Top 22 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Glanvill

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English writer Joseph Glanvill.

Last updated on November 20, 2024.

Joseph Glanvill was an English writer, philosopher, and clergyman. Not himself a scientist, he has been called "the most skillful apologist of the virtuosi", or in other words the leading propagandist for the approach of the English natural philosophers of the later 17th century. In 1661 he predicted "To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic conveyances may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence."

English - Writer | 1636 - 1680

Source: Wikipedia

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

Joseph Glanvill

It may not be impossible, but that our Faculties may be so construed, as always to deceive us in the things we judge most certain and assured.

Joseph Glanvill

And for mathematical science, he that doubts their certainty hath need of a dose of hellebore.

Joseph Glanvill

That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry.

Joseph Glanvill

We have a mistaken notion of antiquity, calling that so which in truth is the world's nonage.

Joseph Glanvill

We cannot conceive how the Foetus is form'd in the Womb, nor as much as how a Plant springs from the Earth we tread on ... And if we are ignorant of the most obvious things about us, and the most considerable within our selves, 'tis then no wonder that we know not the constitution and powers of the creatures, to whom we are such strangers.

Joseph Glanvill

Justice is but the distributing to everything according to the requirements of its nature.

Joseph Glanvill

The understanding also hath its idiosyncrasies as well as other faculties.

Joseph Glanvill

The union of a sect within itself is a pitiful charity; it's no concord of Christians, but a conspiracy against Christ; and they that love one another for their opinionative concurrence, love for their own sakes, not their Lord's.

Joseph Glanvill

Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.

Joseph Glanvill

How the purer spirit is united to his clod, is a knot too hard for fallen humanity to untie.

Joseph Glanvill

Time, as a river, hath brought down to us what is more light and superficial, while things more solid and substantial have been immersed.

Joseph Glanvill

They that never peeped beyond the common belief in which their easy understandings were at first indoctrinated are strongly assured of the truth of their receptions.

Joseph Glanvill

The sages of old live again in us, and in opinions there is a metempsychosis.

Joseph Glanvill

It is the great beauty of true religion that it shall be universal, and a departure in any instance from universality is a corruption of religion itself.

Joseph Glanvill

What's impossible to all humanity may be possible to the metaphysics and physiology of angels.

Joseph Glanvill

To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic contrivances may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence.

Joseph Glanvill

And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness, Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.

Joseph Glanvill