"Atheist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gentlemen and men of honour, but, d—n me, I find we have a pickpocket in company." The scandalous sound of this word extremely alarmed the whole board, nor did they all shew less surprise than the CONV—N (whose not sitting of late is much lamented) would express at hearing there was an atheist in the room; but it more particularly affected the gentleman at whom it was levelled, though it was not addressed to him. He likewise started from his chair, and, with a fierce countenance and accent, ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... Turned atheist, and burnt the family Bible before his weeping wife and terrified children and gaping servant-girl, Mr. Williams, a Sunday-school teacher, known hitherto only as a mild, respectable man, a teetotaler, and a good parent and husband. He did not take to drinking; but ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... an Episcopal clergyman of New York told me, the other evening, that General Butler was an Atheist. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... answers this last charge, in his second letter, "you could not have bin farther off from the truth of the thing." "What is added of Socinians and Arminians, in respect of mee, is groundless. I may as well be called a Papist, or Mahometan; Pagan or Atheist. And trulie, Sir, you are wholly mistaken in the whole course of my studies. You say you find me largelie in their Apologia; to my knowledge I never saw or heard of the book before! . . . I have not read ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Imagine an atheist with a religion more attractive than religion itself; a republican full of politeness and interest for kings; a gentleman of the privileged classes tender and solicitous for the people, endowed with the most startling eloquence, attacking all the ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... in a low, even, passionate voice, that he flung at her almost like a blow. "The atheist, the gaol bird, the pariah, the blasphemer, the anti-Christ. I've hoofs instead of feet. Shall I take off my boots and show them to you? I tuck my tail inside my coat. You can't see my horns. I've cut them off close to my head. That's why I wear ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... systems of planets was regarded. Until the evidence became too strong to be resisted, the doctrine that our earth was once a baby world, with many millions of years to pass through before it could be the abode of life, was one which only the professed atheist (so said too many divines) could for a moment entertain; while the doctrine that not the earth alone, but the whole of the solar system, had developed from a condition utterly unlike that through which it is now passing, could have had its origin only in the suggestions ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... common man. His knowledge was great and various: his parts were quick; and his eloquence was singularly ready and graceful. To sanctity he made no pretensions. Indeed Episcopalians and Presbyterians agreed in regarding him as little better than an atheist. During some months Sir John at Edinburgh affected to condemn the disloyalty of his unhappy parent Sir James; and Sir James at Leyden told his Puritan friends how deeply he lamented the wicked compliances of his unhappy ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... may provide arguments for the atheist, intelligent force is inexplicable; for if it emanates from God, why should it meet with obstacles? ought not its triumph to be immediate? Where is God? If the living cannot perceive Him, can the dead find Him? Crumble, ye idolatries and ye religions! ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... you. They say he was educated in Paris, and that he is an atheist. He fought against the Turks in Candia, and is said to have distinguished himself there no less by his race-hatred and cruelty, than ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... enraptured child: "I doat upon you and the babes." And his letters end thus: "Kiss the babies for me ten thousand times. God Almighty for ever bless you, my dearest life and soul." (This from the "French Atheist." I hope his traducers are heartily ashamed of themselves.) Nor is it strange. When, in the beginning of his enterprise, he is in America, preparing to go to France on his great mission, he is troubled by the thought of his defenceless ones. In ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... thing that they have made me, a terror, and a curse to all who call themselves patrician. For daring, remorseless! for brave, cruel! for voluptuous, sensual! for fearless, ruthless! for enterprising, reckless! for ambitious, desperate! for a man, a monster! for a philosopher, an atheist! Ha! ha! ha! ha! I am proud, minion, proud to be that I am—that which thou, Julia, shalt ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... philosopher, went a step further, and declared pantheism itself to be "veiled atheism." Moreover, she says, "So thoroughly does pantheism strike at the root of all idea of God, as taught by theists, that we can scarce think that Bruno was unfairly judged when called atheist by his contemporaries; the conception of the pantheist cannot be called a God in the commonly accepted sense of ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... grappled there, would hinge around these. The field was somewhat widely examined and much discussion awakened,—discussion earnest, though courteous. The religious element largely predominated, and great harmony prevailed. True, an atheist attempted to throw in a firebrand by making a cat's paw of the Jew, but wholly failed, not exciting a single remark in reply. A U. S. judge was present, several State judges, a number of governors and ex-governors, lawyers, clergymen, philanthropists in private life and prison officials, ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... remember your cinchona this morning? Good. Cinchona also is a work of nature; it is, after all, only the bark of a tree which we might gather for ourselves if we lived in the locality. What a world is this! Though a professed atheist, I delight to bear my testimony to the world. Look at the gratuitous remedies and pleasures that surround our path! The river runs by the garden end, our bath, our fish-pond, our natural system of drainage. There is a well in the court which sends up sparkling water from the earth's very heart, clean, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eyed and uncombed hair side—I admit it. On the other hand, the people in our citizenry who subscribe to your system, your religion, that sort of thing, are crackpots, too. Applies to religion as well as politics. An atheist in your country is a nonconformist—in mine, a Christian is. ...
— Summit • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... before the fire, newly hatched from death, had caught some of the conversation between his wife and the assistant who had recovered him to life. So she was gone, that brave, beautiful atheist girl—gone to test the truth. And she ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... father objects to me specially because I am a Jew. If I were an atheist he might, perhaps, say nothing on the subject of religion. On this matter as well as on others it seems to me that your father has hardly kept pace with the movements of the age. Fifty years ago, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... passion. "I don't know whom you mean by they, generally speaking; but I had the impression that poor old Lindau had once done his best to save the country. I don't always like his way of talking, but I know that he is one of the truest and kindest souls in the world; and he is no more an atheist than I am. He is my friend, and I can't allow him ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... gods, should Jove himself descend, And tell me,—Hector, thou deservest not life, But take it as a boon,—I would not live. But that a mortal man, and he, of all men, Should think my life were in his power to give, I will not rest, till, prostrate on the ground, I make him, atheist-like, implore his breath Of me, and not ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... "An atheist," said the dogmatic voice of the individual who had given that common-sense view of spiritualism the previous evening, "must be a fool of the most complete type. Because he doubts what men teach of God, is no reason for doubting the existence ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... Gods. Belial came last, then whom a Spirit more lewd 490 Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love Vice for it self: To him no Temple stood Or Altar smoak'd; yet who more oft then hee In Temples and at Altars, when the Priest Turns Atheist, as did Ely's Sons, who fill'd With lust and violence the house of God. In Courts and Palaces he also Reigns And in luxurious Cities, where the noyse Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Towrs, And injury and outrage: And ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... of the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this, sunned himself in the town's displeasure. For the sake of the public furor it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist, an anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone cared greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations of his passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in Wildman's grocery store he would stand whipping them into a frenzy by declaring for free love, and vowing that he ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... Soon after that famous Atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, entered the House of Commons, it is said that a fellow member approached him with the remark, "Good God, Bradlaugh, what does it matter whether there is a God or not?" Bradlaugh's answer ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... he answered. "What else could I look for, being what I am, and leading such a life as mine? Were I an atheist—a man devoid of conscience—a wretch with coarse and brutal instincts—I might have found peace long ere now. Nay, I never should have lost it. But, as matters stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity there originally ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... none of them excusing one another. So hard were they upon her that she fancied she had nearly come to the conclusion that, if only she could do it pleasantly, without pain or fear, the best thing would be to swallow something and fall asleep; for like most people she was practically an atheist, and therefore always thought of death as the refuge from the ills of life. But although she was often very uncomfortable, Florimel knew nothing of such genuine downright misery as drives some people to what can be no more to ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... divisions: Han Chinese 91.9%, Zhuang, Uygur, Hui, Yi, Tibetan, Miao, Manchu, Mongol, Buyi, Korean, and other nationalities 8.1% Religions: Daoism (Taoism), Buddhism, Muslim 2-3%, Christian 1% (est.) note: officially atheist, but traditionally pragmatic and eclectic Languages: Standard Chinese (Putonghua) or Mandarin (based on the Beijing dialect), Yue (Cantonese), Wu (Shanghainese), Minbei (Fuzhou), Minnan (Hokkien-Taiwanese), Xiang, Gan, Hakka dialects, minority ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... leper island in the South Seas, where he would be buried alive for the remainder of his life. All he had was an ideal, but it flooded his soul with light. Another was a Russian Nihilist, a girl in years and yet an atheist and a revolutionist in thought, and her unbelief was in its way as beautiful as the religion of my priest. To return to Russia meant death; she knew, and yet she went back, devoted and exalted, to lay down her life for an illusion. So ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... lips, he allowed his ferocious soul for one moment to appear; but, having grown old in deceit, he immediately had the circumspection to give this movement of rage the appearance of religious zeal, and exclaimed, "What comparisons are these? Are you not ashamed to assume the language of the Atheist? By speaking in this way you clearly manifest how little you deserve to leave this place. But since I have told you that I love you, I will give you a proof of it by thinking no more of those irreligious expressions; they shall be forgotten as though they had never been spoken. Well, the Cardinal ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... subjects. Less critical than Voltaire, and less philosophical than Rousseau, he exceeded both as the practical teacher. But in unbelief he unhappily advanced farther than either; his temper lacked moral earnestness; and in later life he was an atheist. A growth of unbelief may be traced in him: at first he was a doubter, next he became a deist, lastly an atheist. In the first stage he only translated English works, and even condemned some of the English deists. His views seem gradually to have altered, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Joshua, the Saviour of Israel; and after all this, to treat the Thing his son with addresses no lesse then blasphemous, whose Father (as themselves confess to be the most infamous Hypocrite and profligate Atheist of all the Usurpers that ever any age produc'd) had made them his Vassalls, and would have intaild them so to his posterity ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... our system out of hatred to the Established Church, though our system is ten times less liberal than the Church of England. Some of them have really come over to us. I myself confess a baronet who presided over the first radical meeting ever held in England—he was an atheist when he came over to us, in the hope of mortifying his own church—but he is now—ho! ho!—a real Catholic devotee—quite afraid of my threats; I make him frequently scourge himself before me. Well, Radicalism does us good service, especially amongst the lower classes, for Radicalism ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... know of the Nunc Dimittis?" he asked at last, with a half-smile. "You might as well say PATER NOSTER,—both canticle and prayer would be equally unmeaning to you! For poet as you are,—or let me say as you WERE,—inasmuch as no atheist was ever a poet ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a God was an hypothesis. There was left an admitted possibility that the vague somewhat which went by more names than one, might be personal, intelligent, and superintendent. In the works of Laplace,[1] who is sometimes called an atheist from his writings, there is nothing from which such an inference can be drawn: unless indeed a Reverend Fellow of the Royal Society may be held to be the fool who said in his heart, etc., etc., if his contributions to the Philosophical Transactions go no higher than nature. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... that are currently accepted, and will endeavour [sic] to show that the ideas now current are in truth efforts to grasp the one on which I shall here insist. Finally, I shall persuade the reader that the differences between the so-called atheist and the so-called theist are differences rather about words than things, inasmuch as not even the most prosaic of modern scientists will be inclined to deny the existence of this God, while few theists will feel that this, the natural ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... hardly likely to know your Herbert Spencer as intimately as he, and all the most exquisite literature of doubt was upon his shelves. Though you might declare him superficially disingenuous, you could not, unless you were some commonplace atheist or materialist, gainsay the honest ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... "Some three months before Sir Richard's death," writes Mr. P. P. Cautley, the Vice-Consul at Trieste, to me, "I was seated at Sir Richard's tea table with our clergy man, and the talk turning on religion, Sir Richard declared, 'I am an atheist, but I was brought up in the Church of England, and that is officially my church.' [529] Perhaps, however, this should be considered to prove, not that he was an atheist, but that he could not resist the pleasure ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... spirits are now. Speeded thence, they may have already made the next world richer by their coming. I do not know that; but I do know that they have made my soul infinitely richer by their sojourn here; I do not know whether they were Catholic or Atheist, but I do know how truly the Master of all souls could say to these two brave little Belgians: "When I was an hungered, ye gave me food; when I was thirsty, ye gave me drink; when I was a stranger, ye took me in; when I was sick and in ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... only so, for I have surrounded thee with two walls, one of bone and the other of flesh. What shall be given to thee, or what shall be added unto thee, O thou false tongue?" Rabbi Yochanan, in the name of Yossi, says, "He who slanders is an atheist, for it is written (Ps. xii. 4), 'Who have said, With our tongues will we prevail; Our lips are with us; who is ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... midnight revel prone; The slow-tongued bishop, and the deacon sly, The humble pensioner, and gownsman dry; The proud, the mean, the selfish, and the great, Swell the dull throng, and stagger into state. Lo! proud Flaminius at the splendid board, The easy chaplain of an atheist lord, Quaffs the bright juice, with all the gust of sense, And clouds his brain in torpid elegance; In china vases, see! the sparkling ill, From gay decanters view the rosy rill; The neat-carved pipes in silver settle laid, ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... a feeling analogous to the apprehension one experiences when a tooth has to be drawn. The thought recurred to him at every moment: "I must go to confession this evening." And his troubled mind, the mind of an atheist only half convinced, was bewildered with a confused and overwhelming dread of the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... of God to prove my good-will towards a multitude of sects, whose opinions I do not share, but whose malice I fear:— theists; I know one who, in the cause of God, would be ready to draw sword, and, like Robespierre, use the guillotine until the last atheist should be destroyed, not dreaming that that atheist would be himself;— mystics, whose party, largely made up of students and women marching under the banner of MM. Lamennais, Quinet, Leroux, and others, has taken ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... it? He called to mind the look on his mother's face, the agony of her voice; he realised the bitter years she had spent in silence and misery, and remembered who was responsible for it all. Thus Paul became a kind of atheist. He was not yet old enough to think deeply about it, but incipient unbelief was in the boy's mind and heart. It darkened his thoughts and gave a sombre hue to life. In any case he was not going to trouble about religion. He remembered the vow he had made ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... active little fellow, with bright dark eyes. (He had the name of being an atheist, ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... that our platform may be kept as broad as the universe, that upon it may stand the representatives of all creeds and no creeds—Jew or Christian, Protestant or Catholic, Gentile or Mormon, pagan or atheist. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... in its most superstitious corner. Protestantism was a sin, but atheism was a crime against humanity. The Protestant might be the victim of a mistake, but the atheist was the deliberate son of darkness, the source of fearful dangers. An atheist in their midst was like a scorpion in a flower-bed—no one could tell when and where he would sting. Rough misdemeanours among them had been many, there had once been ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... thank the Lord you were not bred at a public school; you would never have preserved your virtue as you have. The first care I always take is of a boy's morals; I had rather he should be a blockhead than an atheist or a presbyterian. What is all the learning in the world compared to his immortal soul? What shall a man take in exchange for his soul? But the masters of great schools trouble themselves about no such thing. ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... "although I have never offended against the laws of the State, of morality or of his paternal authority, merely because I do not share his blind reverence for the Catholic Church and her Ministers. On that account he looks upon me, not merely as Latitudinarian, but as a perfect Atheist, and a faithful old manservant of ours, who is much attached to me, and who accidentally saw my father's will, told me in confidence that he had left all his property to the Jesuits. I think this is highly suspicious, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... and, if that fails, turn atheist! We might fall foul of the four Gospels, get our book burned by the hangman, and then it would sell ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... this doctrine. Locke, in this and many other things, followed Hobbes, whose doctrine, in the Leviathan, is fidem, quanta ad salutem necessaria est, contineri in hoc articulo, Jesus est Christus.[303] For this Hobbes was called an atheist, which {144} many still believe him to have been: some of his contemporaries called him, rightly, a Socinian. Locke was known for a Socinian as soon as his work appeared: Dr. John Edwards,[304] his assailant, says ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... I've seen the Atheist in terror start, Awed to contrition by the strong appeal That waked conviction in ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... and bent his head to let the storm raised in his soul by the atheist philosopher pass over. His bad instincts, aroused, spoke louder at that instant than reason, louder than reality. His glance fell on the chimney-piece, where a porcelain figure, the grotesque chef d'oeuvre of some great Chinese artist, leered at him with its everlasting ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... reflexion of its Creator. This is, to me, one of those great difficulties of this absolute primary truth, to which I referred just now. Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist when I looked into the world. I am speaking for myself only; and I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society and the course of history, but these do ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... said that once he narrowly escaped excommunication for having said that Jesus was only a poor human being and a Jew. Haydn, ingenuously pious, is reported to have called Beethoven an atheist. ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... Italian propaganda, too, that he took a further step. This was the institution of mysteries, with hierophants and torch-bearers complete. The ceremonies occupied three successive days. On the first, proclamation was made on the Athenian model to this effect: 'If there be any atheist or Christian or Epicurean here spying upon our rites, let him depart in haste; and let all such as have faith in the God be initiated and all blessing attend them.' He led the litany with, 'Christians, avaunt!' and the crowd responded, 'Epicureans, avaunt!' Then ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... And supposing greyhound puppies are the only bribes you take? You're an atheist, you never go to church, while I at least am a firm believer and go to church every Sunday. You—oh, I know you. When you begin to talk about the Creation ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... to ascribe great wonders to the devil; and those are taxed with infidelity and perverseness who hesitate to believe what thousands relate concerning his power. Whoever does not do so is accounted an atheist because he cannot persuade himself that there are two Gods, the one good and the other evil[3]—an assertion which is no mere hyperbole or exaggeration of a truth: there is the certain evidence of facts as well as the concurrent ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... the same amusing correspondence with Boccaccio, which our poet maintained at this period, he gives an account of an atheist and blasphemer at Venice, with whom he had a long conversation. It ended in our poet seizing the infidel by the mantle, and ejecting him from his house with unceremonious celerity. This conclusion of their dialogue gives us a higher notion ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... The very atheist, who in the name of truth repudiates the word God, is really manifesting (in his own different way) the belief which he cannot escape, in the divine righteousness and its lawful claim ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... contended here by the Quakers, that because a man becomes occasionally a hypocrite, this is a sufficient objection against any system; for a man may be an Atheist even in a Quaker's garb. Nor is it insinuated, that individuals do not sometimes feel in their hearts, the sorrow which they purpose to signify by their clothing. But it is asserted to be true, that men who use mourning habits ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... the demons of other peoples, according to the esoteric hyponia, or under-meaning. "The gods exist, but they are not what the hoi polloi, the uneducated multitude, suppose them to be," says Epicurus. "He is not an atheist who denies the existence of the gods, whom the multitude worship, but he is such who fastens on these gods the opinions of the multitude." In his turn, Aristotle declares that of the "Divine Essence pervading the whole world of Nature, what are styled the gods are ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... views of the divine sovereignty. Chapter VI. The Existence Of Moral Evil, Or Sin, Reconciled With The Holiness Of God. Section I. The hypothesis of the soul's preexistence. Section II. The hypothesis of the Manicheans. Section III. The hypothesis of optimism. Section IV. The argument of the atheist—The reply of Leibnitz and other theists—The insufficiency of this reply. Section V. The sophism of the atheist exploded, and a perfect agreement shown to subsist between the existence of sin and the holiness of God. Section VI. The true and ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... the tenets of our church, including the Seventh Day Sabbath, than I had of the laws of nature; but the truly spiritual character of my mother's religion saved me from becoming a bigot. If I had been trained in the dogmas of Christianity, I have no doubt I should have then become an atheist. Nor was I a prig. I must confess that I enjoyed the occasional larks in which my classmates sometimes led and sometimes followed me, as well as any of them. Our Greek professor, Doctor R., was a bit of a snob, and the plebeians of the class, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... of Young's morality in the early part of his life may, perhaps, be wrong; but Tindal could not err in his opinion of Young's warmth and ability in the cause of religion. Tindal used to spend much of his time at All Souls. "The other boys," said the atheist, "I can always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually pestering me ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... friend of mine once exhibited great distress because in a gay moment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need scarcely say that the remark lacked something of biographical precision; it was meant to. Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious cosmic theory, though he had not a special and flaming faith in God, like Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... superior man. He says the schools invented by the genius of the Revolution manufacture incapacities. For my part, I say they manufacture unbelievers; for if Monsieur Gerard is not an atheist, he is a protestant." ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... Cross' is a theological novel. It is, without any doubt, the most brilliant of Chesterton's novels; it is an argument between a Christian ass and a very decent atheist. Atheists, if they are sincere, are on the way to becoming good Christians; Christians, if they are insincere, are on the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... nearer view, took on proportions overwhelming—so dense was that curtain at which he gazed. And to-day the very skies above it were leaden, as though Nature herself had turned atheist. In spite of the vigour with which he was endowed, in spite of the belief in his own soul, doubts assailed him of his ability to cope with this problem of the modern Nineveh—at the very moment when he was about to realize his matured ambition of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... we can do any good to an atheist? Besides, we have to consider our reputation. Whatever good we might do, it would be ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... true that Darwin did not declare himself an atheist[26] and that Spencer is not one; it is also true that, strictly speaking, the theory of Darwin, like that of Spencer, can also be reconciled with the belief in God, since it may be admitted that God created matter and force, and that both afterward evolved into ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... know of our father? I knew him; I have been present when he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred. Lucretius was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist lay by his pillow and was his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... case of that man of our own family who was ordered to the front with a higher rank. He refused promotion in order to stay behind, and in a month's time he died of the plague in his own village. If he had gone to the front his family would have received the war pension. An atheist never achieves honour, Mother. He is always unsettled and has no consolations. Do we Mussulmans think that the Prophet will spend all his time in asking God to forgive our transgressions? Tell the Pir Murshid what I ...
— The Eyes of Asia • Rudyard Kipling
... a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion produced humility or humility a simple joy: but he admitted both. He only said, "But shall I not find in evil a life of its own? Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out: will not the ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... epoch when "the Mohammedan, the Jew, the Christian, the Deist, and the Atheist will live together in one community, equally sharing the benefits which arise from its associations, and united in the bonds of charity and ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... indulgence, the various errors of the vulgar, they diligently practised the ceremonies of their fathers, devoutly frequented the temples of the gods; and sometimes condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition, they concealed the sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robes. Reasoners of such a temper were scarcely inclined to wrangle about their respective modes of faith, or of worship. It was indifferent to them what shape the folly of the multitude might choose to assume; and they approached with the same inward contempt, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... the Atheist; the Atheist satirizes the Christian; the Catholic and Protestant are ceaselessly engaged in wordy warfare, and the spirit of strife and hatred rules where ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... the ethical responsibility of the present to all the future, the immeasurable consequence of every thought and deed, the ultimate disparition of evil, and the power of attainment to conditions of infinite memory and infinite vision,—cannot be termed either an atheist or a materialist, except by bigotry and ignorance. Profound as may be the difference between his religion and our own, in respect of symbols and modes of thought, the moral conclusions reached in either case ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... Maxims" I have collected all the passages which can give us a clear comprehension of Leonardo's ideas of the world at large. It is scarcely necessary to observe that there is absolutely nothing in them to lead to the inference that he was an atheist. His views of nature and its laws are no doubt very unlike those of his contemporaries, and have a much closer affinity to those which find general acceptance at the present day. On the other hand, it is obvious from Leonardo's will (see No. 1566) that, in the year ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... severest attacks. The small group of skeptics, which is hardly perceptible under Louis XIV, has obtained its recruits in the dark; in 1698 the Palatine, the mother of the Regent, writes that "we scarcely meet a young man now who is not ambitious of being an atheist."[4215] Under the Regency, unbelief comes out into open daylight. "I doubt," says this lady again, in 1722, "if; in all Paris, a hundred individuals can be found, either ecclesiastics or laymen, who have any true faith, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... host of suns wander round a greater sun, Our Father, that art thou.'' In this inexpressibly lofty verse there is essentially, and only in an extremely intensified fashion, evidence of the existence of God, and if the convinced atheist should read this verse he would, at least for the moment, believe in his existence. At the same time, a real development of evidence is neither presented nor intended. There are magnificent images, unassailable true propositions: the moon goes round ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the credit of suggesting it, and how Lawrence Dalhonde, the Frenchman, testified to its destructive consequences; of how Edmund Massey, lecturer at St. Albans, preached against sinfully endeavoring to alter the course of nature by presumptuous interposition, which he would leave to the atheist and the scoffer, the heathen and unbeliever, while in the face of his sermon, afterwards reprinted in Boston, many of our New England clergy stood up boldly in defence of the practice,—all this has ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Son with a proper love and fear of God, as the foundation and sole pillar of our temporal and eternal welfare. No false religions, or sects of Atheist, Arian (ArRian), Socinian, or whatever name the poisonous things have, which can so easily corrupt a young mind, are to be even named in his hearing: on the other hand, a proper abhorrence (ABSCHEU) of Papistry, and insight into its baselessness and nonsensicality (UNGRUND ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... referred to God; and a sadder word than 'crime' or 'fault' had to be used about it. I have done wrong as against my fellows, but worse than that, I have sinned against God. The notion of sin implies the notion of God. Sin is wilful transgression of the law of God. An atheist can have no conception of sin. But bring God into human affairs, and men's faults immediately assume the darker tint, and become men's sins. Therefore the need of prayer if these evils are to be blotted out. If I had done crime against man only, I should not need to ask God for pardon ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... "Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten", gives the literary man the place of priest in the world, continually unfolding the Godlike to man. This was also Beethoven's aim. Haydn charged him with being an atheist, but his works as well as his life refute this charge. The Kyrie and the Agnus Dei of the Mass in D, could never have been produced had he been other than a devout, religious man. In his journals he continually addresses the Godhead. Outwardly, however, he gave no sign. "Religion and general-bass," ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... him to be, certainly could not offer one valid argument against the alleged fact. He could only stare, and wonder, and say that it might be so for all that he knew to the contrary. Just so, when the atheist tells us, that far off in infinite space is a region, of which we can see nothing, even with our best telescopes, except a faint glimmer of light, floating like a cloudlet in the heavens, where the primitive atoms of matter, ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... years, in every age, in every clime, among all classes of men, from the refined infidel to the vilest sinner, from the cold atheist to the brutal idolater, men have been changed— transformed. Men who have been the bond slaves of passion, whose daily lives have been the output of iniquity, whose deeds have been for destruction, whose words have been poison, and whose inmost thoughts have been as the vapors ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... bearded this lion in his den. I agree most entirely with all that you have written. What I meant when I wrote to Agassiz to thank him for a bundle of his publications, was exactly what you suppose. (183/2. Namely, that Mr. Darwin, having been abused as an atheist, etc., by other writers, probably felt grateful to a writer who was willing to allow him "a spirit as reverential as his own." ("Methods of Study," Preface, page iv.) I confess, however, I did not fully perceive how he had misstated ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... I fell under his influence he stood more aloof; and this made him the more impressive to a youthful atheist. He had a keen sense of language and its imperial influence on men; language contained all the great and sound metaphysics, he was wont to say; and a word once made and generally understood, he thought a real victory of man and reason. But he never ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... poems are not poems about little children who win good-conduct prizes. They are poems of the agonies of life, poems about tragic severance, poems about failure. They range through the virtues and the vices with the magnificent boldness of Dostoevsky's novels. The madman, the atheist, the adulterer, the traitor, the murderer, the beast, are portrayed in them side by side with the hero, the saint, and the perfect woman. There is every sort of rogue here half-way between good and evil, and every sort of half-hero who is either worse than his virtue or better ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... without knowing his misery, or to know his misery without knowing the Redeemer, who alone can deliver him from it, is alike dangerous. The one knowledge constitutes the pride of the philosopher, the other the despair of the atheist. Man must therefore have the double experience, and so it has pleased God to reveal it. This the Christian religion does; in this it consists.” Again: “Christ is the centre in which alone we find at once God and our misery. In Him alone we have a God whom we must approach without ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... I'm no the thing I shou'd be, Nor am I even the thing I cou'd be, But twenty times, I rather wou'd be An atheist clean, Than under gospel colours hid be Just ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... believe? Did Sprot go wherever he went with a blasphemous lie in his mouth? A motive for such vehemence of religious hypocrisy is difficult to find. Conceivably he had promise of benefits to his family. Conceivably he was an atheist, and 'took God in his own hand.' Conceivably his artistic temperament induced him to act his lie well, as he had ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... families, and beginning exactly such a castastrophe as did the Noailles and the Montmorencis in 1789. Cobden and Bright were promiscuously likened to Baboeuf, Chaumette, and Anacharsis Clootz. Baboeuf, it is true, was for dividing up all property, and Chaumette was an aggressive atheist; but these were mere nuances, not material to the purposes of obloquy. Robespierre, Danton, Marat have been mercilessly trotted forth in their sanguinary shrouds, and treated as the counterparts and precursors ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... which was so effectually suppressed, as a monster of atheism, that a copy is now only to be found in the hands of the curious. This author ridiculed the absurd and horrid doctrine of infant damnation, and was instantly decried as an atheist, and the printer prosecuted to his ruin! Caelius Secundus Curio, a noble Italian, published a treatise De Amplitudine beati Regni Dei, to prove that Heaven has more inhabitants than Hell,—or, in his own phrase, that the elect are more ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... content with your lot, where the hoarders of pennies are venerated and the pluggers canonized—I wouldn't bring you here just for me. For I'm not worthy of you. No, sir-ree! Don't you know I'm no good—didn't you see that yesterday? Why, Old Samuel Terwilliger said I'm an atheist because I quoted Ingersoll's graveside oration—said no Christian would repeat anything that man ever said, even if his watch is a bargain at a dollar!... ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... standards acceptable to all? A good churchman, perhaps, whose first thought would be to bring everyone into the saving grace of his religion? Or an atheist, who would take care that no rascally churchman got the upper hand? Can you think of any man who does not have strong opinions on at least one subject? Who does not have one thing that he is a little bit more afraid of than anything ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... then, an unmistakable Atheist. He did not admit a God in any rational sense. True, he professed to believe in gods, but evidently in a very equivocal manner, and solely to escape the popular condemnation. "They are not pure spirits, for there is no spirit in the atomic theory; they are not bodies, for where are ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... acquainted with a French gentleman, whom nature had endowed with more tongue than with discretion and good principles;—in fact, it came to the ears of Mr. G——, that the loquacious Gaul was a revolutionist in politics, a professed atheist in religion, and (how could it happen otherwise?) a man devoid of the most ordinary principles of honour, probity, and social decencies. He was in the habit of slandering and vituperating, in the most ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... middle class who are swayed chiefly by material interests and are blind to the force of ideas and the value of culture. Leslie Stephen, who is always ready to plead the cause of the Philistine, remarks: "As a clergyman always calls every one from whom he differs an atheist, and a bargee has one or two favorite but unmentionable expressions for the same purpose, so a prig always calls his adversary a Philistine." Mr. Matthew Arnold and the Church of England, Fraser's Magazine, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... to be remarked that this philosophy is not atheist; those races called Semitic have never denied either the presence or the personality of God. It is, on the contrary, their boast that they have felt His presence, His unity, and His personality ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and Europe. Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, 1635, affirmed his belief in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of atheist." But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and executions, and was the more shocking from the general high level of intelligence in the community in which these were held. It would be well if those who lament the decay of "faith" would remember ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... who believes in two gods (the old Persian dualism); in books an atheist, i.e. one who does not believe in a god or gods; and, popularly, a free-thinker who denies the existence of a Supreme Being, rejects revelation for the laws of Nature imprinted on the heart of man and for humanity in its widest sense. Hence he is accused ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... softly stole to his room and opened the New Testament, and read its heavenly moralities with purged eyes; and when he had done, he fell upon his knees, and prayed the Almighty to pardon the ungrateful heart that, worse than the Atheist's, had confessed His existence, but denied His goodness. His sleep was sweet and his dreams were cheerful. Did he rise to find that the penitence which had shaken his reason would henceforth suffice to save his life from all error? Alas! remorse overstrained has too often ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... new infant Messiah. A few generations ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into pulpits and the ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and in everything! The end of this is misery;—it must be so; it cannot by law be anything else. For what is God? Who is God? God is a name merely,—but we give it to that Unseen, but ever working Force which rules the Universe! The coldest atheist that ever breathed must own that somehow,—by some means or other,— the Universe is ruled,—for if it were not, we should know nothing of it. Therefore, when we set aside, or leave out the consciousness and acknowledgment of the Ruler, the ruling of our affairs must, of necessity, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... private reasonings whereby a man convinceth himself? and how shall he call his conviction the truth, since all truth is one, but the testimony of no man's private conscience is the same as another's? Nay, how does thee know that the atheist, whom thee excludes, is further from the truth than thee thyself is? Truly, I hear the clanking of the chains on ye all; but if ye will accept the Inner Light, then indeed shall ye know what ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... I had many very strange characteristics in common, which we shared with no one else, while we differed utterly in other respects. It was very like both of us, for Lola, when defending the existence of the soul against an atheist, to tumble over a great trunk of books of the most varied kind, till she came to an old vellum-bound copy of Apuleius, and proceed to establish her views according to his subtle neo-Platonism. But she romanced and embroidered ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... rigging out a yacht to give him a sail. It seems that salt water did him some good last year. They're both of them rather the worse for a row at one of their meetings in the North in support of that public nuisance, the democrat and atheist Roughleigh. The Radical doctor lost a hat, and Beauchamp almost lost an eye. He would have been a Nelson of politics, if he had been a monops, with an excuse for not seeing. It's a trifle to them; part of their ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... simple lines in which his purer and nobler characters are rapidly but not roughly drawn suffice to give them all due relief and all requisite attraction. The virtuous victims of the murderous conspirator whose crimes and punishment are the groundwork of "The Atheist's Tragedy" have life and spirit enough to make them heartily interesting: and the mixed character of Sebastian, the high-hearted and gallant young libertine whose fearless frankness of generosity brushes aside and breaks away the best-laid schemes of his father, is as vividly and ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... an Atheist formerly, and a very zealous and able advocate of Atheistical views. He gives his articles in the Atlantic Monthly as an autobiography, and seeks to make the impression that he has revealed to his readers all ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... but he believes that he does it, and this mere thought, false and low as it is, keeps him in the most miserable condition of life; to sum up, a man who believes himself free may not perhaps be an atheist, but he ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Louis XIV. on one occasion objected to the appointment of a representative on a foreign mission on account of the person being supposed to be a Jansenist; but on its being discovered that the nominee was only an Atheist, the objection was at ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... did not know what his views were, beyond having a vague notion that he was an Atheist of a rather pronounced type, but that I would go and hear him when I had ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... related it once or twice as to himself, with a low and careful tone, how Sextus Roscius was murthered after supper by the Balneae Palatinae. Of such general extent is that remark of Cicero, in relation to Epicurus the Atheist, of whom he observed that he of all men dreaded most those things which he contemned—Death and the Gods." Merely because it was supper time, and in the neighborhood of a bath, Mr. Hobbes must have the fate of Sextus Roscius. What logic was there in this, unless to a man who was always ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey |
