be out of place to refer to the fact that in the attempt to divorce God from Nature have arisen all the superstitions and senseless religious theories with which, since the earliest ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... quitting my knife and fork, and laying them across one another upon my plate, desired me that I would humour her so far as to take them out of that figure and place them side by side. What the absurdity was which I had committed I did not know, but I suppose there was some traditionary superstition in it; and therefore, in obedience to the lady of the house, I disposed of my knife and fork in two parallel lines, which is the figure I shall always lay them in for the future, though I do not know any reason ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... of his own judgment. If what was said earlier (See p. 159) about originality of thought seemed overstrained, demanding more of education than the capacities of average human nature permit, the difficulty is that we lie under the incubus of a superstition. We have set up the notion of mind at large, of intellectual method that is the same for all. Then we regard individuals as differing in the quantity of mind with which they are charged. Ordinary persons are then expected to be ordinary. Only the exceptional ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... religious edifice in the world. From all parts, pilgrims flocked to it; and kings made offerings to it. It was believed by the Jews to be the special seat of their deity; and the Romans, partly from policy, partly from superstition, paid respect and reverence to the gods of all the nations they subdued, and annual offerings had been sent ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... different way—they have the property of absorbing DISEASE and destroying it in certain cases; and these, after being worn a suitable length of time, naturally exhaust what virtue they originally possessed, and are no longer of any use. Stone amulets are considered nowadays as a mere superstition of the vulgar and uneducated; but it must be remembered that superstition itself has always had for it a foundation some grain, however small and remote, of fact. I could give a very curious explanation of the formation of ORCHIDS, those strange plants ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... is fond of lifting his "eyebrows" (supercilium), and a trivial matter is so commonplace that it can be picked up at the meeting of "three ways" (trivium). Dexterity implies skill with the "right" hand (dexter), while sinister preserves the superstition of ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... are only dying, they are in extremis, they are virtually defunct, but they are above-ground—we trip and stumble on them. We shall eventually lay them tidily away. This is a bad moment, because it's a moment of transition, and we still miss the old superstition, the bravery of execution, the eloquence of the lips, the interpretation of character. We miss these things, of course, in proportion as the ostensible occasion for them is great; we miss them particularly, for instance, when the curtain rises on Shakespeare. ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... help reflecting, what little Notion we have at this Time of Prodigies and Phenomena, that are not in the common Course of Nature. We are grown Epicureans in our Principles, and force our selves to believe, that it is Fear, Superstition, or Ignorance, to fancy that Providence sends the World a Warning in extraordinary Appearances: We buoy our selves up, that we only want such a Portion of Philosophy to account for what startles the Grossness of Sense, and to know that such Appearances must have their Cause in Nature, tho' ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe
... Settled on lands of his own, he was both farmer and landlord. Having no superior to whom he was obliged to look up, and producing all the necessaries of life from his own grounds, he soon became independent. His mind was equally free from all the restraints of superstition. No ecclesiastical establishment invaded the rights of conscience, or lettered the free-born mind. At liberty to act and think as his inclination prompted, he disdained the ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Grace. "I beg your pardon. I was curious to know how far superstition and persecution can go in our day." If the epithets were not very accurate, she used them with a woman's effectiveness, and her intention made them descriptive. "Good-day," she added, and she made a movement toward the door, from which Dr. Mulbridge retired. But she did not open the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... rising above them, looked grey in the moonlight. He picked up a stone and sent it right into one of the elm trees; some of the birds, disturbed from their roost, flew out, croaking, over his head. In the old days of superstition it might have been looked upon as an evil omen, coupled with what was to follow. Ah, Charley! if you could only foresee what is before you! If Mrs. Channing, from her far-off sojourn, could but know what grievous ill is ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... past, but now erect in the midst of desolation, with only scattered huts about them, where once there must have been a dense population, rich and lordly. The fate of these towering monuments of idolatry and superstition, now for the most part given over to the moles and the bats, shows what God can do for pagodas, and encourages us to believe that missionary effort will be mighty through God to the pulling down of similar more modern strongholds, together with all the high things that ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... in other projects of known utility, did he have much to endure and much from which to gather merit. With the zeal of Elias did he relentlessly persecute divine offenses, while he at the same time loved the persons most especially. It was the same for him to discover any trace of superstition or the slightest vestige of the badly extinguished infidelity, and to fly to its destruction with all his power. Amid continual risks of losing his life, he exercised his gigantic charity for many years in directing ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... prudent man that must define in each case the golden mean in relation to ourselves, which every moral virtue aims at. Thus, without prudence, fortitude passes into rashness, vindictive justice into harshness, clemency into weakness, religion into superstition. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... placed upon the young)—"you are too slow. You are asleep, stagnant, dormant, hibernating. The whole world is 'beating you to it.' Get over your baby superstition about love, and ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... judgment of Lord Evandale, who was finally inclined to settle in the belief that the heated and disturbed imagination of Edith had summoned up the phantom she stated herself to have seen, and that Halliday had, in some unaccountable manner, been infected by the same superstition. Meanwhile, the by-path which Morton pursued, with all the speed which his vigorous horse could exert, brought him in a very few seconds to the brink of the Clyde, at a spot marked with the feet of horses, who were conducted ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... find a spot where she could put down the foot of contradiction, for she came of a family known for what the neighbours called common sense, and in the habit of casting contempt upon everything characterized as superstition: she had now ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... they came from one or two, and then to three oranges; nay, at present we often find punch made all with oranges, and not one single lemon. For the Jacobites, before the death of that immortal Prince, had, by a superstition, formed a private prayer, that, as they squeezed the orange, so might that Protestant King be squeezed to death[177]: According to that ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... of divine Providence, good men of various denominations have planted mission stations within the hallowed enclosures of the proud monarch of that great empire, and in the midst of superstition and ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... many a long day. His horse, with muddied saddle, and broken reins trailing on the ground (muddied and broken, no doubt, by the horse rolling), was found next day grazing on the links. But of the judge, no trace. He might—as some, with the superstition of the day, were disposed to believe[1]—have been spirited away by a warlock; or, perhaps, even like Thomas the Rhymer, he had vanished into Fairyland. Tidings of him there were none. The flowing waters of the Forth had effectually wiped out his horse's tracks along the shore, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... that a king addicted to such habits should conceive any projects of utility or advantage for his people; he wished, however, to distinguish himself by some effort in their favour, or at least to relieve them from the trammels of superstition. He was a freethinker in a bad sense. He hated the religion of his country, because it laid some restraints upon his inclinations, and he determined to overthrow it; not for the purpose of introducing a better, a task ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... dormer window in each of its four sloping sides, became a gallery hung with poignant pictures of the past. And here was I leaving it with my life in my hands and my pockets full of stolen jewels! A superstition seized me. Suppose the conductor came down with me ... suppose I slipped ... and was picked up dead, with the proceeds of my shameful crime upon me, under the ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... felt no anxiety to attach her to his theories. But when he saw the intelligence growing in her eyes, the dawn of her soul deepening, there stirred within him a strong desire that she should face existence as he faced it, free from trammels of superstition. The mother, with the quick intuition of woman, soon understood his unexpressed feeling and thrilled with religious fear. Although—or indeed because—she loved her husband so much she was tortured by his lack of faith. And now she ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... glittering of wealth only to feed the insolent pride of those who will not in return feed their hunger—that the sordid niggard should find any sacrifices on the altar of his vanity—seems to arise from a blinder idolatry, and a more bigoted and senseless superstition, than any which the sharp eyes of priests have discovered ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... of this ballad is found in Arndt's Murchen, Berlin, 1816. The ballad appeared first in St. Nicholas, whose young readers were advised, while smiling at the absurd superstition, to remember that bad companionship and evil habits, desires, and passions are more to be dreaded now than the Elves and Trolls who frightened the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... stream of electricity passed through the company. Their mirth was extinguished, for none could wholly free their minds from the superstition of their age. The good Doctor sat down, and wiped his moistened eye-glasses. He would tell no more to-night, he said. He had really gone too far, making jest of earnest and earnest of jest, and begged pardon of Jumonville ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... brought necessarily with it an impulse to intellect as well as to morality. So startling are the facts it relates, so broad and deep the principles it lays down, so humane the spirit it inculcates, and so ravishing the hopes it awakens, that, however disguised in superstition and clouded by imperfect representation, it never fails to produce, in all countries to which it comes, a resurrection of the nation's virtue, and a revival, for a time at least, of the nation's political and intellectual energy and genius. Hence we find the very earliest literary names in our ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... would now seize Paris. We are witnesses of a struggle to the death. Against us is all that manifold power which emerges from the past, the spirit of monarchy, of superstition, of the barrack and of the convent; we have against us temerity, effrontery, audacity, and fear. On our side there is nothing but the light. That is why the victory will be with us. For to enlighten is to deliver. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... Brophy if he could tell them where the devil's sounding-stone was. There was indeed a superstition amongst these poor people that Kidd had buried his money under a rock he gave that name to; and that there was an agreement with his satanic majesty, who was to stand guard over it, and allow only those who had the talisman to lay ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... school-house. In the great revolution that followed the war, the heels were put where the brains ought to have been. An ignorant majority, without competent leaders, could not rule an intelligent Caucasian minority. Ignorance, vice, poverty, and superstition could not rule intelligence, experience, wealth, and organization. It was here that the "one could chase a thousand, and the two could put ten thousand to flight." The Negro governments were built on the shifting sands of the opinions of ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... exercise may have tired me, or perhaps it was some lingering remnant of the old farm superstition against the theatre that made me slacken my steps as I neared the office. I remembered my father's tremulous voice cautioning me against play-houses before I started for ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... with twins in her arms, who prayed that her insulter might have at one birth the same number of children as there were days in the year. Of course, notwithstanding the story being attested by a tablet in a church, it must be placed among the many other instances of superstition afforded by an ignorant and ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... The priest, who used to be an oracle to his flock, was asked first to every festivity, and consulted in every difficulty. "The priest says so" put an end to all questioning. With their religious feeling, superstition goes hand in hand. They believe in vampires, nightmares, witches, and "Vilen." The vampire is an evil spirit which appears by night to frighten men, in the guise of a lately dead man or woman "who had not ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... it has often been and is still grossly abused. It has often been encumbered and entangled with error and superstition; and therefore there have not been wanting radical purists who have not only set it aside, but cried it down as Romish and heathenish. The more sober and conservative churches have been content to purge ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... principle, why should they not apply the term folklore to the myths and stories that make up the body of Roman and Greek mythology? The present author reserves the term folklore for application to those unappropriated scraps of popular song, story, myth, and superstition that have drifted down the stream of antiquity and that reach us in the scrap-bag of popular memory, often bearing in their battered forms the evidence of ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... of London, whatever the night happened to be, light or dark, quiet or stormy, all shops were kept open on Saturday nights until twelve o'clock, at the least, and many for half an hour longer. There was no rigorous and pedantic Jewish superstition about the exact limits of Sunday. At the very worst, the Sunday stretched over from one o'clock, A. M. of one day, up to eight o'clock A. M. of the next, making a clear circuit of thirty-one hours. This, surely, was long enough. Marr, on this particular Saturday night, would be content ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... contents, is like reading over a roll of peers' names. We have, taking them as they stand, essays treating Of Great Place, Of Boldness, Of Goodness, and Goodness of Nature, Of Nobility, Of Seditions and Troubles, Of Atheism, Of Superstition, Of Travel, Of Empire, Of Counsel,—a book plainly to lie in the closets of statesmen and princes, and designed to nurture the noblest natures. Bacon always seems to write with his ermine on. Montaigne ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... But I'm not sure that there's any such thing as superstition. Superstition, in its essence, is merely a recognition of the truth that in a universe of mysteries and contradictions, like ours, nothing ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... "yellow yite," or yellowhammer, hovered round the gang when they were setting out. Still more ominous was the "peat" when it appeared with one or three companions. An old rhyme about this bird runs—"One is joy, two is grief, three's a bridal, four is death." Such snatches of superstition are still to be heard amidst the gossip of ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... felt abashed at his implied rebuke. It was not deserved, for he was guiltless of superstition. However, he had accepted the position of delegate of the top-floor, which, of course, was an hysterical floor, owing to the sex of its tenants. For Mr. Bartlett's meaning was the conventional one, that all women were hysterical, not some more ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Mother to her dead boy To a Dove Fall of Superstition The Infant St. John the Baptist Shelley's Obsequies The Fountain Revisited Death of Samson An ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... Martyr who for truth could die, When all about thee owned the hideous lie The world redeemed from superstition's sway, Is breathing freer for thy ...
— Quaint Epitaphs • Various
... which sexual acts are performed on children belong to the province of paedophilia. It is well known that in certain countries—Germany is one of them—a superstition prevails among certain strata of the population to the effect that venereal diseases may be cured by means of sexual intercourse with children. Where this is the motive of the sexual act, the case does not belong to ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... on the verge of a fearful upheaval of ignorance and superstition. Religion, our greatest blessing, perverted, will become our greatest curse. I cannot understand it, Cora; but we are on the brink of some terrible volcano, which ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... credit for merits we have not. Madame Beck herself deemed me a regular bas-bleu, and often and solemnly used to warn me not to study too much, lest "the blood should all go to my head." Indeed, everybody in the Rue Fossette held a superstition that "Meess Lucie" was learned; with the notable exception of M. Emanuel, who, by means peculiar to himself, and quite inscrutable to me, had obtained a not inaccurate inkling of my real qualifications, and used to take quiet opportunities of chuckling in my ear his malign glee over their scant ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Benassis' patients in Isere, who died in 1829, was buried on the same day as the last "cretin," which had been kept on account of popular superstition. Pelletier left a wife, who saw Genestas, and several children, of whom the eldest, Jacques, was born about 1807. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... more than once observed to the vicar, "Such music is quite heavenly." "I am in despair," cried out the village fiddler, "I may now stick my fiddle in my thatched roof, for a greater performer is come to reside in the parish." The existing superstition of the country is that his spirit, playing on his favourite instrument, still haunts one wing of Brynbella. If he designed the building, his architectural taste does not merit the praises she lavishes on it. The ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... That's the sort of thing we scientific men have to put up with nowadays, Mr. Cuthbertson. Ignorance, superstition, sentimentality: they are all one. A guinea pig's convenience is set above the health and lives ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... the accident, replaced the frame, relighted the candle, and went to work again. A second time the frame was thrown down. Thereupon the children ran away, afraid of a thing so strange, and, with the superstition common to their class, dreaming of witchcraft. The neighbors, attracted by their cries, refused to credit their story. So, returning, but with fear and trembling, two of them at first, afterwards a third, resumed their occupation, without the recurrence of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... celebrated dealer in the black art, who was regularly consulted, on the subject of all lost spoons, and the pilfering of servants, by the good housewives of the town, as recently as my school-boy days. The Dutch, like the Germans, appear to have been prone to this species of superstition; from which, even the English of education were far from being free, a century since. Mademoiselle Normand existed in the present century, even, in the sceptical capital of France. But, the somnambulist is taking ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... from the Persian Gulf to Formosa and Japan, and in the other from the wastes of Siberia to the Gulf of Siam. Scarce any of the other forms of heathenism darken so large a portion of the map as Buddhism,—a superstition which is estimated to include within its pale nearly one third of the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... loose feelings in religion—scarcely any. His sensibility and a slight constitutional leaning towards superstition and omens showed that the sense of devotion was, however, alive and awake within him; but with him religion was a sentiment, and the convictions of the understanding had nothing whatever to do with his creed. That ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... hour before dawn, traditionally the worst for man. The hour superstition sets apart for its own, when the life flame burns lowest. At a distance a dog had treed some little wood ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... churches were rapidly abounding and filled with members from every people. Those who, in consequence of the delusions that had descended to them from their ancestors, had been fettered by the ancient disease of idolatrous superstition, were now liberated by the power of Christ, through the teachings and miracles of His messengers."—(Eusebius, Eccles. Hist., Book ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... to his methods of proceeding that the Emperor learnt the news forty-eight hours late. Le Gaulois, in a somewhat officious explanation, informs us that the Russian Ambassador kept back his telegram because May 5 is the birthday of the Empress, and because there is a superstition in Russia that it is bad luck to get bad news on one's birthday. This explanation is untrue; there is no such superstition. Did they conceal from Nicholas II, on the day of his coronation, the terrible catastrophe at Khadyskaje, which cost the lives of thousands of Russians; and did this ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... woman of the mysterious warnings and the wild black eyes still thousands of miles away in America? Or was the march of events taking her unexpectedly, too, on the journey to Venice? Agnes started out of her chair, ashamed of even the momentary concession to superstition which was implied by the mere presence of such questions as ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... and his evident conviction of the origin of the wavering figures on the wall (which had now disappeared), that Arthur felt, had it not been for Angela, he would not be sorry to get clear of him and his shadows as soon as possible, for superstition, he knew, is as contagious as small-pox. When at length he reached his great bare bed-chamber, not, by the way, a comfortable sort of place to sleep in after such an experience, it was only after some hours, in the excited state of his imagination, that, tired though he was, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... art which give sensible form to ideas, to dogmas, to religious faith, to mystic exaltation, fulfil a noble mission. The caricatures, the aberrations of taste, the grotesque works with which a mistaken piety fills the church, also fulfil their object; but this is a sad one enough: They encourage superstition, cool enthusiasm, oblige the eyes of the believer to turn away from the altar, and, with the eyes, the souls that have not a very profound and a very firm ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... the people of England; and I will not bate a jot of heart or hope so long as the glorious principles and the immortal martyrs of the Reformation shall be held in reverence by the great mass of a nation which looks with contempt on the mummeries of superstition, and with scorn at the laborious endeavours which are now making to confine the intellect ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of the Ethics of the enlightened nations of antiquity, of the Jews, and of Jesus, no notice should be taken of the corruptions of reason among the ancients, to wit, the idolatry and superstition of the vulgar, nor of the corruptions of Christianity by the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... mass, toward the source, And blended with the general elements, When thy young star o'er life's horizon hung Far from it's zenith yet low lagging clouds (Vapors of earth) obscured its heaven-born rays— Dull joys of prejudice and superstition And vulgar decencies begirt thee round; And thou didst wear awhile th' unholy bonds Of "holy matrimony!" and didst vail Awhile thy lofty spirit to the cheat.— But reason came-and firm philosophy, And mild philanthropy, and pointed out The shame it was-the crying, crushing shame, To curb within ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... of course they have," said Lucy; "but once you come across a bit of superstition in this family, it is of no use to ask for reasons. However, this particular bit is too ridiculous even for George. Owing to Mr. Leslie having come to-day, we must use every room in the house: it is ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... solely because of the hideous fate to which I was condemned, but from the contemplation it engendered of the sad decadence of a once enlightened race. To these depths of ignorance, brutality, and superstition had the vaunted civilization of twentieth century England been plunged, and by what? War! I felt the structure of our time-honored militaristic arguments ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... stumbling-block to the reforming party. He was a disgrace, they wrote, to the city; he practised secret and wicked arts, and had sold his soul to the enemy. It was of a piece with the gross corruption and superstition of the Babylonish Church that such a viper and blood-sucking Troldmand should be patronized and harboured by the Bishop. The Bishop met these reproaches boldly; he protested his own abhorrence of all such ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... of superstition mar: True to the earth she is, patient and calm. Her tranquil eyes shall ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... "that she should continue in a darkness penetrated only by the dim light of nature than be made a victim of Roman superstition." ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... as far as I can make out, Pierre is right. There's some rotten bad luck that follows him. It may not be the cross—I don't suppose you believe in superstition like that, Miss Brown?" ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... measures that are independent of drugs has been coincident with popular emancipation from the mere superstition of drug-administration. The older lists of approved remedies were loaded with items that had no curative properties at all, except by suggestion. They were purely magical—the thumb-nails of executed criminals, the hair of black ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... worst of fear,—to superstition. But whether that, or fondness of a wife, (The more unpardonable ill) has seized you, Know this, the Grecians think you fear Achilles, And that Polyxena ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... preponderance of the imagination during the middle Ages: intensity of religious feeling, ceaselessly repeated epidemics of superstition; the institution of chivalry, with all its accessories; heroic poetry, chivalric romances; courts of love, efflorescence of Gothic art, the beginning of modern music, etc. On the other hand, the quantity of imagination applied during this epoch to practical, industrial, commercial invention ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... story, in conjunction with song, of the great misfortunes which overtook a Negro who tried to get his living by hunting Jaybirds. Finally it also belongs under the heading Superstitions, for its last stanza very plainly alludes to the old Negro superstition of slavery days which declared that it was almost impossible to find Jaybirds on Friday because they went to Hades on that day to carry sand ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... humanity endures? But of the seven sciences of antiquity, two alone deserve the name,—their arithmetic and their geometry. Their music was a cumbrous and complicated machinery, and the others were exercises of wit and pleasure and superstition. It is true that the Egyptian excelled, that the Arabian delved somewhat into the secrets of nature; but who venerates those people, and who spends all that season in study of their language that he should spend in putting oxygen into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... self-constituted interpreter of the will of the gods, stood in front of the only refuge from harm and demanded as the price of entrance that ignorance, that asceticism, that self-abnegation which could but end in the complete subjugation of man to superstition. He was taught that Heaven, the refuge, was the very antithesis of Earth, which was the source of sin. To gain for himself a seat in Heaven, man devastated the Earth. Yet she renewed herself, the good mother, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... exceedingly difficult to give them at once the sound of the words, and their signification, which they were careful to inquire. Besides this, there was the task of correcting the false ideas, and remedying the ignorance and superstition which presented so formidable an obstacle to rational improvement. We did our best, however, and had the satisfaction of seeing them, after a time, making really respectable progress with their spelling-book, and, what was still more encouraging, acquiring a degree of light and knowledge ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... draining off great stagnant pools of population which no current of intellectual or moral activity has stirred for ages. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of those who represent the very lowest stage of degradation to which human beings can be reduced by hopelessness, hunger, squalor, and superstition, are found among the new citizens whom the last decade has brought into the Republic." It is known beyond doubt that prisoners' aid societies in various European countries have been steadily shipping convicts to the United States. Neither has it been an uncommon thing for ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... young author's nascent seriousness, and his still existing Buskbody superstition, combine to spoil the book, not merely, as in the Tristan case, to top-hamper it. Having given us eight pages of rather cheap sermonising about the poetry of youth not lasting; having requested us to imagine Manon and Des Grieux "decrepit and catarrhous," Paul and Virginie shrivelled and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... that this time, in pointing towards the house, Israel unavoidably pointed towards the advancing man. Hoping that the strangeness of this coincidence might, by operating on the man's superstition, incline him to beat an immediate retreat, Israel kept cool as he might. But the man proved to be of a braver metal than anticipated. In passing the spot where the scarecrow had stood, and perceiving, beyond the possibility of mistake, that ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... that I paint flesh lower in tone than it is in nature, is entirely based upon the popular superstition as to what flesh really is—when seen on canvas; for the people never look at nature with any sense of its pictorial appearance—for which reason, by the way, they also never look at a picture with any sense of nature, ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... getting their dinner allowances of soup and meat in exchange for tickets. I was told that people thought they got slightly more if they took their food in this way straight from the kitchen to their own rooms instead of being served in the restaurant. But I watched closely, and decided it was only superstition. Besides, I had not got a ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... eyes and general expression approved the words of Hartrott. What he had just said was only too true—the world was a victim of "the German superstition." An intellectual cowardice, the fear of Force had made it admire en masse and indiscriminately, everything of Teutonic origin, just because of the intensity of its glitter—gold mixed with talcum. The so-called Latins, dazed with admiration, were, with unreasonable pessimism, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a product of our century as the poetry of Tennyson. Miracle Plays were shown at Oberammergau and in the town about it more than five hundred years ago, but the Passion Play of to-day is not like them. The imps and devils and all the machinery of superstition are gone. Harmony has taken the place of crudity, and the Christ of Oberammergau is the Christ of modern conception. The Miracle Play, dead or dying everywhere else, has lived and ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... from the continent. All ranks, all orders of society, all religions, leaned upon his power to ameliorate disease, and to prolong existence. The rigid and sternly pious, who had attempted to renounce his aid, from a superstition that no blessing would attend the prescriptions of a sceptic, sacrificed, after a time, their superstitious scruples to their involuntary consciousness of his mighty skill." Mr. Mathias, though ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... I can reply," said my good master, "that I believe of demons all that is reported of them in the Scriptures, and that I reject as error and superstition all and every belief in spells, charms and exorcism. Saint Augustine teaches that when the Scriptures exhort us to resist the demons, it requires us to resist our passions and intemperate appetites. Nothing is more detestable ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... always more or less civilised. Sometimes, poor fellows, they are stripped and plundered by their naked relatives, but at any rate they help, by what they have learnt, to improve the style of life in those native groves, so sunny but so full of superstition and barbarous rites. ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... seeing that Free Joe was asleep, had grown somewhat impatient, and he concluded to make an excursion to the Calderwood place on his own account. Lucinda was inclined to give the incident a twist in the direction of superstition. ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris |
