"Credulity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Roselius and his colleagues endeavored to lay upon the defendants the burden of proof which the lower court had laid upon Salome. He admitted generously the entire sincerity of Salome's kinspeople in believing plaintiff to be the lost child; but reminded the court of the credulity of ill-trained minds, the contagiousness of fanciful delusions, and especially of what he somehow found room to call the inflammable imagination of the German temperament. He appealed to history; to the scholarship of the bench; citing the stories of Martin ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... but our henchman, the negro lad Arthur, assured us that every fish we had caught was poisonous. We had reason later to doubt this assertion, as we saw him walking home with a splendid parti-coloured string of fish, probably chuckling over the white man's credulity. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... before. Had he been laughing at her last night? she asked herself indignantly; was that balcony scene a practical joke? He had been describing it to Lady Geraldine perhaps this afternoon, and the two had been laughing together at her credulity. She was in so bitter a mood just now that she was almost ready to ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... blind faith to the rational inquiry into the development of nature. The beginnings of knowing the scientific causes were very small, and sometimes ridiculous, yet they were of immense importance. To take a single step from the "age of credulity" toward the "age of reason" was of great importance to Greek progress. To cease to accept on faith the statements that the world was created by the gods, and ordered by the gods, and that all mysteries were ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... that Joan would accompany Reid in the night to Swan Carlson's house on any pretext he could devise in his crafty mind was absurd. It was all a bluff, Reid playing on Swan's credulity to induce him to hand over the money, when he would make a dash for ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... man's mission consisted merely in hardening his muscles, sweating and delighting in the shifting chances of a game. Activity fled from the brain to the extremities of the body. They were strong, but their minds lay fallow, wrapped in a haze of childish credulity. Modern men seemed to stop growing at the age of fourteen; they never went beyond, content with the joys of movement and strength. Many of these big fellows were ignorant of women, or almost so, at the age when in other times they were turning back, satiated ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... worked, lived and died to free us from superstition, from credulity, from ignorance, yet still we stand in the same place, and fail to appreciate the freedom that ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... by certain writers, with more credulity than discretion, of some personal characteristics of a great-hearted man. My purpose in tendering this sketch to the lovers of FitzGerald is to show that in many ways he has been calumniated. The man who could write the ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... same satisfaction I found that the result of my inquiry concerning your clergy was not dissimilar. It is no soothing news to my ears, that great bodies of men are incurably corrupt. It is not with much credulity I listen to any, when they speak evil of those whom they are going to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned or exaggerated, when profit is looked for in their punishment. An enemy is a bad witness; a robber is a worse. Vices and abuses ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to perfection on your verandah in twenty minutes might be able to do it, but not a consistent Christian. Nevertheless I affirm that I have done all these things, and I shall even venture to make other demands upon the public credulity. ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... the evidence, decided unhesitatingly in her favor. The stories of the witnesses were utterly inconsistent with each other, and in many of their details impossible. Still, so great was the public credulity, and so eager the desire to believe every thing, however absurd, which would arouse and strengthen the anti-Catholic feeling, that the queen found herself soon the object of ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... mingled doubt, rage, and despair of Hero's father is, moreover, undoubtedly affecting. Nevertheless, powerful as these scenes are, they are so girt about with laughter that they cannot destroy our good spirits. Even at their height, the manifestations of human wickedness, credulity, and weakness seem but the illusions of a moment, soon to be dissipated by the power of radiant mirth. It is not without significance that the deep-laid plot should be defeated through the agency of the immortal Dogberry, most deliciously ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... concealed within, which excited his fears? He replied, he was afraid lest he should be called a naturalist, and so an atheist, by the clergy, and a man of unsound reason by the laity; as they both either believe from a blind credulity, or see from the sight of those who confirm that credulity. But just then, being impelled by a kind of indignant zeal for the truth, we addressed him in saying, "Friend, you are much deceived; your ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... of veterans—race of victors! Race of the soil, ready for conflict—race of the conquering march! (No more credulity's race, abiding-temper'd race,) Race henceforth owning no law but the law of itself, Race of passion and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Hume[5] has pointed out, also, the readiness with which men believe, on very slight evidence, any story that pleases their imagination by its admirable and marvellous character. Such hasty credulity, however, as he well remarks, is utterly unworthy of a philosophical mind; which should rather suspend its judgment the more, in proportion to the strangeness of the account, and yield to none but the ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... the wall and a stool, and a kettle in the fireplace, with a little pile of sticks and a great scattering of ashes, but no one there, and also, if I may be believed, no broom. All this I tell for what it may be worth to the credulity of them who hear; the facts be such as I have said. But whether believing it myself or not, yet knowing that that white cat, though it had been Margery Key in such guise, or her familiar imp on his way to join her at some revel whither she ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... The ladies, he said, had sent him after us in all haste; there was a report that the whole coast was to be shelled; a lady had passed, flying with her children; the carriage was ordered out; they were only waiting for us, to run, too. We did not believe a word of it, and were indignant at their credulity, as well as determined to persuade them to remain where they were, if possible. When told their plan was to run to the house formerly used as a guerrilla camp, we laughed heartily. Suppose the Yankees fired a shell into it to discover ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... St. Louis, in common with every one else on board, had already had his credulity stretched about as far as it would go, and he was beginning to wonder whether he was really awake; but when he heard the hail and recognised the speaker he stared at him in blank and, for the moment, speechless bewilderment. Then ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... principle which every argument of sound policy should have dictated, upon the condition that the forty acres could in no wise be alienated, and that it could be regarded only as property as long as it was cultivated; and a fool because he designed simply to impose upon the credulity and ignorance of his victims. But the justness of the "forty acre" donation cannot be controverted. In the first place, the slave had earned this miserable stipend from the government by two hundred years of unrequited toil; and, secondly, as a free man, he was inherently entitled to so much of the ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... called by names he knows—kings, bishops, judges, poets, priests, men of letters—but what a gulf between him and them! What motives, what beliefs, what embryonic processes of thought and morals, what bizarre combinations of ignorance and knowledge, of the highest sanctity with the lowest credulity or falsehood; what extraordinary prepossessions, born with a man and tainting his whole ways of seeing and thinking from childhood to the grave! Amid all the intellectual dislocation of the spectacle, indeed, he perceives certain Greeks and certain Latins ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that this good luck will happen to any one that is favoured with a dream of the calf three times in succession. All our party professed to believe the local tradition, especially one who had been in Europe, and from whom such credulity had been less expected; but he was sure that some tales of that nature are well founded, and if so, why not this? In my opinion, it is probably a superstition connected with some ancient form ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... Oswestry and Newtown line found it expedient to assure the community that "preparations for letting the contract were in active progress" and the first sod was to be cut on April 11th. Alas for the optimism of eager pioneers and the credulity of an impatient public! April 11th came and proved nothing else than a slightly belated "All Fools Day"! No sod was cut. Not a spade or a barrow was visible, and the operation might, by all appearances be postponed till the Greek Kalends. Patience, already sorely tried, ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... ignorant you say The thing that's not, elated still to sway The crass credulity of gaping fools And women by ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... lessons of experience; and hence recourse has been had to a series of the wildest and most extravagant conjectures, such as may well justify the opinion of those who have held that the creed of certain philosophers makes a much larger demand on human credulity than that of almost any section of the Christian Church. For, according to that theory, the origin of the FLORA is first accounted for by the action of some element—probably electricity—on a certain mucus, which is supposed to be generated at those points where the ocean comes ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... after us, and who will look without prejudice or excitement at the record of events which have occurred in our day, will not fail to wonder how men professing and proclaiming such a belief should have so far imposed upon the credulity of the world as to be able to arrogate to themselves the claim of being the special friends of a Union contracted in order to insure "domestic tranquillity" among the people of the States united; that they were the advocates ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... guardian had tempted her to commit suicide. The only incident which she omitted from her story was that which had occurred the night before, for she felt that it might put too severe a tax upon Mrs. Scully's credulity. Indeed, looking back at it, she almost persuaded herself that the sight which she had seen might be some phantom conjured up by her own imagination, weakened as she was ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to warn you, friend of my youth, against excessive credulity. When a fellow tells you that the cartridges in your revolver are damp, however great your confidence in that fellow may be, even though his name be Arsene Lupin, never allow yourself to be taken in. Fire first; and, if the ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... with the existence of the commonwealth. According to Ludlow, the best soldier and statesman in the opposite party, Monk had in view an additional object, to deceive the suspicions and divert the vigilance of his adversaries; and so successfully had he imposed on the credulity of many (Hazlerig himself was of the number), that, in defiance of every warning, they blindly trusted to his sincerity, till their eyes were opened by the introduction of ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... drove to a famous apothecary's, in the Rue St. Honore. "This," said she to the shopman, "is the residence of my homme d'affaires: follow me, and you shall have your money." She accordingly alighted, and, after saying a few words in the ear of the doctor, on whose credulity she had already exercised her genius, desired him to take the young man to his private room, and settle the business, while she remained ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... silence to find the table laid, a plentiful supper spread, and the company seated. After supper came singing of songs, saying of ballads, and telling of tales. I know with what in- credulity many highlanders will read of a merry-making in their own country at which no horn went round, no punch-bowl was filled and emptied without stint! But the clearer the brain, the better justice is done to ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... pronounce themselves freethinkers on principle. On the contrary, Dryden seems to have doubted with such a strong wish to believe, as, accompanied with circumstances of extrinsic influence, led him finally into the opposite extreme of credulity. His view of the doctrines of Christianity, and of its evidence, were such as could not legitimately found him in the conclusions he draws in favour of the Church of England; and accordingly, in adopting them, he evidently stretches his complaisance towards the national religion, while perhaps ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... inaccessible to your inquiry and to the malice of my foe, where I might henceforth employ myself in composing a faithful narrative of my actions. I designed it as my vindication from the aspersions that had rested on my character, and as a lesson to mankind on the evils of credulity on the one hand, and of ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... unknown nationality; for surely his name marks him as no Hindoo. The Master could not have brought him, shivering like Jos Sedley's black servant, to Scotland. As in America, this alien would have found it "too dam cold." My power of belief (which verges on credulity) is staggered by the ghastly attempt to reanimate the buried Master. Here, at least to my taste, the freakish changeling has got the better of Mr. Stevenson, and has brought in an element out of keeping with the steady ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... undisturbed. The Union soldiers who are stationed within its limits are as orderly as if they were in New York or Boston.... One effect of the march of General Sherman through Georgia has been to satisfy the people that their credulity has been imposed upon by the lying assertions of the rebel Government, affirming the inability of the United States Government to withstand the armies of rebeldom. They have seen the old flag of the United States carried by its victorious legions through their State, almost unopposed, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... east to west, and he adopted the crescent of his dream for his standard, adding the motto, Donec repleat orbem." [153] Schlegel mentions the story that Mahomet "wished to pass with his disciples as a person transfigured in a supernatural light, and that the credulity of his followers saw the moon, or the moon's light, descend upon him, pierce his garments, and replenish him. That veneration for the moon which still forms a national or rather religious characteristic of the Mahometans, may perhaps have its foundation in the elder superstition, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... been judicious in my selection of those which I hoped would amuse the reader, but I have done my best to choose for insertion those which differed the most from each other; and I may be allowed to add as an excuse for my apparent credulity regarding the tales themselves, that they are implicitly believed by the inhabitants, so that, making allowance for the corruption of tradition, the facts on which they are founded in all ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... few such weaknesses exist, they do not count for much with the average reader when the principal scenes are as finely drawn as those in A Marked Man or Fidelis, or The Three Miss Kings. The latter story in some details puts a greater strain upon the credulity than any of the other novels, yet so well conceived and absolutely natural are the characters of the three girls, and so humorously and pictorially presented the chief incidents in their development, that the dubious points of the plot become almost insignificant. The qualities ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... not been withheld by the advice of his first lieutenant, who was a renegade Englishman, [Footnote: Who, by the way, was Mr. Parker, born in Virginia, and never in England in his life.] it is not of much consequence whether his making the statement was due to excessive credulity or petty meanness, for, in either case, whether the defect was in his mind or his morals, it is enough to greatly impair the value of his other "facts." Again, when James (p. 165) states that Decatur ran away from the Macedonian ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... opinion, however, he erred greatly. The same rural credulity that made him the victim of Peter Smartweed, now led him to suppose that the unscrupulous rascals who held him a prisoner would soon release him. He looked upon the matter as simply one of revenge on the part of Mortimer. He little realized his true situation, ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... sorry to see them other than they are; but it is somewhat singular to hear people talking of Turner's exquisite care and watchfulness in color as false, while they receive such cases of preposterous and audacious fiction with the most generous and simple credulity. ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... with which to fan some sick person, and from this process would hope for miraculous intervention in behalf of the suffering one. "And do you believe there is any efficacy in such a proceeding?" we asked. "You would call it the result of credulity and imagination," was his intelligent reply, "but I have seen some wonderful cures brought about after this manner. Do not people, who call themselves Christians, believe in prayer?" "Most certainly," we replied. ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... I, take not advantage of my credulity, and these my weak moments: but were I the first lady in the land, instead of the poor abject Pamela, I would, I could tell you. But I can say ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... these notes, a freshness of sentiment and a youthful credulity which produced the impression of a clear morning in early spring, all the frankness and faith of a mind ignorant of evil and destitute of guile; then, in the later ones, the spontaneous outburst of a heart which believes it has given ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... always rigorously pure, is formed with great diligence upon ancient models, and wholly uninfected with monastic barbarity. His history is written with elegance and vigour, but his fabulousness and credulity are justly blamed. His fabulousness, if he was the author of the fictions, is a fault for which no apology can be made; but his credulity may be excused in an age, when all men were credulous. Learning was then rising on the world; but ages so long accustomed to darkness, ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... simplicity "I'll make Dr. Johnson a convert" (to the view then still largely obtaining that Rowley's poems were written in the fifteenth century) and he pointed to the "Wondrous chest".' '"There" said he 'with a bouncing confident credulity "There is the very chest itself"!' After which 'ocular demonstration', Boswell remarks, 'there was no more to be said.' It was to such men as these that Chatterton read his 'Rouleie's' poems. Another of his audience was Mr. Barrett, ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... are little else than a narrative of miracles,—frequently, however, with such apparent marks of weakness or design that they afford little encouragement to insist on them. They were then received with a blind credulity: they have been since rejected with as undistinguishing a disregard. But as it is not in my design nor inclination, nor indeed in my power, either to establish or refute these stories, it is sufficient to observe, that the reality or opinion ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of God and intended for use, surely it is very strange to silence them in your search for the supreme truth. Faith, of course, has its place, but it must not be blind faith. Reason must test, verify, and interpret, or faith is mere credulity. ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... centuries later, when credulity concerning miracles was on the wane, that the priests began to study and to apply medical means in order to sustain the reputation of the place, and to keep ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... the miracle resolved itself into a series of events which, though surprising enough, could not by any stretch of the credulity ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... in a lower latitude, which they who give credit (if any such there now be) to the pretended discoveries of De Fonte, affect to wish had been recommended to Captain Cook, has (if that will cure them of their credulity) been satisfactorily made. The Spaniards, roused from their lethargy by our voyages, and having caught a spark of enterprise from our repeated visits to the Pacific Ocean, have followed us more than once into the line of our discoveries within ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... now do you forgive my faith and credulity, Miss Vernon," he said, sauntering in with a noble dog ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... the veil himself, from the studies which made him a poet. "In my boyish days," he says to Moore, "I owed much to an old woman (Jenny Wilson) who resided in the family, remarkable for her credulity and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs, concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... free criticism of the scriptures, in the Froben Plato the substitution of Platonic idealism for the scholastic philosophy based on Aristotle, in the Nuremberg book the epitome of mediaeval superstition, credulity, and curiosity on the verge of the new era, and in Morte d'Arthur the fond return of the modern mind, facing an unknown future, upon the naive and beautiful legends of Arthurian romance. An age full of contradictions and strange delusions, but an age ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... good understanding between the reader and the author. It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and we are right to resent it. It is the violence of a weakling hand—the worst manner of violence. Exaggeration is conspicuous in the newer poetry, and is so far, therefore, successful, conspicuousness being its aim. But it was also the vice of Swinburne, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... good faith. No lurking horrors were to upbraid him for his easy credulity. He did consent. He had not been at Donwell for two years. "Some very fine morning, he, and Emma, and Harriet, could go very well; and he could sit still with Mrs. Weston, while the dear girls walked about the gardens. He did not suppose they could be damp now, in the middle of ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Morning Post, it evinces more weakness in its disbelief than the Record in its credulity. What the former says about doubting on account of inaccuracy in the detail of the phthisical symptoms, is a mere fetch, as the Cockneys have it, in order to make a very few little children believe ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... in upon the editor, saying that while, as a general rule, the writers were willing to stand the ordinary lie of commerce daily printed in the sheet, there was a limit to their credulity and they objected to be taken for drivelling imbeciles. To complete the discomfiture of the Daily Bugle, the Government of Austria published an official statement, which Reuter and the special correspondents ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... Asia. His talents are spoken of in high terms, but his credit as an historian is held very light—"probatur ingenium, fides infamatur," Quint. x. 1, 74. Cicero also (de Leg. i. 2) ranks him very low. That his credit as an historian was sacrificed to a childish credulity and a foolish love of fable and adventure is sufficiently testified by the pretty numerous fragments which still remain (Pauly). Demetrius Phalereus, quoted by Pearce, quotes a grandiloquent description ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... with producing a change of opinion in the captain, who always listened politely, but with just such an air of credulity as you might suppose one born to the benefits of the Burgerschaft, and who had got to be fifty, would listen to a dead attack on all his ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... understand you," she said. "You have a good deal of the brutality of youth, Guy, and, I might add, of its credulity also. Whose word is it, I wonder, that you have taken so abjectly—with such an open mouth? If I have enemies I have not deserved them. But, after all, ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... would blaze forth upon those hands which had upheld her in the darkest stages of her passage from impending servitude to acknowledged independence. But faith has its limits, as well as temper, and there are points beyond which neither can be stretched without sinking into cowardice, or plunging into credulity. This, my friends, I conceive to be your situation. Hurried to the very verge of both, another step would ruin you for ever. To be tame and unprovoked when injuries press hard upon you, is more than weakness; but to look up for ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... point to the good American tradition that it is the educated man who finally succeeds. The richest man in the Italian colony can neither read nor write—even Italian. His cunning and acquisitiveness, combined with the credulity and ignorance of his countrymen, have slowly brought about his large fortune. The child himself may feel the stirring of a vague ambition to go on until he is as the other children are; but he is not popular with his schoolfellows, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... both medical testimony and individual 370:24 experience, a drug may eventually lose its supposed power and do no more for the patient. Hygienic treatment also loses its efficacy. Quackery 370:27 likewise fails at length to inspire the credulity of the sick, and then they cease to improve. These les- sons are useful. They should naturally and genuinely 370:30 change our basis from sensation to Christian Science, from error to Truth, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... easy to conceive the abuse that may be made by the clergy of the credulity of a nation in which such ridiculous and absurd practices prevail as those to which we have already alluded. The priest is considered, in Roman Catholic countries, as the representative of Jesus Christ, the only depositary of true doctrine, the only ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... scamps of the tribe. My dear father must forgive me for reflecting so harshly on his brother practitioners, and be reconciled when he hears that they belong to the corps of quacks; for they doubt their own powers, and are constantly imposing on the credulity of others. On returning from an evening walk, we met, near the fort, a notable procession. First came an old medicine man, whose Indian name I cannot recall; but the children of the garrison called him "Old Sneak"—a most appropriate appellation, ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... in which credulity shook hands with faith. Belief was in the air. If doubt did whisper, "Let me see, please," it was too low to be quite audible. Come-Back Stumper was surrounded by an atmosphere of black-edged glory suddenly; he wore a halo; his ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... strictly enforced. You, dear sir, are too little experienced in these circumstances, however obvious your other merits are to me, to act on your own judgment in the matter, as you have hitherto done. Credulity can in the present instance only lead to embarrassment, the result of which might prove injurious to you rather than beneficial, and this I wish to avoid for the ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... Indians in the heart of the strange country to which he had penetrated, Raleigh became in many ways the victim of his ignorance and his pardonable credulity. Not only was he gulled with diamonds and sapphires that were really rock-crystals, but he was made to believe that there existed west of the Orinoco a tribe of Indians whose eyes were in their shoulders, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... written these treatises need not rest on this fact, however honourably it appeals to our candour. Let us place it on higher ground, and tell those who asperse this monarch for his credulity and intellectual weakness, that they themselves, had they lived in the reign of James I., had probably written on the same topics, and felt as uneasy at the rumour of a witch being ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... divination to a system, and, by the help of the barsom or bundle of divining rods, undertook to return a true answer on all points connected with the future, upon which they might be consulted. Credulity is never wanting among Orientals; and the power of the priesthood was no doubt greatly increased by a pretension which was easily made, readily believed, and not generally discredited by failures, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... individuals, and whole families, live in idleness, without any settled abode, concluding every day with schemes for defrauding the public of their subsistence for the next: where the children belonging to this numerous society are made use of to impose on the credulity of the benevolent, and where they are regularly trained, from their earliest infancy, in all those infamous practices, which are carried on systematically, and to such ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... unconsciousness of their antagonism is the most notable characteristic of the modern scientific mind; and I believe no credulity or fallacy admitted by the weakness (or it may sometimes rather have been the strength) of early imagination, indicates so strange a depression beneath the due scale of human intellect, as the failure of the sense of beauty in form, and loss of faith in heroism of conduct, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... drink together in the dining room, and then repair together to "Old Forty Rods," or some other favorite haunt. Together they seek for pleasure in the haunts of the vilest, Evan continually playing upon the vanity and credulity in Burrill's nature, to push him forward as the leader in all their debauches, the master spirit, the ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... becomes with amazing rapidity a resistless force. The reason for its uncanny power lies in the fact that when once formed it is dominated by the unconscious, not the conscious forces, of man's nature. Its credulity is boundless. Its passions dominate all life. The records of history are a sealed book. Experience ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... now at his credulity, as he had done once at his incredulity over the same peculiar word. Then recurred to him that wonderful little saying ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... swindle the commonwealth by means of the absolute freedom with which loans were granted. In America a syndicate of speculative 'men of business' was formed for the purpose of exploiting the simple-minded credulity of us 'stupid Freelanders.' Their plan was to draw as large a sum as possible from our central bank under the pretence of requiring it to found an association. Forty-six of the cleverest and most unscrupulous Yankees joined in this campaign against our pockets. What they meant to ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... OF BROTH: An ancient story, pleasantly dramatized, of a witty wanderer who plays to his advantage on the credulity, greed, and love of flattery of ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... of the book I remember as a mysterious Swede right enough. Whether he was a baron, too, I am not so certain. He himself never laid claim to that distinction. His detachment was too great to make any claims, big or small, on one's credulity. I will not say where I met him because I fear to give my readers a wrong impression, since a marked incongruity between a man and his surroundings is often a very misleading circumstance. We became very friendly for a time, and I would not like to expose him to unpleasant suspicions ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... therefore, crouch with timid servility to great names. The opinions of men of erudition, and genius, and holy zeal for religion, are to be examined with modest deference, but not to be received with implicit credulity. In the most enlightened and holy men, who, since the decease of the apostles, have served God and his Christ; in the fathers of the ancient Church; in those who headed the Protestant Reformation, and ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... inquiries among the seamen. Two or three asserted that they had witnessed an extraordinary sight during the night, but they all differed considerably in their accounts. It may be supposed that they were trying to practise on the credulity of a greenhorn. My belief is that they really fancied that they had seen what ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... careless and humiliating manner as we. It should be our pride to revise our ideas and not to adhere to what passes for respectable opinion, for such opinion can frequently be shown to be not respectable at all. We should, in view of the considerations that have been mentioned, resent our supine credulity. As ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... pleasures appeared to me ever fresh and young, filled up all my hours satisfactorily, gave a new zest to life, and diffused a lasting serenity over my mind. If he believe me, it can only be from respect and veneration for my authority. It is credulity, and not conviction. I have not said any thing, nor can any thing be said, of a nature to produce real conviction. The affair is not an affair of reasoning, but of experience. He would probably observe in reply, what you say may be very true with regard to yourself and many other good ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... and rumor with her half-lying tongue often whispered in the public ear the suspicion that the earl and the dowager princess were unmindful of the requirements of virtue. Public credulity believed the scandal, and the public mind became troubled because the pupilage of the future sovereign was under the guidance of the shallow earl. He was a tutor more expert in the knowledge of stage-plays, the paraphernalia of the acted drama, and the laws of fashion ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... the early boat left next morning, driven by undefined anxieties towards Madame Clementine's alley. There is a childish credulity which clings to imaginative people through life. I had accepted the blue man and the woman with floating hair in the way which they chose to present themselves. But I began to feel like one who sees a distinctly focused picture shimmering to a dissolving view. The intrusion of an accident to a ...
— The Blue Man - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... friend. I don't quite believe it all,—it would be too delicious; but a great many do." Madame Goesler, however, was strong in her opinion that the report in reference to Lady Laura was scandalous. She did not believe a word of it, and was almost angry with the Duchess for her credulity. ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... to put into this paper a picturesque Sicilian woman who has grown old in years but is still a child in spirit. She loves a fairy story as much as she did sixty years ago, and listens with the same breathless credulity. One night about twilight as I sat on the front steps with her and several little Italian children, listening to her tales of the old home country, there came a silence in our little group. Suddenly Angel Licavoli asked, "Teacher, what ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... time I take up the book with the thoroughness of his work, and the soundness of his judgments. I would not say the same of some of his predecessors, great lawyers though they were, for in dealing with mediaeval affairs they showed a wonderful credulity. To me it seems that he has often gone right when they went wrong, and that his estimate of historical evidence was very much sounder than theirs. The amount of uncongenial, if not repulsive labour that he must ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... of Madame Virubova, the favorite lady-in-waiting of the czarina. With the credulity of a superstitious woman of her class, the czarina was a patroness of many occult cults and had a firm belief in the influence of invisible spirits. Rasputin was presented to her by the lady-in-waiting as an occult ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... the opportunities for illicit gain afforded by the service made an irresistible appeal. Sham gangs and make-believe press-masters abounded, thriving exceedingly upon the fears and credulity of the people until capture put a term to their activities and sent them to the pillory, the prison or the fleet they pretended to ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... fortunate, rather. I have but few burdens of credulity to carry. The stars be blessed, my articles of faith are neither very many nor very cumbrous. I should be sorry if my clients were ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... alchymists. Struck by the splendour of gold, its incorruptibility, and other rare qualities, some physicians imagined that this metal might introduce into the animal economy an inexhaustible source of strength and vitality; while empirics, abusing the credulity of the wealthy and the voluptuous made them pay exorbitantly for aphrodisiacal preparations in which they assured their dupes that gold, under different forms, was an ingredient. Among innumerable ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... and at the same time poles removed from each other. He could not refrain however from taking up the thread of his thought. "Yes, yes," he exclaimed with the same short, jerky laugh that accompanied the beginning of the conversation, "my little spirits also demand faith, credulity, and whine and cry for form and shape. You have expressed yourself in an admirable ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... double-chins or destroy them; the same tonic killed superfluous hair or made it grow on bald spots. A freckle to eradicate, a wrinkle to remove, a moth-patch to bleach, a grey hair to dye; nothing was impossible here, not even credulity. It was but meet that the mistress should steal past the servant, that the servant should dodge the mistress. Every woman craves beauty, but she does not want the public to know that her beauty is of the kind in which nature has no hand. No ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... the happy medium between absolute negation and dangerous credulity? Is it reasonable either to deny everything we do not comprehend, or to accept all the fantasies engendered in the vortex of disordered imaginations? Can we not achieve at the same time the humility which becomes the weak and the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... Homer, instead of being admired as the original productions of human genius, were seriously ascribed to the heavenly inspiration of Apollo and the muses. The deities of Olympus, as they are painted by the immortal bard, imprint themselves on the minds which are the least addicted to superstitious credulity. Our familiar knowledge of their names and characters, their forms and attributes, seems to bestow on those airy beings a real and substantial existence; and the pleasing enchantment produces an imperfect and momentary assent of the imagination to those fables, which ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... limits of common life and practice. Nothing, therefore, can be more contrary than such a philosophy to the supine indolence of the mind, its rash arrogance, its lofty pretensions, and its superstitious credulity. Every passion is mortified by it, except the love of truth; and that passion never is, nor can be, carried to too high a degree. It is surprising, therefore, that this philosophy, which, in almost every instance, must be harmless and innocent, should be the subject of ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... liberated wave, Paean to sky, leapt over that vast grave. Its shadow-points against her sacred land converged. And him, her yoke-fellow, her black lord, her fate, In doubt, in fevered hope, in chills of hate, That tore her old credulity to strips, Then pressed the auspicious relics on her lips, His withered slave for foregone miracles urged. And he, whom now his ominous halo's round, A three parts blank decrescent sickle, crowned, Prodigious in catastrophe, could wear The realm of Darkness with its Prince's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Bladud was treated by the rude crowds who were thronging to the royal city, he began to suspect either that the youth himself had been deluded by some strange dream respecting his royal birth and breeding, or that for knavish purposes he had practiced on his credulity, in inducing him to undertake so long ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... strongest imputations on the Duke himself, some of them even going the length of affirming that he aimed at the throne, and that the organization of this new force was the means on which he reckoned for the attainment of his object. No story is too gross for the credulity of the populace. To hear of such a plot was to believe it; to believe it was to resolve to defeat it; and at the beginning of November the government received several warnings that a plan was in agitation to raise a formidable riot on Lord Mayor's Day, when the ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... the Channel Islands, sad as they were in their characteristics and results—as is abundantly evidenced by our judicial records—were but a part and parcel of that vast wave of unreasoning credulity which swept across the civilised world during the Middle Ages, and more or less affected every class of society, and all sorts and conditions of men. From the lists given in the following pages (pp. 28-32), it will be seen that in about seventy-one ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts
... carried forward some furlongs, and planted there for the succor of the world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside by the same speaker, as morbid; "I thought I was right, but I was not,"—and the same immeasurable credulity demanded for new audacities. If we were not of all opinions! if we did not in any moment shift the platform on which we stand, and look and speak from another! if there could be any regulation, any 'one-hour-rule,' that a man should never leave his point of view without sound of trumpet. ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... wretch was deceiving me," she muttered through her set teeth. "Who knows but Martial and Marie-Anne are there in that house now, mocking me, and laughing at my credulity?" ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... of disbursements to be made public, he regarded as one of Brassfield's jokes. His suggestion that he meant to stand on a platform of principles seemed equally humorous. To propose such ridiculous things in a perfectly serious way, and laugh at the victim's credulity in "biting" on the hoax, was quite in harmony with the relations among the members of the set to which they belonged, where practical jokes, merciless chaffing and perpetual efforts to get the best of one another had given the group a more than ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... examined in the cold light of reason, puts a heavy enough strain on the credulity. Such an influence can reach the embryo only through the blood of the mother. Is it conceivable to any rational human being, that a scar, or what not, on the mother's body can be dissolved in her blood, pass through the placenta into the child's circulation, and then gather ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... the Roman state is accordingly full of the greatest inconsistences and improbabilities; so much so, that many respectable writers have rejected the whole as unworthy of credit; but this is as great an excess in scepticism, as the reception of the whole would be of credulity. But if the founders of the city, the date of its erection, and the circumstances under which its citizens were assembled be altogether doubtful, as will subsequently be shown, assuredly the history of events that occurred four centuries previous must be involved in still greater obscurity. ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... holy men of old, who spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. To evade this argument, infidels may trace these legends to Jews, who, led captive of the heathen, related to them the Mosaic story, and took advantage of man's love of the marvellous to practise on his credulity. The attempt is vain; since, on turning from the Old World to the New, we find the very same traditions there; and there, long ages before Jew or Christian knew of its existence, or had landed on its shores. Those paintings which were to Mexicans and Peruvians substitutes for history, for ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... the use of patent medicines is mysticism. Ignorance is the mother of credulity. It is reported[13] that Cato, the elder, recommended cabbages as a panacea for all sorts of ills, that he treated dislocations of the limbs by incantations, and ordered the Greek physicians out of Rome. The ignorant are ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... during his freshman's term, that when the pleasures of the Long Vacation were at an end, and he had returned to Brazenface, with his firm and fast friend Charles Larkyns, he felt himself entitled to assume a patronizing air to the freshmen who then entered, and even sought to impose upon their credulity in ways which his ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... bright example of Christian piety which he has left for the edification of mankind. But I am much concerned to say, that a careful perusal of the proceedings and of the evidence shows that upon this occasion he was not only under the influence of the most vulgar credulity, but that he violated the plainest rules of justice, and that he really was the murderer of two innocent women.... Had the miserable wretches, indicted for witchcraft before Sir Matthew Hale, pleaded ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... the golden net upon the ground, and into it he threw a few grains of credulity, which his father had left him, and which he kept in his breast-pocket. They were like white puff-balls, and when you trod on them a brown dust flew out. Then he sat by to see what would happen. The first that ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... complacency and reverence with which he every where mentions the popular belief in omens and prodigies; but this was the general superstition of the times; and totally to renounce the prejudices of superstitious education, is the last heroic sacrifice to philosophical scepticism. In general, however, the credulity of Livy appears to be rather affected than real; and his account of the exit of Romulus, in the following passage, may be adduced as an instance in confirmation of ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... no longer? "Maybe at the moment the Lord will put it into our heads." This is very old-fashioned phraseology, and a week before, most likely, I should have smiled (though always with kindness) at Dr. Moncrieff's credulity; but there was a great comfort, whether rational or otherwise I cannot say, in the mere ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... streets at night; though their lives were content and mirthful, and for the most part pious. They went out into the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to pray for rain on their parching orchards, in the same credulity with which they groped through the winter-fog bearing torches, and chanting dirges to gain a blessing at seed-time on ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... was spent in poverty, dodging creditors through the labyrinthine gloom of the town. Chronic embarrassment was caused by Shelley's extravagant credulity. His love of the astonishing, his readiness to believe merely because a thing was impossible, made him the prey of every impostor. Knowing that he was heir to a large fortune, he would subsidise any project or any grievance, only provided it were wild enough. Godwin especially was a running ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... Springs.—The temptation to take up quack forms of treatment or to treat himself without the advice of a physician besets the path of the syphilitic throughout the course of the disease; an enormous number of fraudulent enterprises thrive on the credulity of its victims. Most of them are of the patent medicine specific type. Others, however, have a tinge of respectability and are dangerous simply because they are insufficient and not carried out under proper direction. Many popular superstitions as to the value of baths in ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... that they are vouched for by respectable though not numerous authorities., Still, he groups them together in one complete and continuous story, and gives them to the world as history; nor does the world impute to him either dishonesty, ignorance, credulity, or shallowness, because in every single event he does not specify the exact amount of evidence on which his ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... as any intellectual evidence was concerned, of an absurd triviality. Even in the private circles, where no trace of fraud could be suspected, the good faith of all entering them being assured, I found sometimes such extraordinary credulity that the subject would have been offensive to any dispassionate investigator who was not, like myself, determined to get to the bottom of it. The majority of the persons who entered into a circle were ready ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the great body of reports of such so-called extra-conscious knowledge which the experience of the race has furnished from the beginning of human history down to the present time. Such a person will see that it is not a sign of "credulity" for a person to accept such reports, so universally set forth; but that, rather, it is a sign of "credulity" for a person to accept blindly the dogmatic assertions of the materialistic sceptics to the effect that "there is no such thing possible in the natural world, under natural world, ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... contrast to Christian in the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' the pilgrim's journey being in the opposite direction to the other place. Throughout we are on the solid earth, amidst real experiences. No demand is made on our credulity by Providential interpositions, except in the intercalated anecdotes which do not touch the story itself. The wicked man's career is not brought to the abrupt or sensational issues so much in favour with ordinary didactic tale-writers. Such issues ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... are going on at Gergovia, the Aedui, on receiving the first announcements from Litavicus, leave themselves no time to ascertain the truth of these statements. Some are stimulated by avarice, others by revenge and credulity, which is an innate propensity in that race of men to such a degree that they consider a slight rumour as an ascertained fact. They plunder the property of the Roman citizens, and either massacre them or drag them away to slavery. Convictolitanis ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... the first to admit it, but it is not the fact. Instead, the idea that an order so noble, so heroic in its history, so rich in symbolism, so skilfully adjusted, and with so many traces of remote antiquity, was the creation of pious fraud, or else of an ingenious conviviality, passes the bounds of credulity and enters the domain of the absurd. This fact will be further emphasized in the chapter following, to which those are respectfully referred who go everywhere else, except to Masonry itself, to learn what Masonry is and how it came ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... difficulty afterward; and does no harm, even when the intentions of both parties are perfectly good. 2d. If you are dealing with a knave, it prevents him from accomplishing any evil designs he may have upon you. 3d. Young people are apt to be deceived by appearances, both from a credulity common to their youth and inexperience, and because neither the young nor the old have any certain method of knowing human character by externals. The most open hearted are the most liable to be imposed upon ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... and told us that this was the print of St. Peter's head in the hard stone, said to have been produced as he stumbled and fell against it, coming down the stair a chained prisoner. It requires no small amount of devotional credulity to recognise the likeness or to believe ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... War, the officers of the Federation maintained a calm and neutral attitude which increased in vigilance as the strain upon American patience and credulity increased. As soon as the United States declared war, the whole energies of the officials of the Federation were cast into the national cause. In 1917, under the leadership of Gompers, and as a practical antidote to the I.W.W. and the foreign ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... history of his political life is a ludicrous illustration of the perplexities of politicians. His invariable course as a diplomatist has been to leave the way open to prevarication, to keep his opinions in a cloud, and to confound sense with ambiguity. It would be pure credulity to place much confidence in the expressions of a statesman who within two months boldly censured and then as boldly favored the designs of Victor Emmanuel on Venice, officially and unblushingly before ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... conversation! Also a sister,—but this sister he had no belief in. The coincidence was too startlingly out of nature for him to accept a brother and a sister too. A brother or a sister; but not both. Not even Mr. Harper's assurances should influence his credulity to this extent. "Money! money is at the bottom of it all," was his final decision. "She knows it and is making her will, as a possible ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... and deserved a little help. He had done well enough so far, but he scarcely understood how near to the edge of Mrs. Ascher's credulity he had gone. ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... really think so?" exclaimed the lady with joyful vehemence. The notion that Chilton was perhaps imposing on her credulity and fears seemed not to have struck ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... Artificial as the atmosphere was here, it no doubt inspired her life with permanent tenderness of feeling and loftiness of purpose, and gave a mystic quality to her imagination. Later she experienced to the full revulsion of thought and experience which comes when doubt reacts upon youthful credulity. It was the age of the encyclopedia, and now she came to doubt her creed and even God and the soul, but clung to the Gospels as the best possible code of morals, and later realized that while her intellect had wandered ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... varied in light and dark colored animals. Of course, there is an odor about some colored dyes, such as black and indigo blue. Some of the blind are themselves responsible for fostering this belief, but they do it to test the credulity of the public, and they do not know the real harm they are doing ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... year he dwelt, a fervent worshipper at the temple of Isis on the Campus Martius. Once more visions of the night began to afflict him; he consulted the priests and discovered the cause; he required yet to be initiated into the mysteries of Osiris. The priests of Corinth had worked upon his credulity to such good effect, that he found himself in serious financial difficulties, but by practising as a lawyer he succeeded in making a sufficient income to provide more than adequately for the expenses of this fresh initiation (Metamorph. ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... jet standard of Madalena de Santiago's famous crystal. He had enjoyed the excitement when he and Madalena and their two assistants, among the other passengers on board ship, had consented to be searched for the missing jewels. And he had laughed sneeringly at the credulity of those who believed in Madalena's trumped-up vision "of the small fair man," the lighted life-preserver dropped into the sea at night, and the yacht which sent out a boat to pick ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... which he had listened to these tales. Ah, Soller! The epoch of holy innocence in which he had first opened his eyes upon life to the accompaniment of miraculous stories and commemorations of heroic struggles! The House of the Moon he had lost forever, and also the credulity and the innocence of youth. Only memories lingered. More than twenty years had rolled away since he had pressed foot on the paths of forgotten Soller; it now came back to his mind with all the smiling ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... truth roused his advocacy, or some falsehood provoked his wrath. He put down the book, bewildered. Could it be the obscure, briefless lawyer in Gray's Inn (that very morning the object of his young pity) who was thus lifted into fame? He smiled at his own credulity. But he listened with more attention to the enthusiastic praises that circled round, and the various guesses which accompanied them. Soon, however, his former gloom returned,—the Babel began to chafe and weary him. He rose, and went forth again into the air. He strolled on without purpose, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of large bearded apes, forming a considerable item in the population of the island, and said to be under a king of their own, crowned with leaves. We can give what credit we like to such fables as these, which were propagated by the credulity of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... at your prompt credulity. The Prince of Meissen and Liebhaid von Orb! A jest for gossips and—Look, look, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... be only to endear his pleasure, and prepare the joy that follows, when he proves his mistress true. But let husbands' doubts convert to endless jealousy; or if they have belief, let it corrupt to superstition and blind credulity. I am single and will herd no more with 'em. True, I wear the badge, but I'll disown the order. And since I take my leave of 'em, I care not if I leave 'em a common ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... spoke warmly against any attempt to enforce the stamp act. He avowed his distrust of the government in a characteristic fashion: "Pardon me, gentlemen," said he, bowing towards the ministers, "confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom; youth is the season of credulity". He thought that he saw "traces of an overruling influence," a dark saying which probably referred to Newcastle.[72] While he asserted the sovereignty of Great Britain over the colonies in legislation, he maintained that parliament had no right to tax them; taxation, according to him, was "no ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... laboratories have taken the place of the supernatural absurdities of the medieval mind as a fillip for the imagination of the man in the street. Even spiritualism apes the technique of the physicist. The credulity of reporters alone concerning developments in surgery, for example, is incredible. There is enough rot published daily for a brief to be made out against ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... criminal captivates all hearts; at others, the triumphant tyrant. Augustus, drenched in the blood of his fellow-citizens, and Charles Stuart, falling in his own blood, are held up to admiration. Truth is left out of the discussion; and odes and anniversary sermons give the law to history and credulity. ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... wields, as a rule, with any amount of dignity the massive style of the early Victorian "Quarterly Review" and Lane's so-called "Arabian Nights." Thus, speaking of Gypsy fortune- tellers, he says: "Their practice chiefly lies among females, the portion of the human race most given to curiosity and credulity." Sentences like this always remind me of Lord Melbourne's indignation at the thought of religion intruding on private life. His indignation is obviously of the same period as the sentence: "Among the Zingari are not a few who deal in precious ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... puts faith out of the question, for faith to me means a trusting on spiritual grounds. And surely the acceptance of scriptural statements like that of the miraculous birth without investigation is not faith—it is mere credulity. If Jesus had been born in a miraculous way, the disciples must have known it. Joseph must have known it when he heard the answer 'I must be about my father's business,' ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and supper, the entire school, instead of being allowed to pursue fancy work, was summoned to the lecture hall, and harangued by Miss Beasley upon the follies and dangers of superstition. She touched upon ancient beliefs in witchcraft, and modern credulity in clairvoyance and spiritualism, and placed an equal ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... to the possibilities of astrology continued with but little abatement.[173] This half-belief in astrology as a kind of black art was widespread during the sixteenth century, and vestiges of this ingenuous credulity have survived in unexpected quarters till our own time. It was perhaps unwise of Luis de Leon thus to furnish his adversaries with ammunition which they might use against him; but could anything bespeak conscious innocence more strongly ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... seem either strange or improbable? The absent and distant are always regarded with wonder and incredulity; while familiar facts, in themselves far more wonderful, neither excite curiosity nor challenge credulity. Who now regards the startling phenomenon of the electric wire otherwise than as a simple truth easily comprehended? And yet there was a time—ah! there was a time—when to have proclaimed this truth would have rendered ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... spiritless, compared with the endless expression of our affection; to feel our heart rise at the favoured voice; and to believe that life must hereafter consist of a ramble through the world, pressing but one fond hand, and leaning but upon one faithful breast; oh! must this sweet credulity indeed be dissipated? Is there no hope for them so full of hope? no pity for them ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... Forney was bullet-proof. It was even affirmed, and received additions by repeating, that after he reached the fort and unbuttoned his vest, a handful of bullets dropped out. In subsequent years Forney was accustomed to smile at this innocent credulity of his neighbors but frequently remarked that the impression of his being bullet-proof was of great service to him on more than one occasion preceding and during the ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... long-haired and two-bunched camel from "Bukhtar" (Bactria), the "Eastern" (Bakhtar) region on the Amu or Jayhun (Oxus) River; afterwards called Khorasan. The two-humped camel is never seen in Arabia except with northern caravans, and to speak of it would be a sore test of Badawi credulity. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... an earl—or, being upon the marches of France, a marquess. Observe, I don't absolutely vouch for all these things: my own opinion varies. On a fine breezy forenoon I am audaciously sceptical; but as twilight sets in, my credulity becomes equal to anything that could be desired. And I have heard candid sportsmen declare that, outside of these very forests near the Vosges, they laughed loudly at all the dim tales connected with their haunted solitudes; but, on reaching a spot notoriously eighteen ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... currency, either because those who knew the truth were precluded by their official status from revealing the facts or because no one took the trouble to contradict the absurdities. Some of these yarns saw the light in the newspapers, and the credulity of the public in accepting everything that happens to appear in the Press is one of the curiosities of the age. Not, however, that many of the criticisms of which the War Office was the subject during ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... smiling, yet with an underlying credulity and seriousness as singularly pathetic as it seemed incongruous to their years and intelligence. Small wonder, however, that in their occupation and environment—living daily in an atmosphere of hope, expectation, and chance, looking forward each morning to the ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... nobody to accept Darwin's, or any other derivative theory, as true. The time has not come for that, and perhaps never will. We also advise against a similar credulity on the other side, in a blind faith that species—that the manifold sorts and forms of existing animals and vegetables—"have no secondary cause." The contrary is already not unlikely, and we suppose will hereafter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various |
