"Axiom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anonymous pamphlet written by Doctor Leo Pinsker (1821-1891), one of the foremost physicians of Odessa. His Auto-Emancipation (Berlin, 1882) is now recognized as the forerunner of Herzl's Judenstaat, which appeared fifteen years later. Pinsker accepts as an axiom what Sokolov had tried to demonstrate as a proposition. Jew-hatred, he claims, like Lombroso in his work on anti-Semitism, is a "platonic hatred," a hereditary mental disease, which two thousand years' duration has so aggravated ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... figurative diction of the poet—indeed, all the poetical requisites save metre alone. Had ‘Jane Eyre,’ ‘Villette,’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ existed in Coleridge’s time he would, we may be sure, have taken these three prose poems as illustrations of the truth of his axiom that the true antithesis of poetry is ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... picturesque ensemble. In the midst of the lawn was Mrs. Prockter's famous weeping willow, on whose branches Chinese lanterns had been hung by a reluctant gardener, who held to the proper gardener's axiom that lawns are made to be seen and not hurt. The moon aided these lanterns to the best of her power. Under the tree was a cane chair, and on the cane chair sat an ageing man with a concertina between his hands. He put his head on one side and played ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... past I have had no other news of you than your excellent articles on "artistic individuality," etc., in which, among many other right and fine observations, I was specially pleased with the axiom: "The artistic temperament, when genuine, corrects itself in consequence of the change of contrasts." May it prove so in my case;—this much is certain,—that in the tiresome business of self-correction few have to labor as ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... and the other the consummation of the hopes and visions of the most spiritual people that the world has ever known. Both Socrates and Jesus believed in God, and both have taught the world, with no uncertain sound, of their faith in immortal life. The latter was clearly an axiom with Jesus, for He said to His disciples in effect, "If there had been any question about it I would have told you;" and almost with his last breath Socrates compelled his disciples to think of him as immortal, for he told them that, though his body might be buried anywhere, ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... little axiom and passed a whole week in delight, grouping around this harmless epigram the crowd of ideas which came to him unconsciously and which he was astonished to find that he possessed. His humorous mood yielded at last to the claims of serious investigation. Willing as he was to take a hint, the author ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... envy of many a steady leader of fashion. The world begins to ask, vaguely at first, but with a constantly increasing persistence, how the thing is done. Respectability and malice combine to whisper a truthful answer. Starting from the axiom that the precarious income which is produced by a want of success in many branches of business cannot support luxury or purchase diamonds, they arrive, per saltum, at the conclusion that there must ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... A quite convincing axiom Is, "Life is like a play"; For, turning back its pages some Few dog-eared years away, I find where I Committed my Love-tale—with ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... of the whole art and mystery of excuse-making, in all its branches. Indeed, it was an axiom with her that the cook can do no wrong; and a cook in a Southern kitchen finds abundance of heads and shoulders on which to lay off every sin and frailty, so as to maintain her own immaculateness entire. If any part of the dinner was a failure, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... first figure was regarded by logicians as the only perfect type of syllogism, because the validity of moods in this figure may be tested directly by their complying, or failing to comply, with a certain axiom, the truth of which is self-evident. This axiom is known as the Dictum de Omni et Nullo. It may be ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... present effect. It is so serviceable a pigment for so many purposes, especially in admixture, that its sin of fugacity is overlooked. Hence we find indigo constantly mentioned in works on painting, their authors forgetting or not caring to remember that wholesome axiom, a fugitive colour is not rendered durable by being compounded. Artistically, it is adapted for moonlights, and when mixed with a little lamp black, is well suited for night clouds, distant cliffs, &c. With a little raw umber and madder it is used for water in night effects. With the ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... be traced to the nature of their institutions; and I hold it as an axiom, that the chief end of government is the happiness, social order, and morality of the people; that no government, however perfect in theory, can be good which in practice demoralises those who are subjected to it. ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... as an axiom, that no superstition of general acceptance is destitute of a foundation of truth; and if we discover the myth of the were-wolf to be widely spread, not only throughout Europe, but through the whole world, we may rest assured that there is a solid core of fact, round ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... "priority of need" will supersede the law of "supply and demand." And the organizations built up during the war, if they prove efficient, will not be abolished. Hours of labour and wages in the co-operative League of Nations will gradually be equalized, and tariffs will become things of the past. "The axiom will be established," says Mr. Webb, "that the resources of every country must, be held for the benefit not only of its own people but of the world . . . . The world shortage will, for years to come, make import duties ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... subject remained with us, and one after the other the dogmas were voted down as the mistaken ideas of men of a less enlightened age. I forget who first started us with a second axiom. It was one we often dwelt upon: "A forgiving God would be the noblest work of man." We accepted as proven that each stage of civilization creates its own God, and that as man ascends and becomes better his conception of the Unknown likewise improves. Thereafter we all became less theological, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... the carriers of freight hold the keys of trade was stating what appears almost an axiom, and an illustration is afforded of the results of reduced rates in an analogous business in the way in which the establishment of penny postage sent up the receipts of the General ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... breeder is—est in equis patrum virtus—"Like produces like." But the second axiom is, "The goodness of the horse goes in at his mouth." The moral is, that like produces like only under like natural conditions. Turn out all the winners of the last ten years to breed on Dartmoor or in Shetland; what would be the betting about ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... that sort of England who considered herself as embodied with Europe, but in that sort of England who, sympathetic with the adversity or the happiness of mankind, felt that nothing in human affairs was foreign to her. We may consider it as a sure axiom, that, as, on the one hand, no confederacy of the least effect or duration can exist against France, of which England is not only a part, but the head, so neither can England pretend to cope with France but as connected ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... depends your future happiness. It is not a small matter to lay the first stone of an edifice. A husband's first kiss"—I felt a thrill run down my back—"a husband's first kiss is like the fundamental axiom that serves as a basis for a whole volume. Be prudent, Captain. She is there beyond that wall, the fair young bride, who is awaiting you; her ear on the alert, her neck outstretched, she is listening to each of your movements. At every creak ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... such an introduction we might expect that the writer would go on to unfold the various principles of duty, derived from an analysis of man's moral constitution. Confining himself, however, to the second axiom, he proceeds to say that 'the path may not for an instant be left, and that the superior man is cautious and careful in reference to what he does not see, and fearful and apprehensive in reference to what he does not hear. There is nothing more visible than what is ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... demonstrate the truth of his favourite axiom, drove off at such a furious rate over great stones left in the middle of the road by carmen, who had been driving in the gudgeons of their axle-trees to hinder them from lacing, [Opening; perhaps from LACHER, ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... instituted one law; one edict of the Divine Will, one all-inclusive order, regulating and controlling everything that is. This is the Law of the series. The stars in their courses move in the serial order, and the leaves clothing the trees obey the same cosmic code. Fourier's first axiom was: The series distribute the Harmonies. That is to say, the operation of the Law of the series brings about harmonious results. The stars traverse serenely their proper orbits, influencing each other ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... had both been killed in the fight, whereupon the Castilians being without a leader, returned to Manila and allowed the corsairs opportunity to escape. But the latter remained, in order to verify the axiom that they have in China, that they may not flee. This is so evil a race that if today the whole world were given them, tomorrow they would commit a thousand treasons to steal one single real. We shall live here always on our guard, and shall ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... a certain sort of German metaphysic; but I perceive that you have now become a convert to it. The final arcanum of that, I think, is, Something Nothing. You give this abstraction a concrete form; your axiom is, No Hire Hire for Life. To deny that laborers have any property in their own toil, and to allow them their poor peck of maize and pound of bacon per week, not at all as a wage for their work, but solely as a means of converting corn into cotton, and cotton into seats in Congress and summers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... and false tastes, which occasionally become so powerful as to stifle within us all good feelings, and ultimately to lead us into guilt and wickedness. From this view of things, then, comes the axiom that if you visit to discover the author of any bad action, seek first to discover the person to whom the perpetration of that bad action could be in any way advantageous. Now, to apply it in your case,—to whom could ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... they do not know how passions originate in the mind. But, if people would consider the nature of substance, they would have no doubt about the truth of Prop. vii. In fact, this proposition would be a universal axiom, and accounted a truism. For, by substance, would be understood that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself—that is, something of which the conception requires not the conception of anything else; whereas modifications exist in ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... most illiterate observer involves more or less of hypothesis;'—yet both by the observer himself and by most of those who listen to him, each of these conjectural assumptions is treated as respectfully as if it were an established axiom. We are supposed to deny the possibility of a circumstance, when in truth we only deny the evidence alleged for it. We allow the excellence of reasoning from certain data to captivate our belief in the truth of the data themselves, even when they are unproved and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... answers very well as a hit at the critics; but I am by no means sure that the god was in the right. I am by no means certain that the true limits of the critical duty are not grossly misunderstood. Excellence, in a poem especially, may be considered in the light of an axiom, which need only be properly put, to become self-evident. It is not excellence if it requires to be demonstrated as such; and thus, to point out too particularly the merits of a work of Art, is to admit that they are not ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... a great mistake when Orthodoxy or Rationalism reverses the axiom of John, and instead of saying, "Life is the light of man," tells us that "Light is the life of man." Knowledge comes from life. Belief comes from knowledge, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... with this axiom, he had taken his degree in the grand lodge of financiers. There he at once made himself an authority by his manner and address; and he knew well how to use his name, his political influence, and his reputation ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... when they regard the sinister side of events, are apt to call in question the axiom, Nothing is accomplished without the will of God. Why, they ask, do the wicked triumph? Why are the just oppressed? Why this evil? What is the use of that disaster? Was it necessary that Mary Wolston should be thrown into the sea, and that she should afterwards die in consequence ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... main point, the theory of descent, he had to disallow convergent, or as they were then called, analogous forms. To appreciate the difficulty of his position we have to take the standpoint of fifty years ago, when the immutability of the species was an axiom and each was supposed to have been created within or over the geographical area which it now occupies. If he once admitted that a species could arise from many individuals instead of from one pair, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... understand by the term cause the axiom that every change has an occasion, hence that every event is bound up with a number of conditions which when lacking in whole or in part would prevent the appearance of the event, while their presence would ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... cartoon, stricken Serbia impotent to ward off the blow about to be dealt by a monstrous fist. That is the Teuton conception of War, Merry War (Lustige Krieg)! In the English prize-ring we have an axiom indelibly impressed upon novices—"Follow up one stout blow with another—quick!" That, also, is the consummate art of war. But when a man is knocked out we don't savage him as he lies senseless at our feet. The Hun does. His axiom is—"As you are ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... received a call that same evening from Mr Plornish, who, having intimated that he wished to speak to her privately, in a series of coughs so very noticeable as to favour the idea that her father, as regarded her seamstress occupation, was an illustration of the axiom that there are no such stone-blind men as those who will not see, obtained an audience with her on the common ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... goldsmith, "perfect honesty;" and the reason he gives for his emphasis is, that the business is peculiarly liable to suspicion, and if a man is "once detected in the smallest fraud ... at once he is ruined." The character of his argument was always simple. He usually began with some such axiom as the desirability of success in one's enterprises, or of health, or of comfort, or of ease of mind, or a sufficiency of money; and then he showed that some virtue, or collection of virtues, would promote ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... we observe, there are two things which are to be learned from this passage. The first is this, that happiness is not our end and aim. It has been said, and has since been repeated as frequently as if it were an indisputable axiom, that "Happiness is our being's end and aim." Brethren, happiness is not our being's end and aim. The Christian's aim is perfection, not happiness, and every one of the sons of God must have something of ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... had just set down, to such a degree that he forgot to attend to his new companion? Nothing could be more wide of the truth; but that is the way we judge and misjudge one another. She was almost hurt at his silence, before he spoke again. The fact is, that the general axiom that a man can always put in words anything of which his head and heart are both full, seems to have one exception. Mr. Dillwyn was a good talker, always, on matters he cared about, and matters he did not care about; and yet now, when he had secured, ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... upon one of the errors that drag most heavily upon human progress, in order to find a remedy for it—namely, the belief that man becomes happier and better by the increase of outward well-being. Nothing is falser than this pretended social axiom; on the contrary, that material prosperity without an offset, diminishes the capacity for happiness and debases character, is a fact which a thousand examples are at hand to prove. The worth of a civilization is the worth of the man ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... came Frank's brave reply in his favorite axiom. "We'll live to fly the old Golden Eagle yet, ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... repose—tracts which rouged poor Christianity on the cheeks, clapped a crown of innocent daffodillies on her head, and set her to dancing a pas de zephyr in the pastoral ballet in which St. Simon pipes to the flock he shears; or having first laid it down as a preliminary axiom, that ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... material forces, to show that matter, as mere matter, is endowed with particular forces, with which they might satisfactorily explain a great many of its phenomena. No one had hitherto sought for a similar proof; for ARISTOTLE had contented himself with an axiom, that all natural things contain in themselves the sufficient cause of their movement and rest. GLISSON and LEIBNITZ set themselves in search of this proof; but it was reserved for the immortal KANT to find it in ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... said just as well in prose, there is no excuse for not putting it in prose. That axiom should kill off half our amateur poets and rid the world of a nuisance. On the other hand, when a thought or a feeling is to be communicated from a mind profoundly stirred, exalted, filled with fervour, or from ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... must see people and customs not with the eyes of his body only, but with the eyes of his heart, if he would really understand them. Above all things, he must not deliberately buckle on blinders. Of no country is this axiom more true than of Russia. A man who would see Russia clearly must strip himself of all preconceived prejudices of religion, race, and language, and study the people from their own point of view. ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... on life, I have always found that those connections which were formed from inordinate passion, or what some would call pure affection, have been ever the most unhappy. Examine the varied circles of society, you will there see this axiom demonstrated; you will there see how few among the sentimentally refined are even apparently at ease; while those, insusceptible of what you name tender attachments, or who receive them only as ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... covering with one broad blanket of prejudice the most diverse cases of wealth. But spoliation is assumed, not proved. My own conviction that most wealth is quite blameless, whether under the general or specific accusation, is based on no comprehensive axiom, but simply on the knowledge of a number of particular fortunes and of their owners. Such a road towards truth is highly unromantic. The student of particular phenomena is unable to pose as the champion of the race. But the method has ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... is a remarkable place is an axiom, and no better evidence of the fact can be found (were evidence necessary to sustain an axiom) than in the loyalty that every citizen displays, and the sincere love that prompts every one who has ever come under the ...
— The Real Diary of a Real Boy • Henry A. Shute
... betrayed what the club chose to do or say was to be, nolens volens, banished. Over the clock in the kitchen some wit had inscribed in neat Latin the merry motto, "If the wine of last night hurts you, drink more to-day, and it will cure you"—a happy version of the dangerous axiom of "Take a hair of the dog ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... if everybody does it, it is all right," he conceded; and though he was not aware of it, he had compressed into this convenient axiom his whole philosophy ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... work and fatigues of this world, people had gathered for a little enjoyment of what we call society. It is true that both the room and its occupants did not indicate that there had been much recreation. But, then, one can lay it down as an axiom that the people who work for pleasure are the hardest-working people in the world; and, as it is that for which society labors, this scene is but another proof that they get very much fatigued over their pursuit of happiness and enjoyment, considering that they hunt ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... to that which is last, and let us, beginning from that which is perfectly effable and known to sense, ascend too the ineffable, and establish in silence, as in a port, the parturitions of truth concerning it. Let us then assume the following axiom, in which as in a secure vehicle we may safely pass from hence thither. I say, therefore, that the unindigent is naturally prior to the indigent. For that which is in want of another is naturally adapted from necessity to be subservient to that ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... men in religion rendered it easy for them to conform in all external points to custom. Their fundamental axiom was that a scientific thinker could hold one set of opinions as a philosopher, and another set as a Christian. Their motto was the celebrated Foris ut moris, intus ut libet.[11] Nor were ecclesiastical authorities dissatisfied with this attitude during the ascendancy of humanistic culture. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... alone met the problem, and which the successful steam-engine must possess. He abandoned all else for the time as superfluous, since this was the key of the position. This is the law he then laid down as an axiom—which is repeated in his specification for his first patent in 1769: "To make a perfect steam engine it was necessary that the cylinder should be always as hot as the steam which entered it, and that the steam should be cooled below 100 deg. to ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... do get warm when I talk of the delicious sex: for though now and then I thrash my wife before company, who shall imagine how cosy we are when we're alone? Do you not remember that great axiom of Sir Robert's—an axiom that should make Machiavelli howl with envy—that "the battle of the Constitution is to fought in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... good growing condition; but if the manure is deficient, the soil bakes, or the plants show signs of disease, then cultivate and hoe once or twice extra. "Hoe cabbage when wet," is another farmer's axiom. In a small garden patch the soil may be stirred among the plants as often as may be convenient: it can do no harm; cabbages relish tending, though it is not necessary to do this every day, as one ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... a sup at all in the house?" said Mat; "if there is, let me get it; for there's an ould proverb, though it's a most unmathematical axiom as ever was invinted—'try a hair of the same dog that bit you;' give me a glass, Nancy, an' you can go for Father Connell after. Oh, by the sowl of Isaac, that ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... this should be. The first principle on which the theory of a science of history can be plausibly argued, is that all actions whatsoever arise from self-interest. It may be enlightened self-interest; it may be unenlightened; but it is assumed as an axiom, that every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something which he considers will promote his happiness. His conduct is not determined by his will; it is determined by the object of his desire. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... This fundamental axiom, upon which the entire basis of civilization necessarily rests, is challenged by a small class ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... at all junctures of island life, social or international; but I never heard of any banquet—the child's presence at the daily board perhaps sufficing. We may find the rationale in the ancient Arabian idea that a common diet makes a common blood, with its derivative axiom that "he is the father who gives the child its morning draught." In the Marquesan practice, the sense would thus be evanescent; from the Tahitian, a mere survival, it will have entirely fled. An interesting parallel will probably occur to many ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an axiom with the regular army of our own country and those of foreign nations, that soldier and discipline are synonymous. Meaning thereby the blind discipline ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... Boston he played good ball for a time, but his bad habits soon caused his downfall, just as they had caused the downfall of many good players before him, for it may be set down as an axiom that baseball and booze will not mix any better than will oil and water. The last time that I ever saw him was at an Eastern hotel barroom, and during the brief space of time that we conversed together he threw in enough whisky to put an ordinary man under the table. After leaving ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... inflame more than vast Local self-government which is the life-blood of liberty Logical and historical argument of unmerciful length Long succession of so many illustrious obscure Look through the cloud of dissimulation Luther's axiom, that thoughts are toll-free Lutheran princes of Germany, detested the doctrines of Geneva Made no breach in royal and Roman infallibility Made to swing to and fro over a slow fire Maintaining the attitude of an injured but forgiving Christian Man had only natural ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... am,' has its fallacy in the statement, 'I think.' It assumes that that assertion is axiomatic and basic, when in reality it is the conclusion derived from a long process of mental introspection. It is a theory rather than an axiom." ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... belongs to him, and with that power of richly adorning truth from the wardrobe of genius which he possessed above almost all men, "Civil knowledge is conversant about a subject which, above all others, is most immersed in matter, and hardliest reduced to axiom."[28] ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... of his journey he dismissed bewildering questions of right and wrong, of prudence and imprudence, laying it down as an axiom that his emprise was both right and prudent, and busied himself with the more material and homely considerations of ways and means. He amused himself in attempting to fix the sum for which it would be possible for him and Anastasia to keep house, and by mentally straining to the utmost the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... out against the standing tyranny, and chose to do beauty homage in his own fashion, and at his leisure. It was Farina, and oaths were registered against him over empty beer-barrels. An axiom of the White Rose Club laid it down that everybody must be enamoured of Margarita, and the conscience of the Club made them trebly suspicious of those who were not members. They had the consolation of knowing that Farina was poor, but then he was affirmed a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is needed to prove so plain an axiom we have it in our own history. At the beginning of our National Government we fixed the value of gold and silver as 1 to 15. Gold was undervalued and fled the country to where an ounce of gold was worth 151 ounces of silver. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... the first, it has long been laid down as a general axiom, and it is no doubt as a rule true, that prose is always later than verse, and that in mediaeval times especially the order is almost invariable. Verse; unrhymed and half-disrhythmed prose; prose pure and ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... tainted, And my noble name were branded. If I leave him here in prison, So excessive is his sadness, So extreme his melancholy, That I fear 't will end in madness. In a word, I hold, my nephew, Hold it as a certain axiom, That these dark magician Christians Keep him bound by their enchantments; Who through hatred of my house, And my office to disparage, Now revenge themselves on me Through my only son Chrysanthus. Tell me, then, what shall I do; But before you give the answer ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... theories of the universe are also divergent. According to the Bible the outer world is the creation, by God, out of nothing. To the Brahman of all times the idea of pure creation has seemed absurd. Ex nihilo nihil fit is an axiom of all their philosophies. Whether it be the Vedantin who tells us that the material universe is the result of Brahm invested with illusion, or the Sankya philosopher who attributes it to prakriti—the power of nature; or the Veisashika ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... indeed the case of Aladdin's Lamp, and as potent were these Fiddles as the wonderful lamp or ring itself. In the possession of Luigi Tarisio they drew forth from the purses of the wealthy gold that would have enabled the humble villagers to have ceased labour. It is an axiom, however, that everything on this earth is only of value providing it is in its proper place, and these rare old instruments, in the keeping of the poor peasants, could scarcely be considered to be in their proper element; ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... Mr. Stukely Culbrett, Mrs. Lespel prepared the house and those of the company who were in the secret of affairs for the arrival of Beauchamp. The ladies were curious to see him. The gentlemen, not anticipating extreme amusement, were calm: for it is an axiom in the world of buckskins and billiard-cues, that one man is very like another; and so true is it with them, that they can in time teach it to the fair sex. Friends of Cecil Baskelett predominated, and the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... axiom of the breeder is—est in equis patrum virtus—"Like produces like." But the second axiom is, "The goodness of the horse goes in at his mouth." The moral is, that like produces like only under like natural conditions. Turn out all ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... logical basis possible, and thus have carefully and critically inquired into its foundations. The new geometry which has thus arisen is of two closely related yet distinct forms. One of these is called NON-EUCLIDIAN, because Euclid's axiom of parallels, which we shall presently explain, is ignored. In the other form space is assumed to have one or more dimensions in addition to the three to which the space we actually inhabit is confined. As we go beyond the limits set by Euclid in adding a fourth dimension to space, this last ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... of will and of desire is the only road to deliverance," and "the individual life is a misfortune from which impersonal contemplation is the only enfranchisement," etc. But the principle that life is an evil and annihilation a good lies at the root of the system, and this axiom I have never dared to enunciate in any general way, although I have admitted it here and there in individual cases. What I still like in the misanthrope of Frankfort, is his antipathy to current prejudice, to European hobbies, to western hypocrisies, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... For suppose you have convinced me by reason, how am I to know that it is not my reason, corrupted by sin, which makes me accept what you say? besides, what proof, what demonstration, can you advance, more self-evident than the axiom it is to destroy? It is more credible that a good syllogism is a lie, than that the part is greater ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... old axiom of philosophy, which counsels us to "think with the learned, and talk with the vulgar;" and the practical application of this axiom runs through the whole scene of human affairs. Thus the most learned astronomer talks of the rising and setting of the sun, and forgets in his ordinary discourse ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... had been manoeuvred with a rapidity and precision which must have excited even the admiration of the distinguished soldier opposed to him. He had promptly concentrated his forces opposite every threatened point in turn, and if he had not been able to carry out the axiom of Napoleon, that a commander should always be superior to the enemy at the point of contact, he had at least done all that was possible to effect that end, and had so far succeeded as to have repulsed if not routed his adversary. This is the main feature ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... down as an axiom, that it is more easy to take away superfluities than to supply defects; and therefore, he that is culpable, because he has passed the middle point of virtue, is always accounted a fairer object of hope, than he who fails by falling ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... to a conclusion. It may be taken as a safe axiom that to make gold mining in the mine as distinct from mining on the Stock Exchange really profitable the same system of economy, of practical supervision, and scientific knowledge which is now adopted in all other businesses must ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... of faith, aspires only to exhibit them in broad daylight; which, instead of rejecting traditional dogmas and the prejudices of conscience, asks only to verify them; which, while defending itself against exclusive opinions, takes for an axiom the infallibility of reason, and, thanks to this fruitful principle, will doubtless never decide against any of the antagonistic sects? Is it possible that the religious and political conservatives will charge ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... aphorism; apothegm, apophthegm^; dictum, saying, adage, saw, proverb; sentence, mot [Fr.], motto, word, byword, moral, phylactery, protasis^. axiom, theorem, scholium^, truism, postulate. first principles, a priori fact, assumption (supposition) 514. reflection &c (idea) 453; conclusion &c (judgment) 480; golden rule &c (precept) 697; principle, principia [Lat.]; profession of faith &c (belief) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... religion and morals, we must follow strenuously the norm of reason rightly applied, as of the highest faculty of the mind; which law of thinking and perceiving, if it be applied to prove any positive religion (theological Rationalism) lays it down as an axiom that religion is revealed to men in no other manner than that which is agreeable both to the nature of things and to reason, as the witness and interpreter of divine providence; and teaches that the subject-matter ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... both and hale them away to prison. But it was not till many years afterwards that I read in his well-remembered effigy the allegory of civilization which lets the man-made suffering of men come to the worst before it touches it, and acts upon the axiom that a pound of prevention is worth less than an ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... newspapers that I see; but the Morning Chronicle and the Daily News, of which I have only seen one article for a long time back, appeared to be maintaining what I hold. That we ought to be strictly neutral (not armed and threatening neutrals) seems to be an axiom; but at the same time I look at the crisis with much hope and little or no fear. To declaim against L. N.'s treachery is only a way of playing into the wrong hands, i.e. supporting Austria. He has pledged himself to expel her from Italy and not to seek dominion ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... new year is called "happy" doubtless on account of the good resolutions which inevitably spring from a contemplation of the past. It is the one day in the year when every right-minded person at least tries to do good, and it is an axiom that to be good ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... not be laid down as an axiom, that that system must be radically wrong which can only be supported by transgressing ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... "Physiology of Common Life" (George Henry Lewes) discussed Liebig's brilliant error in considering food chemically, and not physiologically. The rest assume his classification without reserve, and work from the axiom that heat-making, carbonaceous and non-nitrogenous foods (e.g. fat and sugars), necessary to support life in the arctic and polar regions, must be exchanged for the tissue-making, plastic or nitrogenous (vegetables), as we approach ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... ourselves up. For the nonce, however, three weeks would pass, and with them all our woes. The idea of eighteen weeks occurred to nobody; it would have been too farcical, too puerile. That starvation must have killed us long ere the period had fled, would have been our axiom, if it were pertinent to the issue, when the 'pros' and 'cons' of the situation were being eagerly discussed on the opening days of a Siege that was to send the fame of the Diamond City farther than ever did its diamonds. A few weeks would terminate the trouble; and if, in the ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... axiom is understood by the French author, and in an imaginative, not a didactic way, though his imagination is not strong enough to make ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... in us," announced Mrs. Bowers, with the manner of one who delivers an axiom, "not a little bit. St. Marys happens to be the town near the works, and we happen to be the people ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... seem an obvious thing enough, that when a man collects a number of his fellow-men together to work for him, it would be right to provide a sufficient supply of air for them. But this does not appear to have been considered as an axiom; and, in truth, we cannot much wonder at this neglect, when we find that those who have to provide for the amusement of men, and who would be likely, therefore to consult the health and convenience ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... Thursday.—The MEMBER FOR SARK, in pursuance of his favourite axiom that there is nothing new under the sun, calls attention to two conversations in which he discovers singularly close parallel in tone and temper. The first will be found in official report of Parliamentary debate. It took place between LEADER OF OPPOSITION ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... as he was of "the vast authentic book of nature," there is abundant proof that Fielding fulfilled his own axiom that a "good share of learning" is necessary to the equipment of a novelist. Let the romance writer's natural parts be what they may, learning, he declared, "must fit them for use, must direct them ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... one asks what was really the original of his picture.'[297] A little earlier he had written to Sir John Acton: 'I was not the important person in the negotiation before the war that Mr. Kinglake seems to suppose; and with him every supposition becomes an axiom and a dogma.' All the papers from various sources to which I have had access show that Mr. Gladstone, as he has just said, had no special share in the various resolutions taken in the decisive period that ended with the abandonment of ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... novelists, not merely in its own country, but on the far greater artists in fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in England from Fielding to Scott, if not to Dickens. Now, I suppose, that we are told to start with the axiom that even Fielding's structure of humanity is a simple toy-like thing, how much more is Lesage's? But for those of us who have not bowed the knee to foolish modern Baals, "They reconciled us; we embraced, and we have since been mortal enemies"; and the trout; and the soul of the licentiate; ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Church, and that the missionaries, their successors, have been and are quite comfortable, and have no other occupation than to maintain what the first ones built. It is a fact that, according to the philosophic axiom that the conservation is equivalent to a second production, that would not be doing little even did they do no more. But as a matter of truth it must be said that if so holy a province rests in the conservation of the conquests acquired, it also labors without end in the building ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... instance, the workingmen considered machinery their deadly foe, to be gotten rid of by all means. The simple axiom that machinery, factories, mines, land, together with every other means of production, if only in the hands of the entire community, would serve for the comfort and happiness of all, instead of being a ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... there was another use for these lofty towers. The fact is that the Nuremberg engineers, at the time that they were built, had not yet adopted a complete system of flank-works, and not having as yet applied with all its consequences the axiom that that which defends should itself be defended, they wanted to see and command their external defenses from within the body of the place, as, a century before, the baron could see from the top of his donjon whatever was going on round the walls of his castle, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... is granted, that every single congregation hath equal power, one as much as another, and that there is no subordination of one to another; according to that common and known axiom, An equal hath no power or rule over an equal. Subordination prelatical, which is of one or more parishes to the prelate and his cathedral, is denied; all particular churches being collateral, and ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... Axiom:—In order to be happy in wedlock, you must either be a man of genius married to an affectionate and intellectual woman, or, by a chance which is not as common as might be supposed, you must both of you be ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... actual geographical distribution over the earth's surface, were leading up from all sides and in various ways to the question of their origin. Now and then we encountered a sentence, like Prof. Owen's "axiom of the continuous operation of the ordained becoming of living things," which haunted us like an apparition. For, dim as our conception must needs be as to what such oracular and grandiloquent phrases might really mean, we felt confident that they presaged ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... hope, and too often embittered by terrible pangs of starvation and cold. This picture is unfortunately true in the main; at any rate, there is sufficient truth about it to account for the element of sentimental fiction escaping unnoticed, and thus it comes to be regarded as an axiom that the Chinese woman is low, very low, in the scale of humanity and civilisation. The women of the poorer classes in China have to work hard indeed for the bowl of rice and cabbage which forms their daily food, but not more so than women of their own station in other countries ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... up by philosophers, he was not theoretically acquainted with the beautiful axiom that self-preservation is the first law of nature. If he had been, perhaps he would have been prepared for this. Not being prepared, however, it alarmed him the more; so away he went like the wind, with the old gentleman and the two boys roaring and ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... notion of a religion as essentially doctrinal, the very first axiom about it is, that being true itself it makes all others false. Whereas, the capital distinction of the Pagan was—that given, supposing to be assumed, 10,000 religions—all must be true simultaneously, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... aspect, causing him, as compared with his head clerk, Dominic Iglesias—standing there patiently awaiting his further utterance—to be as is a cheap oleograph to a fine sketch in pen and ink. It may be taken as an axiom that, in body and soul alike, to be deficient in outline is a sad mistake. But of all these little facts and the result of them, Sir Abel was, needless to relate, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... beautiful; and the due ornamentation of it will depend principally upon its form, but also upon its colour and material. Now, form is the principal thing; every one that has half an eye for art will tell you this—'tis an admitted axiom. Either, then, the shape of the covering should conform to that of the head, or it should not, and we take our ground in support of the latter position. The natural form of the head is determined by the rotundity of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... I suppose, to J.H.N.'s axiom, that if the movement was to do anything it must become "respectable"; but ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... the dead languages of Greece and Rome. That the classics should form the basis of all teaching was an axiom with Dr. Arnold. 'The study of language,' he said, 'seems to me as if it was given for the very purpose of forming the human mind in youth; and the Greek and Latin languages seem the very instruments by which this is to be effected.' Certainly, there was something providential about it— ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... than mere dependents on men," was his axiom. "Don't talk that you are his equal, and then open that eloquent mouth to be fed by his hand—do something! It is by doing fifty useful and therefore lucrative things to your one that man becomes your creditor, ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... axiom with Menabrea, with Nigra, with Corti, that Italy and England herself could do nothing in the Mediterranean without France, still less do anything against France. The last conversation of Corti with Crispi shows plainly his conviction that a real alliance of Italy and England was a Utopia. How many ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... youth. That is an axiom I have frequently heard fall from the lips of my dear mistress. As you grow older you will grow less positive in your opinions, and will be careful to have a solid foundation for them. Now I know these ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... This Subtilty of yours exceeds all Bounds, for you have withdrawn your self from the State and Condition of understanding Men, and indeed thrown away the Nature of Intelligible Things, for this is a certain Axiom, that a thing must be either one, or more than one. Soft and fair; let that Gentleman be pleas'd to consider with himself, and contemplate this vile, sensible World, after the same manner which Hai ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... years been changing to a storage for trunks instead of vegetables. The old-fashioned housewife exclaims at the lack of storage in the house of to-day, and we are eliminating it still more. A twentieth-century axiom is, "Throw or give away everything you have not immediate or prospective use for." It is as true of household furniture as of books; only the very best is of any value second-hand. Our young people may have heirlooms, but they will buy very little in the way of sideboards or first ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, the author of Poor Richard's quaint sayings; Franklin the immortal axiom-builder, who used to sit up at nights reducing the rankest old threadbare platitudes to crisp and snappy maxims that had a nice, varnished, original look in their regimentals; who said, "Virtue is its own reward;" who said, "Procrastination ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is true and worthless;—because what all have asserted, always, and in all places, supposing of course that the means of judging were in their power, may be assumed to be some indisputable axiom, such as never will be disputed any more than it has been disputed hitherto. But take it with any allowance, and then it is of no use in settling a question: for what most men have asserted, most commonly, and in most places, has a certain ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... was talking about. But this is only Phase One of the plan. A corollary is based upon the axiom that one disabled automobile is equal ...
— "To Invade New York...." • Irwin Lewis
... Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. What is true of relation—of form and quantity—is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom fails. In the consideration of motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Henry, repairing the boat, I went up to Burlington, where I ordered this to be done. It came down to-day, and I want it put up in the wheel-house, where it will be constantly before your eyes, as the best axiom in the world for a steamboat man. It will be the history of the Woodville to you, and I hope you will always act upon it, never running your boat above a safe speed, nor leave your wharf when it is ...
— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic
... Psychology (vol. ii, p. 646) I gave the name of the 'axiom of skipped intermediaries and transferred relations' to a serial principle of which the foundation of logic, the dictum de omni et nullo (or, as I expressed it, the rule that what is of a kind is of that kind's kind), ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... in the "War of Liberation" and in the fighting during the subsequent advance on Paris. As for grand old William I., the real maker of the German Empire on the quid facit per alium facit per se axiom, he died a veteran of many wars. He was not seventeen when he won the Iron Cross by a service of conspicuous gallantry under heavy fire. He took his chances in the bullet and shell fire at Koeniggraetz, and again on the afternoon of Gravelotte. ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... power of disqualification was necessary to the house of commons, for otherwise expulsion would not be a real, but a nominal punishment. Other pens were employed in proving the contrary; and among them was that of Junius, whose argument rested on the axiom that political expediency does not prove existing law, and who defied his opponents to produce any statute applicable to the subject. Junius also argued that, although the house of commons could expel, the concurrence of every ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... could be no doubt about it. There in material form on the corner of his table was a point-blank, tangible contradiction of the universally accepted axiom that two bodies cannot occupy the same space, and that, come from somewhere or nowhere, there were two plainly material objects through which his daughter's hand, without her even knowing it, had passed as ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... degradation. Mr. Jefferson here threw away and forever lost the power to establish the true system, and fixed the curse of patronage upon American administration. The true principle may be stated in the form of an axiom. Administrations should rely for continuation upon measures, not on patronage. Gallatin yielded with reluctance to the spirit of persecution which he did not hesitate to say disgraced the Republican cause, and sank them to a level ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... spiritual entity that, so far as general principles can be applied to particular instances, often gave me a grip of the evil, and enabled me, by dealing with the generating cause, to strike at its immediate manifestation. My axiom was that in the human subject mind is king; the mind commands, the body obeys. From this follows the corollary that the really great doctor, however trivial the complaint, should always begin by trying to understand the mind of his patient, to follow the course of its workings, and estimate ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... suggestion with dogged inflexibility, maintaining only one axiom above all the rest—that whatever minor parts might be enacted—Casca, Cassius, or what not—he was to be the dramatic Brutus, excepting that assassin's negativeness. In other words, the idea was to be his own, as well us the ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... to attack the rooms of one with whom he is not in the habit of intimacy. From ignorance of this axiom I had near got a horse-whipping, and was kicked down stairs for going to a wrong oak, whose tenant was not in the habit of taking jokes of this kind.—The Etonian, Vol. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Coetlogon's play formally, BECAUSE IT CRITICISED THE EMPIRE. That is the censorship's answer. As I have in the le Sexe faible a rather ridiculous general, I am not without forebodings. What a fine thing is Censorship! Axiom: All governments curse literature, power does not ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... together, these good many years past, and they at length end it.—Sulzer said, "Men are by nature good." "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer, Er kennt nicht diese verdammte Race," ejaculated Fritz, at hearing such an axiom. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... apparently drinking, and drinking again, and drinking yet again, nibbling cheese, crackers and smoked-beef meanwhile, apparently to keep up the necessary thirst. "Fire and fall back!" seemed to be a military axiom not always observed by the rank and file of the Two Hundredth, as many of them kept their places and went on with their guzzling, with a determination worthy of a much better cause. But it was occasionally observed, after all, for there ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... set for the most distant of land views, beach scenes and boats in the middle distance off-shore. You will learn by costly overexposures that water views require much less light than landscapes. Photographers have an axiom that "water is as bright as the sky itself." So at "64," which is proper exposure for the most distant of land panoramas, you ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... effect is defined by the power of its cause, in so far as its essence is explained or defined by the essence of its cause. (This axiom ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... grant, and the extravagance of Government stimulates individual extravagance until the spirit of a wild and ill-regulated speculation involves one and all in its unfortunate results. In view of such fatal consequences, it may be laid down as an axiom rounded in moral and political truth that no greater taxes should be imposed than are necessary for an economical administration of the Government, and that whatever exists beyond should be reduced or modified. This doctrine does in no way conflict with the exercise ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... saying, ancient as the hills, that "truth is stranger than fiction," and in a most startling manner has this axiom been brought home to me within ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... application of them in individual cases to the individual church or church-member. This was the course exemplified with admirable wisdom and fidelity in the Presbyterian "deliverance" of 1818. (6) To meet the postulate, laid down with so much assurance, as if an axiom, that "slave-holding is always and everywhere a sin, to be immediately repented of and forsaken," with a flat and square contradiction, as being irreconcilable with facts and with the judgment of the Christian Scriptures; and thus to condemn and oppose to the utmost ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Revolution developed two striking pictures of the inconsistency of human nature. The author of the Declaration of Independence lays down at the very first this axiom: "We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." And yet this man, with members of others who signed the famous document, was a slave-holder, and contributed to the maintenance ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... her circle together with prudent deliberation; only men whose opinions and habits agreed foregathered there, men whose interest it was to hold together and to proclaim the many merits of the lady of the house. Scandal is the true Holy Alliance in Paris. Take that as an axiom. Interests invariably fall asunder in the end; vicious natures can ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... axiom in physics, that a part cannot be greater than the whole; and it will be recollected, that, after Epistemon had his head sewed on, he related a tough story about the occupations of the mighty dead, and swore, that, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... this, no logic on earth is able to touch the inference; the position of pure idealism is beyond the reach of argument. Nevertheless, it is opposed to the whole momentum of science. For if mind is supposed, on no matter how small a scale, to be a cause of motion, the fundamental axiom of science is impugned. This fundamental axiom is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed—that just as motion can produce nothing but motion, so, conversely, motion can be produced by nothing but motion. Regarded, therefore, from the stand-point of physical science, ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... of the families, her favourite object would have been, in either case, equally secure. Here was a plain, easy road to her object; but it was too direct for Mrs. Beaumont. With all her abilities, she could never comprehend the axiom that a right line is the shortest possible line between any two points:—an axiom equally true in morals and in mathematics. No, the serpentine line was, in her opinion, not only the most beautiful, but the most expeditious, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... you cannot attain," said Mr. Axiom, my employer,—"think of the influence you exercise!—more than a clergyman; Horace Greeley was an editor; so was George D. Prentice; the first has just been defeated for Congress; the last lectured last night and got fifty dollars ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... unknown to the republics of antiquity—which was introduced into the world almost by accident, like so many other great truths—and misunderstood by several modern nations, is at length become an axiom in the political science of the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... possess me. Aye, she was a ship! I was soon to curse my masters, and the very day I was born, but never, after that night, did I curse the ship. I loved her. I felt the full force that night of a hoary sea axiom, "Ships are all right. ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation.... The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please. It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also.... A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... leads to complications," Jurgen admitted, "through a choice of the wrong example. But the axiom is ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... the British parliament was in fact a struggle on the part of the people and taxpayers of one portion of the empire to resist the domination of the people and taxpayers of another portion. In this light it may be accepted as having historically established the fundamental axiom of the constitution of the empire, that the crown is the supreme head from which the parts ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Constantinople, from Constantinople to Venice, from Venice to Spain, from Spain to England—while no trace is left of Memphis, of Tyre, of Carthage, of Rome, of Venice, or Madrid. The soul of those great bodies has fled. Not one of them has preserved itself from destruction, nor formulated this axiom: When the effect produced ceases to be in a ratio to its cause, ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... "Anything for a quiet life," was his constant saying; and, like the generality of people with whom those words form a favorite maxim, he led the most uneasy life imaginable. Endurance, to excite commiseration, must be uncomplaining—an axiom the aggrieved of the gentle sex should remember. Sir Piers endured, but he grumbled lustily, and was on all hands voted a bore; domestic grievances, especially if the husband be the plaintiff, being the most ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... think your correspondent "A MAN IN A GARRET" (No. 19. p. 308.) is not warranted in stating that M. de Gournay was the author of the above axiom of political economy. Last session Lord J. Russell related an anecdote in the House of Commons which referred the phrase to an earlier date. In the Times of the 2nd of April, 1849, his Lordship is reported to have said, on the preceding day, in a debate on the Rate-in-Aid Bill, that Colbert, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... President that it was not desirable to rob Saint Peter's altar in order to build one to Saint Paul. It might have been simpler to suggest that the consumer would pay the tax, supposing it were ever paid at all, but the axiom was not so familiar three centuries ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... there are some who think that a prince who conveys an impression of his wisdom is not so through his own ability, but through the good advisers that he has around him, beyond doubt they are deceived, because this is an axiom which never fails: that a prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice, unless by chance he has yielded his affairs entirely to one person who happens to be a very prudent man. In this case indeed he may be well governed, but it ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... good deal to puzzle the spectator. That the English are a fortune-hunting race may be a popular axiom; but it was quite possible, after all, that Roger Barnes was not the latest illustration of it. It was quite possible, also, that he had a sweet-heart at home, some quiet, Quakerish girl who would never wave in his face the red flags that Daphne was fond of brandishing. It was equally possible ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and teaches that the coming revolution, which every intelligent mind must foresee, is strictly an evolution. Socialists of this school reason from no assumed first principle, like the French, who start from "social equality," or like Herbert Spencer, who lays it down as an axiom that "every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the like freedom of every other man;" but basing themselves squarely on experience,—not individual but universal experience,—they can, and do ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... 9. "CHERRIES" illustrates the axiom that a gift must be measured, not by itself, but by the faculty of the giver, and by the amount of loving care which he has bestowed upon it. Man's general performance is to be judged from the same ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr |
