"Disproof" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... short cuts to health, or goodness, or wisdom. They delight to build up, out of their own inner consciousness, systems which have little contact with reality and which, through their very tenuousness, are as incapable of disproof as through their disengagement from normal experience they are capable of verification. They are the people of what the alienist calls the "idee fixe." Everything for them centers about one idea; they have one key and one only to the marvellous complexity of life. Such a temper as this naturally ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... Every proof or disproof of statements continually made with regard to the extravagant titles assumed, or complacently received, by the bishops of Rome being both interesting and important, the inquiry of J.B. (Vol. ii., ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... implication, in the first principle of the utilitarian scheme, of perfect impartiality between persons, is regarded by Mr. Herbert Spencer (in his Social Statics) as a disproof of the pretentions of utility to be a sufficient guide to right; since (he says) the principle of utility presupposes the anterior principle, that everybody has an equal right to happiness. It may be more correctly described as supposing that equal amounts of happiness are ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... Can it truly be said that most men find the wishes of their youth satisfied in later life? Ten years ago, I should have utterly denied it, and could have brought what seemed to me abundant evidence in its disproof. And as regards myself, is it not by mere happy accident that I pass my latter years in such enjoyment of all I most desired? Accident—but there is no such thing. I might just as well have called ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... attempt at a normal explanation by fraud, therefore, is of no weight. He has to exaggerate the value, as disproof, of such discrepancies as occur in all human evidence on all subjects. He has to lay stress on the interval of five weeks between the events and the collection of testimony by himself. But contemporary ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... pleader's room, Lightning of the hour, the pun, the scurrilous tale,— Old scandals buried now seven decads deep In other scandals that have lived and died, And left the living scandal that shall die— Were dead to him already; bent as he was To make disproof of scorn, and strong in hopes, And prodigal of all brain-labor he, Charier of sleep, and wine and exercise, Except when for a breathing-while at eve, Some niggard fraction of an hour, he ran Beside the river-bank: and then indeed Harder the times ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... by the Governor of the sale of arms and ammunition throughout the Cape Colony. It was feared that the Africanders might buy the goods and throw them across the border; it had been done. But information in disproof of this was forthcoming when the story reached us that a number of the Cape Dutch had risen in rebellion and needed the weapons for themselves! Kimberley's voice at once favoured the extreme penalty—death for high treason! Even moderate men, who allowed for racial sympathies, ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... nevertheless it is with the hope that observation may be directed to the facts of mesmerism, that we have written the preceding pages. In reasoning on a subject, we can use only those lights which experience has given us. The efficacy of logical disproof, somewhat contemptuously treated by Mr Townshend in the above passage, is yet fully vindicated by the latter half of the book itself, which is an endeavour, logically, to bring home mesmerism to the understanding of men of experience. It is vain to make light of logic, when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... enough to disprove the wreck story and to disprove mesmerism itself (as far as the proof of mesmerism depends on the proof of the wreck story, and no farther) with all doubters and undetermined inquirers; but with the very large class of previous believers, this disproof of a proof is a mere accident, and cannot be expected to have much logical consequence. Believing that such things may be as this revelation of a wreck, they naturally are less exacting of the stabilities ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... present time maintained two positions,—the first, that every species is, within certain defined or definable limits, fixed and incapable of modification; the second, that every species was originally produced by a distinct creative act. The second position is obviously incapable of proof or disproof, the direct operations of the Creator not being subjects of science; and it must therefore be regarded as a corollary from the first, the truth or falsehood of which is a matter of evidence. Most persons imagine that ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... washed the blood from his hands, and disarraying himself of the cast-off clothing which he had assumed for the occasion, thrust them into the fire, and watched until the whole was entirely consumed. Having thus guarded against direct evidence, he made some artful dispositions of negative disproof, that he might be provided with full armor against all suspicions; and then retiring to his homely bed with a feelingless heart, and unmurmuring conscience, he slept soon ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... a bold air had made conquests easy to him. It was an axiom of his that a girl who worked for her living by that fact proclaimed flirtation to be agreeable to her—at all events with such as he. Chance had so shaped affairs that this was the first time his theory had found disproof. He saw she was offended; so much the more tickling; conquest was ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... to ignore these facts, and to adduce in their disproof the case of some child brought up most successfully by hand, as it would be to deny that a battle-field was a place of danger because some people had been present there and had ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... particularly those of a trivial everyday kind, are so frequent in an ordinary life, that we grow used to their unaccountableness, and forget the question whether the very long odds against such juxtaposition is not almost a disproof of it being a matter of chance at all. What occurred to Elfride at this moment was a case in point. She was vividly imagining, for the twentieth time, the kiss of the morning, and putting her lips together in the position another such a one would demand, ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy |
