"Tree of knowledge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... forget that such a place as Lacville existed; there she must banish Paul de Virieu from her heart and memory. Yes, there was nothing now to keep her here, in this curious place, where she had eaten, in more than one sense, of the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... of Lebanon, of Sharon, and of Carmel, is given to the church: that is, she is more beautified with gifts and graces than can by types and shadows be expressed. "The tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... are slow to believe that ever any man did, or could, learn the somewhat awful truth, that in a certain ruby-coloured elixir, there lurked a divine power to chase away the genius of ennui, without subsequently abusing this power. To taste but once from the tree of knowledge, is fatal to the subsequent power of abstinence. True it is, that generations have used laudanum as an anodyne, (for instance, hospital patients,) who have not afterwards courted its powers as a voluptuous stimulant; but that, be sure, has arisen from no abstinence in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... the dignity and importance of its objects, natural theology or theism, and natural religion or ethics. If we consider the order of the sciences in their rise and progress, the first place belongs to natural philosophy, the mother of them all, or the trunk, the tree of knowledge, out of which, and in proportion to which, like so many branches, they all grow. These branches spread wide, and bear even fruits of different kinds. But the sap that made them shoot, and makes them flourish, rises from the root through the trunk, and their productions ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... that eat of its fruit should ever die. From month to month and from year to year it had power to renew life perpetually. And on the other side of the river stood a tree which had power to make one wise. It was a tree of knowledge, one whose fruit would intoxicate and revitalize,—speeding up the action of life, causing one to think rapidly, and to see with a clearer vision. Setting the vitalities in a key where they must wear out, ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... Mother, Holy Church, Sit like a painted harlot: round her limbs An oily snake had coiled, who smiled, and smiled, And lisped the name of Jesus—I'll not tell thee: I have seen more than man can see, and live: God, when He grants the tree of knowledge, bans The luckless seer from off the tree of life, Lest he become as gods, and burst with pride; Or sick at sight of his own nothingness, Lie down, and be a fiend: my time is near: Well—I have neither child, nor kin, nor friend, Save thee, my son; I shall go lightly forth. Thou knowest ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... chains, And ever slipping backward to the brute. Shall he not break the galling, brazen bonds That bind him writhing on the wheel of fate? Long ages groveling with his brother brutes, He plucked the tree of knowledge and uprose And walked erect—a god; but died the death: For knowledge brings but sadness and unrest Forever, insatiate longing and regret. Behold the brute's unerring instinct guides True as the pole-star, while ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... little life, the hands, reaching out to the tree of knowledge, find themselves pushed back on all sides. The dearest wishes are made light of, the most earnest desires slighted, the most sacred thoughts ridiculed, till one marvels that men can grow up anything but devils. In ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... forbear expostulating with my destiny: Is this thy pastime, O Nature, to put such tricks upon a silly creature, and then to take off the mask, and show him how he hath been befooled? If this is the philosophy of human nature, my soul enter thou not into her secrets. It is surely the forbidden tree of knowledge; I no sooner taste it, than I perceive myself naked, and stript of all things - yea even of my very self. I see myself, and the whole frame of nature, shrink into fleeting ideas, which, like Epicurus's atoms, dance ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... contacts. So her daughter was subjected only to the maternal; it was not necessary to be definite in qualifying that. The girl had by this time a collection of ideas, gathered by impenetrable processes; she had tasted, in the ostracism of her ambiguous parent, of the acrid fruit of the tree of knowledge. She not only had an approximate vision of what every one had done, but she had a private judgment for each case. She had a particular vision of her father, which did not interfere with his being ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... that abound in our modern society. It is not at all needful to 'see life,' or to know the secrets of wickedness, in order to be wise and good. 'Simple concerning evil' is a happier state than to have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Many a young man has been ruined, body and soul, by a prurient curiosity to know what sort of life dissipated men and women led, or what sort of books they were against which he was warned, or what kind of a place a theatre was, and so on. Eyes are greedy, and there is a very quick ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in Banbury jail, whom he found preaching through the grates of his cell to the people in the street. On seeing Roberts he called to mind the story of Zaccheus, and declared that the word was now to all who were seeking Christ by climbing the tree of knowledge, "Come down, come down; for that which is to be known of God is manifested within." Returning home, he went soon after to the parish meeting-house, and, entering with his hat on, the priest noticed him, and, stopping ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... created man He placed him in a garden which He had planted eastward in Eden. In this garden God made to grow every tree that was pleasant to the sight and good for food; also, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil were in this garden, and a river to water it. It is said that God "walked in the garden in the cool of the day." That was in the day of literal things. We are now in the day of spiritual things, when ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... a rich bookseller's shop, Quoth he! we are both of one college, For I myself sate like a cormorant once Fast by the tree of knowledge. ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... in the four series of novels of the Spanish life he lived, in Madrid, in the provincial towns where he practiced medicine, and in the Basque country where he had been brought up. The foundation of these was laid by El Arbol de la Ciencia ("The Tree of Knowledge"), a novel half autobiographical describing the life and death of a doctor, giving a picture of existence in Madrid and then in two Spanish provincial towns. Its tremendously vivid painting of inertia ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... for the good times of sewing and spinning, Ere this new tree of knowledge had set them a sinning; The women are mad, and they'll build female colleges,— So here's to plain English!—a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... appeal that philosophy should approach more closely to practical life. His thought aims at setting forth, not any system of knowledge, but rather a method of philosophizing; in a phrase, this method amounts to the assertion that Life is more than Logic, or, as Byron put it, "The tree of Knowledge is not the tree ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... volumes "insufficiently concealed by the protecting web of a dead spider," condemns them to be sold, and converted for her own use into silken hoods and furred gowns.[238] Eve's descendants continue, thinks the bishop, to wrongfully meddle with the tree of knowledge. ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... biting its tail is, above all, applicable to science. It would appear that Claude Frollo had experienced this. Many grave persons affirm that, after having exhausted the fas of human learning, he had dared to penetrate into the nefas. He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit. He had taken his place by turns, as the reader has seen, in the conferences of the theologians in Sorbonne,—in the assemblies of the doctors of art, after the manner of Saint-Hilaire,—in the disputes of the decretalists, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... But I need not tell you that the magazine containing the profane treatise on consciousness was burned, while a livid picture was drawn of my own future if I persisted in stealing forbidden fruit from this particular tree of knowledge. ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... now I wish me to be dead." ... Tonight I bowed in silence under the vault of stars. To be holy is to lose the knowledge of good and evil through "clinging Heaven by the hems." To refuse evil is to refuse the apple (malum) of the Tree of Knowledge. There is no possibility of finding the ideal unless we look passionately for nothing but the beauty of souls, seeing therein God's image and refusing to perceive the clouds of evil. Circles lead to Heaven, but straight lines to Hell. Straight lines are the tangents that "err" from the sphere ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton |
