|
|
|
More "Delusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Champaubert. At the latter place was fought the battle which hears its name. The Russians were defeated, General Alsufieff was made prisoner, and 2000 men and 30 guns fell into the hands of the French. After this battle the Emperor was under such a delusion as to his situation that while supping with Berthier, Marmont, and his prisoner, General Alsufieff, the Emperor said, "Another such victory as this, gentlemen, and I ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to his idols! As our old preacher used to say in Missouri. Your delusion is hopeless. It's well ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... trade, and it was during this period that Susan had an awakening. A friend to whom she confided her history ridiculed her grave acceptance of her position; and all was over with her peace of mind. When Newson came home at the end of one winter he saw that the delusion he had so carefully sustained ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... enough to maintain the contest with great spirit, the rather that of the two he was for the time the more cool, since he could not help imputing Leicester's conduct either to actual frenzy or to the influence of some strong delusion. ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly 'Liberty first and Union afterward'; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... is, I find, in some quarters an apprehension that the recruiting for the new army and the functions to be assigned to that army when it is formed and trained may interfere with or may in some way belittle or disparage the territorial force. Believe me, no delusion could be more ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... could never account for. She was sure that he must have been a very bad valet. However, she did not marry him for a valet, but for a husband; and she was satisfied with her bargain. What if he did suffer under a delusion? The exposure of that delusion merely crystallized into a definite shape her vague suspicions concerning his mentality. Besides, it was a harmless delusion. And it explained things. It explained, among other things, why he had gone to stay at the Grand Babylon Hotel. ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... sand, or me. And then the sun rose behind him, and he looked up, and lo! it was reflected from the wall of a city before him, which resembled another sun of hope rising in the west to cheer him. And he rubbed his eyes, and looked again, saying to himself: Is it a delusion of the desert, to mock me as I perish, or is it really a true city? And he said again: Ha! it is a real city. And his ebbing strength came back to him with a flood of joy. And he stooped, and took up a little sand, and turned, and threw it back, exclaiming: Out ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... unaffected people, the Italians,—for such they are,—that, far from disgusting a nation accustomed to romantic impulses and to the singing of poetry in their streets and gondolas, their gravest and most distinguished men and, in many instances, women, too, ran childlike into the delusion. The best of their poets", the sweet-tongued Filicaja among others, "accepted farms in Arcadia forthwith; ... and so little transitory did the fashion turn out to be, that not only was Crescimbeni its active officer for ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... lips, and dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips," is sufficient to show how far the thoughts of such a vicarious satisfaction were from the prophets. Such is surely not the ground from which the delusion of being substitutes for others can grow up. All those who entertained such a delusion, such as Gichtel, Bourignon, Guyon, were misled into it by proudly shutting their eyes to their own sinfulness. It would surely be abasing the prophets without any cause, if we were ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... brotherhood of the Cross, in imitation of the children who, about a hundred years before, had united, at the instigation of some fanatic monks, for the purpose of recovering the Holy Sepulchre. All the inhabitants of this town were carried away by the delusion; they conducted the strangers to their houses with songs of thanksgiving, to regale them for the night. The women embroidered banners for them, and all were anxious to augment their pomp; and at every succeeding pilgrimage ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... there be an ax there?" Ivan interrupted, carelessly and disdainfully. He was exerting himself to the utmost not to believe in the delusion and not to ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... spirit to undertake, and the eloquence to support, so great a measure of hazardous benevolence. His spirit is not owing to his ignorance of the state of men and things; he well knows what snares are spread about his path, from personal animosity, from court intrigues, and possibly from popular delusion. But he has put to hazard his ease, his security, his interest, his power, even his darling popularity, for the benefit of a people whom he has never seen. This is the road that all heroes have trod before him. He is traduced and abused ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... altogether unsuccessful. Notwithstanding the general lukewarmth of the age in matters of religion, it produced considerable effect among the fanatic sectaries that swarm through the kingdom of England. The leaders of those blind enthusiasts, either actuated by the spirit of delusion, or desirous of recommending themselves to the protection of the higher powers, immediately seized the hint, expatiating vehemently on the danger that impended over God's people; and exerting all their faculties to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent—the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free. It is only on the surface that there are transformations—and these we must study and make the most of, for of what is underneath men are mainly unconscious. ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... of which a stream of dark liquid descended. So vividly did this phantasm present itself to Leonard, that, almost convinced of its reality, he placed his hands before his eyes for a few moments, and, on withdrawing them, was glad to find that the delusion was occasioned by a black cloud over the cathedral, which his distempered fancy had converted into the colossal figure of ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... found it difficult to divest himself of an habitual delusion on this head, handed down out of the past and inculcated by interested politicians, to the effect that in some mysterious way he stands to gain by limiting his own opportunities. But the neutralisation of international trade, or the abrogation ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... first, but lastly into the direct track that enabled him fully to develop them, is a curious instance of his modesty of feeling, and of the methods which the human mind uses at once to deceive itself, and yet, in its very delusion, to make its way out of error into the path which Nature has marked out as its right one. He often incited me to attempt the writing a tragedy: he conceived that I possessed some dramatic talent, and he was always most earnest and energetic in his exhortations ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... perceives. The death-blow to such superstition is only struck when we have not only proved that men have been deceived, but shown besides how they came to be deceived; when science has explained the optical delusion, and shown the physiological state in which such apparitions become visible. Ridicule will not do it. Disproof will not do it. So long as men feel that there is a spirit-world, and so long as to some the impression is vivid that they have seen it, you spend your rhetoric ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... in pints; and another fourth, from gangrene due to too tight bandaging of the limb to prevent the poison from getting into the circulation, or from pus infections of the wound from cutting it with a dirty knife. Alcohol is as great a delusion and fraud in snake-bite as in everything else; instead of being an antidote, it increases the poisoning by its depressing effect on the heart. If you should be bitten, throw a bandage round the limb, above the bite, and ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... Oro (mother of gold)." Then, as Raleigh well knows that the public is on its guard against his exaggerations, he adds, "It will be thought perchance, that I am the sport of a false and cheating delusion, but why should I have undertaken a voyage thus laborious, if I had not entertained the conviction that there is not a country upon earth which is richer in gold than Guiana? Whiddon and Milechappe, our surgeon, brought back several ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... with the utmost fortitude; but, to everyone's joy, it was found there was no necessity for it; she had been deceived by a villainous quack, who knew too well how to make a wound hideous and painful, and had continued her delusion for his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... who are restored to health leave without having had aroused or implanted in them a desire for alcoholic liquors, neither have they been taught to regard them as valuable aids to the recovery of health and strength. On the contrary, there have been many who have come in, suffering from this delusion, who have had it thoroughly dispelled, both by their own experience and the experience of ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... up the carcass with a pair of scissors. It does not look formidable now that it is all contracted;—it is scarcely eight inches long,—thin as card-board, and even less heavy. It has no substantiality, no weight;—it is a mere appearance, a mask, a delusion.... But remembering the spectral, cunning, juggling something which magnified and moved it but a moment ago,—I feel almost tempted to believe, with certain savages, that there are ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... zeal for the honor and worship of the true God whom he was preaching. Asking them whether all trees around about had that quality of inflicting death on him who touched them, accidentally or designedly, they answered "Yes." Then elevating his voice, he gave them a fervent discourse against the delusion under which they were laboring; and concluded by intimating to them that he himself would get and eat the fruit, as well as cut down the trees, so that they might see that one would not die, and so that they ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... for happiness to be my reward, and not titles or money;" and happiness means being with her whom he repeatedly calls Santa Emma, and his "guardian angel,"—a fond imagining, the sincerity of which checks the ready smile, but elicits no tenderness for a delusion too ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... popular power; take from the book of experience the lesson that in public affairs great and happy results follow in proportion to faith in the efficacy of that principle, and learn to rebuke ill-advised counsellors who pronounce the most momentous and most certain of political truths a delusion ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the deadly range of their well planted guns. It was then that, far to the right, a heavy column could be seen moving rapidly in the rear of the contending hosts. Was it a part of Hunter's division that had turned the enemy's rear? Such was the thought at first, and with the delusion triumphant cheers rang from the parched throats of the weary Federals. They were soon to be undeceived. The stars and bars flaunted amid those advancing ranks, and the constant yells of the Confederates proclaimed the truth. Johnston was pouring his fresh troops upon ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... experience novel and suggestive, such minor discomforts did not trouble anyone seriously; but considered in retrospect it must be admitted that these, their first billets, were very poor for a village so far behind the line. If it was an unpromising beginning for the companies, it proved a delusion and a snare for headquarters, for they scored on this occasion in having at the Chateau the most comfortable billets they ever were fated ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... of spirit. [Sattva.] Fortune that first shows like nectar, and finally appears as poison, Chaining the senses to the world, belongs to the realm of passion. [Rajas.] Fortune that immediately and thereafter strikes the soul with delusion, In sleep, indolence, laziness, such Fortune belongs to ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... subjected to, when, "on looking up he beheld a white hand—a lady's delicate white hand—so placed between the light and the deed as to obscure the spot on which he was engaged. The unaccountable hand, however, was gone almost as soon as noticed." The clerk concluding that this was some optical delusion, proceeded with his work, and had come to the clause wherein the Master of Draycot disinherited his son, when again the same ghostly hand was thrust between the light and ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... established; men began to collect armor and relics: in this period grew up such an antiquary as Mr. Oldbuck, who curiously sought out every relic of the Roman times,—armor, fosses, and praetoria,—and found, with much that was real, many a fraud or delusion. It was an age which, in the words of old Walter Charleton, "despised the present as an innovation, and slighted the future, like the madman who fell ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... been so fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essential difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... to me more likely that Smith was genuinely deluded by the automatic freaks of a vigorous but undisciplined brain, and that, yielding to these, he became confirmed in the hysterical temperament which always adds to delusion self-deception, and to self-deception half-conscious fraud. In his day it was necessary to reject a marvel or admit its spiritual significance; granting an honest delusion as to his visions and his book, his only choice lay between counting himself the sport of devils or the agent of Heaven; ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... looked round—yet scarce believed The witness that his sight received; Such apparition well might seem Delusion of a dreadful dream. Sir Roderick in suspense he eyed, 260 And to his look the Chief replied, "Fear naught—nay, that I need not say— But—doubt not aught from mine array. Thou art my guest—I pledged my word As far as Coilantogle ford; 265 ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Chief, in his demonic power and fertility of resource. That any evil should befall him!—Pascal snapped his thin fingers; while, with the inalienable optimism of the born fanatic, he proceeded to state hopeful conjecture as established fact, thereby doing homage to the spirit of delusion which so conspicuously ruled him even to his inmost thought. But a spell of cold weather in the winter of 1862 struck a little too shrewdly through Pascal's seedy overcoat, causing that tender- hearted subverter of society to cough ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... bristly moustache resembling a shoe-brush. As he paces up and down the room, knitting his brows and gazing at the floor, he looks as if he were forming combinations of the first magnitude; but those who know him well are aware that this is an optical delusion, of which he is himself to some extent a victim. He is quite innocent of deep thought and concentrated intellectual effort. Though he frowns so fiercely he is by no means of a naturally ferocious temperament. Had he passed all his life in the country he would probably ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... by hammering it harder and harder into the elementary schools. Nor, perhaps, can one have much sympathy with the literary cultivation of Welsh as an instrument of living literature; and in this respect Eisteddfods encourage, I think, a fantastic and mischief-working delusion. ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... perceive about one third of a square inch of any bright object, if held at the distance of half an inch or an inch from the eye, and obliquely in such a direction as to reflect the light strongly toward the pupil. But this, I am convinced, was a mere delusion, for all rays of light falling in the direction of the optic axis must have been intercepted and reflected by the opaque capsule. By these rays, therefore, a perception of light, indeed, might be conveyed, but certainly no perception of objects. On the other hand, it seems probable ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... score of potatoes, if there be nothing else; but offer them caviare, canvas-back duck, quail, and nesselrode pudding, and they will look askance at food that is plain and wholesome. The "plain and wholesome" liver is a snare and a delusion, like the "bluff and genial" visitor whose geniality veils all sorts of satire and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... innocent frauds as we concerted together, made her latter days pass in a heavenly calm, by persuading her that our security was absolute, and that all search after us had ceased, under a belief on the part of Government that we had gained the shelter of a foreign land. All this was a delusion; but it was a delusion—blessed be Heaven!—which lasted exactly as long as her life, and was just commensurate with its necessity. I hurry ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... parliamentary game of brag, obstruction, and finesse. Keep, in short, the Irish members at Westminster, and you ensure the supremacy in Ireland of professional politicians. By a curious fatality the Gladstonian policy which weakens England ruins Ireland. Let no one fancy that this is the delusion of an English Unionist. Sir Gavan Duffy is an Irish Nationalist of a far higher type than the men who have drawn money from the Clan-na-Gael. In '48 he was a rebel, but if he was disloyal to England, he was always careful of the honour and character of Ireland. He, at least, ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... drove of buffalo, and while they scattered and ran would slip his rope about the neck of a calf and lead it back to the ranch. The calf would side up to the pony and follow it along as if under the delusion that it was following its mother. The man traded in cattle by picking up estrays and buying, for a song, those that were footsore and sick, keeping them till in condition and then selling them to passing trains ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... interposed Benjamin Tuch, another of the displaced demigods, a politician with a delusion that he swayed Presidential elections by his prestige in Brooklyn. 'You said the other day that your initials made ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... delusion!" said The Author, severely. "You have made Scholarship and Wisdom put on cap and bells and prance like a morris-dancer. Isn't that mischief enough for ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... foolish is this! how ill-grounded the satisfaction! and how weak am I to argue thus, and please myself with the delusion! For some months after, it appears, perhaps, that whereas there was L38 entered, received of Mr B.K., the figure 3 was mistaken, and set down for a figure of 5, for the sum received was L58; so that, instead of having L18 more in cash than there ought to be, I have 40s. wanting in my cash, which ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... impression made on the travellers' eyes been a mere vision or the result of a reality? an optical delusion or the shadow of a solid fact? Could an observation so rapid, so fleeting, so superficial, be really regarded as a genuine scientific affirmation? Could such a feeble glimmer of the invisible disc justify them in pronouncing a decided opinion on the inhabitability ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... characterised, as it was in the past, by the strong evidence of miracles,—in other words, by transcendental phenomena of a very extraordinary kind, connecting in a direct manner with what is generically termed Black Magic. Now, Black Magic in the past may have been imposture reinforced by delusion, and to state that it is recurring at the present day does not commit anyone to an opinion upon its veridical origin. To say, also, that the existence of modern diabolism has passed from the region of rumour ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... mankind in general pursues, particularly the so-styled religious class of community, is wholly contrary to our views, and therefore wrong; and that the God of Nature, as our God, requires that we put down the fabulous book called the Bible, to save mankind from priestcraft and delusion, and bring them over to ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... place, and the unity of action—which last would, perhaps, have been as appropriately, as well as more intelligibly, entitled the unity of interest. With this last the present question has no immediate concern: in fact, its conjunction with the former two is a mere delusion of words. It is not properly a rule, but in itself the great end not only of the drama, but of the epic poem, the lyric ode, of all poetry, down to the candle-flame cone of an epigram,—nay, of poesy in general, as the proper generic term inclusive of all the fine arts as its species. But of the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... which brought the new dog to the Place failed somehow to destroy the illusion of size and fierceness. But the moment the crate door was opened the delusion was ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... feign; yet though but verse The dreams and fables that adorn this scroll, Fond fool! I rave, and grieve as I rehearse; While GENUINE TEARS for FANCIED SORROWS roll. Perhaps the dear delusion of my heart Is wisdom; and the agitated mind, As still responding to each plaintive part, With love and rage, a tranquil hour can find. Ah! not alone the tender RHYMES I give Are fictions: but my FEARS and HOPES I deem Are FABLES all; deliriously I live, And life's whole course is one protracted ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... important it is for both our sakes, and more especially for our child. I would have made excuses, and would have endeavoured to think that this horrid feeling on his part is nothing more than a short delusion." ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... was a delusion, and that he must soon wake and find relief; but when he did, the relief did not come for the horrors of the dream were continued in the reality, and his lips parted to utter a wild cry; but lips, tongue, and throat were all parched and dry, and he lay ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... talk of nonsense; alas! what are all our opinions else? if we search for truth before we fix our principles, what do we find but doubt? And which of us begins the search a tabula rasa? Nay, where can we hunt but in volumes of error or purposed delusion? Have not we, too, a bias in our Minds—our passions? They will turn the scale in favour of the doctrines most agreeable to them. Yet let us be a little vain: you and I differ radically in our principles, and yet ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... "You say so, oh friend, and yet you know that Siddhartha is no driver of an ox-cart and a Samana is no drunkard. It's true that a drinker numbs his senses, it's true that he briefly escapes and rests, but he'll return from the delusion, finds everything to be unchanged, has not become wiser, has gathered no ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... was Mr. Zangwill (he who has no Christian name). Mr. Zangwill made an attempt to swear out a "writ de lunatico inquirendo" against his Jewish brother, on the ground that the first symptom of insanity is often the delusion that others are insane; and this being so, Doctor Nordau was not a safe subject to be at large. But the Assize of Public Opinion denied the petition, and the dear people bought the book at from three to five dollars a copy. Printed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... a start, to find that his rich banquet was a terrible delusion! that he was starving to death—and that a large ship was hove-to within a few ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... this young man," said the unblushing Antonina, "I was secreting our most precious effects from the knowledge of Justinian." The youth resumed his garments, and the pious husband consented to disbelieve the evidence of his own senses. From this pleasing and perhaps voluntary delusion, Belisarius was awakened at Syracuse, by the officious information of Macedonia; and that female attendant, after requiring an oath for her security, produced two chamberlains, who, like herself, had often beheld the adulteries of Antonina. A hasty flight into Asia saved Theodosius ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... again to Jerusalem into his kingdom." The whole history of religious error shows that the church is cold, formal, and controversial before the visitation of skepticism. When every power is in full exercise, infidelity stands aloof. God has so provided for his people that he has even caused the delusion by which they have suffered to contribute great benefits but little anticipated by the deluded or the deluders themselves. The intellectual labors of the German Rationalists have already shed an incalculable degree of light on the sacred books, and upon almost every branch of theology. But ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... "A popular delusion, my friend. Under Slave labor the South is growing poorer daily. While the Northern States, under the wage system, ten times more efficient, are draining the blood and treasure of Europe and growing richer by leaps and bounds. Norfolk, Richmond and Charleston should have been the great cities ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... a sweet dream, a beautiful delusion, a spirit-spell that moves the soul with pictures of love and enchantment, and from which some stern reality would soon awake him and dispel the charm? No, it was reality, appealing more forcibly to all that was true and kindly in his nature, ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... hir Chappell that stands besydes the Church of St. Croix, to sy the impression that Christ left wt his foot (so sottish is their delusion) on a hard great stone when he appeared to Ste. Radegonde as she was praying at that stone. The impression is as deip in the stone as a mans foot will make in the snow; and its wonderfull to sy whow thir zealots hath worn the print much deiper in severall parts wt their ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... that his delusion about "hot-headed fanatic young men" continues: here again I figure with my strolling company. "They said," he observes, "what they believed; at least, what they had been taught to believe that they ought to believe. ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... finesse, lie, cunning, double-dealing, fraud, lying, deceit, duplicity, guile, prevarication, deceitfulness, fabrication, hypocrisy, trickery, delusion, falsehood, imposition, untruth. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... twice been released from public process as non compos mentis, recovered his reason at the same time with his bodily health, and published an unreserved and affectionate acknowledgment of the wrong that he had done under the influence of a spirit of delusion which he had mistaken for the Spirit of truth. Those who had gone furthest with him in his excesses returned to a more sober and brotherly mind, and soon no visible trace remained of the wild storm of enthusiasm that had swept over ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... tumble, and jostle one another to behold the show, till the Abbey was nearly empty, while he tried to work out the perplexing question whether all this pomp and splendour were truly for the glory of God, or whether it were a delusion for the temptation of men's souls. It was a debate on which his old and his new guides seemed to him at issue, and he was drawn in both directions—now by the beauty, order, and deep symbolism of the Catholic ritual, now by the spirituality and earnestness of the men among whom he lived. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... much more. The terrible advantage thought has over expression bewildered him. All that he dreamed, all that was in embryo within his brain, he fancied was already in form and on the page, and he was aghast at the disproportion between the dream and the reality. His delusion was like that of Don Quixote,—he believed himself in the Empyrean, and took the vapors from the kitchen for the breath of heaven, and, seated on his wooden horse, felt all the shock of an imaginary fall.. Had he been in such a state of mental exaltation merely to produce ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... found comfort in the thought that their own suffering was the price of immunity from similar hardships their friends at home, in following their trail, would otherwise have had to pay. But the arrival of spring proved this a delusion. Before the warm weather had made the earth dry enough for easy travel, messengers came in from Nauvoo to overtake the party with fear-exaggerated tales of outrage, and to urge the chief men to hurry ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... somewhat similar work, On Force, its Mental and Moral Correlates. His philosophy was summarized in a volume published in 1871, which was entitled A Manual of Anthropology. He also wrote pamphlets on "Illusion and Delusion," "The Reign of Law," "Toleration," and "Christianity." In his work on necessity he promulgated very many of those ideas which have formed so prominent a part of the philosophy of George Eliot. The dominion of law, the reign of necessity, experience as the foundation of knowledge, humanity as an ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... in advance, and this delusion was not broken till the last half mile of the course was struck. Then he heard somebody's skates ringing close behind, and, looking over his shoulder, he saw Frank bearing down on him ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... an old home-strain mollifies the ear irritated by the protracted rhythmic clash or the dull, steady buzz of iron machinery. Contrasting the Mormon settlements with their surrounding desolation, we could not wonder that their success has fortified this people in their delusion. The superficial student of rewards and punishments might well believe that none but God's chosen people could cause this horrible desert, after such triumphant fashion, to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... fancies, numbed his heart. He felt the contraction of his hair, which rose on end as his eyes, dilating to their full strength, beheld through the darkness two faint amber lights. At first he thought them an optical delusion; but by degrees the clearness of the night enabled him to distinguish objects in the grotto, and he saw, within two feet of him, an enormous animal ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... teachers had tried to impress. This resplendent theophany confirmed the fact of a universal apostasy, with the inevitable corollary—that the Church of Christ was nowhere existent upon the earth. It effectively dissipated the delusion that direct revelation from the heavens had forever ceased; and affirmatively proved the actuality of personal communication between God ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... was recovering from a fever—and though tolerably well in health, the delirium had not finally left him. But since Lois came, how headstrong he had been at times! how unreasonable! how moody! What a strange delusion was that which he was under, of being bidden by some voice to marry her! How he followed her about, and clung to her, as under some compulsion of affection! And over all reigned the idea that, if ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... everything was in its natural condition, and could give me no explanation of what had just occurred. The sight of all the blood I had lost led me to fancy that my brain had, probably, been weakened by the haemorrhage, and that I had been a prey to some delusion. I retired to my cell, and remained shut up there until the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... voluntary delusion does every man endeavour to conceal his own unimportance from himself. It is long before we are convinced of the small proportion which every individual bears to the collective body of mankind; or ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... child to be born to him, that night when he had gone out into the scented garden and felt drowning and yet uplifted on the tide of the deepest emotion of his life—to know that that had all been based on a delusion was what upset the whole ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... under some delusion, and instead of taking things as they are, and making the best of them, we follow an ignis fatuus, and lose, in its pursuit, the joy ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... spread beyond all former example. Their prophecies were triumphantly brought to light, for only in the promises which were there held out could the Portuguese find consolation; and proselytes increased so rapidly, that half Lisbon became Sebastianists. The delusion was not confined to the lower orders; it reached the educated classes; and men who had been graduated in theology became professors of a faith which announced that Portugal was soon to be the head of the Fifth and ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... pointed out that the acid test of a master is a man's ability to enter at will the breathless state, and to maintain the unbroken SAMADHI of NIRBIKALPA. {FN21-5} Only by these achievements can a human being prove that he has "mastered" MAYA or the dualistic Cosmic Delusion. He alone can say from the depths of realization: ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... troops had embarked at Taenarum and at Corinth, and sailed to take part in the defence of Syracuse. In Greece, all the old enemies of Athens were arming against her, and beyond the sea her prospects grew darker and darker every day. Yet nothing, it seemed, could break the spell of fatal delusion which rested on the doomed city. While Attica lay in the grip of the enemy, a fleet of sixty-five triremes, carrying a great military force, weighed anchor from Peiraeus, and steered its course, under the command of ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... have driven any one to despair. It was uncalled for; childish; unwomanly. I maintain that she was much to blame. And again, sometimes, in the black, fever-stricken night-watches, I have begun to think that I might have been a little kinder to her. But that really is a "delusion." I could not have continued pretending to love her when I didn't, could I? It would have been unfair ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... fought as it has been almost incessantly through the six years since his death, has required nothing less than the intervention of all the great Powers of Europe to give it a chance of success, and, even so, has not yet succeeded. That Byron himself was under no delusion as to the importance of his own solitary aid,—that he knew, in a struggle like this, there must be the same prodigality of means towards one great end as is observable in the still grander operations of nature, where individuals are as nothing in the tide of events,—that such was his, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... that this war has usefully dispelled is the delusion that there can be a sort of legality about war, that you can make war a little, but not make war altogether, that the civilized world can look forward to a sort of tame war in the future, a war crossed with peace, a lap-dog war that will bark but not ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... from the hedge, projecting through the foliage, and the bird, perched near its end, sat only about five feet above the bare ground of the lane. Now, I owe my best thanks to this individual nightingale, for sharply calling to my mind a common pestilent delusion, which I have always hated, but had never yet raised my voice against—namely, that all wild creatures exist in constant fear of an attack from the numberless subtle or powerful enemies that are always ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... forgotten by the multitude who had passed it so diligently from mouth to mouth. Seldom, indeed, was it recalled, even by his closest former intimates. Nor could it have been otherwise. The man had laid no real touch on any mortal's heart. Being a mere image, an optical delusion, created by the sunshine of prosperity, it was his law to vanish into the shadow of the first intervening cloud. He seemed to leave no vacancy; a phenomenon which, like many others that attended his brief career, went far to prove the illusiveness ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was sorry to see, damped cousin Serena's ardor; for this working by proxy, as it were, did not at all coincide with her old-fashioned notions; and "ready-made garments" were to her a delusion and a snare, giving opportunity to Satan to find mischief for idle hands to do. I hated to disappoint her when she was so enthusiastically preparing to cut put work for both Bessie and me; but I hated still more to sew, and held my ground, being borne out by Bessie, ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... on my mind by the peculiarities of the place; nor must they be omitted here. The sphere in which it is my dearest privilege to labor, is the cause of Protestantism; and sometimes when God has blessed my poor efforts to the deliverance of some captive out of the chains of Popish delusion, I have recalled the fact of being born just opposite the dark old gateway of that strong building where the noble martyrs of Mary's day were imprisoned. I have recollected that the house wherein I drew my first breath ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... did not understand; then came a shock of disappointment, and then a sense of indignation, not so much against the men who had deceived him as at himself for his delusion ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... God, sharer of His life and power, born to have dominion, fearing, shaking, cringing before a little draft of pure life-giving air. But scapegoats are convenient things, even if the only thing they do for us is to aid us in our constant efforts at self-delusion. ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... but what to do I could not tell. I was fit for nothing, and yet I could not make up my mind to accept a life which was simply living. It must be a life, through which some benefit was conferred upon my fellow-creatures. This was mainly delusion. I had not then learned to correct this natural instinct to be of some service to mankind by the thought of the boundlessness of infinity and of Nature's profuseness. I had not come to reflect that, taking into account her eternities, and absolute exhaustlessness, it was folly in ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... especially when it involved the seeming rejection of advances like the Sergeant's. Still, converting his real amazement into affected surprise, Israel, in presence of the sentries, declared to Singles that he (Singles) must labor under some unaccountable delusion; for he (Potter) was no Yankee rebel, thank Heaven, but a true man to his king; in short, an honest Englishman, born in Kent, and now serving his country, and doing what damage he might to her foes, by being first captain of a carronade on board a ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... the pattern of the carpet as if anxious to improve upon it, was vaguely conscious of relief in being spared his landlady's conversation. For Mrs. Leadbatter was a garrulous body, who suffered from the delusion that small-talk is a form of politeness, and that her conversation was a part of the "all inclusive" her lodgers stipulated for. The disease was hereditary, her father having been a barber, and remarkable ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... astray?" they cry in anger. Then they ask, "Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him? But this multitude which knoweth not the law, are accursed." They would have it that only the ignorant masses had been led away by this delusion; none of the great men, the wise men, had accepted this Nazarene as the Messiah. They did not suspect that at least one of their own number, possibly two, had been going by night to hear this ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... few hours before in deadly strife. The basest lie which the murderous contrivers of this Rebellion have told is that which tries to make out a difference of race in the men of the North and South. It would be worth a year of battles to abolish this delusion, though the great sponge of war that wiped it out were moistened with the best blood of the land. My Rebel was of slight, scholastic habit, and spoke as one accustomed to tread carefully among the parts of speech. It made my heart ache to see him, a man finished in the humanities and Christian ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... it to be a mere delusion, we all idealise and idolise our childhood. The memory of it makes pleasant purple in the distance, and as we look back on the sunlight of its blue far-off hills, we forget how steep we ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... in which the earth is flattened, the circle squared, the angle divided into three, the cube doubled (the famous problem which the Delphic oracle set astronomers), and the whole of modern astronomy shown to be a delusion and a snare. He treated these works in a quaint fashion: not unkindly, for his was a kindly nature; not even earnestly, though he was thoroughly in earnest; yet in such sort as to rouse the indignation of the unfortunate paradoxists. He was abused roundly ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Mabel Manderson were the insane suddenness of its uprising in full strength and its extravagant hopelessness. Before it came, he had been much disposed to laugh at the permanence of unrequited passion as a generous boyish delusion. He knew now that he had been wrong, and he was living ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... aesthetic charm of Nature but most vaguely. It was as much as they could boast, if they kept steadily to the rule of their order, and attended to the concerns each of his own soul. A terrible selfishness, if rightly considered; but one which accorded with the delusion that this world is a cave of care, the other world a place of torture or undying bliss, death the prime object of our meditation, and lifelong abandonment of our fellow-men the highest mode of existence. Why, then, should monks, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... was always Clare's ideal of love and beauty, and when thirty years afterwards, he lost his reason, among the first indications of the approaching calamity was his declaration that Mary, who had then long been in her grave, had passed his window. While under the influence of this delusion he wrote the poem entitled "First Love's Recollections," of which the following ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... that a boy without any deep regard for spotless stones, who labored under the delusion that windows were made to look out of, and who did not hesitate to push curtains aside and open blinds, who whistled when his grandfather was taking his nap, left his things lying about, and teased the snappish old pug was destined to be a trial. On the other hand, the change from ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... said, "are you under the delusion that I'm going to be Queen of the May? You've called me early all right. It's ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... famous words, "She is not the first." Such a Faust as this, we feel, can no more be ultimately lost than can the Mephistophilis of Marlowe. As for Marlowe's Faust, the plea for his destruction is the great delusion of a hard theology, and the only really damnable person in the whole company is the Mephistopheles of Goethe, who seems from first to last continually to be committing the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... you seriously," said he, biting his lip, "that if you persist in that preposterous delusion about my being Louis Leczinski, you'll be most awfully sold. I have nothing on earth to do with Louis Leczinski. Your ingenious little theories, as I tried to convince you at ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... (that is, in talking with others, but with the intention that I should hear), she boldly expressed,—not thinking that an hour before she had said the opposite,—half joking, half seriously, this idea that maternal anxieties are a delusion; that it is not worth while to sacrifice one's life to children. When one is young, it is necessary to enjoy life. So she occupied herself less with the children, not with the same intensity as ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... one calls a fine countenance!" thought Rachel. "Is it a delusion of insipidity as usual? The brow is good, massive, too much for the features, but perhaps they were fuller once; eyes bright and vigorous, hazel, the colour for thought; complexion meant to be brilliant brunette, a pleasant glow still; hair with threads of ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hemp, but the stalk is cleaner and semi-transparent. The flower also is so gaudy, that a field in blossom looks like a bed of florist's flowers, and its aromatic fragrance does not aid to dispel such delusion. It flourishes most upon land which is light and fertile. The fragrance of the oil is perceptibly weaker when obtained from seed produced on wet, tenacious soils. A gallon of seed seems to be the usual quantity sown upon an acre. In Bengal, S. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... I believe it would have been no difficult matter at that time to have persuaded the poor woman to have believed that an express messenger came from heaven on purpose to bring that individual book. But it was too serious a matter to suffer any delusion to take place, so I turned to the young woman, and told her we did not desire to impose upon the new convert in her first and more ignorant understanding of things, and begged her to explain to her that God may be very ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... arguments are entirely fallacious; and even in the countries where the licensed-house system prevails enlightened public opinion has come to that conclusion. In the first place, the idea that the system tends to lessen disease is a dangerous delusion. Owing to the fact, already referred to, that venereal disease in the early stages is difficult to detect in women, even by skilled experts working with the best methods and with practically unlimited time at their disposal, the routine inspection given, for example, ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... that they had lost their prestige. It was true that their mother and elder sister at least (in spite of the flag) did not seem to treat the past danger with all the seriousness it deserved. It even struck Jack and Guy sometimes that they were under the delusion that the whole thing had been only a new development of the game. But as the General said: 'Even if that were so, it was kinder not to undeceive them. He certainly was contented to leave them in their error; he knew well enough what he had had to go through—he did not like even now ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... bodily strength and my mental powers, by thinking about another Orphan House? 4. Am I not going beyond the measure of my faith in thinking about enlarging the work so as to double or treble it? 5. Is not this a delusion of Satan, an attempt to cast me down altogether from my sphere of usefulness, by making me to go beyond my measure? 6. Is it not also, perhaps, a snare to puff me up, in attempting to build ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... had written this new book? What was its name—'Delusion' or something? Fellows were saying he had; hadn't read it himself; his mother and sister had; said it was a devilish good book, too. Where was he hanging out now, and what was he doing on the 10th? Could he come to a little dance his people had ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Christ, is truly—as Homer said of old—more miserable than the beasts of the field. If their unconscious conceit did not make them unintentionally cruel, they would surely be silent for pity's sake; they would let men go on in the pleasant delusion that there is a living God, and a Word of God who has revealed Him to men; and would hide from their fellow-creatures the dreadful secret which they think they have discovered—That there is none that heareth prayer, and therefore to Him need no ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... imagine to myself the present condition of man as that which is designed to endure. I cannot imagine it to be his whole and final destination. If so, then would everything be dream and delusion, and it would not be worth the trouble to have lived and to have taken part in this ever-recurring, aimless, and unmeaning game. Only so far as I can regard this condition as the means of something better, as a point of transition to a higher and more perfect, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... labour? or because he fled Rhine's icy torrent and the shifting pools He calls an ocean? or unchallenged sought Britannia's cliffs; then turned his back in flight? Or does he boast because his citizens Were driven in arms to leave their hearths and homes? Ah, vain delusion! not from thee they fled: My steps they follow — mine, whose conquering signs Swept all the ocean (29), and who, ere the moon Twice filled her orb and waned, compelled to flight The pirate, shrinking from the open sea, And humbly begging for a narrow ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... of genius, in public situations, sighing for this solitude. Amidst the impediments of the world, they are doomed to view their intellectual banquet often rising before them, like some fairy delusion, never to taste it. The great VERULAM often complained of the disturbances of his public life, and rejoiced in the occasional retirement he stole from public affairs. "And now, because I am in the country, I will send ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... saw-edge of mountain peaks to stir up my imagination with the sense of the sublime, while I can watch the saw-edge of those fir peaks against the red sunset. They are my Alps; little ones it may be: but after all, as I asked before, what is size? A phantom of our brain; an optical delusion. Grandeur, if you will consider wisely, consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span of some cathedral roof. Have you eyes ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... The delusion is general—and general must the mortification be. But as attention must be paid to the infatuation—we have endeavoured, by a regular publication of the fortunate numbers, to ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... learned that fine books, like human beings, are capable of mutual affection, and that it is not necessary to devour them in order to value their charms. "We do not gather books to read them, my Boeotian friend," says Mr. Joline; "the idea is a childish delusion. 'In early life,' says Walter Bagehot, 'there is an opinion that the obvious thing to do with a horse is to ride it; with a cake, to eat it; with a sixpence to spend it.' A few boyish persons carry this further, and think that the natural thing to do with a book is to read it. ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... "it's quite clear to me that he's on the trail; and it's fortunate in one way that he's left a plain trail behind him. Whether the whole thing's a delusion on his part, or whether he did strike that lode, I don't know, but I didn't like the man's looks yesterday. He seemed badly played out, and it kind of struck me he was just holding on." He turned toward the pack-horse and pulled up the picket. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... (we have heard enough of the "female mind" to use the analogue!) is a fight, and his ancient military institutions and processes keep up the delusion. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... epidemic, which is contagious to the last degree, seizes its victims when they are off guard, under pretense of amusing an idle hour, and ends by robbing them of sleep and health; some it drives into lunatic asylums and some into newspaper correspondence. That thought-reading is not necessarily delusion or collusion is now generally recognised; a protegee of Mr. F. W. Myers convinced me of the possibility of simple feats, though not of her explanation of them. She credited them to spirits, and wicked spirits ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... I commit my now completed work, in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even if this should be late recognised, as is commonly the lot of what is good. For it cannot have been for the passing generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment, that my mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly stuck to its work through the course of a long life. And while the lapse of time has not been able to make me doubt the worth of my work, neither has the lack of sympathy; for I constantly saw the false and the bad, and ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... a delusion, I think that I see the necessity for this privilege. The egg of the carnivorous burrower is firmly fixed on the victim at a point which varies considerably, it is true, according to the nature of the prey, but which is uniform for the same ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... obtaining more than a particular measure of enfranchisement from the Volksraad or the burghers has been made over and over again in the history of this question—never more emphatically than by the President himself at Bloemfontein—and has over and over again been shown to be a delusion."[118] ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... it is a common delusion among Americans that every Englishman drops his "h's," and is to ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... shore or when trying to get ashore. Nothing which had happened since had furnished any reason for altering that view. No battleship depending upon flat trajectory guns could ever play a role of paramount importance during fighting ashore, except in quite abnormal circumstances. The whole thing was a delusion. Ships of war, and particularly such a vessel as the Queen Elizabeth, did undoubtedly provide moral support to an army operating on land close to the coast, and their aid was by no means to be despised; but their potentialities under such conditions were apt to be greatly overestimated, and ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... at home, the return of Louis XVIII. would afford her the best prospect of restoring a regular government within, peace without, and the reassumption of her proper rank in Europe. In public life, duty and reason equally dictate to us to encourage no self-delusion as to what produces evil; but to adopt the remedy firmly, however bitter it may be, and at whatever sacrifice it may demand. I had taken no active part in the first Restoration; but I concurred, without hesitation, in the attempts of my friends to establish the second under the most favourable ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... place himself in the power of a maniac. The rain was now falling in thick drops, and he decided at any rate to remain a while longer. He knew that it would not be well to dispute the old man, and resolved to humor his delusion. ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... republican Dutch, but that they had secured, in addition, the unfaltering allegiance of the larger Dutch population which remained behind in the Cape Colony. Grey assured the Home Government that in both respects it was the victim of a delusion bred of its complete ignorance of South African conditions. The Boer Republics would give trouble. Apart from the bad draftsmanship of the conventions—a fertile source of disagreement—these small states would be centres of intrigue and "internal commotions," while ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... the ultimate triumph and dignity of labor. 'We shall one day,' he says, 'supersede Politics by Education.' Pause well here, you who grope forward into the dark future with misgiving and faithless hearts. This is not the chimerical delusion of a transcendental philosophy, this death-knell to the Slavery of Ignorance and Vice. Recognize in it the wide generosity that says with Leczinsky, 'Je ne connais d'avarice permise que celle du temps.' Here is wealth for want, industry for indolence, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... This deplorable madness was in New England a mere transitory panic, from which the people quickly recovered; but while it lasted it almost silenced opposition, and it required genuine heroism to lift a voice against it. No country of Europe was free from the delusion during that century, and some of its wisest men were carried away by it. The eminent judge, Sir William Blackstone, in his "Commentaries," published in 1765, used ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... is a unity in special contradistinction to the Trinity of the Christians, and the doctrine of a divine generation. Our Saviour is never called the Son of God, but always the son of Mary. Throughout there is a perpetual acceptance of the delusion of the human destiny of the universe. As to man, Mohammed is diffuse enough respecting a future state, speaking with clearness of a resurrection, the judgment-day, Paradise, the torment of hell, the worm that never dies, the pains that never end; ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... occupied directly or indirectly about the Orphans. 3, Am I not undertaking too much for my bodily strength and mental powers, by thinking about another Orphan-House? 4, Am I not going beyond the measure of my faith in thinking about enlarging the work so as to double or treble it? 5, Is not this a delusion of Satan, an attempt to cast me down altogether from my sphere of usefulness, by making me go beyond my measure? 6, Is it not also, perhaps, a snare to puff me up, by attempting to ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Fourth Part • George Mueller
... his idol. It may be that the scorn of the world had opened his eyes to behold of what mean materials was shapen the divinity he had so honored. It may be that the glitter of the gems he had heaped around it had perpetuated the delusion which had first charmed him, and he had thus been saved the last, worst pang of wasted idolatry. It matters not. He died—as all such men must die—in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... believers, as having themselves been visited by the inhabitants of the other world, was opposed by his own experience; for although he had frequently thought he had been so honored, yet upon investigating the cause, he had invariably found it to be a mere delusion. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... lying in the middle of the street. I don't say he is intentionally prevaricating. Of course he thinks he saw all that he says he did. I grew up in the firm conviction that I had known Judas Iscariot. I was ten years old before I could be persuaded that it was only a sweet delusion,—a dazzling dream of childhood, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... woman. About 2,000 years ago, there lived a man who was intelligent enough to understand what the trouble was. He said that there were not any evils, or devils, and that God, or the Creative Principle, was good only, and that evil was a lie, or delusion, and proved His words by His works. This enraged the wise men of His time very much, for they had been teaching the people that evil was real, and that in many instances God put evil upon His children to make them good. These wise men ...
— The Pastor's Son • William W. Walter
... from a form of the same delusion. When talking to a Frenchman, he employs a mangled cross between West Coast and China pidgin, and by placing a long E at the end of every word imagines he is making himself completely clear to the suffering Gaul. And the suffering Gaul listens to it all with incredible patience and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... all that could be expected in that way. What more could he want? Colebrook was the place, and there was no need to ask for more. Miss Carvil praised him for his good sense, and he was soothed by the part she took in his hope, which had become his delusion; in that idea which blinded his mind to truth and probability, just as the other old man in the other cottage had been made blind, by another disease, to the light and beauty ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... this kingship of mine is," he said haltingly. "I know how great it seems. But is it real? It is incredible—dreamlike. Is it real, or is it only a great delusion?" ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... and Jesus must go there as one in authority, cost what it might. We believe him to have gone there in a spirit of grand and careless bravery, yet seriously and soberly, and under the influence of no fanatical delusion. He knew the risks, but deliberately chose to incur them, that the will ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... letter was a great surprise and a great pain to me. I believe you will recognise before long that you wrote it under a delusion, and that you have said in it both unkind and unjust things of one who is totally incapable of wronging you or anyone else. My wife read your letter, for she and I have no secrets. She will try and see you at once, ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Notwithstanding all the lessons I had received in childhood, I was pretty nearly in the situation of one who had never heard the name of the Saviour mentioned. The extent of my reflections on such subjects, was the self-delusion of believing that I was to save myself—I had done no great harm, according to the notions of sailors; had not robbed; had not murdered; and had observed the mariner's code of morals, so far as I understood them; and this gave me a sort of claim ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... this time the House of the Medici, with all their followers, having been hunted out of Florence, came to Bologna and were lodged in the House of the Rossi. Thus the vision of Cardiere, whether a delusion of the devil, a divine warning, or a strong imagination that had taken hold of him, was verified; a thing so truly remarkable that it is worthy of being recorded. I have narrated it just as I heard it from ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... age in matters of religion, it produced considerable effect among the fanatic sectaries that swarm through the kingdom of England. The leaders of those blind enthusiasts, either actuated by the spirit of delusion, or desirous of recommending themselves to the protection of the higher powers, immediately seized the hint, expatiating vehemently on the danger that impended over God's people; and exerting all their faculties to impress the belief of a religious war, which never fails to exasperate and impel ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... sufficiently evident that Tyson had got it from his wife. The odd thing was that Tyson was unaware of this. He seemed to have no doubt whatever that his marriage with the perfect woman had been arranged for in heaven, though somehow it had failed to come off on earth. A delusion not uncommon with men of ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... these dissectors is probably the German Professor, Kirchhoff, some of whose opinions we shall cite in this appendix. His psychological tendency is that of analysis, separation, division; the very idea of unity seems a bugbear to him, a mighty delusion which he must demolish or die. Specially is his wrath directed against Book First, probably because it contains the three unities above mentioned, all of which he assails and rends to shreds in his ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... assertion of radical change, during recent years, in weather aspect was scouted as imaginary, or insane. I am indeed, every day of my yet spared life, more and more grateful that my mind is capable of imaginative vision, and liable to the noble dangers of delusion which separate the speculative intellect of humanity from the dreamless instinct of brutes: but I have been able, during all active work, to use or refuse my power of contemplative imagination, with as easy command of it as a physicist's of his telescope: ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... from the demonetization of silver, their relief lay in bimetallism. It was easy to argue that the best form of bimetallism was the free coinage of gold and silver, and after the panic of 1893 this delusion grew, but the strength of it was hardly appreciated by optimistic men in the East until the Democrats made it the chief plank in the platform on which they fought the presidential campaign of 1896. Nominating an ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... be a companion to your children, and just where the idea came in which developed into the English boarding-school delusion, that children should be sent away among hirelings— separated from their parents—in order to be educated, I do not know. It surely was not complimentary to the parents. Old Jacopo didn't try very hard to discipline his boys—he loved them, which is better if you are forced to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... in the court of the palace, the inexorable dates would not permit me to rest in the delusion that the head of Marin Falier had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the ground—at the end of Lord Byron's tragedy. Nor could I keep unimpaired my vision of the Chief of the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he proclaimed ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... they confusedly pictured their misery. They are crammed with a curse which strives to find a way out and to come to light in words, a curse which makes them to groan and wail. It is as if they toiled to emerge from the delusion and ignorance which soil them as the mud soils them; as if they will at last know ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... this was followed several years later by a somewhat similar work, On Force, its Mental and Moral Correlates. His philosophy was summarized in a volume published in 1871, which was entitled A Manual of Anthropology. He also wrote pamphlets on "Illusion and Delusion," "The Reign of Law," "Toleration," and "Christianity." In his work on necessity he promulgated very many of those ideas which have formed so prominent a part of the philosophy of George Eliot. The dominion of law, the reign of necessity, experience ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... no way of lying but straight on your back; unless, to be sure, one's limb went round and round in the ankle, like a swivel. Upon getting into a sort of doze, it was no wonder this uneasy posture gave me the nightmare. Under the delusion that I was about some gymnastics or other, I gave my unfortunate member such a twitch that I started up with the idea that someone ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... she was here—that she was the nurse the boys praise so much. But that was a delusion," he said, and without a thought of the result, Katy asked, impetuously: "If she were here would you ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... descended. So vividly did this phantasm present itself to Leonard, that, almost convinced of its reality, he placed his hands before his eyes for a few moments, and, on withdrawing them, was glad to find that the delusion was occasioned by a black cloud over the cathedral, which his distempered fancy had converted into the colossal ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... interrogating himself, a new sound disturbs the tranquillity of the forest—the same, which the assassin at first fancied was the voice of one wailing for his victim. The coon-hunter has no such delusion. Soon as hearing, he recognises the tongue of a stag-hound, knowing it to be Clancy's. He is only astray about its peculiar tone, now quite changed. The animal is neither barking nor baying; nor yet does it yelp as if suffering chastisement. The soft tremulous whine, that comes pealing ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... and then he is ready to put the whole weight of his nature to deceiving others. This letter ran so smoothly, so plausibly, that it produced on the writer of it the effect of a work of fiction, which we know to be unreal, but feel to be true. Long habits of this kind of self-delusion in time produce a paralysis in the vital nerves of truth, so that one becomes habitually unable to see things in their verity, and realizes the awful words of Scripture,—"He feedeth on ashes; a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Ingram slowly. "I have heard a good many people called impostors. Did it ever occur to you that the blame of the imposture might possibly lie with the person imposed on? I have heard of people falling into the delusion that a certain modest and simple-minded man was a great politician or a great wit, although he had never claimed to be anything of the kind; and then, when they found out that in truth he was just what he had pretended to be, they called out against him as an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... military operations and foreign negotiations, to deal with the Indians, and to regulate national finances. The immediate effect of the Declaration of Independence was that it obliged every American to take sides for or against the Revolution. No one could any longer entertain the delusion that he could remain loyal to Great Britain while making war upon her. It was, therefore, a great encouragement to the patriots, who speedily succeeded, in most colonies, in driving out or silencing the loyalists. There is a tradition that another ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... founts of its wisdom present us Each morning with gems of this kind, Such matters must strike as momentous The news-editorial mind; 'Tis time this delusion was done with, High time that some voice made it clear We don't want those fountains to run with Such very ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... please— Beauty dancin' all around me, music ringin' everywhere, Like a weddin' celebration. Why, I've plumb fergot my care An' the tasks I should be doin' fer the rainy days to be, While I'm huggin' the delusion that God made ...
— All That Matters • Edgar A. Guest
... field, as if on the track of game. Ever nearer and nearer he circles, and in his wake, as it appears to Faust, trails a flickering phosphorescent gleam. But Wagner ridicules the idea as an optical delusion. He sees nothing but an ordinary black poodle. 'Call him,' he says, 'and he'll come fawning on you, or sit up and do his tricks, or jump into the water after sticks.' The poodle follows them—and makes himself at home by the ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... of being able to appreciate Shakespeare more in reading him than in seeing him acted used to be a common method of affecting special intellectuality. I hope this delusion—a gross and pitiful one to most of us—has almost absolutely died out. It certainly conferred a very cheap badge of superiority on those who entertained it. It seemed to each of them an inexpensive opportunity ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... brief reference to George Burnet, who, in this epidemic delusion, had given his sanction to, and embarked all his prospects in life on this Pantisocratical scheme. He was a young man, about the age of twenty; the son of a respectable Somersetshire farmer, who had bestowed on him his portion, by giving him an University education as ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... 1572, as the illustrious Danish astronomer, Tycho, was walking through the fields, he was astonished to observe a new star in the constellation Cassiopea, beaming with a radiance quite unwonted in that part of the heavens. Suspecting some delusion about his eyes, he went to a group of peasants, to ascertain if they saw it, and found them gazing at it with as much astonishment as himself. He went to his instrument, and fixed its place, from which it never after appeared to deviate. For some time it increased in brightness—greatly ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... what has kept me long; a fear that I am under a delusion; but the conviction remains firm under all circumstances, in all frames of mind. And this most serious feeling is growing on me; viz. that the reasons for which I believe as much as our system teaches, must lead me ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Laws; the power of entering into Bonds, Covenants, Leagues and Treaties; the power of raising Armes, keeping of Strengths and Forts are Essential parts, and inseparable privileges of the Royal Authoritie and Prerogative of the Kings of this Kingdom: Yet, such hath been the madness and delusion of these times, that even Religion itself, which holds the Right of Kings to be Sacred and Inviolable, hath been pretended unto, for warrand of these injurious Violations and Incroachments, so publickly done and owned, upon and against His Majesties just Power, ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... and to the influence of which it now succumbs. It now takes on the distortion for which the way has already been paved by its transference to the recent material. Thus far it is in the way of becoming something resembling an obsession, delusion, or the like, i.e. a thought reinforced by a transference and distorted in expression by the censor. But its further progress is now checked through the dormant state of the foreconscious; this ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... Esther delicately, with an air of regret and several other picturesque emotions mingled carefully, "my aunt has one delusion. It is connected with this necklace, which she certainly did possess at one time. She imagines things about it, queer things, where it went and where it is now. But you mustn't let her tell you about it, and if she insists you mustn't allow it to get into ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... engagement, perhaps expecting your early return. I believe your pursuit of her can only end in failure and disappointment; and although I am ready to assist you in any manner you wish, I warn you against sacrificing your life to a delusion." ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... clothed and haughty strangers may, by recalling his sensations, realize Henry's feelings as he stood alone and unfriended there, exposed for the first time in his life in evening dress to the vulgar gaze. Several minutes passed before Henry could conquer the delusion that everybody was staring at him in amused curiosity. Having conquered it, he sank sternly into a chair, and surreptitiously felt the sovereigns ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... what her mother was "driving at," as she would have expressed it. And the whole reality of her relations to Evan and his relations to her stood in colours as distinct as those of the red and green maple leaves, and unsoftened by the least haze of self-delusion. In the dash of the rain and the roar of the wind, in the familiar swirl of the elm branches, she read as it were her sentence of death. Before this she had not been dead, only stunned; now she was wakened up to die. Nature herself, which ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... does not derive any increase of authority from being misnamed: its truth is not supreme over, but depends upon, experience. If our so-called consciousness is not borne out by experience, it is a delusion. It has no title to credence, but as an interpretation of experience; and if it is a false interpretation, it must ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... their arms like strong swimmers—when I saw that. boisterous human flood become still water in a moment, and remain so from the opening to the end of the play, it suggested to me something besides the trustworthiness of an English crowd, and the delusion under which those labour who are apt to disparage and malign it: it suggested to me that in meeting here to-night we undertook to represent something of the all-pervading feeling of that crowd, through all its intermediate degrees, from the full-dressed lady, with her ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... costly table of Lazarus, and purchased "curios"—Indian silks, Javanese; knives, Birmingham metal-work, and what not—as mementoes of their explorations. In particular, Miss Paterson had invested in a heavy bronze image— apparently Japanese—concerning which she entertained the thrilling delusion that it was an object of local worship. It was a grotesque thing, massive and bulky, weighing not much less than ten or twelve pounds. Hence it was confided to the careful porterage of Dawson, an assiduous and favored courtier of Miss Paterson; and he, having lunched, was fated to ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... the legislature; we have our part to perform, without at all overstepping the modesty of private life: and it is the constant influence of public opinion, and the active interest taken by the country at large in its own concerns, which, in spite of occasional delusion or violence, is mainly instrumental in preserving to us the combined vigour and order of our political constitution. And so, if we took an equal interest in the affairs of our divine commonwealth, our Christian church, and endeavoured as eagerly to promote every thing which tended to its ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... a dream presented to our view, Those airy forms appear so like the true; Nor heaven nor hell the fancy'd visions sends, But every breast its own delusion lends: For when soft sleep the body wraps in ease, And from th' unactive mass our fancy frees, Whatever 'tis in which we take delight, And think of most by day, we dream at night. Thus he, the now sackt city justly ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... after which it is delivered to the proprietor, and declared by the old men and jugglers to be a security against arrows; and provided the feast has been satisfactory, against even the bullets of their enemies. Such is the delusion, that many of the Indians implicitly believe that this ceremony has given to the shield supernatural powers, and that they have no longer to fear ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... which has worked perversely. Elsa, you are under a spell, poor woman; you do not know the truth. I gave you the philtre in your drinking water, and Foy, the traitor Foy, has reaped its fruits. Dear girl, shake yourself free from this delusion, it is I whom you really love, not that base thief of ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... It is a favorite delusion with the British parent that marriage will work a miracle, and steady their children for life, by casting forth the lutins who beset them. A thousand failures have not convinced the good speculative matrons of the hazard of the experiment, nor will as many more do so; they ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... A moment, sweet delusion, Like birds the brown leaves hover; But it will not be long Before their wild confusion Fall wavering down to cover The ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than ...
— The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot
... among the Allies, that Englishman who more than any other single man speaks for the whole English-speaking and Western-thinking community, President Wilson, has said definitely that this is his meaning. America, with him as her spokesman, is under no delusion; she is fighting consciously for a German Revolution as the essential War Aim. We in Europe do not seem to be so lucid. I think myself we have been, and are still, fatally and disastrously not lucid. It is high time, and over, that we cleared ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... Because Through the Arrangements of the Government the Moral Responsibility for such Deeds is Divided among a Great Number of Participants in it, and Everyone Throws the Responsibility on Someone Else—Moreover, the Sense of Moral Responsibility is Lost through the Delusion of Inequality, and the Consequent Intoxication of Power on the Part of Superiors, and Servility on the Part of Inferiors—The Condition of these Men, Acting against the Dictates of their Conscience, is Like that of Hypnotized Subjects Acting by Suggestion—The ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... gradient in the direction in which we were travelling; occasionally it would almost seem as though we were descending a fairly steep hill, had not the unrelaxed efforts of our teams suggested the optical delusion which, as long ago as 1828, was observed by Erman the explorer, who wrote: "I am disposed to think that this phenomenon was connected with the glistening and distortion of distant objects which I remarked not only in this part of the valley, but frequently also on the ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... Miss Todd's party. Assist me, my muse. Come down from heaven, O, Calliope my queen! and aid me to spin with my pen a long discourse. Hark! do you hear? or does some fond delusion mock me? I seem to hear, and to be already wandering through those sacred recesses—the drawing-rooms, namely, at Littlebath—which are pervious only to the streams and breezes ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... the way delusion comes,—a glass of old Madeira, A pair of visual diaphragms revolved by Jane or Sarah, And down go vows and promises without the slightest question If eating words won't compromise ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... you labor under the delusion that all pirates are bad and cruel men. I confess, sir, there are many of our people who treat their prisoners with unnecessary severity, and frequently inflict death when the occasion does not demand it. But, my dear sir, this is the abuse ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... seems to be disturbed. If the second figure is presented to any one without sufficient science to understand this delusion, the impression is created that these lines converge to the right and diverge to the left. The vision is deceived in its mental factor and judges wrongly ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... very spring, he had asked her to pledge herself to him. Fortunately—oh, how very fortunately!—she had refused, and he had been left free. Now he knew that his fancied love for her had been merely a passing whim, a delusion of the moment. This—THIS which he was now experiencing was the grand passion of his life. He wrote a poem with the title, "The Greater Love"—and sold it, too, to a sensational periodical which circulated largely among sentimental shopgirls. It is but truthful to state that the editor ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... yet every human being believing that he is master of his actions, at the very moment that he might be conscious that his belief is only a part of the great law of necessity. Then it seemed as if this delusion in which men indulge, and are forced to indulge, was an element of the farce introduced into the play, so as to relieve the mind from the heavy burden of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... step nearer him. "But what I'm not in any doubt about at all is the scorn I feel for myself for ever having cherished the delusion. If I'd been a woman with—with more claim, let us say, to ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... different History for Germany and the rest of us. Fancy it! But for many reasons, change of religion, had there been no other, it was an impossible notion. "May be," thinks Hotham, "that the Court of Vienna throws out this bait to continue the King's delusion,"—or a snuffle from Seckendorf, without the Court, may have given it currency in so inane an element ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him:—It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... vestments which were hanging on the walls, everything was in its natural condition, and could give me no explanation of what had just occurred. The sight of all the blood I had lost led me to fancy that my brain had, probably, been weakened by the haemorrhage, and that I had been a prey to some delusion. I retired to my cell, and remained shut up there ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Water!" He began making passes over his patient—"The stage has passed. O'Hana no longer is possessed by O'Iwa. The wronged lady leaves O'Hana to peace. O'Hana is completely herself again. O'Iwa is all delusion. O'Hana believes this. She believes firmly. The Daiho[u]-in tells her to believe. O'Iwa does not haunt O'Hana. O'Iwa has no ill will against O'Hana." He looked fixedly and with command into the eyes of O'Hana. His voice rang clear and authoritative. Then he began gently to stroke the back of her ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... he assured her; "I have been deeply interested and concerned in all you have said. I think you are laboring under a great delusion, and I have tried my best to convince you of it; but I have never heard you speak more intelligibly or, ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... always looked upon me as a benefactor. The claim, on my part, certainly rested on a very small foundation originally; it was strengthened afterwards by a less questionable act of patronage. Like many other under-graduates of every man's acquaintance, Hurst laboured under the delusion, that holding two sets of reins in a very confused manner, and flourishing a long whip, was driving; and that to get twenty miles out of Oxford in a "team," without an upset, or an imposition from the proctor, was an opus operatum of the highest possible merit. To do him justice, he laboured ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... slant that made him doubt what others accepted so easily as facts. Martin knew he was bound to things of substance but he followed the lure of property and accumulation as he might have followed some other game had he learned it, knowing all along that it was a delusion and at the same time acknowledging that for him there was nothing ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... captains. Already in my state-room my senses had suspected a chill; but I had refused to believe my senses. I knew and had known all my life that American trains were too hot, and I had put down the supposed chill to a psychological delusion. It was, however, no delusion. As we swept through a snowy landscape the apologetic captains announced sadly that the engine was not sparing enough steam to heat the whole of the train. We put on overcoats ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... affairs—there he is clear-sighted, critical and acute, and accordingly he discusses the matter philosophically and logically, and concludes without fear of sinning against the church, that the whole is delusion. When, on the other hand, he has to deal with cases of demoniacal possession, in countries under the rule of the Roman hierarchy, he contents himself with the decisions of the scholastic divines and the opinions of the fathers, and makes frequent references to the decrees of various ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... have thought about them at all, it has been my opinion that spiritists are either fools or frauds. But I am endeavouring to give a faithful account of my feelings and sensations at the time of which I am writing, and the incident of the voice cannot be ignored. Perhaps it was all a delusion—an hallucination, if you will, due to the gradual breaking down of my body and mind. As to that, the reader can form his own conclusions. Certain it is, that from this time on, when I needed help and encouragement the most, I felt a vague assurance that my wife was by my side; and ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... insensate delusion and folly, the critical reader will immediately counterplead that England all this time was conducting a war which involved the organization of several millions of fighting men and of the workers ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... be a sweet dream, a beautiful delusion, a spirit-spell that moves the soul with pictures of love and enchantment, and from which some stern reality would soon awake him and dispel the charm? No, it was reality, appealing more forcibly to all that was true and kindly in his nature, and ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... goodness of God with the moral turpitude of man, much more would it be hard to do so if his very angels are depraved. Therefore, if the reasonable question which I originally put "may be followed by a series of similar questions to which there is no end," the goodness of God must simply be pronounced a delusion. For the question which I originally put was no mere flimsy question of a stupidly unreal description. My own moral depravity is a matter of painful certainty to me, and I want to know why, if there is a God ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... Schopenhauer's cynical contention concerning the economy of Nature, who invests youth with just enough transient beauty to ensure the perpetuation of the race, making men and women serve her purpose under the delusion that they are free agents and ministers to their own pleasure. Here were no pomp and circumstance to interpose their false colours before the sordid vista of the future. It lay glaringly before the imagination ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... unpainted pine table with four straight legs. It was a table of dark polished wood, and it stood on a single post with feet. There was nothing there that you said was there. Everything was a sham and a delusion; every word you spoke was untrue. And yet everybody in that theatre, excepting you and me, saw all the things that you said were on the stage. I know they saw them all, for I was with the people, and ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... are largely interested here, and have invested two or three millions, which will pay large interest to their grandchildren. Their long avenue is loyally named "Victoria." A thrifty Canadian crazed by the "boom," the queerest mental epidemic or delusion that ever took hold of sensible people, bought some stony land just under Rubidoux Mountain for $4000. It was possibly worth $100, but in those delirious days many did much worse. It is amazing to see what hard work and water and good taste will do for ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... white bones representing the burnouses of the men. A small white stone, not ten inches high, appeared to be several feet in height, at the distance of a quarter of an hour's ride. And so of the few other discernible objects on this wide expanse of optical delusion. Mirage was seen at times, but nothing pretty. We encamped late, midway through the vast plateau, when shadowy night began to establish her sable throne, in "rayless majesty," over this silent, sombre ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... fully understood the polluted stock from which they had all sprung, and the terrible pit of heathenish wickedness from which they had been rescued, not by him (the humbled mutineer had long since escaped from that delusion), but by the Word ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... round and round they went, now seeming to sink into the ground, now leaping into the air, and often turning head over heels. All the time not a sound proceeded from the phantom-looking dancers. The Gilpins could scarcely help fancying themselves under some delusion. They ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... at this wonderful story which her daughter told her. She could only imagine that Pearl had in some way or another been bewitched, and was under a fatal delusion that she was in love with some hero of romance, to whom she believed she was betrothed. Still, her daughter had always been most loving and devoted to her, and had shown more brightness and ability than Chinese ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... had to do was to follow the river. It was simple enough in theory, but in practice it was a tough job, as they had to struggle every foot of the way, squirming and crawling. When they heard Compton's hail they had come to the conclusion that the forest was a trap, its mysteries a delusion, and ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... the impossibility of a fruition of love that slowly and surely removed her. On the other hand, the image of her sweet face, of her form, of her beauty, of her movements—every recall of these physical things enhanced her charm, and his love. He had cherished a delusion that it was Mel Iden's spirit alone, the wonderful soul of her, that had stormed his heart and won it. But he found to his consternation that however he revered her soul, it was the woman also who now allured him. That moment of revelation ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... spirit, its very essence; without which the heart cannot be right, let the tongue proclaim what delusion ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... his heart he turned to Nell to dispel her delusion, when unexpectedly an incident occurred which drew the attention ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... survive him, and there is a remarkable story of the commencement of his last illness. He dreamt that the spirit of Robert Grosteste had appeared, and given him a severe beating. The delusion hung about him, and he finally died in the belief that he was killed by the blows of the ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... band cut to pieces. It is said that Triunnis himself was saved by his mother, and thenceforth dwelt with her in the lake. "But, indeed," adds the truth-loving Walter, "I think it is a lie, because a delusion of this kind is so likely to account for his body not having ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... long as there were unpaid bills at the doctor's and the grocer's. All of which was, of course, perfectly reasonable, and like other women who have had a narrow experience of life, she cherished the delusion that a man's love, as well as his philosophy, is necessarily rooted ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... it was a lady? Just like a woman making up a romance out of nothing. Yes, there's the delusion, which is bad. Keep his mind off it as much as possible, and tell him some of your own in your best brogue. I'll come and examine ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... and we felt almost certain, by the shouts and cries we heard, that the patriots had forced an entrance into the town. We thought, indeed it was no delusion, that we heard a voice proclaiming liberty to the Netherlands, and the cry of "Long live the Prince of Orange! long live our noble Stadtholder!" Again loud noises reached our ears, and thundering blows echoed through the building. There could be little doubt that the jail was being forced. Then came ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... right judgment in all things, that he sometimes gave undue prominence to the facts which supported his theory. It was only fair and reasonable that critics should draw attention to this characteristic of Froude as an historian. That he deliberately falsified history is a baseless delusion. A sterner moralist, a more strenuous worker, it would have been difficult to find. An artist he could not help being, for it was in the blood. Once his fingers grasped the pen, they began instinctively to draw a picture. He was not, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... ambition, thirst for power, restless eagerness to meddle in what did not concern her, blind longing to escape from the torture of watching other women with full lives and satisfied instincts, while her own life was hungry and sad. For a time she had actually, unconscious as she was of the delusion, hugged a hope that a new field of usefulness was open to her; that great opportunities for doing good were to supply the aching emptiness of that good which had been taken away; and that here at last ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... while tales no less flattering were being whispered in the ear of Mazzini. He declined to give the French any guarantees as to his future mode of governing; it cannot be said, therefore, that they were under the delusion that they were restoring a ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... me. Of course, it was pure self-delusion; but, if I am going to begin that sort of folly, it is high time to come away. Indeed, the folly of it. Besides, I suppose I ought to feel ashamed. I am sure he knows now quite well that I love him, and perhaps that is why he looked strangely at me when ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... warm, the nurse covers it in her lap with a shawl, and, under this blind, surreptitiously inserts a finger between the parched lips, which possibly moan for drink; and, under this inhuman cheat and delusion, the infant is pacified, till Nature, balked of its desires, drops into a troubled sleep. These are two of our reasons for impressing upon mothers the early, the immediate necessity of putting themselves sympathetically in communication with their child, by ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Franklin discarded all idea of the Atonement, he of course could not express any gratitude for that which is, to the Christian, the crowning act even of divine love. This Saviour, to millions who cannot be counted, has proved, even if the comfort be a delusion, in temptation, disappointment, and death, more precious than it is in the power of words ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... continue, and animated to do it thoroughly, by the old man's expression of face, which was that of one who says, 'I give you rope,' and I dealt him a liberal amount of stock irony not worth repeating; things that any cultivated man in anger can drill and sting the Boeotian with, under the delusion that he has not lost a particle of his self-command because of his coolness. I spoke very deliberately, and therefore supposed that the words of composure were those of prudent sense. The error was manifest. The women saw it. One who has indulged ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in hospital, during convalescence (but while mentally affected) I ran away to the Van As's. It was a case of mental delusion. The whole issue of the war depended upon me—could I be kept in hospital, then the English would win; was I allowed to ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... rumor afloat that Tardif was about to marry the girl you had been attending, and that everybody in the island regretted it. She said it would be a mesalliance for him, Tardif! What then would it be for you, a Dobree? No; it is a delusion, an infatuation, which will quickly pass away. I cannot believe you are so weak as to be taken in by mere prettiness without character; and this person—I do not say so harshly, Martin—has no ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... as if I were the victim of some hoax, some miserable delusion," he said to himself. "Not till I see her, not till I clasp her by the hand, shall I believe that she is ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... years in early youth she may have money in plenty, and then slowly she begins to sink. Her health becomes sapped. Often loathsome disease makes her a victim. As the shadows begin to gather she will often turn to drink that for an hour she may recover the delusion of well-being. Slowly but certainly the morass drags her down. Often she does not reach thirty. If she lives it is to face a state in which, toothless, wrinkled, and obscene, she is seen only by those who visit the murkiest parts of our cities. She dies ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... in their constitutions, and indeed expressly denied in the Constitution of the United States, which provides the mode in which amendments shall be made—but appearing plainly enough in every word of self-gratulation which comes from them. Political finality has ever proved a delusion—as has the idea of finality in all human institutions. I do not doubt but that the republican form of government will remain and make progress in North America, but such prolonged existence and progress must be based on an acknowledgment of the necessity for change, and must much depend ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... cheeks were wreathed in smiles while she slept; how happy and unconscious was the beautiful slave. And now she seems to hear the song of her native valley falling upon her ear as Aphiz used to sing it. Hark! is that delusion, or do those sounds actually fall upon her waking ear? Now she rouses, and like a startled fawn listens to hear from whence come those magic notes, and by whom could they be uttered. She stood electrified ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... you have what Mr. Dooley calls 'the stage delusion'. It is a delightful quality to feel the reality of the drama and not remember there is any 'behind the scenes'. I fancy at this minute Louise, who got a little husky in that duet with Julien, when she promised to leave her mother ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... replied, "what object can I have with regard to you? What a delusion! You look very far ahead; but of course the sudden surprise or turn of chance ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... Med Service," the beaming man observed zestfully. "Of the Interstellar Medical Service, to which all problems of public health may be referred! But here we have a real problem for you! A contagious madness! A transmissible delusion! An epidemic of insanity! A plague of ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... follow the dictum of the Master: 'Eliminate the impossible; whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is the truth.' And, since there is absolutely nothing left, there is no truth. At the bottom, the whole thing is merely a matter of mental delusion." ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... there galore! If she had Mr. Saffron's "record" before her, she would expect to read of a vain ostentatious man, ambitious in his own small way; the little plant of these qualities would, given a morbid physical condition, develop into the fantastic growth of delusion which she had now diagnosed in the case of Mr. Saffron—diagnosed with the assistance of ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... offering of fruit or flowers, she found him unusually bright, his cheeks flushed, his eyes brilliant, and his state of mind exceedingly cheerful. He talked of his recovery and future plans in life with hopefulness almost amounting to certainty. This made her somewhat sad, for she regarded it as a delusion of his flattering disease, a flaring up of the life-candle before it sank in the socket. She thus reported the case, when she returned home. In the afternoon she was sewing as usual, surrounded by her mother ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... of the Barcoo was the last feather in the cap of the Surveyor-General. He was doomed to learn soon that it was not the river of his dreams, but only the head waters of that central stream discovered by Sturt, Cooper's Creek; but meanwhile the delusion must have been ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... dreams, years when the moonlight had grown duller in the areaway and the youth had faded out of Olive's face, but as a glorious and triumphant climb over obstacles which he had determinedly surmounted by unconquerable will-power. The optimistic self-delusion that had kept him from misery was seen now in the golden garments of stern resolution. Half a dozen times he had taken steps to leave the Moonlight Quill and soar upward, but through sheer faintheartedness he had stayed on. Strangely enough he now ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... yet with an uneasy feeling that it not only was possible, but that she herself had contributed something to the delusion. "But how do they account for my friendship with YOU—you, who are supposed to be a correspondent—an ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... dependencies of Russia, before she had herself an existence either in name or fact! If the originator of the term frontier demonstrations would take the trouble to study the map, he would not be able to cherish the delusion that his intelligent readers could believe that battles fought near Kowno, Oszmiana, Upita, Poniewiez, Lida, Ihumen, Dubno, Pinsk, Mscislaw, etc., were really ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... which will never die! The idea of home, with its sweet repose and calm blessedness, was only a delusion after all!" ...
— Sister Carmen • M. Corvus
... you will think me scarcely less under the influence of a similar delusion when I tell you, that I have been somehow or other drawn also into an association, not indeed so public or potent as that of the Saints, but equally persevering in the objects for which it has been formed. The drift of the Saints, as far as I can comprehend the ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... "All had been delusion, trick, and fallacy: a new scheme of commercial arrangement is proposed to the Irish as a boon; and the surrender of their Constitution is tacked to it as a mercantile regulation. Ireland, newly escaped from harsh trammels and severe discipline, is treated like a high-mettled ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... answer," he said, "to those that sent you. I will neither hear nor consider such words any more. If I yield in this matter, and say one word to the King or to any other, by which any may understand that my message was a delusion, or that I spoke of myself and not from our Lord, then I pray that our Lord may blot my name out of the ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... many a time," he answered her, lying awake at night among the long grass of the Andes, or under the palms of the desert. It was a strange delusion to build shrines to the honour of God while there are still his own—the forests ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the plums and left nothing but the bread and milk and corn-starch, or whatever the horrible concoction is?—I had it to-day for dinner. Pleasure, at least, I imagine—pleasure pure and simple, pleasure crude, brutal and vulgar—this poor flimsy delusion has lost all its charm. I shall never again care for certain things—and indeed for certain persons. Of such things, of such persons, I firmly maintain, however, that I was never an enthusiastic votary. It would be more to my credit, I suppose, if I had been. More would be forgiven me if I had ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... lain on the Balkan lands was healed, the fog dispelled. Even the prestige of military despotism was gone like a pricked bubble. The tyranny that rested on delusion and not on power was vanished like an empty nightmare that fades when the sleeper wakes. The establishment of Europe's freedom was fulfilled; the final step taken. A great and notable nation had obtained recognition through ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.—George Eliot. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... and his melancholy, to drive him to the doing of so desperate an act as murder. And he determined that he would have more certain grounds to go upon than a vision, or apparition, which might be a delusion. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... with England by surprise naval attack was no doubt an element in German plans; but in 1914 this was negatived by the forewarning of events on the Continent, by Germany's persistent delusion that England would stay neutral, and by the timely mobilization of the British fleet. This had been announced the winter before as a practical exercise, was carried out according to schedule from July 16 to ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... myself. Although miserably deficient in education—for I had been well beaten but never taught—yet I was looked upon as a prodigy of knowledge; and I can assure the reader that I took very good care not to dispel that agreeable delusion. Indeed, at this time, I was as great a young literary coxcomb as ever lived, my vanity being high and inflated exactly in proportion to my ignorance, which was also of the purest water. This vanity, however, resulted as much from my position and circumstances as ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... corner of her bed in the next room, and the fading light fell on something white which pushed aside the black brocade bed-curtain—a large yellow-white hand holding a small gleaming knife. The Duchess, still with the dread of insanity upon her, told herself that it was an hallucination, a delusion, the frenzied working of her overwrought brain. She gathered her courage and fixed her eyes on the mirror, which showed her what she conceived to be a phantom. The hand was large, with hair growing hideously over ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... and will be "summer girls" when their time comes, and "winter girls" as well, clad in cloth and velvet and furs. They will dance Germans instead of the bewildering Spanish dance she had that first night with her lover. Even children have changed in half a century. Beauty is no longer considered a delusion and a snare. Physical culture gives strength and ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... suffered for the Popish plot, was tried and executed in 1680. It appears, that his life was foully sworn away by Dugdale and Turberville. The manly and patient deportment of the noble sufferer went far to remove the woful delusion which then pervaded the people. It would seem that Hunt ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... rather than to Arthur; and I had no intention of pleading by innuendo. When I did speak, I meant to speak directly, and there was but one thing I had to say. If that failed, I was ready to admit that I had been suffering under a delusion. ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... which rages horridly around him. Nay, so blinded is the fool that he does not perceive how it is merely this ocean of universal misery that fills him with horror; but he rather cherishes the sad delusion that his dread will become less if but the abyss below be deeper and farther removed from his giddy seat above. And let it not be supposed that by this superstitious dread of hunger merely the foolishness of individuals ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... their statements were exaggerated by the reporters. Yet enough remains, after every deduction, to render witches' confessions a very curious mental problem. Was it vision, or monomania, or nervous delusion, all influenced by foregone conclusion? or was it, as the mesmerists seem to hold, an instance of clairvoyance in a high degree? The case of Gaufridi is of this puzzling nature. Gaufridi was a French priest of licentious character, who succeeded ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... I thought that I should smother. I told them so, as well as my choked voice would allow; but one of them said, in a soft, meek tone, as I writhed in distress, "Hush, Gustavus, lie still; you are certainly laboring under a delusion." This was all the more painful from its being so cruelly true, in a literal sense, while I knew that they had reference to my views with regard to freedom, in the word "delusion." What sustained me in those moments, ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... darkness deceive me as to the meaning of this mute response? Was I the victim of a fresh delusion? I fancied that Jeanne looked sad, that perhaps she was thinking of the oaths sworn only to be broken by her former lover, but that ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the influence of that fancy. That fatal summer, at the time of his infatuation for that heartless girl, insensibly a chilling hardness crept over my feelings. I struggled against my awakening; and if Lucien had displayed any emotion before his departure, I might still have kept up the happy delusion. But in vain, it disappeared, and with it all the beauty of life, which increased in weariness from that moment. I sought for some object of interest—I married; but, though my husband has been devoted and kind, I weary of existence. Life has no interest for ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... invited to the table and conversation of the grand master, or grand prior; he was then intoxicated with hashish and carried into the garden, which on awaking he believed to be Paradise; everything around him, the houris in particular, contributing to confirm the delusion. After he had experienced as much of the pleasures of Paradise, which the Prophet has promised to the faithful, as his strength would admit; after quaffing enervating delight from the eyes of the houris and intoxicating ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... which it was left to the discretion of individuals whether to adopt its practice or not; and the fourth, since 1856, when its acceptance was inculcated as essential to happiness in this world and salvation in the next. It was the inevitable tendency of Mormonism, like every other religious delusion, from the advent of John of Leyden to that of the Spiritualists, to disturb the natural relation of the sexes under the Christian dispensation. The mystery surrounding the subject constituted the most attractive charm of the religion, both to the initiated and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... their conversation was interrupted by the Sacristan, who, in a voice almost inarticulate with anger, accused the Bohemian of having practised the most abominable arts of delusion among the younger brethren. He had added to their nightly meal cups of a heady and intoxicating cordial, of ten times the strength of the most powerful wine, under which several of the fraternity had succumbed, and indeed, although the Sacristan had been ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Kenneth," she said in a regal, kindly voice. She was mad, he knew, but her delusion was nicely kept within bounds. All of her bright world hinged on the single fact that she was unshakably certain of her royalty. As long as the FBI catered to that notion— which included a Royal dwelling for ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the first turning. "But he's mad!" he protested. "Mad, poor fellow! Merciful heavens, Mr. Hewitt, his whole tale must have been a delusion! A mere madman's fancy! Poor fellow! We must go back, Mr. Hewitt—we really must! We can't leave that poor girl there ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... victim of some sweet hallucination, and was almost afraid to speak of the fancies that floated from time to time before his eyes, lest he should be told that his mind was wandering, and that he was the victim of delusion. ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... out upon the whole Creation; but what a rough unsightly Sketch of Nature should we be entertained with, did all her Colouring disappear, and the several Distinctions of Light and Shade vanish? In short, our Souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing Delusion, and we walk about like the enchanted Hero of a Romance, who sees beautiful Castles, Woods and Meadows; and at the same time hears the warbling of Birds, and the purling of Streams; but upon the finishing of some secret Spell, the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
