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Affirmation   Listen
noun
Affirmation  n.  
1.
Confirmation of anything established; ratification; as, the affirmation of a law.
2.
The act of affirming or asserting as true; assertion; opposed to negation or denial.
3.
That which is asserted; an assertion; a positive statement; an averment; as, an affirmation, by the vender, of title to property sold, or of its quality.
4.
(Law) A solemn declaration made under the penalties of perjury, by persons who conscientiously decline taking an oath, which declaration is in law equivalent to an oath.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Affirmation" Quotes from Famous Books



... the moment his deformities, and Mr. Fox made us laugh until our sides ached again. His Lordship told many a capital yarn, and my own wit was afterwards said to be astonishing, though I can recall none of it to support the affirmation. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... which, whether or no the interesting happened to filter through his guide, strained now to its limits his brief opportunity. Waymarsh hadn't come with them; he had seen plays enough, he signified, before Strether had joined him—an affirmation that had its full force when his friend ascertained by questions that he had seen two and a circus. Questions as to what he had seen had on him indeed an effect only less favourable than questions as to what he hadn't. He liked the former to ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James

... the more enlightened classes, was the admiration of this new Professorship: how an enlightened Government had seen into the Want of the Age (Zeitbedurfniss); how at length, instead of Denial and Destruction, we were to have a science of Affirmation and Reconstruction; and Germany and Weissnichtwo were where they should be, in the vanguard of the world. Considerable also was the wonder at the new Professor, dropt opportunely enough into the nascent University; so able to lecture, should occasion call; so ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... Episcopal Church and a sober and quiet industrious people," and, being such, were hereby encouraged to settle in the American Colonies. Next, in response to their own request, they were allowed to affirm instead of taking the oath. The form of affirmation was as follows: "I, A. B., do declare in the presence of Almighty God the witness of the truth of what I say." Next, they were allowed to pay a fixed sum instead of rendering military service, and were also exempted from ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... time with Caesar. The latter, who was childless, based great hopes upon him and was devoted to him, intending to leave him as successor to his name, authority, and supremacy. He was influenced largely by Attia's explicit affirmation that the youth had been engendered by Apollo. While sleeping once in his temple, she said, she thought she had intercourse with a serpent, and through this circumstance at the end of the allotted time bore ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio

... negation are only harmless in great political organisms, which go without them and in spite of them. The multiplication of them among ourselves will bring about the ruin of our little countries, for small states only live by faith and will. Woe to the society where negation rules, for life is an affirmation; and a society, a country, a nation, is a living whole capable of death. No nationality is possible without prejudices, for public spirit and national tradition are but webs woven out of innumerable beliefs which have been acquired, admitted, and continued ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... what is written, and believe that every one, infant or adult, who has been born of the flesh, must be born of the Spirit. Listen to the earnest words of Jesus as he emphasizes them with that solemn double affirmation, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." He repeats this sweeping declaration a second time. In the Greek it reads, Except any one be born again. The assertion is intended to ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding

... calmed many a heart since, welled to his lips. The expression of unwavering faith and unbroken peace is much heightened by the frequent recurrence of the word which is variously translated "truly," "surely," and "only." It carries the force of confident affirmation, like the "verily" of the New Testament, and is here most significantly prefixed to the assertions of his patient resignation (ver. 1); of God's defence (ver. 2); of the enemies' whispered counsels (ver. 4); to his exhortation of his soul to the ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren

... development through a succession of stages or stories (French, etages, ESTAGES, STAGES), and that this and other similar repetitions, in the development of the one, of all the facts and features of the development of THE OTHER, is what is meant by the Analogy of one with the other, and by the affirmation implied in the title of this article, that Language is a ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... turning up of the eyes in prayer. So it is with kissing as a mark of affection; but this is innate, in so far as it depends on the pleasure derived from contact with a beloved person. The evidence with respect to the inheritance of nodding and shaking the head as signs of affirmation and negation is doubtful, for they are not universal, yet seem too general to have been independently acquired by all the individuals of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... Thus, the mixed mode which the word LIE stands for is made of these simple ideas:—(1) Articulate sounds. (2) Certain ideas in the mind of the speaker. (3) Those words the signs of those ideas. (4) Those signs put together, by affirmation or negation, otherwise than the ideas they stand for are in the mind of the speaker. I think I need not go any further in the analysis of that complex idea we call a lie: what I have said is enough to show that it is made up of simple ideas. And it could not be but an offensive ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... And at a period when the distaff of fiction is too often in the hands of men the voice of the romantic realist and poetic ironist, Joseph Conrad, sounds a dynamic masculine bass amid the shriller choir. He is an aboriginal force. Let us close with the hearty affirmation of Walt Whitman: "Camerado! this is no book, who ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... agencies named, will gradually bring about an increase in the birth-rate of superior people, will not be speedy; but it has begun. The writers, therefore, feel justified in thinking, not solely as a matter of optimistic affirmation, but because of the evidence available, that the race suicide now taking place in the old American stock will soon reach its lowest limit, and that thereafter the birth-rate in that particular stock will slowly rise. If it does, and if, as seems probable, the birth-rate in some inferior sections ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... greatly surprised at the view which I took, but it had no influence with him whatsoever. No one, he answered, expected that the boy either would or could know all that he said he knew; but the world was full of compromises; and there was hardly any affirmation which would bear being interpreted literally. Human language was too gross a vehicle of thought—thought being incapable of absolute translation. He added, that as there can be no translation from ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... their affirmation solemnly, and the next day Honora appeared among them, pallid and courageous. They were simple folk for all of their learning. Sorrow was sorrow to them. Honora was widowed by an accident more terrible than death. No mockery, no affected solicitude detracted from the efficacy ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... by Calvin, and hailed with relief by Luther. But the instinctive doctrine that there is something holy and mystic in sex, a doctrine which many of us now easily dissociate from any priestly ceremony, but which in those days seemed to all who felt it to need a ritual affirmation, could not be thrown on the scrap-heap with the sale of Indulgences and the like; and so the Reformation left marriage where it was: a curious mixture of commercial sex slavery, early Christian sex abhorrence, and later ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... an affirmation or series of affirmations about a real World distinct from the Knower. It was surely now obvious that the warrant for such affirmations and the source of their validity must come from somewhere beyond the cognitive ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip

... century, I should think. He stood over me while I read them, and convinced myself that his "Yay Bogu" (God is my witness) was accurately placed. The price of relays was, in reality, fixed by law; but though over-affirmation had now aroused my suspicions, in my ignorance of the situation I could not espy the loophole of trickery in which I was to be noosed, and I agreed once more. More quibbling. He would not stir unless he were allowed to drive the same horses the whole distance, though paid for three ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... but it has been agreed already that the spirit of truth is indifferent to the question whether facts be true or false, but only concerns itself with the sincere affirmation of them, whatsoever they may be. Much more then must it be indifferent to those processes by ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley

... Nothing is wrong that leads men to Christ, and this is true from the Salvation Army at one end of the scale to the Seven Sacraments of Catholicity at the other. The world demands now not denial but affirmation, not protest and division but the ringing "Credo" of ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... Political parties and leaders: Affirmation for an Egalitarian Republic or ARI [Elisa CARRIO]; Front for Victory or FV [Nestor KIRCHNER]; Interbloque Federal or IF (a broad coalition of approximately 12 parties including PRO); Justicialist Front or FJ [leader NA]; Justicialist Party or PJ (Peronist umbrella political ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... the first conception of the negation of a negation. Two minus signs in arithmetic or algebra make a plus. Two negatives destroy each other. This abstruse notion is the foundation of the Hegelian logic. The mind must not only admit that determination is negation, but must get through negation into affirmation. Whether this process is real, or in any way an assistance to thought, or, like some other logical forms, a mere figure of speech transferred from the sphere of mathematics, may be doubted. That Plato and the most subtle philosopher of the nineteenth ...
— Parmenides • Plato

... be right in holding the morality of an action to consist simply in the pleasure it gives to the person who {72} contemplates it. Rightness thus becomes simply a name for the fact of social approbation.[2] And yet surely the very heart of the affirmation which the moral consciousness makes in each of us is that right and wrong are not matters of mere subjective feeling. When I assert 'this is right,' I do not claim personal infallibility. I may, indeed, be wrong, as I may be wrong in my political or scientific ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... full chord, the sweet voice ceased; A faint white glow smote up the east, Like wings uplifting—and a cry Of winds went forth, as if the night Beneath the brightening firmament Had voiced, in hollow prophecy, The affirmation: "By and by!" ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... solemn affirmation or denial of anything, before a person authorized to administer the same, for discovery of truth and right. (See CORPORAL OATH.) Hesiod ascribes the invention of oaths to discord. The oath of supremacy and of the Protestant faith ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... tell what meaning a speaker intends to convey when he uses certain words; for often the same words may carry two or three different meanings according to the inflection. The simple word "Yes," with an abrupt downward slide, expresses decided affirmation. When spoken with an upward slide, it expresses interrogation and is equivalent to "Is that really so?" When it has a combination of the downward and upward slide or a rising circumflex inflection, the meaning is no longer simple but complex. ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty

... those older expressions of the hope and misery of another society in decay. That is the spirit that, for good or evil, is stirring throughout Europe to-day, among the poor and the hungry and the oppressed and the outcast, a new affirmation of the rights and duties of men. Baroja has felt this profoundly, and has presented it, but without abandoning the function of the novelist, which is to tell stories about people. He ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... Christendom. As the years go on, the value of that legacy will be more and more felt; not so much, perhaps, in doctrine as in spirit, in those utterances of a devout soul which are above and beyond the affirmation or negation of dogma. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... our students that the Augsburg Confusion is a safe directory to determine upon matters of faith declared in the Lamb's book." (Spaeth, 1, 336.) Accordingly Dr. Jacobs interprets the Gettysburg pledge as follows: "It was a pledge to a distinctively Lutheran position. Such an affirmation could never have been enforced in the proposed Lutheran-Reformed seminary which the ministerium [of Pennsylvania] had had in mind. It could not have been exacted of those who believed the confession to be ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente

... Bank, or non-repudiated bonds, are receivable for State lands, requires this addition, which Mr. Jefferson Davis has omitted, that they are only so receivable upon lands being taken at three times its current value. The affirmation afterward, that no one has a right to assume that these bonds will not be fully provided for before the date at which the principal falls due, is simply to be met by the fact that portions of them fell due in 1841 and 1846, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... escape from self. The doctrine of Christ is a negation of life, that of Nietzsche an affirmation; it seems to me much easier to attain to sublimity ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair

... of opinions by affirmation, the cultivation of the propensity to believe that which has been affirmed many times, let us call affirmatization. If the world's opinions were governed only by the principles of mythologic philosophy, affirmatization would become so powerful that nothing would be believed but the ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell

... by the intellect, of negation as a mode of passage towards a higher kind of affirmation, there is correlated the subtlest of moral counterparts in the sphere of the personal will. Since denial of the finite self and its wants, since asceticism of some sort, is found in religious experience to be the only doorway to the larger and more blessed life, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... ceremonies by the ministers of religion, were pronounced to be the judgments of God! The ordeal consisted of various kinds: walking blindfold amidst burning ploughshares; passing through fires; holding in the hand a red-hot bar; and plunging the arm into boiling water: the popular affirmation—"I will put my hand in the fire to confirm this," was derived from this custom of our rude ancestors. Challenging the accuser to single combat, when frequently the stoutest champion was allowed to supply their place; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... through the deserts, they came vnto a certaine countrey, wherein (as it was reported vnto vs in the Emperours court, by certaine clergie men of Russia and others, who were long time among them, and that by strong and stedfast affirmation) they found certaine monsters resembling women who being asked by many interpreters, where the men of that land were, they answered, that whatsoeuer women were borne there, were indued with the shape of mankinde, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt

... that "poetry conforms the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things." There could never be presented a subject less calculated to be wound up with a rhetorical flourish or to close in pompous affirmation than that which I have so temerariously brought before you this afternoon. I hope that you will not think that your time has been wasted while we have touched, lightly and erratically, like birds on boughs, upon some of the probable or possible features of the poetry of the future. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... of divorce. XX. There are also several accidental causes of cold; the first of which is, that enjoyment is common (or cheap), because continually allowed. XXI. The second is that living with a married partner, from a covenant and compact, seems to be forced and not free. XXII. The third is, affirmation on the part of the wife, and her talking incessantly about love. XXIII. The fourth is, the man's continually thinking that his wife is willing; and on the other hand, the wife's thinking that the man is not willing. XXIV. As cold is in the mind it is also in the body; and according ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... is criticised by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,—what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our {10} experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... fits. Upon recovery they "would cough extremely, and bring up much phlegm and crooked pins, and one time a twopenny nail with a very broad head; which pins (amounting to forty or more), together with the twopenny nail, were produced in court, with the affirmation of the said deponnent that he was present when the said nail was vomited up, and also most of the pins.... In this manner the said children continued for the space of two months, during which time, in their intervals, this deponnent would cause them to read some ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... there are two sorts of discretion—the active and the negative. Negative discretion is that of fools who make use of silence, negation, an air of refusal, the discretion of locked doors—mere impotence! Active discretion proceeds by affirmation. Suppose at the club this evening I were to say: 'Upon my word of honor the golden-eyed was not worth all she cost me!' Everybody would exclaim when I was gone: 'Did you hear that fop De Marsay, who tried to make us believe that he has already ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... by infinity, and you may guess a little of the sublime contentment which wraps me round! Does the best stage-trick of your liberal clergy help them to anything but a plasticity of mind to be moulded into artistic forms of skepticism? How can you feel the delight of a definite, positive affirmation which accounts for and includes all creeds and lives of men? How can you come out from your partial dogmas to enter Truth and find it alone dogmatic and compulsive? Clifton, I pity you. I would rescue you from this haze of thought and feeling,—I, who have even now ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... now professed were less objectionable, so she was examined as to former errors, among others "that she had denied inherent righteousness;" she "affirmed that it was never her judgment; and though it was proved by many testimonies ... yet she impudently persisted in her affirmation to the astonishment of all the assembly. So that ... the church with one consent cast her out.... After she was excommunicated her spirit, which seemed before to be somewhat dejected, revived again and she gloried in her sufferings." [Footnote: Winthrop, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... signal he had heard meant, "Is business good to-day?" And M. Joyeuse had replied, obeying only an instinct without any knowledge, "Fairly well for the season." Although young Maranne was very red as he made this affirmation, M. Joyeuse accepted his word at once. Only this idea of frequent communications between the two households made him afraid for the secrecy of his position, and from that time forward he cut himself off from what he used to call his "artistic days." Moreover, the moment ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... way? If these questions can be answered in the affirmative, Mr. Darwin's view steps out of the ranks of hypotheses into those of proved theories; but, so long as the evidence at present adduced falls short of enforcing that affirmation, so long, to our minds, must the new doctrine be content to remain among the former—an extremely valuable, and in the highest degree probable, doctrine, indeed the only extant hypothesis which is worth anything in a scientific point of view; but still a hypothesis, and not yet ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... are joyned together into a Consequence, or Affirmation; as thus, A Man Is A Living Creature; or thus, If He Be A Man, He Is A Living Creature, If the later name Living Creature, signifie all that the former name Man signifieth, then the affirmation, or consequence is True; otherwise False. For True and False are attributes ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson

... an autonomous person by making allowance for his protest and exercise of freedom. The next stage in the dialogue between them is the reassurance which the child experiences and reflects in his behavior in response to his parent's affirmation of him as a person. He may show this by a more realistic acceptance of the parent's authority. This in turn may reassure the parent, so that he feels more relaxed in the exercise of his authority. Gradually the parent and the child begin to experience a more mature relationship ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe

... Carvel answered Hermione's question about Professor Cutter by a simple affirmation to the effect that he was a very learned man, the young girl did not press her father with any more ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford

... financier. I have written him further, calling his attention to the fact that his letter conveys no information not heretofore made public in circular but that my inquiry was directed to the particular transaction alluded to in Everybody's, and requesting a flat affirmation or denial. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... these be inferior to the European races, in the opinion of the paramount West: for it is barely possible that, proceeding on other lines, and having reduced his knowledge to a system which precludes hypothesis and simple affirmation, the Eastern student has preserved a perfectly authentic record (for him) of those periods which his opponent regards as ante-historical. The bare fact that, while Western men of science are referred to as "scholars" and scholiasts—native Sanskritists and archeologists ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... emotions; tics of the ear or auditory tics; nictitation and vision tics, particularly of the eyelids; tics of sniffing; tics of sucking; tics of licking; tics of biting and of mastication, and mental trismus; tics of nodding, tossing, affirmation, negation, salutation and mental torticollis; trunk, arm and shoulder tics; snatching tics; the professional or occupational spasms, which are really a special atypical form of tics; walking and leaping tics; tics of spitting, swallowing, vomiting, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... me even to think of it. To redeem my name before the world would be of no avail to me now, for all my English habits are broken, and all that made life valuable to me is gone. If Long and Beauchamp could reject my solemn affirmation three years ago, what would a retractation slowly wrung from them be worth to me now? It might once have been, but that is all over now. Even the desire to take care of you would no longer actuate me since you have Keith again; and in ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... mankind accepted the virtue of relics, that intellects the equals of his own rejected that determinism to which he was bound, and that the Pagan world might be presented in a fashion very different from his own. And in that perpetual—often gratuitous —affirmation you have no sign of limitation in him but ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... which he appeared to have carried with him to the Placide, was regarded by those who knew him best as proving the truth of the affirmation elicited from him in the pauses of his delirium of the genuineness of the stone which had passed from his hands to those of his wife at the time of their separation; and, further despatches coming in, some private ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green

... warrant for the change of identity between Wendot and Griffeth, and for the escape and reinstatement of the former in the halls of Dynevor; but there are traditions which point to a possibility that he did escape from prison, in spite of the affirmation of the chroniclers, as there have been those who claim descent from him, which they would hardly have done if such had not been the case, for there is no record that he was married before he ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green

... the law of evidence has been on two main lines, originally, of course, under the Federal Constitution, to destroy all religious tests, and permit an atheist or person of heathen religion to testify upon simple affirmation, or according to his religious tenets. Universally, persons charged with crime have been permitted to testify in their own defence, with the common provision that no inference shall be drawn from their not doing so. Of course, by our Constitution itself, they were given the right to counsel ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... Zenobia, however, fully expecting her to resent—as I felt, by the indignant ebullition of my own blood, that she ought this outrageous affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of masculine egotism. It centred everything in itself, and deprived woman of her very soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to make it a mere incident in the great sum of man. Hollingsworth ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... States providing for the confiscation of property of persons engaged in rebellion have been instituted; but upon the condition, nevertheless, that every such person shall take and subscribe the following oath (or affirmation) and thenceforward keep and maintain said oath inviolate, and which oath shall be registered for permanent preservation and shall be of the tenor and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson

... their families, which renders the o'er populous world such a wilderness of selfhood as it is. Destroy this feeling, they say, and you prohibit every motive for exertion. Much truth is there in this affirmation. For to them no other motive remains, nor indeed to any one else, save that of the universal good, which does not permit the building up of supposed self-good, and, therefore, forecloses all possibility of an ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... suspicions of their honesty. New witnesses were called, but they only served to complicate matters; for out of thirty, nine or ten were convinced that the accused was Martin Guerre, seven or eight were as positive that he was Arnold du Tilh, and the rest would give no distinct affirmation either one ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous

... criterion either of good faith or of accuracy. "The accent of sincerity" is the appearance of conviction; an orator, an actor, an habitual liar will put more of it into his lies than an undecided man into his statement of what he believes to be the truth. Energy of affirmation does not always mean strength of conviction, but sometimes only cleverness or effrontery.[147] Similarly, abundance and precision of detail, though they produce a vivid impression on unexperienced readers, do not guarantee the accuracy ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... animal and psychological aspect. The emotion and gesture of it had not been excluded from the idea. So that while the argument proves to perfection that unwise courage is a bad thing, it does not end with an affirmation really true of the original concept. The instinct which we call courage, with an eye to its psychic and bodily quality, is not always virtuous or wise. Dialectic, when it starts with confused and deep-dyed feelings, like those which ethical and metaphysical terms generally ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... It will not be expected that I should be able to give a more correct explanation of my intentions after a lapse of three years, having declared at the time that many particulars had escaped my remembrance; neither shall I attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied in that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily, or with a strong probability, ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... certain pleasure in it. And when anything meets us which appears likely, our minds are filled with pleasure thoroughly worthy of a man. Both your wise man and ours, then, will inquire into these things; but yours will do so in order to assent, to feel belief, to express affirmation; ours, with such feelings that he will fear to yield rashly to opinion, and will think that he has succeeded admirably if in matters of this kind he has found out anything which ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... claim for the family really indicates its value. We live before we can interpret our life, and what is already achieved by those in the forward ranks shows what all may yet become. We are not left to chance or imagination or to argument or affirmation of principles to visualize the family as it is or as it may be. We may look about us and see what it is and can do for men and women. Few, perhaps, are standing on the heights of their own being when they build the family altar. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... difficulties and confusion in the classification invalidated the science along with its one main inference altogether. Yet we can see that such an argument would have been mistaken. There will probably be some points in every science which will never be cleared up to the end of time. The affirmation of the antiquity of Marcion's Gospel rests upon the simple axiom that every event must have a cause, and that in order to produce complicated phenomena the interaction of complicated causes is necessary. Such an assumption involves ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... translated either as a question or as an affirmation. It makes comparatively little difference to the substantial meaning whether we read 'believest thou?' or 'thou believest.' In the former case there will be a little more vivid expression of surprise and admiration at the swiftness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... discouraged, but to carry out his plan of "seeing Europe" during the summer, and return to Paris in the autumn and settle down comfortably for the winter. "Madame de Cintre will keep," she said; "she is not a woman who will marry from one day to another." Newman made no distinct affirmation that he would come back to Paris; he even talked about Rome and the Nile, and abstained from professing any especial interest in Madame de Cintre's continued widowhood. This circumstance was at variance with his habitual frankness, and may perhaps be regarded as characteristic ...
— The American • Henry James

... sign of affirmation; turning a last anxious glance at the low clouds which were chasing each other with extreme swiftness, he left the bridge, returned to his cabin, and soon resumed his interrupted slumbers. The next morning, the 22nd of June, as Captain Turcott had ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne

... the slightest shade of inquiry about words which might have seemed rude as a mere affirmation. Then she appeared to answer for herself, still with the same tinge of sadness faintly colouring her pride. "For this reason I cannot tell you how we ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... (formerly at any rate) the concept is the simple and primitive element; next comes the judgment, uniting two or several concepts; then ratiocination, combining two or several judgments. For the psychologists, on the contrary, affirmation is the fundamental act; the concept is the result of judgment (explicit or implicit), of similarities with exclusion ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell

... recognizing his mother at a distance—the child expresses by crowing sounds, which have become stronger and higher than they were, but which, can not be clearly designated; the nearest approach to a representation of them is [)a]hij[)a]. Affirmation and negation may already be recognized by the tone of voice alone. The signification of the cooing and the grunting sounds remains the same. The former indicates desire of food; the latter the need of relieving the ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... ashes of his funeral pyre. As was said in homely phrase some years ago, he 'always keeps bobbing up again.' What is the secret of this wonderful capacity of revival? How is it that Mr. Gladstone seems to find even his blunders help him, and the affirmation of principles that seem to be destructive to all chance of the success of his policy absolutely helps ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook

... example also, the Consequent phrase is a complete affirmation of its Antecedent, agreeing in its melodic form with the latter until the cadence is nearly due, when an extra measure is inserted (as extension), and the usual digression into the necessary perfect cadence is made. The condition of Unity predominates, but ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius

... by others. This can be done by resolutely substituting a health thought for a diseased one; no matter how fast negative thoughts crowd in upon the mind, they can be antidoted by the strong positive affirmation ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.

... soul are divine allurements." Ever welcome is the perception of this truth,—as the sublime audacity of Paracelsus, that "those who would understand the course of the heavens above must first of all recognize the heaven in man"; and the affirmation, that "the laws of Nature are the same as the thoughts within us: the laws of motion are such as are required by our understanding." It remains to say that Kepler, too, had intuition of this lofty thought. At the conclusion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... to Nau-hau, who nodded affirmation in the reverse Solomon way; whereupon Van Horn counted twenty-six gold sovereigns into ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... analogy. Take two pictures of a person printed from the same negative photograph; you do not say they are like each other, they are the same. It is most dangerous to fasten on any point of the depicted human procedure, and found on it the affirmation that the divine ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... Muscovite indifference which her father, Prince Tchereteff, might have displayed when ordering a spy or a traitor to be shot, she retraced her steps to the house, where all seemed to sleep, murmuring, with cold irony, in a sort of impersonal affirmation, as if she were thinking not of herself, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie

... instrumentality, mighty to relieve, has yet reached, shall think to put back,—as if we had no need of it,—this great gift of light and healing,—this gift of power, which the scientific ages are bringing in; this gift which the ages of 'anticipation,' the ages of inspiration and spontaneous affirmation, could only divinely—diviningly—foresee and promise;—this gift which the knowledge of the creative laws, the historic laws, the laws of kind, as they are actual in the human nature and the human life, puts into our hands? Who shall think himself competent to oppose this benefaction? ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... destined to commit crimes. 'It is unhappily a fact,' says Mr. Francis Galton ('Inquiries into Human Faculty'), 'that fairly distinct types of criminals breeding true to their kind have become established.' And he gives extraordinary examples, which fully bear out his affirmation. We may safely say that, in a very large number of cases, the worst crimes are perpetrated by beings for whom the death penalty has ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... Though Guizot's affirmation that the Church has always sided with despotism is only too true, it must be remembered that in the policy she follows there is much of political necessity. She is urged on by the pressure of nineteen centuries. But, if the irresistible indicates itself in her action, ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... prefer to rest it on foundations that cannot be shaken, on his moral oneness with God, the divineness of his spirit, the ideal perfectness of his life. The strength of this position being realized, the world begins to hear from Christian thinkers the innovating affirmation that belief of the miraculous birth can no longer be deemed essential to Christianity; else it would not have been left unmentioned in two of the four Gospels, and in every extant Apostolic letter. And now we hear theologians saying: "I accept it, but I place it no more among the evidences of ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... pretty white spoons from that wood to sell to the colonists. Horn was an appropriate and available material for spoons. Many Indian tribes excelled as they do to-day in the making of horn spoons. The vulgar affirmation, "By the great horn spoon," has ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... first human father dost believe, And of our well-beloved. And let this Henceforth be led unto thy feet, to make Thee slow in motion, as a weary man, Both to the 'yea' and to the 'nay' thou seest not. For he among the fools is down full low, Whose affirmation, or denial, is Without distinction, in each case alike Since it befalls, that in most instances Current opinion leads to false: and then Affection bends the judgment ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... could not now deal with these matters in an indifferent spirit. Everything she heard might have some bearing on the circumstances which she had discussed with Dr Porhoet times out of number. She had never been able to pin him down to an affirmation of faith. Certain strange things had manifestly happened, but what the explanation of them was, no man could say. He offered analogies from his well-stored memory. He gave her books to read till she was saturated with occult science. At one moment, she was ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... that proposition, an object is the same with itself, if the idea expressed by the word, object, were no ways distinguished from that meant by itself; we really should mean nothing, nor would the proposition contain a predicate and a subject, which however are implyed in this affirmation. One single object conveys the idea of unity, not ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... so abstract, obscure, and generally unpalatable, as Logic and Metaphysics, the difficulty which the teacher finds in inspiring interest is extreme. That Sir W. Hamilton overcame such difficulty with remarkable success, is the affirmation of his two editors; and our impression, as readers of his lectures, disposes us to credit them. That Sir W. Hamilton should have done this effectively is in itself sufficient to stamp him as a meritorious professor—as a worthy successor to the chair of Dugald Stewart, whose unrivalled perfection ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote

... made direct and clear affirmation that she had never had any intention to deny them; and that if—I noted the if—"if she had made some retractions and revocations on the scaffold it was from fear of the fire, and it was a violation of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... He nodded affirmation. We use a great deal of coal in our cooking, and when the present supply gives out we shall have to cut through a bulkhead to get ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... the reproach of a personal interest. Let us say frankly he was a party man; he believed the policies advocated by him and his friends counted for much in the country's progress and prosperity. He hoped in his second term to accomplish substantial results in the development and affirmation of those policies. I spent a day with him shortly before he started on his fateful journey to Buffalo. Never had I seen him higher in hope and patriotic confidence. He was gratified to the heart that we had arranged a treaty ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... "Romanzero," dated 1851, there appeared, amid much mystifying banter, a declaration that he had embraced Theism and the belief in a future life, and what chiefly lent an air of seriousness and reliability to this affirmation was the fact that he took care to ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... new-born infant in ancient Mexico, the mother thus addressed the Sun and the Earth: "Thou Sun, Father of all that live, and thou Earth, our Mother, take ye this child, and guard it as your son." A common affirmation with them was: "By the life of the Sun, and of our ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... affirmation is given by Mr IBSEN'S declaration in the Storthing, that the negotiations fell through in consequence of Mr BOSTROeM'S opposition to the request of the Norwegian delegates that in the Communique it should be mentioned that the identical laws were to be valid only "so long ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund

... see how much such a surrender signifies; for the moment it suffices to say plainly that Pantheism, the doctrine which denies the transcendence of God, is by no means the same as that which affirms His immanence, nor does it logically follow from that affirmation. The mistake so frequently made lies in regarding the Divine immanence and the Divine transcendence as mutually exclusive alternatives, whereas they are complementary to one another. A one-sided insistence on the immanence of God, to the exclusion of His ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... the public affirmation of class, if it were imaginable, could not be imaginable except upon the terms of a mutinous protest in the spectators which would not have been less real for being silent. But again I say the thing would not have been possible with us in New York; though in Newport, where the aristocratic tradition ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... and thirst after righteousness;" and he put the blessed Sacrament in the colonel's mouth. The news of the old soldier's affirmation ran through the town. The strange and terrible oath, which was repeated from one to the other, made a profound impression on the public. The relations and friends of the count made a great parade of the matter. ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... place in their speculations. Science, while seeking to explore every part of the physical universe, never escapes from the fascination of this question. Is the death of the body the end of the spirit? Or, if we have not sufficient material for a positive statement, is there enough to make a strong affirmation of probability? We are facing the deepest mystery which is ever presented to thinking men. Heretofore we have been trying to follow a history clearly marked in the progress of humanity; now we can only balance ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... indeed," Hilda replied, and bent her shamed head upon her hands again in the confession. It is not strange that he heard only the affirmation in it. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... replied; "she didn't." He found himself studying a face at once youthful and lined, a good jaw contradicted by a mouth already traced with discontent, and yellow-brown eyes kindling with a surprising energy of resentment. "You are Byron Polder's son?" he said in a manner that carried its own affirmation. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... await the ghost's arrival. It was then explained by Parsons, that although the ghost would never render itself visible to any body but his daughter, it had no objection to answer the questions that might be put to it, by any person present, and that it expressed an affirmation by one knock, a negative by two, and its displeasure by a kind of scratching. The child was then put into bed along with her sister, and the clergymen examined the bed and bed-clothes to satisfy themselves that no trick was played, by knocking upon any substance concealed ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... guaranteed rights of individuals, on the plea of conserving the public safety—when I may choose to say the public safety requires it. This question, divested of the phraseology calculated to represent me as struggling for an arbitrary prerogative, is either simply a question who shall decide, or an affirmation that nobody shall decide, what the public safety does require in ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... time, however rapidly its forms may change. The other, in the symbol of suffering and death, points to the denial of the will to live, to redemption from this world, the domain of death and devil. And in the question between the affirmation and the denial of the will to live, Christianity is in the ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer

... directness of appeal may be heightened by addressing the question to the reader with "you," "your," or by presenting it from the reader's point of view with the use of "I," "we," or "ours." The sub-title may be another question or an affirmation, but should not attempt to answer the question. The following are typical question titles ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... to be ridiculed as a superstitious dreamer—nor, on the other hand, could I ask you to accept on my affirmation what you would hold to be incredible without the evidence of your own senses. Let me only say this, it was not so much what we saw or heard (in which you might fairly suppose that we were the dupes of our own excited fancy, or the victims of imposture in others) ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various

... of this is short: Christianity teaches the rights of God, not the rights of man or woman. You may search the Bible from Genesis to Revelations, and not find one clear, strong, bold affirmation of human rights as such; yet it is on human rights as such—on the equality of all individuals, man or woman, with respect to natural rights—that the demand for woman suffrage must ultimately rest. I know I stand nearly alone in this, but I believe ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... inquisitiveness, without recourse to the unlawful method of lying. Silence is not an effective resource, for it not infrequently gives consent one or the other way; the question may be put in such a manner that affirmation or negation will betray the truth. To what then shall one ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... left him, wrote his last testamentary note. It was a rehearsal of the topics on which he meant to speak on the scaffold. If his mouth were closed it was intended to be a substitute. He repeated in it his constant affirmation of his loyalty: 'If,' he said, 'I had not loved and honoured the King truly, and trusted in his goodness somewhat too much, I had not suffered death.' Then the poet awoke in him. He wrote in the Bible which he gave to ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... called the Bocca della Verita, and has given its name to the irregular piazza in which the church is situated. It is so called from the use to which it has been put from time immemorial, as an ordeal for testing the guilt or innocence of an accused person. If the suspected individual on making an affirmation thrust his hand through the hole and was able to draw it back again, he was pronounced innocent; but if, on the contrary, the hand remained fixed in the marble jaws, the person was declared to have sworn falsely and was pronounced guilty. The marble mouth was ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... named, who was expert for war in the membership of the Secret Room, came a short grunt of affirmation. A few ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... given me by the boy and his mother's implicit approval were only the decisive affirmation of that indomitable spirit of freedom that animates the Sakai and makes him do what he likes but never ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti

... the denouement is not the same; and the fundamental difference of temperament between the two artists is strongly marked. M. d'Indy finishes with the renouncement of a Christian, and Herr Richard Strauss by a proud and joyous affirmation of independence.] ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... She nodded vigorous affirmation of the statement. "So I'm told, at least; so Walter tells me; and he ought to know; he claims to have been the moving spirit in the affair. When he found out his mistake, of course, he posted off after ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... accustom a servant to tell a lie for me, have I not reason to apprehend that he will tell many lies for himself.' I am, however, satisfied that every servant, of any degree of intelligence, understands saying his master is not at home, not at all as the affirmation of a fact, but as customary words, intimating that his master wishes not to be seen; so that there can be ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... them. They were overtaken the next day and brought back to the scene of the murder. They both stoutly denied any knowledge of the crime. They were separated, and each was told that the other had confessed. This was done that a confession might be forced from them. They continued in their affirmation of innocence. They were then taken to the woods near by and each hung up until life was almost extinct, but they still denied the commission of the crime. They were at length taken to the county seat, not ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds

... claimed that the court decision by which Ducconius had had to refund to my uncle all the rents received from the farm in dispute since the first decision of the lowest court had awarded it to a Ducconius had been, in effect, an affirmation that his ancestors and he had always been, constructively, tenants of ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... inquiry. When Mr. Bradlaugh lay on his death-bed, on the very night the House of Commons was debating the resolution to expunge from the Order Book the dictum that stood there through eleven years, declaring him ineligible either to take the oath or to make affirmation, Sir Walter Barttelot appealed to the House unanimously to pass the motion, concluding his remarks with emphatic expression of the hope that "God would spare ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... from the time of Augustus. The vow of poverty, therefore, was a stern, lofty, disdainful protest against the most dangerous and demoralizing evil of the Empire. It hurled scorn, hatred, and defiance on this overwhelming evil, and invoked the aid of Christianity. It was simply the earnest affirmation and belief that money could not buy the higher joys of earth, and might jeopardize the hopes of heaven. It called to mind the greatest examples; it showed that the great teachers of mankind, the sages and prophets of history, had disdained money as the highest good; that riches exposed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord

... post-horn with him to further contribute to the harmony of the evening. It seemed to be a great art in the singers of the chorus to dwell as long as possible on the third repetition of the word "fellow," and in the most defiant manner to pounce down on the bold affirmation by which it is followed; and then to lyrically proclaim that, not only was it a way they had in the Varsity to drive dull care away, but that the same practice was also pursued in the army and navy for the attainment ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... of those whose very position enabled them to be well informed. When Mrs. Turner was confronted with the proof of her error, and gently upbraided by the placid captain for being so positive in her affirmation or denial, that pretty matron was wont to shrug her lovely shoulders, and petulantly set aside the subject with the comprehensive excuse, "Oh, well! ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King

... but I do not think it necessary for a man to be a theist in order to become or to remain a citizen of this country. The various laws, from 1790 up to 1828, provided that the person wishing to be naturalized might make oath or affirmation. The first exception you will find in the Revised Statutes of the United States passed in 1873-74, section 2,165, as follows:—"An alien may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States in the following manner, and not otherwise:—First, ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... a real clash between two principles; not shades of principles as these may subsist between Germany and her western foes, but principles in all their essential features; not between different tints of gray, but between black and white, between affirmation and negation; affirmation of the principle of human dignity, liberty, safety, and negation of the same; western evolution and ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various



Words linked to "Affirmation" :   asseveration, avouchment, faith, statement, averment, judgment, religion, commitment, affirmative, speech act, jurisprudence, affirm, profession, assertion, reversal, judicial decision, avowal, say-so, religious belief, reassertion, dedication, judgement, professing, reaffirmation, law



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