Positive men err most of any men. [ Proverb ]

Positive in proportion to their ignorance. [ Hosea Ballou ]

A man who makes no enemies is never a positive force. [ Simon Cameron ]

Obstinacy is ever most positive when it is most in the wrong. [ Madame Necker ]

To be great one must be positive, and gain strength through foes. [ Donn Piatt ]

Variety is a positive requisite even in the character of our food. [ Ruskin ]

One single positive weighs more. You know, than negatives a score. [ Prior ]

In common things the law of sacrifice takes the form of positive duty. [ Froude ]

Childish, imbecile carelessness is enough to render any man poor, without the aid of a single positive vice. [ Francis Wayland ]

I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world ever convince me to the contrary. [ Sterne ]

Pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature; one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness. [ Lowell ]

Each department of knowledge passes in succession through three different theoretic stages: the theologic stage, or fictitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; the scientific, or positive. [ A. Comte ]

Pain itself is not without its alleviations. It may be violent and frequent, but it is seldom both violent and long-continued; and its pauses and intermissions become positive pleasures. It has the power of shedding a satisfaction over intervals of ease, which, I believe, few enjoyments exceed. [ Paley ]

A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analyzed the laws of aesthetic beauty concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination - sculpture, painting, written fiction - is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

We readily excuse paralytics from labor; and shall we be angry with a hypochondriac for not being cheerful in company? Must we stigmatize such an unfortunate person as peevish, positive, and unfit for society? His disorder may no more suffer him to be merry, than the gout will suffer another to dance. The advising a melancholic to be cheerful is like bidding a coward to be courageous, or a dwarf be taller. [ Wollaston ]

Why has the beneficent Creator scattered over the face of the earth such a profusion of beautiful flowers? Why is it that every landscape has its appropriate flowers, every nation its national flowers, every rural home its home flowers? Why do flowers enter and shed their perfume over every scene of life, from the cradle to the grave? Why are flowers made to utter all voices of joy and sorrow in all varying scenes? It is that flowers have in themselves a real and natural significance; they have a positive relation to man; they correspond to actual emotions; they have their mission - a mission of love and mercy; they have their language, and from the remotest ages this language has found its interpreters. [ Henrietta Dumont ]