"Theist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... religion, and that sensible men never said what it was. Those who had a more definite and avowable creed were content to follow Stewart's amiable philosophising. Brougham professed, let us hope, sincerely, to be an orthodox theist, and explained the argument from design in a commentary upon Paley. Sydney Smith expounded Reid and Stewart in lectures which showed at least that he was still a wit when talking 'philosophy' at the Royal Institution; ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... power—who never succeed in accomplishing that feat at all. Therefore, while I feel bound to assert that the clearest and most irrefragable argument for the existence of God is that which is supplied by the idealistic line of thought, I should be sorry to have to admit that a man {20} cannot be a Theist, or that he cannot be a Theist on reasonable grounds, without first being an Idealist. From my own point of view most of the other reasons for believing in the existence of God resolve themselves into idealistic arguments imperfectly thought out. But they ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... writings, which have already been published; whoever knows that Mr. Pope was indebted to him for the plan of the noblest poem extant in any language, I mean his Essay on Man, must at once be convinced, from ocular demonstration, of the infamous falshood of this assertion. That his lordship was a theist, and a disbeliever in miracles and revelations, cannot and need not be denied. But that he was no atheist, no materialist, his acknowledged good sense is, alone, a sufficient proof. I do think scepticism the best and truest ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... rendering. If I were to answer with the jocosity in which my critic indulges, I certainly doubt whether he would justify me. So too, when a Pantheist objects (erringly, as I hold) that a Person is necessarily something finite, so that God cannot be a Person; if, against this, a Theist contend that God is at once a Person and a Principle, and invent a use of the word Personality to overlap both ideas; we may reject his nomenclature as too arbitrary, but what rightful place ridicule has here, I do not see. Nevertheless, it had wholly escaped my ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... himself all moral and intellectual perfection. These sublime truths, thus announced in the language of the prophet, [78] are firmly held by his disciples, and defined with metaphysical precision by the interpreters of the Koran. A philosophic theist might subscribe the popular creed of the Mahometans; [79] a creed too sublime, perhaps, for our present faculties. What object remains for the fancy, or even the understanding, when we have abstracted from the unknown substance all ideas of time and space, of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... co-operation by personal purity and nobility." To the Atheist it seems that the knowledge that the perfecting of the race is only possible by the improvement of the individual, supplies the most constraining motive which can be imagined for efforts after personal perfection. The Theist may desire personal perfection, but his desire is self-centred; each righteous individual is righteous, as it were, alone, and his righteousness does not benefit his fellows save as it may make him helpful and loving in his ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... self-confident, ceremonious Swede, who had read a great many books. At that time he was a new Rationalist, which seemed to promise one point of interest in common; but he was a follower of the Bostroem philosophy, and as such an ardent Theist. At this point we came into collision, my researches and reflections constantly tending to remove me farther from a belief in any God outside the world, so that after the Meeting Carl von Bergen and I exchanged letters on Theism ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes |
