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More "Axiom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Physiology of Common Life" (George Henry Lewes) discussed Liebig's brilliant error in considering food chemically, and not physiologically. The rest assume his classification without reserve, and work from the axiom that heat-making, carbonaceous and non-nitrogenous foods (e.g. fat and sugars), necessary to support life in the arctic and polar regions, must be exchanged for the tissue-making, plastic or nitrogenous (vegetables), as we approach the equator. They are right as far as the southern ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... election. Moreover, other States followed California's example. Woman suffrage soon dominated the West, and began its progress eastward. The shrewd Lincoln said that no government could continue to exist half slave and half free; and the axiom is equally true of a divided suffrage. There can be little question that woman suffrage will ultimately be adopted throughout the Eastern States, not because of force, but through the ever-increasing pressure ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... 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 ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... truth. What is true of relation—of form and quantity—is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom fails. In the consideration of motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... conclude this head 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 ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... Constantinople, from Constantinople to Venice, from Venice to Spain, from Spain to England—while no trace is left of Memphis, of Tyre, of Carthage, of Rome, of Venice, or Madrid. The soul of those great bodies has fled. Not one of them has preserved itself from destruction, nor formulated this axiom: When the effect produced ceases to be in a ratio to ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... criminals, the answer was, that it is not the law which is merciful to the earthly offender but the magistrate. The law is an eternal principle. The magistrate may forgive a man without exacting satisfaction. The law knows no forgiveness. It can be as little changed as an axiom of mathematics. Repentance cannot undo the past. Let a man leave his sins and live as purely as an angel all the rest of his life, his old faults remain in the account against him, and his state is as bad as ever it was. ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... of the 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 ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... be like a mirror of gold without alloy, bright and lustrous for ever. For Lucian, it was no defect in the woman that she was desirous and faithless; he had not conceived an affection for certain moral or intellectual accidents, but for the very woman. Guided by the self-evident axiom that humanity is to be judged by literature, and not literature by humanity, he detected the analogy between Lycidas and Annie. Only the dullard would object to the nauseous cant of the one, or to the ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... "wanted no crowning indignity but this! You had already proved that the body is made of the basest element— earth. You had argued away the immovability, the ubiquity, the permanency, the eternity, and the divinity of the soul, for is not your favourite axiom, ' It is the nature of limbs which thinketh in man'? The immortal mind is, according to you, an ignoble viscus; the god-like gift of reason is the instinct of a dog somewhat highly developed. Still you left us something ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... to government in general, would be admitted as an axiom; and it would be incumbent on those who might refuse to acknowledge its influence in American affairs to prove a distinction; and to show that a rule which, in the general system of things, is essential to the preservation of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... more than a very pretty comparison, which was suitable for a fable, but which could by no means serve as the foundation for science. He, as frequently happens, mistook his pet hypothesis for an axiom, and imagined that his whole theory was erected on the very firmest of foundations. According to his theory, it seemed that since humanity is an organism, the knowledge of what man is, and of what should be his relations to the world, was possible only through a knowledge ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... to the maximum in 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 ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... 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 Etonian, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... set for the most distant of land views, beach scenes and boats in the middle distance off-shore. You will learn by costly overexposures that water views require much less light than landscapes. Photographers have an axiom that "water is as bright as the sky itself." So at "64," which is proper exposure for the most distant of land panoramas, you begin to ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... his high brow with his slender hand. "By subtle drinking I mean the drinking of choice wine, and did you ever taste anything more delicate than this juice of the vines of Anthylla that your illustrious brother has set before us? Your paradoxical axiom commends you at once as a powerful thinker and as the benevolent giver of the best ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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, ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... we rightly assert that a form of imaginative life is clearly pathologic? In my opinion, the answer must be sought in the nature and degree of belief accompanying the labor of creating. It is an axiom unchallenged by anyone—whether idealist or realist of any shade of belief—that nothing has existence for us save through the consciousness we have of it; but for realism—and experimental psychology is of necessity realistic—there are ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... of mischief. Besides fanning the smouldering sparks of discontent, they served up catchwords wholesale for that section of the British public whose political machinery is largely fed by catchwords. But, as has been decided by axiom, "any stick will serve to beat a dog with," and the Transvaal difficulty was a convenient weapon for the attack on the Government. The real feeling of the Boer community was an outside matter, and, as we shall presently see, had nothing to do with the case, ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... 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 ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... trouble receives settlement in the office of a lawyer, when a receipt and full release of past and future claims is taken by the legal gentleman, who thus secures his client immunity from further demands. It is a well-accepted axiom that under like circumstances the same cause produces the same effect. And so the causes which lead to black-mailing in this city are precisely similar to the influences operating in Paris or London to produce the same ignoble crime. ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... the life of his master. At his death he might become the chattel of any human brute with a white epidermis and money enough to buy him; might be separated from wife, children, companions and past associations. Suggesting the practical wisdom involved in the biblical axiom that sufficient for the day is the evil thereof, I turned the conversation and presently dismissed him. I experienced some little difficulty in accomplishing the latter, for he was both zealous and familiar in my service: indeed, this is one of the nuisances appertaining to the institution; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... on the old geometric axiom that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. I mean that a volleyer must always cover the straight passing shot since it is the shortest shot with which to pass him, and he must volley straight to his opening and not waste time trying freakish curving ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... to our incorrigible pride. Law courts, codes of civil contract and criminal procedure, the systems of subordination in armies and navies, castes and classes, men and women, employers and employees, teachers and pupils, parents and children, are based upon the fundamental, the conservative axiom that man, especially the common plain man (Lincoln's phrase), is a being incurably lazy, stupid, dishonest, muddled, cowardly, greedy, restless, obsessed with a low cunning and a selfish callousness ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... It is natural For a Horse when frightened at anything in Front of him, To jump Backwards, and when frightened at anything Back of him, To jump Forwards. (Applause, in recognition of the accuracy and observation of this axiom.) Now I will show you my method Of correcting this Tendency by means Of my double Safety Rope and driving Rein, without Cruelty. Always Be Humane, Never causing any Pain if you Possibly can Help it. Fetch ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various
... 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 of disciples at St. Helena, and it may ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... animal organism can also generate heat outside of itself. A blacksmith, for example, by hammering can heat a nail, and a savage by friction can warm wood to its point of ignition. Now, unless we give up the physiological axiom that the living body cannot create heat out of nothing, 'we are driven,' says Mayer, 'to the conclusion that it is the total heat generated within and without that is to be regarded as the true calorific effect of the matter oxidised in ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... circumstances. Sooner or later they need new great principles. Then they obliterate the old ones. The old jingle of words no longer wins a response. The doctrine is dead. In 1776 it seemed to every Whig in America that it was a pure axiom to say that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. They clung to this as a sacred dogma for over a hundred years, because it did not affect unfavorably any interest. It is untrue. Governments get their powers ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... though perfectly inexperienced, her confidence in her theoretical knowledge of human nature was unbounded. She had an idea that she could penetrate the characters of individuals at a first meeting; and the consequence of this fatal axiom was, that she was always the slave of first impressions, and constantly the victim of prejudice. She was ever thinking individuals better or worse than they really were, and she believed it to be out of the power of anyone to deceive her. Constant attendance ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... of action, culminating in the Dred Scott decision, has been in the direction of Centralization. During all these changes, it has contrived to have the Constitution always on its side by the simple application of Swift's axiom, "Orthodoxy is my doxy, Heterodoxy is thy doxy," though it has had as many doxies as Cowley. Sometimes it has even had two at once, as in refusing to the iron of Pennsylvania the protection it gave to the sugar of Louisiana. Pennsylvania avenged herself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... 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 descent from a ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... above court favor, Descartes (1596-1650) elaborated his system of philosophy, in creating a new method of philosophizing. The leading peculiarity of his system was the attempt to deduce all moral and religious truth from self- consciousness. I think, therefore I am, was the famous axiom on which the whole was built. From this he inferred the existence of two distinct natures in man, the mental and the physical, and the existence of certain ideas which he called innate in the mind, and serving to connect it with the spiritual ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 'Capital! An axiom worth putting into print, for the benefit of all and sundry. Now I must say goodbye; that fellow yonder will take me back to the domesticities.' He hailed an empty carriage. 'We shall meet again among the mountains. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Scotland our annals and his tyrannies declare), they sell their birthright and become unworthy the name of men? In that deed they abjure the gift with which God had intrusted them; and justly, the angels of his host depart from them. You know the sacred axiom, Virtue is better than life! By that we are commanded to preserve the one at the expense of the other; and we are ready to obey. Neither the threats nor the blandishments of Edward have power to shake the resolves of those who draw the sword of ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... Fox, afterwards bishop of Hereford, said to Henry VIII., The surest way to peace is a constant preparation for war. The Romans had the axiom, Si vis pacem, para bellum. It was said of Edgar, surnamed "the Peaceful," king of England, that he preserved peace in those turbulent times "by being always prepared for ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... things in Germany are national which elsewhere are universal. And in Germany Socialism is becoming national, as German political economy is national, as German science is national, as German religion is national. Therefore the political axiom that German Socialists would necessarily come to an understanding with their French and English brethren has been falsified by the event. German Socialists have, no doubt, shown their pacific intentions; they have issued pacific manifestoes and organized ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... That is to say, that the law of his time already admitted that in certain circumstances the State could take what belonged to one and give it to another, without there being any fault on the part of the previous owner to justify its forfeiture; and he defends this proceeding on the axiom just cited (ibid., pp. 182-3), namely, its necessity "for the peaceful intercourse of ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... those other two great classes—the Impressionistic and the Biographical—are peculiar in this amongst other things: they alone extract light from refuse and deal profitably with bad art. I am not going back on my axiom—the proper end of criticism is appreciation: but I must observe that one means of stimulating a taste for what is most excellent is an elaborate dissection of what is not. I remember walking with an eminent contributor to The New Republic and a lady who ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... compounds are composed of familiar elements—chiefly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen; but these elements were supposed to be united in ways that could not be imitated in the domain of the non-living. It was regarded almost as an axiom of chemistry that no organic compound whatever could be put together from its elements—synthesized—in the laboratory. To effect the synthesis of even the simplest organic compound, it was thought that the "vital force" must be ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... by which the modern community has succeeded in asserting itself against the individual, in protecting the weak from his weakness, the poor from his poverty, in defending the woman and child from the fierce claims of capital, in forcing upon trade after trade the axiom that no man may lawfully build his wealth upon the exhaustion and degradation of his fellow—these things stirred in him the far deeper enthusiasms of the moral nature. Nay more! Together with all the ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... passion, forms the groundwork of the drama. Now, admitting the axiom of Rochefoucauld, that there is but one love, though a thousand different copies, yet the true sentiment itself has as many different aspects as the human soul of which it forms a part. It is not only modified by the individual character and temperament, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... responsibility, 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 is, qua officials (as such they are responsible to the crown), but they are responsible ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... achievement—the Doers of the Word. Dr. Howe found his way to Laura Bridgman's soul because he began with the belief that he could reach it. English jurists had said that the deaf-blind were idiots in the eyes of the law. Behold what the optimist does. He controverts a hard legal axiom; he looks behind the dull impassive clay and sees a human soul in bondage, and quietly, resolutely sets about its deliverance. His efforts are victorious. He creates intelligence out of idiocy and proves to the law that the deaf-blind ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... corporal of Arcis had taken. As they drove along, the agent was on the look-out for signs to show why the corporal had been unhorsed. He blamed himself for having sent but one man on so important an errand, and he drew from this mistake an axiom for the police Code, which ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... of a certain sort of German metaphysic; but I perceive that you have now become a convert to it. The final arcanum of that, I think, is, Something Nothing. You give this abstraction a concrete form; your axiom is, No Hire Hire for Life. To deny that laborers have any property in their own toil, and to allow them their poor peck of maize and pound of bacon per week, not at all as a wage for their work, but solely as a means of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... 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 from distant lands that fishes will not live out of water. It is a no less familiar fact that certain ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... syllogistic principles I call that a [Greek: thxsis] which you cannot demonstrate, and which is unnecessary with a view to learning something else. That which is necessary in order to learn something else is an Axiom. ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... being so unfortunate as to make some awkward leaps at the commencement, and showing some concern at his failure, whenever his turn came, he was sure to be greeted with laughter and applause. The audience had elected him clown, nem. con.—thus proving the truth of the axiom, ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... it necessary to consult him. This class of men influence less than they ought. Sensible persons are apt to set them down, as either fools or pedants. Their very magniloquence condemns them; for, in the present day, it seems an axiom, that simplicity and genius ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... 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
... become of the fine arts if all men delighted in dirt, dust, dullness, and desks? Depend upon it, John, that our tastes and tendencies are not the result of accident; they were given to us for a purpose. I hold it as an axiom that when a man or a boy has a strong and decided bias or partiality for any particular work that he knows something about, he has really a certain amount of capacity for that work beyond the average of men, and is led thereto by a higher power ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... of mankind on this matter vary in different countries, making morality an affair of latitude, and what is right and proper in one place wrong and improper in another. It must, however, be understood that, since all civilised nations appear to accept it as an axiom that ceremony is the touchstone of morality, there is, even according to our canons, nothing immoral about this Amahagger custom, seeing that the interchange of the embrace answers to our ceremony of marriage, which, as we know, justifies ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... parliament where he begged for supply, and where he should naturally have used every art to ingratiate himself with that assembly, he expressed himself in these terms: "I conclude, then, the point touching the power of kings, with this axiom of divinity, that, as to dispute what God may do, is blasphemy; but what God wills, that divines may lawfully and do ordinarily dispute and discuss. So is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do in the height ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... displays his great talents? Do you think that none of the gentlemen below the gangway do not believe that in their mute and inglorious breasts, there are no streams of eloquence more copious and resistless? No, my friend, take this as an axiom of political careers, that you hold your life as long as you are able to kill anybody who tries to kill you, and not one ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... advances principles which, at first sight, seem to be quite true; for instance: "Public School Education is necessary for our republican form of government, for the very life of the Republic." "It is an admitted axiom, that our form of government, more than all others, depends on the intelligence of the people." "The framers of our Constitution firmly believed that a republic form of government could not endure without intelligence and education generally ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... a man of discretion, and my forbearance was in consideration of my friends, whose bodies might perchance gave got scarred by the blows aimed at my foes. Being a friend and fellow fortune seeker, I need have no scruple in saying to you, that I have always held it an axiom, that all great men husband their valor well, and never use it except with great discretion. In truth, and as I hope to honor the profession to which I belong, it was the exercise of that worthy discretion God implanted ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... Improvements there were, but they were slow, small in ultimate extent, and in no sense revolutionary. Ships and guns, masts and sails, grew better, as did also administrative processes; it may indeed be asserted, as an axiom of professional experience, that as the military tone of the sea-officers rises, the effect will be transmitted to those civil functions upon which efficiency for war antecedently depends. Still, substantially, the weapons of war were in principle, and ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... 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 ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... in us," announced Mrs. Bowers, with the manner of one who delivers an axiom, "not a little bit. St. Marys happens to be the town near the works, and we happen to be the people ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... observed the Colonel, "the Republic of Plato you would have been saved your initial mistake; for it was an axiom among the Greeks that in all things women are inferior, and never to be trusted in large affairs. The great Plato pointed out, and it has never been controverted, that women are given to concealment and spite; and ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... In fact, severity is seldom necessary in a well conducted education. The smallest possible degree of pain, which can, in any case, produce the required effect, is indisputably the just measure of the punishment which ought to be inflicted in any given case. This simple axiom will lead us to a number of truths, which immediately depend upon, or result from it. We must attend to every circumstance which can diminish the quantity of pain, without lessening the efficacy of punishment. Now it has been found from experience, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... the very life of the colonies had, by 1700, become an almost unquestioned axiom in British practical economics. The colonists themselves declared slaves "the strength and sinews of this western world,"[12] and the lack of them "the grand obstruction"[13] here, as the settlements "cannot subsist without supplies of them."[14] Thus, with merchants clamoring at home and planters ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... application of this principle, and tries to prove geometrically the dogmas defined in the Creed. This bold attempt is entirely factitious and verbal, and it is only his employment of various terms not generally used in such a connexion (axiom, theorem, corollary, etc.) that gives his treatise its apparent originality. Alain de Lille has often been confounded with other persons named Alain, in particular with Alain, archbishop of Auxerre, Alan, abbot of Tewkesbury, Alain de Podio, etc. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in England, nor acknowledged by the law; therefore the man James Somerset must be discharged. By securing this judgment Granville Sharp effectually abolished the Slave Trade until then carried on openly in the streets of Liverpool and London. But he also firmly established the glorious axiom, that as soon as any slave sets his foot on English ground, that moment he becomes free; and there can be no doubt that this great decision of Lord Mansfield was mainly owing to Mr. Sharp's firm, resolute, and intrepid prosecution of the cause from ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... visitor with a taste for natural history became obtrusive and sought close investigation. It was part of Nickie's duty to fill such visitors with a proper respect for Missing Links, but ninety-nine out of every hundred accepted Mahdi in good faith. It is an axiom in the show business that the people who can't be deceived are so few that they are not ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... soul was not hers, as her soul was not his. That impression, received in a crisis which, she felt, was to be the crisis of her life, had grown to be an axiom. His youth, his vigor, the pull of a stalwart vitality which made his coarseness almost beauty—that had been the attraction. His spirit, so blazing but so full of flaws—that had been ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... likely," replied Mr. Dinks, with the polite air of a man assenting to an axiom in a science of which, unfortunately, he has ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... I 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 or two about Greek tragedy to the tall pupil, which led to a 8dissertation ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... presence of her menstrual functions. This is the very reverse of the truth. "They claim," remarks Engelmann, "that woman in her natural state is the physical equal of man, and constantly point to the primitive woman, the female of savage peoples, as an example of this supposed axiom. Do they know how well this same savage is aware of the weakness of woman and her susceptibility at certain periods of her life? And with what care he protects her from harm at these periods? I believe not. The importance of surrounding ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... would say in her most lofty manner. "Shut up, you kids. A fellow can't hear himself speak for your row!" Gurth would call out fiercely. Even when Mrs Saxon was present she would shake her head gently across the table, to enforce the oft-repeated axiom that in so large a family the younger members must perforce learn to be quiet at table. Maud beamed with pleasure at being allowed to continue her never-ending descriptions without a word of remonstrance. She was a fair, pretty, somewhat stupid child, gifted with an overflow of words, which ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... supervened would depend on the security of his hold on the local Liberal organisation; and that would depend on his personal ability as a politician and—very largely—on his unscrupulousness. For it may, I think, be stated as an axiom that no man can long retain his hold as "boss" of the machine in a large city except by questionable methods,—methods which sometimes involve dishonesty. He must—no matter whether he likes it or not—use his patronage and his power to advance ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... '"It was an axiom with Menabrea, with Nigra, with Corti, that Italy and England herself could do nothing in the Mediterranean without France, still less do anything against France. The last conversation of Corti with Crispi shows plainly his conviction that a real ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... mistake when Orthodoxy or Rationalism reverses the axiom of John, and instead of saying, "Life is the light of man," tells us that "Light is the life of man." Knowledge comes from life. Belief comes from knowledge, and not ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... obsessions of the evil one, who contrived in this manner to give scandal to the faithful, and selected the most godly for his evil purpose. This ingenious defence of the field-chaplain was the saving of my back, for my father, who was a believer in Solomon's axiom, had a stout ash stick and a strong arm for whatever seemed to him to be a falling away ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to generate steam, then, only two steps are required: 1st, procure the heat, and 2nd, transfer it to the water. Now, you have it laid down as an axiom that when a body has been transferred or transformed from one place or state into another, the same work has been done and the same energy expended, whatever may have been the intermediate steps or conditions, or whatever the apparatus. Therefore, when a given quantity of water at a given ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... seen through the dormer windows of their garrets, and through utopian spectacles. In minds like these, empty or led astray, the Contrat-Social could not fail to become a gospel; for it reduces political science to a strict application of an elementary axiom which relieves them of all study, and hands society over to the caprice of the people, or, in other words, delivers it into their own hands.—Hence they demolish all that remains of social institutions, and push ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... which have been described in a former chapter. The Recess Committee, in their enquiries, found that, in the countries whose competition Ireland feels most keenly, Departments of Agriculture had come to recognise it as an axiom of their policy that without organisation for economic purposes amongst the agricultural classes, State aid to agriculture must be largely ineffectual, and even mischievous. Such Departments devote a considerable ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... axiom of Solon "KNOW THYSELF" (Nosce teipsum), applied by the ancient sage as a corrective for our own pride and vanity, Hobbes contracts into a narrow principle, when, in his introduction to "The Leviathan," he would ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... you are 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
... you cross the threshold of married life depends your future happiness. It is not a small matter to lay the first stone of an edifice. A husband's first kiss"—I felt a thrill run down my back—"a husband's first kiss is like the fundamental axiom that serves as a basis for a whole volume. Be prudent, Captain. She is there beyond that wall, the fair young bride, who is awaiting you; her ear on the alert, her neck outstretched, she is listening to each of your movements. At every creak of ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... ride into office, or to promote, in some other way, selfish and concealed ends. All such attempts, though they may seem to "run well" for a time, and may result in temporary success, may be safely left to the counteraction of right opinions. For it has always remained an axiom of truth, verified by every day's experience, "That he that diggeth a pit for his neighbor shall himself fall ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... function of the Vindemiatio has been already pointed out; with regard to axioms, he says (N. O. i. 106), "In establishing axioms by this kind of induction, we must also examine and try whether the axiom so established be framed to the measure of these particulars, from which it is derived, or whether it be larger or wider. And if it be larger and wider, we must observe whether, by indicating to us new particulars, it confirm that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... by these trifles when I am contemplating such a desperate deed?" thought he, and he gave a strange smile. "Ah, well, man holds the remedy in his own hands, and lets everything go its own way, simply through cowardice—that is an axiom. I should like to know what people fear most:—whatever is contrary to their usual habits, I imagine. But I am talking too much. I talk and so I do nothing, though I might just as well say, I do nothing and so I talk. I have acquired this habit of chattering during the last month, while I have ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... get warm when I talk of the delicious sex: for though now and then I thrash my wife before company, who shall imagine how cosy we are when we're alone? Do you not remember that great axiom of Sir Robert's—an axiom that should make Machiavelli howl with envy—that "the battle of the Constitution is to fought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... his bloody suggestion with dogged inflexibility, maintaining only one axiom above all the rest—that whatever minor parts might be enacted—Casca, Cassius, or what not—he was to be the dramatic Brutus, excepting that assassin's negativeness. In other words, the idea was to be his own, as well us ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... of the "Presse Theatrale", which is kindly sent to me, I remain au courant 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)
... principle of gradation throughout organic Nature,—a principle which answers in a general way to the law of continuity in the inorganic world, or rather is so analogous to it that both may fairly be expressed by the Leibnitzian axiom, Natura non agit saltatim. As an axiom or philosophical principle, used to test modal laws or hypotheses, this in strictness belongs only to physics. In the investigation of Nature at large, at least in the organic world, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... size that which is most remote from the eye will look the smallest. [Footnote: This axiom, sufficiently clear in itself, is in the original illustrated by a very large diagram, constructed like that here ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... of the least action is not simply a mechanical, but it is a universal axiom. The Divine Being does all things with the least possible expenditure of force; and all hearts and all minds honor men in proportion as they approach to this divine economy. As gracefulness in motion consists in moving with the least waste of muscular power, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... thinks of one of them, at any rate; for if the mutual verdict of the top of an empire and the bottom of it does not establish for good and all the judgment of the entire nation concerning that book, then the axiom that we can get a sure estimate of a thing by arriving at a general average of all the opinions involved, is ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... administration. If it lead not to despotism by sudden violence, it prepares men for it more gently by their habits. All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it. This is the first axiom ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... President that it was not desirable to rob Saint Peter's altar in order to build one to Saint Paul. It might have been simpler to suggest that the consumer would pay the tax, supposing it were ever paid at all, but the axiom was not so familiar three centuries ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... charitable persons—and no more than a recognition of a great constitutional axiom—to assume, in the absence of proof to the contrary, that every British subject is an honest man. Now, if we had gone to Lord Castlemallard for his character—and who more competent to give him one—we know very well what we should have heard about Dangerfield; ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... universe and man. And here is the paradox. This quartet of genius suffered from and were slain by consumption. (Stevenson died directly of brain congestion; he was, however, a victim to lung trouble.) That the poets turn their sorrow into song is an axiom. Yet these men met death, or what is worse, met life, with defiance or impassible fronts. And the world which loves the lilting rhythms of Chopin's mazourkas seldom cares to peep behind the screen of notes for the anguish ambushed there. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... 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
... in the area of consciousness," Ernst Mallin was saying. "You all know, of course, the axiom that only one-tenth, never more than one-eighth, of our mental activity occurs above the level of consciousness. Now let us imagine a hypothetical race whose ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... class do not keep money long, and when the proceeds of the robbery had been wasted at cards and in drink they separated. As in fulfilment of the axiom that a murderer is sure to revisit the scene of his crime, one of the men found himself at the Ocmulgee, a long time afterward, in sight of the new town—Macon. In response to his halloo a skiff shot forth from the opposite shore, and as it approached the bank ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... had it been possible, that man should have had a divine book-revelation to tell him that a divine book-revelation was impossible. Great as is my admiration of Mr. Newman, I should, myself, have preferred having God's word for it. However, let us lay it down as an axiom that a human book-revelation, showing you that 'a divine book-revelation is impossible,' is not impossible; and really, considering the almost universal error of man on this subject,—now happily exploded,—the ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... of Christianity, slavery was an established institution in all countries.[478] Some pagan philosophers, like Seneca, maintained that all men are by nature free and equal, still by the law of nations slavery was upheld in all lands; and it was an axiom among the ruling classes, that "the human race exists for the sake of the few." Aristotle held that no perfect household could exist without slaves and freemen and that the natural law, as well as the law of nations, makes a distinction between bond and free.[479] ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... of fashion. The world begins to ask, vaguely at first, but with a constantly increasing persistence, how the thing is done. Respectability and malice combine to whisper a truthful answer. Starting from the axiom that the precarious income which is produced by a want of success in many branches of business cannot support luxury or purchase diamonds, they arrive, per saltum, at the conclusion that there must be some third party to provide the wife and the husband with means for their existence. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... Odo's outlook since his visit to Pontesordo was cleared away by the discovery that in a sympathetic study of the past might lie the secret of dealing with present evils. His imagination, taking the intervening obstacles at a bound, arrived at once at the general axiom to which such inductions pointed; and if he afterward learned that human development follows no such direct line of advance, but must painfully stumble across the wastes of error, prejudice and ignorance, while the theoriser traverses the same distance ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... received your letter on the 26th February, and am much obliged to you for all the trouble you have taken about the arias, which are quite accurate in every respect. "Next to God comes papa" was my axiom when a child, and I still think the same. You are right when you say that "knowledge is power"; besides, except your trouble and fatigue, you will have no cause for regret, as Madlle. Weber certainly deserves your kindness. ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... this process. It must not be allowed to weigh against the validity of a word once fairly naturalized by use, that originally it crept in upon an abuse or a corruption. Prescription is as strong a ground of legitimation in a case of this nature as it is in law. And the old axiom is applicable—Fieri non debuit, factum valet. Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much of their wealth. And, universally, the class of purists, in matters of language, are liable to grievous suspicion, as almost constantly proceeding on half knowledge and on insufficient ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... distinguished botanist, and Professor Haeckel, maintain that our experience, as well as the range of our microscopes, is too limited to justify the current axiom. They believe that life may be evolving constantly from inorganic matter. Professor J. A. Thomson also warns us that our experience is very limited, and, for all we know, protoplasm may be forming naturally in our own time. Mr. Butler Burke has, under the action of radium, caused the birth ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... civilizations that had died out,—mostly mere stones to Eaton, whose mind was too preoccupied by his wild enterprise to speculate much on what others had done there before him. Want of water, scarcity of provisions, the lazy dilatoriness of the Arabs, who had never heard of the American axiom, "Time is money," gave him enough to think of. But worse than these were the daily outbreaks of the ill-feeling which always exists between Mussulman and Christian. The Arabs would not believe that Christians could be true friends to Mussulmans. They were not satisfied ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... "slinging," "squaring," and "cockbilling" her yards; for "making" and "shortening" sail; "heaving out" her boats and "handling" her cargo, were of course all of the crude and simple patterns and construction of the time, usually so well illustrating the ancient axiom in physics, that "what is lost [spent] in ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... at once such a child as Margaret Fuller was, or would have done even as wisely as he? And how long is it since a wiser era has dawned upon the world (its light not yet fully welcomed), in which attention first to physical development to the exclusion of the mental, is an axiom in education! Was it so deemed forty years ago? Nor has it been considered that so gifted a child would naturally, as she did, seek the companionship of those older than herself, and not of children who had little in unison with her. She needed, doubtless, to ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... form and quantity, is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry, also, the axiom fails. In the consideration of motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value, when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... only the product of the evil days when "judgment had fled to brutish beasts, and men had lost their reason." Possibly at no time or place in our history has there been more emphatic verification of the axiom, "In the midst of arms, the laws ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... if the same rule be applied to us, my readers; if every man is mentally a screw, in whose intellectual and moral development a sharp eye can detect something not right in the play of the machinery or the formation of it; then I fancy that we may safely lay it down as an axiom, that there is not upon the face of the earth a perfectly sane man. A sane mind means a healthy mind; that is, a mind that is exactly what it ought to be. Where shall we discover such a one? My reader, you have not got it. I have not got it. Nobody has got it. No doubt, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... reason bring; But a diviner fury, fierce and high, Valour transported into ecstasy, Which angels, looking on us from above, Use to convey into the souls they love. You now that boast the spirit, and its sway, Shew us his second, and we'll give the day: We know your politic axiom, lurk, or fly; Ye cannot conquer, 'cause you dare not die: And though you thank God that you lost none there, 'Cause they were such who lived not when they were; Yet your great general (who doth rise and fall, As his successes do, whom you dare call, As fame unto you doth reports dispense, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... gulf 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 functions; so that, it is said, the non-discovery of such vast differences proves, not that they ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... was not till many years afterwards that I read in his well-remembered effigy the allegory of civilization which lets the man-made suffering of men come to the worst before it touches it, and acts upon the axiom that a pound of prevention is worth less than an ounce ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... not to fly, my little chevalier," replied the captain; "it is an axiom of the art which I advise you to consider; besides, I am not sorry to study your play. Ah! you are a pupil of Berthelot, apparently; he is a good master, but he has one great fault: it is not teaching to parry. Stay, look at this," continued he, replying by a thrust in "seconde" to a ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... there's hope," came Frank's brave reply in his favorite axiom. "We'll live to fly the old Golden Eagle ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... you would have others do unto you." This simple and fundamental axiom Jefferson Ryder had adopted early in life, and it had become his religion—the only one, in fact, that he had. He was never pious like his father, a fact much regretted by his mother, who could see nothing but eternal damnation in store ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... amongst his opinions anything but what presented itself so clearly and 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 ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... philosophy of the complex vision assumes as its only axiom the concrete reality of the "soul" within us which is so difficult to touch or handle or describe and yet which we feel to be so much more real than our physical body, justifies us in making an experiment which ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... 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, ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... islanders. It is but due to your merit that you should be appointed to the command of it; and further to testify my infinite esteem for your character, and my complete confidence in your abilities, I make you post-captain on the spot. As the axiom of your school seems to be that everything can be made perfect at once, without time, without experience, without practice, and without preparation, I have no doubt, with the aid of a treatise or two, You will make a consummate naval ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 trade, which was turned in their favour, and concluded, that when ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... alternative or choice, to tread, not what our great poet calls the "primrose path" to the everlasting bonfire, but one of jaded flints and stones, laid down by brutal ignorance, and held together, like the solid rocks, by years of this most wicked axiom. ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... 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 international law." Nor did he hesitate ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... then recur, Will our surplus labor be then more beneficially employed, in the culture of the earth, or in the fabrications of art? We have time yet for consideration, before that question will press upon us; and the axiom to be applied will depend on the circumstances which shall then exist. For in so complicated a science as political economy, no one axiom can be laid down as wise and expedient for all times and circumstances. Inattention to this is what has called for this explanation, which reflection would ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... interested in us," announced Mrs. Bowers, with the manner of one who delivers an axiom, "not a little bit. St. Marys happens to be the town near the works, and we happen to be the ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... condition which alone met the problem, and which the successful steam-engine must possess. He abandoned all else for the time as superfluous, since this was the key of the position. This is the law he then laid down as an axiom—which is repeated in his specification for his first patent in 1769: "To make a perfect steam engine it was necessary that the cylinder should be always as hot as the steam which entered it, and that the steam should ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... cried, looking at the slovenly, dirt-streaked wrapper and the shabby golf-cape that had slipped from her shoulders to the cot. She regarded me with pity for my ignorance, and then delivered herself of an axiom. ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... "you would think in such a general thing as marriage there would be. Complications like this must constantly arise. What if Miss Deborah and Miss Ruth had another sister? Just see how confused a man might be. Yes, one would suppose the wisdom of experience would take the form of an axiom. But ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... laid in the third sphere, the pleasant heaven of Venus. The other, which on the whole appears to me preferable, and which I have therefore chosen for translation, begins and ends with the sound axiom that water and wine ought never to be mixed. It is manifest that the poet reserves the honour of the day for wine, though his arguments are fair to both sides. The final point, which breaks the case of water down and determines her utter confusion, is curious, since it shows that people ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... crowd, which had gathered on the station to watch the departure of a prince, thereupon broke into loud outbursts of laughter, and when I said to them, 'I suppose you are glad that this happened to me?' they replied, 'Yes, it was very funny.' On this incident I based my axiom that you can please the German public by your misfortunes if by nothing else. As there was no other train to Leipzig for five hours I telegraphed to my brother-in-law, Hermann Brockhaus (whom I had asked to put me up), telling him of my delay, and allowed ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke; it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months. Before that time, if to think is to live be a true axiom, I did not live, I could only lay claim to a state of vegetation. The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... necessary to consult him. This class of men influence less than they ought. Sensible persons are apt to set them down, as either fools or pedants. Their very magniloquence condemns them; for, in the present day, it seems an axiom, that simplicity and ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... from his high brow with his slender hand. "By subtle drinking I mean the drinking of choice wine, and did you ever taste anything more delicate than this juice of the vines of Anthylla that your illustrious brother has set before us? Your paradoxical axiom commends you at once as a powerful thinker and as the benevolent giver of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... don't. I've no doubt a great many women begin that way," said his lordship, who, be it averred, did not in the least believe in the axiom he thus beguiled his anxiety by uttering. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... frank, loyal, and open-hearted,—in a word, possessed of all the qualities attributed to the canine race. I in no wise deny the merits of Medor, Turk, Miraut, and other engaging animals, and I am prepared to acknowledge the truth of the axiom formulated by Charlet,—"The best thing about man is his dog." I have been the owner of several, and I still own some. Should any of those who seek to discredit me come to my house, they would be met by a Havana lap-dog barking ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... threatened them. This work of rescue was the fulfilment of an ideal. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of it! The senior partner of Hatch & Buckley had been quick to note this condition of mind and to reap the profits that came therefrom. Monomania means money, was a business axiom in that gentleman's office, but he had pumped the stream dry and Von Barwig was now at the end of his resources. By some strange process of thought, Von Barwig recognised this fact, but it seemed to him ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... on the side of the English, and then what would become of America? We ought not to deceive ourselves. The maritime resources of Great Britain are more substantial and real than those of France and Spain united. Her commerce is more extensive than that of both her rivals; and it is an axiom, that the nation which has the most extensive commerce will always have the most powerful marine. Were this argument less convincing, the fact speaks for itself: her progress in the course of the last year is ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... experts as an axiom that trained troops armed with the present breech-loading and rapid-firing arm cannot be successfully assailed by any troops who simply assault. Of course you can make the regular approaches and dig up to them. The fallacy of that proposition was made very manifest that day ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... suggestion with dogged inflexibility, maintaining only one axiom above all the rest—that whatever minor parts might be enacted—Casca, Cassius, or what not—he was to be the dramatic Brutus, excepting that assassin's negativeness. In other words, the idea was to be his own, as well us ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... first place, the moral ideal is something more than a mere idea not yet realized. It is more even than a true idea; for no mere knowledge, however true, has such intimate relation to the self-consciousness of man as his moral ideal. A mathematical axiom, and the statement of a physical law, express what is true; but they do not occupy the same place in our mind as a moral principle. Such a principle is an ideal, as well as an idea. It is an idea which has causative potency in it. It supplies motives, it is an incentive ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... representatives. Industry and frugality are the only entailed estate bequeathed from father to son. Yet this State alone manufactures to the value of 86,282,616 of dollars in the year. As a general axiom it may fairly be asserted, that the more sterile the soil, the more virtuous, industrious, and frugal are the inhabitants; and it may be added, that such a country sends out more clever and intelligent men than one that ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... else, how absurd the philosophical utilitarians are with their axiom that everyone pursueshis own happiness. He exposes over and over again, with nerve-rending subtlety, how intoxicating to the human spirit is the mad lust of self-immolation, of self-destruction. It is really from him that Nietzsche learnt that ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... expressing your opinion, you should consider what your opinion is worth." But this shaft would have glanced harmlessly from off the panoply of the stupid and self-complacent old lady of whom I am thinking. It was a fundamental axiom with her that her opinion was entirely infallible. Some people would feel as though the very world were crumbling away under their feet, if they realized the fact that they could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... an axiom of theology that the spirit of Peter lives in his successors. It will live in them, more or less hidden, until the longed-for expansion of the Holy Ghost. Then John, who has been held in reserve, as the Gospel says, will begin his ministry ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... said that 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
... the individual, but rather as actual obsessions of the evil one, who contrived in this manner to give scandal to the faithful, and selected the most godly for his evil purpose. This ingenious defence of the field-chaplain was the saving of my back, for my father, who was a believer in Solomon's axiom, had a stout ash stick and a strong arm for whatever seemed to him to be a falling away from the ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... nobility of promise have learned the important truth, ably enforced by Thomas Carlyle, that work is not only man's appointed lot, but his highest blessing and safeguard. The rising members of various noble families have laid this axiom to heart; and, when not engaged in public business, have come grandly forward to protect the unhappy, to provide for the young, to solace the old. The name of Shaftesbury carries with it gratitude and comfort in its sound; whilst that of him who figured of old in the cabal, the Shaftesbury of Charles ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... presents, as historical, accounts of events which 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 event, and supernatural events are impossible; therefore, a revelation ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... demand." And the organizations built up during the war, if they prove efficient, will not be abolished. Hours of labour and wages in the co-operative League of Nations will gradually be equalized, and tariffs will become things of the past. "The axiom will be established," says Mr. Webb, "that the resources of every country must, be held for the benefit not only of its own people but of the world . . . . The world shortage will, for years to come, make import duties look both oppressive ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... position which an enemy would be glad to manoeuvre a year—or a long time—to get me in. I was going into the enemy's country, with a large river behind me, and the enemy holding points strongly fortified above and below. He said that it was an axiom in war that when any great body of troops moved against an enemy they should do so from a base of supplies which they would guard as the apple of the eye, etc. He pointed out all the difficulties that might be encountered in ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... monarchy and the authority of princes. Even in a speech to the parliament where he begged for supply, and where he should naturally have used every art to ingratiate himself with that assembly, he expressed himself in these terms: "I conclude, then, the point touching the power of kings, with this axiom of divinity, that, as to dispute what God may do, is blasphemy; but what God wills, that divines may lawfully and do ordinarily dispute and discuss. So is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power. But just kings will ever be willing to declare ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... conducive to a high standard of nutrition, 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, ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... nonsense. No crime or misdemeanor specifiable on either side; unhappy together, these good many years past, and they at length end it.—Sulzer said, "Men are by nature good." "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer, Er kennt nicht diese verdammte Race," ejaculated Fritz, at hearing such an axiom. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the New Testament writings, as we now have them, are not by any means accurate records of the events which they profess to chronicle. This, which few English Churchmen would be prepared to admit, was to him so much of an axiom that he despaired of seeing any sound theological structure raised until it was ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... all classification is in 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 ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... its 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... FOR SARK, in pursuance of his favourite axiom that there is nothing new under the sun, calls attention to two conversations in which he discovers singularly close parallel in tone and temper. The first will be found in official report of Parliamentary debate. It ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... happy one must cultivate his garden," murmured H., quoting Voltaire as we made off down the road. And within a day or two we again had an excellent proof of this axiom when we discovered that Abbe L. still resided in his little home whose garden extended far into the shadow ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... years it had been a received axiom in palaeontology that reptiles had never existed before the Permian or Magnesian Limestone period, when at length in 1844 this supposed barrier was thrown down, and Carboniferous reptiles, terrestrial and aquatic, of several genera were brought to light; and discussions are now going on as to whether ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... By illustrations from other spheres, let us make clear what is meant by such dynamical elements of Christianity. The doctrine of the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection was put before the world by Darwin in 1859, and within the half century has been accepted almost as an axiom by the whole civilised world. Undoubtedly that doctrine has proved itself dynamical. On the other hand, a few years earlier than the publication of The Origin of Species, another body of new doctrine was propounded to Britain and the world, and strongly ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... 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
... learned Jesuit teachers long before Yale was founded, has recently been paved with concrete, transformed into a tennis court, and now echoes to the shouts of students to whom Dr. Giesecke, the successful president, is teaching the truth of the ancient axiom, "Mens ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... Judaism in France has become proverbial. The original French Jews never amounted to much; and the Alsatian immigrants, while still supplying rabbis for the pulpits, have of late begun to disappear from the pews. You may state it is an axiom that the synagogue will have to go a-begging for a quorum wherever church-going is unpopular. But French Judaism has recently been gaining reinforcement by the influx of newcomers from Eastern Europe. Paris might be considered ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... and rearing the oaks which are to compose its beams and stanchions. You take over all such supplies ready hewn, and choose by preference time- seasoned timber. Since Homer's prime a host of other great creative writers have recognised this axiom when they too began to build: and "originality" has by ordinary been, like chess and democracy, a ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... and, consequently, refused any longer to render obeisance to absurdities. 'Shun evil, and you will evolve good.' That is what the friar said to me as a parting word—though long before our encounter had I grasped the meaning of the axiom. And that axiom I myself have since passed on to other folk, as I hope to do yet ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... anything you could find, and generally had to make it yourself. That first night I was "in" I discovered, after a humid hour or so, that our battalion wouldn't fit into the spaces left by the last one, and as regards dug-outs, the truth of that mathematical axiom, "Two's into one, won't go," suddenly dawned on me with painful clearness. I was faced with making a dug-out, and it was raining, of course. (Note.—Whenever I don't state the climatic conditions, read "raining.") After sloshing about in several primitive ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... work was still being done carefully. It had become an axiom of a British sailor that a German was not to be trusted—that when he appeared the least dangerous, it was time to watch him more carefully. Consequently, in spite of the impending armistice, the vigilance of the ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake
... well-known philosophical axiom, that "action is equal to reaction, and in a contrary direction." The American Negro is now meeting the reaction consequent upon his violent action in the direction of civilization and culture; but, this reaction is only temporary, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... that man creates artistic products out of nothing. What is called creation is in reality a composition, a construction raised upon a primitive material of the mind, which must be collected from the environment by means of the senses. This is the general principle summed up in the ancient axiom: Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensa (There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in the senses). We are unable to "imagine" things which do not actually present themselves to our senses; ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... intimately acquainted with his bent of mind; and if there ever was a school-boy despised and detested by his fellows, William was that youth. "The boy's the father of the man," and those who have known him only in his ripened years, if they apply the truth of this axiom, will have no difficulty in correctly conjecturing what must have been his early youth. Even then his predominant weakness was to almost daily, and by the hour, expatiate upon the merits of his great "grandfather," and to entertain boys, ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... observer involves more or less of hypothesis;'—yet both by the observer himself and by most of those who listen to him, each of these conjectural assumptions is treated as respectfully as if it were an established axiom. We are supposed to deny the possibility of a circumstance, when in truth we only deny the evidence alleged for it. We allow the excellence of reasoning from certain data to captivate our belief in the truth of the data themselves, even when they ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... pleasure without variety," this same mighty Bossuet had written in 1670, and his young friend had taken the axiom to heart. We find him pursuing almost beyond the bounds of good taste the search for variety of manner. He has strange sudden turns of thought, startling addresses, inversions which we should blame as violent, if they were not so ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... come to put an end to Dick Turpin methods. Socialism is a rational criticism of our present methods of production and distribution. It desires to say to the possessors: Show us by what title you possess; and it proposes to pass its judgments upon the axiom that whoever renders service to society should be able to have some appropriate share in the national wealth."[297] In other words, an inquisitorial tribunal with arbitrary powers would be empowered to ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... modern dressing? and are not men still the great artists in costume? Madame la baronne prepares herself in one of the little saloons. First of all come the skirts and the young ladies who preside over the fabrication of the dessous, or underclothing, for it is an axiom in modern French dress-making that half the success of the toilet depends on the underclothing, or, as the French put it in their neat way, "Le dessous est pour la moitie dans la reussite du dessus." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... nearing fever-point. "There is no question about it. All my investigations led to the same certainty. And my conviction gradually became so positive that I ended, one day, by drawing up this startling axiom: in theory and in fact, the robbery can only have been committed with the assistance of an accomplice staying in the house. Whereas there was ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... earlier than nine in the morning, or later than noon. She had a horror of the early breakfast, when the family, cold, but clean, gathers itself around the board which only last night was festive and strives valiantly to be pleasant. It was almost an axiom with her that human, friendly conversation was not possible before nine ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... grown man when he's trying for a secret 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 wealth or starvation, and offered a green ribbon for ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... assumed 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 is the greatest good that can be conferred upon ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... general it 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 ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... specific or definite information as to the amount of the company's indebtedness this action of the directors was a most magnificent exemplification of nerve and integrity and a superb testimony reinforcing the axiom that a California man's word is as ...
— The Spirit of 1906 • George W. Brooks
... papers are one and all in bad odour because they declined to believe in the Emperor's victories, and if a Daily News comes in here with an account of some new French reverse, I shall probably be imprisoned. Government and people have laid down this axiom, "bad news false news." General Trochu again appears in print in a long circular letter to the commandants of the corps d'armee and the forts. He desires them each to send him in a list of forty men who have distinguished ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... 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. ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... numbered with the base inferior passions, in the frigid and hardy composition of the warrior of the north. It was the offspring of reasoning and observation, not of instinctive sentiment and momentary impulse. In the wild, poetical code of the old Gothic superstition was one axiom, closely and strangely approximating to an important theory in the Christian scheme—the watchfulness of an omnipotent Creator over a finite creature. Every action of the body, every impulse of the mind, was the immediate result, in the system of worship ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... are never pardoned. And yet no offences are more frequently committed than these. And it seems still more remarkable, when we consider, in addition to this, that in consequence of the experiments, made in other countries, it seems to be approaching fast to an axiom, that crimes are less frequent, in proportion as mercy takes place of severity, or as there are judicious substitutes for the ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... a twinkle in his eyes. "Now," he observed, "you've hit the reason the first time. When you've done it once, you'll do it again. You have to. Perhaps it's Nature's protest against your axiom that man's chief business is dollar-making. Still, I'm admitting that this is a blamed curious place for Nasmyth to figure on killing a wapiti in. Say, are you going to sleep ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... one, exclaims over his lack of moral sense, and winds up by bidding the crazy Prince leave the cemetery. Quand on finit par folie, c'est qu'on a commence par le cabotinage. (Which is a consoling axiom for an actor.) Hamlet with his naive ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... presented itself so clearly and 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 ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... entered into her young mind that it was her mission to teach older people the way to heaven; but if there was trouble in the village—a sick child, a husband in prison for rabbit snaring, a dead baby, a little boy's pinafore set fire—Vixen and her pony were always to the fore; and it was an axiom in the village that, where Miss Tempest did "take," it was very good for those she took to. Violet never withdrew her hand' when she had put it to the plough. If she made a promise, she always kept it. However long the sickness, however dire the poverty, Vixen's patience and ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... allowed to weigh against the validity of a word once fairly naturalized by use, that originally it crept in upon an abuse or a corruption. Prescription is as strong a ground of legitimation in a case of this nature as it is in law. And the old axiom is applicable—Fieri non debuit, factum valet. Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much of their wealth. And, universally, the class of purists, in matters of language, are liable to grievous suspicion, as almost constantly proceeding ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... facts—a matter of little consequence had it not been for assuming that they were facts and must be facts because they appeared to be such. When they proceeded on the path of the Ram, their course was scarcely as straight as a ram's horn, for they never had an axiom which was an axiom at all. They must have been very blind not to see this, even in their own day; for even in their own day many of the long "established" axioms had been rejected. For example—"Ex nihilo nihil fit"; "a body cannot act where ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... notions of Puseyism revolutionized by the present novel, he will be a little startled at its real doctrines and intentions. The author has the most supreme and avowed contempt for liberal ideas in Church and State; and for every good-natured axiom about toleration and representative government he spurns from his path as a novelty and paradox. There is nothing dominant in England which he does not oppose. The Whig party he deems the avowed enemies of loyalty, order and religion. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... weakness he could not comprehend, aware that he had no wound of the trunk. His useless arms made all effort vain, and the left foot under the weight of the horse began to feel numb. The position struck him as past help until our people charged. He thought of Francis's axiom that there was nothing so entirely tragic as to be without some marginalia of humour. The lad smiled at his use of the word. His own situation appealed to him as ridiculous—a man with a horse on him waiting for an army to ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... 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 an inactive, confused mass, surrounded by ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... their governors. I shall not, however, dwell on the vices, though they be of the most contemptible and embruting cast, to which a sudden accession of fortune gives birth, because I believe it may be delivered as an axiom, that it is only in proportion to the industry necessary to acquire wealth that a nation is really ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... heathen; the walls were decorated with bible texts in gold letters, and above the divan, which was covered with a giraffe skin, there was a crucifix. On the middle panel of the coffered ceiling was inscribed defiantly, in the Coptic language the first axiom of the Jacobite creed: "We believe in the single, indivisible nature of Christ Jesus." And below this ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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
... soil and subsoil will frequently afford most useful indications respecting the value of land. It may be laid down as an axiom that a soil to be fertile must contain all the chemical ingredients which a plant can only obtain from the soil, and chemistry ought to be able to inform us in unproductive soils what ingredients are wanting. It also is able to inform us if any poisonous substance exists in the ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... Auberly, "would become of the fine arts if all men delighted in dirt, dust, dullness, and desks? Depend upon it, John, that our tastes and tendencies are not the result of accident; they were given to us for a purpose. I hold it as an axiom that when a man or a boy has a strong and decided bias or partiality for any particular work that he knows something about, he has really a certain amount of capacity for that work beyond the average ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 a message ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... not willing to be its judge," he answered. "Yet it is a moral axiom that the higher we seek for our pleasures the greater happiness we attain to. I am an uncompromising enemy to what is known as fashionable society, so ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... opinion, a thing taken for granted, an axiom in horticulture, that melon seed is the better for being old. Mr. Marshall says, that it ought to be "about four years old, though some prefer it much older." And he afterwards observes, that "if new seed only can be had, it should ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... his emphasis is, that the business is peculiarly liable to suspicion, and if a man is "once detected in the smallest fraud ... at once he is ruined." The character of his argument was always simple. He usually began with some such axiom as the desirability of success in one's enterprises, or of health, or of comfort, or of ease of mind, or a sufficiency of money; and then he showed that some virtue, or collection of virtues, would promote this result. He advocated ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... memory, the question of what he would have thought of it, affected my attitude materially. He had accepted it as axiomatic, I thought, that his son must be a gentleman. My present lot as an 'inmate' of St. Peter's hardly seemed to fit the axiom, somehow; and Ted, whatever I might think or say about 'beggin'' or the like, was all the friend I had or seemed likely to have, and a really good fellow at that. But withal a certain stubbornly resistant ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... assert that a form of imaginative life is clearly pathologic? In my opinion, the answer must be sought in the nature and degree of belief accompanying the labor of creating. It is an axiom unchallenged by anyone—whether idealist or realist of any shade of belief—that nothing has existence for us save through the consciousness we have of it; but for realism—and experimental psychology is of necessity realistic—there are ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... then, with more emphasis, why the trouble was not immediately communicated to her. It had never entered into her head to take her mother into her confidence with regard to Elsmere. Since she could remember, it had been an axiom in the family to spare the delicate nervous mother all the anxieties and perplexities of life. It was a system in which the subject of it had always acquiesced with perfect contentment, and Catherine had no qualms about it. If there was ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... first figure was regarded by logicians as the only perfect type of syllogism, because the validity of moods in this figure may be tested directly by their complying, or failing to comply, with a certain axiom, the truth of which is self-evident. This axiom is known as the Dictum de Omni et Nullo. It may be ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... remained the dead languages of Greece and Rome. That the classics should form the basis of all teaching was an axiom with Dr. Arnold. 'The study of language,' he said, 'seems to me as if it was given for the very purpose of forming the human mind in youth; and the Greek and Latin languages seem the very instruments by which ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... a great evil," said an ancient writer,—an axiom which an unfortunate Russian author felt to his cost. "Whilst I was at Moscow," says a pleasant traveller, "a quarto volume was published in favor of the liberties of the people,—a singular subject when we consider the place where the book was printed. In this work the iniquitous ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... admitted that organic compounds are composed of familiar elements—chiefly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen; but these elements were supposed to be united in ways that could not be imitated in the domain of the non-living. It was regarded almost as an axiom of chemistry that no organic compound whatever could be put together from its elements—synthesized—in the laboratory. To effect the synthesis of even the simplest organic compound, it was thought that the "vital force" must be ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... old bonnet, which in its weight and amplitude of trimmings seemed to frown into evanescence the sprightly half-ounce head gearing of today. Paying for what they get and giving a good price for it when they have a chance is evidently an axiom with the believers in St. James's. There is at present a demand for seats worth from 7s. to 10s. each; but those which can be obtained for 1s. are not much thought of, and nobody will look on one side at the pews which are offered for nothing. That which is not charged for is never cared ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... 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
... Dundonald's other views on naval architecture, will be explained by another letter written by him to Lord Haddington, three months before, on the 20th of February. "I have lately," he said, "submitted to the consideration of Sir George Cockburn an axiom for the uniform delineation of consecutive parabolic curves, forming a series of lines presenting the least resistance in the submerged portion of ships and vessels—an axiom never before so applied in naval ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... materials, provisions, and naval stores, were 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 trade, which was turned in their favour, and concluded, that when ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... cross the threshold of married life depends your future happiness. It is not a small matter to lay the first stone of an edifice. A husband's first kiss"—I felt a thrill run down my back—"a husband's first kiss is like the fundamental axiom that serves as a basis for a whole volume. Be prudent, Captain. She is there beyond that wall, the fair young bride, who is awaiting you; her ear on the alert, her neck outstretched, she is listening to each of your movements. At every creak of the boards ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... the main axiom of life appears to be the same: "Never do to-day what you can put off to to-morrow." On the left bank of the Guadiana it is summarised by the word manana; on the right bank the word used is amanha. There is only a phonetic distinction between the Spanish and the Portuguese ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... a very difficult and complicated one at times," said the man in the corner, leisurely pulling off a huge pair of flaming dog-skin gloves from his meagre fingers. "I have known experienced criminal investigators declare, as an infallible axiom, that to find the person interested in the committal of the crime ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... aphorism; apothegm, apophthegm^; dictum, saying, adage, saw, proverb; sentence, mot [Fr.], motto, word, byword, moral, phylactery, protasis^. axiom, theorem, scholium^, truism, postulate. first principles, a priori fact, assumption (supposition) 514. reflection &c (idea) 453; conclusion &c (judgment) 480; golden rule &c (precept) 697; principle, principia [Lat.]; profession of faith &c (belief) 484; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the merchants and manufacturers, it was answered by the President that it was not desirable to rob Saint Peter's altar in order to build one to Saint Paul. It might have been simpler to suggest that the consumer would pay the tax, supposing it were ever paid at all, but the axiom was not so familiar three centuries ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Principles of Psychology (vol. ii, p. 646) I gave the name of the 'axiom of skipped intermediaries and transferred relations' to a serial principle of which the foundation of logic, the dictum de omni et nullo (or, as I expressed it, the rule that what is of a kind is of that kind's kind), is the most familiar instance. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... are altogether subordinate—I mean the family. For the family is the immediate agent in the production and rearing of children; and this, as we have seen, is the end of society. With the family therefore social reconstruction should start. And we may lay down as the fundamental ethical and social axiom that everybody not physically disqualified ought to marry, and to produce at least four children. The only question here is whether the state should intervene and endeavour so to regulate marriages as to bring together those whose union is most likely to result ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... There could be no doubt about it. There in material form on the corner of his table was a point-blank, tangible contradiction of the universally accepted axiom that two bodies cannot occupy the same space, and that, come from somewhere or nowhere, there were two plainly material objects through which his daughter's hand, without her even knowing it, had passed as easily as it would ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... was asleep, should know how to sleep in the very best style; but do not forget to reckon among the sciences necessary to a man on setting up an establishment, the art of sleeping with elegance. Moreover, we will place here as a corollary to Axiom XXV of our Marriage Catechism the two ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... remember our axiom? Build your church, and the rest will take care of itself. You remember our scraping and begging, and how that good Mr. Davison helped us out and brought the endowment up to the needful point for consecration, on condition the incumbency was given to him. He held it just a ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rouged poor Christianity on the cheeks, clapped a crown of innocent daffodillies on her head, and set her to dancing a pas de zephyr in the pastoral ballet in which St. Simon pipes to the flock he shears; or having first laid it down as a preliminary axiom, that ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... far from being concerned with the real foundation of his creed—this was accepted as an axiom—were occupied with the arguments used against the forms ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... one, and that suffering at one point was remedial at 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 be at ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... based upon a denial of the axiom that the satisfaction of one want breeds another want. Experience does not teach the decay but the metamorphosis of individuality. Under socialised industry progress in the industrial arts would be slower ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... the whole art and mystery of excuse-making, in all its branches. Indeed, it was an axiom with her that the cook can do no wrong; and a cook in a Southern kitchen finds abundance of heads and shoulders on which to lay off every sin and frailty, so as to maintain her own immaculateness entire. If any part of the dinner was a failure, there were fifty indisputably good ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... "bring forth fruits of righteousness," or, to use modern language, to live the good life, without seeking any help from that world of the ideal in which religion lives. This teaching, of course, is diametrically opposed to that of the Churches, who lay it down almost as an axiom that without such extraneous assistance as "grace," generally conveyed in answer to direct supplication, or through the mystery of Sacramental agencies, such as Baptism or the Lord's Supper, it is fairly impossible to keep the moral law. To the credit of humanity, this dark ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... accidents with us, as with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
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