"Agnostic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fellow-creatures. As he told his friend Trelawny, he used the word Atheism "to express his abhorrence of superstition; he took it up as a knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance of injustice." But Shelley believed too much to be consistently agnostic. He believed so firmly and intensely in his own religion—a kind of passionate positivism, a creed which seemed to have no God because it was all God—that he felt convinced he only needed to destroy accepted figments, for the light which blazed around him to break ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... his thoughts contribute to the difficulty of obtaining a methodical view of Bruno's philosophy. It has, therefore, been disputed whether he was a pantheist or an atheist, a materialist or a spiritualist, a mystic or an agnostic. No one would have contended more earnestly than Bruno himself, that the sage can hold each and all of these apparent contradictions together, with the exception of atheism; which last is a simple impossibility. The fragmentary and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Can't you see how miserable I am, and how hollow everything seems all at once? I don't believe in any one, and I don't feel as if I knew anything, except that love is an inexplicable phenomenon of matter. I shall become an agnostic. ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... Easton, visiting her sisters Guelma and Hannah, and meeting many of her old friends, Susan realized as never before how completely she had outgrown her old environment. In her enthusiasm for her new work, she exposed "many of her heresies," and when her friends labeled William Lloyd Garrison an agnostic and rabble rouser, she protested that he was the most Christlike man she had ever known. "Thus it is belief, not Christian benevolence," she confided to her diary in 1854, "that is made the modern ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... no more agnostic than you are. I should be glad of an age of faith for the rest to my soul, if for no other reason. I was harking back to the Stoics not only because they were good to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed to have the same barren devotion to duty which ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... apparent weakness, surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological doctrine that Mrs. Dax's husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed from his wife's masterful presence, Leander dared to be an "agnostic," as he called himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His iconoclasm was not of a pattern with paw's gusty protests against life in general, but it was Leander's way of asserting himself, on the rare occasions when he got a chance, to deny clamorously every tenet ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... miserable always appeared. Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with an intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are passages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from the reader's own knowledge: who else but Turgenev ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... follow the arguments closely, and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such strange expressions. Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that what is is right, and another old man who discoursed interminably about the cosmos and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... you do see me, yes, I suppose you are. What have you got there that makes you cut all your friends?" He looks at Roberts's open page. "Oh! Popular Science Monthly. Isn't Agnes a little afraid of your turning out an agnostic? By-the-way, where ...
— The Albany Depot - A Farce • W. D. Howells
... him every night," but Mrs. Arundell still refused consent. She reiterated her statement that whereas the Arundells were staunch old English Catholics, Burton professed no religion at all, and declared that his conversation and his books proclaimed him an Agnostic. Nor is it surprising that she remained obdurate, seeing that the popular imagination still continued to run riot over his supposed enormities. The midnight hallucinations of De Quincey seemed to be repeating themselves ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... misanthrope—he had a wife in a lunatic asylum—he had known some great trouble that had embittered his life; he had made a vow never to let a human being cross his threshold; he was a Roman Catholic priest in disguise, an Agnostic, a Nihilist." There was no end to Olivia's quaint surmises, but she could only be certain of two facts—that the mysterious Mr. Gaythorne was methodical by nature, and whatever might be the weather always took his exercise at the same hour, and also that only tradespeople entered ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... called a religious attitude of mind. It is the morbid desire to set up a fetich and adore it, to fall down and worship something. It makes little difference whether the something be Jesus or Buddha or a tum-tum tree. You don't agree with me, of course. You may be atheist or agnostic or anything you like, but I could feel the religious temperament in you at five yards. However, it is of no use for us to discuss that. But you are quite mistaken in thinking that I, for one, look ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... how to serve men? We feel the existence of something invisible and mysterious, but its nature and meaning are too deep for the human understanding to grasp. The safest, indeed the only reasonable, course is that of the agnostic—to leave alone the unknowable, while acknowledging its existence and its mystery, and to try to understand knowable phenomena and guide our ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... Christian. She rarely disagreed with the Dunleavys, who were Catholics; or her Aunt Emma, who regarded anything but High Church Episcopalianism as bad form; or her brother Mason, who was an uneasy Unitarian; or Carl, who was an unaggressive agnostic. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... have to leap back over a score of years and contemplate once more the young doctor of philosophy who returned to Copenhagen in 1872 and began a course of trial lectures at the University on modern literature. The lecturer here flies his agnostic colors from beginning to end. He treats "The Romantic School in Germany" as Voltaire treated Rousseau—with sovereign wit, superior intelligence, but scant sympathy. At the same time he penetrates to the fountains of life ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... like an anachronism to put the very words of the modern agnostic into the mouth of Buddha's tempter, but these men are merely threshing over old straw. The sneer of Epicurus curled the lip of Voltaire, and now merely breaks out into a broad laugh on ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... reward of heaven, nor did he threaten non-believers with hell. He claimed no special influence nor relationship to the Unseen. In all his teachings he was singularly open, frank and free from all mystery or concealment. In reference to the supernatural he was an agnostic. He often said, "I do not know." He was always an inquirer, always a student, always open to conviction. History affords no instance of another individual who has been so well and so long loved, who still holds his place, and who, so far as his reasoning went, is unassailed ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... hunchback had no idea of the moods of nature; at any rate they never seemed to affect him. To him all water was something to drink or something to swim in, and the earth was good pasture or hard road to ride a horse over. The grasp of no agnostic was more cynical. He inquired if any of Woodford's men had crossed that day, and was ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... rule, gross materialists now as they were forty years ago, although all theories regarding the composition of matter have been radically altered since that day? Evidently, the modern scientist is not on account of his research and speculation induced to proclaim himself as agnostic; quite the reverse, the fact that on any system of physics, zoology, psychology, the conclusions remain the same, proves that these conclusions were in the mind before the facts were investigated. Unbelief is not a product of scientific and philosophic speculation, it is rather their origin ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... for such feeling. In the second century B.C. old Cato had described the paterfamilias, on his arrival at his farm from the city, saluting the Lar familiaris before he goes about his round of inspection; and even Horace hardly shows a trace of the agnostic when he pictures the slaves of the farm, and the master with them, sitting at their meal in front of the image of the Lar[378]. We may perhaps guess that with the renewal of the love of country life, and with that revival of the cultivation of the vine ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... notorious and ultimately great. Thus, while his Celtic aestheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he mistrusted alike "the reeking products of the manure-heap and the barbaric fingers of cooks," it was surely his modernity that made him an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller men might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest conviction should have its place in the formation of his character. ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Even his dialect is no longer pure South Carolinian; it is corrupted by Northern slang. We have ruined his religious principles, too. The crackers haven't much of any morality, but they are very religious,—all Southerners are. But Demming is an unconscious Agnostic. 'I tell ye,' he says to the saloon theologians, 'thar ain't no tellin'. 'Ligion's a heap like jumpin' arter a waggin in th' dark; yo' mo'n likely ter lan' on nuthin'!' And you have seen for yourselves that he has lost the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... be the fittest; that the weakest must go to the wall, and that any one he could not understand must be the weakest; that was the philosophy which he lumberingly believed through life, like many another agnostic old bachelor of the Victorian era. All his views on religion (reverently quoted in the Review of Reviews) were simply the stalest ideas of his time. It was not his fault, poor fellow, that he called a high hill somewhere in ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... "Oh, you miserable agnostic!" exclaimed his friend Professor Helfenstein. "Can you not, in the face of this so beautiful landscape, get rid of your eternal subjunctive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... Douglas Fraser were that couple—until the cloud came that was to eclipse their happiness in this world. There is no need for me to enter into the matter very fully, though I know everything. One unhappy day Dinah discovered that Dr. Fraser was an agnostic—that for some time he had had grave doubts on the subject of revealed religion, which he had kept to himself for fear of distressing her; but now a sense of honour compelled him to tell her the truth. He had lost his faith, and he no longer ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... trial of the Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O'Connellised self had deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place. He was a Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries. He was a follower of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was half-hearted. He was an Irish-Canadian and sat ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... spiritual conception, itself also a result of the general reaction of the Century against the languid and materialistic positivism of the Eighteenth Century. Anti-positivist, but positive: neither sceptical nor agnostic, neither pessimistic nor passively optimistic, as are in general the doctrines (all of them negative) which place the centre of life outside of man, who by his free will can and should create his own world ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... great and supreme in manhood. In France, man now knows himself to be the only God; England—good, slow-pacing England—is approaching France in intelligence by degrees, and I rejoice to see that it is possible for a newspaper like the Agnostic to exist in London. Only the other day that excellent journal was discussing the possibility of teaching monkeys to read, and a witty writer, who adopts the nom de plume of 'Saladin,' very cleverly remarked 'that supposing monkeys were able ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... simpler-hearted reader. But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came near him without in some measure loving him. To me ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... have no regard for group beliefs but only for those of the individual. Each has his own beliefs, and he must have confidence in them, for they are the grounds on which he acts, if he is a normal man. Even the faith of an Agnostic is based on a very positive belief. As for me, I feel that the churchman goes one step beyond him: he even doubts Doubt. Said Socrates: "I know nothing except this one thing, that I know nothing. The rest of you ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... Pythagoras, according to which the philosopher was wont to declare that in an earlier state he had visited Hades, and had there seen Homer and Hesiod tortured because of the absurd things they had said about the gods. Apocrypbal or otherwise, the tale suggests that Pythagoras was an agnostic as regards the current Greek religion of his time. The same thing is perhaps true of most of the great thinkers of this earliest period. But one among them was remembered in later times as having ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... mutterings of some of the other Scherzi. There is the same "spirit of opposition," but of arrogance none. The C sharp minor theme is of lyric beauty, the coda with its scales, brilliant. It seems to be banned by classicists and Chopin worshippers alike. The agnostic attitude is not yet dead in the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... He's a Gentile by religion, by the way; an ordinary agnostic. Aunt Cynthia, don't go on spreading that nonsense, if you don't mind. You might contradict it ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... false systems it is important to distinguish between religion and ethics. In the sphere of ethics the different faiths of men may find much common ground, while in their religious elements they may be entirely true or utterly false. The teachings of Confucius, though agnostic, presented a moral code which places the relations of the family and state on a very firm basis. And the very highest precepts of Buddhism belong to the period in which it was virtually atheistic. Many great and noble ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... among scientific people, the affirmation which is the reverse of this became at one time popular, widely accepted—not Gnostic but "Agnostic," "without the Gnosis"; that was the position taken up by Huxley and by many men of his own time of the same school of thought. He chose the name because of its precise signification; he was far too scientific a man ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... do ere long. But in the meantime,"—he hesitated a moment, then went on, "in the meantime, I have a strong wish to be deluded—I use the word advisedly, and repeat it—DELUDED into an imaginary happiness, though I am aware that as an agnostic and searcher after truth—truth absolute, truth positive—such a desire on my part seems even to myself inconsistent and unreasonable. Still I confess to having it; and therein, I know, I betray the weakness ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... physiognomy of disease includes not merely its face, but its voice; not only the picture that it draws, but the sound that it makes. For, when all has been allowed and discounted that the most hardened cynic or pessimistic agnostic can say about speech being given to man to conceal his thoughts, and the hopeless unreliability of human testimony, two-thirds of what your patients tell you about their symptoms will be found to be literally the voice of the disease itself speaking through them. They may ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... admitted that he was a reverent agnostic, and if Gibbon had been a reverent free-thinker these two chapters would have been far different in tone. Lecky regarded the Christian church as a great institution worthy of reverence and respect although he stated the central thesis of Gibbon with emphasis just as great. ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... identity or nonduality (advaitha) lies at the foundation of all their religious thinking. This Being which is devoid of qualities (nirguna), because incomprehensible to man, can be of no comfort to him. In this respect the Hindu is an agnostic of ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... to the forthcoming book. Huxley was one of the few privileged to learn Darwin's argument before it was given to the world; but the greatness of the book, mere instalment as it was of the long accumulated mass of notes, almost took him by surprise. Before this time, he had taken up a thoroughly agnostic attitude with regard to the species question, for he could not accept the creational theory, yet sought in vain among the transmutationists for any cause adequate to produce transmutation. He had had many talks with Darwin, and ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... the way we have ourselves gone. Investigate every nook and corner of your mind, and learn how to control it and your sense perceptions. Then you will no longer mistrust your results as possibly imperfect, but you will have attained to some closer contact with Truth." To both the Agnostic and the indifferent, the study of Theosophy will bring a consciousness of the responsibility towards others, which is the basis of our universal brotherhood. It will tend to remove the personal element ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... dear; he didn't know the meaning of the words himself, and he said 'Very good—very good.' The class caught right on—at least three or four of the brighter ones did—and they kept up the fun. Jean Blane said that 'acoustic' meant 'a religious squabble,' and Muriel Baker said that an 'agnostic' was 'a man who had indigestion,' and Jim Carter said that 'acerbity' meant that 'you ate nothing but vegetable food,' and so on all down the list. Whiskers swallowed it all, and kept saying 'Very good—very good' until Ella thought that ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to unpack he grinned in spite of himself, for into his mind came a poem of Guiterman's he'd read lately, about an agnostic Brahmin who didn't believe in prayer, and came inadvertently on a tiger praying for ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... courteous atheist. His greatest sorrow in life was that his mother, a Middle State woman of ferocious religion, could not be kept in ignorance of his principles. We argued ethics sophistically as to whether a convinced agnostic might on occasion ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... blue paper. The other was the living room, and contained a cedar piggin and gourd on a shelf; a bread tray, dishpan, a pot and two skillets on another shelf near the fireplace, two split-bottom chairs, a table, and a cat. The cat was a large, gray agnostic. He never admitted William's presence by so much as a purr or a claw, and I have noticed that the agnostic is the only creature living who can treat a preacher with so much contempt. We found him curled up on the window sill next to the milk pitcher, ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... scholar, see the famous estimate in Macaulay's Essays. For a short but very interesting account of him, see Mark Pattison's article in vol. iii of the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The postion of Pattison as an agnostic dignitary in the English Church eminently fitted him to understand Bentley's career, both as regards the orthodox and the scholastic world. For perhaps the most striking account of the manner in which Bentley lorded it in the scholastic world of his ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... vague disquiet, a breaking up of ancient social and natural bonds, and a blind groping toward some more cosmopolitan creed and some deeper satisfaction for the emotional needs of mankind.'— The Religion of all Sensible Men in An Agnostic's Apology, 1893.]; all that need be done is to pass in review those points of it, some important, and some trifling, which are sure to occur in a detached way ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Lincoln was the most honest man he ever knew. Well, if Lincoln was an honest man in his character, he must have been honest in talking about his religion and his faith in God. Was Abraham Lincoln an agnostic in that hour when he spoke his farewell words to his neighbours in Springfield, about starting on the memorable journey to his inauguration? He said: "I feel that I cannot succeed without the same divine aid that sustained Washington, ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... another ground for quizzing English moderation even in negation. I thought then, and have often thought since, how far the principle of moderation might be extended, and whether you could be a moderate agnostic or a moderate fatalist ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... coincidence, Brommit! For a long time I've been looking for somebody to scrub the stairs thoroughly on Sundays, while the men are at church. Sergeant-major, put Brommit down as an Agnostic—on permanent fatigue for scrubbing the stairs ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... years Secretary of the Historical Society of Southern California; author of a History of Los Angeles City, and another of Los Angeles County; and another of San Diego County, and one in MSS of Orange County; also a work on State Division (in MSS) engaged in oil and mining business; agnostic in religion; independent ...
— The Stephens Family - A Genealogy of the Descendants of Joshua Stevens • Bascom Asbury Cecil Stephens
... this simile was not altered by the fact that in this case the slave woman was an agnostic, while the patrician girl had been brought up in the creed of Christ. Sylvia had long since begun to question the formulas of a church whose very pews were rented, and whose existence, she declared, had to be justified by charity to the poor. As we sat and ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... call ourselves agnostics can recollect the feelings with which, in the period of our fresh emancipation from a faith far more irrational than Buddhism, we looked back upon the gloomy theology of our fathers. Intellectual Japan has become agnostic within only a few decades; and the suddenness of this mental revolution sufficiently explains the principal, though not perhaps all the causes of the present attitude of the superior class toward Buddhism. For the time being it certainly borders upon intolerance; ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... afflicted with cholera, next with trichinae, and then with Andy Johnson, all in the same year, and that was more than any country could stand. Ebon C. Ingersoll was a brother of the famous Robert G. Ingersoll, the world's greatest agnostic. ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... not so easy to see through. Clever and brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for some line of achievement may make him more effective. There is nothing he may not call himself: conservative, liberal, progressive, or radical. Often he is an agnostic about social and political affairs and problems, which passes for the indecision of the open mind, and is quite handy to render him all things to all men. But perpetually, the underlying careerist instinct drives him to use all men and women, all ideas ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... may not be misunderstood, I would say that the doctrine of Duty agrees perfectly with every form of religion—a man may be Roman Catholic, Church of England, Presbyterian, Agnostic, or what he will; and, if a form aids him in the least to be sincerely honest, it would be a pity for him to be without it. Truly there are degrees in forms, and where I live in Italy I am sorry to see so many abuses or errors in them. But to know and do what is right, ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way. She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned the meaning of life as ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Agnostic. Atheist. Non-observant Jewish. Neo-pagan. Very commonly, three or more of these are combined in the same person. Conventional faith-holding Christianity is rare ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... which was most widespread, most intense, and most formative. Nor could it be otherwise with a Capitalist enterprise whose directing motive was not conversion or even expression, but mere gain. There was nothing to distinguish a large daily paper owned by a Jew from one owned by an Agnostic or a Catholic. Necessity of expression compelled the creation of a Free Press in connection with this one motive ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... Intervals too of poetic enthusiasm, or ascetic religion. At eighteen she had been practically a Catholic, influenced by the charming wife of one of her father's aides-de-camp. And then—a few stray books or magazine articles had made a Darwinian and an agnostic of her; the one phase as futile ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Cultivated fiddlesticks, madam! You cannot change this subject until the heavens and the earth pass away. I am not an Agnostic: I am a gentleman. When I believe a thing I say I believe it: when I don't believe it I say I don't believe it. I do not shirk my responsibilities by pretending that I know nothing and therefore can believe nothing. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... is the creed of the Agnostic, but the confession of the spiritual numbness of humanity? Natural Law, Death, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... years old she lived in an old unpainted house on an unused road that led off Trunion Pike. Her father gave her but little attention and her mother was dead. The father spent his time talking and thinking of religion. He proclaimed himself an agnostic and was so absorbed in destroying the ideas of God that had crept into the minds of his neighbors that he never saw God manifesting himself in the little child that, half forgotten, lived here and there on the bounty of ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... to Lalun's door I stumbled over a man at the threshold. He was sobbing hysterically and his arms flapped like the wings of a goose. It was Wali Dad, Agnostic and Unbeliever, shoeless, turbanless, and frothing at the mouth, the flesh on his chest bruised and bleeding from the vehemence with which he had smitten himself. A broken torch-handle lay by his side, and his quivering lips murmured, 'Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain!' as I stooped over him. I pushed him ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... no; the author is not a cowboy—he's a perfect gentleman—as polished as I am; and there's nothing very sad in the book. It contains several lectures in the line of agnostic agitation, which were from time to time delivered by a very talented, but, as I think, mistaken man. When I say mistaken, I do not mean mistaken in the sense that our church people might apply the term to him; for our church people seem to misunderstand him, almost as greatly as he misapprehends ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... different times, its teaching has become both negative and positive, agnostic and gnostic. It passes from apparent atheism and materialism to theism, polytheism, and spiritualism. It is, under one aspect, mere pessimism; under another, pure philanthropy; under another, monastic communion; under another, high morality; under another, a variety of materialistic ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... the uncertainties of atheism, then the verdict must be reversed. The dialogues on religion contained in The Ball and the Cross are alone enough and more than enough to place it among the few books on religion which could be safely placed in the hands of an atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence. ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... metaphysical ethics, but in popular novels. The aim of the modern historian is to compile a Times newspaper of events which happened three or four, eight or ten centuries ago. The aim of the modern philosopher is to tabulate mountains of research, and to prune away with agnostic non possumus the ancient oracles of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... manner or movement: to summarize what Mathew Arnold says of it (the best I can do): it is as direct and rapid as Scott's; as lucid as Wordsworth's could be; but noble like Shakespeare's or Milton's. There is no Dantesque periphrasis, nor Miltonian agnostic struggle and inversion; but he calls spades, spades, and moves on to the next thing swiftly, clearly, and yet with exultation. (Yet there is retardation often by long similes.) And he either made a language for himself, or ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris |
