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Thesis   /θˈisəs/   Listen
Thesis

noun
(pl. theses)
1.
An unproved statement put forward as a premise in an argument.
2.
A treatise advancing a new point of view resulting from research; usually a requirement for an advanced academic degree.  Synonym: dissertation.






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"Thesis" Quotes from Famous Books



... least, is my thesis. It is not, however, unchallenged. Jonathan has challenged it when, from time to time, as occasion offered, I have lightly sketched it out for him. Sometimes he argues that my instances are really isolated cases and that their evidence is ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge

... memory? Miss Drake, our English governess, is especially clever at developing the powers of memory. And holiday tasks are so useful, too; don't you find them so? It is impossible to forget, if one has to study for an elaborate thesis." ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... it as the whole and sole truth—of falling, in a word, from one extreme into the other. To that rule the present case offers no exception; it is, on the contrary, very distinctly one of the pendulum swinging as far in one direction as it previously swung to the other. Let us then at once state the thesis which many of the following pages will serve to elaborate: when the indwelling of God in the universe is interpreted as meaning His identity with the universe; when the indwelling of God in man is taken to mean His identity with man, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... Pisa to see a very honest man, but so great an Aristotelian, that his most usual thesis was: "That the touchstone and square of all solid imagination, and of all truth, was an absolute conformity to Aristotle's doctrine; and that all besides was nothing but inanity and chimera; for that he had seen all, and said all." A position, that for having been a little ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... in my eyes, anything but very accessory; I should probably not have taken up the pen to discuss it. If I have raised it, that has been the consequence, not the aim of my work. Artist, and poet if you like, I am only interested in seeing and describing the poetical and psychological side of my thesis. I have sought in speech the power of depicting, with less fire and allurement possibly, but with more precision than music has done, some impressions which are not derived from science or polemics-which come from the heart and ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated

... of service, and its nobler satisfactions. You may say that is demanding more insight and power in our novels and novelists than we can possibly hope to find in them. So much the worse for us. I stick to my thesis that the complicated social organisation of to-day cannot get along without the amount of mutual understanding and mutual explanation such a range of characterisation in our novels implies. The success of civilisation amounts ultimately to a success ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... not been slow to remind us of their passionate temperaments. Landor, perhaps, may oblige us to dip into his biography in order to verify our thesis that the poet is invariably passionate, but in many cases this state of things is reversed, the poet being wont to assure us that the conventional incidents of his life afford no gauge of the ardors within his soul. Thus Wordsworth solemnly ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... he exulted, "splendid! And just in line with my thesis. You shall tell it before the Council of the Rhamdas. It will be the greatest day since the ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... changes which the sheep have brought about in a few years, it occurred to me that we must look to Oriental countries in order to see the final results of sheep and goat grazing in semi-arid climates. I have proposed as an historical thesis a subject which at first appears somewhat humorous, namely, "The Influence of Sheep and Goats in History." I am convinced that the country lying between Arabia and Mesopotamia, which was formerly densely populated, full of beautiful cities, and heavily wooded, has been ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various

... occupation of this prison period was the preparation of an exercise (or academical thesis) in geometry, which I undertook that I might the sooner obtain an independent ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel

... under the above heading, for which you were so good as to find room in July last, I returned to the thesis which I had ventured to maintain some months previously, a propos of a question put in the House of Commons. My contention was that the establishment of an international prize Court, assuming it to be under any circumstances desirable, ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland

... to lessen your renown. However, it is not the business of impartial history to maintain a given thesis; it follows whither the facts lead it. I wish simply to question you upon the power of logic attributed to you. Do you or do you not enjoy gleams of reason? Have you within you the humble germ of human thought? That is the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... they set conscientiously to work with their handful of cartridges to convince the reds that it is not healthy to crawl along ridge-tops on an autumn day. Sundry outlying Indians, with ammunition to waste, took belly and knee rests and strengthened the thesis to the contrary. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White

... this book, my mind following step by step the author's advance upon the citadel of privilege, I was forced to admit that his main thesis was right. Unrestricted individual ownership of the earth I acknowledged to be wrong and I caught some glimpse of the radiant plenty of George's ideal Commonwealth. The trumpet call of the closing pages filled me with a desire to battle for the right. Here was a theme for the great orator. Here ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... idea of cooping up his mind in a college. As to future occupation, his father had said nothing that was definite. His thesis was that observation and thought concerning men and their activities, pointed and directed by intimate touch with what others had observed and set down—that is, through books—was the gist of life. Any job which gave opportunity ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story. Either history affords a thesis—or one is suggested by an incident of the day—or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his narrative—designing, generally, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... If the thesis here set forth of the original character and import of the episode of Enkidu with the woman is correct, we may again regard lines 149-153 of the Pennsylvania tablet, in which Gilgamesh is introduced, as a later addition to ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous

... time. M. Cuvier and I had been appointed, as Royal Commissioners, to support the proposed measures,—a false and weak position, which demonstrates the infancy of representative government. We do not argue politics as we plead a cause or maintain a thesis. To act effectively in a deliberative assembly, we must ourselves be deliberators; that is to say, we must be members, and hold our share with others in free thought, power, and responsibility. I believe that I acquitted myself with propriety, but coldly, ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... aroused an astonishing tumult of comment, mostly antagonistic. Walter Page, editor of the Forum, in which one of the key-note chapters appeared, told me that over a thousand editorials were written upon my main thesis. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... professor, whose name I wittingly conceal lest those choughs should chatter at me that Greek proverb I have so often mentioned, "an ass at a harp," discoursing magisterially and theologically on this text, "I speak as a fool, I am more," drew a new thesis; and, which without the height of logic he could never have done, made this new subdivision—for I'll give you his own words, not only in form but matter also—"I speak like a fool," that is, if you look upon me as a fool for comparing myself with those false apostles, I shall seem yet ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus

... He has worked out, with incredible penetration, the part which this instinct plays in every phase of human life and in the development of human character, and has been able to establish on a firm footing the remarkable thesis that psychoneurotic illnesses never occur with a perfectly normal sexual life. Other sorts of emotions contribute to the result, but some aberration of the sexual life is always present, as the cause of ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud

... poem is no less remarkable than its pathos. The versification, although carrying the fanciful to the very verge of the fantastic, is nevertheless admirably adapted to the wild insanity which is the thesis of the poem. ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... could have been applied by the blank negation of the maxim; i.e. by lodging the responsibility exactly where the executive power [ergo the power of resisting this responsibility] was lodged. Here then is one example in illustration of my thesis—that the English constitution was in a great measure gradually evolved in the contest between the different parties in the reign of Charles I. Now, if this be so, it follows that for constitutional history no period is ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... With Mr. Chamberlain the thesis of vital competition, the morality of force, the judgment of history against little nations, the civilizing mission imposed upon greater Germany by its very greatness, by its economic, scientific and artistic superiority, everything tends to the glorification ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... professed to remedy it. He goes to Letchworth, in which abode of middle-class faddery he finds a teetotal public-house, pretending to look like the real thing, and calling itself "The Skittles Inn." He immediately raises the question, Can we dissociate beer from skittles? Then he widens out his thesis. ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... his poetical illustration of my thesis. There is great good to be got out of a squinting brain, if one only knows how to profit by it. We see only one side of the moon, you know, but a fellow with a squinting brain seems now and then to get a peep at the other side. ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... To develop thesis: Some unusual conditions; and a weird feminine product, of such sort that her lover's sudden surrender and frantic marriage is as it were involuntary. It is of the kind that requires no soul in the beloved object, a soul might have been a little ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... conclusion as to the personality of the L.U. compiler has been challenged, his main thesis has remained unshaken. On the whole, it can be asserted positively that the common source of L.U. and Y.B.L. goes back to the early eleventh century; on the whole, that this common source itself utilised texts similar to those contained in the Book of Leinster. ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy

... All' apo limenos men oudeis anagetai, me thusas tois Thesis, kai parakalesas autous boethous.] Arrian upon Epictetus. l. 3. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant

... recapitulation, and as presenting the main thesis of these papers, that to the British mind, at any rate, so inarticulate often, yet so tenacious, the Western campaign of last year presents itself as having been fought ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... relation to it; therefore it was that, having been invited to deliver a lecture in the great hall of the Cooper Institute at New York, I took as my subject The Battlefields of Science, maintaining this thesis ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... (1935), 284-98; Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden, A Bibliography, p. 167) demonstrated Dryden's authorship so satisfactorily that it is unnecessary to set forth here the arguments that established this thesis. The time when Dryden was composing his defence of the royal Declaration is approximately fixed from the reference to it on June 22, 1681, in The Observator, which had noted the Whig pamphlet Dryden was answering under ...
— His Majesties Declaration Defended • John Dryden

... abroad and was brilliant in the capacity of lecturer at the university, towards the end of the forties. He only had time to deliver a few lectures, I believe they were about the Arabs; he maintained, too, a brilliant thesis on the political and Hanseatic importance of the German town Hanau, of which there was promise in the epoch between 1413 and 1428, and on the special and obscure reasons why that promise was never fulfilled. This dissertation was a cruel and skilful thrust at the Slavophils ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... The thesis of the French Command, which it wished to establish publicly by these reports, was formulated as follows for ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... the tumbling, foaming Fall, the lonely river, the Bois Clair settlement and Poussette were almost forgotten. A camping trip with friendly Ontarians succeeded the lectures, then ensued a fortnight of hard reading and preparation for the essay or thesis which his Church demanded from him as token of his standing and progress, he being as yet a probationer, and thus the summer passed by until on the 6th of August a letter reached him from the Lower Province bidding him attend at the opening services of the new Methodist church recently ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... "A thesis," he said, "is generally a paper with a statement of the line of action you propose to adopt, subject to the Society's approval. Each member has his specialty—as law, art, divinity, ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie

... across the argument as employed by him, I was struck by it at once as important if only it was sound. But, upon examination, not only does it vanish into thin air as an argument in support of the thesis he is maintaining, but there remains in its place a positive argument that tells directly and strongly against that thesis. A passage is quoted from Canon Westcott, in which it is stated that while Tertullian and Epiphanius accuse ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... noblest of men and peerless patriots; and then he went on to argue that President Woodrow Wilson has been the target of similar malignity, and to leave you to conclude that consequently Wilson is in the same class with Washington and Lincoln. If he had put his thesis in a different form, the publicist might have seen himself, as his hearers did, the absurdity of it. Suppose he had said, for instance: "In spite of the fact that Washington and Lincoln each kept a cow, they were both ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... will but bear with me so far as to endure the thesis that the first theoretical object of the biographer should be indiscretion, not discretion, I will concede almost everything practical to delicacy. But this must be granted to me: that the aim of all portraiture ought to be the emphasizing of what makes the man different from, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... of Mr. Alban's meekness, for I am not a witness of it. When he was presiding over one of his students in divinity in the public hall of Douay college, a disputant, who was probably much offended at some proposition in the thesis, as being opposite to some favorite opinion of his school or religious family, said to him with intolerable rudeness, habes mel in ore, sed fel in corde: to which he made no reply, nor showed the least resentment. Mr. Alban Butler was totally averse to the system of ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... the first sentence of the Promium of my Thesis. 'JURISPRUDENT studio nullum uberius, nullum generosius: in legibus enim agitandis, populorum mores, variasque fortun vices ex quibus leges ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... of Holland, speaks boldly of Confucius as a Taoist; and though I dislike many of this learned Dutchman's ideas, this one is excellent. His thesis is that Laotse was no more an innovator than Confucius; that both but gave a new impulse to teachings as old as the race. Before Laotse there had been a Teacher Quan, a statesman-philosopher of the seventh century, who had also taught the Tao. The immemorial Chinese idea had been ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... self-governin' power: We've a war, an' a debt, an' a flag; an' ef this Ain't to be inderpendunt, why, wut on airth is? An' nothin' now henders our takin' our station Ez the freest, enlightenedest, civerlized nation, Built up on our bran'-new politickle thesis Thet a Guv'ment's fust right is to tumble to pieces,— I say nothin' henders our takin' our place Ez the very fus'-best o' the whole human race, A-spittin' tobacker ez proud ez you please On Victory's bes' carpets, or loafin' at ease In the Tool'ries front-parlor, discussin' ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... remarks on this subject, it is necessary that I should carefully distinguish between the thesis, that self-complacency is the indispensible condition of all that is honourable in human achievements, and the proposition contended against in Essay XI, that "self-love is the source of all our actions." Self-complacency is indeed the feeling without ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... incrimination and recrimination, of intrigue and counter-intrigue. The atmosphere is realistic, but the actuality implied is sharply limited and largely superficial. There is little attempt at getting down to the roots of things. There is absolutely no tendency or thesis. The story is told for the sake of the story, and its chief redeeming quality lies in the grace and charm and verve with which it is told. These were qualities that immediately won the public's favor when "Anatol" first appeared. And to some extent it must be counted unfortunate ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler

... territory. And, most important, you fail to say that troops and military supplies will cease to be sent into the territory of the former Russian Empire. You thereby go a long way toward proving Trotsky's thesis: That any armistice will simply be used by the Allies as a period in which to supply tanks, aeroplanes, gas shells, liquid fire, etc., to the various antisoviet governments. As it stands, your armistice proposal is absolutely unfair, ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt

... to disgust him with the hard give-and-take of the struggling lawyer's life. He sought escape in graduate work in history and politics at Johns Hopkins, where, in 1886, he received his Ph.D. for a thesis entitled Congressional Government, a study remarkable for clear thinking and felicitous expression. These qualities characterized his work as a professor at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan and paved his path to an appointment on ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... the course of instruction, as originally proposed, and as now carried out, the student prepares a "graduating thesis," in which he is expected to show good evidence that he has profited well by the opportunities which have been given him to secure a good professional education. These theses are papers of, usually, considerable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various

... In the course of these inquiries, we have permitted ourselves to take a few concrete glimpses of households, costumes, conveyances, and conveniences of the coming time, but only as incidental realizations of points in this general thesis. And now, assuming, as we must necessarily do, the soundness of these earlier speculations, we have arrived at a stage when we may consider how the existing arrangements for the ostensible government of the State are likely to develop through their own inherent forces, and ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... thesis of this part of my argument that the ordinary time-telling clock is no affiliate of the other simple time-telling devices such as sundials, sand glasses and the elementary water clocks. Rather it should be considered as a degenerate branch from the main stem of mechanized astronomical devices ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... God, that beats the fairy-tales! One man asserts that he is innocent, The other that the guilty man am I!— How will you demonstrate that thesis now? ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... title; but it represents the truth which the author has endeavored to set forth, though recognizing clearly that the victories on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain do illustrate, in a distinguished manner, his principal thesis, the controlling influence upon events of naval power, even when transferred to an inland body of fresh water. The lesson there, however, was the same as in the larger fields of war heretofore treated. Not by ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... dwelling on the destructive and weeding-out elements of Nature—"Nature red in tooth and claw," rather than the equally pervasive Nature of the brooding wing and the flowing breast. Had not Professor Drummond unfortunately mixed it up with a good deal of extraneous sentiment, his main thesis ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... thou didst me the honor to read and approve my treatise on the Philosophy of Conspiracy. Dost thou remember the confounding elements given in the thesis?" ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... view. Still the appearance of such a document from a person in Mr. Gladstone's position must, of course, invite attention and speculation. He may put aside the questions which the word "Disestablishment"—which was in the thesis given him to write upon—is likely to provoke—"Will it come? ought it to come? must it come? Is it near, or somewhat distant, or indefinitely remote?" On these questions he has not a word to say. But, all the same, people will naturally ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... criticism was taken in good part by all concerned. When Ellis wrote a sort of treatise to Scott in epistolary form, and complained of the poet's monotonous use of the eight-syllable line, Scott replied with equanimity, and took as much pains to convince his friend as though he were discussing a thesis for some valuable prize. On one occasion a few of the really great men found themselves in the midst of a society where the practice of mutual admiration was beginning to creep in. The way in which two of the most eminent guests ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... Life and Works of Chatterton gave Scott an opportunity to discuss the characteristics of Middle-English poetry, but his general thesis, that the Rowley poems exhibit graces and refinements which are in marked contrast to the tenuity of idea and tautology of expression found in genuine works of the period, is supported by an argument which seems to be based ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball

... we may, then, say that this thesis rests on a weighty mass of facts; that the motor element of the image tends to cause it to lose its purely "inner" character, to objectify it, to externalize it, to ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... along. Valkanhayn had been on Gimli and talked to Mardukan naval officers; Ravallo had brought Princess Bentrik to Tanith and heard her stories on the voyage. They began adducing arguments in support of Trask's thesis. Of course Dunnan and Makann were in collusion. Who tipped Dunnan off that the Victrix would be on Audhumla? Makann; his spies in the Navy tipped him. What about the Honest Horris; wasn't Makann blocking any investigation about her? Why was ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper

... holding its breath, to see what stroke will fall on it. Poor Peltier! Acts of Apostles, and all jocundity of Leading-Articles, are gone out, and it is become bitter earnest instead; polished satire changed now into coarse pike-points (hammered out of railing); all logic reduced to this one primitive thesis, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!—Peltier, dolefully aware of it, ducks low; escapes unscathed to England; to urge there the inky war anew; to have Trial by Jury, in due season, and deliverance by young Whig ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... on with his companions to write a thesis on the downfall of Marius. Nothing more congenial to his convictions or more encouraging to the deep resolution growing in his heart could be selected. The picture he drew from the sad history of the conqueror of the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... Accordingly the House of Commons, representing only mind coupled with property, is not equal in mind to a legislature chosen for mind only, and whether accompanied by wealth or not. But I do not for a moment wish to see a representation of pure mind; it would be contrary to the main thesis of this essay. I maintain that Parliament ought to embody the public opinion of the English nation; and, certainly, that opinion is much more fixed by its property than by its mind. The "too clever by half" people who live in "Bohemia," ought to have ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot

... known as scholastic philosophy; the alternative of surrender and suicide is exemplified by Avicenna and his followers when they declared that that which is true in theology may be false in philosophy, and vice versa; and by Sanchez in his famous defence of the thesis "Quod nil scitur." ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... to inequality. "Knowledge is easy," says the wise man, "to him that understandeth";[482] easy, he means, to him who will use his mind simply and rationally, and not to make him think he can know what he cannot, or to maintain, per fas et nefas, a false thesis with which he fancies his interests to be bound up. And to him who will use his mind as the wise man recommends, surely it is easy to see that our shortcomings in civilization are due to our inequality; ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... that had been expressed in the formulas of the current philosophy or theology, and resting upon premises and conceptions altogether different. In fact, it can dispense both with the philosophical thesis of the immateriality or indestructibility of the human soul, and with the theological thesis of a miraculous corporeal reconstruction of our person; theses, the first of which is altogether foreign to the religion of the Bible, and the second absolutely opposed ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... and sexual desire. He has eliminated certain of the psychical problems embraced in the First and Second Editions and has added instead a bibliography. The student, he thinks, will find these changes of value, especially in the matter of reference. The author has also added certain data to the thesis of the work, as well as foot-notes; which, he thinks, will strengthen the deductions and conclusions therein enunciated. He has carefully and conscientiously edited and verified all notes and quotations to be found in the book and rests satisfied in the conviction ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... principal thesis consisted of "We are not Prussians, Westphalians, Saxons, etc., ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... sophisters of Narbonne to the decretists of the Sorbonne, who will discuss you a position of Cornelius a Lapide, or a sentence of Peter Lombard, as readily as you would a flask of hippocras, or a slice of botargo. Aye, and cry transeat to a thesis of Aristotle, though it be against rule. What sayst thou, Capete?" continued he, addressing his neighbor, a scholar of Montaigu, whose modest gray capuchin procured him this appellation: "are we the men to be ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... awakened to civilisation. Hegel's philosophy was the one which was the rage at that moment, and he soon became such an expert in it, that he had been able to hurl that master's most famous disciples from the saddle of their own philosophy, in a thesis couched in terms of the strictest Hegelian dialectic. After he had got philosophy off his chest, as he expressed it, he proceeded to Switzerland, where he preached communism, and thence wandered over France and Germany ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... natural, but also of the spiritual universe—the history of the world. That this "Idea" or "Reason" is the true, the eternal, the absolutely powerful essence; that it reveals itself in the world, and that in that world nothing else is revealed but this and its honor and glory—is the thesis which, as we have said, has been proved in philosophy and is here ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... my vacations, an invitation to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa Commencement Address at Yale, I laid down as my thesis, and argued it from history, that in all republics, ancient or modern, the worst foe of freedom had been a man-owning aristocracy—an aristocracy based upon slavery. The address was circulated in printed form, was considerably discussed, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... favorite thesis of Fielding, often repeated by his successors, that the novel is a sort of comic epopee. Yet the romantic and the epic styles have nothing in common, except that both are narrative. The epic, the rare and lofty cypress of literature, is the story of a nation ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... possible only through the aid of the wheel and of what it has brought. If the improvement of democracy is to come through more democracy, as some think, then the railroad is an essential agent of political progress as well as of economic exploitation and social homogeneity. I am not discussing this thesis but simply showing how dependent upon this physical agent is the machinery ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... ex-President Smith mean by your fundamental thesis, that a thing which is essentially different from that from which it came is an impossibility, you are certainly wrong, for the world is full of such things. In the tree of life there are millions of examples, since (using language in its general significance) everything above the amoeba must be ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown

... an experiment in propagating nut trees by cuttings as a thesis subject for one of our fourth year horticultural students at the O. A. C. In this experiment ten cuttings each of English walnut, butternut, Japanese walnut, hickory, chestnut and black walnut were planted in sand and watered at intervals with a 1 to 10,000 solution ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various

... attempt at partisanship is a miserable failure, and as an academic thesis it is doubtful whether the faculty of law in any German university would grant a student a degree ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... life and of the world, and came very soon upon metaphysics, whose task is to discover the Word that should solve all riddles. He stated his thesis with great clearness and proceeded onward ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... or the survival of the fittest, is one of the processes by which evolution takes place. According to this law, only the fittest survive in the struggle for life. Darwin was led to this discovery on reading Malthus's thesis regarding the disproportion between the rates of increase in population and food, and the ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple

... appeared as one of the Popular Fallacies under the title, "That great Wit is allied to Madness;" beginning: "So far from this being true, the greatest wits will ever be found to be the sanest writers..." and so forth. Compare the essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare," Vol. I. Lamb's thesis is borrowed from Dryden's couplet (in Absalom and Achitophel, Part ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... and all those who formed my chosen associates, most positively dissented. It is due to my father to say that he denied having intended to affirm that women should be excluded, any more than men under the age of forty, concerning whom he maintained in the very next paragraph an exactly similar thesis. He was, as he truly said, not discussing whether the suffrage had better be restricted, but only (assuming that it is to be restricted) what is the utmost limit of restriction which does not necessarily ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill

... large, perhaps, Mr. Huxley's share in moulding the thesis of NATURAL SELECTION is less well-known than is his bold unwearied exposition and defence of it after it had been made public. And, indeed, a speculative trifler, revelling in the problems of the "might have been," would find a congenial theme in the inquiry how soon what we now ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... that of a family stewing in love continuously from the cradle to the grave, can hardly have given five minutes serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition. They cannot have even made up their minds as to what they mean by love; for when they expatiate on their thesis they are sometimes talking about kindness, and sometimes about mere appetite. In either sense they are equally far from the realities of life. No healthy man or animal is occupied with love in any sense for more than ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... then death and love are also one, and to be in love is to be in death, to be dead—which is preposterous: corpses don't love. Presently we shall see that Isolda died in a state of exaltation akin to the state of being in love; but that does not establish the thesis. Blake, for hours before he died, shouted till the ceiling rang for joy to think that he was soon to be with God: does that prove that mysticism and death are one? Mr. Chamberlain, in his exegesis of Tristan, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... the shortcomings of the present study, and especially for the imperfections of the fragments I have still to present. They are, however, sufficiently defined to make it certain that they belonged to cycles of myths closely akin to those already given. They will serve to support my thesis that the seemingly confused and puerile fables of the native Americans are fully as worthy the attention of the student of human nature as the more poetic narratives of the Veda or the Edda. The red man felt out after God with like ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton

... genuine article, a boy and girl still in the springtime of life, by contrast with whom the preserved immaturity of Mr. Teddy and his partner, Miss Daisy, is shown for an artificial substitute. Baldly stated, the thesis sounds cynical and a little cruel; actually, however, you will here find Mr. BENSON in a kindlier mood than he sometimes consents to indulge. He displays, indeed, more than a little fondness for his disillusioned ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various

... scene of Moliere or any work of Michael Angelo? "I once answered this question, but rather too lightly. Every moment I am apt to make a mistake, because language does not furnish me with the right expression for the truth at the moment. I abandon a thesis for lack of words that shall supply my reasons. I have one thing in the bottom of my heart, and I find myself saying another. There is the advantage of living in retirement and solitude. There a man speaks, asks himself questions, listens to himself, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... you say, "I write for ten or twelve people only." One says in conversation, many things which are the result of the impression of the moment; but you are not alone in saying that. It was the opinion of the Lundi or the thesis of that day. I protested inwardly. The twelve persons for whom you write, who appreciate you, are as good as you are or surpass you. You never had any need of reading the eleven others to be yourself. But, one writes for all the world, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... like a citadel with a hundred gates: at whatever point you take it up, wherever you make your entrance, you are on the road to the center. In this respect his writings resemble a series of essays composed in support of a single thesis; a circumstance which led him to insist, more emphatically even than most philosophers, that for a proper understanding of his system it was necessary to read every line he had written. Perhaps it would be more correct ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer

... threw his whole energies into his studies with an effect which distanced all his previous efforts. Remembering my former hint, he employed his spare hours in writing for the annual prizes, both of which he took by a unanimous vote of the judges. Those who heard him read his Thesis at the Medical Commencement will not soon forget the impression made by his fine personal appearance and manners, nor the universal interest excited in the audience, as he read, with his beautiful enunciation, that ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... reading one of his theses, which he had nearly finished, when Pythodorus entered with Parmenides and Aristoteles, who was afterwards one of the Thirty. When the recitation was completed, Socrates requested that the first thesis of the treatise might ...
— Parmenides • Plato

... modern times, in respect to forms and machinery, are products of the feudalization of England which resulted from the Norman Conquest, and not survivals of Anglo-Saxon governmental arrangements, is the well-sustained thesis of this able study. That many important elements, however, were contributed by Anglo-Saxon statecraft ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... however, and is extremely simple and reasonable, if we will take the pains to think it out carefully for ourselves. Unless we are prepared to support the thesis that the Power which created the universe is inherently evil, or that the universe is the work of two opposite and equal powers, one evil and the other good—both of which propositions are demonstrably ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... mysteries and inexplicable psychological phenomena in the constitution of man, and the inexplicable absence of the phenomena in the state of death, inexplicable upon any known materialistic ground, and I shall laugh at his inability to maintain his thesis beyond the poor shred of a hypothesis. If a man shall tell me as the result of pure reasoning that he concludes for the endless existence of the soul after death, and shall do this even upon the plane of induction, I shall turn and tell him that ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman

... unconscious adaptation of attention which indicates those born to authority and to honor. When asked after dinner if he would pay his respects to the mistress of Drumloch, he rose calmly and with a real unconcern. He had sat with doctors of divinity, and faced learned professors with a thesis or an exegesis that touched the roots of the most solemn propositions; an interview with a lady a little younger than himself was not likely to disturb his equanimity. For he was yet in that callow stage of sentient being, which has not been inspired and ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr

... him a little sickly. "COMCORP has never made any use of my specialty," I conceded. "You already had about ten guys around here who had learned twice as much as I had simply by doing it every day for a living. They could have written rings around my thesis." ...
— The Trouble with Telstar • John Berryman

... quote in evidence of our thesis will be few in number. Here, if anywhere in the course of this discussion, the author is conscious that he is treading on the perilous ground of conjecture, and that what seems to him a clear, if delicate and gradual, transition in the intellectual movement of the fourteenth ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... but because she loved shocking him, and nothing surely could shock him more at this time of night than the moth-like apparition that she presented. She even felt a wayward curiosity to know what he did with himself at night. For several years there had been whispers of a theological thesis that he was writing for his doctor's degree. She imagined him, with a reading lamp and red eyes, up to his ears in the minor prophets. It would be fun to see what he ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... was written in 1916, before the entrance of the United States into The War, and was presented to the Faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Its publication at this time needs no apology, for it will find its only public in the circumscribed circle of professional scholars. They at least will understand that scholarship knows no nationality. But in the fear that this ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke

... journalistic naivete of college periodicals; in the diaries of early graduates; in newspaper clippings and magazine "write-ups"; in historical sketches to commemorate the decennial or the quarter-century; and from the lips of the pioneers,—teacher and student. For, in the words of the graduate thesis, "we are still in the period of the sources." The would-be historian of a woman's college to-day is in much the same relation to her material as the Venerable Bede was to his when he set out to write his Ecclesiastical History. The thought ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse

... discussed the types predisposed to the nervousness of the housewife, it is a cardinal thesis of this book that great forces of society and the nature of her life situation are mainly responsible. From now on we are face to face with these factors and must ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... through a rent in his unfortunate nether garments. Sirius and the Pleiades look down from above. The book is everywhere, and everywhere at once. The asides seem to occupy more space than the main thesis, whatever that may be. Just when you think you have found the meaning of the author at last, another display of these fireworks distracts your attention. It is not dark enough to see their full splendour, yet they confuse such daylight ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... classification, but full of life and reality, and not only Greek reality but human reality. Aristotle precedes his work on Politics, in which he embodied the results of a study of all the available political and constitutional material of his day—for a Greek could work like a modern German or American thesis-grubber when he tried—with a book on Ethics which is still regarded, quite rightly, as a standard work for the modern student. As for Thucydides, his knowledge of men, the fruit of patient experience deepened by disappointment, is felt behind every line of his book, as one descries ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... all countries prize,— Yet 'mong themselves no weavers rise.— He who would know and treat of aught alive, Seeks first the living spirit thence to drive: Then are the lifeless fragments in his hand, There only fails, alas the spirit-band. This process, chemists name, in learned thesis, ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... work on Genius in Art (Le Genie dans l'art), M. Seailles develops this twofold thesis, that art is a continuation of nature and that life is creation. We should willingly accept the second formula; but by creation must we understand, as the author does, a synthesis of elements? Where the elements pre-exist, the synthesis that will be made is virtually given, being ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... his new work Professor Metchnikoff expounds at greater length, in the light of additional knowledge gained in the last few years, his main thesis that human life is not only unnaturally short but unnaturally burdened with physical and mental disabilities. He analyzes the causes of these disharmonies and explains his reasons for hoping that they may be ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... hostile to his administration, and opposed its prominent measures. His most remarkable performance was his speech on the exclusive constitutional competency of the executive to originate foreign missions without the advice and consent of the Senate. As a constitutional thesis, without respect to the time of delivery,—for, although Mr. Adams asserted the power, he at the same moment waived its exercise,—as a specimen of his manner of treating a great constitutional question ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby

... of his observations to mathematical treatment, he proved, to his own satisfaction, the absolute correctness of his thesis that the well-known "proper motion of the solar system" was about to result in an encounter between the earth and an invisible watery nebula, which would have the effect of inundating the globe. As this startling idea gradually ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... till I have run through my thesis again. Where can I find a quiet spot? I won't be long; I read ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various

... probably ultimately evolve into the Servile State of Mr. Belloc's thesis. The poor will sink into slavery; it might as correctly be said that the poor will rise into slavery. That is to say, sooner or later, it is very probable that the rich will take over the philanthropic as well as the tyrannic ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... who, after having accepted his dubious courtship for no particular reason, fortunately deserts him without any better excuse, thus clearing the way for a most decorous divorce and readjustment. Neither is the writer's inner thesis—the immoralness of ordinary morality, so far as I can make out—particularly agreeable; but Anita, though far from being the sort of person one would look to meet in real life, is intriguing after a fashion, and just possibly repays ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various

... write a thesis on Chesterton's sociology once complained bitterly that almost none of his books were indexed, so he had to submit to the disgusting necessity of reading them all through, for some striking view on ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... Leonardo da Vinci and Berkeley are examples. In my Ancient Greek Historians (1909) I dwelt on the modern origin of the idea (p. 253 sqq.). Recently Mr. R. H. Murray, in a learned appendix to his Erasmus and Luther, has developed the thesis that Progress was not grasped in antiquity (though he makes an exception of Seneca),—a ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... in real life that such conversations occur. Generally, in any talk worth calling conversation, every man has some point to maintain, and his object is to justify his own thesis and disprove his neighbour's. I will allow that he may primarily have adopted his thesis because of some sign of truth in it, but his mode of supporting it is generally such as to block up every cranny in his soul at which more truth might enter. In the present case, unusual as it is for ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... a class of one hundred and eighty in my law examinations, won the second prize for the best graduating thesis, received a complimentary vote for class oratorship, and much to my surprise was soon after offered an assistant superintendency of the public schools by the school board, who knew nothing of my studies and thought my work as a ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton

... present case unable to contain himself, was determined to declare against them at all adventures. Upon the eve of All-saints, therefore, in 1517, he publicly fixed up, at the church next to the castle of that town, a thesis upon indulgences; in the beginning of which, he challenged any one to oppose it either by writing or disputation. Luther's propositions about indulgences, were no sooner published, than Tetzel, the Dominican friar, and commissioner ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... Witherspoon ceased to pry into the private life of Arthur Ferris. McNerney stoutly maintained the thesis to the last, that Ferris ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... want to quote also a letter of Dr. Ryerson, whose name I have just mentioned, dating as far back as 1857, and this letter, although it contains but four lines, contains the whole thesis upon which this question rests. I invite your special attention to every word of this letter, not only because of the man who wrote it, but on account of the significance of the words he uses. ...
— Bilingualism - Address delivered before the Quebec Canadian Club, at - Quebec, Tuesday, March 28th, 1916 • N. A. Belcourt

... starts with considering the nature of true Christian repentance; but he would have this understood in the sense and spirit taught by Christ and the Scriptures, as, indeed, Staupitz had first taught it to him. He begins with the thesis 'Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He says Repent, desires that the whole life of the believer should be one of repentance.' He means, as the subsequent theses express it, that true inward repentance, that ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... Oliver Lodge the fact that electricity possesses mass or inertia has now passed out of the hypothetical stage into the realm of fact and experiment. In his Romanes Lecture recently published, he states, page 4: "My first thesis is that an electric charge possesses the most fundamental and characteristic property of matter, viz. mass or inertia; so that if any one were to speak of a milligramme or an ounce or a ton of electricity, though he would certainly be speaking inconveniently, he might ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... writing a "Comparison of the Campaign on the Marne and the Aisne with Caesar's battles against the Belgian Confederacy." He had a paper edition of the Gallic Wars which he carried round with him. One day he explained his thesis to me. He drew a plan with a green pencil on a piece ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan

... Dean Andrew F. West of the Princeton Graduate School for his unfailing interest in my work. It was in one of his graduate courses that the translation was begun, three years ago, and at his suggestion that I undertook the composition of the thesis in its present form. He has read the entire treatise in the manuscript, and has been my constant adviser and critic. Thanks are also due to Dr. Charles G. Osgood of the English Department of Princeton ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes

... Hindostani, the thesis that the Sanskrit is the parent language in India, and Swinton, in Persian, that the poems of Hafiz are to be understood in a figurative or mystical sense, there came a Bengali declamation by Tod senior on the position that the translations ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... purpose of Hero in his preliminary thesis has to do with the nature of matter, and recalls, therefore, the studies of Anaxagoras and Democritus. Hero, however, approaches his subject from a purely material or practical stand-point. He is an explicit champion of what we nowadays call the molecular theory of matter. "Every ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... and the socialist thesis confronted by the theory of evolution 92 The law of apparent retrogression and collective ownership 100 The social evolution and ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... Genius of Pope is not well arranged, and, in spite of eloquent passages, as literature it does not offer much attraction to the reader of the present day. But its thesis is one which is very interesting to us, and was of startling novelty when it was advanced. In the author's own words it was to prove that "a clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient, alone, to make a poet." The custom of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... Germany, England and the United States. No book of a philosophic or scientific character has ever caused such a sensation at the time of its publication, excepting perhaps Darwin's Origin of Species, the thesis of which is more than hinted at by Holbach. There were several editions in 1770. A very few copies contain a Discours prliminaire de l'Auteur of sixteen pages which Naigeon had printed separately in London. The Abrg du Code de la Nature, which ends ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing

... other, and this something is the will. I do not will to consider myself as equal to myself, for in the very act of constructing myself I, I take it as the same, and therefore as incapable of comparison, that is, of any application of the will. If, then, I MINUS the will be the THESIS, Thou, PLUS will, must be the ANTITHESIS, but the equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness in order to establish the equality, is the true definition of conscience. But as without a Thou there can be ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... imponderable fluid, by a sort of nervous fluid, or magnetic fluid (if this term be preferred), circulating through our organs. And the commissioners took good care not to speak on this subject of impossibility. Their thesis was more modest; they contented themselves with saying that nothing demonstrated the existence of such a fluid. Imagination, therefore, had no share in their report; but in Servan's refutation, on the contrary, imagination was the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago

... ambition. He still hoped to find it in Manicheeism, but he began to think that it was a long time coming. The leaders of the sect could not have trusted him thoroughly. They feared his acute and subtle mind, so quick to detect the flaw in a thesis or argument. That is why they postponed his initiation into their secret doctrines. Augustin remained a simple auditor in their Church. By way of appeasing the enormous activity of his intelligence, they turned him on to ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... temperament conducive to non-invidious work. It is commonly attempted to show all this empirically or it is rather assumed that this is the empirical generalization which must be obvious to any one who cares to see it. In conducting the proof of this thesis the treacherous ground of inference from cause to effect is somewhat shrewdly avoided, except so far as to show that the "manly virtues" spoken of above are fostered by sports. But since it is these manly virtues ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... on Fifth Avenue and four-flushing toward every point of the compass. His last stunt was 'patron of science.' He'd gotten into the Geographical Society, and he was laying lines for the Royal Society in London. He had a Harvard don working over in the Metropolitan library, building him a thesis! ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... which was upon the point of shutting him up in a state prison. Another man wrote to recommend the war: he was applauded, and his word taken for the science, the politeness, and importance of the Turks. It is true that he believed in his own thesis, for he has found among them people who cast a nativity, and alchymists who ruined his fortune; as he found Martinists at Paris, who enabled him to sup with Sesostris, and Magnetizers who concluded with destroying his existence. Notwithstanding ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... parliamentary debate in its vicissitudes and interchange—gifted, too, with a prophetic insight into coming objections, which "cast their shadows before," and with an almost diseased subtlety of thinking, he binds up his answers to opponents with every thesis he propounds; and his paragraphs sometimes remind you of the plan of generals in great emergencies, putting foot soldiers on the same saddles with cavalry—they seem to ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett



Words linked to "Thesis" :   assumption, premiss, treatise, premise, dissertation



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