"Infallibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found it good policy to maintain this character for infallibility with my staff. It is true, perhaps, that I ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... it was only the want of power that prevented the Catholics from renewing the fires of Smithfield and the terrors of the Inquisition. It was believed that the infallibility and supremacy of the Pope bound the Catholic citizen to yield unquestioning obedience to the Catholic clergy in matters civil and political, as well as spiritual. There was a natural and very strong ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... Word of God, is much disputed, as all questions must needs bee, that are not well stated. For they make not the question to be, "Why we Beleeve it," but "How wee Know it;" as if Beleeving and Knowing were all one. And thence while one side ground their Knowledge upon the Infallibility of the Church, and the other side, on the Testimony of the Private Spirit, neither side concludeth what it pretends. For how shall a man know the Infallibility of the Church, but by knowing first the Infallibility ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... in the House of Lords last night. It is a really terrible place for the unaccustomed. Frigid impatience and absolute goodwill, combined with a thorough conviction of the infallibility of laymen (if not too religious) on all sacred subjects, are the tone, morale, and reason, of the House as a living being. My whole self-possession departs, and ejection from the House seems the best thing which could happen to one."—Archbishop ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... believe in her heaven, her purgatory or her hell, nor do I believe that her Masses move God to release souls from torment. I do not believe in her powers to pardon and curse. I do not believe in her claims of infallibility. But—" ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... thought the bishops of Rome may be in error, but cannot long remain in it, if they adhere to the universal church;—this seems to presuppose the church's infallibility:[057] ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... individual recollection, but begins to recognize the instability of his position: "I either witnessed the occurrence or dreamt it." This is sufficient to prove that, with all people's boasting about the infallibility of memory, there are many who have a shrewd suspicion that some of its asseverations will not bear a very ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. viii. 35, 38, 39). Now these words, "I am persuaded," exclude all doubt. But what was the foundation of Paul's assurance? It was in the infallibility of God alone. The epistles of this great apostle, this mystical teacher, are often read, but seldom understood; yet all the mystic way, its commencement, its progress, its end, are described by St Paul, and even the divine life; but few are able to understand it, and those to whom ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... miracles in the ordinary conduct of His Church. It would be a strange miracle if infallibility existed in one man. But it appears so natural for it to reside in a multitude, since the conduct of God is hidden under nature, as ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... and his successors that French verse completely broke away from the control of those classical rules, the infallibility of which had been first attacked by the Romantics. In order to express the delicate, shifting, and indecisive feelings which he loved so well, Verlaine abolished the last shreds of rhythmical regularity, making his verse a perfectly fluid substance, which he could ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... shock to Rachel's infallibility, and as she slowly began working her way in search of her mother, after observing the felicity of Emily's bright eyes, she fell into a musing on the advantages of early youth in its indiscriminating powers of enthusiasm for anything distinguished for anything, and that sense of self-exaltation ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are become great enemies to all manner of fatigues. But, to make amends, the sciences flourish among them. The effendis (that is to say, the learned) do very well deserve this name: They have no more faith in the in inspiration of Mahomet, than in the infallibility of the Pope. They make a frank profession of Deism among themselves, or to those they can trust; and never speak of their law but as of a politic institution, fit now to be observed by wise men, however at first introduced by ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... than the average senior, he had been already in the larger world. His opinion of things had especial value even in his Junior year. After the football season, when he had been acknowledged the keenest manager the college had ever found, the under-classmen had a blind faith in his infallibility. The older students relied on him in much the same way, though there were some who said that self lay at the bottom of Lyman's system of morals, that the watchword of his philosophy was "Does it pay?" These men were sentimentalists who had ideals. Langdon, the Sequoia ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... the spirits have baptized their new theological dogmas, "The Harmonial Philosophy," of which Reason is the final umpire. Revelation no longer speaks to them in tones of authority. From the Bible, it is claimed, "the seal of infallibility must be broken away, before a new light and beauty can enliven and embellish the mystical disclosures of any seer, prophet, or evangelist." So writes Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie seer, one of ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... Pardon us, brother of the flesh, say they, in saintly whispers,—it is all for the Church and Christ. Boldly fortified with sanctimony, they hurl back the shafts of reform, and ask to live on sumptuously, as the only sought recompense for their christian love. Pious infallibility! how blind, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... having had greater opportunity: a little further seeing, maybe, having had more leisure for thought: but otherwise, no whit superior to any other young, eager woman of the people. This absurd journalistic pose of omniscience, of infallibility—this non-existent garment of supreme wisdom that, like the King's clothes in the fairy story, was donned to hide his nakedness by every strutting nonentity of Fleet Street! She would have no use for it. It should ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... his mistakes and shortcomings, Colon was neither a visionary nor an imbecile. Had he been perfect in all things and wise to the point of infallibility, we could not have claimed him as the glorious credit he was to the common humanity to which we all belong. His greatness was sufficient to cover with its mantle far more of the weaknesses of frail mortality than he had to ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... Catholic theologian, born in Bamberg, Bavaria, professor of Church History in the University of Muenich; head of the old Catholic party in Germany; was at first a zealous Ultramontanist, but changed his opinions and became quite as zealous in opposing, first, the temporal sovereignty, and then the infallibility of the Pope, to his excommunication from the Church; he was a polemic, and as such wrote extensively on theological and ecclesiastical topics; lived to a great age, and was much honoured ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Having reached his full height, he instantly rolled upon the grass, goblet in hand, spilling the cold liquor on more than one ankle—whose owners frisked—but not disturbing a muscle in his own long face, which, in the total eclipse of reason, retained its gravity, primness, and infallibility. ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Emperor into an adherent of the Bishop of Rome, which, considering the Bishop is Satan unchained, will not admit of a further descent in sin. The Mystery tonight is Scholarius' scheme in contravention of His Serenity's efforts. Oh, it is a quarrel, and a big one, involving Church and State, and the infallibility of our newly risen Jeremiah. Thus full-handed, thinkest thou in a suit the Prince of India against the venerable Hegumen of all the St. James', His Majesty will hesitate? Is thy opinion of him as a politician so uncomplimentary? Think again, I ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... is full of doleful creatures, who move about demanding our sympathy. I have nothing to offer them but doses of logic, and stern commands to move on or fall back. Catholics in distress about Infallibility; Protestants devoting themselves to the dismal task of paring down the dimensions of this miracle, and reducing the credibility of that one—as if any appreciable relief from the burden of faith could be so ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... well powdered; at others, curled without powder; at others, straight, without powder or curls. He was churchwarden; and then, when his head was full of his office, it was also full of flour, and full of ideas of his own consequence and infallibility. On a concert night, and in the ball-room, it was curled, and then it was full of amatory conquests; and, as he was captain in the Cavalry Volunteers, on field days his hair was straight and lank—martial ardour gave him no time to attend to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... not exactly like us, and when we read his book we all give thanks that we are not like him, but every trait that he had large, we have in little. Cellini was sincere; he never doubted his own infallibility, but he points out untiringly the fallibilities in various popes and everybody else. When Cellini goes out and kills a man before breakfast, he absolves himself by showing that the man richly deserved his fate. The braggart ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... whole vision: but only for a moment's space. The reader may find also details of interpretation which are open to doubt; if so, he will remember that no man would have shrunk with more horror than Mr. Maurice from the assumption of infallibility. Meanwhile, that the author's manly confidence in the reasonableness of his method will be justified hereafter, I must hope, if the Book of Revelation is to remain, as God grant it may, the political ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the Girondins, a party of phrase-makers who have enjoyed a posthumous sentimental reputation, but who, when living, had not the energy and active courage to back their fine speeches. The reductio ad horribile of all the fine arguments in favor of popular infallibility and virtue had come; neither was the reductio ad absurdum wanting. The old names of the days and months and years were changed. The statues of the Virgin were torn from the little niches in street-walls, and the busts of Marat and Lepelletier set up in their stead. The would-be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Sophomore class at Yale, was of the age when one is constitutionally "from Missouri." Probably King Solomon, at sixty, had doubts concerning the scope and depth of his wisdom; at eighteen he would have admitted its all-embracing infallibility without a blush. ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... by heart a grammar or a compendium, repeating well and imitating well—that," writes a former Minister of Public Instruction, M. Jules Simon, "is a ludicrous form of education whose every effort is an act of faith tacitly admitting the infallibility of the master, and whose only results are a belittling of ourselves and a rendering of ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... told and ordered him not to receive an office of justice under any circumstance, for the first that he should obtain threatened him with a very great disaster. I know that fact absolutely; for the rest, concerning the infallibility and even possibility of like judgments, I declare that I am ready to obey the command of our holy Mother the Church, in the constitution of his Holiness Sixtus V which begins, Caeli ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... inchoare longam. I then accepted the doctrine, in profound obedience to the absolutely infallible system of precepts. I now see that the falsity and mischief of the doctrine is one of the very many disproofs of the assumed, but unverified infallibility. However, the hold which the apostolic belief then took of me, subjected my conscience to the exhortations of the Irish clergyman, whenever he inculcated that the highest Christian must necessarily decline the pursuit of science, knowledge, art, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... last three that a doubt began to trouble him. It gnawed at his huge moral strength. Like a hidden seepage of water, it undermined (in anticipation) his terrible resolution. It was a sign perhaps of age, a slipping away of the reckless infallibility of youth. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... free will hath his proper working also. From the result of his whole performance I was confirmed in this opinion; that we must acknowledge the work of both grace and free will in the conversion of a sinner; and so likewise in all other events, the consistency of the infallibility of God's foreknowledge at least (though not with any absolute, but conditional predestination) with the liberty of man's will, and the contingency of inferior causes and effects. These, I say, we must acknowledge for the [Greek: hoti] but for the [Greek: to pos], I thought it bootless ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... the appearance of young Belllounds, and it was with a melancholy reminder of the infallibility of his presentiments. As he and Columbine halted in the trail, Belllounds's hurried stride lengthened until he almost ran. He carried the rifle forward in a most significant manner. Black as a thunder-cloud was his face. Alas for the dignity ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... important result of the supreme position accorded to the Papacy was the gradual emergence of the doctrine of papal infallibility. "The Church of Rome," says Gregory VII, "through St. Peter, as it were by some privilege, is from the very beginnings of the faith reckoned by the Holy Fathers the Mother of all the Churches and will so be considered to the very end; for in her no heretic is discerned to have had ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... many circumstances, with some of which he is only imperfectly acquainted, he must divine the intentions of his opponent. It is not pretended that even the widest experience and the finest intellect confer infallibility. But clearness of perception and the power of deduction, together with the strength of purpose which they create, are the fount and origin of great achievements; and when we find a campaign in which they played a predominant part, we may fairly rate it ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... witness the fish of Tukuran taking a constitutional on the beach, after the manner of the oysters in "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Nothing daunted, the officer agreed to the proposition, and so confident was he that even Mrs. Munchausen became less apologetically sure of his infallibility. But on our arrival at the beach, not a fish was to be seen, and loud was the laughter at both Munchausens, and numerous ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... find in it an attack (I am not concerned with the truth or falsehood of the opinions attacked) on the doctrines of episcopal succession, of sacramental grace, of baptismal regeneration, and the like. It is wholly silent about claims to Papal domination, about infallibility, about purgatory and indulgences, about the worship of the Virgin or of the Saints. Am I justified in concluding that the writer is 'referring in unmistakable terms' to the Church of Rome, because the Church ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... the clergy, had been for some time since looked upon in Bohemia with private disgust and open disapprobation; and when the professors Huss, Jerome, and Jacobellus, began to declaim against monks, auricular confession, and the infallibility of the pope, they found a responding echo in the breasts of their hearers; and all that was novel in their doctrines, was the boldness with which they were pronounced, and the logical consistency with which they ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... assertion—no more, and no less. I had never before so felt the force of unquestioned authority as I learned to feel and appreciate it in the services of the Episcopal Church of England. The very fact of arguing a question is in itself a compromise of its one-sidedness and of the infallibility of the position the preacher may have taken; but let the clergy of an entire nation read the same mass and recite the same prayers in all their congregations, and let them refrain from discussing ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... since accorded him. In our senior year the higher classes competed for the Boylston prizes for English composition. Emerson and I sent in our essays with the rest and were fortunate enough to take the two prizes; but—Alas for the infallibility of academic decisions! Emerson received the second prize. I was of course much pleased with the award of this intelligent committee, and should have been still more gratified had they mentioned that the man who was to ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... difficult archeological investigation, frankly confessed his inability to understand what was going on; for his ordinary business, he said, was cattle. A story is told of a metropolitan journal, which illustrates another difficulty the public has in keeping up its confidence in newspaper infallibility. It may not be true for history, but answers for an illustration. The annual November meteors were expected on a certain night. The journal prepared an elaborate article, several columns in length, on meteoric displays in general, and on the display of that night in particular, giving in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... outside, in common with those undesirable coxcombs, who have not been bred by the High Church movement, but have taken refuge in its cracks, as they would have done forty years ago in those of the Evangelical,—youths who hide their crass ignorance and dulness under the cloak of Church infallibility, and having neither wit, manners, learning, humanity, or any other dignity whereon to stand, talk loud, pour pis aller, about the dignity of the priesthood. Such men Frank had met at neighbouring clerical meetings, overbearing and out-talking the elder and the wiser members; and finding that ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... excitement such as has not often thrilled Europe, but the cause was not the Infallibility of Pius IX. On the 16th, Napoleon declared war with Prussia. War, like death, comes as a shock, however plainly it has been foreseen; besides, it was only the well-informed who knew how near the match had been to the powder-magazine for two years and more. Whether the explosion, at the last, ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who in a dispute with her sister, said: 'I don't know how it happens, sister, but I meet with nobody but myself that's always in the right.'—Il n'y a que moi ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... of the ultramontanism of the Spanish clergy. Never had those doctrines more fanatical defenders, nor sectarians more fiery partisans, than the ecclesiastical writers of the Peninsula; the dogma of the infallibility of the Pope, the superiority of his jurisdiction with respect to the bishops and to the general councils, was propagated not only in books but in the pulpit and the confessional. Nevertheless the enlightened ministers ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... execrable 'Reaping Woman,' one of those stupidly spoilt figures which seemed like hoaxes on his part, so unworthy they were of his powerful hands; but he was none the less radiant, feeling certain that he had turned out yet another masterpiece, and promenading his god-like infallibility through the crowd which he did not ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... extensive practice among the females of the settlement. "Are we to be classed with the heathen in knowledge, or to be accounted as the unnurtured men who are known once to have roamed through these forests in quest of their game? Without assuming any infallibility of judgment, or aspiring to any peculiarity of information, it doth not appear to my defective understanding, Master Dudley, that the progress of the settlement hath ever been checked for want of necessary foresight, nor that the growth of reason ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... saddened me. The adventure destroyed from summit to foundation three of my most important Meditations, and the catholic infallibility of my book was assailed in its most essential point. I would gladly have paid to establish the fidelity of the Viscountess V——- a sum as great as very many people would have offered to secure her surrender. But alas! my money will now ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... the new sect of [A]ryas in the United Provinces and Punjab. Their chief doctrine, the infallibility of the Vedas or earliest Hindu scriptures, is reactionary, although a number of reforms are inculcated in the name of ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... heart. It is only those who do not know her, or who have only met her in the conflict of opposing wills, who pronounce her, as some have done, a cold and heartless egotist. Opinionated she may be, because convinced of the general soundness of her ideas, and infallibility of her judgment. If the success of great designs, undertaken and carried through single-handed, furnish warrant for such conviction, she has an undoubted right ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... little volume the author gives but his own personal opinions upon the subjects discussed, and although the sentiments are expressed with an assurance born of conviction, yet he claims not infallibility. ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... game. Would they be tolerant? Why ask such a question? When was Roman Catholicism tolerant, and where? Is not the whole system of Popery based on intolerance, on infallibility, on strict exclusiveness? Let me give you a few local facts to show ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the word "progress" unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible—at any rate, without believing in some infallibility. For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress. Never perhaps since the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the following platform is understood and the 330:9 letter and the spirit bear witness, the infallibility of divine metaphysics ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... the infallibility of our traveller's memory, we may conceive confusion here, between the recollections of his journey westward and those of his return; but this does ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... of resemblance between this hapless monarch and the present occupant of the German throne, for in both there exists and has existed the same exaggerated and narrow-minded religious beliefs, bordering on mysticism, and also an all-embracing faith in their absolute and unquestionable infallibility. ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... Wollaston's "Religion of Nature," when he took exceptions to some of his reasoning, and wrote a dissertation thereon, and printed it, with the title, "A DISSERTATION ON LIBERTY AND NECESSITY, PLEASURE AND PAIN." This pamphlet fell into the hands of one Lyons, a surgeon, author of a book entitled "The Infallibility of Human Judgment," and he was so much pleased with it, that he sought out the author, and showed him marked attention. He introduced him to Dr. Mandeville, author of the "Fable of the Bees," and to Dr. Pemberton, who promised to take him to see ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... has changed greatly within two generations. Today the Bible is so little read that the language of the Authorized Version is rapidly becoming obsolete; so that even in the United States, where the old tradition of the verbal infallibility of "the book of books" lingers more strongly than anywhere else except perhaps in Ulster, retranslations into modern English have been introduced perforce to save its bare intelligibility. It is quite easy today to find cultivated persons who have never read the New Testament, and on whom ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... invasion is a jest. Your troops will fight, I allow, but your cabinets will betray. I have seen enough to satisfy me, that, if you do not take Paris within the next three months, you will not take it within ten times the number of years. Of course, I make no attempt at prediction. I leave infallibility to the grave fools of conclaves and councils; but the French mob will beat them all. What army can stand before a pestilence? When I was last in Sicily, I went to the summit of Etna during the time of an eruption. On my way, I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Pope's use of names made such a defense desirable. See, for example, Ward (p. 9) and "A Letter to a Noble Lord: Occasion'd by the Late Publication of the Dunciad Variorum," in Pope Alexander's Supremacy and Infallibility Examin'd (London, 1729), p. 12. Boileau's Discourse is a particularly apposite reply to the latter, which had contrasted Pope's satiric practice with that of Horace, Juvenal, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... may be said, that the Franco-German war changed all this. The Turkish government then no longer feared the French, and hence no longer lent itself to Papal intrigues. The dogma of the Papal Infallibility has been also a severe ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... victory over this dreadful philosophy, and it is not remarkable that the skeptic becomes the exponent of freedom, charging like a host of war upon all institutions of slavery. Liberal theology puts its one hand on the dogmatist who tells him to accept literal infallibility, and its other on the sincere lover of men who has lost his Bible entirely. And liberalism says: It is in just such moments that we trust our Bible the most, and we remember that William Wilberforce, who lifted the chains from the bondmen, has said: "I never knew happiness until I found Christ as ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... briefly noticed all that was necessary to mention of the antiquities of the French stage. The duties of the poet were gradually more rigorously laid down, under a belief in the authority of the ancients, and the infallibility of Aristotle. By their own inclination, however, the poets were led to the Spanish theatre, as long as the Dramatic Art in France, under a native education, had not attained its full maturity. They not only imitated ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... authority appears to him in its true colours, as mere private judgment in excelsis, and if he have the courage to stand alone, face to face with the abyss of the Eternal and Unknowable, let him be content, once for all, not only to renounce the good things promised by "Infallibility," but even to bear the bad things which it prophesies; content to follow reason and fact in singleness and honesty of purpose, wherever they may lead, in the sure faith that a hell of honest men will, to him, be more endurable than a ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... who considered this unlooked-for escape as a species of resurrection, patiently awaited the time the trapper mentioned with renewed confidence in the infallibility of his judgment. The Doctor regained his tablets, a little the worse from having fallen among the grass which had been subject to the action of the flames, and was consoling himself for this slight misfortune by recording uninterruptedly ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... civil marriage is one of unalloyed joy. In the selection of the day even the elements are studied by men specially devoted to meteorology, who, with perfect infallibility, can predict the weather ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... Secularism—that, and that alone is the field of argument. The supernaturalist, be he the fundamentalist of whatever denomination, or the more advanced modernist, is as tenaciously clinging to the transcendental, to revelation, to the infallibility of the Bible, if not in all respects at least in some (although this is a contradiction per se), to the interdisposition of a deity in the affairs of mankind, as were his ancestors of five hundred years ago. In these aspects as well as ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... this delicate problem was left unsolved. But Mr. Waddell, who liked to get to the bottom of things, continued to ponder these matters as he marched. He mistrusted the omniscience of Struthers and the superficial infallibility of the self-satisfied Cockerell. Accordingly, after consultation with that eager searcher after knowledge, Second Lieutenant Little, he took the laudable but fatal step of carrying his difficulties to one Captain Wagstaffe, the humorist of ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... in the right as far as Austerlitz. Then swollen ambition had ruined everything and, in his opinion, another swollen ambition, though for far less cause, was now bringing equal disaster upon Europe. A belief in one's infallibility might come from achievement or birth, but only the former could win any respect ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... magnolia-leaf texture as a woman's name,—a thing so easily stained that it must be ever elevated beyond the cleaving dust of suspicion, and the scorching breath of gossiping conjecture. The time has passed (did it ever really exist?) when the prestige of pastoral office hedged it around with impervious infallibility, and to-day, instead of partial and extenuating leniency, pure and uncontaminated society justly denies all ministerial immunities as regards the rigid mandates of social decorum and propriety,—and the world demands that, instead of drawing heavily upon an indefinite fund of ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... accused of slowness; but it is this very slowness that constitutes its strength and surety, its almost infallibility. One scarcely knows what a time evidence takes to produce itself. There is no knowing what important testimony ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... Of the infallibility of the Pope, and his right to the deposing power, our author thus expresses himself in one of his letters on Mr. Bower's History of the Popes; "Mr. Bower having been educated in the Catholic schools, could not but know that, though some ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... only incense he was capable of craving; and if such a nature can be susceptible of enjoyment, his consisted in the abasement of his fellow-creatures. The severity of his decrees, the rigor of his administration, and the attributes of infallibility which he cast around his person, caused him to be regarded with awe, but not with love. He could brook no opposition nor survive a failure. Few tears were shed when he was stricken down in his pride. He left but a small legacy of good deeds to endear ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... old. He was then a Dominican monk, and he is brought to our attention because he distinguished himself by incurring the displeasure of his superiors. His particular offense was that he had declared, "The infallibility of the Pope is only in matters spiritual, and does not apply to the science ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... in a meddling, presumptuous, reading-and-writing, socially and politically powerful ignorance inconceivable by Thomas Aquinas or even Roger Bacon, was incapable of so convenient an arrangement; and science was strangled by bigoted ignoramuses claiming infallibility for their interpretation of the Bible, which was regarded, not as a literature nor even as a book, but partly as an oracle which answered and settled all questions, and partly as a talisman to be carried by soldiers in their breast pockets or placed under the pillows of persons who were afraid ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... custom, tradition, and even government. The wave of rebellion swept over me in an instant, beginning with an heretical doubt as to the sanctity of the established order of things—that fetish which has ruled Pan-Americans for two centuries, and which is based upon a blind faith in the infallibility of the prescience of the long-dead framers of the articles of Pan-American federation—and ending in an adamantine determination to defend my honor and my life to the last ditch against the blind and senseless regulation which assumed the synonymity ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... possession in a rare degree of this wonderful open-air quality as a writer that constrains us in our generation to condone any offences against the mint and anise and cummin decrees of literary infallibility that Borrow may have from time to time committed. And when it is realised, in addition, what a unique knowledge he possessed of the daily life, the traditions, the folk-lore, and the dialects of the strange races of vagrants, forming such a picturesque element in the life of the road, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... he has millions, should assume that they confer omniscience in all branches of knowledge, is something which may be left to the psychologist to answer, but most of those thrown much in contact with millionaires will agree that an attitude of infallibility is typical ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... knowledge or character. Perhaps it may justly be said to be the common practice of teachers in this country, to affect dignity of deportment in the presence of their pupils, which, in other cases, is laid aside; and to pretend to superiority in knowledge, and an infallibility of judgment, which no sensible man would claim before other sensible men, but which an absurd fashion seems to require of the teacher. It can however scarcely be said to be a fashion, for the temptation is almost ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... paid no attention whatever to me, continuing to hold my grandmother's hand and look into the wise, stormy, tender, emphatic, much-enduring old face. And I wondered at my relative, and saw in this marvel one more proof of her own infallibility. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... find it so nearly perfect. Whatever opinion he had of its errors he would sacrifice to the public good, and he hoped that every member of the convention who still had objections would on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and for the sake of unanimity put his name to this instrument. Hamilton added his plea. A few members, he said, by refusing to sign, might do infinite mischief. No man's ideas could be more remote from the plan than his were known to be; but ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... Inevitable neevitebla. Inexact malgxusta. Inexhaustible nekonsumebla. Inexpedient nenecesa, nekonvena. Inexperience malsperteco. Inexplicable neklarigebla. Inexpressible neesprimebla. Inextricable nemalplektebla. Infallible neerarebla. Infallibility neerarebleco. Infallibly neerareble. Infamous malglora, malfama. Infamy malgloro, malfamo. Infancy infaneco. Infant infaneto. Infantile infana. Infantry infanterio. Infatuation delogiteco. Infect infekti. Infelicity malfelicxeco. Infer impliki. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... married. The exact proportion of teachers is not known, but it is of course large. The Wellesley College Christian Association is of great assistance to the alumnae recorder in keeping in touch with Wellesley missionaries, but even the Christian Association disclaims infallibility in questions of numbers. An article in the News for February, 1912, by Professor Kendrick, the head of the Department of Bible Study, states that no record is kept of missionaries at work in our own country, but there were then missionaries ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... reason did Edward Coke call this the greatest question which had ever been argued in Westminster. It was proved to him that he himself as judge had followed the interpretation which he now condemned. He answered that he was not pope, and made no pretensions to infallibility. He now firmly maintained that the King had ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... me say I am certain, would you? these are no times for Popery and infallibility; however, I assure you I think him perfectly safe. He has done a foolish and idle trick, but no man is wise always. We must get rid of his fever, and then if his cold remains, with any cough, he may make a little ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... one fact which stands out and dominates the whole case is this: The prisoner's connection with this case rests solely upon the police theory of the infallibility of finger-prints. Apart from the evidence of the thumb-print there is not, and there never was, the faintest breath of suspicion against him. You have heard him described as a man of unsullied honour, as a man whose character is above reproach; ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... barrier to the attainment of that parliamentary reputation for which he had already shown both a desire and a capacity; perhaps because, being young and independent, he was not over-anxious irremediably to identify his career with a school of politics of the infallibility of which his experience might have already made him a little sceptical. But he possessed the talents that were absolutely wanted, and the terms were at his own dictation. Another, and a very distinguished Mediocrity, who would not resign, was thrust out, and ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... Daniel Chester French, has the superb simplicity of all works of that master of sculptural calm, intellectual power and straightforward sincerity. Mr. French is said to make no mistakes in composition; his precision is not dryness but technical ease and infallibility; his classical quality is not obedience to tradition but insight, into the underlying laws that made tradition. Here we have a splendid example of his perfection of mass, balance and finish and of quiet, inspiring depth and directness ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... very nature, be sectional, any more than light and heat. Prevention is not abolition, and unjust laws are the only serious enemies that Law ever had. With history before us, it is no treason to question the infallibility of a court; for courts are never wiser or more venerable than the men composing them, and a decision that reverses precedent cannot arrogate to itself any immunity from reversal. Truth is the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to get trace of him. If all remained true to him:—on the chance of that Sam was staking his faith. The Honourable the Hudson's Bay Company has been established a great many years; it has always treated its Indians justly; it enjoys a tremendous prestige for infallibility. The bonds of race are strong, but the probabilities were good that in the tribes with whom Jingoss would be forced to seek sanctuary would be some members, whose loyalty to the Company would out-balance the rather shadowy obligation ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... to believe in the infallibility of the priestcraft you educate the mind of that child to implicitly believe in the officials of the Catholic Church, and when you gain the implicit confidence you have established a belief that cannot be easily eradicated, as this belief has become a part of that child, ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... on lines in which the father believes. For the latter purpose the opinion is no disqualification. The devout Catholic accepts the multiplication table, and can impart his knowledge without reference to the infallibility of the Pope. To refuse to employ him is to impose an extraneous penalty on his convictions. It is not illiberal for an editor to decline the services of a member of the opposite party as a leader writer, or even as a political reviewer or in any capacity in which ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. THEY gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... sentence accordingly. I will not say that the modern critic has abandoned altogether that conception of his duty. He seems to me not infrequently to place himself on the judgment-seat with a touch of his old confidence, and to sentence poor authors with sufficient airs of infallibility. Sometimes, indeed, the reflection that he is representing not an invariable tradition but the last new aesthetic doctrine, seems even to give additional keenness to his opinions and to suggest no doubts of his infallibility. And yet there ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... to his wife to let nothing come in the way of her returning to her place beside her husband, no matter what the difficulties? "'It is not good,' we are told, 'for a man to live alone,' and please remember that there is no such thing as infallibility in human nature. Sometimes temptations are so strong that one needs to be superhuman to withstand them. Why expect too much of Life?" stared up at Joyce from ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... which I could not cherish for the work of an old contributor; such a one stood more upon his own feet; and the young contributor may be sure that the editor's pride, self-interest, and sense of editorial infallibility will all prompt him to stand by the author whom he has introduced to the public, and whom he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... it will be found that the anniversary was commemorated, piously and merrily, by sneering and adoring multitudes For the one did not prevent the other; people caricatured the Church, her hierarchy and ceremonials, but did not doubt her infallibility; they laughed at the devil and feared him. "Priests, deacons, and sub-deacons," says the Pope, are bold enough, on those mad days, "to take part in unbecoming bacchanals, in the presence of the people, whom they ought rather to edify by preaching the Word of God."[761] ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... a preacher by the name of McIntyre, a type of the blatant Bellarmine who exiled Galileo—a man who never doubts his own infallibility, who talks like an oracle and continually tells of perdition for all ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... despite the common opinion, he never had that sense of companionship with her that he enjoyed with his father. Mrs. Rizal was a strict disciplinarian and a woman of unexceptionable character, but she arrogated to herself an infallibility which at times was trying to those about her, and she foretold bitter fates for those ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... terno worth having. My dream, coming as it did straight from the blue, must be infallibility itself, and we felt perfectly sure that the three magical numbers would bring a fortune for every one of us, and we all sent out and bought tickets with all the money ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... that. Of course, all plans will not succeed; for man's judgment is far from possessing the virtue of infallibility. But human reason would be a poor endowment, did it not lead us, in most cases, to right conclusions, if we are careful in our modes ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... a unanimous vote." There was a strong hint of approval in the President's voice. He was a good man; but he belonged to that sect which holds as one of the main articles of its faith, "I believe in the infallibility of ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... your Haeckel, your Wundt, your Weismann? Do you still believe in the infallibility of the germ-plasm? Has the fan brought you ill-luck? The fact is, Arn, ever since your return from China you've been a strange bird!" It was Effinghame's turn ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... should question his authority, his right to choose for her, and his superior knowledge of the world, was still more surprising. Her disaffection was strongly suggestive of disrespect, a lack of faith in his infallibility in which he, the Colonel, firmly believed, ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... paramount throughout the civilized world until within the last three hundred years. In the records of the College of Physicians of England we read that Dr. Geynes was cited before the college in 1559 for impugning the infallibility of Galen, and was only admitted again into the privileges of his fellowship on acknowledgment of his error, and humble recantation signed with his own hand. Kurt Sprengel has well said that "if the physicians who remained so faithfully attached to Galen's ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae |
