Superstition Sentence Examples

This superstition dominated Scotland.

He had fits of superstition which in healthier moments he despised.

The young king regarded him with an affection which the superstition of the time attributed to witchcraft.

The old Hebrew prohibition of graven images was surely based on a like superstition, so far as it was not merely due to the physical impossibility for nomads of heavy statues that do not admit of being carried from camp to camp and from pasture to pasture.

He had made a copy of St Paul's epistles and committed them to memory, and from this arsenal of Scripture he attacked the unrighteousness of the state no less than the superstition of the Church.

Superstition also entered largely into the choice of remedies.

It must be remembered that his training was not altogether bad, although superstition entered so largely into it.

The church and church theology, to whose guidance the masses now surrendered themselves, took in along with them their superstition, their polytheism, their magic, their myths, and all the machinery of religious witchcraft.

He maintained that old prejudices would disappear with the progress of knowledge, and that superstition and mechanical devices of salvation would be insensibly abandoned.

Religion began in fear - as if it were no more than a lying superstition.

The philosophers themselves, no doubt, still lived on the knowledge they repudiated; but the masses were trained to a superstition with which the Christian church, as the executor of Neoplatonism, had to reckon and contend.

The removal of the ancient temple was undoubtedly intended when the Erechtheum was built, but superstition and popular feeling may have prevented its demolition and the removal of the, 6avov to the new edifice.

Dante refers to the shadowless spectre of Virgil, and the folklore of many European countries affords examples of the prevalence of the superstition that a man must be as careful of his shadow as of his body.

He was disgusted with the brutality of English manners, which he paints in no flattering colours, and he found pedantry and superstition as rampant in Oxford as in Geneva.

But the highest developments of priestly influence are hardly separable from something of magical superstition, the opus operatum of the priest has the power of a sorcerer's spell.

Being open to objection on grounds both of superstition and of irreverence, these customs were gradually put down by the council of Laodicea in A.D.

While in Egypt he became more and more imbued with superstition, consulting astrologers and allowing himself to be flattered into a belief that he possessed a divine power which could work miracles.

It is possible that the whole may be merely a reminiscence of a superstition similar to the familiar werwolf stories.

On the same bench of a Calcutta college sit youths trained up in the strictest theism, others indoctrinated in the mysteries of the Hindu trinity and pantheon, with representatives of every link in the chain of superstition - from the harmless offering of flowers before the family god to the cruel rites of Kali, whose altars in the most civilized districts of Bengal, as lately as the famine of 1866, were stained with human blood.

The practice of magic, superstition, &c., are also frequently referred to as sacrilege, especially during the long struggle with German heathenism.

Chrysippus did his best to reconcile the superstition with his own rational doctrine of strict causation.

Scaevola, following Panaetius, explained that the prudence of statesmen had established this public institution in the service of order midway between the errors of popular superstition and the barren truths of enlightened philosophy.

Antoninus may perhaps be explained in harmony with the older Stoic teaching; but, when taken in connexion with the rise of Neoplatonism and the revival of superstition, they are certainly significant.

In some of them he attacks superstition and philosophical error with the sharpness of his wit; in others he merely paints scenes of modern life.

If not intended from the first for purposes of divination, it was so used both before and after Confucius, and on that account it was exempted, through the superstition of the emperor of the Ts'in dynasty, from the flames.

The Cheese Well may have been a pagan shrine in the past, whose veneration has fallen to superstition.

At the same time a class of men arose interested in these forms for their own sake, professional lawyers Bence, but also "poisons, nay destroys, the divinest feeling in man, the sense of truth," and the belief in sacraments such as the Lord's Supper, a piece of religious materialism of which "the necessary consequences are superstition and immorality."

Another factor besides climate which has exerted a powerful influence on dress - more perhaps on what is commonly regarded as " jewelry " as distinct from " clothing " - is superstition.

They reveal to us a kindly and cheerful soul, well versed in the literary accomplishments of the period, but without any strength of intellectual grasp and peculiarly prone to superstition.

Born of a family of priest-physicians, and inheriting all its traditions and prejudices, Hippocrates was the first to cast superstition aside, and to base the practice of medicine on the principles of inductive philosophy.

The Christians were attacked on slanderous charges of superstition and secret abominations, but not as a church.

The popular faith was full of heathenish superstition strangely blended with the higher ideas which were the inheritance left to Israel by men like Moses and Elijah; but the common prophets accepted all alike, and combined heathen arts of divination and practices of mere physical enthusiasm with a not altogether insincere pretension that through their professional oracles the ideal was being maintained of a continuous divine guidance of the people of Yahweh.

It is a problem how to reconcile his ignorance, his weakness, his superstition, his crude notions, his erroneous observations, his ridiculous influences and theories, with his grasp of method, his lofty views of the true scope of medicine, his lucid statements, his incisive and epigrammatic criticisms of men and motives.

We must bear in mind that he was no cold systematic thinker, but an Oriental visionary, brought up in crass superstition, and without intellectual discipline; a man whose nervous temperament had been powerfully worked on by ascetic austerities, and who was all the more irritated by the opposition he encountered, because he had little of the heroic in his nature.

The piles of granite rocks somewhat in the shape of cromlechs which are found scattered about this province, and especially along the western edge of the Hondsrug, have long been named Hunebedden, from a popular superstition that they were "Huns' beds."

But to these were quickly added subjects of allegory, of classical learning, of witchcraft and superstition and of daily life; scenes of the parlour and the cloister, of the shop, the field, the market and the camp; and lastly portraits of famous men, with scenes of court life and princely pageant and ceremony.

Penetrated by the conviction that ignorance was the worst of the inveterate evils of old Russia, a pitiless enemy of superstition of every sort, a reformer by nature, overflowing with energy and resource, and with a singularly lucid mind armed at all points by a farreaching erudition, Prokopovich was the soul of the reforming party after the death of Peter the Great.

To the same effect, the synod of Chalon-sur-Saone (813) reprobated the superstition which was wedded to the pilgrimage (c. 13); and it would be easy to collect similar judgments, delivered in every centre of medievalism.

The comic poets satirized them, and Plato and Demosthenes inveighed against them; but they continued to spread, with all their fervid enthusiasm, their superstition and their obscene practices, wide among the people, whose religious cravings were not satisfied with the purely external religions of Hellenism.

But this version of the idea of Antichrist, hostile to the Jews and better expressing the relation of Christianity to the Roman empire, was prevented from obtaining an absolute ascendancy in Christian tradition by the rise of the belief in the ultimate return of Nero, and by the absorption of this outcome of pagan superstition into the Jewish-Christian apocalyptic conceptions.

Some thought him Elijah or one of the ancient prophets returned to earth - a suggestion based on popular tradition; others said He was John the Baptist risen from the dead - the superstition of Herod who had put him to death.

The supposition that the tree was the source of Christ's crown of thorns gave rise doubtless to the tradition current among the French peasantry that it utters groans and cries on Good Friday, and probably also to the old popular superstition in Great Britain and Ireland that ill-luck attended the uprooting of hawthorns.

The result is instructive when we turn to the numerous serpent myths and legends from the Old World and the New, to the stray notices in old writers, or to the fragmentary scraps of popular superstition everywhere.

According to a common Indian belief a wealthy man who dies without an heir returns to guard his wealth in the form of a serpent, and Italian superstition supposed that to find a serpent's skin brought good luck (Leland) .2 No singular preference for jewels on the part of serpents will explain the belief, and creatures like the jackdaw which have this weakness do not enjoy this prominence in folk-lore.

Superstition and stupidity hedged them in on every side, so that sorcery and magic seemed the only means of winning power over nature or insight into mysteries surrounding human life.

The medieval Jews also held that there is a cardiac demon in wine which takes possession of drunken men; and the Mahommedan prohibition of wine-drinking is based on a similar superstition.

It appals the reader with its irregularity of treatment, its variations of style, and its abrupt transitions from the spiritual to the crude and trivial, and from superstition to the purest insight.

Against superstition, fanaticism and priestcraft they protested unceasingly.

Grieved at the ignorance and superstition which the remissness of the clergy permitted to flourish in the neighbouring parishes, he used every year to visit the most neglected parts of Northumberland, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Westmorland and Cumberland; and that his own flock might not suffer, he was at the expense of a constant assistant.

The people exhibit every stage of human progress, and every type of human enlightenment and superstition from the educated classes to primitive hill tribes.

Ibn Jubair mentions a curious superstition of the Meccans, who believed that the water rose in the shaft at the full moon of the month Shaban.

By natural instinct he hated the French, but there was no room in his nearly imbecile mind for more than childish superstition, insane pride of birth, and an interest in court etiquette.

Idolatry of his father's hero and leader had now superseded the earlier superstition inculcated by his mother.

It was in the calm, resolute, skilful culling of such pleasures as circumstances afforded from moment to moment, undisturbed by passion, prejudices or superstition, that he conceived the quality of wisdom to be exhibited; and tradition represents him as realizing this ideal to an impressive degree.

But these, to the untutored imagination, present a mystical, as well as a mechanical aspect; and barbaric familiarity with the heavens developed at an early age, through the promptings of superstition, into a fixed system of observation.

The power of superstition was greatly broken, a result partly due to the keen good sense of the king, but chiefly to the spread of knowledge and religious teaching.

During his stay here Ricci was convinced that a mistake had been made in adopting a dress resembling that of the bonzes, a class who were the objects either of superstition or of contempt.

They are a strange blend of sophistry, superstition, sound sense and solid argument.

How far the more serious claim is likely to be revived in connexion with the renewal of research into the "occult" sciences generally, it is still too early to speculate; and it has to be recognized that such a point of view is opposed to the generally established belief that astrology is either mere superstition or absolute imposture, and that its former vogue was due either to deception or to the tyranny of an unscientific environment.

This superstition, perhaps at its strongest in the 1 3 th to the 15th century, passed into Protestantism.

Superstition as to the appearance of the pie still survives even among many educated persons, and there are several versions of a rhyming adage as to the various turns of luck which its presenting itself, either alone or in company with others, is supposed to betoken, though all agree that the sight of a single pie presages sorrow.

The superstition was extended to a cult surviving among some Jews even as late as the 7th century A.D.

In the case of this modern superstition the process is doubly hard because various factors have combined to administer artificial respiration.

They call the sun dance barbarous, savage, a bloody superstition.

Crystal is thrust into a past ruled by superstition, then catapulted into a future devastated by biological weapons.

This apparently light and bright little show was in fact a searing critique on gloss, superstition, power and sugar.

The prince of Conti, one of the many people ensnared by Croesus ' superstition, tried to withdraw his deposits in gold coins.

He cultivated a certain fatalism, a grain of superstition.

It was soon replaced by a New Age of ignorance and superstition, from which came a Holy Crusade.

Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.

Third, I consider priestcraft and superstition the greatest obstacle to human improvement and happiness.

It seems a most strange delusion and not reconcilable with our superstition that man is a reasoning being.

Probably the most well known superstition involves William Shakespeare's Macbeth, which is often called " the Scottish play " by actors.

He saw that the best education - for people still went to finish their education in Athens - was no protection against irrational superstition.

We are almost space age travelers still trying to move about in the primitive superstition of ancient times.

The decision to use the same name is on one hand superstition and on the other prophesy.

In an age of superstition no people had so great a reputation for credulity as the Paphlagonians, and Alexander had little difficulty in convincing them of the second coming of the god under the name of Glycon.

With a surface gloss of Greek education, he united the subtlety, the superstition, and the obstinate endurance of an Oriental.

Vulgar materialism sneers at the problem; duty is a fraud or hobgoblin, a mere superstition.

When Christian scholars began to study the Old Testament in Hebrew, if they were ignorant of this general rule or regarded the substitution as a piece of Jewish superstition, reading what actually stood in the text, they would inevitably pronounce the name Jehovah.

In the 8th century Charlemagne, through the Capitularies, tried in vain to galvanize preaching; such specimens as we have show the sermons of the times to be marked by superstition, ignorance, formality and plagiarism.

To ascertain the truth, he had also put to the torture two maid-servants described as deaconesses, but had discovered nothing beyond a perverse and extravagant superstition.

Clifford, perceive in the ecclesiastical organization and its influence nothing more than a perpetuation of demoralizing medieval superstition.

His real name was Michele Pezza, and he was born of low parentage at Itri; he had committed many murders and robberies in the Terra di Lavoro, but by good luck combined with audacity he always escaped capture, whence his name of Fra Diavolo, popular superstition having invested him with the characters of a monk and a demon, and it seems that at one time he actually was a monk.

Articles 11-14 forbid books which outrage God and sacred things, books which propagate magic and superstition, and books which are pernicious to society.

It was written from the point of view of a Quaker who did not believe in revealed religion, but who held that "all religions are in their nature mild and benign" when not associated with political systems. Intermixed with the coarse unceremonious ridicule of what he considered superstition and bad faith are many passages of earnest and even lofty eloquence in favour of a pure morality founded on natural religion.

Since the new moon is associated with special acts of devotion in Turkey - where, as in England, there is a popular superstition that it is unlucky to Gee it through glass - it may originally have been adopted in consequence of its religious significance.

Ignorance is the mother of suspicion as well as of superstition; and accordingly the Christian inhabitants of the Lebanon have long been persuaded that the Druses in their secret assemblies are guilty of the most nefarious practices.

They were but a magnificent drapery of pomp and glory thrown across a background of poverty, ignorance, superstition, hypocrisy and cruelty; remove it, and reality appears in all its brutal and sinister nudity.

The advent of the Persians, bringing with them a conception of religion of a far higher order than Babylonian-Assyrian polytheism (see Zoroaster), must also have acted as a disintegrating factor in leading to the decline of the old faith in the Euphrates Valley, and we thus have the interesting though not entirely exceptional phenomenon of a great civilization bequeathing as a legacy to posterity a superstition instead of a real achievement.

Through the Ages and for All Eternity The exact origin of the wedding ring is uncertain and is rife with superstition and mythology.

Probably the most well known superstition involves William Shakespeare 's Macbeth, which is often called " the Scottish play " by actors.

The use of blue is a remnant of an ancient superstition.

Superstition is also an ancient German tradition.

One German superstition says the couple will have the same number of children as the grains of rice that remain in the bride's hair.

Nudists often met with religious opposition, but there were also many openly Christian nudists, who argued that it was time for Christianity to rid itself of superstition.

Scientists and physicians saw nudism not as a return to Eden (although this trope certainly occurred in nudist writing), but as a path forward to a shining new modernity in which science, rather than superstition, would lead the way.

The lore handed down from yesteryear may sound like superstition, but if it works, it can only help your garden by working with nature to increase the harvest yield.

There are many good luck signs and symbols used in feng shui that go beyond what many people consider to be symbols of superstition.

If you're the type who prefers science over superstition, you can may want to purchase an at home baby gender prediction test.

One consideration that couples may want to acknowledge before choosing black jewels for an engagement ring is the symbolic superstition associated with black.

If you've ever wondered about the history of Friday the 13th, the following article details the many sources that make up this powerful superstition that still exists throughout the world.

Historians are able to trace the superstition surrounding this date all the way back to a Norse myth where twelve gods have a dinner party in their heaven.

On Wall Street, this superstition is stronger than ever, and the belief is based on a few stock market events that strike fear into the heart of wall street brokers every time the date rolls around.

This superstition deemed fact for many people has its roots in cultures stemming from Viking and Norse mythology through the view of modern Christianity.

Unlike tales of Santa Claus and stepping on cracks to break your mother's back, this superstition lingers and flits through the mind of the most doubtful.

Sometimes superstition is tied to the jersey a home team will choose.

Thus it encouraged an unrestrained emotionalism, rank superstition, an unhealthy asceticism, and the employment of artificial means to induce the ecstatic state.

It is a celebrated place of Hindu superstition, the favourite residence of the Brahmans of Nepal, and contains more families of that order than either Khatmandu or Patan.

Isolated fireballs and star showers had been occasionally observed, but instead of being attentively watched they had been neglected, for their apparitions had filled mankind with dread, and superstition attributed to them certain malevolent influences.

He shared the piety and superstition of the age, and did much for the spread of Christianity.

The clergy were bidden to exhort their hearers to the " works of charity, mercy and faith, specially prescribed and commanded in Scripture, and not to repose their trust or affiance in any other works devised by men's phantasies beside Scripture; as in wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same, saying over a number of beads, not understood or minded on, or in such-like superstition."

Doubtless the king's sore financial needs had much to do with the dissolution of the abbeys and the plundering of the shrines, but there is no reason to suppose that he was not fully convinced that the monks had long outlived their usefulness and that the shrines were centres of abject superstition and ecclesiastical deceit.

So far too as the Romans were capable of taking interest in speculative questions, the tragic poets contributed to stimulate curiosity on such subjects, and they anticipated Lucretius in using the conclusions of speculative philosophy as well as of common sense to assail some of the prevailing forms of superstition.

In spite of their conversion to Christianity, the Samoyedes still regard these piles with superstition.

Marius had a decided tinge of fanaticism and superstition.

Some curious memorials of the superstition have survived in rings and amulets, engraven with the various signs, and worn as a kind of astral defensive armour.

From the beginning to the end of his career he remained true to the purpose of his life, which was to fight the battle of sound learning and plain common sense against the powers of ignorance and superstition, and amid all the convulsions of that period he never once lost his mental balance."

Superstition, misunderstanding and hatred caused the Christians trouble for many generations, and governmental repression they had to suffer occasionally, as a result of popular disturbances.

Contempt for reason and science leads in the end to barbarism - its necessary consequence being the rudest superstition.

In other words, thought, which will 'not stop, takes to mythology; and in the place of reason we have superstition.

In order to justify superstition and the ancient forms of worship, philosophy becomes in his hands a theurgy, a knowledge of mysteries, a sort of spiritualism.

He drew the horoscopes of the emperor and Wallenstein, as well as of a host of lesser magnates; but, though keenly alive to the unworthy character of such a trade, he made necessity his excuse for a compromise with superstition.

They are the chief factor in surviving Irish superstition.

A popular superstition in Bohemia assumes that the soul in the shape of a white bird leaves the body by way of the mouth.

This is one rule of wisdom with regard to religion; and another equally important is to avoid superstition, which he boldly defines as the belief that God is like a hard judge who, eager to find fault, narrowly examines our slightest act, that He is revengeful and hard to appease, and that therefore He must be flattered and importuned, and won over by pain and sacrifice.

As a typical embodiment for all time of the conflict between superstition and true religion, it is lifted out of the range of mere individual biography into that of spiritual symbolism, and it has accordingly furnished at once a fruitful theme for the religious teacher and 1 The text is uncertain.

The Stoic doctrine of Fatalism seemed to Epicurus no less deadly a foe of man's true welfare than popular superstition.

It was noted for the first time in this February speech, but the most striking instance was in a speech on Mr Osborne Morgan's Burials Bill in April 1875, in which he described a Quaker funeral, and protested against the "miserable superstition of the phrase `buried like a dog.'" "In that sense," he said, "I shall be buried like a dog, and all those with whom I am best acquainted, whom I best love and esteem, will be ` buried like a dog.'

This is an endemic human bias that is often said to be based on total illogic and superstition.

From all the lower levels where superstition and cruelty reign, from the depths of fear inspired by fetichism, we look on to the higher level of Judaism as the progressive religion of the old world.

Though his teaching was largely directed against superstition, he seems to have been inclined to mysticism, and perhaps for this reason various kabbalistic works were ascribed to him in later times.

The Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms 1 of the 11th century, published in the Rolls series of medieval chronicles and memorials, admirably illustrate the mixture of magic and superstition with the relics of ancient science which constituted monastic medicine.

Still, as compared with the later Neoplatonists, he is comparatively free from crass superstition and wild fanaticism.

Lastly, the restriction to aniconic worship saved them from much superstition, for there is nothing which so much stimulates the growth of a mythology as the manufacture of idols.

It was not till 1168 that the gigantic four-headed image of Swantevit was destroyed at Arcona, the capital of the island of Riigen, and this Mona of Slavonic superstition was included in the advancing circle of Christian 5 Church, Gifts of Civilization, p. 330.6 Bede, H.E.

Vespasian, who had a strong vein of superstition, was made to believe that he was himself to fulfil this expectation, and all manner of omens and oracles and portents were applied to him.

This superstition has been immortalized in Keats's poem, "The Eve of St Agnes."

The learned hold the doctrine of Confucius, and Buddhism, alloyed with much popular superstition, has some influence.

It may here be incidentally mentioned that this superstition brought him into trouble with the Roman Church.

Protestantism took over the superstition from.

It is impossible to trace directly the influence exercised upon him by the great men of his time, but one cannot fail to connect his emancipation of medicine from superstition with the widespread power exercised over Greek life and thought by the living work of Socrates, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus and Thucydides.

Under the influence of the touchstone of strict inquiry set on foot by the Royal Society, the marvels of witchcraft, sympathetic powders and other relics of medieval superstition disappeared like a mist before the sun, whilst accurate observations and demonstrations of a host of new wonders accumulated, amongst which were numerous contributions to the anatomy of animals, and none perhaps more noteworthy than the observations, made by the aid of microscopes constructed by himself, of Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch naturalist (1683), some of whose instruments were presented by him to the society.

He used to say that there are only two sources of human vice--idleness and superstition, and only two virtues--activity and intelligence.

But of the three claims which he makes to immortality, the importance of his subject, his desire to liberate the mind from the bonds of superstition and the charm and lucidity of his poetry - that which he himself regarded as supreme was the second.

Powell contends that in a proper sense none of the Indian tribes was nomadic, but that, governed by water-supply, bad seasons and superstition (and discomfort from vermin must be added), even the Pueblo tribes often tore down and rebuilt their domiciles.

On his return he was wrecked on the holy island of Fosite (Heligoland), where his disregard of the pagan superstition nearly cost him his life.