"Reasoning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dinner, as one often does here, in society; out of society the meals are despatched with a rapidity unknown to the Altrurians. Our habit of listening to lectors, especially at the evening repast, and then of reasoning upon what we have heard, prolongs our stay at the board; but the fondest listener, the greatest talker among us, would be impatient of the delay eked out here by the great number and the slow procession of the courses served. Yet the poorest American ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... had stood in this position for several seconds, or minutes—he didn't know how long—because now the feeling of being watched had overcome any power of reasoning he had. He managed to step back a few paces, and apparently got out from under the object, because he could see the edge of it ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... of Cochlaeus, if abusive and less cogent in reasoning, as well as less relieved by any sparkle of wit or racy anecdote than those of Alesius, are certainly written in a more easy and flowing Latin style, and, in that respect at least, the Scottish prelates had no reason to be ashamed of the champion who had volunteered his services in their cause. ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... other person, had administered an infinitesimal dose of lead and gunpowder immediately after he fell, he would have recovered forthwith. But unhappily the woman concerned did not possess the power of reasoning by analogy, or carrying out a principle, and thus the unfortunate gentleman had been sacrificed to the ignorance of ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... perception constitutes its title to posthumous renown. To embody the flying colours of folly, to arrest evanescence, to give to bubbles the globular consistency as well as form, to exhibit on the stage the piebald denizen of the stable, and the half-reasoning parent of combs, to display the brisk locomotion of Columbine, or the tortuous attitudinizing of Punch;—these are the occupations of others, whose ambition, limited to the applause of unintellectual fatuity, is too innocuous for the application ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... All this reasoning men have long ago set aside. For one thing, it has come to be recognized that there may be consciousness, perhaps rather dim, blind, and fugitive, but still consciousness, which does not get itself recognized as do our clearly conscious purposes and volitions. Many of the actions ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... sort of purpose to talk to those people of the natural rights of mankind, and the particular constitution of this country. Blinded by prejudices, soured by misfortunes, and tempted by their necessities, they are as incapable of reasoning rightly, as they have hitherto been of acting wisely. The late Lord Pembroke never would know anything that he had not a mind to know; and, in this case, I advise you to follow his example. Never know either the father or the two sons, any otherwise than as foreigners; and so, not knowing ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... away by a person scrupulously-intentioned but not continually looking both ways, when placed among a people endowed with the uneasy suspicion of the barbarian and struggling to assert a doubtful refinement. Apart from this, there has to be taken into consideration their involved process of reasoning, and the unexpectedly different standards which they ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... The reasoning in the letter of our late envoys to France is so fully supported by the writers on the law of nations, particularly by Vattel, as well as by his great masters, Grotius and Puffendorf, that nothing is left to be desired to settle the point that if there be a collision between two treaties made ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 4) of Volume 1: John Adams • Edited by James D. Richardson
... aware that her objective was man. Man—in the abstract. 'Man,' not 'a man.' Beyond that, she could not go. It is not too much to say that she did not ever, even in her most errant thought, apply her reasoning, or even dream of its following out either the duties, the responsibilities, or the consequences of having a husband. She had a vague longing for younger companionship, and of the kind naturally most interesting to her. There ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... way, Lord Henry Goade assures us, pausing here at long length for one of those digressions into the history of families whose members chance to impinge upon his chronicle. "They were," he says, "ever an impetuous, short-reasoning folk, honest and upright enough so far as their judgment carried them, but hampered by a lack of penetration in ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... at the bar of Northern Ohio. The Cuyahoga bar was for many years considered the strongest in the State, but amongst all of its talented members, each with his own peculiar forte, for the faculty of close and long-continued reasoning, clearness of statement, nice discrimination, and never ending ingenuity, he had ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... with his mistress, and finally why Marie Pascal, having seen him again, had invented the story of the chemise, which could not be found. This young girl is imprudent. She lets it be seen too clearly how disagreeable the hypothesis would be to her. After reasoning thus to himself Juve turned to the ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... of conscience that he could neither shake off nor endure. His act of injustice against the man Chester had been followed so close by his death, that with all his subtle reasoning he could not separate the two events in his mind. He began to wonder about the family so terribly bereaved, and more than once the form of Mary Fuller rose before him, with her little hand extended, exclaiming, "He died of a ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... nuts when ripe, being lighter than water, rose to the surface, instead—as is the habit of supermarine arboreal produce—of falling to the ground. Scarcely could a more splendid illustration of the fallacies of hypothetical reasoning be found, than the pages that contain this specious and far-fetched argument. Even the celebrated Rumphius, who wrote so late as the eighteenth century, assures his readers that 'the Calappa laut,' the Malay term for the nut, 'is not a terrestrial production, which may have fallen by accident into ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... the truth of his reasoning before he had finished speaking. Once more my spirits fell to the point where they had been before I hit upon what I thought was such ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... how thoroughly understood by the common people were the principles of liberty, and with what keen penetration they saw through all shams and specious reasoning, than the decided, nay, fierce, stand they took against the stamp act. This was nothing more than our present law requiring a governmental stamp on all public and business paper to make it valid. The only difference is, the former was levying a ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... attention of the different men to the address, to the clarity of the reasoning, the simplicity of the argument, the strength of the appeal and the glowing patriotism that filled all the pages. The pamphlet had been worn by much reading. It was covered with the black finger prints of busy men who had been working around the ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... him. He began with the story of the time Sanders and Hart had saved him from the house of his enemy into which he had been betrayed. He related how the boy had pursued the men who stole his pinto and the reasoning which had led him to take it without process of law. He told the true story of the killing, of the young fellow's conviction, of his attempt to hold a job in Denver without concealing his past, and of his busy week since returning ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... arduous way towards it. He craved not the false excitement of temporary applause, nor deemed the opinion of weak men essential to his design. He had a sacred duty to perform, which left him not the choice of action, and he performed it to the letter. He had a feeling conscience, and a reasoning heart, and the home of his youth, and the sister who had grown up with him, the father who had laboured, the mother who had striven for him, visited him by night and by day—in his silent study, and in his lonely bed, comforting, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... fancy, but that it is altogether worthy of Anacreon." Such is his enthusiasm, indeed, that he finds in this simple and faithful expression of sentiment the highest form of poesy; "the true, the supreme, the divine; that which is above rules and beyond reasoning."[72] ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... conspicuous ability the view that was then accepted in all circles from the highest to the lowest. He was preaching to those who were already in the fullest accord with his doctrine. They followed with eager approbation his reasoning about the watch that he supposed himself to have found on the heath. According to his assumption he had never seen a watch made, nor known of anyone capable of making such a thing. He concludes, nevertheless, that it must have been ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... of reasoning, in short, will not stand the test of plain common sense. It is trifling, ignoring all distinctions which rest on principles, and substituting factitious ones; and Christians who assume this ground, lay ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... soul is a natural faculty of the body. A pretty doctrine, indeed, for a Brahman to hold. You might as well agree with me at once that the soul of man resides, when at home, either in a vein in the breast, or in the pit of his stomach, or that half of it is in a man's brain and the other or reasoning half is in his heart, an organ of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... reasoning with him from time to time, but he wasn't a sort of boy to be moved from a purpose. His mother was the only argument that had any weight with him. I believe so long as she had lived he would have kept straight; that ...
— The Observations of Henry • Jerome K. Jerome
... roumeli-valicy he would find it easy to excuse himself. To give more effect to his perfidious advice, Ali further employed the innocent Emineh, who was easily alarmed on her father's account. Overcome by the reasoning of his son-in-law and the tears of his daughter, the unfortunate pacha consented to go to Monastir, where he had been summoned to appear, and where he was immediately arrested ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... man spoke, for countless thousands of years, before he had any idea of the principles on which he spoke, of the laws of speech or of the grammar of his language; just as he reasoned, long before he made the reasoning process matter of reflection, and reduced it to the laws of logic; so from the beginning he was religious though he had no more idea that there were principles of religion, than that there were principles of grammar or laws of correct ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... slumbering in a furry heap beside Mary-'Gusta at one end of the carriage seat, and Rosette, the smallest of the five dolls, and Rose, the largest, were sitting bolt upright in the corner at the other end. The christening of the smallest and newest doll was the result of a piece of characteristic reasoning on its owner's part. She was very fond of the name Rose, the same being the name of the heroine in "Eight Cousins," which story Mrs. Bailey, housekeeper before last for Marcellus Hall, had read aloud to the child. When the new ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... his hypotheses with analogous illustrations, oftentimes approaching very close to the cogent methods of a new inductive logic. He rested his case at least on the processes of argumentation that the Roman daily applied in the law-courts and the Senate, and not upon flights of metaphysical reasoning. He came with a gospel of illumination to a race eager for light, opening vistas into an infinity of worlds marvelously created by processes that the average man beheld ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... 'I wish you would not talk so! It is really very wrong. This comes of your way of questioning and reasoning about everything. What we have to do with the ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... the whig party except Timothy Bigelow, the blacksmith; while the tories were pale with rage." After a few moments, James Putnam, the leader of the tories, arose. Putnam was said to be "the best lawyer in North America. His arguments were marked by strong and clear reasoning, logical precision and arrangement, and that sound judgment whose conclusions were presented so forcibly as to command assent." He made such a speech against the resolutions as had never before been heard in Worcester; and when he sat down, the same informant said that "not a man of the whig ...
— Reminiscences of the Military Life and Sufferings of Col. Timothy Bigelow, Commander of the Fifteenth Regiment of the Massachusetts Line in the Continental Army, during the War of the Revolution • Charles Hersey
... with what took place except through the newspapers? Such publicity was the more necessary, when it was recollected that the advocates of the law in the committee were as a majority of twenty-two to four." Mr. Harvey's reasoning would have been sound if the committee had been compelled to make a daily report—a course which they subsequently adopted of themselves; but there could be no doubt that it rested only with the committee or the house to determine that point. Lord John Russell's motion ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... but remained silent; then he sat still and thought. Pere Antoine also said nothing, for he knew that the man before him was reasoning his way toward a decision upon which all his ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... defective early training of the former. This explanation only covers a portion of the ground: the other portion is covered by the fact that a certain number of criminals are almost incapable of acquiring instruction. The memory and the reasoning powers of such persons are so utterly feeble that attempts to school them is a waste of time.[43] Deficiencies in memory, imagination, reason, are three undoubted characteristics of the ordinary criminal intellect. Of course, there are ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... them to themselves, and permit error or imposture to be mixed and confounded with truth?" No: from the same source cannot proceed sweet waters and bitter. As the moral precepts of the Gospel are divinely inspired, so, likewise, must be its doctrines. This reasoning appeared to me incontrovertible, and I received with full conviction the whole contents of the New Testament, as dictated ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... I had worshipped, of whom a consuming jealousy had made ten years of my life a mad fever, which only her death had cured. Saner men have protested against the same situation that ruined me—and yet, even in my reasoning moments, like this, I knew that to have rebelled would have been to have forced a tragic climax before the hour at which Fate had ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... specifically against the position which the State had taken. Judge Roane of Virginia, in a series of articles in the Richmond Enquirer, argued that the Federal Union was a compact among the States and that the nationalistic reasoning of his fellow Virginian, Marshall, in the foregoing decisions was false; and Jefferson heartily endorsed his views. In Cohens vs. Virginia, in 1821, the Supreme Court held that it had appellate jurisdiction in ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... woman was by this time half in love with a vision. The fantastic nature of her passion, which lowered her as an intellect, raised her as a soul. If she had had a little more self-control she would have attenuated the emotion to nothing by sheer reasoning, and so have killed it off. If she had had a little less pride she might have gone and circumambulated the Yeobrights' premises at Blooms-End at any maidenly sacrifice until she had seen him. But Eustacia did ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... foot healed slowly; and the Hermit, while it was mending, repaired daily to her cave, reasoning with her in love and charity, and exhorting her to return to the cloister. But this she persistently refused to do; and fearing lest she attempt to fly before her foot was healed, and so expose herself to hunger and ill-usage, he promised not to betray her presence, or ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... he took the greatest interest in his friends' concerns, and was always ready to do anything he could for you. "I had no idea what a man he was," he said, with fervour. Mrs. Warrender looked up at this with a little anxiety, for according to the ordinary rules which govern the reasoning of women she was led from it to the deduction, not immediately visible to the unconcerned spectator, that her son had got into some scrape, and had found it necessary to have recourse to his friend's advice. Theo in a scrape! It seemed impossible: but yet there are few women who ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... As reasoning beings, it is our duty to heed the lessons of history, and not rush blindly on until we perpetrate a ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... stages? Are there not frequently, or always, many phenomena which at first seem inexplicable, but which are gradually accounted for as knowledge increases? If, then, this is no objection in scientific pursuits generally, why should it be so here?" This reasoning would be perfectly valid if Darwinism were regarded simply as a scientific investigation. But it is under consideration now on very different rounds. Whatever Mr. Darwin's own views may be, the theory ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... we do not know it is the result of calm reasoning," she answered. "The bee perhaps comes into existence, permeated through and through with this one idea, and lives solely to fulfil it. The service humanity asks of humanity is something even higher, surely—a willing, conscious sacrifice of present ease to future good. The spirit of heroes ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... It required not much reasoning to arrive at these conclusions; and our adventurers had come to them almost on that instant, when they first set eyes on ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... ground-floor room, you may safely conclude that the neighborhood is the lurking place of many unlettered folks, and of much vice and crime, the outcome of misery; for ignorance is the mother of all sorts of crime. A crime is, in the first instance, a defect of reasoning powers. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Ethicks enquiring whether the felicity of the sun, do any whit concern the happinesse of the defunct progenitor, after much reasoning have determin'd that the honour only which his son acquires by worthie and great actions, does certainly refresh his Ghost: What a day of Jubilee, is this then to Your blessed Father! Not the odor of those flowers did so recreate the dead Archemorus which the Nymphs were yearly wont to strow ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... carrying New York that he would have himself. The element of military heroism was wanting. He had written to General Sherman on the subject, and of course the General thought he could not consent to be President—for that was what it amounted to—but his reasoning was fallacious. If General Sherman had the question put to him—whether to be President himself or turn the office over to the Democratic party, with the Solid South dominant—he would see his duty and do it, though his reluctance ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... toward itself. It would be hard to find any greater romance in modern times. The romance of science is the assumption that man is a plain, pure-blooded, non-inferring, mere-observing being and that in proportion as his brain is educated he must not use it. "Deductive reasoning has gone out with the nineteenth century," says The Strident Voice. This is the one single inference that the scientific method seems to have been able to make—the inference that no inference has a right ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... principle to the various questions of philosophical criticism which must arise in the course of this inquiry, it may be needful here to explain (as I have already explained elsewhere) how the chief intellectual operations—Perception, Inference, Reasoning, and Imagination—may be viewed as so many ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... lives of men who became celebrated under even greater adversities; "The Wonderful Instrument," which turned out to be the eye; "Metaphysics," a ludicrous description of a colonial salt-box in affected terms of exactness designed to ridicule some forms of reasoning. Those who used this edition of the third reader will surely ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... fro with his hands behind his back. Perhaps he was not yet quite settled in his mind about the parallel between thieves and soldiers; perhaps Villon had interested him by some cross-thread of sympathy; perhaps his wits were simply muddled by so much unfamiliar reasoning; but whatever the cause, he somehow yearned to convert the young man to a better way of thinking, and could not make up his mind to drive him forth again ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have passed over naturally into Edwards's work along with the Vice. In support of this other source may be cited the absence from this play of the long speeches which went hand in hand with the learned reasoning and soliloquies of Sackville and Norton. Quite undeniably of classical influence, however, is the refinement and restraint noticeable throughout the play. These we welcome. They prune the tree of ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... ought to pay for them. In other words, his duty or obligation to pay rests rather on the ground of an implied contract (which has been already explained) than of an express one. The force of this reasoning we shall immediately see. ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... capacity to understand the value of this knowledge and its utter destruction of all forms of supernaturalism. When man becomes fully cognizant of the fact that all the knowledge acquired by the human race has been the result of human inquiry, the result of reasoning processes, and the exercise of mind alone, then secularism will have overcome the long night of supernaturalism. And it is this mental attitude of securalism that proceeds with an ever accelerated ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... rebellious archangel, the true hero of 'Paradise Lost,' is here dwarfed into a puny, malignant sophist; nor is the final issue in the later poem even for a moment in doubt—a serious defect from an artistic point of view. Jortin holds its peculiar excellence to be 'artful sophistry, false reasoning, set off in the most specious manner, and refuted by the Son of God with strong unaffected eloquence'; merits for which Milton needed no original of any kind, as his own lofty religious sentiments, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... had been basely deserted by him who was sworn to be her friend and protector and she became almost demented, she tried to account for his silence in many ways but her intellectual acumen as too great and her reasoning always brought her to the one sad conclusion. However, as nothing better could be done the spirited creature made up her mind to earn her own living and that of her child, and setting her wits to work she soon obtained a situation as governess at the house of Mr. Mullaly, a retired merchant ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... been adopted in America, with a clearness, and a strength of argument, believed to be irresistible. To place the subject in a point of view, admitting of no possible misunderstanding, the secretary of state had annexed to his own full and demonstrative reasoning, documents, establishing the real fact in each particular case, and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... disappointed at his not volunteering at the first call as his gallant young brother had done. Yet his reasoning was sound. ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... young captives put them right. A shred of their handkerchief, or of some part of their dress, which they had intrusted to the wind unobserved, indicated their course, and that the captives were thus far not only alive, but that their reasoning powers, unsubdued by fatigue, were active and buoyant. Next day, in passing places covered with mud, deposited by the dry branches on the way, the foot prints of the captives were distinctly traced, until the pursuers had learned to discriminate not only the number, ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... to the elbow of the river below Berber, and that when he got upon that route it would be supposed that he had travelled all along by it, and he would thereby avoid the suspicion of having been trading with the British camp. Rupert quite agreed with the justice of this reasoning. The sheik selected a route that led them through a desolate country, and they reached the elbow of the Nile without encountering any natives, save two or three small parties at wells, from the time they left camp. This course was dictated not only by the reason that he had given ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... distress and madness. And I am the diseased limb, and it is you who have lopped it off—" He went on with increasing vehemence, regardless of the supplications of his terrified auditors, in a fervid tirade that abounded with symbols and striking images. It was the untainted, the reasoning, the substantial portion of France, the peasantry, the tillers of the soil, those who had always kept close contact with their mother Earth, that was suppressing the outbreak of the crazed, exasperated part, the part that had been vitiated by the Empire and led astray by vain illusions and empty ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... brooks of blood that have flowed forth; They feel their own bereavements; so their mood Asked no deep reasoning for its geniture. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... the excellent reasoning of her lady of honour, the Princess perceived that she spoke the truth, and that she herself would, with just cause, be blamed on account of the close friendship which she had always shown towards the ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... glad to see them. In spite of all my reasoning that it made no difference about anybody coming to see me off, it did make a good deal of difference. It was a lonely sort of business starting off in that way—especially after seeing Rectus's father and mother come down to the boat ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... while professing boundless devotion to his. By a sophistical process of developing his rude notions, they often lead him to conclusions which he had not foreseen, but which they induce him to make his own, not by a fruitless effort to quicken his mind into following the steps of their reasoning, but by stimulating his passions to the point of adopting its results. They thus become parasites in order that they may become powers, and their interests make them particularly ruthless in their dealings with their master's consistency. Their relation to him, if they would bluntly express ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... through that dreadful ordeal; having no previous knowledge of the murdered man in his lifetime, or only knowing him (if you suppose that I saw the apparition of Ferrari) through the interest which I took in his wife. I can't dispute your reasoning, Henry. But I feel in my heart of hearts that you are deceived. Nothing will shake my belief that we are still as far from having discovered ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... see the force of your reasoning, Dr. Thorne. I have enough to answer for, without the additional contumely of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... land. Perhaps you have not thought of the significance, the extreme significance, of this fact. Certainly those who continually talk of the ignorance of the people have never thought of it! What does it mean? Why, that every reasoning man in the country, whatever his social position, reads the same news, the same debates, the same arguments as the statesman, the scholar, the philosopher, the preacher, or the man of science. He bases his opinions on the same reasoning and on the same information as the Leader of the ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... Thus reasoning to herself, Dexie put on her house-dress, intending to return to her father's room and ask who had called during the afternoon, but second thoughts prevented her, and she turned to the kitchen to see what had been provided for her father's supper, or to prepare, if need ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... and therefore prayer is not merely an impertinence, it is a mistake; for it is speaking to a Being who only exists in your own imagination. I need not say, my friends, that all this, to my mind, is only a train of sophistry and false reasoning, which—so I at least hold—has been answered and refuted again and again. And I trust in God and in Christ sufficiently to believe that He will raise up sound divines and true philosophers in His Church, who will ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... through with the old propaganda of argument. All we ask now is to be allowed to prove by the examples of things well done here in Russia, that the new system is good. We are so sure we shall make good, that we are willing to stop saying so, to stop reasoning, stop the haranguing, and all that old stuff. And especially are we sick of the propaganda by the sword. We want to stop fighting. We know that each country must evolve its own revolution out of its own conditions and in its own imagination. To force it by war is not scientific, not democratic, ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... contrary to the first principles of reasoning; as, that a part should be greater than the whole is absurd. A paradoxical statement appears at first thought contradictory or absurd, while it may be really true. Anything is irrational when clearly contrary to sound reason, foolish when contrary to practical good sense, silly when ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... plan again in his mind. He was certain now that his reasoning was right. There had been two dozen men on the raider ship; there had been no question, even from the start, that they would succeed in boarding the orbit-ship and taking its occupants prisoners. The ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... of the stamp-heads deadened her hearing of the night's subtler noises. Her thoughts went grinding on, crushing the hard rock of circumstance, but incapable of picking out the grains of gold therein. Later siftings might discover them, but she was reasoning now under too great human ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... discomfited, until at length they in madness killed, without reason, him against whom they could find no adequate charge. His lack of "learning" (John vii. 15) was simply his innocence of rabbinic training; he had no diploma from their schools. In keenness of argument, however, and invincibleness of reasoning, as well as in the clearness of his insight, he was ever their unapproachable superior. His reply to the charge of league with Beelzebub is as merciless an exposure of feeble malice as can be found in human literature. He was as ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... in the kitchen like the blast of a bomb. The boys looked at each other, too startled to explain to Logan and Jane, who, though they were listening intently, were unable to fathom the boys' reasoning. ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... to them, that this mode of action between two nations, who were, as they acknowledged, friendly to each other, was unworthy of reasoning men, but rather characteristic of brute beasts. I represented to them, moreover, that they were enough occupied in repelling their enemies who pursued them, in routing them as often as possible, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... a fool he must have guessed at once how it came so, and having guessed it, he must have thought twice ere he ventured within reach of a man who could so handle iron. But he was a slow-reasoning clod, and so far, thought had not yet taken the place of surprise. He stepped into, the chamber and across to the window, that he might more closely ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... father, Justus Van Huysum, who dealt in pictures, was himself a middling painter in most kinds of painting. He taught his son to paint screens, figures and vases on wood, landscape, and sometimes flowers; but the son being arrived at a reasoning age perceived that to work in every branch of his art was the way to excel in none, therefore he confined himself to flowers, fruit, and landscape, and quitting his father's school set up ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... held before; The earth is just as positive and direct as it was before; Facts, religions, improvements, politics, trades, are as real as before; But the Soul is also real,—it too is positive and direct; No reasoning, no proof has established it, Undeniable ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... (and of submission) in will, and on the relation of conduct to impulse and to reasoning, see McDougall's Social Psychology, Chapter IX, on "Volition", and Supplementary Chapter I, on "Theories ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... to prevent readers from taking up Supernatural Religion: any misrepresentation to prejudice them against its statements. Elaborate literary abuse against the author is substituted for the effective arguments against his reasoning which are unhappily wanting. In the later editions of my work, I removed everything that seemed likely to irritate or to afford openings for the discussion of minor questions, irrelevant to the main subject under treatment. Whilst Dr. Lightfoot in many cases points out such alterations, ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... little or no respite for preparation, weaving visibly, as it were, before the mental eye, from all these elicited materials, his closing argument, which, as we have said, was all the more effective, because profound reasoning and exquisite tact and influence were involved in it as a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... to-day could denounce me as Deucalion if so he chose. These rebels had expended a navy in their wish to kill me four days earlier, and if they knew of my nearness, even though Nais were my advocate, her cold reasoning would have had little chance of an audience now. The High Gods who keep the tether of our lives hide Their secrets well, but I did not think it impious to be sure that mine was very near the ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... Drew, who had hunted nothing larger than house rats in his own city, was not the young man to see the logic of this reasoning, and before Mukoki could open his mouth again he was hurrying up the hill. On its summit he saw a huge torn-up blotch in the snow, spattered with blood, where the moose had fallen first after the shots; and at the foot of the ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... sucked. These he brought forth in tiny volumes, wide-edged and thick-papered, illuminated as to capitals and bound in ooze or in old brocade on which were scattered a few decorations, calculated, so unthinkable were they, to upset the reasoning power of the average reader, and thus prepare him for the literary matter which he should ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... at the question, and replied, "Many persons would apply the epithet to me without qualifying it. This, you know, is the age of reason, and during the last hundred and fifty years men have been reasoning themselves out of everything that they ought to believe and feel. Among a certain miserable class, who are more numerous than is commonly supposed, he who believes in a First Cause and a future state is regarded with contempt as a superstitionist. The religious ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... could not help thinking that there was no doubt that to a certain type of mind the reasoning might appeal ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... prove too much and too little, and in the end become simply our own briefs for our own inclinations. Charity's mood being what it was, she adopted the line of reasoning that led to her own ambition. She spent much time on her knees, but communed chiefly with herself, and rose always confirmed in her belief that to marry Jim Dyckman was the next great business of ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... old writers expected credit for the doctrines they taught, by proving them from the word of God to be correct: they inserted the scripture passages in italics, and their works have been sometimes one-half in italics. Modern writers on theology, on the contrary, give us a long train of reasoning to persuade us to their opinions, but very little in italics." This remark of hers has great force, and deserves the serious attention of those who write and those ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... the pleasure of remembering Gail's gay company and the gloom of understanding the complete implications of the Colonel's clarifying lectures. Against the background of his remarks, I could find myself appreciating the Ghopal-Klueng-Natalenko reasoning: the only way to cut the Gordian knot was to have ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... feel the force of the hunchback's reasoning. To marry the girl to this malformed assassin was to destroy her more utterly, she still living, than to destroy her by taking her life. "Well," he said—"well, you shall try your luck. If she marries you, she is out of my way. If she refuses you, you shall be avenged for her disdain. We can ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... distress which he had observed in his features at their first meeting; and being a gentleman of uncommon vivacity, as well as sincerely attached to the family of Melvil, to which he had owed his promotion, he exerted all his good-humour and good sense in amusing the fancy, and reasoning down the mortification of the afflicted Hungarian. He in particular endeavoured to wean his attention from the lost Monimia, by engaging it upon his domestic affairs, and upon the wrongs of his mother and sister, who, he gave ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... My line of reasoning, or I had better say of fancying (that, on such dangerous ground, is safest), is forcing an inference from which I shrink a little; it seems so very bold, so very contrary to recent prepossessions. But the candor which ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... hear Messer Dante talk as he talked, and his calm reasoning, together with the sweetness and serenity of his confidence, cheered me mightily. In such company, and hearkening to such speech, it was impossible to be downhearted, and as the brave, hopeful words fell from him, I that had been not ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... allowing that she would float at all, if we struck a rock where should we be? They declared that, tired as they were, they preferred to go on struggling on foot through the forest rather than get drowned. With his peculiar reasoning, Benedicto said that it was bad enough to die of starvation, but to die of starvation and get drowned as well was ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... of noon, something of his habitual confidence returned to him. He had succeeded, though but partially, in reasoning away the obvious meaning of the words; and he ascended to the chamber from the gardens, in which he had sought, by the air, to cool his mental fever, with a sentiment, ominous and doubtful indeed, but still ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more struck with the unfairness of the Critic, or with the feebleness of his reasoning? For,—(to say nothing of the insecurity of building on a Latin Translation,(502) especially in such a matter as the present,)—How can testimony like this be considered to outweigh the three distinct places in the original ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... religious as they are virtuous, less from principles founded on reasoning and argument, than from elegance of mind, delicacy of moral taste, and a certain quick perception of the beautiful ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... regard to the order of society and the government of mankind. Its main doctrine might be called that of ideal Ghibellinism; and though its arguments are often unsound, and based upon fanciful propositions and incorrect analogies, though it exhibits the defects frequent in the reasoning of the time,—a lack of discrimination in regard to the value of authorities, and no sense of the true nature of evidence,—yet the spirit with which it is animated is so generous, and its object of such importance, that it possesses interest alike as an illustration of Dante's ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... rendered ministers of state more daring than otherwise they would be, in contriving and executing projects that were grievous to the people; schemes that could never enter into the heads of any but those who were drunk with excess of power. The marquis of Tweedale, in reasoning against such a number as the ministry proposed, took occasion to observe, that not one shilling of the forfeited estates was ever applied to the use of the public; he likewise took notice, that the eighteen thousand ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... improvement have been cherished and strengthened and humanized by their intercourse with man. The wild horse has been brought under his protecting care, has become a faithful ministering servant, rejoicing in his master's voice, fondled by his master's children. The huge elephant has had his "half-reasoning" powers turned into the faculties of a gentle, benevolent giant, starting aside from his course to befriend a little child, listening with the docility of a child to his driver's rebuke or exhortation. The light, airy, volatile bird seems to glow ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... the habits and haunts of wild creatures by long experience, and also know the best way to capture some of them; but a very little communication with natives enables the European to learn the secret; and he soon far excels his simple instructors in the art, being aided by vastly superior reasoning faculties, and also by incomparably better appliances for the chase. Firearms for shooting beasts and birds, and seines for catching fish, render the Esquimaux spears, and arrows, and traps mere children's toys in comparison. Moreover, a ship is never frozen up many weeks, before some wandering ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... assured, both by experiment and by Liebig's reasoning, that the successive stages of decomposition were wholly ascribable to the action of the stagnant air which occupies the interstices between the beans, and taking into account that a mass of coffee presented a medium pervious ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... have given worlds to be free from complicity in the abduction. Bitterly, indeed, she reproached herself for her enmity toward the unsuspecting girl, an innocent victim of Diana's own vain desires and Charles Mershone's heartless wiles. Repenting her folly and reasoning out the thing when it was too late, Diana saw clearly that she had gained no possible advantage, but had thoughtlessly conspired to ruin the reputation of ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... the possibility of reasoning in a vicious circle, however, I thought it would be well to endeavour to ascertain what amount of cranial variation is to be found in a pure race at the present day; and as the natives of Southern and Western Australia are ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... most prominent is the combustion theory, which, though bearing the seal of ages, is obnoxious both to common and philosophic reasoning. This theory presupposes a consumption of material beyond all conception, and the supply of which has been no small tax upon the scientific imagination. The source of this supply has been claimed to be the subsidence of useless worlds, and of ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... Duryodhana, Karna said, 'It doth not seem to me, O Duryodhana, that thy reasoning is well-founded. O perpetuator of the Kuru race, no method will succeed against the Pandavas. O brave prince, thou hast before, by various subtle means, striven to carry out thy wishes. But ever hast thou failed to slay thy foes. They were then living near thee, O king! They were then unfledged ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... these words, Elise!" said he. "But the children—the children! Our decision will influence their future; we must also hear what they have to say; we must lay the matter before them: not that I fear their having, if they were aware of our mode of reasoning, any wish different to ours, but at all events they must have a voice in the business. Come, Elise! I shall have no rest till it is all talked over ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... worshipped, and who loved the place because they knew how much those fathers had suffered for it, although they never troubled themselves with the reason why they left the parish church; of a few shopkeepers, far more thoughtful and reasoning, who were Dissenters from conviction, unmixed with old ancestral association; and of one or two families of still higher worldly station. With many poor, who were drawn there by love for Mr Benson's character, and by a ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... use our reasoning faculties (Isaiah 1:18); and if we believe these great truths taught in the Bible, we can reach no other reasonable conclusion than that restitution is the great objective of God's plan relative to the human race, and that restitution blessings are near because the kingdom of heaven is at ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... achievement and for good. It is natural for the mother of placid, contented, and perhaps rather unenterprising children, looking on as a detached outsider, seeing nothing of the teeming activities of the quick, restless little brain, and the persistent, though faulty reasoning—it is natural for her to blame another's work, and to flatter herself that her own routine would have avoided all these troublesome complications. The mother of the nervous child may often rightly ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... themselves, and to a certain extent they deceive others. The wish to see their splendid visions a reality leads to the belief that they are already on the point of being victors over the hard-to-move and well-intrenched powers that be. As to the quality of his thinking and the soundness of his reasoning, the idealist is ahead of the world all the time, and just as surely the world pays him the compliment of following in his trail. But only in its own time and at its own good pleasure. It is in quantity that he is short. There is never enough ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... some of them are very profitable and pleasant; others are very hurtful; yet, seeing they have no moral faculty, or sense of desert, and do not act from choice guided by understanding, or with a capacity of reasoning and reflecting, but only from instinct, and are not capable of being influenced by moral inducements, their actions are not properly sinful or virtuous; nor are they properly the subjects of any such moral treatment for what they do, as moral agents are for their ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... England's Hostility. Causes. The Trent Affair. Seward's Reasoning. Great Britain's Breach of Neutrality. Louis Napoleon's Hypocrisy. Invasion of Mexico. Maximilian. War Expenditure. How Met. Duties. Internal Revenue. Loans. Bonds. Treasury Notes. Treasurer's Report, July 1, 1865. Errors of War Financiering. Confederate ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... there will always be a suspicion, either that they have no existence, or are beyond human knowledge.' 'There I agree with you,' said Socrates. 'Yet if these difficulties induce you to give up universal ideas, what becomes of the mind? and where are the reasoning and reflecting powers? philosophy is at an end.' 'I certainly do not see my way.' 'I think,' said Parmenides, 'that this arises out of your attempting to define abstractions, such as the good and the beautiful and ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... to go to the devil," was the genial reply. Inspector Murdy was accustomed to rudeness; his profession invited it, and to his rough-and-ready form of reasoning, rudeness ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... transportation in all the mails of the kingdom, did not differ materially from this. Of course, it was impossible to vary the rates of postage according to distance, when the longest distance was but a little over one-tenth of a farthing. The same reasoning is obviously applicable to all the productive routes in the United States. And we have seen the injustice of taxing the letters on routes that are productive or self-supporting, to defray the expense of the unproductive routes ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... be found. For centuries the planet has been diligently examined with this special object, and as failure after failure came to be recorded, the conclusion seemed almost to be justified that the chain of analogical reasoning had broken down. The moonless Mars was thought to be an exception to the rule that all the great planets outside Venus were dignified by an attendant retinue of satellites. It seemed almost hopeless to begin again a research which had often been tried, and had invariably led to disappointment; ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... afforded me such refreshment that I firmly believe of these it came that I died not. But, as it pleased Him who, being Himself infinite, hath for immutable law appointed unto all things mundane that they shall have an end, my love,—beyond every other fervent and which nor stress of reasoning nor counsel, no, nor yet manifest shame nor peril that might ensue thereof, had availed either to break or to bend,—of its own motion, in process of time, on such wise abated that of itself at this present it hath left me only that pleasance which ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... very great, in furnishing arguments to men like myself, who never lost an opportunity to restate them, and to editorial writers for the Western newspapers, who generally read The Nation and who were apt to reproduce its line of reasoning. When I look back to 1869, the year in which I became a voter, and recall the strenuous opposition to civil service reform on the part of the politicians of both parties, and the indifference of the public, I confess that I ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... shame or compunction, things which criminated themselves. I must acknowledge the truth, and declare that all this had an effect upon my mind. I questioned whether I might not be in the wrong, and felt as if their reasoning might have some just foundation. I had been several years under the tuition of Catholics, and was ignorant of the Scriptures, and unaccustomed to the society, example, and conversation of Protestants; had not heard any appeal ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... modern times, have considered that the moral character of a revelation enters into the evidence in its favour; whence, morality must be considered as independent, and exclusively human, in its origin. It would be reasoning in a circle to derive the moral law from the bible, and then to prove the bible from ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... time and place I gained the reputation of being a very shrewd fellow, but I was always careful to introduce subjects in which my assertions were likely to go unchallenged. I had established the habit of reasoning by deduction and analogy, and would often startle people by what they thought was my profound wisdom. I had a system of cues by which I tried to cultivate a memory so tenacious that nothing could escape me, but this ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... seductive and his reasoning so correct that Mrs. Fortescue suddenly laughed, too; there was no way short of putting Kettle in handcuffs and leg-irons to keep him from obeying the After-Clap, whose orders ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... friend, Pennington. Ellwood's father held a discourse with the two Quakers on their doctrine of free and universal grace. "James Nailer," says Ellwood, "handled the subject with so much perspicuity and clear demonstration, that his reasoning seemed to be irresistible. As for Edward Burrough, he was a brisk young Man, of a ready Tongue, and might have been for aught I then knew, a Scholar, which made me less admire his Way of Reasoning. But what dropt from James Nailer had the greater Force ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... The reasoning was sound enough; nevertheless, the move turned out unfortunate. In that relaxation of moral fibre which is brought about by the ease of soothed vanity, Lieutenant Feraud had condescended in the secret of his heart to review the case, and even to doubt not the justice of his cause, but the absolute ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... nervous plexus surrounding the roots of the blood-vessels, from which branches proceed in company with the branches of the coronary arteries and veins, and penetrate the muscular substance of the ventricles. He endeavoured to prove, by experiment, observation, and reasoning, that the arteries as well as the veins contained blood, and in this connection he tells an amusing story. A certain teacher of anatomy, who had declared that the aorta contained no blood, was earnestly desired by his pupils, who were ardent disciples ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... was still on the way out to the gully, and at some distance away, the sound of Ashby's discharging gun had reached them. Reasoning that the raiders would probably place a guard only on the town end of the gully, the posse had made a wide detour, so as to approach the gully from the westward. Leaving the cars at a considerable distance, the pursuers, with Mr. Hawkins at their head, had ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock |
