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More "Illogical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conclusion was extremely illogical, as was demonstrated a few days later, when one of the other "alternatives" was adopted with success. This successful movement was essentially the same as that which had been previously made to dislodge ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... with a touch of his old airy manner; 'you come to commit suicide and are not afraid; I wish to save you the trouble, and you are, my dear—you are illogical.' ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... and we often confuse a wise suspension of judgment with the weakness of hesitation. To profess an opinion for which we have no sufficient reason is clearly illogical, but when it is necessary to act we must do so on the best evidence available, however slight that may be. Herein lies the importance of common sense, the instincts of a General, the sagacity of a Statesman. Pyrrho, the recognized representative of doubt, was often wise in suspending ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... does the so-called Prussian prove that the Cabinet Order is not the outcome of religious feeling? By describing the Cabinet Order everywhere as an outcome of religious feeling. Is an insight into social movements to be expected from such an illogical mind? Listen to his prattle about the relation of German society to the Labour movement ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... both lads on account of their illogical conduct. Jakin might be pounding Lew, or Lew might be rubbing Jakin's head in the dirt, but any attempt at aggression on the part of an outsider was met by the combined forces of Lew and Jakin; and the consequences were painful. The boys ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... not assurance." {25} Could the clergyman have dared to answer, he would have said, "No, my Lord! but 'sure and certain hope' is as like assurance as a minikin man is like a dwarf." Sad to say, a theologian must be illogical: I feel sure that if you took the clearest headed writer on logic that ever lived, and made a bishop of him, he would be shamed by his own ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... all-embracing Good. Fear has a creative force which invertedly mimics that of Love; but the difference between them is that Love is eternal and Fear is not. Love as the Original Creative Motive is the only logical conclusion we can come to as to why we ourselves or any other creation exists. Fear is illogical because to regard it as having any place in the Original Creative Motive involves ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... tender He was to the sinning. Yes, He understood, He understood. And what a death He had died, too. He might have escaped death, but He had died believing that by dying He would enrich, glorify the life of the world. In a sense it was illogical, but there was a deeper logic which he eventually saw. After all, it was the death of Jesus that made Him live in the minds and hearts of untold millions during nineteen centuries. According to the standards of man, His death ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... being the cause of his daughter's abrupt departure from school. As a matter of fact, Mr. Adair knew her position exactly, and was very much amused by the whole affair; also, as it had procured him the pleasure of his daughter's return home, he had an illogical inclination to be pleased also with Janetta. "As Margaret is so fond of her, there must be something in her," he said to himself, with a critical glance at the girl's delicate features and big dark eyes. "I'll draw her ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to find out, and who'd mind what he said, if he did find out? He only know'd that it wasn't put right by them what undertook that line of business, and that it didn't come right of itself. And, in brief, his illogical opinion was, that if you couldn't do nothing for him, you had better take nothing from him for doing of it; so far as he could make out, that was about what it come to. Thus, in a prolix, gently-growling, foolish way, did Plornish turn the tangled skein of his estate about and about, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... explain. Our system is so illogical. Theoretically, the boys needn't show up for the next three or four years after Second Camp. They are supposed to be making their way in life. Actually, the young doctor or lawyer or engineer joins a Volunteer ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... be suggested, that it is highly illogical to conclude that you are yourself a person of whom a great deal more might have been made, merely because you are a person of whom it is the fact that very little has actually been made. This suggestion may appear ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... elapsed before he spoke she had no means of knowing; probably, at most, two or three minutes. But to the woman gazing out blindly through the cobweb-covered window into the night, it might well have been hours. For some illogical reason, which she could not have explained to herself, she had the feeling that the victory in the coming struggle would lie with the one who kept silent the longer. To break the nerve-wrecking spell would be a ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... former days, and which is perhaps sometimes committed still. Let us not fall into the mistake of fancying that everything antiquarian, which we do not see at first sight the exact use of, must necessarily be something very mysterious. Old distaff-whorls, armlets, etc., have, in this illogical spirit, been sometimes described as Druidical amulets and talismen; ornamented rings and bosses from the ancient rich Celtic horse-harness, discovered in sepulchral barrows, have been published as Druidical astronomical instruments; ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... mind escapes easily. It possesses the secret of some fourth mental dimension, known only to the naive and the illogical, or perhaps supralogical. He has brilliant intuitions, hunches, premonitions, the acute perceptions of some two or three extra senses that have been bred or schooled out of ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... a confused mind. And as a disease once fixed on the skin reacts and poisons the blood in turn as it has first been poisoned by the blood, so careless use of language if indulged reacts on the mind to make it permanently and increasingly careless, illogical, and inaccurate ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... firm of Denton, Day & Co. has come to a crisis in its business career, owing to the illogical stand recently taken by one of its members. From a paying investment it has turned into a philanthropical institution, and so long as it can live as such it will be a great benefit to hundreds. Further than this, I hear that one man has made an unjust fortune by withdrawing ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... Americans; the British, in turn, looked upon our blockade-runners which entered the French ports exactly as we regarded, at a later date, the British steamers that ran into Wilmington and Charleston. It is curious to see how illogical writers are. The careers of the Argus and Alabama for example, were strikingly similar in many ways, yet the same writer who speaks of one as an "heroic little brig," will call the other a "black pirate." ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... stupid? Jack says I am a bit illogical at times. But, Rudolph, you mustn't expect a woman to judge the man she loves; if you call on her to do that, she doesn't reason about it; she just goes on loving him, and thinking how horrid you are. Women love ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... at the Beginning of the Christian Era.—The philosophy of the Greeks and Romans had reached a state of degeneracy at the time of the coming of Christ. Thought had become weak and illogical. Trusting to the influence of the senses, which were at first believed to be infallible, scepticism of the worst nature influenced all classes of the people. Epicureanism, not very bad in the beginning, had come to a stage of decrepitude. To seek immediate pleasure regardless of consequences ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... of recovering their child's body, they returned South. Though don't think," said pretty Ruth suddenly regarding Mr. Dilke's attentive face while she laughed, "that I received the story from Mrs. Buckley in any such direct fashion. Such people are not only illogical and irrelevant, they are secretive,—if ever you have to do with them as my work leads me to, you'll understand what I mean. But to continue with Mrs. Buckley. In order to convince her that neither Rosy nor ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... described as an author of bewildering variety, whose mind drifted waywardly from topic to topic—from painting to political economy, from architecture to agriculture—with a license as illogical as it was indiscriminating. To this impression, Ruskin himself sometimes gave currency. He was, for illustration, once announced to lecture on crystallography, but, as we are informed by one present,[5] he ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... make a salutary impression upon such a heart. A French infidel declared that, should he be told that the most remarkable miracle was occurring close by his house, he would not take a step out of his way to see it. Pride never surrenders; it prefers rather to take an illogical position than to bow even to the authority of reason. Furious, beside itself, and absurd, it revolts against evidence. To all reasoning, to undeniable evidence, the infidel—the man without religion—opposes his own will: "Such is my determination." ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... not how long this lasted—it might have been for hours, as I took no account of time. My mind seemed dazed, incapable of consecutive thought although a thousand illogical conceptions flashed through the brain, each in turn fading away into another, before I was fully aware of its meaning. Occasionally some far-off noise aroused me from lethargy, yet none of these could be identified, except once the ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... poet's, or the philosopher's view of the world. The scientific investigator who, like Mr. Tyndall, so far forgets the limitations of his province as to use his natural data as premises for religious or irreligious conclusions, is as illogical as the popular preacher, who attacks scientific conclusions because they are not consistent with his theological presuppositions. Looking only at their primary aspects, we cannot say that religious presuppositions and the scientific interpretation of ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... practice of these tribes, who venerate and almost deify the animals which they habitually hunt, kill, and eat, is not so flagrant as at first sight it appears to us: the people have reasons, and some very practical reasons, for acting as they do. For the savage is by no means so illogical and unpractical as to superficial observers he is apt to seem; he has thought deeply on the questions which immediately concern him, he reasons about them, and though his conclusions often diverge very widely from ours, we ought not to deny him the credit of patient and prolonged meditation ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... extremely retentive of favours. They will overlook any shortcomings in a ruler who has the divine gift of sympathy, and serve him with devotion. Macaulay has branded them with cowardice. If the charge were true, it was surely illogical and unmanly to reproach a community numbering 50,000,000 for inherited defects. Difference of environment and social customs will account for the superior virility of Europeans as compared with their distant kinsmen whose lot is cast in the sweltering tropics. But no ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... distaste for the insignia of birth, we cannot get away from the fact that there is a certain honor of inheritance, and that we instinctively pay homage to one who represents a noble name. There is nothing really illogical in this: for, as an English statesman has put it, "the past is one of the elements of our power." He is the wise democrat who, with no opposition to such a decree of Nature, endeavors to control its operation by expecting ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... the high mantel-shelf and her head against her hand, Celia stood looking down on the vacant hearth. There was something of weariness in the attitude. What a delicate bit of porcelain she seemed! Allan had a sudden, illogical vision of a fire of blazing logs, and himself and Celia ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... supernaturally early age the purple-born are appointed to high titular positions in the State Administration or in the army. In Russia, where the "right divine of kings to govern wrong" is pushed to its most logical or illogical consequences, this royal custom flourishes to excess. At the mature age of eight, Alexander was appointed Chancellor of the University of Finland. His brother Constantine was nominated in early youth High ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... fact that prayer itself is quite often a difficult act, the more arduous works of salvation would in the Syncretist hypothesis be stripped of their meritoriousness and degraded to the level of a voluntarium in causa, which is an untenable assumption.(778) Finally, there is something illogical and unsatisfactory in admitting on equal terms, as it were, two such incompatible notions as the Thomistic cognitio Dei in decretis praedeterminantibus and ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... academy the 'brown-study color'; and it would clearly have been supererogatory to lay the same tint upon it. No, sir; we avoid repetitions even in our prayers, deeming them to be so many proofs of an illogical ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... possession was questioned by the adverse side, accepting without doubt the possibility—and, indeed, the actual existence—of the phenomenon. Thus the liberals, or pseudo-liberals, in that important controversy were placed in an illogical position. For (as their opponents might triumphantly argue) if the devil's power and possession could be manifested in one way, why not by any other method. Nor was it for them to determine the appointed ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... large number of small national banks in the guise of state banks, to which the public deposits were committed, and the collection of the public revenues intrusted. Such an arbitrary policy, at once so ignorant, illogical, and dangerous, aroused Mr. Webster thoroughly, and he entered immediately upon an active campaign against the President. Between the presentation of the Boston resolutions and the close of the session he spoke on the bank, and the subjects necessarily connected with it, no ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... common people. Its peculiarities in pronunciation, syntax, phraseology, and the use of words we are inclined to avoid in our own speech, because they mark a lack of cultivation. We test them by the standards of polite society, and ignore them, or condemn them, or laugh at them as abnormal or illogical or indicative of ignorance. So far as literature goes, the speech of the common people has little interest for us because it is not the recognized literary medium. These two reasons have prevented the average man of cultivated tastes from giving much attention to the way in which ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... race of wretched cave-dwellers, and we believe that our still earlier ancestors were possessed of tails and pointed ears. Having come so far, we are sometimes inclined to forget that not every step has been an advance and to entertain an illogical confidence that each future step must carry us still further forward; having indubitably progressed in many things, we think of ourselves as progressing in all. And as the pace of progress in science and in material things has become ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... finger, and carried the silver case containing the parchment in his breast, but since he had thrown in his lot with the Egyptian army, his faith in those talismans had become weakened. Why, he did not know; it was an illogical feeling, for, of course, the circumstances had not altered. Probably it was because it is impossible to trust to two diametrically opposite sources of ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... neglect those skillful little touches which go to make a story natural and literary, and reach the end to find that they have skeletonized an important part of the narrative. In such a case the reader is very apt to come upon the climax unexpectedly, and so to find it forced and illogical; whereas if the author had preserved the proportions of his narrative, and led up to his climax properly, it would have been accounted strong ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... leave her in the wrong! Her maiden pride had somehow failed her, for she ought to have sent him forth crushed. And yet, surely, she had hurt, punished, humiliated him. Oh, no doubt of that! And for a moment her illogical heart wavered. She drew out her hanky, muttering 'how I hate him!'—and blew her pretty nose. Then she clenched her hands and set her teeth. Then she went lax again. Then—oh, dear! he had even insulted her by leaving her to pick ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... on its way to me via this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the mean time ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... Lonesome Cove and he had not come—why should he, on her account? Between them all was over—why should he? The question was absurd in her mind, and yet the fact that she had expected him, that she so WANTED him, was so illogical and incongruous and vividly true that it raised her to a sitting posture on the log, and she ran her fingers over her forehead and down her dazed face until her chin was in the hollow of her hand, and her startled eyes were fixed unwaveringly ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... Caroline's sparkling eyes responded to his own, the Gentleman in Black entered on a conversation with his young companion, as aimless as the swaying of the branches in the wind, as devious as the flitting of the butterflies in the azure air, as illogical as the melodious murmur of the fields, and, like it, full of mysterious love. At that season is not the rural country as tremulous as a bride that has donned her marriage robe; does it not invite the coldest soul to be happy? ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... the whole evening with him, and made him more comfortable than he had been since his cold began. Westover now talked seriously and frankly with him, but no longer so harshly, and in his relenting he felt a return of his old illogical liking for him. He fancied in Durgin's kindness to himself an indirect regret, and a desire to atone for what he had done, and he said: "The effect is in you—the worst effect. I don't think either of the young Lyndes very exemplary people. But you'd be doing yourself a greater wrong ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... monsieur," I cut in, speaking very quietly, "for argument's sake I will admit, if you like, that your injuries are both real and deep. Still, does it not seem to you absurdly illogical that because certain persons have injured you, you must yield to this insane craving to wreak your revenge upon somebody else who has had no hand in the infliction of ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... have with an intransitive verb is irreducible to the idea of possession: indeed, it is illogical. In I have waited, we cannot make the idea expressed by the word waited the object of the verb have or possess. The expression has become a part of language by means of the extension of a false analogy. It is an instance of ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... learned and logical are accused by other learned and logical of false assumptions, of invalid reasoning, of foregone conclusions, of pride and prejudice and passion. One would say that the result of your profound researches was only to make you more intensely illogical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... explosion that will clear the air and bring peace and quiet to the earth again—when the town, sea and sky will be calm and beneficent. But it is only an illusion, preserved by the untiring hope of man and his imperishable and illogical ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... especially attracted by the Quaker John Bellows of Gloucester, England, the author of the wonderful little French dictionary. This led him to say that he sympathized with the Quakers in everything save their belief in property; that in this they were utterly illogical; that property presupposes force to protect it. I remarked that most American Quakers knew nothing of such force; that none of them had ever seen an American soldier, save during our Civil War, and that probably not one in hundreds ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... flagrant sort for this State to withdraw from the Union after all that had been spent and done to introduce her; yet, if separation had actually occurred, Texas must necessarily have gone with the South, both on account of her institutions and her geographical position. Secession was illogical as well as impracticable; it ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... didn't like to. Passing you by, just now, I made a sudden resolution. You have thought badly of me on account of my attitude towards Phyllis Gedge. I want to tell you that you were quite right. My attitude was illogical ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... of the buildings, however, merely typified the incongruous and illogical disorganization of the people themselves. For instance, here was a big, strong, well-fed fashionably groomed young man, walking along the street, carrying no heavier burden than a light walking stick, while just beside him was ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... standing rule never to go against the popular feeling of the moment, above all when it was manifestly illogical and cruel, "because in that case," he would say, "the voice of the people was the voice of God." But Brotteaux proved himself untrue to his principles; he asseverated that the old man, whether he was a Capuchin or not, could not have robbed the citoyenne, ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... of every such rebirth, considered as an end in itself, is perceived, as well as the paramount need of adopting a course of life by which the necessity for such repeated rebirths can be abolished. Ignorance also begets the illusive and illogical idea that there is only one existence for man, and the other illusion that this one life is followed by states of unchangeable pleasure ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... rather more worthless than usual in the present case, because Mr. Carlyle is ostentatiously illogical and defiantly inconsistent; and, therefore, the term which might correctly describe one side of his teaching or belief would be tolerably sure to give a wholly false impression of some of its other sides. The qualifications ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... of the color line of the quadroon and octoroon, but it must not be forgotten that these are only the contrasts of specific improvement, and the inference that the borrowed defects of a half breed exceed the original defects of the full-blooded aborigine is utterly illogical." He stopped suddenly and laid down his pen with a heightened color; the bugle had blown, the guard was turning out to receive the commandant and his returning party, ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... truth that may be found in this study, so in this present work with the same confidence I give this illustration of Lord Kitchener's as another proof of character indicated in the shape and lines of the hand, and as it has been said so often that "Character is Destiny," so it is surely not illogical to point out that in following the rules laid down by this study one may obtain a clear idea of the destiny that the Character, Will, and Individuality trace out in advance—tracks, as it were, stretching ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... I illogical? I knew they were going to turn out us in the end. But I was sure I shouldn't be convinced at once." And the talk wandered away into a sort ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... they malign you. It cannot be sooth That you talk like an angry illogical girl. Yes, banish the Hebrews, as wholly as ruth. Be cold in your wrath as the Neva's chill swirl, Snub friendly remonstrance, blunt satire's keen blade. With a blot of black ink! Will it carry you far? A ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... that Halleck is to take the command of the army, together with Hooker. I almost believe it, because it is nameless, and here all that is illogical is, eventually, probable. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... almost always full of gaiety that, unlike the occasional joking of those about her, was illogical and incalculable and yet always kindly and tolerant. I had called one evening to find her absent, but expected every moment. She had been somewhere at the seaside for her health and arrived with ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... with the uncommon quality which is called "common sense," but it is the woman of caprice, the sweet, illogical despot of a thousand moods, who is most often and most tenderly loved. Man is by nature a discoverer. It is not beauty which holds him, but rather mystery and charm. To see the one woman through all the changing moods—to discern Portia through Carmen's ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... kill off obstinacy or practical joking. This is why it is so irritating. Your consistent sceptic never puts his scepticism into a formal proposition,—he simply chooses it as a habit. He provokingly hangs back when he might so easily join us in saying yes, but he is not illogical or stupid,—on the contrary, he often impresses us by his intellectual superiority. This is the REAL scepticism that rationalists have to meet, and their logic does ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... there was something harrowingly pathetic about the combination of little, veinous hands twitching nervously in the folds of the blue gingham, the painstaking frizzes, the pale, screwed little face, and the illogical feminine brain. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... system interpretation is simplified; for if we consider the mobility of the sun and how it is in a certain sense the soul and heart of the universe, it is not illogical to say that it gives not only light, but also motion to the bodies round it. In this manner, by the standing still of the sun at Joshua's command, the day might be lengthened without disturbing the order of the universe or the mutual positions ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... robot did know about bluffing. The trouble is that bluffing is essentially illogical, and the robot had no rules whatsoever to go by to judge whether Mike was bluffing or not. It finally decided to make its decisions by chance, judging by Mike's past performance at bluffing. When it did, Mike quit bluffing and ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to do all we can to limit, to restrain, to fetter the abuse of military power. Bayonets are at best illogical arguments. I am not willing, except as a case of sheerest necessity, ever to permit a military commander to exercise authority over life, liberty, and property. But, sir, it is part of the law of war; you cannot carry in the rear of your army your courts; you cannot ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... books that man ever wrote. A book which one could almost prove never could be written, and which, as an illogical conclusion, but a stubborn fact, has been written, nevertheless. "Harrington" is an Abolition novel, the scene of which is laid in Boston, with a few introductory chapters of plantation-slavery in Louisiana. Its principal merit is its burning earnestness of feeling and purpose; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... magazine again. Hostility had come out from the corner into which she had tucked it away and was once more filling her mind. She knew it was illogical, but she could not help it. For a moment, during her revelations of servants' etiquette, she had allowed herself to hope that she had frightened her rival out of the field, and the disappointment made her feel ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... perfectly true that, after hearing Dr. Sexton's exposition—rather than expose—it is quite easy for any one to frustrate the designs of these clever conjurors, if he wishes to do so. I am not sure that the expose is wise. Illogical people will not see the force of Dr. Sexton's argument, and will possibly think it "proves too much." If so much can be done by sleight of hand and ingenious machinery, they will argue, perhaps, that the Davenports and other mediums are only cleverer conjurors still, or have better machinery. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... more to live, but there is nothing in this world that one cannot get accustomed to, and in time we began to get accustomed even to that. And, after all, our anxiety, though no doubt natural, was, strictly speaking, illogical, seeing that we never know what is going to happen to us the next minute, even when we sit in a well-drained house with two policemen patrolling under the window — nor how long we have to live. It is all arranged for us, my sons, so what is ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... Elements in the Homeric Poems." Most seductive title! Such a popular touch about it! Think I shall have it printed as a "leaflet" for distribution among Workmen's Clubs and Radical Associations. Might conciliate those well-meaning but illogical Eight-Hour Men. Wonder if KEIRHARDIE would like a copy. What more nicely calculated to cheer ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... proposing," he said to himself. "Absurd and illogical. How can I tell that d'Albufex and Sebastiani will not escape me? How can I even tell that, once they are in my power, they will speak? No, I shall stay. There are better things to try... much better things. It's not those two I must ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... or a doctor should rather be consulted. He himself had never encouraged such confidences. What did he keep curates for? His curates had saved him many a long hour of talk with inconsequent men and illogical women who had come to him with their stories. What were to him the stories of men whose wives were giving them trouble? What were to him the stories of wives who had difficulties with their housemaids or who could not keep their boys from reading pirate literature? ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... but her eyes denied the mirth that her lips affirmed, and Appleton had such a sudden, illogical desire to meddle with her career, to help or hinder it, to have a hand in it at any rate, that he could hardly ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... patronized by his wife. I neither excuse nor blame her for thus deciding and transacting. Should I censure, a majority of my readers—nearly all of the masculine portion—would pick holes in my unpractical philosophy, scout my reasoning as illogical, brand my conclusions as pernicious—winding up their protest with the sigh of the mazed disciples, when stunned by the great Teacher's deliverance upon the subject of divorce, "If the case of the man be so with his wife, it ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... whole course of English Gothic architecture, the treatment of the west end is curiously hesitating and arbitrary. Sometimes it is altogether unambitious, as at Winchester and Norwich; sometimes boldly illogical, as at Lincoln or Peterborough; and at Salisbury, where everything else is beautiful, it is altogether unsatisfactory. In all these cases circumstances were against the architect, but at York there was every ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... is these, the analogy between the words these and it misleads us; the expression being illogical. ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... with one of those startling surprises which defy philosophy and make drama, confirmed the most illogical of Gabriella's assumptions. Madame, coming in late, with a blotched face and puffy eyelids, had dispatched her to the workroom, and she was sitting before one of the long tables, embroidering azure beads on a black collar, when Agnes darted through ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Joe's he was lurching more and more, his walk grown markedly unsteady. His eyes were flaming and growing red; his face was splotched with colour, hot, angry colour; he was muttering to himself, little broken, feverish, illogical outpourings of the seething passion within him. He passed three men who were lounging and smoking. He did not turn his eyes toward them. They were the three big mining men, Madden and Hasbrook and Sothern. They saw him, their eyes following him ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... compelled, by parity of reasoning, to understand that the manifestations of the same consciousness in finer matter, astral or mental, are equally worthy, and no more worthy, of development, of consideration. You will not find yourself in the absurdly illogical position of declaring it a good thing to train the physical plane consciousness, while it is dangerous to cultivate the astral and mental plane consciousness. You will understand that all psychism is of the same kind, that on each plane the development ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... me to say—as I have occasionally said—that, to my mind, the whole truth lies neither with the individualist nor with his antagonist, my friends have often assured me that I was illogical. Of two contradictory principles, they say, you must take one. There are cases, I admit, in which this remark applies. It is true, or it is not true, that two and two make four. We cannot, in arithmetic, adopt Sir Roger de Coverley's ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... at the pageant of the socially great: this he appreciated and accepted. But he felt that it ought to be some one other than himself—and, at the same time, was sufficiently just to smile at himself for his illogical attitude. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of liberal candor due to an honorable contemporary.] At this very day, a French and an English economist have reared a Babel of far more elaborate errors on this subject; M. Say, I mean, and Mr. Malthus: both ingenious writers, both eminently illogical,—especially the latter, with whose "confusion worse confounded" on the subject of Value, if reviewed by some unsparing Rhadamanthus of logical justice, I believe that chaos would appear a model of order and light. Yet the very want of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the reasons for disbelief are utterly illogical. For instance, one view is this: "I never want to come back to this earth after I once leave it." The fact is, that there could be no return to today's recognized conditions of life. If one were to return to this planet and become reembodied, he would ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... and jerky, and you never knew just where he would put his foot. Indeed, he was not certain himself. He was thoroughly illogical, and the question he asked would sometimes seem quite foreign to the subject being discoursed upon. His legs were crooked and reminded you of interrogation points, and his arms were interrogations, and his neck was an interrogation, while his eyes ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... Windsor fashion. In theory she never deviated one iota from the solid ground of the creed of her childhood. But while she held inflexibly to her creed in all its generalizations, she made all those sweet illogical exceptions which women of her kind are given to making. In general, she firmly believed that everybody who failed to have a saving faith in the vicarious atonement of Christ would be lost. In particular, she excepted many individual cases among her own acquaintance. ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... value as being indications of things much more real than themselves, namely, of the stages of evolution of the human mind. The fact that a certain god-figure, however grotesque and queer, or a certain creed, however childish, cruel, and illogical, held sway for a considerable time over the hearts of men in any corner or continent of the world is good evidence that it represented a real formative urge at the time in the hearts of those good people, and a definite stage in their evolution and the evolution of humanity. Certainly ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... board a twirl; "ving-cinq," she would say; the ball flew round and fell into a number; it might be ten, or twenty, or twenty- five, it did not much matter; she looked to see what it was, but right or wrong, never failed to eat the bonbon—an illogical result, which contrasted quaintly with the intense seriousness with which she made her stakes. Sometimes she would place two or three sugar-plums on one number, always naming it aloud—"trente-et-un," "douze-premier," "douze- apres." It was the oddest game for ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... youth had an awakening of fervent mystical piety in the Catholic form. That form she could not keep. Popular religion of all kinds, with its deep internal impossibilities, its "heaven and hell serving to cover the illogical manifestations of the Divinity's apparent designs respecting us," its "God made in our image, silly and malicious, vain and puerile, irritable or tender, after our fashion," lost all sort ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... demanding rather than as 'the giving God.' Such thoughts paralyse action. Fear is barren, love is fruitful. Nothing grows on the mountain of curses, which frowns black over against the sunny slopes of the mountain of blessing with its blushing grapes. The indolence was illogical, for, if the master was such as was thought, the more reason for diligence; but fear is a bad reasoner, and the absurd gap between the premises and the conclusion is matched by one of the very ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... exasperatingly uncertain and illogical about it all. Was it possible that St. Pierre Boulain was playing a huge joke on him? Even that was inconceivable. For there was Carmin Fanchet, a fitting companion for a man like Black Roger, and there was ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... loss of a child or a wife weakens even the best of us illogical," commented Harris. "No man who is mourning a relative has any business to be calling himself ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... possibility of a reconciliation between Sylvia and Jermain. The girl was deeply under the impression made by the philosophy of the older woman; she did not for the moment dream of denying its truth; but she stood granite in a perfectly illogical denial of its implications in her own case. She did not consciously revolt against the suggestion that she renew her relations to Jerry Fiske, because with a united action of all her faculties she refused utterly to consider it for an instant. She would no more have been persuaded to ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... a man distracted; I cannot think what ailed me: when I awoke the following day, nothing remained of it; but that night I was filled with a gloomy fury of the nerves. I had killed him; he had done his utmost to protect me; I had seen him with that awful smile. And so illogical and useless is this sentiment of remorse that I was ready, at a word or a look, to quarrel with somebody else. I presume the disposition of my mind was imprinted on my face; and when, a little after, I overtook, saluted, and addressed the doctor, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... working behind them. But as has been the case with other great philosophers, and with Plato and Aristotle themselves, what was really permanent and original could not be understood by the next generation, while a perverted logic carried out his chance expressions with an illogical consistency. His simple and noble thoughts, like those of the great Eleatic, soon degenerated into a mere strife of words. And when thus reduced to mere words, they seem to have exercised a far wider influence in the cities of Ionia ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... drive out of culture the slave-grown cotton of America. If this be so, of what use can it be to make irritating speeches in the House of Lords against a state of things by which we are content to profit? Lord Brougham and Lord Grey are not men of such illogical minds as to be incapable of understanding that it is the demand of the English manufacturers which stimulates the produce of slave-grown American cotton. They are, neither of them, we apprehend, so reckless or so wicked as to close our factories and to throw some two millions of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... series of cause-effect phenomena we fail. All the characteristics of the effects are indescribable and indefinable ajnana of maya, and in whatever way we may try to conceive these phenomena in themselves or in relation to one another we fail, for they are all carved out of the indefinite and are illogical and illusory, and some day will vanish for ever. The true cause is thus the pure being, the reality which is unshakable in itself, the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... code, inherited from generations of scrupulous and God-fearing ancestors, overlaid by selfish living, and now revived under the stress, the purification partly of deepening passion, partly of a high responsibility. The letter was incoherent, illogical; it showed now the meaner, now the nobler elements of character; but it was human; it came from the warm depths of life, and it had exerted in the end a composing and appeasing force upon the woman to whom it was addressed. He had loved her—if only at the moment of ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... measures to dispose of the flesh before transporting the bones to distant burial-places. Many of the epidemics of disease that decimate the populations of Eastern countries, and sometimes travel into the West, originate from these abominable caravans of the dead and kindred irrationalities of the illogical and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... letter, the one she had but just written and deposited in the tree. She chilled and stiffened under the keen edge of Kelley's contemptuous pity, then burned hot with illogical rage. ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... housekeeper, while Knox stood in the breach for the liberties of Scotland, and when Carmichael began to meddle with Mary, he distinctly lost the sympathies of his audience and entered on dangerous ground. Scots allow themselves, at times, the rare luxury of being illogical, and one of the occasions is their fondness for Queen Mary. An austere Puritan may prove that this young woman was French in her ways, an enemy to the Evangel, a born and practised flirt, and art and part in the murder ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... stated from another standpoint. The higher man develops, the more impatient he becomes with illogical reasonings and defective conceptions; he thus becomes increasingly skeptical in regard to current traditional religions with their crude, primitive ideas; he is accordingly increasingly freed from the restraints they impose. But unless he finds some new religious sanctions for the communal life, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... that some calamity would happen. But he reassured her and departed, surprised at her illogical moods. ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... of the Republicans stopped short of the demand for the conferment of suffrage on the negro. That privilege was indeed, still denied him in a majority of the loyal States, and it seemed illogical and unwarrantable to expect a more advanced philanthropy, a higher sense of justice, from the South than had been yet attained by the North. But without raising the question of suffrage, there were ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... urged, a little feebly perhaps, for I was nearly worn out by her prejudice and utterly illogical refusal to see how the land lay. But I quickly recovered myself, and said quite peremptorily, "You shall have half an hour to make up your mind, not a minute more, Lady Henriette. You shall give me my answer when I return. I warn you that I shall bring ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... dying for years, and some of them will not escape from life for years to come. It is the Moral Sense which teaches the factory proprietors the difference between right and wrong—you perceive the result. They think themselves better than dogs. Ah, you are such an illogical, unreasoning race! And ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... style has been concisely described as fiery exultation on a basis of languid melancholy. To all this we may retort that what he lacks in profundity and firm control, he makes up in spontaneity, wealth of imagination and, above all, warmth of color. It is illogical to expect his music to be different from what it is. He expressed himself sincerely and his style is the direct outcome of his own temperament plus his nationality. Tchaikowsky was widely read in modern literature—Dickens and Thackeray being favorite ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... "Still, there is one illogical point in your surmise. The letter from St. Louis arrived sometime this morning. If Atwood was in Chicago Tuesday morning, how did he get that letter ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... men and women to realize the wrongs of the Race, or at any rate the illogical and therefore unjust position in which we have placed them; were the just and thoughtful men, the refined and golden-hearted ladies who are ready in this country to support every good cause when it is properly presented; were they to realize the ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... is, slavery is right, and is proved to be so, notwithstanding all the noisy declamation we hear about human equality. The Negro is a barbarian, and barbarism is not humanity but inhumanity; hence the unfitness to the case, of such illogical reasoning as is adopted by the advocates of Negro equality. Human equality, as applied to the Negro, is an idle fantasy, without even the shadow or semblance of plausibility. White men are equals in few things; certainly not in physical nor mental capacity, ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... had already brought her basin, and who flew forth in most illogical readiness, eager to satisfy her brother, though she did not know what he wanted. Good-will, however, is often its own reward, and in this instance it was emphatically so, for Chatty almost ran into a little group advancing ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... being quite fair to either of us," I protested, turning away to push in a hair-pin so that he wouldn't see the tremble that I could feel in my lower lip. For an unreasonable and illogical and absurdly big wave of compassion for my poor old Dinky-Dunk was welling up through my tired body, threatening to leave me and all my make-believe dignity as wobbly as a street-procession Queen of Sheba on her circus-float. I was hearing, I knew, the words ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... for rejecting my plans as other than illogical, and I feel sure they must really have appeared so to ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... reason with these men,' continued the Judge, 'for I confess, at once, that I cannot demonstrate, either by logic or by mathematics, a modern quitclaim or warranty in holding slaves. In combating their illogical and unscriptural positions, I seem to them to be an advocate of the divine right of oppression,—which I am not. That it is best, however, and that it is right, for this relation to continue until God shall manifest some purpose to terminate it consistently ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... was anything modern in Villeneuve-Loubet, the moonlight would hide it or gloss it over; if there was anything ancient, the moonlight would enable us to see it as we wanted to see it. I pity the limited souls who do not believe in moonshine, and use the word contemptuously. One is illogical who contends that moonshine gives a false idea of things; for he is testing the moonshine impression by sunshine. It would be as illogical to say that sunshine gives a false idea of things on the ground that moonshine is the standard. If sunshine is reality, so is moonshine. The difference ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... mind. The first is that the Bible must be thought of not as a series of disconnected texts and thoughts, but as a connected whole. The division of King James' Bible into verses and chapters is but poorly adapted to this purpose. The illogical, strange character of the paragraphing, as measured by the standards of modern English, is apparent at a glance, for often a verse will end in the middle of a sentence, and the sentence be concluded in the next verse. The chapters in the same way often fail to finish ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... populations of this earth, though less numerous and comfortable, had been proportionately healthier than they were at present. As for religion, I had never had the least faith in Providence rewarding the pitiable by giving them a future life of bliss. The theory seemed to me illogical, for the more pitiable in this life appeared to me the thick-skinned and successful, and these, as we know, in the saying about the camel and the needle's eye, our religion consigns wholesale to hell. Success, power, wealth, those aims of profiteers and premiers, pedagogues and pandemoniacs, of ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... endless confusion when we sail out into the dark, mysterious seas that lie beyond that 'because.' Nine times out of ten our conclusions are unassailable. And nine times out of ten our reasons for reaching those conclusions are absurdly illogical, totally inadequate, or grossly mistaken. Everybody remembers the fable of the bantam cock who assured the admiring farmyard that the sun rose every morning because of its anxiety to hear him crow! The ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... its speedy disappearance. But it does try the earnest, while it makes shipwreck of the frivolous, and exercises the faith and humility of all. Even a very poor scholar can see that his reasoning is most inconclusive, and his reading superficial and inferences illogical. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... their lesson books were unget-at-ably packed up, she would certainly have suspected Ralph of a sly peep at Mrs. Markham, just on purpose "to set Sylvia down." But failing this weapon, her defence of Sylvia was, it must be confessed, somewhat illogical. ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... own cherished doctrines may have originated in the similar superstitions of our rude forefathers; and the suspicion inevitably shakes the confidence with which we had hitherto regarded these articles of our faith. The doubt thus cast on our old creed is perhaps illogical, since even if we should discover that the creed did originate in mere superstition, in other words, that the grounds on which it was first adopted were false and absurd, this discovery would not really disprove the beliefs themselves, for it is perfectly possible that a belief may be true, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... governed by logic. Truth as well as Providence is always on the side of the strongest battalions. An illogical opinion only requires ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... a square capital an arch composed of two rings of squared stones, the lower one only half the width (say) of the upper one, it will be apparent that on the square capital the arch stones would leave a portion of the capital at each angle bare, and supporting nothing.[4] This looks awkward and illogical, and accordingly the pier is modified so as to suit the shape of the arch. Figs. 111, 112, 113, and 114, with the plans, B C D, accompanying them, illustrate this development of the pier. Fig. 111 is a simple cylindrical pier with a coarsely ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... vaguely into the freshly watered shop before breakfast, greeted him in a new tone, and with startling deference asked him what he thought she had better do in regard to the addressing of a certain parcel. Edwin considered this odd; he considered it illogical; and one consequence of Miss Ingamells's quite sincere attitude was that he despised Miss Ingamells for a moral weakling. He knew that he himself was a moral weakling, but he was sure that he could never bend, never crouch, to such a posture as Miss Ingamells's; that she ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... shelter in the miraculous, nor do we run from a dilemma to the refuges of religion. Apart from our theological belief in the potency of the Creator and Controller of all worlds, we simply regard it as illogical and inconclusive to argue that because organization, life, and intelligence obtain within one sphere under one order of circumstances, therefore the same order obtains in every other sphere throughout the system to which that one belongs. The unity of ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... was only in the making, although she herself considered her life as practically finished. The past and the present were moulding her into something that only the future could determine. Sometimes April, sometimes July, sometimes witch, sometimes woman; impetuous, intrepid, romantic, tempestuous, illogical,—these were but the elements of which the coming years of experience had yet to shape a character. Young Mrs. Loring had plenty of briars, but she had good roots and in favorable soil would be ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... in all they did by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by language—language being like the sun, which rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme. There are no follies and no unreasonablenesses so great as those which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is hardly an error ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... allies itself with reason, in order to make that selection of ideas which personal interest can either set aside entirely or modify by illogical inference. ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... was trying to shake off a haunting feeling that was enveloping him like a mist—a feeling that everything the young Englishman was saying he had heard before. It left him dazed, and made Durwent's voice sound far away. He tried to dismiss it as an illogical prank of the mind, but the thing was relentless. He could not rid himself of the thought that sometime in the past—months, years, perhaps centuries ago—this pitiful ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... made frequent portages is grossly and maliciously false. That honor belongs to him, as a few facts will show. In giving the guide as his authority he is most illogical, for in his first article (on three separate pages) he wholly discredits this same man. Again, some information: there are five portages above Aitkin, as follows: first, into the western gulf of Lake Cass, saving six miles; second, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... to me more illogical than the argument that this power is acquired by a grant from the Congress, connected with the other argument that Congress have not got the power to do the act themselves; that is to say, that the recipient takes ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... them for new uses. Could such a power be deflected by any human supplication? It was that or nothing,—the last court of appeal, left open to injured humanity. And so they all prayed, as lover loves, or a poet writes, from the very inside of their souls, and they rose with that singular, illogical feeling of inward peace and satisfaction which prayer only ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... critical moments of history. But a Christianity which tells us to think of Christ doing good, but to forget and put out of sight Christ risen from the dead, is not true to life. It is as delusive to the conscience and the soul as it is illogical to reason. ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... endowed with wider activities, and unhampered by many human limitations. The forms of expression adopted often appear to us to be almost gratuitously absurd; but when we put ourselves as nearly as may be at the primitive point of view, we realise that they were not even illogical. The marvel is that out of the seething chaos of sensations and emotions there could arise the solid structure of even the simplest kinds ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... when the former corresponds with the wish of those who are ready to make good the full cost of production. (Malthus.) It has been asked, indeed, whether it were more natural and better that demand should precede supply or supply demand.(660) But the inquiry is an illogical one, when expressed in so general a manner, since supply and demand are only two sides of the same transaction. But, we may say that in the case of indispensable goods, the want of them (demand) is always ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Pollyanna sent Jimmy a letter. It was confused and incoherent—a series of half-completed, illogical, but shyly joyous sentences, out of which Jimmy gathered much: a little from what was written; more from what was left unwritten. After all, did he really need ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... was thus airing and exercising his bravado, the man at his side was actually engaged in prayer. Prayer, what for? God knows. But out of his inconsistent, illogical, and agitated spirit, a stream of supplication was poured forth, inarticulate as himself, earnest as death ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether on private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who will call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no rational footing for scorning the whole present population of the globe, unless I scorn every previous ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... preserved for me as this book has done a record of my struggles and failures, and of my victories. Yes, I write the word proudly, victories, for I have been beyond my hopes successful. How well I remember my dear mother's distress at my queer notions, as she called them—her entreaties, her tender illogical protests against my making myself "conspicuous"! Dear mother! I can see now that it was very natural she should have disliked and dreaded my becoming a "strong-minded woman," for anything narrower than her ideas of a woman's education and sphere one cannot imagine. She was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... against the possibility of any future existence, yet she was quite certain that her love for Godfrey had a future existence, and indeed one that was endless. When at length he put it to her that her attitude was most illogical, since that which was dead and dissolved could not exist in any place or shape, she thought for a while and ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... myeloid tissue and not the accompanying swelling of spleen or lymph glands that is specific in the process, the nomenclature "lienomedullary or medullary-lymphatic" leukaemia must also be described as illogical ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... violent outbursts and uprisings. He may discover many causes and record them duly, but he will always be sensible that others have escaped him. The changing tides of public opinion, the undercurrents of interest, partisanship and caprice, the whirlpools of illogical sentiment or ignorant prejudice, exert forces so complex and numerous, that to observe and appreciate them all, and to estimate the effect of each in raising the storm, is a task beyond the intellect ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... not dramatic. A man's profession only enters into the drama of his life when it comes into conflict with his nature. The result of this conflict is tragic in Mrs Warren's case, and comic in the clergyman's case (at least we are savage enough to laugh at it); but in both cases it is illogical, and in both cases natural. I repeat, the critics who accuse me of sacrificing nature to logic are so sophisticated by their profession that to them logic is nature, and ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... spectacle, senora, is what impels me to disregard your law, what impels me to trample it under foot, braving every thing. This which appears to you lawlessness is obedience to an unescapable law. I do what society does when a brutal power, as illogical as irritating, opposes its progress. It tramples it under foot and destroys it in an outburst of frenzy. Such am I at this moment—I do not recognize myself. I was reasonable, and now I am a brute; I was respectful, and now I am insolent; I was civilized, and now I am a savage. You ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... he remarked, "that this unfortunate attraction exists in spite of philosophical training,—that it is exerted towards the antipodes of their previous associations; that, as they have been trained to yield only to well-grounded syllogisms, it is the illogical mode of assault that vanquishes them unguarded; that their reasonable minds have nothing to say to such, perfectly unreasonable fascinations; that, in short, the enemy succeeds by supplying a vacuum, as the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... it. And unfortunately it was this very doubt that, touching his own pride as a self-made man, made him first seriously consider his wife's proposition. He was as good as Don Ramon, any day! With this subtle feminine poison instilled in his veins, carried completely away by the logic of his wife's illogical premises, he almost hated his old benefactor. He looked down upon the little Garden of Eden, where his Eve had just tempted him with the fatal fruit, and felt a curious consciousness that he was losing its ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... illogical," said I. And pushing him aside, I mounted and set out into the night after my ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... high, the hardy and ubiquitous purple grass of Naraka grew far more lushly around the edges of the swamps. He felt that it would be a risky business at best to plunge into it after an unknown number of enemy. At the same time he had an illogical determination not to leave the bodies of his men in the hands of the Rumi. He looked at the broad, big-mouthed exaggerations of Irish faces around him, heaved a sigh that came from deep in his chest and ordered, "All right, men. Spread ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... extremely illogical, as was demonstrated a few days later, when one of the other "alternatives" was adopted with success. This successful movement was essentially the same as that which had been previously made to dislodge the enemy from Dalton, and that ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... little known to boarding-houses, was on its way to me via this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the mean time he ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... in feminine guise, like 'L'Ingenu' of Voltaire, struck, as was Huron, with all that was illogical in our social code; but she did not make, after his fashion, a too literal application of its rules, and knew where to draw the line, if she found herself on the point of making some hazardous remark, declaring frankly: "I was about to say something foolish!" which lent originality ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... reason of the college man, also, the cause of peace makes a peculiar appeal through its simple logic. War is most illogical. It breaks the law of the proper interpretation of causality. When two nations of adjacent territory cannot agree over a boundary line, why should settlement be made in terms of physical force? When two nations fail to see eye to eye in adjusting ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... some little space to what may be called the legitimate object of his work,—that is, the vindication of the distinctive tariff policy of the Whigs,—and here advocates a good cause in a singularly illogical, bungling way. Most of his book, however, is given up to foolish invective against British machinations in the United States,—an idea which may have been plausible in Jefferson's time, but has long been abandoned to minds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of this move is not clear. The advance of the KtP could only be condoned by a desire to obtain an open file, and it seems illogical to protect it now. If White wanted to escape the pinning of his KKt he need not have moved the Queen. KtxKt would have effected this and prevented the King's side ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... no technical class-name; they are merely extreme examples of the ambiguity common to most words, which grows up naturally from divergence of meaning. True homophones are separate words which have, or have acquired, an illogical ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... naked savages. They proved their barbarism, however, by indulging in the most unreasonable prejudices against a foreign religion, and when cornered in argument they would say to the missionaries, "How would you like us to convert your people to our religion?" an answer so illogical that it demonstrates either their bad faith or the low development of their intellects. The missionaries of some of the sects, by the help of their governments, gradually obtained a good deal of land and at the same time a certain degree of civil jurisdiction. The ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... state with perfect clearness the general free trade argument.[50] But he had to keep an eye to the uncomfortable tricks which theories sometimes play. He argued emphatically in 1825[51] that analogy between manufactures and agriculture is 'illogical.' He does not wish to depress the price of corn, but to keep it at such a level that our manufactures may not be hampered by dear food. Here he was forced by stress of politics to differ from his economical friends. The country gentleman did not wish to ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... to find that the heavens had fallen. Her father, whom she had left four hours before apparently in the highest health and spirits, was dead. The village physician attributed his sudden death to apoplexy, which seems illogical. But he was dead, whatever the cause, and his orphaned daughter mourned him with as genuine a grief as ever wrung a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... for municipal purposes long before the scheme of reconstruction contemplated by the bill is effectuated. "To recognize them in advance," said he, "would be to incur the danger of further embarrassing the whole subject by the illogical consequences of our ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... moonlight would hide it or gloss it over; if there was anything ancient, the moonlight would enable us to see it as we wanted to see it. I pity the limited souls who do not believe in moonshine, and use the word contemptuously. One is illogical who contends that moonshine gives a false idea of things; for he is testing the moonshine impression by sunshine. It would be as illogical to say that sunshine gives a false idea of things on the ground that moonshine is the standard. If sunshine is reality, so ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... more life, in splendid prodigality. Ishmael watched and wondered. Was this, then, the blind end of creation—to create again? If life were only valuable for the production of more, then what it created was not valuable either, and the whole thing became an illogical absurdity. There must be some definite value in each life apart from its reproductive powers, or the reproductions were better left in the void. Blind pleasure, like blind working, was not a possible solution to one of his blood and ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... be quarrelled with as illogical, but the feeling that led to it was beautiful beyond question; and, indeed, all her ideas ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... contradictory. The author of the poem, who seems to be aware of the inconsistency of arousing Arjuna to the mighty activities of the battle-field, and at the same time indoctrinating him in the spirit of a dead and nerveless asceticism, struggles hard with the awkward task of bridging the illogical chasm with ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... the highest degree, to certain theories which were developed, and which made their way, pari passu, with the advancements of electrical and electro-magnetic science. These theories, specious, inconsistent, illogical, yet withal plausible, and even fascinating, served to blind the mental vision so that mankind might ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... whom they had loved in life would have marred if not destroyed the happiness of the chosen, about to receive their crowns and harps! What a theology—that made the Creator and Preserver of all mankind thus illogical! ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... school of fiction permitted him to believe that men and women were for the most part neither good nor bad, but tabby. Moreover, the leisurely reading of many sentences had given him some understanding of the elements of style. He perceived that some combinations of words were illogical, and that others were unlovely to the ear; and at the same time he acquired a vocabulary and a knowledge of grammar and punctuation that his earlier education had failed to give him. He read new novels at his writing-table, and took pleasure in correcting the mistakes of their authors in ink. When ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... path with that: in more out-of-the-way places, England for instance, it still felt the influence of the life of its earlier and happy days, and in a way lived on a while; but its life was so feeble, and, so to say, illogical, that it could not resist any change in external circumstances, still less could it give birth to anything new; and before this century began, its last flicker had died out. Still, while it was living, in ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... Republicans stopped short of the demand for the conferment of suffrage on the negro. That privilege was indeed, still denied him in a majority of the loyal States, and it seemed illogical and unwarrantable to expect a more advanced philanthropy, a higher sense of justice, from the South than had been yet attained by the North. But without raising the question of suffrage, there were rights with which ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... theory utterly breaks down, where it becomes not only utterly illogical and incoherent, but where it becomes too gross for any mortal credulity, and too blasphemously wicked for any ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... less numerous and comfortable, had been proportionately healthier than they were at present. As for religion, I had never had the least faith in Providence rewarding the pitiable by giving them a future life of bliss. The theory seemed to me illogical, for the more pitiable in this life appeared to me the thick-skinned and successful, and these, as we know, in the saying about the camel and the needle's eye, our religion consigns wholesale to hell. Success, power, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... sagacity. Have we made an erroneous interpretation of the document? Is there anything illogical about the meaning?" ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... did know about bluffing. The trouble is that bluffing is essentially illogical, and the robot had no rules whatsoever to go by to judge whether Mike was bluffing or not. It finally decided to make its decisions by chance, judging by Mike's past performance at bluffing. When it did, Mike quit bluffing and ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... proletariat. The German proletariat says that Germany is not to involve herself, even if Russia enters in. The German capitalists, on the other hand, demand that Germany step in because Austria makes war with Servia. And on the same illogical, reprehensible grounds the French capitalists are demanding war with Germany. The French proletariat is ...
— 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
... towards his father struck me as an ideal blending of affectionate comradeship with old-fashioned respect.[E] True, this was in Philadelphia, "the City of Homes," and even there it may have been an exceptional case. I am not so illogical as to pit a single observation against (presumably) a wide induction; I merely offer for what it is worth ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... exciting. To begin the foundation of that extension was like setting in motion the siege of a city! It was extravagant—reckless—nevertheless assisted by a neighbor who was clever at any kind of building, I set to work in boyish, illogical enthusiasm. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... into the yielding chair with a sigh. After all, her fascination had always lain in her great decision. Was it not illogical to expect her to fail to display it at such a crisis? There was a long silence. The sun sank lower and lower, the birds twittered happily around them. Miss Gould's long white hook slipped in and out of the wool, and her lodger's ...
— A Philanthropist • Josephine Daskam
... conversazione at which Alcott, the "Oracle of Concord," was to be the chief personage, and, as he had the habit of monopolizing the talk when he took any part, it was suggested that I should try my strength against his. Although Emerson had a high opinion of Alcott, he seemed to me a shallow and illogical thinker, and I have always felt that the good opinion of Emerson was due rather to the fact that Alcott presented him with his own ideas served up in forms in which he no longer recognized them, and so appeared to Emerson as original. Such originality as he had was rather in ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the future. We know that our early ancestors were a race of wretched cave-dwellers, and we believe that our still earlier ancestors were possessed of tails and pointed ears. Having come so far, we are sometimes inclined to forget that not every step has been an advance and to entertain an illogical confidence that each future step must carry us still further forward; having indubitably progressed in many things, we think of ourselves as progressing in all. And as the pace of progress in science and in ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... Observatory, and other scientific associations. At this juncture the discoveries of Captain Inglefield, R. N., in Smith Sound, afforded to Kane a new route for his activities. The scheme, as far as the search for Franklin was concerned, was well-meaning, but none the less fallacious and illogical. Kane was personally cognizant of the fact that Franklin had gone into Lancaster Sound, and had wintered in 1845-46 at Beechy Island, plainly following the direct and positive orders of the Admiralty, that he should push southward from Cape Walker to the neighborhood ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... All this was thoroughly illogical, of course; it left the question whether slaves are population or chattels for theorizers to wrangle over, and for future events to decide. It was easy for James Wilson to show that there was neither rhyme nor reason in it: but he subscribed to it, nevertheless, just as the northern abolitionists, ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... nations from the system of unity which prevailed in the fifteenth, to the system of liberty which was the rule in the nineteenth century, was slow and painful, illogical and wavering, generally dictated by political necessities, seldom inspired by deliberate conviction. We have seen how religious liberty has been realized, so far as the law is concerned, under two distinct systems, ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... regarded, not merely as the giver of the water which made the desert fertile, but as himself the personification and the giver of the vital powers of water. The fertility of the land and the welfare of the people thus came to be regarded as dependent upon the king's vitality. Hence it was not illogical to kill him when his virility showed signs of failing and so imperilled the country's prosperity. But when the view developed that the dead king acquired a new grant of vitality in the other world he became the god Osiris, who was able to confer even greater boons of life-giving to the land ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... the bank-notes was, quite naturally, illogical and self-contradictory. While the bank-notes were in his pocket he had in the end seen three things with clearness. First, the wickedness of appropriating them. Second, the danger of appropriating them—having ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... meanwhile," adjured the Dead Man, "believe her, James. If men would put less faith in their own four-square logic and more faith in their wives' illogical beliefs, there'd be ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... have you shock Mrs. Charnock Poynsett," said Lady Tyrrell. "You illogical woman! The poor are to demand better houses, and the squires are ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the logical fitness of things, or, rather, I am at a loss to know why some things in life are so unfit and illogical. Of course, in our darkest hour, when we were gathered in the confines of the Petrel's diminutive cabin, it was our duty to sing psalms of hope and cheer, but we didn't. It was a time for mutual encouragement: very few of us were self-sustaining, and what ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... reason by synecdoche,—ornamental, but illogical;" and therewith, resolved to hear no more, my father rose ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of awarding prizes has fallen to my lot, I am determined to award them according to my theory, and lest my reasons for bestowing them may not be perfectly clear to all, and the system of reasoning by which my results are attained appear somewhat illogical, I will ...
— Silver Links • Various
... of a child or a wife weakens even the best of us illogical," commented Harris. "No man who is mourning a relative has any business to be calling himself an ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... no such thing as atheism," Ont insisted. "I merely said that the reasoning used by the ancients to arrive at the Creator was the most slipshod and illogical possible. There was another line used long ago that was more solid, but still very weak. It started out with the statement, 'I can be aware of nothing but thoughts.' External stimuli, if such there are, must be transformed into thought ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... into the dark, mysterious seas that lie beyond that 'because.' Nine times out of ten our conclusions are unassailable. And nine times out of ten our reasons for reaching those conclusions are absurdly illogical, totally inadequate, or grossly mistaken. Everybody remembers the fable of the bantam cock who assured the admiring farmyard that the sun rose every morning because of its anxiety to hear him crow! The fact was indisputable; the sun ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... of Christian Theism. As far as I am concerned, I see nothing objectionable in such a result, but I think the friends of the Protestant church are logical in their refusal to abandon the apostle's creed, and the individualists are illogical in imagining that they can keep Protestantism and do ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lack of confidence, because he had confidence in her, and told himself that he ought to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he felt that he was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his life Alexey ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... with other great philosophers, and with Plato and Aristotle themselves, what was really permanent and original could not be understood by the next generation, while a perverted logic carried out his chance expressions with an illogical consistency. His simple and noble thoughts, like those of the great Eleatic, soon degenerated into a mere strife of words. And when thus reduced to mere words, they seem to have exercised a far wider influence in the cities of Ionia (where the people ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... how to get unity and separateness at one and the same time. The two main ideas underlying all action are desire for closer unity and desire for more separateness. Nature is the puzzled sense of a vast number of things which feel they are in an illogical position and should be more either of one thing or the other than they are. So they will first be this and then that, and act and re- act and keep the balance as near equal as they can, yet they know all the time that it ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... in being thereby brought a little nearer to the Father, and making way for coming again. Prayer does react in good upon the praying soul, irrespective of answer. But to pray for the sake of the prayer, and without regard to there being no one to hear, would to me indicate a nature not merely illogical but morally false, did I not suspect a vague undetected apprehension of a Something diffused through the All of existence, and some sort ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... would seem that Nature's disposition of the events of a life or a series of lives is illogical, at others she would seem to play them with an irresistible logic—loosing them, as it were, in a trackless forest of experience, and in some dramatic hour, by an inevitable attraction, drawing them back again to a destiny fulfilled. In this latter way did ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... it would be a blessing, if men could be sent out into the world with the stamp upon them, telling what are their weight and value, plain for every one to see. But of course there are many ways in which a book, sermon, or essay may be bad without being Vealy. It may be dull, stupid, illogical, and the like, and yet have nothing of boyishness about it. It may be insufferably bad, yet quite mature. Beef may be bad, and yet undoubtedly Beef. And the question now is, not so much whether there be a standard of what is in a literary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... most interesting!—As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who first had the really admirable daring to describe them as machina; the whole of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did: what we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called "free will"; now we have taken even this will ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Writing clearly—so far as arrangement of words is concerned—is a mere matter of adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs, placed and repeated according to definite rules.[1] Even obscure or illogical thought can be clearly expressed; indeed, the transparent medium of clear writing is not least beneficial when it reveals the illogical nature ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... pronunciation of Latin may have been illogical, but on one occasion it helped to avert a European war. The late Count Benckendorff, the last Russian Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, a singularly fascinating man, was protocolist to the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and as such was present at every sitting of the Congress. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... to the family circle, for Mrs. Grubb in a hall was ever winning, delightful, and persuasive. If she was illogical, none of her sister-women realised it, for they were pretty much of the same chaotic order of mind, though with this difference: that a certain proportion of them were everywhere seeking reasons for their ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... change in the third edition was chiefly due to Harvey's letter. See Letter 115.) about my question (page 483, "Origin") about creation of eggs or young, etc., (but not about mammals with the mark of the umbilical cord), yet I still have an illogical sort of feeling that there is less difficulty in imagining the creation of an asexual cell, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... some modern ethical writers have regarded the classification of the virtues as unsatisfactory, involving arbitrary and illogical distinctions in value; and some have even discarded the use of the word 'virtue' altogether, and substituted the word 'character' as the subject of ethical study. But inasmuch as character must manifest itself in certain forms, and approximate ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... The County Council is opening out a few new thoroughfares piecemeal." Oh yes, in an illogical, unsystematic, English patchwork fashion, we are driving a badly-designed, unimpressive new street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness, through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. But that is all. No grand, systematic, reconstructive plan, no rising to the ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... rings of squared stones, the lower one only half the width (say) of the upper one, it will be apparent that on the square capital the arch stones would leave a portion of the capital at each angle bare, and supporting nothing.[4] This looks awkward and illogical, and accordingly the pier is modified so as to suit the shape of the arch. Figs. 111, 112, 113, and 114, with the plans, B C D, accompanying them, illustrate this development of the pier. Fig. 111 is a simple cylindrical pier with a coarsely formed capital, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... by Hillyer (Journ. Amer. Chem. Soc., 1903, 524), however, to be quite illogical, for, as he points out, the liberated alkali would be far more likely to recombine with the acid or acid salt from which it has been separated, than to saponify a neutral glyceride, while, further, unsaponifiable greasy matter is removed ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... not only been illogical, he had also been slightly disingenuous. He did not believe that his companion was in love; he had argued the false to learn the true. The true was that Roderick was again, in some degree, under ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... for disbelief are utterly illogical. For instance, one view is this: "I never want to come back to this earth after I once leave it." The fact is, that there could be no return to today's recognized conditions of life. If one were to return to this planet and become ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... important than mere quantity. And yet," I continued, "some people hold that women ought not to have the franchise, or suffrage, or whatever it is! Not that I care two straws about the question myself, and I only hope they'll never get it; but then I think it is so illogical—don't you?" ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... touchingly illogical in the last words—this young apostle of peace naively displaying her credentials as though the mere word "soldier" ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... arguments—intellectual grievances. The suffragist tells us that it is unchivalrous to oppose woman's suffrage; that it is insulting to tell woman that she is unfit to exercise the fran- chise; that it is "illogical" to make in her case an exception to a general rule; that it is mere "prejudice" to withhold the vote from her; that it is indignity that the virtuous and highly intelligent woman has no vote, while the drunkard has; and that the woman of property has no vote, while her male underlings ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... is as diverse from the living Lord God, the creator of heaven and earth. Nay, this equivoque on God is as mischievous as it is illogical: it is the ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... application of columns and entablature to an arch and impost construction, so common in Roman and Renaissance work. This is a redundancy, and finds no justification in reason, because the weight is sustained by the arch, and the "order" is an appendage merely; yet the combination, illogical as it is, satisfies the sense of beauty because the arch effects a transition between the columns and the entablature, and completes the trinity of vertical, horizontal and curved lines (Illustration 21). In the entrances to ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... practice. They show that having passed through such a sieve is no proof of sufficient powdering, not that all ores powdered and so sifted are unfit for assaying. This last would be an absurd and illogical conclusion. ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... they allowed that what he said was very ingenious, and had a great appearance of truth; but still they said it was not truth. They never, however, as far as I could observe, thought proper to grapple with him, to point out anything unfounded in his premises, or illogical in the conclusions which he drew from them; they generally confined themselves to mere assertions, or to minute and unimportant observations by which the real question ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... proved to you that its obscurity was the last place where she proposed to stay. She looked the latest thing evolved by the art of man. Her clothes were the prevailing fantastic creation, and yet, on her, they were not illogical. They were the plumage of an eccentric bird hatched to look that way. Her face, in its sandy monotone of color, fitted the art of her wonderful and yet not too noticeable hat, and her gloves and veil were the last word of style. Amelia had begun making herself, Raven used to think, long before ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... him... It was illogical, but Sally could not help feeling that when—she had not the optimism to say "if"—he lost his money, she would somehow be under an obligation to him, as if the disaster had been her fault. She disliked, with a whole-hearted intensity, the thought of being under ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... talking so. Once before she had tasted the sweetness and the bitterness of crime. She did not stop to think about right or wrong. If she had done so her ethics would have been strangely illogical. It was enough that, short as their acquaintance had been, she felt unconsciously that there was something latent in the spirit of this ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... covers the tragedy of Valerie Delavigae's life, the death blow was then struck, and the central figure is the child. So, with the strangely acquired fortune at her beck and call, Alixe Delavigne has consecrated herself to that most illogical of human careers—a woman's silent vengeance! That achieved, will the furnace fires of her stormy heart be lit by the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... neglected, despised. . . . It was impossible for a man to avoid going astray in such terribly unnatural conditions. Everybody else had parents to counsel and direct them; he alone was bereft of this blessing. It was cruel, it was illogical, to apply the same standard to him as to those fortunate other ones. Let the Court call to mind the names of those who had deviated from the narrow path of duty; did they not all belong to this unhappy class? It might safely be inferred that ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... disorganized and overpowered, while Napoleon saw himself forced to treat with an opponent who, though beaten, was still undaunted and active. If the victor had been fighting for life, his position would have been morally strong; fighting as a world-conqueror, it was illogical; fighting as equal with equal to repel aggression, it was comprehensible. This last was the attitude into which he was forced by the campaign of Aspern, Essling, Wagram. Francis, whose power he had meant ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... don't fence with me. It is so painful to silence you.... It is perhaps natural that you should sympathise with the weaker side. That is the sweet and tender if illogical way of all women. But you must not imagine that when David Rossi has been arrested he will be walked off to his death. As a matter of fact, he must go through a new trial, he must be defended, his sentence would in any case be reduced to imprisonment, and ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... man's soul that covets to do honour to his king and country in this or like attempts.' But this cannot be taken quite literally. So far at least as they relate to discipline, some of Ralegh's articles may be traced back in the Black Book of the Admiralty to the fourteenth century, while the illogical arrangement of the whole points, as in the case of the Additional Fighting Instructions of the eighteenth century, to a gradual growth from precedent to precedent by the accretion of expeditional orders ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... convenience; if we say that they are both novels we shall certainly be puzzled in that case to say what on earth a novel is. But the note of our age, both for good and evil, is a highly poetical and largely illogical faith in liberty. Liberty is not a negation or a piece of nonsense, as the cheap reactionaries say; it is a belief in variety and growth. But it is a purely poetic and even a merely romantic belief. The nineteenth century was ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... matter which was about to become so public could not be ignored. "It means only that a good many people in Carlingford think me a villain," said Mr Wentworth: "it is not a flattering idea; and it seems to me, I must say, an illogical induction from the facts of my life. Still it is true that some people think so—and I am to be tried to-morrow. But in the mean time, something else has happened. I know you are a good woman, aunt Leonora. We don't agree in ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... us good a priori grounds for supposing that the dreams of adults too are full of meaning and are logical; that there is a wish in every dream and that the wish is fulfilled in the dream. The reason dreams appear illogical is due to the fact that if the wish were to be expressed in its logical form it would not square with our everyday habits of thought and action. We should be disinclined to admit even to ourselves that we have such dreams. Immediately upon ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... sky, not for a sky-sign but in a sense for a sign, for some sentence of significance and judgment; by the instinct that makes any man in such a scene seek for the only thing that has not been made by men. But even that was illogical, for it was night, and I could only expect to see the stars, which might have reminded me of Old Glory; but that was not the sign that oppressed me. All the ground was a wilderness of stone and all ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... year wouldn't buy me from you—my own!" In another burst, "Let him ride in his carriage, if he chooses,"—rather, as if such a course would imply the most degraded weakness; but, as I have said before, she was illogical, if affectionate,—"let him ride in his carriage. I would rather walk barefoot through the world with you than ride in a hundred carriages, if every one of them was lined with diamonds and ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... utterly illogical, unreasonable, inconsequential character that gives the pursuit of the buttercup its charm. There is a pleasure in this irregular warfare, with its razzias and dashes and repulses and successes and skirmishes and flights, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... Ingamells, when he went vaguely into the freshly watered shop before breakfast, greeted him in a new tone, and with startling deference asked him what he thought she had better do in regard to the addressing of a certain parcel. Edwin considered this odd; he considered it illogical; and one consequence of Miss Ingamells's quite sincere attitude was that he despised Miss Ingamells for a moral weakling. He knew that he himself was a moral weakling, but he was sure that he could never bend, never crouch, to such a posture as Miss Ingamells's; that she was obviously ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... argument cannot be gainsaid; and yet at the same time we may not be in any way illogical in venturing on an inquiry as to whether, in centuries not wholly dissimilar from our own, the mind of man worked itself out along lines parallel in some degree to contemporary systems of thought. Man's life differs, yet are the ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... could not have been produced unless there were a demand for it. Some people are never tired of abusing the millionaires who have made their fortunes by providing the illiterate nonsense that forms the intellectual food of the vast majority of the public. It is wholly unjustifiable and illogical to blame them. They are not founders of new schools of thought in the field of literature; they are men of business, and do not pretend to be anything worse. As such, it is their vocation to find out what the public want, and to supply it to them. They have no interest ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... defeated, or apparently defeated, his own in a war and his distinguished colleagues might misinterpret the spirit which moved him. Nevertheless, he could not refrain from remarking that it appeared to him that a Just Providence had wiped out the United States and therefore it would be illogical if not blasphemous for this august body to admit a delegation ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... always of belief of a probability) in the fundamental doctrines of God and a future state imposes an 'obligation to be virtuous, that is, to live so as to promote the happiness of the whole body of which I am a member. Is there,' he asks, 'anything illogical ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... so-called Prussian prove that the Cabinet Order is not the outcome of religious feeling? By describing the Cabinet Order everywhere as an outcome of religious feeling. Is an insight into social movements to be expected from such an illogical mind? Listen to his prattle about the relation of German society to the Labour movement and ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... event when he entrusts active positions or a part in public business then he takes no note of it. According to him, "the men who write well and are eloquent have no solidity of judgment; they are illogical and very poor in discussion,"[3327] they are mere artists like others, so many word-musicians, a kind of special, narrow-minded instrument, some of them good solo players, like Fontanes, and who the head of a State can use, but only in official music for grand cantatas and the decoration ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... use of words we are inclined to avoid in our own speech, because they mark a lack of cultivation. We test them by the standards of polite society, and ignore them, or condemn them, or laugh at them as abnormal or illogical or indicative of ignorance. So far as literature goes, the speech of the common people has little interest for us because it is not the recognized literary medium. These two reasons have prevented the average man of cultivated tastes ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... struggled the blood of three races. His father was Scotch, and his mother—Spanish on the spindle side and Irish by way of a most mercurial father—remained an unsolved problem all her days, even to her husband. Her laughter was as illogical as her tears. Her household could never tell what the next hour would bring forth, so ready were her sympathies, so instant her despairs. She lived all her life at the heights or the depths, with never a day of serene, womanly, reasonable action, and when ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Greece. Estimation in which the later ancient writers have been held. Differences between Mr Mitford and the historians who have preceded him. His love of singularity. His hatred of democracy. And love of the oligarchical form of government. His illogical inferences and false statements. His inconsistency with himself. His deficiencies. Charges of misrepresentation brought against him ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... varieties in India, China, and the Malay Archipelago dates, says De Candolle, 'from an epoch impossible to realise.' Its diffusion, as that great but very oracular authority remarks, may go back to a period 'contemporary with or even anterior to that of the human races.' What this remarkably illogical sentence may mean I am at a loss to comprehend; perhaps M. de Candolle supposes that the banana was originally cultivated by pre-human gorillas; perhaps he merely intends to say that before men began to separate they sent special messengers on in front of them to diffuse ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... the gloriously, divinely, illogical Faith that is the God-given heritage of the woman who loves. And all at once she knew this man had not deserted her, that right blithely he would lay down his life for her. That, somehow or other, he had acted for her good. And a feeling of calm ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... free—I could not give full play to my ideas. Everything had to be planned to make money; the last consideration was the work. And the most curious part of it all was the insistence that it was the money and not the work that counted. It did not seem to strike any one as illogical that money should be put ahead of work—even though everyone had to admit that the profit had to come from the work. The desire seemed to be to find a short cut to money and to pass over the obvious short cut—which ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... James of Voragio could not have vouched, nor did it greatly matter. What he could vouch for was the relation of intimacy and confidence between his people and the Queen of Heaven. The fact, conspicuous above all other historical certainties about religion, that the Virgin was by essence illogical, unreasonable and feminine, is the only fact of any ultimate value worth studying, and starts a number of questions that history has shown itself clearly afraid to touch. Protestant and Catholic differ little in that respect. No one has ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... you may take up. It will give you clearness of thought——the ability to see your way through a puzzle——the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form——and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments, which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art. Try it. That is all I ask ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... "Peace at any price," ridicule of which was the stock-in-trade of his revolutionary editorship, is now the topic of his laudatory articles. Heredity, attacked by him in Saint-Simonian phrases, he now defends with solid arguments. This illogical conduct has its origin and its explanation in the change of front performed by many men besides Raoul during ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent? ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... the sentimental Jacklondon idea, that no wild animal should be made to work on the stage or in the show-ring, as illogical and absurd. Human beings who sanely work are much happier per capita than those who do nothing but loaf and grouch. I have worked, horse-hard, throughout all the adult years of my life; and it has been good for me. I know that it is no more wrong or wicked for a horse to work ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... He was worse than the gossiping women, letting himself conjure up weird and incredible ideas. There was not a weak place, not an illogical point, in the case he had disclosed against Carpenter. He had won. His prestige was assured. Far from questioning his work, they ought ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... contenting itself with teaching the patient that his trouble is psychic in origin; that it is based on exaggerated suggestibility and uncontrolled emotionalism; that it is made out of false ideas about the body, illogical conclusions, and unhealthy feeling-tones; and that it may be cured by a kind of moral hygiene, which breaks up these old habits and replaces them with new and better ones. It tries to inculcate the cheerful attitude of mind; to give the patient the conviction of power; to correct his false ideas ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... Benson apparently feels this himself. "Christian tradition," he says, "declares that Philemon at once set Onesimus free." But "tradition" can hardly be cited as a fact. Mr. Henson says "it is more than probable," or, in other words, certain; yet he cannot expect me to follow him in his illogical leap. Nor, indeed, is the "traditional" liberation of Onesimus of much importance to the argument. Not Philemon's but Paul's views are in dispute; and if Philemon did liberate Onesimus—which is a pure assumption—Paul certainly ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... be conjectured—than are apparent in his workmanship: all this, on one moment's reflection, is perceived to be indisputable. Needs must it be, however reluctantly, admitted that nothing can be more illogical than to return back to the cause, and infer from it other effects beyond those by which alone it is known to us, or to infer from creative attributes, distinctly manifested, the existence of other and not apparent attributes, endowed with some efficacy additional ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... also claimed that the sense of immortality possessed by the Ego, was an indication of its having experienced life in the past, as well as anticipating life in the future—there is a sense of "oldness" pervading every thought of the soul regarding its own nature. It is claimed as an illogical assumption to hold that back of the present there extends an eternity of non-existence for the soul, while ahead of it there extends an eternity of being—it is held that it is far more logical to regard the present life as merely a single point ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... if we are wise, we shall continue to do. Our object must now be to make the principles on which our government is founded permeate consistently the mass of society, and to purge out the leaven of aristocratic and Old World ideas. So long as there is an illogical working in our actual life, so long as there is any class denied equal rights with other classes, so long will there be agitation ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... eavesdropped through the keyhole of print at the pageant of the socially great: this he appreciated and accepted. But he felt that it ought to be some one other than himself—and, at the same time, was sufficiently just to smile at himself for his illogical attitude. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... excitedly. And he went on so rapidly that Joan could not keep track of his words. He was not so cautious as formerly. She remonstrated with him, all to no purpose. Not only was he carried away by possession of gold and assurance of more, but he had become masterful, obstinate, and illogical. He was indeed hopeless to-night—the gold had gotten into his blood. Joan grew afraid he would betray their secret and realized there had come still greater need for a woman's wit. So she resorted to a never-failing means of silencing him, of ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... probably have referred. He often mentions "Sir Francis Bacon's" History of Life and Death, which is included in the volume. No doubt it would be more reasonable and more "congruous" that Bacon's book should suggest Bacon. But there it is. That illogical "succession of ideas" which puzzled my Uncle Toby, invariably recalls to me, not the imposing folio to be purchased "next to the Mytre Tauerne" in Fleet Street, but the unpretentious eighteenpenny octavo which, two years later, was on sale at Richard Marriot's in St. Dunstan's churchyard hard ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... classical philology pursues only the final end of its own being, which is the fusing together of primarily hostile impulses that have only forcibly been brought together. Let us talk as we will about the unattainability of this goal, and even designate the goal itself as an illogical pretension—the aspiration for it is very real; and I should like to try to make it clear by an example that the most significant steps of classical philology never lead away from the ideal antiquity, ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... life" is not based upon statistics. The tables may be correct, for aught we know; but they deal with men in general and on the average; they have no message for you and me individually. And it seems not unlikely that birds may be equally illogical; always expecting to live, and not die, and often giving themselves up to impulses of gladness without stopping to inquire whether, on grounds of absolute reason, these impulses are to be justified. Let us hope so, at all events, till ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... possessor to generalise the details afforded by study and experience, and so deduce rules of conduct, his lordship, when he received those frequent appeals which were the necessary consequence of his officious life, became obscure, confused, contradictory, inconsistent, illogical. The oracle ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... awkward habit—no, I won't call it that, for it is a valuable habit—of believing nothing unless there is evidence for it; and they have a way of looking upon belief which is not based upon evidence, not only as illogical, but as immoral. We will, if you please, test this view by the circumstantial evidence alone; for, from what I have said, you will understand that I do not propose to discuss the question of what testimonial evidence is to be ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... him no reply, understanding well enough that though the one premise might be true, the conclusion must be as false as it was illogical and spiteful. They did not go to George Macwha's, but set out for Clippenstrae. When they reached the cottage, they found Meg's nose in ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... caused the men to bare reverently their heads, the women to clap their hands with decorous enthusiasm. Without doubt they were all agreed that it was a sacred duty to fight for one's country. How peculiar and illogical then, he reflected, to be horrified at the visible results of fighting for one's country, of saving the world for democracy. The thing had had to be done. A great many men had been killed. A great number had lost their legs, their arms, their sight. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Surely no one imagines these few sentences contain and sum up the results of a lifetime of earnest thought, or represent all the opinions and beliefs of the earliest philosophers! And should we find therein no recognition of a personal God, would it not be most unfair and illogical to assert that they were utterly ignorant of a God, or wickedly denied his being? If they say "there is no God," then they are foolish Atheists; if they are silent on that subject, we have a right to assume they were Theists, for it is most natural to believe in God. And yet ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... of argument, which it would not be difficult to trace through every constituent branch of human psychology, we may take it as unquestionable that, if there is a Divine Mind, it must differ so essentially from the human mind, that it becomes illogical to designate the two by the same name: the attributes of eternity and ubiquity are in themselves enough to place such a Mind in a category sui generis, wholly different from anything which the analogy furnished by our own mind enables us even dimly to conceive. And this, of ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... had been slowly dwindling of late, and now threatened to die out altogether, the irrepressible old Dr. Jones capturing patients up to Fitzpiers's very door. Fitzpiers knew only too well the latest and greatest cause of his unpopularity; and yet, so illogical is man, the second branch of his sadness grew out of a remedial measure proposed for the first—a letter from Felice Charmond imploring him not to see her again. To bring about their severance still more effectually, she added, she had decided during his absence upon almost ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... was driven by three drivers, of whom I was the middle one, and the worst, having on my Livret the note 'conducteur mediocre'. But that is neither here nor there; the story is as follows, and the moral is that the commercial mind is illogical. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... that we are driven to that assumption. Perhaps later I will make tests on a given number of girls of Stella's general age and type and temperament to show that they will cry out at the unexpected prick of a fine needle. It's illogical to expect that a cry from Miss Lamar, even an exclamation, would have passed unnoticed except during the excitement ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... the hilltop in the long shadows of early morning. I'd had to order him to return to the star ship. I stood now beside the communal mound. Moya had said, pointing down the hill, anger making him illogical: "These are the people you sold out when you transferred to Interstel. They could have used your kind of brains. Post-mortems aren't going ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... is as universal as the renting system, is even more illogical and oppressive. The utter viciousness of both systems in their mutual dependence is sufficiently illustrated by the single fact that, after fourteen years of freedom and labor on their own account, the great mass of the negroes depend for their living on an advance of supplies ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... growing discontent and disintegration. The men and women possessed of leisure cultivated a humanist state of mind, with which arose a critical spirit, a nicer taste and a cultured discrimination. They were offended by literalism, bored by crudeness however much in earnest, and disgusted with the illogical assertions of pietists. The imperative mandate of the meeting awakened in them only opposition. They found many to sympathize with ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... these are not very wise or healthful moods, and that their indulgence does not fit us particularly well for the duties of life, though I never heard that they interfered with its pleasures; on the contrary, they add a sort of zest to enjoyment. Of course the whole transaction is illogical, but if a poet will end every pensive strain with an appeal or apostrophe to death—not the real death, that comes with a sharp, quick agony, or "after long lying in bed", after many days or many years of squalid misery and slowly dying hopes and medicines that cease even to relieve ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
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