"Atheist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heaven be a desert in order that man may be punished for having lived? Is it not enough to have lived? I do not know who asked that question, unless it were Voltaire on his death-bed; it is a cry of despair worthy of the helpless old atheist. ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... and remotest distance of her imagination, to conjure up the degrading picture, 'I am a'most inclined,' said Mrs Jarley, bursting with the fulness of her anger and the weakness of her means of revenge, 'to turn atheist when ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Chinese (singular and plural) adjective: Chinese Ethnic divisions: Han Chinese 91.9%, Zhuang, Uygur, Hui, Yi, Tibetan, Miao, Manchu, Mongol, Buyi, Korean, and other nationalities 8.1% Religions: Daoism (Taoism), Buddhism, Muslim 2-3%, Christian 1% (est.) note: officially atheist, but traditionally pragmatic and eclectic Languages: Standard Chinese (Putonghua) or Mandarin (based on the Beijing dialect), Yue (Cantonese), Wu (Shanghainese), Minbei (Fuzhou), Minnan (Hokkien-Taiwanese), ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Your quest for knowledge—how it rests on that! How sure the soul is that if truth destroy The temple, in three days the truth will build A nobler temple; and that order reigns In all things. Even your atheist builds his doubt On that strange faith; destroys his heaven and God In absolute faith that his own thought is true To law, God's lanthorn to our stumbling feet; And so, despite himself, he worships God, For where true souls are, there are ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... perfect taste and avoidance of red brick and its hoggish swallowing of tracts of pleasant land symbolised the specious charm and the thieving greed which were well known to be the attributes of the aristocracy. Rachael was wonderful. She was an Atheist, too. When she was twelve she had decided to do without God for a year, and it had worked. Ellen had not got as far as that. She thought religion rather pretty and a great consolation if one was poor. Rachael was even poorer than Ellen, but she had an ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... devotion to the King and a determination to have popular assemblies; a great sense of the rights of the white individual together with African slavery; a practical, easy-going, debonair naturalism side by side with an Established Church penalizing alike Papist, Puritan, and atheist. Even so early as this, the social tone was set that was to hold for many and many a year. The suave climate was somehow to foster alike a sense of caste and good neighborliness—class distinctions ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... providence did that which no other hand durst do." While at his headquarters in the house of Major Thomas Pate, in Gloucester, a few miles east of West Point, he became ill of dysentery. Bacon's enemies accused him of being an atheist, but in his last hours he called in Mr. Wadding to prepare his mind for death. "He died much dissatisfied in mind," we are told, "inquiring ever and anon after the arrival of the frigates and soldiers from England, and asking if the guards were ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker
... controversy in proportion to its heat, and too often his pen was dipped in gall, when he directed the acuteness and learning which none denied to him against any who swerved, this way or that, from the narrow path of dogma and discipline which had been marked with his own approval. Tillotson was 'an atheist,'[45] freethinkers were 'the first-born sons of Satan,' the Established Church was 'fallen into mortal schism,'[46] Ken, for thinking of reunion, was 'a half-hearted wheedler,'[47] Roman Catholics were 'as gross idolaters as Egyptian worshippers ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... its own name, has never had many to embrace it. Its only hope is to be tolerated and believed under some other name. In Russia, no man is allowed to belong to the ruling (Communist) party unless he is an atheist. It will be a sorry world when "scientific" atheism wins, under ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... as a young man of steady habits and blameless life, but she regretted that he was an atheist, and that he was not a passenger conductor with brass buttons on his coat. On the whole, she wondered what such an exemplary young man found to like in Thea. Dr. Archie she treated respectfully because of his position in Moonstone, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... transmitted to the apostles.' He assumes his gravest airs in adducing the cases of Cardan, Swedenborg, and a certain Duke of Montmorency, as though he were a genuine historical inquirer. He almost adopts the tone of a pious missionary in describing how his atheist doctor was led by the revelations of a clairvoyante to study Pascal's 'Pensees' and Bossuet's sublime 'Histoire des Variations,' though what those works have to do with mesmerism is rather difficult to see. He relates the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... possession, will stand at the altar and take the loving hand, and say, "With all my worldly goods I thee endow!" A woman that could not make a loaf of bread to save her life will swear to cherish and obey. A Christian will marry an atheist, and that always makes conjoined wretchedness; for if a man does not believe there is a God, he is neither to be trusted with a dollar nor with ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... and convictions are entirely with this that he speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He will make no pretence, therefore, to impartiality and detachment. He will do his best to be as fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the reader must reckon with this bias. He ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... know of the Nunc Dimittis?" he asked at last, with a half-smile. "You might as well say PATER NOSTER,—both canticle and prayer would be equally unmeaning to you! For poet as you are,—or let me say as you WERE,—inasmuch as no atheist was ever a poet at the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... were near you, as I yearn to be, as I ought to be, there would be need for this letter. Oh, be sure that He means well by us by what we suffer, and it is when we suffer that He often makes the meaning clearer. You know how that brilliant, witty, true poet Heine, who was an atheist (as much as a man can pretend to be), has made a public profession of a change of opinion which was pathetic to my eyes and heart the other day as I read it. He has joined no church, but simply (to use his own words) has 'returned home to God like ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... wishing him to make a good impression. But her hints had roused in him the instinct of antagonism, and he went on more recklessly than before. "No; you are perfectly wrong. I'm not an interesting atheist. I have the most beautiful child-like ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... religious community, the village atheist keeps his doubts to himself. I have to do business with these Merlinolators. It's all I can do to keep Flora from ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... however, to be patient and peaceable, in which case he said he would endeavour to devise some plan to satisfy me. Amongst other things, he observed that the bishops hated a sectarian more than an Atheist. Whereupon I replied, that, like the Pharisees of old, they cared more for the gold of the temple than the temple itself. Throughout the whole of our interview he evidently laboured under great fear, and was continually looking behind and around him, seemingly ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... been driven to seek shelter with Elizabeth), while d'Aubigny got their lands and the key of Scotland, Dumbarton Castle, on the estuary of Clyde. The Kirk, regarding d'Aubigny, now Earl of Lennox, despite his Protestant professions, as a Papist or an atheist, had little joy in Morton, who was denounced in a printed placard as guilty in Darnley's murder: Sir James Balfour could show his signature to the band to slay Darnley, signed by Huntly, Bothwell, Argyll, and Lethington. This was not true. Balfour knew much, was himself involved, but had not ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... 495 Triumphal pomp for liberty confirmed, [W] I paced, a dear companion at my side, The town of Arras, [X] whence with promise high Issued, on delegation to sustain Humanity and right, that Robespierre, 500 He who thereafter, and in how short time! Wielded the sceptre of the Atheist crew. When the calamity spread far and wide— And this same city, that did then appear To outrun the rest in exultation, groaned 505 Under the vengeance of her cruel son, As Lear reproached the winds—I could almost Have quarrelled with that blameless spectacle For lingering yet ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... in the camp of the Atheist, the Agnostic, the Higher Critic and particularly the Evolutionist, because of this modern David—America's ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected the less ready was the answer, until, at last, I came to the conclusion ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... doomed man, and probably had not long to live. I was not the first to attend to him, but when the case was transferred to me, I naturally became very anxious about his soul. The family with whom he lived were Christians, and from them I learned that he was an avowed atheist, and very antagonistic to anything religious. They had, without asking his consent, invited a Scripture reader to visit him, but in great passion he had ordered him from the room. The vicar of the district had also called, hoping to help him; but he had spit in his face, and refused ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... him with its opprobrium. Assuredly, he was not the man that world painted. It by no means follows that because Shelley did not repeat the ordinary creeds, and even mocked at them, that he believed nothing. Shelley was never in his soul an atheist: it was simply impossible with his nature that he should be; what he did deny and defy was a deity whose worship seemed, as he saw the world, consistent with the reign of ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... Maggie, bewildered. "Father never minded about dissenters. Our butcher in St. Dreot's was an atheist and—" ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... character Ibn Khallikan remarks (ii. 43), "There were four poets whose works clearly contraried their character. Abu al-Atahiyah wrote pious poems himself being an atheist; Abu Hukayma's verses proved his impotence, yet he was more salacious than a he-goat, Mohammed ibn Hazim praised contentment, yet he was greedier than a dog, and Abu Nowas hymned the joys of sodomy, yet he was more passionate for women ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... and ally of Dermod Mac Murrough. His last exploit was the murder of a neighbouring chief, despite the most solemn pledges. In an old translation of the Annals of Ulster, he is termed, with more force than elegance, "a cursed atheist." After his excommunication, his brother Dermod was made King of Meath, in ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... spiritual despotism of the Middle Ages,—the latter of self-denying monasticism in its best ages. The Brahman is like Thomas Aquinas with his dogmas and metaphysics; the Buddhist is more like a mediaeval freethinker, stigmatized as an atheist. The Brahman was so absorbed with his theological speculation that he took no account of the sufferings of humanity; the Buddhist was so absorbed with the miseries of man that the greatest blessing seemed to be entire and endless rest, the cessation of existence itself,—since ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... "No sir. I asked him what was the rule in Shelley's Case, and he told me the rule in Shelley's Case was that when the father was an atheist the Lord Chancellor would appoint ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... at Landless's ear. "Well for those who find that at the hands of the uncircumcised heathen. Eternal nothingness! The fool hath said in his heart There is no God—and he is being dashed headlong upon the judgment bar of the God who saith, I will repay. Cursed be the Atheist! May he find the passage, fiery though it be, as nothing to the flames of the avenging God; may he go to his appointed place where the worm dieth not and the fire is ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... 28, when the debates were becoming so bitter that it seemed unlikely that the convention could continue, Doctor Franklin, erroneously supposed by many to be an atheist, made the following solemn and beautiful appeal to their better ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... pretended to be in his secrets, and believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system than he himself did," and Morris, it is scarcely necessary to state, was an atheist. The same authority quotes Rush, to the effect that "when the clergy addressed General Washington on his departure from the government, it was observed in their consultation, that he had never, on any occasion, said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Christian religion, and they ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... is unquenchable. Buddhism, in its simple severity, could not even attempt to slake it. But on its simplicity a priesthood shook parures. Its severity was cloaked with mantles of gold. The founder, an atheist who had denied the gods, was transformed into one. About him a host of divinities was strung. The most violently nihilistic of doctrines was fanned into an idolatry puerile and meek. Nirvana became Elysium, and a religion which ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... in state, in an apartment lighted by torches, or what Catholics call une chambre ardente. "I am neither," he said in the same phrase which we have formerly quoted, "a philosopher nor a physician. I believe in God, and am of the religion of my father. It is not everybody who can be an atheist. I was born a Catholic, and will fulfil all the duties of the Catholic church, and receive the assistance which it administers." He then turned to Dr. Antommarchi, whom he seems to have suspected of heterodoxy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble myself about that either; so they called me Atheist and went their way. After them came the politician, who said there was only one purpose in Nature, and that was to get him into parliament. I told him I did not care whether he got into parliament or not; so he called me ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... or atheist, Or him who doubts if ever God can be, And questions the existence of a Christ, Mark well the fruits of Christianity, And say what other power has ever wrought The good ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... standards acceptable to all? A good churchman, perhaps, whose first thought would be to bring everyone into the saving grace of his religion? Or an atheist, who would take care that no rascally churchman got the upper hand? Can you think of any man who does not have strong opinions on at least one subject? Who does not have one thing that he is a little ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... really did not know what his views were, beyond having a vague notion that he was an Atheist of a rather pronounced type, but that I would go and hear him when ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... for a good share of satire, but darker things were said of the Italianate Englishman. He was an atheist—a creature hitherto unknown in England—who boldly laughed to scorn both Protestant and Papist. He mocked the Pope, railed on Luther, and liked none, but only himself.[104] "I care not," he said, "what you talk to me of God, so as ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... they explained eclipses, and supposed that the moon derived its light from the sun. Some of them knew the difference between the planets and the fixed stars. Anaxagoras scouted the notion that the sun was a god, and supposed it to be a mass of ignited stone, for which he was called an atheist. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... only that," she said. "When he was—all right, he was an atheist. Imagine, in this house! He had the most terrible books, Miss Blakiston. And, of course, when a man believes there is no hereafter, he is apt to lead a wicked life. There is nothing ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... naturally suppose that men holding such opinions must be materialists of the grossest type—and, indeed, many of them gloried in the name of materialist and atheist—but such an inference would be erroneous. While denouncing metaphysics, they were themselves metaphysicians in so far as they were constantly juggling with abstract conceptions, and letting themselves be guided in their walk and conversation by a priori deductions; while ridiculing romanticism, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... answer. Great confusion and diversity of opinion prevail as to the real views of the man whose writings have agitated the whole world, scientific and religious. If a man says he is a Darwinian, many understand him to avow himself virtually an atheist; while another understands him as saying that he adopts some harmless form of the doctrine of evolution. This is ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... Father Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... attacks. The small group of skeptics, which is hardly perceptible under Louis XIV, has obtained its recruits in the dark; in 1698 the Palatine, the mother of the Regent, writes that "we scarcely meet a young man now who is not ambitious of being an atheist."[4215] Under the Regency, unbelief comes out into open daylight. "I doubt," says this lady again, in 1722, "if; in all Paris, a hundred individuals can be found, either ecclesiastics or laymen, who have any true faith, or even believe in our Lord. It makes one tremble. . . ." The position ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... by and by that Parson Down preached with peculiar power at the winter revival; and upon this preaching old Bill Bull, the atheist of Out-of-the-Way, attended with scoffing regularity, sitting in the seat of the scorner. It was observed presently—no eyes so keen for such weather as the eyes of Out-of-the-Way—that Bill Bull was coming under conviction of his conscience; and when this great ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... may provide arguments for the atheist, intelligent force is inexplicable; for if it emanates from God, why should it meet with obstacles? ought not its triumph to be immediate? Where is God? If the living cannot perceive Him, can the dead find Him? Crumble, ye idolatries and ye religions! Fall, feeble keystones ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... suppress the language of its misery; a dread of making proselytes,—even as men refrain from exposing their sores or plague-infected garments in the eyes of the world. The least we can expect from him is that mood of mind which Pascal so sublimely says becomes the Atheist ... "Is this, then, a thing to be said with gayety? Is it not rather a thing to be said with tears as the saddest thing ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... a witch and a devil the attributes peculiar to the Almighty; yet how few are willing to be found opposing such a torrent, as knowing that in so doing they shall be sure to meet with opposition to the utmost, from the many, both of Magistrates, Ministers, and people; and the name of Sadducee, atheist, and perhaps witch too, cast upon them, most liberally, by men of the highest profession in godliness; and, if not so learned as some of themselves, then accounted only fit to be trampled on, and their arguments (though both rational and ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... The only atheist is one Who hears no Voice in wind or sun, Believer in some primal curse, Deaf in God's ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... bless the hour of my imprisonment; it has taught me to know the ingratitude of man, my own frailty, and the goodness of God." Close to these words again appeared the proud and desperate imprecations of one who signed himself an Atheist, and who launched his impieties against the Deity, as if he had forgotten that he had just before said there was no God. Then followed another column, reviling the cowardly fools, as they were termed, whom captivity had converted into fanatics. I one day pointed out these ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... poem I was cursed for writing! When it came out no word was bad enough for me! I was a blackguard, a ruffian and an atheist! You will live to have as great a contempt for literary critics and the public as ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... governed by the laws of nature, without rising up in our thoughts to the efficient cause and superior reason, or, that which is always implied in the term law, viz., a legislator and executive putting in force, is to play the Atheist and take things by halves; is to suppose the laws of nature are beings, and imagine fabulous divinities in ignoring or setting aside the Christian's God, who is the source of all the laws of nature, and who governs all things according to them. "The laws of nature are the art of God." ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... passages which can give us a clear comprehension of Leonardo's ideas of the world at large. It is scarcely necessary to observe that there is absolutely nothing in them to lead to the inference that he was an atheist. His views of nature and its laws are no doubt very unlike those of his contemporaries, and have a much closer affinity to those which find general acceptance at the present day. On the other hand, it is obvious ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... whey and buttermilk of literature must know that in philosophy Voltaire was nothing if not a theist—must know that he wrote not against God, but against Jehovah, the God of the Jews, whom he believed to be a false God—must know that to say Voltaire was an atheist on this ground is as absurd as to say that a Jacobite opposed hereditary monarchy because he declared the Brunswick family had no title to the throne. That Dr. Cumming should repeat the vulgar fables about Voltaire's death is merely what we might expect ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Queen Catharine was concerned (and the same is true of some of her advisers), it is admitted by all that no zeal for religion controlled her conduct. A dissolute and ambitious woman, and, moreover, almost an avowed atheist, she could not have acted from a sincere but mistaken belief that it was her duty to exterminate heresy. But among the inferior agents it can scarcely be doubted that there were some who believed themselves to be doing God service in ridding the world of the enemies ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... being divided into an infinity of infinitely divisible lines; and a cube, that is, a solid, infinitely expanded, is capable of being divided into an infinity of infinitely divisible planes. In fine, metaphysic theology furnishes no argument against the infinite series of the atheist. But geology does. Every plant and animal that now lives upon earth began to be during the great Tertiary period, and had no place among the plants and animals of the great Secondary division. We can trace several of our existing quadrupeds, such as the badger, the hare, the fox, the red deer, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... enemies." What did the preacher know about it? He called to mind the look on his mother's face, the agony of her voice; he realised the bitter years she had spent in silence and misery, and remembered who was responsible for it all. Thus Paul became a kind of atheist. He was not yet old enough to think deeply about it, but incipient unbelief was in the boy's mind and heart. It darkened his thoughts and gave a sombre hue to life. In any case he was not going to trouble about religion. He remembered the vow he had made after he had left his mother, and ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... struggle," she said, getting back to the Irish question as the subject of her sentence, "between a people to whom art is an ideal and a people who have accepted materialism and money for their gods, an atheist people." ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... tortures of the inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials for heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts of infidel and atheist, have all been ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... was general at that time all over the civilized world, and that sporadic cases of witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and Europe. Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, 1635, affirmed his belief in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of atheist." But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and executions, and was the more shocking from the general high level of intelligence in the community in which these were held. It would be well if those who lament the decay of "faith" would remember what things ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... thousands of Gipsies, who have died in Britain, that, whether living or dying, have been visited by the minister or his people! The father of three orphan children lately taken under the Care of the Southampton Committee for the improvement of the Gipsies, had lived an atheist, but such he could not die. He had often declared there was no God; but before his death, he called one of his sons to him and said—I have always said there was no God, but now I know there ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... the "light of the glory of God which shines from the face of Jesus Christ," we are compelled to pronounce it a miserable failure. We do not find either Christian faith or Christian morality in it. As to faith, he had none; for he was an atheist, and gloried in his disbelief of all revealed truth. As to morality, his biographer informs us that he was an unchaste, profane, passionate, arbitrary, ungenerous, unloving man. His apparent philanthropy ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... our system out of hatred to the Established Church, though our system is ten times less liberal than the Church of England. Some of them have really come over to us. I myself confess a baronet who presided over the first radical meeting ever held in England—he was an atheist when he came over to us, in the hope of mortifying his own church—but he is now—ho! ho!—a real Catholic devotee—quite afraid of my threats; I make him frequently scourge himself before me. Well, Radicalism does us good service, especially amongst the lower classes, for Radicalism ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... wont to tell her that she and I had many very strange characteristics in common, which we shared with no one else, while we differed utterly in other respects. It was very like both of us, for Lola, when defending the existence of the soul against an atheist, to tumble over a great trunk of books of the most varied kind, till she came to an old vellum-bound copy of Apuleius, and proceed to establish her views according to his subtle Neo-Platonism. But she romanced and embroidered so much in conversation that she did not get credit ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of paganism in the world around him—not all of it, or even most of it, self-conscious and self-confessed, but none the less real on that account? He makes a curious remark as to the personage whom he calls "the benevolent atheist," which is, I take it, his nickname for the man who is not much interested in midway Gods between himself and the Veiled Being. This hapless fellow-creature, says Mr. Wells, "has not really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one to whom he can give himself. ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... Court. For libelling Whig noblemen, in his poem called "Manners," Dodsley, Whitehead's publisher, was summoned by the Ministers, who wished to intimidate Pope, before the House of Lords. He appears to have been an atheist, and was a member of the infamous Hell-Fire Club, that held its obscene and blasphemous orgies at Medmenham Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir Francis Dashwood, where every member assumed the name of an Apostle. Later in life ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... conspiring to establish Popery, to dethrone the King, and to put the crown on the head of Arabella Stewart. Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney-General, led the accusation, and disgraced himself by heaping on Raleigh's head every foul epithet, calling him 'viper,' 'damnable atheist,' 'monster,' 'traitor,' 'spider of hell,' &c., and by his violence, although to his own surprise, as he never expected to gain his cause in full, he browbeat the jury to bring in a verdict of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... revolutionary in her handling of moral situations, she was an insurgent in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogma of eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times and evangelical circles, to be almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late 'seventies, Dean Farrar published his Eternal Hope, that book fell like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long before Dean Farrar's book Anne Bronte had thrown her bomb. There are two pages in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that anticipate and sum up ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... 'infidels' the last forty years. These are the principles I want to maintain—that our platform may be kept as broad as the universe, that upon it may stand the representatives of all creeds and of no creeds—Jew and Christian, Protestant and Catholic, Gentile and Mormon, believer and atheist." ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... Obdurest Atheist among men would seriously and in good earnest consider that relation, and ponder all the circumstances thereof, he would presently cry out, as a Dr. of Physick did, hearing a story less considerable, 'I believe ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Frenchman, a retired teacher of his native language, who had somehow heard of the insult offered to his great countryman, and a copy of the contradiction had been sent to Mr. Broad. He was content with observing that its author was a Frenchman, and therefore probably an atheist, "with no consciousness of moral obligation." Voltaire's diabolic disappearance continued, therefore, to be one of Mr. Broad's most striking effects.)—This was a subject of great delicacy. They knew how ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... October 1, after seven months' constant travel and hard work, and on the 17th went to the National Woman's Rights Convention at Philadelphia and gave the report for New York. It was through her determined efforts, overcoming the objection that she was an atheist and declaring that every religion or none should have an equal right on their platform, that Mrs. Rose was made president. She met here for the first time Anna and Adeline Thomson, Sarah Pugh and Mary Grew, and was the guest of James and Lucretia Mott, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of fact, he does nothing of the kind; but he believes that he does it, and this mere thought, false and low as it is, keeps him in the most miserable condition of life; to sum up, a man who believes himself free may not perhaps be an atheist, but he is ungodly. ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... achieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the burning dreams of Carlyle, the white-hot proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly achieved by a crowd of impossible people. In the centre stood that citadel of atheist industrialism: and if indeed it has ever been taken, it was taken by the rush of ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... unbelief, disbelief; incredulity, incredulousness &c adj.^; want of faith, want of belief; pyrrhonism; bout &c 485; agnosticism. atheism; deism; hylotheism^; materialism; positivism; nihilism. infidelity, freethinking, antichristianity^, rationalism; neology. [person who is not religious] atheist, skeptic, unbeliever, deist, infidel, pyrrhonist; giaour^, heathen, alien, gentile, Nazarene; espri fort [Fr.], freethinker, latitudinarian, rationalist; materialist, positivist, nihilist, agnostic, somatist^, theophobist^. V. be irreligious &c adj.; disbelieve, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Augusta. Scott, the under-preceptor, put in by Lord Bolingbroke, and of no very orthodox odour, was another complaint. Cresset, the link of the connexion, has dealt in no very civil epithets, for besides calling Lord Harcourt a groom, he qualified the Bishop with bastard and atheist,' particularly to one of the Princess's chaplains, who, begged to be excused from hearing such language against a prelate of the church, and not prevailing, has drawn up a narrative, sent it to the Bishop, and offered to swear ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... begins: "Moons wander round the earth, earths round suns, the whole host of suns wander round a greater sun, Our Father, that art thou.'' In this inexpressibly lofty verse there is essentially, and only in an extremely intensified fashion, evidence of the existence of God, and if the convinced atheist should read this verse he would, at least for the moment, believe in his existence. At the same time, a real development of evidence is neither presented nor intended. There are magnificent images, unassailable true propositions: the moon goes round about the earth, the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Nor can this condition be wholly attributed to ignorance or thoughtlessness, as some might hold; for, indeed, we have produced some men of as rare ability as move among the human throng; yet it is almost as difficult to find an atheist, an agnostic, or an infidel of any sort among us as it is to find a "needle in a haystack." The Negro believes in the God ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... By so many risks attended. But I think you both are wrong, Since in this case, having heard that The affliction this man suffers Christian sorcery hath effected Through abhorrence of our gods, By that atheist sect detested, Neither of these feelings should Be your motive to attempt it. I then, who, for this time only Will believe these waves that tell me— These bright fountains—that the beauty Which so oft they have ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... the divine sovereignty. Chapter VI. The Existence Of Moral Evil, Or Sin, Reconciled With The Holiness Of God. Section I. The hypothesis of the soul's preexistence. Section II. The hypothesis of the Manicheans. Section III. The hypothesis of optimism. Section IV. The argument of the atheist—The reply of Leibnitz and other theists—The insufficiency of this reply. Section V. The sophism of the atheist exploded, and a perfect agreement shown to subsist between the existence of sin and the holiness of God. Section ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... i. 62-79, actually speaks of the great atheist in language taken from the Saviour Religions (see ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... was delivering a lecture at the Cathedral Hall of Westminster, in the course of the questioning which took place at the termination of the discourse, which was on vitalism, I was asked by one who signed his paper, "So and So, Atheist," "What would you say if you saw a duck come out of a hen's egg?" I recognised at once the idea at the back of the question and appreciated the fact that it had been asked by one who, as some one has said, "called ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... zeal! I've seen the Atheist in terror start, Awed to contrition by the strong appeal That waked ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... to circulate during his lifetime, and naturally increased in virulence and volume after his death. At that period in human history, it was popularly recognized that nothing good could be true, and nothing vile could be false of an atheist—which was what Spinoza, of course, was reputed to be. Oldenburg even, for years unflaggingly profuse in expressions of devoted friendship and humble discipleship, an eager and fearless advocate ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... out his hands, in the once practised and now natural foreign gesture. "I'm not an atheist. Of course I believe in God, and I thank Him for all ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... loud hymns, Chanted by kneeling multitudes, the wind Shrieks in the solitary aisles. When he Who gives his life to guilt, and laughs at all The laws that God or man has made, and round Hedges his seat with power, and shines in wealth,— Lifts up his atheist front to scoff at Heaven, And celebrates his shame in open day, Thou, in the pride of all his crimes, cutt'st off The horrible example. Touched by thine, The extortioner's hard hand foregoes the gold Wrung from the o'er-worn poor. The perjurer, Whose ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... the most violent and prevailed, and made me apprehensive that they would proceed to greater length than speech. But Macer stood firm, nothing daunted by the uproar. One, who signalized himself by the loudness and fierceness of his cries, exclaimed, 'that he was nothing else than an atheist like all the rest of the Christians; they have no gods; they deny the gods of Rome, and they give ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... Whatever may be thought of particular faiths and sects, a belief in a life beyond this world is the only thing that pierces through the walls of our prison-house, and lets hope shine in upon a scene, that would be otherwise bewildered and desolate. The proselytism of the Atheist is, indeed, a dismal mission. That believers, who have each the same heaven in prospect, should invite us to join them on their respective ways to it, is at least a benevolent officiousness,—but that he, who has no prospect ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... it, has been making in this neighbourhood. It is quite dreadful. Everybody, down to the poorest, claiming a right to think for himself, and set his betters right! There's one worse than any of the rest—but he's no better than an atheist—a carpenter of the name of Weir, always talking to his neighbours against the proprietors and the magistrates, and the clergy too, Mr Walton, and the game-laws; and what not? And if you once show ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... most of these regrets are foolish, and quite on a par in point of philosophic value with the criticisms on the universe of that friend of our infancy, the hero of the fable The Atheist and the Acorn,— ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... pitiless rites have floated with man's blood The skull-pil'd Temple, not for this shall wrath Thunder against you from the Holy One! But (whether ye th' unclimbing Bigot mock With secondary Gods, or if more pleas'd Ye petrify th' imbrothell'd Atheist's heart, The Atheist your worst slave) I o'er some plain Peopled with Death, and to the silent Sun Steaming with tyrant-murder'd multitudes; Or where mid groans and shrieks loud-laughing TRADE More hideous packs his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the Hindoos, who was a notorious atheist, and a contemner of all diety, and who boasted that he knew of no God except the king, and neither believed nor feared any other, happened one day to sit dallying among his women, when one of them plucked a hair from his breast, which hair being fast-rooted, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... the great wheels that roll the world back to light and justice, will He who built it hurl it to the earth again in crashing ruin, to build another order in its place. The man who has let that great truth, written out in flame across the dusky forehead of the Past, slip from his foolish atheist's heart and his shallow atheist's brain, is blind, not only to our own land's short history, but to the lessons of the long ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to use the modern phrase, between science and religion, was thus developed early in ancient Greece; and by the fifth century it is clear that it had become acute. The philosopher Anaxagoras was driven from Athens as an atheist; the same charge, absurdly enough, was one of the counts in the indictment of Socrates; and the physical speculations of the time are a favourite butt of that champion of orthodoxy, Aristophanes. To follow up these speculations ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... busy-looking active little fellow, with bright dark eyes. (He had the name of being an atheist, I learned afterwards.) ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... lands: it may be questioned if there are really any such beings. Hume, known as a famous sceptic, is reported to have said to Ferguson, as together they looked up into the starry sky: "Adam, there is a God." Voltaire, the atheist, prayed to God in a thunderstorm. Ingersoll, when charged with being an atheist, indignantly refuted the charge, saying: "I am not an atheist; I do not say that there is no God; I am an agnostic; I ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... and paced swiftly to and fro across the window, from which the face had instantly vanished. "I tell you there is nothing in it," he cried, with ringing violence. "There is one thing I know about this matter. You may call me an atheist. I am an atheist." Here he swung round and fixed Father Brown with a face of frightful concentration. "This business is perfectly natural. There is no ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... religion would have a divine, or at least a necessary source. To the Theist, what is inevitable cannot but be divinely ordained, therefore religion is divinely preordained, therefore, in essentials, though not in accidental details, religion is true. The atheist, or non-theist, of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... the elements of Shelley's thought I may perhaps mention his atheism. Shelley called himself an atheist in his youth; his biographers and critics usually say that he was, or that he became, a pantheist. He was an atheist in the sense that he denied the orthodox conception of a deity who is a voluntary creator, a legislator, and a judge; ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... quite an atheist," said her teacher, with a deprecatory smile and gesture. "Life, nature, the universe, with their teeming and ever-unfolding wonders tell me that there is a Force—a controlling power and intelligence behind them. We call that force 'God.' We say that God is omnipotent, ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... should be forgiven, because he really didn't hold the views which he had preached," laughed Phyllis. "She also said that he should not be regarded as an atheist, because he believed not only in one God, ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... not so much against social institutions themselves that Shelley revolted as against their abuses, which were still more flagrantly apparent in his time than in ours. When he repudiated Christianity and declared himself an atheist, what he actually had in mind was the perverted parody of religion mainly offered by the Church of his time; and, as some one has observed, when he pronounced for love without marriage it was because of the tragedies that he had seen in marriages without love. Much must be ascribed ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist, the Englishman who called you "a damned Atheist" in the post-office at Pisa. He finds that you had "a little turned-up nose," a feature no less important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to Pascal) in the history of the world. To be in harmony with your nose, you were ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... of Richardetto and of Hippolita in Ford's "Giovanni and Annabella," where both characters are absolutely unnecessary to the main story of the horrible love of the hero and heroine; like the murders of Levidulcia and Sebastian in Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy," and the completely unnecessary though extremely pathetic death of young Marcello in Webster's "White Devil;" until the plays were brought to a close by the gradual extermination of all the principal performers, and only a few ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... human nature which enables the heart of man, under similar circumstances, to bear the occurrence of such a scene as we have described, unmoved. The man was hardened—an infidel, an atheist; but, notwithstanding all this, a sense of awe, wonder, and even, in some degree, of terror, came over his heart, which nearly unnerved him. Most atheists, however, are utter profligates, as he was; or silly philosophers, who, because they take their own reason for their guide, ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... and the Cross' is a theological novel. It is, without any doubt, the most brilliant of Chesterton's novels; it is an argument between a Christian ass and a very decent atheist. Atheists, if they are sincere, are on the way to becoming good Christians; Christians, if they are insincere, are on the way ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... eyes of the beholder, excited general enthusiasm. Imitation is a proof and consequence of it; and many an orthodox believer, who trembled in private, ridiculed religion in public, because he had heard that the king was an atheist; and many a gallant soldier, who hated the sight and smell of snuff, disfigured his nose and lip with rappee, because such was the royal fashion. As a general, he was looked upon as the first of his time. The feeble moment ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... of an innocent Person to do other mischiefs. As for those who acknowledge that Satan may personate a pious Person, but not to do mischief, their Opinion has been confuted by more than a few unhappy Instances. Mr. Clark[17] speaks of a Man that had been an Atheist, or a Sadduce, not believing that there are any Devils or any (to us) invisible World; this Man was converted, but as a Punishment of his Infidelity, evil Angels did often appear to him in the Shape of his most intimate Friends, and would sometimes seduce him into great ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... egotism. If we wish to do good to men we must pity and not despise them. We must learn to say of them, not "What fools!" but "What unfortunates!" The pessimist or the nihilist seems to me less cold and icy than the mocking atheist. He reminds me of the somber words ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... most determined atheist looking at the Sphinx and, in a flash, not merely believing, but feeling that he had before him proof of the life of the soul beyond the grave, of the life of the soul of Khufu beyond the tomb of his Pyramid. ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... 99 out of 100 of my fellows would call me atheist, infidel, and all the other usual hard names. As our laws stand, if the lowest thief steals my coat, my evidence (my opinions being known) would not be received against him. [The law with respect to oaths ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... wholly with the Atheists; for the Atheists do not say that God does not exist, or that God cannot exist, but that we cannot know that he exists. So says Mr. Holyoake, a leading modern Atheist. This is what Mansel also asserts, only he goes farther than they, contending that the very idea of God is impossible to the human reason. It is true that he believes in God on grounds of revelation, which the Atheists do not; but he agrees with them ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... "An atheist," said the dogmatic voice of the individual who had given that common-sense view of spiritualism the previous evening, "must be a fool of the most complete type. Because he doubts what men teach of God, is no reason for doubting ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... lovers of women and of wine, of no outward sanctity or gravity. Charles was a ruler after the Italian fashion; grave, demure, of a solemn carriage, and a sober diet; as constant at prayers as a priest, as heedless of oaths as an atheist." ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... reason, good sense], neither the whirling wheele of Fortune can chaunge neither the deceitful cavilling of worldlings separate, neither sickenesse abate, neither age abolish." Then follows a dialogue between Euphues and an atheist,[89] in which I need not say the latter is utterly routed; and the book ends with a collection of letters[90] between Euphues and various people who ask and get his advice on their ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... house! You—to be sure, what can you know of our father? I knew him; I have been present when he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred. Lucretius was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist lay by his pillow and was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... praises of the sex. I rejoice that their hearts are more susceptible than ours, and that they do not war so strongly against that religion which their nature demands. I have met with but one female, whom I knew to be an avowed atheist. ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... found Livingstone I cared no more for missions than the veriest atheist in England. I had been a press reporter, and my business was to follow armies and to describe battles; to attend conventions and report speeches, but my heart had not been touched with sympathy for missions. ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... and, if that fails, turn atheist! We might fall foul of the four Gospels, get our book burned by the hangman, and then it would sell ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... spoken word, but silent as to the mental conception also. It will be difficult to distinguish the follower of this religion from the follower of none, and the man who declines either to assert or to deny the existence of God, is practically in the position of an atheist. For theism enjoins the cultivation of sentiments of love and devotion to God, and the practice of their external expression. Atheism forbids both, while the simply non-theist abstains in conformity ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... do nothing for me. You are a Spaniard, I am a Frenchman; you believe in the commandments of the Church, I am an atheist." ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... Some Atheist or vile Infidell in loue, When I doe speake of thy diuinitie, May blaspheme thus, and say I flatter thee, And onely write my skill in verse to proue. See myracles, ye vnbeleeuing! see A dumbe-born Muse made to expresse the mind, ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... but it were much to be wished, that they who value themselves upon that conceited Title were a little better instructed in what it ought to stand for; and that they would not perswade themselves a Man is really and truly a Free-thinker in any tolerable Sense, meerly by virtue of his being an Atheist, or an Infidel of any other Distinction. It may be doubted, with good Reason, whether there ever was in Nature a more abject, slavish, and bigotted Generation than the Tribe of Beaux Esprits, at present so prevailing in this Island. Their Pretension to be Free-thinkers, is no other than ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... a love of ruling from delight in ruling, and not from a delight in uses, is wholly devilish; and such a man may be called an atheist; for so far as he is in that love he does not in his heart believe in the existence of God, and to the same extent he derides in his heart all things of the church, and he even hates and pursues with hatred all who acknowledge God, and especially those who acknowledge the Lord. The ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... ever heard," Chris smiled. "It is a good gaming proposition, at any rate. You manage to embrace more chances in your philosophy than do I in mine. It reminds me of Sam—the gardener you had a couple of years ago. I overheard him and Martin arguing in the stable. You know what a bigoted atheist Martin is. Well, Martin had deluged Sam with floods of logic. Sam pondered awhile, and then he said, 'Foh a fack, Mis' Martin, you jis' tawk like a house afire; but you ain't got de show I has.' 'How's that?' Martin asked. 'Well, you see, Mis' Martin, you has one ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... Henry. Oxford'll make a snivellin' parson out of you, an' Cambridge'll turn you into a snivellin' atheist. I know them places well, Henry. I'm acquainted with people from both of them. All the Belfast mill-owners send their sons there, so's they can be made into imitation Englishmen. An' I tell you there's no differs between ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... Atheist in his garden stood, At twilight's pensive hour, His little daughter by his side, ...
— The Pearl Box - Containing One Hundred Beautiful Stories for Young People • "A Pastor"
... choice of which I was not responsible, made me inordinately miserable. I tried to leave it. I wanted to go to Aquila—the opposite of Rome in every respect, and actually founded in a spirit of enmity towards that city (just as I also shall found a city some day), as a memento of an atheist and genuine enemy of the Church—a person very closely related to me,—the great Hohenstaufen, the Emperor Frederick II. But Fate lay behind it all: I had to return again to Rome. In the end I was ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Jewkes speak ill of me, and scorned to take her odious unwomanly advice. O, what a black heart has this poor wretch! So I need not rail against men so much; for my master, bad as I have thought him, is not half so bad as this woman.—To be sure she must be an atheist!—Do you think ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... that famous Atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, entered the House of Commons, it is said that a fellow member approached him with the remark, "Good God, Bradlaugh, what does it matter whether there is a God or not?" Bradlaugh's ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... Montaigne the traditional deism of the pagan and Christian world, without any colour of specifically Christian faith, and with a direct lead to unbelief in a future state. But, whether we suppose Shakspere to have been already led, as he might be by the initiative of his colleague Marlowe, an avowed atheist, to agnostic views on immortality, or whether we suppose him to have had his first serious lead to such thought from Montaigne, we find him to all appearance carrying further the initial impetus, and proceeding from the serene ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... fancied she had nearly come to the conclusion that, if only she could do it pleasantly, without pain or fear, the best thing would be to swallow something and fall asleep; for like most people she was practically an atheist, and therefore always thought of death as the refuge from the ills of life. But although she was often very uncomfortable, Florimel knew nothing of such genuine downright misery as drives some people to what can be no more to their purpose than if a man should strip himself naked ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... Noailles and the Montmorencis in 1789. Cobden and Bright were promiscuously likened to Baboeuf, Chaumette, and Anacharsis Clootz. Baboeuf, it is true, was for dividing up all property, and Chaumette was an aggressive atheist; but these were mere nuances, not material to the purposes of obloquy. Robespierre, Danton, Marat have been mercilessly trotted forth in their sanguinary shrouds, and treated as the counterparts and precursors ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... of Young's morality in the early part of his life may, perhaps, be wrong; but Tindal could not err in his opinion of Young's warmth and ability in the cause of religion. Tindal used to spend much of his time at All Souls. "The other boys," said the atheist, "I can always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually pestering me with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Imagine an atheist with a religion more attractive than religion itself; a republican full of politeness and interest for kings; a gentleman of the privileged classes tender and solicitous for the people, endowed with the most startling eloquence, attacking all the ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... the Atheist that puzzles one so much as those who find it convenient to admit the one point to start from—"There is a God," be He styled in redundant reverence, "Nature," "Providence," or "Heaven." The vacuity behind that is too dark and abysmal to be a home for their soul, and therefore they will ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... time when I fell under his influence he stood more aloof; and this made him the more impressive to a youthful atheist. He had a keen sense of language and its imperial influence on men; language contained all the great and sound metaphysics, he was wont to say; and a word once made and generally understood, he thought ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the world; he said so to me. Beauchamp's for rigging out a yacht to give him a sail. It seems that salt water did him some good last year. They're both of them rather the worse for a row at one of their meetings in the North in support of that public nuisance, the democrat and atheist Roughleigh. The Radical doctor lost a hat, and Beauchamp almost lost an eye. He would have been a Nelson of politics, if he had been a monops, with an excuse for not seeing. It's a trifle to them; part of their education. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and avarice have stained the virtues or the reputation of Tribonian. In a bigoted and persecuting court the principal minister was accused of a secret aversion to the Christian faith, and was supposed to entertain the sentiments of an atheist and a pagan, which have been imputed, inconsistently enough, to the last philosophers of Greece. His avarice was more clearly proved and more sensibly felt. If he were swayed by gifts in the administration of justice, the example of Bacon ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... from quoting him. Mohl went on to tell me a story of a newspaper that had been about to be established, called Le Democrat. The shareholders met, when it appeared that one party wished to make it a Roman Catholic, and the other an atheist organ. Whereupon the existence of God was put to the vote and carried by a majority of one, at which the atheist party were so disgusted that they seceded in ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... development, it necessarily outgrows its ancient ideas of God, which were only temporary and provisional. A man who has a higher conception of God than those about him, and who denies that their conception is God, is very likely to be called an Atheist by men who are really far less believers in a God than he. Thus the Christians, who said the Heathen idols were no Gods, were accounted Atheists by the People, and accordingly put to death; and Jesus of Nazareth was crucified as an unbelieving blasphemer, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... acting. Since then I have been attended by continued success, which I cannot but ascribe to my virtuous resolve to face poverty and distress rather than profit a moment longer by the beneficence of an atheist. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... a good deal of Zaluski's character, because my own existence and growth pointed out what he was not. Still, to study a man by a process of negation is tedious, and though I knew that he was not a Nihilist, or a free-lover, or an atheist, or an unprincipled fellow with a dangerous temper, yet I was curious to see him as he ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... concerned in that about which he was employed. So that he was very far from being an hypocrite, unless his assisting at those performances was a sort of hypocrisy, (as no doubt it was:) But he was sure not to encrease that by any the least appearance of religion. He said once to my self, he was no atheist, but he could not think God would make a man miserable only for taking a little pleasure out of the way. He disguised his Popery to the last. But when he talked freely, he could not help letting himself out against the liberty that under the Reformation all men took ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... denied some power greater than ourselves; that because he never tried to define the indefinite, to confine the infinite within the corners of a phrase, therefore his creed was materialistic. We do not say of Newton that he was an atheist because when he taught us of gravity he did not go further and define to us in equations Him who made gravity; and as we understand more of the Buddha, as we search into life and consider his teaching, as ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... hypostasis of which on both sides, was 'Nature,' or 'the Universe': that both agreed in the order of the existing system, but the one supposed it from eternity, the other as having begun in time. And when the atheist descanted on the unceasing motion and circulation of matter through the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, never resting, never annihilated, always changing form, and under all forms gifted with the power ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... said to the Count de Moustier but one hour ago. But I did not speak to him of the Almighty, because he is an atheist. Yet if we were prudent and merciful it was because we are religious. When men are irreligious, the Lord forsakes them; and if bloodshed and bankruptcy follow it is not to be ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... is a spacious place for him who's gold, to spend, But for the poor it is the house of suffering without end: I wander idly through its streets, as lost us if I were A Koran in an atheist's house, which hath no welcome there.' 'A sigh, a sigh for Bagdad, a sigh for Irak's land! For all its lovely peacocks, and the splendors they expand: They walk beside the Tigris, and the looks they turn on me Shine o'er ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... Times of Charles I. Messenger of the Covenant Prophecy Logic of Ideas and of Syllogisms W. S. Lander's Poetry Beauty Chronological Arrangement of Works Toleration Norwegians Articles of Faith Modern Quakerism Devotional Spirit Sectarianism Origen Some Men like Musical Glasses Sublime and Nonsense Atheist Proof of Existence of God Kant's attempt Plurality of Worlds A Reasoner Shakspeare's Intellectual Action Crabbe and Southey Peter Simple and Tom Cringle's Log Chaucer Shakspeare Ben Jonson Beaumont and Fletcher Daniel Massinger Lord Byron and H. Walpole's ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... macrocosm, and that light and darkness are the two great principles of existence, the one of animate, the other of inanimate nature. He held that soul and life are every day shed from the sun upon all objects open to his beams. For such doctrines as these he was denounced as practically an atheist! Fortunately the times have changed, though we have still much to learn in the way of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... had spoken. My position in the Faubourg Saint-Germain is peculiar, but good, according to my opinion. I have enough family ties to be sustained by several should I be attacked by many, and this is the essential point. It is true that, thanks to my works, I am regarded as an atheist and a Jacobin; aside from these two little defects, they think well enough of me. Besides, it is a notorious fact that I have rejected several offers from the present government, and refused last year the 'croix d'honneur'; this makes amends and washes away half my sins. ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... When the Holy Father gave his blessing from his window, and more especially at his audiences in the gallery of the Louvre, which were always crowded, precautions were taken against any outbreak of the indiscretion or levity to which the French are prone. We saw the atheist Lalande himself fall at the Pontiff's feet and kiss his slipper. In the public buildings which the Pope honored with his presence he was received as a sovereign. No one dared to betray more curiosity than piety; and it often happened to me to ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... exposition of the principles of that famous atheist will be sufficient for the present purpose, and that without entering farther into these gloomy and obscure regions, I shall be able to shew, that this hideous hypothesis is almost the same with that of the immateriality of the soul, which has become so popular. To make this evident, ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... in order to hasten that event. "Some three months before Sir Richard's death," writes Mr. P. P. Cautley, the Vice-Consul at Trieste, to me, "I was seated at Sir Richard's tea table with our clergy man, and the talk turning on religion, Sir Richard declared, 'I am an atheist, but I was brought up in the Church of England, and that is officially my church.' [529] Perhaps, however, this should be considered to prove, not that he was an atheist, but that he could not resist the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright |
