"Preexisting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... oligarchy to democracy, the worst form of all government, peopled by the democratic man whose soul is at war with itself because it claims to do as it likes. The whole dialogue ends in an admirable vision in which he teaches that man chose his lot on earth in a preexisting state. ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... this doctrine far truer, as well as more Orthodox, than the Arianism which so long struggled in the Church for supremacy. That view which supposed that Christ was neither truly man nor truly God, but some high, preexisting being between the two, appears to us to be the falsest and most unsatisfactory of all the doctrines concerning Christ's person. It separates him more entirely from our sympathies than either of the others. It destroys both ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... age of Shakespeare still believed in ghosts and witches is a matter of perfect indifference for the justification of the use which in "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" he has made of preexisting traditions. No superstition can be widely diffused without having a foundation in human nature: on this the poet builds; he calls up from their hidden abysses that dread of the unknown, and presage of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... present textus receptus of the Apostles' Creed, evidently the result of a comparison and combination of the various preexisting forms of this symbol, may be traced to the end of the fifth century and is first found in a sermon by Caesarius of Arles in France, about 500.—In his translation, Luther substituted "Christian" for "catholic" in the Third Article. He regarded ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... comparative spiritual anatomy, we cannot begin to deal with the alleged extra-human elements without blundering into all imaginable puerilities. If you think for one moment that there is not a single religion in the world which does not come to us through the medium of a preexisting language; and if you remember that this language embodies absolutely nothing but human conceptions and human passions, you will see at once that every religion presupposes its own elements as already existing in those to whom it is addressed. I once went to a church in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... "The ruins of an older world," he said, "are visible in the present structure of our planet, and the strata which now compose our continents have been once beneath the sea, and were formed out of the waste of preexisting continents. The same forces are still destroying, by chemical decomposition or mechanical violence, even the hardest rocks, and transporting the materials to the sea, where they are spread out and form strata analogous to those of more ancient date. Although loosely deposited ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard |
