"Axiom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the practice of members gathering before prayer time and placing their hats on the seat they desire to retain. That is a preliminary that receives no official recognition. "No prayer, no seat," is the axiom, and unless a member be actually present in the body when the Chaplain reads prayers, he is not held to have established a claim. Thus his spiritual comfort is subtly and indispensably ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... new life-phenomenon, to keep it happy and prosperous and she cared not how plain this might become to them —she feared not to taunt and humiliate them. And they accepted her sentence meekly, they no longer tried to oppose her. Her will was become an axiom which they never disputed, which they never even discussed. No matter what might happen to them in future, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... abandoned the hope, which his intense interest in the fate of his country had inspired, that the United States might act in behalf of Hungary, he yet returned again and again to the subject. On one occasion he said; "I take it for an axiom that there exist interests common to every nation comprised within the boundaries of the same civilization. I take it equally for certain that among these common interest none is of higher importance than the principles of ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... distinguish between the ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The discipline of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... which 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
... the others, the Twentieth Century will be democratic. The greatest discovery of the Nineteenth Century was that of the reality of external things. That of the Twentieth Century will be this axiom in social geometry: "A straight line is the shortest distance between two points." If something needs doing, do it; the more plainly, ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... passion and never by reason while these moods were on him, has been held up as an authority that may be relied upon as to the doings and sayings of Napoleon and his immediate followers at the "Abode of Darkness." It is a well-known axiom that persons who speak or write anything while jealousy or temper holds them in its grip may not be counted as reliable people to follow, and that is exactly what happened in Gourgaud's case. He was the Peter of the band ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... 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 present ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... relation to some purpose not necessarily our own; that between two human beings no association has final dignity in which each does not take the other as an end in himself. There is a taint on any contact between two people which does not affirm as an axiom the personal inviolability ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... of. For it cannot be otherwise than useful to us to know the means which have been used, and the different persons who have moved in so great a cause. It cannot be otherwise than useful to us to be impressively reminded of the simple axiom which the perusal of this history will particularly suggest to us, that "the greatest works must have a beginning;" because the fostering of such an idea in our minds cannot but encourage us to undertake the removal of evils, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... growth, and moral development, nor to the establishment of normal self-control, especially as regards sexual habits and manifestations. The Committee cannot ignore the fact that the leading medical and psychological authorities lay it down as an axiom that the power of self-control is at its highest when the individual is physically active, well-nourished, and in perfect bodily health, and that impaired control always accompanies impaired nutrition, debility, and disease. It has been said, with profound wisdom and insight, ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... diversifying our industry, and practising those lordly virtues that conquer success, and turn the world's dread laugh into admiring recognition? The white race has yet work to do in making practical the political axiom of equal rights, and the Christian idea of human brotherhood; but while I lift mine eyes to the future I would not ungratefully ignore the past. One hundred years ago and Africa was the privileged hunting-ground ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... 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, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... she had her work to return to, she had reckoned without her henchman Jenkins, a new broom that was sweeping very clean indeed. It is an axiom that while it requires creative genius to start an enterprise, once the momentum is gained any mediocre intelligence may keep it going. Kate learned ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... disposes of all the problems that were connected with such pseudo-propositions. All the problems that Russell's 'axiom of infinity' brings with it can be solved at this point. What the axiom of infinity is intended to say would express itself in language through the existence of infinitely many ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... right, boy. It is a plague which has paralyzed man's sense of time. You have become involved by not remembering Kant's axiom that time is purely subjective. It exists in the mind only. It and space are the only ideas inherently in our brains. They allow us to conduct ourselves among a vast collection of things-in-themselves ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... read, and heard read, that passage of Scripture which says, "Let your communication be Yea, yea, Nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." Just then he felt the truth of the inspired axiom. It seemed just as though any amount of violent protestations would not help him; and though the squire repeated the charge half a dozen times, he only replied with his firm ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... this "the great axiom" of philosophy. That we may distinctly comprehend its meaning, and understand its bearing on the subject under discussion, we must ascertain the sense in which he uses the words "phenomenal" and "relative." The importance of an exact terminology is fully appreciated by our ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... accepted axiom that a public man cannot afford to be modest in these go-ahead days of "boom." Yet Fetherston was one of the most retiring of men. English society had tried in vain to allure him—he courted no personal popularity. Beyond his quiet-spoken literary agent, who arranged his ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... such knowledge of his profession as qualifies him to instruct others. A Doctor of Laws is a man who can form lawyers by his precepts. A Doctor of Medicine is a man who can teach the art of curing diseases. There is an old axiom which no man has yet thought fit to deny, Nil dat quod non habet. Upon this principle to be Doctor implies skill, for nemo docet quod non didicit. In England, whoever practises physick, not being a Doctor, must practise by a licence: but ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... a genius sometimes takes his fits of abstraction for stupidity, and having the man's interests at heart she endeavors to arouse him from his lethargy by chiding him. Occasionally he arouses enough to chide back; and so it has become an axiom that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... by mentioning two examples among others which he brings to explain the better what he means by his first philosophy. The first is this axiom, "If to unequals you add equals, all will be unequal." This, he says, is an axiom of justice as well as of mathematics; and he asks whether there is not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion. But I would ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... has a right 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 ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... between them. It is no doubt perfectly true, in a certain sense, that all difference of function is a result of difference of structure; or, in other words, of difference in the combination of the primary molecular forces of living substance; and, starting from this undeniable axiom, objectors occasionally, and with much seeming plausibility, argue that the vast intellectual chasm between the Ape and Man implies a corresponding structural chasm in the organs of the intellectual ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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, to loosen.] that Lord Colambre ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... fallability, broadening of conclusions, mellowed by hope for the future that seemed typical of a life career. Like the horse in "Sheridan's Ride," their beginning "was gay, with Sheridan fifty miles away;" but if they were helpful with a truth-axiom or a moiety of inspiration—as a view of colonial conduct of a nation, with which we were then and are now growing ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... complication of its consequences, only half understood, can prove its falsity; and even when all is revealed, the opposite principle is acted upon, self is contradicted, and justification sought, in the incomparably absurd modern axiom, that in political economy there is no principle ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... something more than superstition in the old axiom that the third time is charm, perhaps three efforts are required for the training of the human will; but however that may be, at the third striking together of the metal and the flint the Sunrise Council ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... society—or a rising family whose name is up at some club? They'll jump when they hear the sound of the word. The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way. We've made a world where that's necessary. Let me tell you"—Amory became emphatic—"if there were ten men insured against either ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the true art, we should have said, subsists in the indication and the repression, far rather than in the actual exhibition or manifestation of the emotions that are to be represented. Better by far than the familiar si vis me flere axiom of Horace, who there tells us, "If you would have me weep, you must first weep yourself," is the sagacious comment on it in the Tatler, where (No. 68) the essayist remarks, with subtle discrimination: "The true art seems to be when ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... community had a right to do as it pleased. The governor early saw, not only the fallacies, but the danger of this doctrine; and he wrote several communications himself, in order to prove that it was false. If true, he contended it was true altogether; and that it must be taken, if taken as an axiom at all, with its largest consequences. Now, if a majority has a right to rule, in this arbitrary manner, it has a right to set its dogmas above the commandments, and to legalize theft, murder, adultery, and all the ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... Peru, at Caracas as in the island of Cuba, a bare-footed fellow with a white skin, is often heard to exclaim: "Does that rich man think himself whiter than I am?" The population which Europe pours into America being very considerable, it may easily be supposed, that the axiom, 'every white man is noble' (todo blanco es caballero), must singularly wound the pretensions of many ancient and illustrious European families. But it may be further observed, that the truth of this axiom has long since been ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... cannot be answered by those who believe in the appearance or creation of only a few forms of life, or of some one form alone. It has been maintained by several authors that it is as easy to believe in the creation of a million beings as of one; but Maupertuis's philosophical axiom "of least action" leads the mind more willingly to admit the smaller number; and certainly we ought not to believe that innumerable beings within each great class have been created with plain, but deceptive, marks of ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... The mechanical axiom that "what is gained in movement is lost in stability" applies to joints, those which have the widest range of movement ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... object the administration of human affairs. The masters of science explore a multitude of phenomena to ascertain a single cause; the statesman and legislator, engaged in pursuits "hardliest reduced to axiom," examine a multitude of causes to explain a solitary phenomenon. The investigations, however, to which such questions lead, are singularly difficult, as they require an accurate analysis of the most complicated class of facts which can possibly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... accomplishment of the ends of its creation, which is equal to saying, it is God's moral government. But how is this system to be brought into existence? And how is it to be perpetuated? In answering these questions let us remember the law of analogy, based upon the simple axiom that God is a God of order. In the use of the analogy about to be instituted we simply pass through the outer court of the temple of God in order to behold the beauties of the inner. Then, as the world of matter existed as ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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
... exchanged for what the province wanted from other countries. The attention of the mercantile part was chiefly employed about staple commodities; and as their great object was present profit it was natural for them to be governed by that great axiom in trade, whoever brings commodities cheapest and in the best order to market, must always meet with the greatest encouragement and success. The planters, on the other hand, attended to the balance of ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... axiom! ... yet almost a platitude, for did not every one occupy themselves exclusively with the Now, regardless of future consequences? Of course! Who but sages—or fools—would stop to question ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... centuries ago, that no woman was happy until she got herself a home. It really makes no difference who first uttered this truth, the truth itself is and always has been recognized as one possessing nearly all the virtues of an axiom. ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... peace with God. Give my love to padre."' Those are the kind of things that make a man thank God for having volunteered to do one's 'bit' in that particular line of life in which he has been placed. No work is grander than a chaplain's; but I must lay it down as a general axiom, that no man should undertake this particular kind of work unless he knows that he is charged with ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... continued Madame, "in the name of that poor little Naiad, who is indeed the most charming creature I ever met. Moreover, she laughed so heartily while she was telling me her story, that, in pursuance of that medical axiom that laughter is the finest physic in the world, I ask permission to laugh a little myself when I recollect ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... be no doubt as to the truth of the axiom that "facts are stubborn things." Right or wrong, they seem to persist in a resolution to force conviction upon a man however reluctant he ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... for some 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 ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... as an axiom in the government of states that the greatest wrongs inflicted upon a people are caused by unjust and arbitrary legislation, or by the unrelenting decrees of despotic rulers, and that the timely revocation of injurious and oppressive measures ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... 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 in a perfect balance of harmonious relations. The leaves burgeon on the branches ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... is the devil's own mess. We cannot possibly publish all the facts without breaking off relations with several Powers. We shall have to do the best we can, and take the consequences, which will be pretty serious, I do not doubt. 'Give and take'—the axiom of diplomacy to the rest of the world—is positively forbidden to us, by both the Senate and public opinion. We must take what we can and give nothing—which ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... the immensity of space and irradiates worlds as it irradiates cities and as it irradiates ant-hills. To fancy that each vibration in ourselves is the echo of another vibration. To fancy a sole principle, a primordial axiom, to think the universe envelops us as a mother clasps her child in her two arms; and say to one's self, "I belong to it and it to me; it would cease to be without me. I should not exist without it." To see, in short, only the divine unity of laws, which could ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... about distances. I was so eager to get hold of every pretty thing that I giddily grabbed for it, sometimes when it was too far off, and sometimes when it was but six inches away but seemed a foot—alas, with thorns between! I learned a lesson; also I made an axiom, all out of my own head —my very first one; THE SCRATCHED EXPERIMENT SHUNS THE THORN. I think it is a very good one ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the tank happen to be invented?" is a common question. The answer is that in past wars experience has made it an axiom that the defenders suffer more casualties than the attacking forces. From the first days of 1914, however, this condition was reversed, and whole waves of attacking troops were mown down by two or three machine ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... that you forget not that you are a man; that you are sensible that the king was made for the people, not the people for the king. From the rights of nations and of man, and from that social compact whence states arose, it is incontestable that the sovereignty originates from the people. This axiom, our parent Nature has impressed on the hearts of all. It is one of those which a just prince (and such we trust your majesty ever will be) can not dispute. It is one of those inalienable imprescriptible rights which the people can ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... a mighty bag of gold to enrich his county town. To enrich, and be thereby the richer; for Roger's actions of finance were so simple, as to run the risk of being called sublimely indistinct: he took it as an axiom that "money bred money," but in what way to draw forth its generative properties, whether or not by some new-fangled manure, he was entirely ignorant; and it clearly was his wisdom to leave all that mystery of money-making ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of Truth communicated to the world, then it surely is absurd to attend to any other evidence touching matters about which he made any clear statement, or the truth of which is distinctly implied by his words. If the exact historical truth of the Gospels is an axiom of Christianity, it is as just and right for a Christian to say, Let us "close our ears against suggestions" of scientific critics, as it is for the man of science to refuse to waste his time upon ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of the ignorance and credulity of the Romans is their constant axiom, Chi lo sa? (Who knows?) I said to Maria the other day, after she had said it for the fourth time in a quarter of an hour: "My good Maria! The beginning of wisdom is not to fear God, but to say Perche? (why?), instead of ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... merciful provision of nature similar to that by which a sow always takes most kindly to the weakest pig in the litter. Lord Chesterfield, when paternally admonishing his son as to the proper management of women, lays down as a general indisputable axiom that they are all, as a matter of course, to be flattered to the top of their bent; but he adds, as a special rule, that a very pretty or a very ugly woman should be flattered, not about her personal charms, but about her mental powers. It is only in ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... borrowing must end in an inability to pay is a self-evident axiom. It is not a matter that admits of dispute; but to fix the point where the inability will commence is a problem to resolve of a very difficult nature; it is indeed a problem, the re- solution sic of which depends upon some circumstances that cannot be ascertained. ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... Morwenstow, 'the cruel and covetous natives of the strand, the wreckers of the seas and rocks for flotsam and jetsam,' held as an axiom and an injunction to be ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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
... Majesty to bestow an annual bribe upon Lord Burleigh Angle with their dissimulation as with a hook Luther's axiom, that thoughts are toll-free Only kept alive by milk, which he drank from a woman's breast Scepticism, which delights in reversing the judgment of centuries So much responsibility and so little power Sometimes successful, even although founded upon ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... all misery comes to the human race mainly from two causes; firstly, through misconduct: and secondly, through misfortune: therefore; since there is the self-evident truth, in the axiom, that, when the cause is diagnosed, the remedy is near at hand, let us work unitedly to remove the cause of all misery, be it in the Greek people, or Jewish, or Gentiles, and by the light of the Gospel's truth, let us put forth ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... show of discontent. "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 intolerable of ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... be well or would it be wrong to disturb that tranquil acquiescence in a humble destiny? He could not decide. He dared not take upon himself so much responsibility. "In doubt do nothing" has been the axiom of many wise men. The remembrance of the maxim closed his lips. He had himself been in early manhood passionately ambitious; he was only a priest, but of priests are made the Gregorio, the Bonifazio, the Leone of the Papal throne; to the dreams of a seminarist nothing is impossible. But Adone ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... is wisdom to observe not so much the person that speaks as that which he says, because the teacher's faults are always in evidence. But when we consider precepts of God and true obedience, this axiom should be reversed. Then we should observe not so much that which is said, but the person of him who speaks. In respect to divine precepts, if you observe that which is said and not him who speaks, you will easily stumble. This is illustrated by the example of Eve, whose mind did not ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... whatever is received by the earth from the sun, an equivalent for the same must again be returned from the earth to the sun, to the uttermost fraction.[2] Such being the conditions, how may this retro-acting process that all analogy and the profoundest scientific axiom prove to be in constant operation—how, I ask, may this retro-acting process be explained? What equivalent may the earth give back as compensation for such enormous benefits, for such stupendous powers? The laws of conservation may not be violated: ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... meddling with the habits and instincts of the poor. But among the fragments of advice also occurs the following suggestive and even alluring remark: "Every man over forty is a scoundrel." On the first personal opportunity I asked the author of this remarkable axiom what it meant. I gathered that what it really meant was something like this: that every man over forty had been all the essential use that he was likely to be, and was therefore in a manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect that Bernard Shaw has sufficiently answered ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... axiom of this part. For, when man is given, there is something else - say A - more powerful; when A is given, there is something else - say B - more powerful than A, and so on to infinity; thus the power of man is limited ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... That if one gets drunk sometimes, one shall do it often. I deny the consequence, and say in the words of the philosopher, an axiom held by ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... differ from the uncultured, but they differ equally from one another. He cites the evidence of Greek music to show how widely the cultured of one nation and epoch may differ from the cultured of other nations and epochs. Having laid it down as an axiom that our aesthetic judgments are "for the most part immediate, and, so to speak, intuitive," and observing that the fastidious differ among themselves, and that their delight in fine objects is no more intense than the delight of the vulgar in coarser themes, he proceeds to the ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... months he had seen so little of her, had so altered his constant habit of going to the Milburns', that his family talked of it, wondering among themselves; and Stella indulged in hopeful speculations. They did not wonder or speculate at the Milburns'. It was an axiom there that it is ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... mission of love and mercy, being established on an immovable foundation, we have a sure point of departure from which to proceed in our inquiries respecting inspiration. It becomes at once a self-evident proposition—the great axiom of Christianity, we may call it—that the teaching of Jesus Christ, when he was on earth, was truth unmixed with error. This he himself asserted in the most explicit terms: "The Father loveth the Son, and showeth him all things that himself doeth." John 5:20. "I am the ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the series of conditions in the world of sense, considered as a thing in itself. The actual regress in the series is the only means of approaching this maximum. This principle of pure reason, therefore, may still be considered as valid—not as an axiom enabling us to cogitate totality in the object as actual, but as a problem for the understanding, which requires it to institute and to continue, in conformity with the idea of totality in the mind, the regress in the series of the conditions of a given conditioned. For in the world of sense, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... This theory, which was nearly 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 ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... for the jungle all the same." "Casting pearls before swine" by "What is the use of the peacock strutting in the jungle?" "Can these stones become bread?" by "Can the earth become grain?" "Neither can salt water yield sweet," by a very elaborate axiom, "You may plant the bitter cucumber in a bed of sago, manure it with honey, water it with molasses, and train it over sugar cane, but it will be the bitter cucumber still," and "Clear water cannot be drawn from ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... poor man he had not before. But a shilling was given this poor man; therefore he had not a shilling before: where both propositions are true, yet the conclusion is false (saith he), contrary to the axiom, Ex veris nil nisi verum." You are extremely out, Sir: your syllogism of the poor man is fallacia ab amphibolia. The major of it is ambiguous, dubious, and fallacious, and cannot be admitted without a distinction. But ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... 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 require to be demonstrated its such:—and thus to point out too particularly the merits of a work of Art, is to admit that they are not ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... Indiana regiment, was in, command: sent out a big gun; boys went on a big hill; found the enemy were eight or ten thousand strong; big gun ordered back, and as we only had two thousand men, remembered the axiom about "discretion being the better part of valor;" obeyed the aforesaid axiom. Still, recollect, it kept raining in torrents; dripping down Quarter-master Shoemaker's pants into his boots; running over Colonel Anderson's back. Major Christopher looked dry, in order to get a drink: but that ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... especial uses, and are only to be resorted to on especial occasions. Still, the worthy master, who had begun life on the forecastle, without any previous knowledge of usages, and who had imbibed the notion that "manners make the man," taken in the narrow sense of the axiom, was a devotee of what he fancied to be good breeding, and one of his especial duties, as he imagined, in order to put his passengers at their ease, was to introduce them to each other; a proceeding which, it is hardly necessary to say, had ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... may be accepted as an axiom that originality has shunned the town churchyards, and the absence of curious varieties of the gravestone among the well-sown acres of Bunhill Fields and such-like places of the period at which they were by comparison so abundant in less considered localities ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... were beyond the reach of experience, as occurrences connected with the spiritual world; or 3d. When it deals in the marvelous, and is couched in symbolical language."[39] So also a host of others, who pass for biblical expositors, lay it down as an axiom, that all records of supernatural events are mythical, viz: fables, falsehoods, because miracles are impossible. Of course, from such premises the conclusion is easy. A revelation from God to man is a supernatural ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... "Pleiades" could furnish as it were "the sweet influences of rain and sunshine," to foster his native talent; yet, breath being denied them, its improvement is more than his friend Cowper could have accounted for, without violating his poetical axiom, that ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... note that the very variety and irregularity that attracts us so much in these buildings does not meet with universal approval in the French schools. In the 'Grammaire des Arts du Dessin,' M. Charles Blanc lays down as an axiom, that "sublimity in architecture belongs to three essential conditions—simplicity of surface, straightness, and continuity of line." Nevertheless we find many modern French houses built in the style of the 13th and 14th century; especially ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... 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 something external to themselves, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... some other point. I am not in a position to deny the possibility of that, but I am equally unable to affirm that it is so. There is no evidence which would lead me to think it. It only seems to me necessary to affirm it, in order to confirm the axiom that God is omnipotent and all-loving. Much in nature and in human life would seem to ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this important affair at dinner, or supper, will do no good at any other time." Boswell affirms that he never knew a man who dispatched a dinner better than the great moralist. But what avails it to defend cooks and gourmands? It is an axiom in political economy, according to Malthus, that he who makes two blades of grass grow, where before there was but one, ought to be considered as the benefactor of his country, and of mankind. Is not this a service which the epicure and the cook every day do their country? Addison ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... about seventy.[49] The colossi of Abu Simbel, without being of quite such formidable proportions, face the river in imposing array. To say that the decline of Egyptian art began with Rameses II. is a commonplace of contemporary criticism; yet nothing is less true than an axiom of this kind. Many statues and bas-reliefs executed during his reign are no doubt inconceivably rude and ugly; but these are chiefly found in provincial towns where the schools were indifferent, and where the artists had no fine examples before them. At ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... trite axiom with the respect due one who has met and grappled successfully with his one great chance. His well-fed appearance, his genial, contented smile, gave an impression of prosperity even when his linen was frayed and his elbows glossy; now in the latest achievement ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... he simply tells us that he has not felt music. The ancients on this point were wiser than some moderns when, without pretending to assign an intellectual significance to music, they held it for an axiom that one type of music bred one type of character, another type another. A change in the music of a state, wrote Plato, will be followed by changes in its constitution. It is of the utmost importance, said Aristotle, to provide in education for the use of the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... worthy, with whom I occasionally held discourse, philosophic and profound, when he and I chanced to be alone together in the office, say that all first-rate thieves were sober, and of well-regulated morals, their bodily passions being kept in abeyance by their love of gain; but this axiom could scarcely hold good with respect to these women—however thievish they might be, they did care for something besides gain: they cared for their husbands. If they did thieve, they merely thieved for their husbands; and though, perhaps, some of them were vain, they merely ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... only. The promise needs the eye of Faith to interpret the facts of experience, and to let nothing darken the clear vision that if any seeming need is left by God unfilled, it is not an indispensable need. If we do not get what we want we may be quite sure that we do not need it. The axiom of Christian faith is that whatever we do not obtain we do not require. Very desirable things may still not be necessary. Let us limit our notions of necessity by the facts of God's giving, and then we, too, shall have learned, in whatsoever state we are, therein to be content. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... for the simple reason that we have no written constitution; but this responsibility flows as a logical necessity from the dignity of the crown and of the sovereign. 'The King can do no wrong,' says the legal axiom, and hence it follows that somebody must be responsible for his measures, if these be contrary to law or injurious to the country's welfare. Ministers here are not responsible qua ministers, that ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... January, 1756, the Pompadour Conclave has been sitting,—difficulties, no doubt, considerable. I will give only the dates, having myself no interest in such a Committee at Babiole; but the dates sufficiently betoken that there were intricacies, conflicts between the new and the old. Hitherto the axiom always was, "Prussia the Adjunct and Satellite of France:" now to be ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... to be any such things? Ought we to accustom ourselves to having books by our bedside? Ought not 'early to bed and early to rise' to be the motto of every well-conducted person, and is not reading in bed calculated to render the carrying out of that axiom virtually impossible? This is the problem we have first to solve, and it may be said at once that this discourse does not apply virginibus puerisque. Girls and boys, young men and young women, are hereby solemnly exhorted to ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... are essential in the Arab-Israeli dispute because it is an axiom that when the political process breaks down there will ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... preserving its good proportion. The hard chin becomes rounded and not too prominent, the cheek-bones sink, the ears are smaller, a softness spreads itself over the whole face. That which was only honest now grows tender. Again another generation, and it is a settled axiom that the family are handsome. The country-side, as it gossips, agrees that the family are marked out as good-looking. Like seeks like, as we know; the handsome intermarry with the handsome. Still, the beauty has not arrived yet, nor ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... 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 ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... Bores are more frequently clever than dull, and the only all-round definition of a bore is—The Person We Don't Want. Few people are bores at all times and places, and indeed one might venture on the charitable axiom: that when people bore us we are pretty sure to be boring them at the same time. The bore, to attempt a further definition, is simply a fellow human being out of his element. It is said by travellers ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... impressed with possible dishonesty as to doubt mankind generally. I had to fight to overcome that tendency. It is a much happier condition of mind to be freer of suspicion. "No thing is stronger than it is in its weakest point" is an axiom. Almost every person has a weak point, which a detective seeks ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... boys in popular fiction rise to affluence by the practice of the commercial virtues. To be self-made, the axiom tacitly runs, is to be well-made. Time was in the United States when the true hero had to start his career, unaided, from some lonely farm, from some widow's cottage, or from some city slum; and although, with the growth of luxury in the nation, readers have come to ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... a want of circumspection on the part of Stephen Dale that he should welcome a stranger, and a soldier, too, as a guest at his family meal. But it was his favorite axiom that a sergeant might not be looked down upon "like as if he was a common Tom, Dick, or Harry in the ranks"; so that his hospitality was to be expected in the present instance. Had either anxious parent had the slightest fear of the attractive sergeant's pleasing ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... In the Natural Order two and two never make four; to do so, four exactly similar units must be had, and you know how impossible it is to find two leaves alike on the same tree, or two trees alike of the same species. This axiom of your numeration, false in visible nature, is equally false in the invisible universe of your abstractions, where the same variance takes place in your ideas, which are the things of the visible world extended by means ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... furnishes "kings and parliaments, fleets and armies," with a good deal of occupation beyond the support of the twelve judges; and, though the proposition that the State has no business to meddle with anything but the administration of justice, seems sometimes to be regarded as an axiom, it can hardly be said to be intuitively certain, inasmuch as a great many people absolutely repudiate it; while, as yet, the attempt to give it the authority of a revelation has not ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... it. That machine was a wonder. I could weep now as I recollect my wrestlings with it. It must have been a first model in the year one of the typewriter era. Its alphabet was all capitals. It was informed with an evil spirit. It obeyed no known laws of physics, and overthrew the hoary axiom that like things performed to like things produce like results. I'll swear that machine never did the same thing in the same way twice. Again and again it demonstrated that unlike actions produce ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... of your exertions. Be not too much annoyed at being an immortal poet and composer; there is nothing worse in this world to which one should apply the following modified version of Leibnitz's well-known axiom: Tout est pour le mieux, dans un ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... case with children, example and precept are of far greater use than corporeal punishment, although this cannot be neglected altogether. The axiom that we evolve in accordance with the treatment meted out to us is as true in the case of an animal as it is with that of a human being, and the more this is recognized and laid to heart the shorter will be the martyrdom still inflicted ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... 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 the winners of the last ten years to breed on Dartmoor or in Shetland; what would be the betting about a colt or a filly so bred for the Derby ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... and pointed out that in any case his acquaintance with Cuba was altogether too recent to have enabled him to form even the most elementary opinion on the question, at the same time mentioning as a general axiom that Englishmen were usually regarded as cherishing a weakness in favour of good government and the maintenance of ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... distinctly to his mind that he could have no occasion to hold it in doubt." In this absolute isolation of his mind, without past and without future, Descartes, first of all assured of his own personal existence by that famous axiom, "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am), drew from it, as a necessary consequence, the fact of the separate existence of soul and of body; passing oft by a sort of internal revelation which he called innate ideas, he came to the pinnacle of his edifice, concluding for the existence of a ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... he has found it necessary to throw away "pure reason" and to assume an inherent "irrationality" in the system of things. Why then, when it comes to this particular axiom of irrational common-sense, does ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... believe, a generally received axiom that all mortal affairs must sooner or later come to an end; at all events, the dinner I have been describing did not form an exception to the rule. In due time Mrs. Mildman disappeared, after which Dr. Mildman addressed a remark ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... Declaration of Independence could not be good democrats and at the same time uphold and defend the institution of slavery, for the Declaration gives the lie to all such assumptions of human inequality by accepting the cardinal axiom that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of equality had been developed in Europe without special reference to questions of distinct race or color. But the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... not playing the Prince yourself by sympathizing with Jack's unfeigned pride in his part and his finery, and if Jack has a heart under his velvet doublet, he will not forget your generosity. It may also be laid down as an axiom that a good actor will take a pride in making the most of a small part. There are many plays in which small parts have been raised to the rank of principal ones by the spirit put into them by a good actor, who "made" his part instead of grumbling ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing |
