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More "Disbelief" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Coroner, he waited for his dismissal, and receiving it, walked back not to his lonely corner, but to his former place between his father and brother, who received him with a wistful air and strange looks of mingled hope and disbelief. ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... disbelief at this, she put her arms round his neck, and raised her tear-stained face to his: her eyes were blurred and sunken with crying, and her lips were white. He knew every line of her face by heart; he had known it in so many moods, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... francs to the first comer, heretic, scoffer or infidel, that might take a fancy to buy it. This would hardly have been the case when the pope was absolute master of Rome and of all in it. The thing could not have happened save by the dishonesty and cynical disbelief of some priest, and indeed probably of more than one. And, upon the whole, it struck me as a second curious indication of the somewhat breakneck speed with which the threads of history are spinning themselves in these days ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... wrists, from which the bandages had fallen without his notice. A deep red ring encircled each, and it was obvious from their faces that others believed, even if the lieutenant did not. But he, too, dropped at least a part of his disbelief. ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... to the genuineness of your story has turned up," said Gortsby, holding out the cake of soap; "it must have slid out of your overcoat pocket when you sat down on the seat. I saw it on the ground after you left. You must excuse my disbelief, but appearances were really rather against you, and now, as I appealed to the testimony of the soap I think I ought to abide by its verdict. If the loan of a sovereign is any ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... 2. His disbelief that Lord Aberdeen would be able to join in any Government abandoning Sir R. Peel's principles, as he had been consulted before and after Sir James's late speech in which ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... own life the development of a nation. He progresses from unquestioning happiness to childish inquiry and wonder, from fairy tales of princes and dragons to actual knowledge; through inquiry to doubt, through faith to disbelief, through civilisation ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... good-tempered and light-hearted. He could check it by an exhibition of frankness. But this frankness was impossible to him, and as it was impossible he must allow Doro to suspect him of sordid infamies. He knew, of course, the Neapolitan's habitual disbelief in masculine virtue, and did not mind it. Then why should he mind Doro's laughing thought of himself as one of the elderly crew who cling to forbidden pleasures? Why should he feel ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... peace. She was a wife—I would never let her know that all my heart was hers. This I determined. But man is weak, and the very atmosphere of France dried up the springs of every honest impulse. Everywhere was scoffing, raillery and disbelief. Honor, friendship and virtue were regarded as the vain chimeras of a fool. Why should not I ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... narrative is to all but the narrator. It would be dismal even if sprightly and vivacious, for all men are rivals in woman's favor, and to relate your successes to another man is to rouse in him a dumb resentment, tempered by disbelief. You will not convince him that you tell the tale for his entertainment; he will hear nothing in it but an expression of your own vanity. Moreover, as most men, whether rakes or not, are willing to be thought rakes, he is very likely to resent a stupid and unjust inference ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... to be of your opinion, Flora," said Lyndsay, "in spite of my disbelief in signs and omens. There is something beyond mere accident ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... written by recent or living travellers."[179] The scorn passed upon "travellers' tales," the application of the term "romance" to the early descriptions of voyages, have done the same amount of mischief to these early chapters of history as the constant disbelief in the value of tradition has done to the ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... eminent degree, that any farmer who has the power to obtain it, evinces great folly and perverse obstinacy, if he continue to cultivate his land without applying it; either for want of faith, or pretended disbelief in its efficacy; or because he thinks the price fixed upon it by the Peruvian Government, "unjustifiably high;" or because although he has no doubt it will answer in the moist climate of England, is sure it will never answer in this dry climate; ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... or hinted at in the course of this argument must have formed themselves in the minds of at least a few Filipinos of independent character. Otherwise how shall we account for the fact that some declare their disbelief in the possibility of independence? How else shall we explain what is far more significant, the silence under this head of the really first-rate men of the Archipelago? Is it not worthy of note that Rizal himself, the posthumous apostle of the Philippines, never ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... persons except the Epicureans.[453] Among the Fathers of the Church there was some difference of opinion; while in general they denied the existence of human beings beyond the limits of their Oecumene, or Inhabited World, this denial did not necessarily involve disbelief in the globular figure of the earth.[454] The views of the great mass of people, and of the more ignorant of the clergy, down to the time of Columbus, were probably well represented in the book of Cosmas Indicopleustes already cited.[455] Nevertheless ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... keeping our prisoner. Mott lay on the floor, his body still warm, quite dead. I judged that he had expired within the past few minutes. He had been struck with some blunt instrument and then knifed. The man had paid for his obstinate disbelief with his life. ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... disillusion of those people, if they had ever expected anything of Tolstoi, and if they really believed that this demagogue Prince, who stands in nice poses in the middle of drawing-rooms and of prison cells, talking nonsense with a convincing disbelief, was in any sense a mouthpiece for Tolstoi's poor simple little gospel. Tolstoi according to Captain Marshall, I should be inclined to define him; but I must give Mr. Tree his full credit in the matter. When he crucifies himself, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... said Alice, rising with an air of cold dignity, which plainly indicated her entire disbelief of the statement she had just heard—"Say no more: you have mistaken your position, when you seek to prejudice me against a gentleman whom I am so soon to call my husband. Nay, not a word more—I will not listen to you. The Chevalier Duvall is the very soul of honor; and to accuse him—how ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... interrupted Leslie, "you have no right to assume that a disbelief in a general Good, however genuine, necessarily involves a sheer egoism in conduct? For a man might find that his own Good consisted in furthering the Good of other people; and in that case of course he will try to ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... said nothing, the expression on his face was one of such utter disbelief that even Tom noticed it and turned ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... minds of the people to themselves, and to reconcile them to their own purposes, by the assistance of superstition: but by their contempt for auguries, and their inward conviction of their falsity, they were led into a disbelief of the Divine Providence, and to despise religion itself; conceiving it inseparable from the numerous absurdities of this kind, which rendered it ridiculous, and consequently unworthy a ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... thoughts was growing more and more unendurable every moment. A confusion of doubts, questions, suspicions which she could not at once see clearly enough to cast off, and sorrow, raged and fought in her mind with indignant rejection and disbelief of them. What should she do? How could she tell what was right? Mr. Richmond! She would ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... rim of the ledge and looked at him; warily, as he looked at it. With the wariness was something like question, and almost disbelief. ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... cat-sized creature with a valuable fur imported from Hudson's Bay and Canada in prodigious numbers.—"My eye and Betty Martin," is a common expression implying disbelief; a corruption of ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... he calls it by an ugly name!" Then it occurred to her that the world tells lies every day,—telling on the whole much more lies than truth,—but that the world has wisely agreed that the world shall not be accused of lying. One doesn't venture to express open disbelief even of one's wife; and with the world at large a word spoken, whether lie or not, is presumed to be true of course,—because spoken. Jones has said it, and therefore Smith,—who has known the lie to be a lie,—has asserted his assured belief, lying again. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... Suppose he had proved to the world's satisfaction that all religion is a hoax, and all men professing it are liars, how does that comfort me in my hour of sorrow? Scoffing will not sustain a man in his solitude, when he has nobody to scoff at; and disbelief is only a bottomless tub, which will not float me across the dark river. If Infidels intend to convert the world, they must give us some positive system of truth which we can believe, and ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... him, bewildered, amazement, disbelief, and anger flowing in quick waves across her face. The three men held their breaths. Moreland, Senior, took a step toward her; Mr. Farnam's mouth dropped a little open as he waited, panic-stricken, for ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... laboured with courage, as they had been taught, rejoicing in the hope of the promise given them. Their greatest danger was in the disbelief of their teachers. Though every one had a copy of the law, few read it; all were ready, by some excuse, to avoid this duty. Some asserted they knew it, yet never thought on it: some called these the laws ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... important end would be answered by recording such opinions, or by collecting the history of all the cases they could find in which no evidence of the influence of contagion existed, I believe they are in error. Suppose a few writers of authority can be found to profess a disbelief in contagion,—and they are very few compared with those who think differently,—is it quite clear that they formed their opinions on a view of all the facts, or is it not apparent that they relied mostly on their own solitary experience? Still further, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... beings are among the agents of torment. In the second circle the torments commence with the sin of incontinence; and the punishment goes deepening with the crime from circle to circle, through gluttony, avarice, prodigality, wrath, sullenness, or unwillingness to be pleased with the creation, disbelief in God and the soul (with which the punishment by fire commences), usury, murder, suicide, blasphemy, seduction and other carnal enormities, adulation, simony, soothsaying, astrology, witchcraft, trafficking with the public interest, hypocrisy, highway robbery ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... all Jewish prayer is not petition but praise. Still, Judaism believed, not that prayer would be answered, but that it could be answered. In modern times the chief cause of the weakening of religion all round, in and out of the Jewish communion, is the growing disbelief in the objective validity of prayer. And a similar remark applies to the belief in miracles. But to a much less extent. All ancient religions were based on miracle, and even to the later religious consciousness a denial of miracle seems to deny the divine Omnipotence. ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... London particular that had been experienced for years. It was the sort of day when the City clerk has the exhilarating certainty that at last he has an excuse for lateness which cannot possibly be received with harsh disbelief. People spent the day indoors and hoped it ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... sceptic. His utter disbelief in Christian's testimony regarding the footprints was based upon positive scepticism. His reason refused to bend in accepting the possibility of the supernatural materialised. That a living beast could ever be other than palpably bestial—pawed, ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... man was perverse in his agnosticism; he was stubborn in disbelief. It was on his nerves; on his conscience; he ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... turned toward his bride. There was disbelief, hope, despair, in his face, which had grown older by years with the ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... her and at me, fearfully at first, then with a strange look in her eyes, between awe and disbelief ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Admiration mingled with disbelief in the barmaid's voice. A little stir of interest went round the crowded, smoky room ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... suppose him ignorant that Materialism, as he taught it, is totally irreconcileable with that God, and that Religion in which he professed to believe. Belief in inconceivable entities cannot be reconciled with disbelief of all entities, save those of which we can frame clear and distinct ideas. Nor is it easy to persuade oneself that Locke could so far have done violence to his own principles as to feel 'lively faith' in a 'science' with no other aim, end, or ground-work, than 'the ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... the dust of unremembered nothings, and the name of Sah-luma shall carry no meaning to any man born in the coming here-after! For thou hast cherished within Thyself the poison that withers thee, ... the deadly poison of Doubt, the Denial of God's existence, ... the accursed blankness of Disbelief in the things of the Life Eternal! ... wherefore, thy spirit is that of one lost and rebellious,—whose best works are futile,— whose days are void of example,—and whose carelessly grasped torch of song shall be suddenly snatched from thy hand and extinguished in darkness! God ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... me.' He laughed oddly, a tremulous little crow of a laugh, at the same time stroking his head, as if to deprecate disbelief. 'You never heard of the sale of the Christopherson library? To be sure, you were too young; it was in 1860. I have often come across books with my name in them on the stalls—often. I had happened to notice this just before ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... the universe, like Omar Khayyam, according to the heart's desire. And nothing can be more different than such an instinct from the alleged satisfaction in playing with dolls and knowing that they are not real people. By an odd paradoxical coincidence, that very disbelief in the real character of art, and that divorce betwixt art and utility, is really due to our ultra-practical habit of taking seriously only the serviceable or instructive sides of things: the quality of beauty, which the healthy mind insists upon in everything it deals with, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... knowledge of the phenomena which we recognize through the senses. A scientific fact is a fact perceived by the senses. Scientific evidence is evidence addressed to the senses. At one of the meetings of the Victoria Institute, a visitor avowed his disbelief in the existence of God. When asked, what kind of evidence would satisfy him? he answered, Just such evidence as I have of the existence of this tumbler which I now hold in my hand. The Rev. Mr. Henslow says, "By science is ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... the waste of forensic dispute, being always distinguished by vigor and soundness, though without any literary quality, such as Clay's occasional performances had. Berkeley, who covered his own lazy and miscellaneous reading with the mask of eclecticism, and proclaimed his disbelief in a prescribed course of study, was wont to say that Doddridge was the only man that he knew who was using the opportunities given by the college for all they were worth, and really getting out of "the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... sufficiently disposed to usurp a latitude for themselves, without taking a licence also from infidelity to enlarge their range. It is, therefore, fortunate that, for the causes just stated, the inroads of scepticism and disbelief should be seldom felt in the mind till a period of life when the character, already formed, is out of the reach of their disturbing influence,—when, being the result, however erroneous, of thought and reasoning, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... comes out more strongly marked. All these inimitable niceties the finished art of a great actor can alone properly express. Shylock is a man of information, in his own way, even a thinker, only he has not discovered the region where human feelings dwell; his morality is founded on the disbelief in goodness and magnanimity. The desire to avenge the wrongs and indignities heaped upon his nation is, after avarice, his strongest spring of action. His hate is naturally directed chiefly against those Christians ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... pensions, the death of his father, and lucky financial speculations brought Voltaire independence. He travelled in 1722 to Holland, met Jean-Baptiste Rousseau on the way, and read aloud for his new acquaintance Le Pour et le Contre, a poem of faith and unfaith—faith in Deism, disbelief in Christianity. The meeting terminated with untimely wit at Rousseau's expense and mutual hostility. Unable to obtain the approbation for printing his epic, afterwards named La Henriade, Voltaire arranged for a secret impression, under the title La Ligue, at Rouen (1723), whence ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Prince, "Thou sayest sooth, O King, but if thou summon thy slaves and thy soldiers and they fall upon me and slay me, as thou pretendest, thou wouldst but publish thine own disgrace, and the folk would be divided between belief in thee and disbelief in thee. Wherefore, O King, thou wilt do well, meseemeth, to turn from this thought to that which I shall counsel thee." Quoth the King, "Let me hear what thou hast to advise;" and quoth the Prince, "What I have to propose to thee is this: either ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... must tell her. To do this he found it necessary to sit on the sofa close to her. What he told her made her blush very rosy again, and stammer a little as she declared her disbelief in all he said, and was sure there were the prettiest girls in the world in New York, and that he had never thought of her a moment. And no, she would not listen to him—she did not believe a word he said; and—yes, of course, she was glad to see any old friend; ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... adjustment of the probabilities, accorded the homely verisimilitude of their worldly-wise representations the meed of a simple and respectful credulity. The mountaineers were ignorant indeed in their sort, but far too sophisticated to entertain aught but the most contemptuous disbelief in her pretensions of special foresight and mysterious endowment. They did not fear her discrimination, and told their story, through an interpreter, with a glib disregard of any uncanny perspicacity on her part. She was one of the many Indians of the reservation who speak no English. Her ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... maxims, so that they might discover the weak side of every man, and so be able to outwit him. Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. According to this, every man had his price. They did not believe in the Nemesis of a divine destiny; on the contrary, disbelief in the higher justice was taught. One must be so elastic as to suit himself to all situations, and, as a caricature of the ancient ataraxy, he must acquire as a second nature a manner perfectly indifferent to all ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... chiefly among insects and especially among butterflies that we find the greatest number of such cases. Several of these have been minutely studied and every detail has been investigated so that it is difficult to understand how there can still be disbelief in regard to them. If the many and exact observations which have been carefully collected and critically discussed for instance by Poulton[47] were thoroughly studied the arguments which are still frequently urged against ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... astounded: he had certainly probed deep this time into the feminine nature. With every desire and instinct to disbelieve the facts, the deeper his inquiries went, the stronger the evidence rolled up: there was no gainsaying it; no sense in a further disbelief of it. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... Bruno-Bauer, and Feuerbach. At Oxford,' he added, 'these pernicious doctrines are demoralizing the university. Blanco White and John Sterling were but the pioneers of a large party of university men, who are preparing to avow their disbelief in Christianity.' The Doctor was right. Francis Newman, brother of the Puseyite Newman, who seceded to the Romish Church, and belongs now to the Oratory of St. Philip Neri,—Froude, brother of the deceased Puseyite ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... proud of it. There must be something good mixed with his common clay for him to achieve so much. I am glad and proud, as proud as I am of General Washington's thanks the other day; you need not look at me with such disbelief in your eyes, for I only say what is true. So now tell me ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... till I'm through," Andy advised, still wholly unconscious of their disbelief. "Yuh was all kinda skeptical when I told yuh he had a guilty conscience, but I was right about it, and come mighty near laying out on the range to-night with my toes pointing straight up, ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... the situation and character as established by the dramatist on the imaginative level. The author's words on illusion recall the passage in Dryden about reason's suffering itself to be "hoodwinked" by imaginative presentation, foreshadow Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief," and directly suggest Johnson's passages on the subject. Experience will show, he says, "that no Dramatick Piece can affect us but by the Delusion of our Imagination; which, to taste true and real Pleasures at such Representations, must undergo a very great Imposition." ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... sudden and chilly silence; men looked at one another. Obviously no man could have traveled that distance between dawn and dark, but it was as well not to express disbelief to a man who could tell a lie as big ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... recovered to retract my disbelief in kitchen soap, and—and in your skill," she added, with a ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... and on his return to the foc's'le Jem was all attention for him to proceed with his promised yarn about the real pirates of whom he had spoken, the worthy seaman continuing to express a strong disbelief in their entity. ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... doubt respecting, and ultimately disbelief in, the reality of the super-sensible, or the transcendental, or the validity of the evidence on which the belief in it is founded, such as reason or revelation, and in religious matters is tantamount to infidelity more or ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... main objections set forth at length were: First, the alleged unconstitutionality of the whole proceeding; second, the inadequacy of the security. All those speaking against the measure affected a total disbelief that the receipts would be sufficient to enable the company to return the money advanced, and, of course, a spasm of economy nearly rent these statesmen ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... be incredulous. While he dared not break in again with any remark of his own, he took occasion to sniff as loudly as he could, and in this manner show his utter disbelief in the story given out by the skipper of the craft they ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... indeed in the full sense of the word theology, if we confine the term strictly to a reasoned knowledge of a God; for the example of Buddhism proves that a belief in the existence of the human soul after death is quite compatible with disbelief in a deity. But if we may use, as I think we may, the phrase natural theology in an extended sense to cover theories which, though they do not in themselves affirm the existence of a God, nevertheless appear to be one of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... we all knew to be the truth, but still we would rather have shut our eyes to the unpleasant fact. It is extraordinary that men should be able to disregard the future, even when on the very brink of the grave. Is it apathy, or stolid indifference, or disbelief in a future existence that enables them to do so? I speak of those without the Christian's hope—men who lead profligate lives; men stained with a thousand crimes; men who have never feared God, who seemed scarcely to have a knowledge of God. I have thought the matter ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... and universal charity.... Supposing Christianity to have been purely an human invention, it had been the most amiable, and the most useful invention that was ever imposed on mankind for their good." Hume acknowledges, that, "the disbelief in futurity loosens, in a great measure, the ties of morality, and may be supposed, for that reason, pernicious to the peace of civil society." Rousseau acknowledges, that, "if all were perfect Christians, individuals ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... expressions were mingled with sly allusions to Mlle. Fouchette from the women, who were consumed by envy. They had heard of the Savatiere's conquest with disbelief, now they saw it with their own eyes. The brazen thing! She was ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... bound as the sowar announced the approach of the enemy, and I glanced at Ny Deen, in whose face I saw astonishment and disbelief for the moment. But it was only for the moment. Directly after, he gave several orders in a quick, decisive manner, and the officer to whom he spoke dashed off to ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... religion, prevented me from being placed in the alternative of avowal or hypocrisy. I remember two occasions in my boyhood, on which I felt myself in this alternative, and in both cases I avowed my disbelief and defended it. My opponents were boys, considerably older than myself: one of them I certainly staggered at the time, but the subject was never renewed between us: the other who was surprised and somewhat shocked, did his best to ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... should have been taken after the exasperating parade on the 9th to guard against a possible, if not probable, outbreak, is difficult to understand; and can only be accounted for by that blind faith in the Native soldier, and disbelief in his intention or ability to revolt, which led to such ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... friend and pupil of the alchemist Arnold de Villeneuve, is reported to have learned the secrets of alchemy from his master. Later he issued two bulls against "pretenders" in the art, which, far from showing his disbelief, were cited by alchemists as proving that he recognized pretenders as distinct from true ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... at the face of his companion, and detected an expression of triumph about the eyes which led him to doubt the truth of his story. But he decided not to intimate his disbelief. ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... of partiality. But Aeschines denied the story. And did not Demosthenes also deny the story respecting his childish nickname, which Mr Mitford has nevertheless told without any qualification? But the judges, or some part of them, showed, by their clamour, their disbelief of the relation of Demosthenes. And did not the judges, who tried the cause between Demosthenes and his guardians, indicate, in a much clearer manner, their approbation of the prosecution? But Demosthenes was a demagogue, and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... last. My father's thoughtless act I chide That gave thee honoured place, Whose soul, from virtue turned aside, Is faithless, dark, and base. We rank the Buddhist with the thief,(388) And all the impious crew Who share his sinful disbelief, And hate the right and true. Hence never should wise kings who seek To rule their people well, Admit, before their face to speak, The cursed infidel. But twice-born men in days gone by, Of other sort than thou, Have wrought good deeds, whose glories high Are ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... unless when I meet one who has been, like myself, in England, and with whom I can converse on the wonders we have both witnessed in that marvellous country, and which, if I venture to narrate them in public, or even among my own immediate friends and relatives, would draw on me such disbelief, that I would certainly die from grief of heart."—Here leave we Kerim Khan; not without a hope, that in spite of the apprehensions expressed in the passage just quoted, of incurring the reproach to which "travellers' tales" are supposed to be sometimes obnoxious, he has not eventually persisted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Sombreuil, only relates that father and daughter were carried away swooning from the strain of emotion. I would not dwell on so well-worn an anecdote if I believed that it was false. The difficulty of disbelief is that the son of the heroine wrote a letter affirming it, in which he states that his mother was never afterwards able to touch a glass of red wine. The point to bear in mind is that these atrocious criminals rejoiced as much in a man to save as in a man to kill. They were servants ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of matter occupies different portions of time. Accordingly time would have to be expressible in terms of the relations of a bit of matter with itself. My own view is a belief in the relational theory both of space and of time, and of disbelief in the current form of the relational theory of space which exhibits bits of matter as the relata for spatial relations. The true relata are events. The distinction which I have just pointed out between time and space in their connexion with matter makes ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... which Hamlet's highest endowments, his moral sensibility and his genius, become his enemies. A nature morally blunter would have felt even so dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things in one. Thought is the element of his life, and his thought is infected. He cannot prevent himself from probing and lacerating the wound in his soul. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... life, a sincere believer in the existence and attributes of the Deity. He was a firm and decided, and an openly declared unbeliever in Christianity; but he was, without any hesitation or any intermission, a Theist." His open declaration of disbelief in the inspiration of the Bible, and his total rejection of the dogmas of Christianity, laid him open to the malignant attacks and misrepresentations of the priesthood and the bigots of Europe; and so strong were they, that his life was continually in danger. Lord Brougham, in his "Men ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... of Young's colleague at the Royal Institution, Davy, and afterwards with the fame of Faraday. Carlyle refers to a remark of Novalis, that a man's self-trust is enormously increased the moment he finds that others believe in him. If the opposite remark be true—if it be a fact that public disbelief weakens a man's force—there is no calculating the amount of damage these twenty years of neglect may have done to Young's productiveness as an investigator. It remains to be stated that his assailant was Mr. Henry Brougham, afterwards ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... time. Marriage ties were lightly regarded; no gallant but boasted his amours. Revelry ran riot; drunkenness became a habit and gambling a craze. The court scintillated with brilliant wits, conscienceless libertines, and scoffing atheists. It was an age of debauchery and disbelief. ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... from the experience of others that the first terrible silence would be a hard thing to endure until the strangeness wore off. At first they huddled like two children, driving their thoughts far into unanswering space in desperate disbelief that such utter silence could be. Repelled by space, they turned to each other and found more complete union than they had thought possible. From the depth of their union they found the strength and growth and maturity to adapt, to endure, and to survive. ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... Presently a chair was drawn back, then another, and people began to filter, in slow embarrassment, toward the door. Lindsay came up with Hilda's cloak. "You won't mind my coming with you," he said; "I should like to hear the details." Beryl Stace made as if to embrace her, pouring out abusive disbelief, but Hilda waved her away with a gesture almost of irritation. Some of the others said a perfunctory word or two and went away with lingering backward looks. In a quarter of an hour Mr. Lindsay's brougham had followed the other vehicle into the lamp-lit ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... confidence in the character of the negroes than their conduct on so joyous and trying an occasion, as what they have exhibited during the brief period of their political regeneration. It may be considered as an earnest of their future peaceable demeanor; the disbelief of the sceptic will thus be put to the blush, and the apprehensions of the timid allayed. The first of August has passed, and with it the conduct of the people has been such as to convince the most jealous, as well as the most sanguine of the evil ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the APOLOGY, in which the essayist, theistically bent on abasing human pretensions, gives to his scepticism the colour of a belief in those very influences.[173] There is here, clearly, no pro-religious thesis. The whole drift of the play shows that Shakspere shares the disbelief in stellar control, though he puts the expression of the disbelief in the mouth of a villain; though he makes the honest Kent, on the other hand, declare that "it is the stars ... that govern our conditions;"[174] and though he had ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... was possible that he should not believe in them since he had seen them are unaware of the lengths to which scepticism can go in an argumentative mind. Nourished on Lucretius, imbued with the doctrines of Epicurus and Gassendi, he often provoked Monsieur de La Rochecoupee by the display of a cold disbelief in fairies. ...
— The Story Of The Duchess Of Cicogne And Of Monsieur De Boulingrin - 1920 • Anatole France
... "Maybe," sniffed Judith, in disbelief. "It can't be that he sits up to read," she resumed. "Nobody in their senses would do that. Reading may be pleasant to some folks, especially them story-books; but sleep is pleasanter. This last two or three blessed nights, since that ill news come to make ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... her face the while. The girl looked for indignation, for scornful disbelief; she saw something quite different. Mrs. Ormonde's hand trembled, but in a moment she had overcome ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... attitude; the man of ten years says the same as the man of ten months, except—and the exception is worth noting—that the former's moral sense, whatever he originally had of it, has been blunted or discouraged, and he has conceived a settled animosity against human authority, and disbelief in the justice and sincerity of its administrators. He has been the subject, during his incarceration, of such numberless acts of gratuitous tyranny, outrage and cruelty, and has seen so much of "the way ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... watchful, composed face uplifted above a line of bayonets, never failed in their magic. Like all born leaders, he seemed in these emergencies to hold a charmed life—infecting his followers with a like disbelief in death; men dropped to right and left of him with serene assurance in their ghastly faces or a cry of life and confidence in their last gasp. Stragglers fell in and closed up under his passing glance; a hopeless, inextricable wrangle around an overturned ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... his remarkable statement in a voice which he strove to divest of a triumphant inflection. No one said "Rats," though Clovis's lips moved in a monosyllabic contortion which probably invoked those rodents of disbelief. ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... her lodger on the subject of the possibility of selling the light keeper's Development holdings for him. To say the least, she received no encouragement. Galusha was quite emphatic in his expression of disbelief in that possibility. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... would claim an invalid's privilege to stay at home. He had very rarely attended the parish church with his wife, affecting to despise such humdrum and conventional worship. He had just that thin smattering of modern science which enables shallow youth to make a merit of disbelief in all things beyond the limit of mathematical demonstration. He had skimmed Darwin, and spoke lightly of mankind as the latest development of time and matter, and no higher a being, from a spiritual point of view, than the first worm that wriggled in its primeval ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... experiences of a ghost he happens to have met along some country lane; and the fact that there are cases where an imaginative and nervous person has mistaken for a ghost a white goat or a sheet hanging on a bush only strengthens the sceptic's disbelief and makes him blind to the very large weight of evidence that can be arrayed against him. Some day, no doubt, psychologists and scientists will be able to give us a complete and satisfactory explanation of these abnormal apparitions, but ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... on another horse, that I felt the full truth of my instinctive fears. Chu Chu would not permit any one to approach her mistress's side. My mounted presence revived in her all her old blind astonishment and disbelief in my existence; she would start suddenly, face about, and back away from me in utter amazement as if I had been only recently created, or with an affected modesty as if I had been just guilty of some grave indecorum towards ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... always been that the soul survived the man's death.[81] There are, however, exceptions; the continued existence of the soul was not an absolutely established article in the savage creed. According to the reports of travelers, it would seem that among some tribes there was disbelief or doubt on this point. A West African native expressed his belief in the form of the general proposition, "The dead must die"; that is, apparently, the dead man must submit to the universal law to which ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... and sat up. His blind eyes were roving over her with an expression of disbelief. Jinnie knew he was doubting her veracity, so ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... knowledge. The public opinion, timid and enslaved, respected this imperious and, apparently, well-authenticated error. Those who saw through the delusion kept their opinion to themselves, knowing how useless it was to declare their disbelief to a people ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... of the wisest and most virtuous of the Pagans, on account of their ignorance or disbelief of the divine truth, seems to offend the reason and the humanity of the present age. [70] But the primitive church, whose faith was of a much firmer consistence, delivered over, without hesitation, to eternal torture, the far greater part of the human species. A charitable hope might ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... similar reflections the common people have made, and make yet. The step from doubt to disbelief is but short, and those brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, who hesitate about believing Pius VII. to be the vicar of Christ, will soon remember the precepts of atheists and freethinkers, and believe that Christ is not the Son of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Brent confined his dissipations to London and Paris and Vienna—anywhere out of sight and sound of his home—opinion was silent. It is easy to listen to far off echoes unmoved, and we can treat them with disbelief, or scorn, or disdain, or whatever attitude of coldness may suit our purpose. But when the scandal came close home it was another matter; and the feelings of independence and integrity which is in people of every community which is not utterly spoiled, ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... strong evidence has been given to us upon the influence of the Final School' (the examination for degrees with honors) 'upon Oxford thought, as tending to produce at least momentary disbelief.' ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... completely illustrate the effect his words and appearance had upon me than the fact that I accepted his extraordinary statement without any instinct of disbelief! Here was I, an Englishman of sound nerves, of average courage, and certainly untroubled with any superabundance of imagination, domiciled in a perfectly well-known, if somewhat cosmopolitan, London hotel, and yet willing to believe, on the statement ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had recognized Kauhi, and had seen them leave together for what they supposed was a ramble in the adjoining woods, no great anxiety had been felt, as yet. But when the little bird told his tale, there was great consternation, and even positive disbelief; for, how could any one in his senses, they argued, be guilty of such cruelty to such a lovely, innocent being, and one, too, ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... four teeth and a small spring wagon. At length, when she could be trusted to carry his wares to Murphy's Camp, and could be checked from entering a shop with the cart attached to her,—a fact of which she always affected perfect disbelief,—her education was considered as complete as that of the average California donkey. It was still unsafe to leave her alone, as she disliked solitude, and always made it a point to join any group of loungers with her unnecessary cart, and even to follow ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... and argued that if that sun had been eternal, its emanations would be co-eternal, they showed that their true doctrine required the formula—"always being begotten, and as instantly perishing, in order to be rebegotten perpetually." They showed a real disbelief in our English statement "begotten, not made." I overruled the objection, that in the Greek it was not a participle, but a verbal adjective; for it was manifest to me, that a religion which could not ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... she proceeds with sundry sol feggio's, to account for the circumstances, and show her disbelief of the explanation in a very satisfactory manner,—meanwhile, for I must not expose my reader to an anxiety on my account, similar to what the dear Fanny here laboured under, I was making the necessary preparations for flying to her presence, and clasping her to my heart—that ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... last century. By opposing it, even Voltaire incurred the reputation of bigotry, and Hume probably had to listen to a good deal of it on that memorable occasion when, dining with Baron D'Holbach, and intimating to his host his disbelief in the existence of atheists, he was informed by way of reply that he was actually at table with seventeen members of the sect.[36] That in England, too, it was a good deal talked at about the same and a somewhat later period, may be ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... wife had ordered him to be home early, and soon after the congregation had been dismissed he departed by a short cut through the woods. That afternoon an irate committee, composed principally of women, but including also a few men who had expressed disbelief in the new doctrine, arrived at the cabin of their preacher, but found there only his wife, cross-grained old Aunt Rebecca. She informed them that her husband was ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... originated and perfected in any other way, or that this is not the fitting way? If it means that it was not, if he so misuses words that by the Creator he intends an unintelligent power, undirected force, or necessity, then he has put his case so as to invite disbelief in it. For then blind forces have produced not only manifest adaptions of means to specific ends—which is absurd enough—but better adjusted and more perfect instruments or machines than intellect (that is, human intellect) can contrive and human skill execute—which ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... moral development of our race, like Bacon, Shakespeare, or Baxter. They looked on miracles as impossible, and regarded all the Bible accounts of supernatural events as fables. They were Deists. One I found who declared his disbelief in a future life. There was a gradual incline from the almost Christian doctrine of Carpenter and Channing, down to the principles ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... under Duncan Yordas," Mr. Jellicorse answered, with a smile of disbelief, craftily rousing the pugnacity of the man; "because he was not even in the army of the Company, or any other army. I mean, of course, unless there was ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Johnson defended luxury, and said that he had learnt much from Mandeville—a shrewd cynic, in whom Johnson's hatred for humbug is exaggerated into a general disbelief in real as well as sham nobleness of sentiment. As the conversation proceeded, Johnson expressed his habitual horror of death, and caused Miss Seward's ridicule by talking seriously of ghosts and the importance of the question ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... enough," said Lewis solemnly. "And then you are losing grip. A belief in sentiment means a disbelief in competence and strength, and that is the last and fatalest heresy. And a belief in sentiment means a foolish scepticism towards the great things of life. There is none of the blood and bone left for honest belief. You hold your religion half-heartedly. Honest fanaticism is a thing intolerable ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... a man the other day who did not believe in fairy tales. I do not mean that he did not believe in the incidents narrated in them—that he did not believe that a pumpkin could turn into a coach. He did, indeed, entertain this curious disbelief. And, like all the other people I have ever met who entertained it, he was wholly unable to give me an intelligent reason for it. He tried the laws of nature, but he soon dropped that. Then he said that pumpkins were unalterable ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... Lovelace to Belford.— Blesses him for sending him word the lady is better. Her charity towards him cuts him to the heart. He cannot bear it. His vehement self reproaches. Curses his contriving genius, and his disbelief that there could be such virtue in woman. The world never saw such an husband as he will make, if she recover, and will ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... various rumors of Coalitions, or attempted Coalitions, we have already expressed our disbelief in that reported to have taken place between the Grenville-Windhamites and Mr. Fox. At least, if it was ever in negotiation, we have reason to think it received an early check, arising from a strong party of the Old Opposition protesting against it. The account of this transaction, as whispered ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... the utensil takes of the matter. I might multiply examples, ad infinitum, to illustrate my meaning; but to those who are familiar with the phenomena alluded to one instance will suffice; while those who have never experienced them will probably, at all events, take refuge in disbelief, and lament themselves with a self-satisfying sorrow over the fresh proof it adduces of the truth of the Israelitish monarch's aphorism, that "all men are ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... dry, mirthless laugh of disbelief and ridicule. "Ba su, master, the Lord was watching you. There was two silver bits inside that coffin, on ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... fellow is as obstinate as ever, I assure you, in his disbelief in salt water. He torments me continually by asking me to tell him the story of my shipwreck, and does not believe me after all, though he has heard it a dozen times. "Sir," he said to me solemnly, after you were gone, "will that strange gentleman pretend ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... hands, who were men of capital, stood a little higher than the clergy, and moved in society among its autocrats. But they were full of possibilities, men of action, and men, too, of thought, with already a pronounced disbelief in the custom-house. In these days of big carnivals they would have been patented as the dukes of Little ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... worst, for on the occurrence of the disaster the Mahdi was promptly informed of the loss of the Abbas and the murder of the Europeans, and it was he himself who sent in to Gordon the news of the catastrophe, with so complete a list of the papers on the Abbas as left no ground for hope or disbelief. Unfortunately, before this bad news reached Gordon, he had again, on 30th September, sent down to Shendy three steamers—the Talataween, the Mansourah, and Saphia, with troops on board, and the gallant ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... quite illegitimately narrows down the meaning of prayer to petition, may pass; it is more important for us to investigate his implied challenge—the grounds upon which he expresses his absolute disbelief in the fulfilment of ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... till evening of these events, more momentous for him than for others. He was forced to yield to evidence. A strong wall, as it were, crumbled within him; for his life had rested on two bases,—indifference in matters of religion and a firm disbelief in magnetism. When it was proved to him that the senses—faculties purely physical, organs, the effects of which could be explained—attained to some of the attributes of the infinite, magnetism upset, ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... with an endless network of knots. Each of these centres of activity, proselytising and ramifying endlessly, aims by systematic denunciation to injure the prestige of local authority, to reduce the villages to confusion, to spread cynicism and scandals, together with complete disbelief in everything and an eagerness for something better, and finally, by means of fires, as a pre-eminently national method, to reduce the country at a given moment, if need be, to desperation. Are those ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of ours are not fools. They are a keen lot. They judge our religion by us who profess it, as we do with them and theirs. There may come a wide-spread practical disbelief, or lack of belief, that there is any practical power in Christ to change a man's life, and really control his actions. And it will be a perfectly logical conclusion from what they find in us Christian ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... that grand conception it would be vain to deny. A vast majority of mankind associate with the idea of disbelief in their Gods, everything stupid, monstrous, absurd and atrocious. Absolute Universalism is thought by them the inseparable ally of most shocking wickedness, involving 'blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,' which we are assured shall not be forgiven unto ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... Royal Institution, Davy, and afterwards with the fame of Faraday. Carlyle refers to a remark of Novalis, that a man's self-trust is enormously increased the moment he finds that others believe in him. If the opposite remark be true—if it be a fact that public disbelief weakens a man's force—there is no calculating the amount of damage these twenty years of neglect may have done to Young's productiveness as an investigator. It remains to be stated that his assailant was Mr. Henry Brougham, afterwards ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... reins, he declared it was false and prepared to precipitate the boy. A second blow was given, and the lord of the castle asserting that the greatest pains were at his heart, the blind man expressing his disbelief, again carried the boy to the summit of the tower. The third time, however, the father, to save his son, really mutilated himself; and when he exclaimed that the greatest pain was in his teeth; "It is true," said he, "as a man who has had experience ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... a long and very interesting story, but in substance it is this: While in a condition of contemptuous disbelief as to the alleged phenomena of spiritualism, Sir William chanced to witness a seance wherein a young girl named Florence Cook was the medium. Her doings so puzzled and interested him that he went again and again to see her. ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... in their confidence, but when the machine was completed they issued a statement to the press to the effect that they were ready for the voyage to the moon, and that, when they returned, a reckoning with the world was to be made for its disbelief and total lack of sympathy. Again the press subjected Oradel to a series of scathing denunciations, and the scientific publications refused to take cognizance of his claims in any way, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... privy-councillors; at all events nothing like exculpatory evidence was brought, or attempted to be brought, on the subject, consequently no effect was produced on public opinion; the whole was regarded as an ex-parte proceeding. Philip Sidney, who probably set out with a sincere disbelief of these shocking accusations brought against any uncle who had shown for him an affection next to parental, eagerly took up the pen in his defence. But the only point on which his refutation appears to have been triumphant, was unfortunately one ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... let me be told so on such authority that I must believe it, and I will be silent henceforth, recognizing that my mind is in a state of disorganization. If the doctrine I have maintained is a mournful truth; if to disbelieve it, and to practise on this disbelief, and to teach others so to disbelieve and practise, is to carry desolation, and to charter others to carry it, into confiding families, let it be proclaimed as plainly what is to be thought of the teachings of those who sneer at the alleged dangers, and scout ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... hants,"—that is, "the HAUNTS" or spirits,—but had believed it a part of their ignorance, and unworthy a white child,—the daughter of their master! She had laughed with Dick Ruggles over the illusions of Larry, and had shared her father's contemptuous disbelief of the wandering visitant being anything but a living man; yet she would have screamed for assistance now, only for the greater fear of making her weakness known to Mr. Starbuck, and being dependent upon him for help. And with it came the sudden conviction that HE had seen this awful vision, ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and other pious men of his day deprecated in all sincerity and earnestness the growing disbelief in witchcraft and diabolical agency, fearing that mankind, losing faith in a visible Satan and in the supernatural powers of certain paralytic old women, would diverge into universal skepticism. It is one of the saddest of sights to see ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tip-toe, looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite pity, and ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the insanity, which had hitherto been more confined to the better classes, burst forth among the common people. Were we to dwell minutely on this period, we should start from the picture with horror: we might, perhaps, console ourselves with a disbelief of its truth; but the drug, though bitter in the mouth, we must sometimes digest. To observe the extent to which the populace can proceed, disfranchised of law and religion, will always ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... laugh, which might have been intended to deprecate the possession of any opinion on a vintage, or to express his disbelief that Dormer ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... Khayyam, according to the heart's desire. And nothing can be more different than such an instinct from the alleged satisfaction in playing with dolls and knowing that they are not real people. By an odd paradoxical coincidence, that very disbelief in the real character of art, and that divorce betwixt art and utility, is really due to our ultra-practical habit of taking seriously only the serviceable or instructive sides of things: the quality of beauty, which the ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... alone with Lorenzo. Villari, after sifting the evidence, arrives at the conclusion that we may believe Burlamacchi. The Baron Reumont, in his recent Life of Lorenzo, vol. ii. p. 590, gives some solid reasons for accepting this conclusion with caution, and Gino Capponi expresses a distinct disbelief in Burlamacchi's narration. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... to imagine the desperate case, and in spite of his disbelief in the man and all he said, Kenton could not keep his hardness of heart towards him. "I don't know what you're after, young man," he began. "But if you expect me to receive you under my ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... while they lived in the body, and especially that scarcely any within the church so believed. Those that have not believed in the world in any life of the soul after the life of the body are greatly ashamed when they find themselves to be alive. But those that have confirmed themselves in that disbelief seek affiliation with their like, and are separated from those that have had faith. Such are for the most part attached to some infernal society, because they have also denied the divine and have despised ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... man, I knew to be exaggerations and perversions of the truth, if not entirely false—things derogatory to him, and flattering to them—especially to Miss Murray—which I burned to contradict, or, at least, to show my doubts about, but dared not; lest, in expressing my disbelief, I should display my interest too. Other things I heard, which I felt or feared were indeed too true: but I must still conceal my anxiety respecting him, my indignation against them, beneath a careless aspect; ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... and Scotty looked at him with disbelief. "He's gone off his rocker at last," Scotty muttered. "How can anyone make a ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... at the laboratory and gasped in disbelief. All the trees were bent toward the building, as if held by some mighty wind. Their branches straining, every single leaf standing at rigid attention, the trees were bending in toward the structure. ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... people, who saw 'Tonio shoot and try to kill Teniente Willett—saw him shoot and club, shoot twice. Sanchez called on the Blessed Virgin and all the saints to witness his innocence, his entire truth, and the chief, with just one gesture of disbelief and disgust, turned ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... a faint color in his cheeks. And the girl flushed more deeply; her eyes were still bright, but they no longer sharpened to such a penetrating point. She was believing at least a little part of what he said, and her disbelief only heightened her joy in what was real in ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... had been gay, and said she now was married; they did not believe that, though they kept their disbelief to themselves, and only Esther knew she had been gay, although all knew she had run away from home. Sarah got her living by washing for Esther's mother. I heard some funny things about ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... such a Church, let there be a perfect toleration for all subjects of the realm round about that Church, no compulsion on any of them to belong to that Church, no pains and penalties for any profession of belief or disbelief, or any form of worship or no-worship, out of that Church." These are not Williams's own words, but they exactly express his meaning; and, in fact, he intended his Bloody Tenent to be a plea for toleration in this ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... of the man was a disbelief in Christianity,—much more of an anomaly in that day than at present,—and a belief in the transmigration of souls, it being one of his fancies that, after death, his spiritual part was to return to this world in the form ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... keynote to the wonderful power of Dickens in making characters from those who were in a world sense undistinguished. On this position Chesterton lays great stress. It was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. It was the same position that made Browning an optimist. It is the disbelief in the Divine image in Man that makes ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... convince our judges, not seek to sway them by entreaties; that they may judge rightly according to the laws, and not by favor. For you are sworn. And how should I persuade you to break your oath, who am charged by Meletus with impiety. For by so doing, I should be persuading you to disbelief in the gods, and making that very charge against myself. To you and to the god I leave it, that I may be judged as shall be best for you ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... through," Andy advised, still wholly unconscious of their disbelief. "Yuh was all kinda skeptical when I told yuh he had a guilty conscience, but I was right about it, and come mighty near laying out on the range to-night with my toes pointing straight up, just because ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... of Coalitions, or attempted Coalitions, we have already expressed our disbelief in that reported to have taken place between the Grenville-Windhamites and Mr. Fox. At least, if it was ever in negotiation, we have reason to think it received an early check, arising from a strong party of the Old Opposition protesting ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... of examining evidence is not always belief, or even suspension of judgment, but is sometimes positive disbelief. This can ensue only when the affirmative evidence does not amount to full proof, but is based on some approximate generalisation. In such cases, if the negative evidence consist of a stronger, though still only an approximate, generalisation, we think the fact ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... the last four months came pelting. Anthony fairly opened his heart. At first, listening to the bare truth told with the confident naivete of disbelief, Valerie felt as though she were cheating the blind. After a little, this sense of shabbiness was suddenly supplanted by a perfect torment of apprehension lest Anthony should detect her hypocrisy. ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... known from the experience of others that the first terrible silence would be a hard thing to endure until the strangeness wore off. At first they huddled like two children, driving their thoughts far into unanswering space in desperate disbelief that such utter silence could be. Repelled by space, they turned to each other and found more complete union than they had thought possible. From the depth of their union they found the strength and growth and maturity to adapt, to endure, and ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... Anstice faltered, feeling as though his friend must see through his pretence, and guess that it was because this land enshrined the one woman in the world that he was here. But Sir Richard gave no sign of disbelief, and Anstice was emboldened to proceed. "But you—what are you doing here? I thought you were somewhere in the ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... suggestion met with fierce and unanimous opposition. It was evident that no plan which entailed parting from their new acquisition would for a moment be entertained. "Besides," said Tom Ryder, "them fellows at Red Dog would swap it, and ring in somebody else on us." A disbelief in the honesty of other camps prevailed at Roaring Camp, as ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... throat; there is nothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of Cosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our profound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are few books in the world that can be compared with it. There is as much calm and serenity as Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramatic coarsenesses that disfigured ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... together with ample descriptions of all the phenomena in Spaceland, and the arguments for the existence of Solid things derivable from Analogy. Yet—I take shame to be forced to confess it—my brother has not yet grasped the nature of Three Dimensions, and frankly avows his disbelief in the existence ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... voice, some secret and subtle thing in the voice that reached out and gripped Pederson and bore meaning with it. He stood quite motionless, staring at Beardsley; for a split second his eyes widened, then disbelief gave way ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... tandy?" asked Paul, and the laugh that followed in a measure relieved the nerves of the girls, for in spite of their almost entire disbelief in what they had heard, the talk bothered ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake • Laura Lee Hope
... sure that he had the speed of his opponent, and then, sad to say for his supporters, he fell into the very error which Sylla Chipchase had so deprecated, viz., holding his antagonist too cheap. Mr. Montague's vanity had been considerably wounded by that young lady's disbelief in his prowess. She had contrived, as she had most assuredly intended, to irritate him by her persistent scepticism as to his being the swift-footed Achilles he so loved to pose as. He determined to show ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... in these parts, I suppose?" he said to Flinn as they sauntered towards the house after seeing the electrical party off. He asked the question with hesitation, being impressed with a strange disbelief in tigers, except in a menagerie, and feeling nearly as much ashamed as if he had asked whether they kept elephants in the sugar-basin. To his relief Flinn did not laugh, but replied quite gravely—"Och! yes, we've got ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... with anger at the crassness of things, "I'll consider the advisability of sending in my own papers. Dash it!" He said something quite different, but his friends may read this record, and they would repudiate an exact version with scorn and disbelief. "Are we going to admit ourselves beaten by a half-bred hound like Hilton Fenley? Not if I know it, or I know you. We've got the noose 'round his neck, and you and I will pull it tight if we have to follow ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... invalid's privilege to stay at home. He had very rarely attended the parish church with his wife, affecting to despise such humdrum and conventional worship. He had just that thin smattering of modern science which enables shallow youth to make a merit of disbelief in all things beyond the limit of mathematical demonstration. He had skimmed Darwin, and spoke lightly of mankind as the latest development of time and matter, and no higher a being, from a spiritual point of view, than the first worm that wriggled in its primeval slime. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... his falsehood. It never entered his head that a royal personage and the trusted counsellors of a great kingdom could be telling the truth in a secret international transaction, and he justified the industry with which his master and himself piled fiction upon fiction, by their utter disbelief in every word which came ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... not accuse her yet, though something told him he might have to do so at last. He grew angry at the ever-recurring thought of her, and turning his face to the wall, like a man trying to shut out the light, resolved to force disbelief in her guilt until clearer testimony than his own suspicions should convict her of the death of Caroline. And yet in his secret soul he dreaded a discovery that might turn out as he feared. But he pushed the black thoughts ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... wide-eyed. "Aw, gwan!" he retorted after a minute, imitating Happy Jack's disbelief of any unpleasant news. "I guess you're jest loadin' me. Daddy Chip is takin' care of her. He wouldn't let her ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... lifeless manufacture) would be originated and perfected in any other way, or that this is not the fitting way? If it means that it was not, if he so misuses words that by the Creator he intends an unintelligent power, undirected force, or necessity, then he has put his case so as to invite disbelief in it. For then blind forces have produced not only manifest adaptions of means to specific ends—which is absurd enough—but better adjusted and more perfect instruments or machines than intellect (that is, human intellect) can contrive and human skill execute—which ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... the real difficulties which beset this question, and for the peculiar feelings, partly allowable, and largely the reverse, with which it is entertained, we have no doubt that many have been driven to the extreme of utter disbelief in the existence of any punishment by the bold and presumptuous manner in which they may have heard men consign all the heathen, and all Christendom, with the exception of a very few, to this awful ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... these shapes and why? Man has created them that he may indicate his own spiritual state when he has fallen out with the established order. Really they are phases of the development of the hero, who is reaching out through disbelief, denial, defiance, toward a restoration. He is negative to the Greek consciousness, and this negation takes shape by mind, yet has to be put down by mind. The whole process he projects out of himself into two lines ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... however, this disbelief was partly destroyed by an unexpected and singular discovery. Mr. Smith, who commanded a vessel trading between Rio Plato and Chili, was naturally desirous to shorten, as much as possible, his passage ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... conscious and deliberate action of man. There is no deed which is not an attempt to realize an ideal; whenever man acts he seeks a good, however ruinously he may misunderstand its nature. Final and absolute disbelief in an ultimate good in the sphere of morals, like absolute scepticism in the sphere of knowledge, is a disguised self-contradiction, and therefore an impossibility in fact. The one stultifies action, and asserts an effect without any cause, or even contrary to the cause; the other ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... to see how readily the disbelief died out of the other's face. It was almost magical. It was as though his previous expression had been nothing but acting and his fresh attitude the result ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... even know when the boy left. He, also, was looking upon the hardness of life, but he was looking with the eyes of the fighter. So long as Jack Allen had breath in his body, he would fight to keep it there. His incredulity against the verdict swung to a tenacious disbelief that it would really come to the worst. So long as he was alive, so long as he could feel the weight of the dagger in his sleeve, it was temperamentally impossible for him to believe that he was going to die ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... English breathed fire and flame. The sudden outburst of a volcano would not have been more startling than this piece of news which came from a clear sky. The impression made upon the populace was one of surprise which amounted to disbelief. People stopped in the streets to ask one another ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... virus of rabies. The sporting-fever is the veritable malady of St. Vitus, holding its victim forever on the go, as game-seasons come, and so long as back and legs, eye and ear, can wrestle with Time's infirmities. It breeds ambition, boasting, and "yarns" to a proverbial extent, with a general disbelief in the possible veracity of a brother sportsman, and an irresistible; desire to talk of new and privately discovered sporting-heavens. The gold-seeker stakes his claim, the "wild-catting" oil-borer boards up his lot, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... cannot conclude better than with these reflections, at a time when disbelief is something too fashionable even amongst our ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... who now appeared would not avouch his own disbelief in the identity of Master Peregrine, being, as he said, a man who had studied his Bible, listened to godly preachers, and seen the world; but he had no hesitation in declaring that almost every other soul in the household believed in it as firmly as in the Gospel, certainly ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the legend; of which reason vainly expresses its disbelief, as long as the eye of faith can discern physical proofs of its truth in the deep furrow which, crossing the mountain in detached portions, terminates abruptly in the lake; for it seems that when the two oxen were summoned by their mistress, they were ploughing in the field; and at their ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 54, November 9, 1850 • Various
... such I receive it. I can sooner believe the Mosaic revelation than the doctrine which tells you that you are part of God and capable of penetrating to absolute truth. To quote the expressive language of an acute critic (whose well-known latitudinarianism and disbelief in the verbal inspiration of Scripture give peculiar weight to his opinion on this subject), 'when the advocates of this natural, spontaneous inspiration will come forth from their recesses of thought and deliver prophecies as clear as those of the Hebrew seer; when they shall mold the ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... hardship which these heroic men will not encounter in performing their thrice holy mission. Piotrowski, who, like all Poles, was an ingrained Roman Catholic, after passing through phases of doubt and disbelief had returned to a fervent orthodoxy: this spiritual succor was most precious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... as mortal sin is contrary to charity, so is disbelief in one article of faith contrary to faith. Now charity does not remain in a man after one mortal sin. Therefore neither does faith, after a man ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... his head emphatically, to indicate his disbelief of this pantomimic information, and muttered a few words not intended for polite ears as he turned on his heel and ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... foundation. For those who, without being occultists—students that is to say of Nature's loftier aspects, in a position to obtain better teaching than that which any written books can give—for those who merely avail themselves of recorded evidence, a declaration on the part of others of a disbelief in the possibility of clairvoyance, is on a level with the proverbial African's disbelief in ice. But the experiences of clairvoyance that have accumulated on the hands of those who have studied it in connection with mesmerism, ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... am satisfied; but it seems she either knows or suspects something, and we must be more than ever on our guard. What I wish to say to you now, is, that this lady, either for willfulness or out of disbelief, affects to discredit my statement concerning Hadley's death, and I wish you to accompany me to the cave to-morrow, and confirm my statements. You need not implicate yourselves, but give the facts as ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... nothing more than has been laid before the reader, up to this time, disbelief in the miracles of which it gives so precise and full a record might well be regarded as hyper-scepticism. It might fairly be said, Here you have a man, whose high character, acute intelligence, and large instruction are certified by eminent contemporaries; a man who stood high in the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... where Olaf was, and when she stood near him she looked at him in disbelief, taking him to be but a workman. But when the king laid down his hammer and stood up at his full height and uncovered his head, she saw that he was no ordinary man. Her eyes went to his bare arm, where there still remained ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... said—"I have wronged you and I apologise. But you can hardly wonder at my disbelief, considering your appearance, which is that of a much younger man than your actual years ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Holland, once upon a time, speaking to Macaulay of his grandfather, said: "He had that temper which kind folks have been pleased to say belongs to my family; but he shared the fault that belonged to that school of statesmen, an utter disbelief in public virtue."] ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... doubles-ententes, of knaves and dupes, of men who sold their daughters, and women who cheated their husbands. But the cynicism of Wycherly was no greater than that of the men about him; and in mere love of what was vile, in contempt of virtue and disbelief in purity or honesty, the king himself stood ahead of any of ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... her. To do this he found it necessary to sit on the sofa close to her. What he told her made her blush very rosy again, and stammer a little as she declared her disbelief in all he said, and was sure there were the prettiest girls in the world in New York, and that he had never thought of her a moment. And no, she would not listen to him—she did not believe a word he said; and—yes, of course, ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... then wild disbelief; what she had told him was untrue, she had said it to anger him, to spite him. He sprang from his chair and moved towards the door. He would find her and tell her that he knew that she had been lying to him, that ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... the crown of France, who had been one of Isabella's suitors, as will be remembered. This French alliance, threatening for a moment, was soon impaired by the unexpected death of the young duke, and Isabella's position was strengthened daily by the growing disbelief in La Beltraneja's legitimacy. To give in detail an account of all the plots which were concocted against Isabella would take many chapters in itself, for she met with bitter opposition in spite of the fact that she seems to have won the sympathies of the larger part of the population ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... who takes much interest in jurisprudence, or {268} a prizefighter who is an acute metaphysician. Nay, more than this, a positive distaste may grow up, which, in the intellectual order, may amount to a spontaneous and unreasoning disbelief in that which appears to be in opposition to the more familiar concept, and this at all times. It is often and truly said, "that past ages were pre-eminently credulous as compared with our own, yet the difference is not so much in the amount of the credulity, as in ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... one of my strangest experiences with Master. He healed the rebellious veterinary surgeon in spite of his disbelief, and extended the man's natural term on earth by six months, just because of my earnest supplication. Sri Yukteswar was boundless in his kindness when confronted by the urgent ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... be considered, that this was not the case of philosophers propounding in their books, or in their schools, doubts concerning the truth of the popular creed, or even avowing their disbelief of it. These philosophers did not go about from place to place to collect proselytes from amongst the common people; to form in the heart of the country societies professing their tenets; to provide for ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... interrogatory in good French. As the prisoner shook his head, he harked back and repeated his questions in extremely bad English. Tristram answered them truthfully, which had the effect of raising disbelief in M. de Soisson's breast. After ten minutes this disbelief grew to such an extent that the peppery officer turned to the sergeant and ordered Tristram to be taken off to the barn where the deserters were kept ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... entirely dependant on attention;—and attention is a voluntary intellectual state over which we have a direct and absolute control. As it is, therefore, by prolonged and continued attention that evidence produces belief, a man may incur the deepest guilt by his disbelief of truths which he has failed to examine with the care which is due to them. This exercise is entirely under the control of the will; but the will to exercise it respecting moral truth is closely connected with the love of that truth; and this is intimately ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... the equipoise of Reason and Faith, in the individual or the Nation, and the alternating preponderance cease, the result is, according as one or the other is permanent victor, Atheism or Superstition, disbelief or blind credulity; and the Priests either of Unfaith or ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... averred that Mr Maguire would not have come down there unless he had had, as she said, every encouragement. Indeed, throughout the whole affair, Lady Ball believed Mr Maguire, and disbelieved her niece; and something of her belief, and something also of her disbelief, communicated itself to her son. But, still, he reserved to himself the right of postponing his own opinion till the morrow; and as he was coming upstairs, when Margaret saw him through the chink of the door, he was thinking of her smiles, of her graciousness, and her ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... of a little feeling of qualmishness, which even his boasted disbelief in ghosts did not save him from, Mr. Henderson was about to spring upon the thing ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... up, wonder and disbelief struggling against the pathetic hopelessness in her eyes. Alice bent lower. She kissed the young widow's ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... disbelief, incredulity, perplexity, suspense, distrust, indecision, question, suspicion, hesitancy, irresolution, scruple, unbelief, hesitation, misgiving, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... not "shock modern views of the Universe" (p. 157) must thus think of the Deity. And so Atheism acquires a new meaning. "It is," we read, "a disbelief in the existence of God—that is, a disbelief in any regularity in the Universe to which a man must conform himself under penalties" (p. 27); a definition which surely is a little hard upon the libres-penseurs, as taking the bread out of their mouths. I remember hearing, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... course, only partial; for we are equally susceptible to the negative suggestions of the whiteness of the marble and the smallness of the outline of the tree. Every work of art represents a sort of compromise between reality and unreality, belief and disbelief. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... bed, and for the first time in her life was overcome with hysterical tears. She dared not confess to herself what she wanted. She would have liked to cast herself at his feet; but notwithstanding her disbelief in form and ceremony, she could not do it. She cursed the check which had held her so straitly while she was talking with him, and cursed him that he dealt with her so lightly. The continued sobbing at last took the heat out of her, and she rose from her bed, collected the pieces of the note, ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... deep of the night, the flush of his joy at the proof of Viola's innocence grew gray and cold in a profound disbelief in the reality of his experiences. "Did anything really happen?" he asked himself. Returning to the library with intent to study the situation he mused long upon the tumbled books, the horn, the tables, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... abasing human pretensions, gives to his scepticism the colour of a belief in those very influences.[173] There is here, clearly, no pro-religious thesis. The whole drift of the play shows that Shakspere shares the disbelief in stellar control, though he puts the expression of the disbelief in the mouth of a villain; though he makes the honest Kent, on the other hand, declare that "it is the stars ... that govern our conditions;"[174] and though he had previously made Romeo speak of "the yoke of ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... shore, and procured a room for his wife in the dairy-woman's cottage, passing her off as a relative of Danny Mann's. She retired at once and Hardress and Kyrle sat talking together of Anne Chute. The sight of his friend's sufferings won Hardress's sympathies. He protested his disbelief in the idea of another attachment, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... reluctance that I join in affixing this dark stain on his memory, but truth compels me to add the following extract from a letter which I have since received from one whose name (which I communicate to your lordship privately) forbids disbelief:— ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Judith, in disbelief. "It can't be that he sits up to read," she resumed. "Nobody in their senses would do that. Reading may be pleasant to some folks, especially them story-books; but sleep is pleasanter. This last two or three blessed nights, ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... a solicitor, with his wife and family, had come to reside for the season in the suburban house of a friend and neighbour of Professor Barrett's. He was an Irish country gentleman who had an utter disbelief in spiritualism. Professor Barrett was therefore not a little amused on making Mr. C.'s acquaintance, to find that he had in his own family what appeared to be spiritualistic phenomena then and there going on. Mr. C. gave Professor Barrett every opportunity of close ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... Lovat made upon this well-meant but absurd proposal, show his natural shrewdness, or his disbelief in all that is good and generous. "This," he exclaimed, on being told of these remarkable letters, "is an extraordinary man indeed. I should like to know what countryman he is, and whether the thing is fact. Perhaps it may be only some finesse in politics, to cast an odium on ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... decency and candour, I do hold to be an absolute requisite in all speech and argument, where truth is the object of inquiry. Therefore when I am asked, whether there is a God or no God, I do not mince the matter, but I boldly answer there is none, and give my reason for my disbelief; for I adopt my friend's answer ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... of expertness) I'm just twenty. (He nods his head, without showing the least sign of disbelief.) Eleven ...
— The Noble Lord - A Comedy in One Act • Percival Wilde
... to the book itself. And first, as to its author. The reader of the New Heloisa will remember that the heroine, after her repentance and her marriage, has only one chagrin in the world; that is the blank disbelief of her husband in the two great mysteries of a Supreme Being and another world. Wolmar, the husband, has always been supposed to stand for Rousseau's version of Holbach, and Holbach would hardly have complained ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... gulped a throatful of smoke in disbelief. Evidently they'd told him it wouldn't be as easy as this. They must have told him it would be as hard as hell, because he stared at Brent as though ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... in the dust and still to keep burning the fire of his enthusiasm: to find Knowledge so often a curse and Ignorance a blessing and still to desire Knowledge: all this, the man learned that he must do if he would work out his dreams. That which saved the man from the pit of hopeless disbelief in everything and helped him to a clear understanding of Ignorance, was this: he went back ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... domes of their space helmets, Joe could see a look of horror and disbelief pass across Haney's face. But it was true! Joe and his crew were locked out of ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... youth echoed Oliver's opinion, and added that the remark of Cuttance about his intention not to do something unknown that night, and Joe Tonkin's muttered expressions of disbelief and an intention to watch, seemed to him sufficient to warrant unusual caution in the matter of locks, bolts, ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... 390 millions of millions of millions of tons), with a velocity of some 300 miles per second, would warm our sun considerably. But there is no risk of this happening in Mercury's case—though the unseen and much more shifty Vulcan (in which planet I beg to express here my utter disbelief) might, perchance, work mischief if ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... the lowly and self-denying faith in common chances. She had learnt to be content with her share—no more—in common security, and to be pleased with her part in common hope. For all this, it may be repeated, she could have had but small preparation. Yet no anxiety was hers, no uneasy distrust and disbelief of that human thing—an ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... of those to whom knowledge comes as a bitter aftermath. When his regiment had received orders to move from the Rock, and he had informed Inez of his departure, she had turned aside, just as Zahara had done; scornfully and in silence. Because of his disbelief in her he had guarded his heart against this beautiful Spanish girl who (as he realized too late) had brought him the only real happiness he had ever known. Often she had told him of her brother, Miguel, who would kill her—would kill them both—if he so much as suspected their ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... government has ceased to enjoy the confidence of the electorate. We have for Dr. Oliphant personally nothing but the warmest admiration. We do not venture for one moment to impugn his sincerity. We do not hesitate to affirm most solemnly our disbelief that he is actuated by any but the highest motives in lending his name to persecutions that recall the spirit of the Star Chamber. But in these days when the rapid and relentless march of Scientific Knowledge is devastating the plain of Theological Speculation we owe it to our ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... at him, bewildered, amazement, disbelief, and anger flowing in quick waves across her face. The three men held their breaths. Moreland, Senior, took a step toward her; Mr. Farnam's mouth dropped a little open as he waited, panic-stricken, ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Stone, not to-night. No, by no means, not to-night! It wouldn't do!" The boy's earnestness seemed to me out of all proportion to his simple statement, but I could stand no more and I went home, to spend the night in a dazed wonder, a furious disbelief, and finally an enforced conviction that Vicky Van and Ruth Schuyler ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... to creep insidiously into our lives. We should crown the man who has achieved distinction and advise him as to pitfalls. "No sadder proof," Carlisle has said, "can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men." There is no royal road to a lasting eminence but the toilsome pathway of diligence, self-denial and high moral rectitude; surely not by turning sharp corners to follow that "will-o'-the ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... respecting the conduct of Russia to the Poles, and he believed many of them to be unfounded in fact. It had been stated that thousands of children had been torn from their parents, and banished into Siberia; he had expressed his disbelief of that assertion, and he had since been informed, on good authority, that those children were orphans—made orphans, he regretted to say, by the calamities of war—and that they had been placed in Russian schools, ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... medium of scorn, to abandon the beneficent exercise of prayer, the injury which he inflicts upon his natural reason prepares him to fall again with but little struggle. For a period of several weeks I was almost daily assaulted with strong, bitter tendencies to doubt and disbelief; and it called for the whole power of my mind to free myself from ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... Waking Hallucinations. Popular Scepticism about the Existence of Hallucinations in the Sane. Evidence of Mr. Francis Galton, F.R.S. Scientific Disbelief in ordinary Mental Imagery. Scientific Men who do not see in "the Mind's Eye". Ordinary People who do. Frequency of Waking Hallucinations among Mr. Gallon's friends. Kept Private till asked for by Science. Causes of such Hallucinations unknown. Story of the Diplomatist. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... not respected as a first lieutenant should have been. It is but fair to say, that he was the same to his superiors as he was to his inferiors, and the bluntness with which he used to contradict and assert his disbelief of Captain Kearney's narratives often produced a coolness between ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... increase the productiveness of lands in sound condition, in such an eminent degree, that any farmer who has the power to obtain it, evinces great folly and perverse obstinacy, if he continue to cultivate his land without applying it; either for want of faith, or pretended disbelief in its efficacy; or because he thinks the price fixed upon it by the Peruvian Government, "unjustifiably high;" or because although he has no doubt it will answer in the moist climate of England, is sure it will never answer in this dry climate; or because he is afraid the luxuriant crops produced ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... as are found in books,', coupling it with the assertion that he could produce songs and ballads as good as those sold at fairs, so much admired by his father. Parker Clare again shook his head in a doubting mood, expressing a strong disbelief of his offspring's abilities in writing poetry. Thus put upon his mettle, John resolved to do his best to change the scepticism of his father, and having written some verses which he liked, and corrected them over and over ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... subject at all, and from the strange inconsistency of such, as profess to respect what they really despise and hate,—these feel and express a deep interest in religious opinions; devote time and attention to theological studies; and, as the result of their investigations, avow their utter disbelief of the peculiar doctrines of the cross; and undertake to demonstrate their falsehood and absurdity. They tell you, they have maturely examined the whole subject—that they have brought to the investigation all the aid that extensive ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin
... been repeatedly urged upon me on previous occasions, and also during the progress of these sheets through the press, that I should make a clean breast of my own belief or disbelief in spiritualism; that besides being descriptive, I should go one step beyond a mere catalogue of phenomena, and, to some extent at least, theorize on this mysterious and generally ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... their conduct on so joyous and trying an occasion, as what they have exhibited during the brief period of their political regeneration. It may be considered as an earnest of their future peaceable demeanor; the disbelief of the sceptic will thus be put to the blush, and the apprehensions of the timid allayed. The first of August has passed, and with it the conduct of the people has been such as to convince the most jealous, as well as the most sanguine of the evil prognosticators, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... common horde? Learn then, my Joan, that a French booking clerk is a skeptic who can be convinced only by the sight of money. Consider the number of brokendown royalties in Paris, and picture, if you can, the scowl of disbelief that would cloud the official features of the Gare de l'Est if Prince Michael asked for a special train to Delgratz; booked it on the nod, so to speak. It could not be done, Joan, not if one substituted ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... one true book I had seen in your country. And another girl wasn't allowed to read another book, which I've since looked at, called Robert Elsmere,—an ephemeral thing enough in its way, I don't doubt, but proscribed in her case for no other reason on earth than because it expressed some mild disbelief as to the exact literary accuracy of those Lower Syrian pamphlets to which your priests attach such ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... grunt of disbelief the Traveling Salesman edged over to the window and peered out through the deepening frost on the pane. Inquisitively the Youngish Girl followed his gaze. Already across the cold, white, monotonous, snow-smothered landscape the pale ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... upon Jurgen, there in the garden between dawn and sunrise, and a disbelief in such ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... he hesitated. He had spoken rather than thought, for he thought little, and he was not used to keeping secrets. Moreover, despite his courageous disbelief in his coming fate, he must have had some yearnings for sympathy; the iron of his exile surely entered his soul at times. The girl, so delicately framed, so flower-like of face, seemed alien to her rude surroundings and the burly, heavy, matter-of-fact folk about her. Her ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... investigation, had looked extremely embarrassed, and, to use a vulgar but expressive phrase, chop-fallen. Oldbuck's obstinate disbelief led him strongly to suspect the imposture of Dousterswivel, and the adept's mode of keeping his ground was less resolute than he had expected. Yet he did not entirely ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... no longer, although he had been so obstinate in his disbelief. The affair of the previous night had produced a powerful effect on his mind; and he was exceedingly unwilling to allow himself again to be beguiled into a belief in any danger that was not real. Had the guide not believed ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... believing nothing intelligently, and yet supposing that your having read the words of a divine book must give you the right to despise every religion but your own. I assure you, strange as it may seem, our scorn of Greek tradition depends, not on our belief, but our disbelief, of our own traditions. We have, as yet, no sufficient clue to the meaning of either; but you will always find that, in proportion to the earnestness of our own faith, its tendency to accept a spiritual personality increases: and that the most vital and beautiful Christian ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Demosthenes also deny the story respecting his childish nickname, which Mr Mitford has nevertheless told without any qualification? But the judges, or some part of them, showed, by their clamour, their disbelief of the relation of Demosthenes. And did not the judges, who tried the cause between Demosthenes and his guardians, indicate, in a much clearer manner, their approbation of the prosecution? But Demosthenes was a demagogue, and is to be slandered. Aeschines was an aristocrat, and is to ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Tories found themselves in a minority when the new Parliament assembled in November. The Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, the last man from whom the popular cause could expect to receive any concessions. At the opening of the session the premier took occasion to declare his disbelief "that the state of representation could be improved or be rendered more satisfactory to the country at large than at the present moment." "I am fully convinced," he said, "that the country possesses a ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... the beginning of his treatise concerning the Gods: "I am unable to arrive at any knowledge whether there are, or are not, any Gods." This treatment of him, I imagine, restrained many from professing their disbelief of a Deity, since the doubt of it only could not escape punishment. What shall we say of the sacrilegious, the impious, and the perjured? If Tubulus Lucius, Lupus, or Carbo the son of Neptune, as Lucilius says, had believed that there were Gods, would either of them have ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... without moving?" asked the Rabbit, with an air of disbelief. "Without stirring an eighth of an ...
— Adventures in Toyland - What the Marionette Told Molly • Edith King Hall
... supposed to be, he was not quite prepared to give credit to this explanation; but being of a peaceful disposition, and altogether unaccustomed to retort, he merely smiled his disbelief, as he proceeded to lay aside his fowling-piece, and divest himself of the voluminous out-of-door trappings with which he was clad. Mr. Hamilton was a tall, slender youth, of about nineteen. He had come out by the ship in autumn, and was spending his first winter at York Fort. ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... you?" asked Norah, with the sharp tones of alarm and incredulity. "I don't know you:" trying, by futile words of disbelief, to do away with the terrible ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... Hardyman and Miss Pink devised an arrangement which paid due respect to Isabel's scruples, and at the same time met Lady Lydiard's insulting assertion of disbelief in Hardyman's honor, by a formal and public announcement of ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... and two may not make four?" That Turgenev's aphorism quite illegitimately narrows down the meaning of prayer to petition, may pass; it is more important for us to investigate his implied challenge—the grounds upon which he expresses his absolute disbelief in the fulfilment ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... without misgivings, in the end gave the broth the benefit of the doubt. Only a small band of martyrs elected to bleed at the shrine of principle; they declined to stultify their stomachs with "horse soup." This was a reckless assumption, indicative of a shocking disbelief in human nature; an inexpedient conclusion. They were all honourable men on the Kitchen Committee. What! all? the reader may exclaim. Well, all but one, perhaps—who told an interviewer in London that "horseflesh made excellent soup!" But that was long ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... with a Malthusian relentlessness. We of to-day have the ghosts that haunted our ancestors, as well as our own modern revenants, and there's no earthly use trying to banish or exorcise them by such a simple thing as disbelief in them. Schopenhauer asserts that a belief in ghosts is born with man, that it is found in all ages and in all lands, and that no one is free from it. Since accounts vary, and our earliest antecedents were poor diarists, it is difficult to establish the apostolic succession ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... came out in his dealings with Mary's family. Walter Gray came home to find his daughter's grand lover stretching his long figure on the grass at her feet, while the smaller Grays, their shyness quite departed, rolled and tumbled over him as confident as puppies. To be sure Walter Gray, with his disbelief in distinctions of rank as otherwise than accidental, was not unduly elated by the fine company in which he found himself. He looked hard and long at Robin Drummond as hand met hand. Then a bright look of reassurance came over his face. ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... the wisest and most virtuous of the Pagans, on account of their ignorance or disbelief of the divine truth, seems to offend the reason and the humanity of the present age. [70] But the primitive church, whose faith was of a much firmer consistence, delivered over, without hesitation, to eternal torture, the far ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... engineer's quarters at the atmosphere station was crowded with workers, enlisted Solar Guardsmen and officers of the Solar Guard. They stood around staring in disbelief at the ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... character which his biographers have not mentioned, and which might pass by the name of incredulity. He was the most difficult of men to persuade of any strange and remarkable event. Neither did he take the least pains to conceal his disbelief; and when you were telling him the living truth this was rather difficult to bear. When we said that a woodpecker had been seen in Walden woods nearly as large as a crow and quite as black, he shook his head and looked up at the pine ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... did not dare to reject them from their own knowledge. The public opinion, timid and enslaved, respected this imperious and, apparently, well-authenticated error. Those who saw through the delusion kept their opinion to themselves, knowing how useless it was to declare their disbelief to a people filled ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Romans, and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... symbolism is one great object lesson of the interblending of the two worlds, the natural and the spiritual. The first stage regarding all this marvellous panorama was entire and unquestioning acceptance; the succeeding stage was doubt, disbelief; the third, into which we are now entering, is that of an enlightened understanding and a growing knowledge and grasp of the laws under which these ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... charm in this record of his collegiate life. Mr. Hughes has the true, wholesome English love of home, the English delight in rude physical sports, the English hatred of hypocrisy and cant, the English fidelity to facts, the English disbelief in all piety and morality which are not grounded in manliness. The present work is full of illustrations of these healthy qualities of his nature, and they are all intimately connected with an elevated, yet eminently sagacious spirit of Christian philanthropy. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... no means lacked ability to "fit to the finite" such "infinity" as he possessed. And if he had the chance, as is obscurely hinted at the close, of becoming, like Dante, the "Apollo" of the Italian people, he hardly missed it "through disbelief that anything was to be done." But the outward shell of his career included some circumstances which, had they befallen a Dante, might have deeply moulded the history of Italy. His close relations with great Guelph and Ghibelline families would have offered extraordinary opportunities to a patriot ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... considered to include the one greatest work of art ever fashioned by the mind of man. The "Divine Comedy" is supreme in subject-matter. The facts of its cosmogony have been disproved by modern science, the religion of which it is the monument has fallen into disbelief, the nation and the epoch that it summarizes have been trampled under the progress of the centuries; but in central and inherent truth, in its exposition of the struggle of the beleaguered human ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... and stared at him, since the lie was so amazing that it seemed to deprive me of the power of motion. Noting my very obvious disbelief ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... what is held to be Reality is such as would naturally be associated with the belief that Reality is good. What is, in all cases, ethically characteristic of mysticism is absence of indignation or protest, acceptance with joy, disbelief in the ultimate truth of the division into two hostile camps, the good and the bad. This attitude is a direct outcome of the nature of the mystical experience: with its sense of unity is associated a feeling of infinite peace. Indeed it may be suspected that the feeling of peace produces, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... however, seeing that we continued to advance, expressed his disbelief in our friendship ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... be suspected of any desire to prophesy too smooth things. It is no object of ours to bridge over the gulf between belief in the vulgar theology and disbelief. Nor for a single moment do we pretend that, when all the points of contact between virtuous belief and virtuous disbelief are made the most of that good faith will allow, there will not still and after all remain a terrible controversy between those who cling passionately to all ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... than a week; there was a great number of people, and it was very agreeable. Erskine was extremely mad; he read me some of his verses, and we had a dispute upon religious subjects one morning, which he finished by declaring his entire disbelief in the Mosaic history. We played at whist every night that the Duke was there, and I always won. The Duchess was unwell most of the time. We showed her a galanterie which pleased her very much. She produced a picture of herself one evening, which ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
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