FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • More 'Irrational' Quotes from Famous Books

... sea has a natural monotony Of which 'twere irrational to complain: You cannot, for instance, study botany As in an English country lane. But the mind is superior to distance With its own reminiscences stored, Not to mention the spiritual assistance We derived from a ...

— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)

... changing outlines of vapory fancies for the firm and consistent form and shape of real conceptions deeply realised in the imagination. Idealism has suffered much at the hands of feeble practitioners who have substituted irrational dreams for those far-reaching visions and those penetrating insights which are characteristic of its true use and illustration in the arts. The height of the reaction so vigorously and impressively illustrated in a great group of modern realistic works is due largely to the weakness ...

— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... would make such a number of intelligent beings to damn them, or command a sinner to repent and come to Christ, and condemn him for not doing it, if it were not in his own power upon moral suasion to obey, &c. It is true indeed, that in comparison of the irrational insect and inanimate creation, man is a noble creature, both as to his formation, I am wonderfully made, Psal cxxxix. 14. and also in his intellectual parts, but much more in his primeval state and dignity, when all the faculties of the mind and powers of the soul stood entire, being ...

— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... in the death of my neighbor. Therefore, get you gone immediately to Binalatongon, and tell your cousin that I pity him, since the fleet of Manila is already on its way to punish him. Assure him that his threats make me laugh; that his demand for obedience from the Zambal nation is irrational; and that I am sending him his relative Sumulay in order to increase his army, besides twenty-five Indians of this village, who are, according to appearances, looking upon him with too much affection." The father designated those persons by name, and added with a show of great anger: "Not ...

— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various

... American philosophers, and some French ones, for the support of mass opinion, developed a system which set forth that reason always led you into traps and that the only mind to trust was the irrational, instinctive or intuitional mind. Thus the nonsenseorship, with excellent philosophic support put the ban upon thinking. Now, I do not contend that many suffer seriously from this restriction. For, after all, thinking is ...

— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... so little flexibility that we cannot readily perceive that the State's restraining them from these indulgences may yet fix clearly in their minds that, to the collective nation, these indulgences appear irrational and unallowable, may make them pause and reflect, and may contribute to bringing, with time, their individual reason into harmony with right reason. But in no country, owing to the want of intellectual ...

— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold

... seen spring," Louise said to him, one day, in excuse of some irrational impulse that had driven her out of the house. And the quick picture she drew, of how, in her native land, the brief winter passed almost without transition into the scathing summer; her suggestion of unchanging leaves, brown barrenness, and and dryness; of grass burnt to cinders, ...

— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... rational account of these bits of fact. They tell what is done in different parts of the world, but they forget to mention "the moving why they did it." The consequence is that, in this age of instantaneous communication, we know what is going on in other countries, but it seems very irrational. The rational elements have been lost in ...

— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... small thing by comparison. It is the last act of committal. After that, there is no way left, not even suicide, but to be a good man. (4) She will help you, let us pray. And yet she is in the same case; she, too, has daily made shipwreck of her own happiness and worth; it is with a courage no less irrational than yours, that she also ventures on this new experiment of life. Two who have failed severally, now join their fortunes with a wavering hope. (5) But it is from the boldness of the enterprise that help springs. To take home to your hearth that living witness ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... his walk with a definite sense of well-being. And yet, because of the irrational and unexpecting nature of Omega, he almost died before reaching the ...

— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley

... that these men should have been deceived than that the Deity should have appeared to them. Our reason can never admit the testimony of men, who not only declare that they were eye-witnesses of miracles, but that the Deity was irrational; for He commanded that He should be believed, He proposed the highest rewards for faith, eternal punishments for disbelief. We can only command voluntary actions; belief is not an act of volition; ...

— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... show, that aspirations after intellectual freedom had nothing whatever to do with the movement. Dante, who struck the Papacy as hard blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself and Luther himself, when they began their work; were far enough from any intention of meddling with even the most irrational of the dogmas of mediaeval Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to Socinus, or even to Muenzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered ...

— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... refuse me; nor must we part in this way. Step in here; I will not keep you a minute;" and he took her into a room off the hall—"do not let us be children, Fanny; do not let us deceive each other, or ourselves: do not let us persist in being irrational if we ourselves see that we are so;" and he paused for ...

— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... Eloquence to describe, "The Miseries of War." Again in that same fearless spirit has Germany driven back the invader, while War is seen anew in its atrocious works. But it was not merely the Miseries of War which Germans regarded. The German mind is philosophical and scientific, and it early saw the irrational character of the War System. It is well known that Henry the Fourth of France conceived the idea of Harmony among Nations without War; and his plan was taken up and elaborated in numerous writings by the good Abbe de Saint-Pierre, so that he made it his own. Rousseau, in his treatise ...

— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner

... irrational—and impossible. But Rilla believed it, for all that; and Mrs. Blythe believed it; and the doctor, though he smiled faintly in pretended derision, felt an odd confidence replace his first despair; and foolish and absurd or not, they all plucked up heart and courage to carry on, just because ...

— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... nature of the relations of two human beings to one another. If a man marries a woman after three weeks acquaintance, and the day after meets a woman he has known for twenty years, he finds, sometimes to his own irrational surprise and his wife's equally irrational indignation, that his wife is a stranger to him, and the other woman an old friend. Also, there is no hocus pocus that can possibly be devized with rings and veils and vows and benedictions that can fix either a ...

— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... and in viciousness I abhorred discord; in the first I observed a unity, but in the other, a sort of division. And in that unity I conceived the rational soul, and the nature of truth and of the chief good to consist; but in this division I miserably imagined there to be some unknown substance of irrational life, and the nature of the chief evil, which should not only be a substance, but real life also, and yet not derived from Thee, O my God, of whom are all things. And yet that first I called a Monad, as it had been a soul without sex; but the latter ...

— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... because she isn't guilty!" said Alston with violence, and did not even remember to be glad no legal brother was present to hear so irrational an explosion. He hurried on lest she should call satiric attention to its thinness. "And as for Madame Beattie, she'll get nothing out of it. For the necklace being lost, she won't ...

— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... point of view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered almost irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It turns the scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially possible that the key of all social evolution may be found in the dusty casket of some discredited creed. It cannot be amiss ...

— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... soled. So he was admitted to that department, and need no longer submit to preparing waxed-ends for the others! But the fact did not give him any pleasure. He sat there struggling with something irrational that seemed to keep on rising deep within him; when no one was looking he licked his fingers and drew them over his neck. He seemed to himself like a half-stupefied cat which had freed itself from the snare and ...

— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... these, the Literal must always go first, as that in whose sense the others are included, and without which it would be impossible and irrational to understand the others. Especially is it impossible in the Allegorical, because, in each thing which has a within and a without, it is impossible to come to the within if you do not first come to the without. Wherefore, since in books the Literal meaning is always external, ...

— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

... continues as he formerly was. The man in brown, who so unseasonably interrupted his pleasantry, is an officer of justice, and has probably taken him before a magistrate, to answer some one of his numerous creditors. You must know," added he, "that the people of the moon, however irrational themselves, are very prompt in perceiving the absurdities of others: and this lively wit, who, as you see, wants neither parts nor address, acts as strangely as the wretch he has been ridiculing. He inherited a large estate, which brought him in a princely revenue; ...

— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker

... pains, to come to this unbounded catacomb, seems now singular to me: for by that time I could not have been sufficiently daft to expect to find another being like myself on the earth, though I cherished, I remember, the irrational hope of yet somewhere finding dog, or cat, or horse, to be with me, and would anon think bitterly of Reinhardt, my Arctic dog, which my own hand had shot. But, in reality, a morbid curiosity must have been ...

— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... Parkman was going out to see Ernestine. Every mile which brought him nearer, brought added uncertainty as to what he should say when he reached her. What was there for him to say? The dead leaves of her hopes were all huddled in the hollow. Was he becoming so irrational as to think he could give life to things dead? Was she not right in wishing to cover them up decently and let them be? Was anything to be gained in blowing them about as last summer's leaves were being blown about now by the unsparing, ...

— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell

... natural processes by which society has been developed under the stress of circumstances. Nothing could be more unnatural for him than the revolutionary principle which despises tradition and regards the patriotic sentiment as superfluous and irrational. Wordsworth represents again another sense of Nature. He announced as his special principle that poetry should speak the language of Nature, and therefore, as he inferred, of the ordinary peasant and uneducated man. The hills did not speak to him of legend or history but of ...

— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... Aristotle, if he had lived in our day, would have supported the constitutional government. But, with all deference to the Stagirite, a government which sacrifices the life of the proletaire to that of the proprietor is quite as irrational as one which supports the former by robbing the latter; neither of them deserve the support of a free man, much less of ...

— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... to the effect, upon the Government of the day, of the dread of Revolution in England. There were a few partisans of France and of the Revolution in England; and the panic which followed, though irrational, was widespread. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, a Bill was passed against seditious Assemblies, the Press was prosecuted, some Scottish Whigs who clamoured for reform were sentenced to transportation, while one Judge ...

— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... right. Such seemed to many English observers to be the condition of the case in America. They were mistaken, but excusable; but for the error in their premise, their deduction would have been correct, or at least not irrational. ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... conceivably generate in time a violent antipathy, not only to that particular toy, but to the class of toys resembling it. The aversion might even persist after he had forgotten about the original burns; later on he might even invent some reason to account for his seemingly irrational antipathy. In some cases, altering the external habit of action by changing the environment to affect the stimuli to action will also alter the mental disposition concerned in the action. Yet this does not always happen; a person trained to dodge a threatening blow, dodges automatically ...

— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... without my forty winks, and now if you put on that killingly tragic face, I'll scream with laughter, I know I shall. Oh, dear, oh, dear, you must learn once for all never to mind a single thing Tony says; she's the oddest, most irrational creature—a genius of course—her pictures are simply monstrosities, which is a ...

— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade

... people are most liable to it; and it would probably astonish a good many people were I to say who is the "funkiest" oarsman before a race that I know. I mean by "funk," not the under-estimating of one's chances—for some of the most nervous men have a very shrewd idea of them—but the irrational excitement which keeps the brain constantly thinking of the impending race, and prevents the sufferer from sitting still or having any comfort, or, in the most serious cases, any sleep, for two or three days before it. It is a real malady, ...

— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... finally able to exclaim in great wonderment. "Is it possible that you don't see it as clear as day? Don't you see, my son, that all this proves plainly that the reforms of the ministers are irrational?" ...

— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... on the seat, his legs dangling out of the car, fighting down a sudden irrational wave of panic. He pushed the container to the other end ...

— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking

... right of suffrage to depend, as in a good state of things it would, on personal conditions. Where it depends, as in this and most other countries, on conditions of property, the contradiction is even more flagrant. There something more than ordinarily irrational in the fact that when a woman can give all the guarantees required from a male elector, independent circumstances, the position of a householder and head of a family, payment of taxes, or whatever may be the conditions imposed, the very ...

— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill

... critical century, Don Quixote has also contaminated himself with criticism, and he must charge against himself, victim of intellectualism and sentimentalism, who when he is most sincere appears most affected. The poor man wants to rationalize the irrational, and irrationalize the rational. And he falls victim of the inevitable despair of a rationalism century, of which the greatest victims were Tolstoy and Nietzsche. Out of despair he enters into the heroic fury of that Quixote of thought who broke out of the cloister, ...

— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... influences combine to bring about that unfortunate result, the chief cause of this high mortality is the unsympathetic attitude of high school teachers toward the adolescent. But, you may ask, why unsympathetic? Because they regard them as fickle, unstable, and irrational, and so have but little patience with them. I'll admit that the adolescent seems all that at times, but that is only on the surface. The developmental changes—physical and moral—thru which he is passing ...

— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... grass and shady trees, where there should be no cold, starvation, over-work, or flogging. Some one has said that the most exquisite material scenery would look very cold and dead in the entire absence of irrational life. Trees suggest singing-birds; flowers and sunshine make us think of the drowsy bees. And it is curious to think how the future worlds of various creeds are described as not without their lowly population ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... upper parts of the faade, the wooden cupolas over the five domes, and the pointed arches in the narthex, are deviations from Byzantine traditions dating in part from the later Middle Ages Nothing could well be conceived more irrational, from a structural point of view, than the accumulation of columns in the entrance-arches; but the total effect is so picturesque and so rich in color, that its architectural defects are easily overlooked. The external veneering of white and colored marble occurs rarely in the East, but ...

— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... Simmias," he continued, "those who pursue philosophy rightly, study to die; and to them, of all men, death is least formidable. Judge from this. Since they altogether hate the body and desire to keep the soul by itself, would it not be irrational if, when this comes to pass, they should be afraid and grieve, and not be glad to go to that place where, on their arrival, they may hope to obtain that which they longed for throughout life? But they longed for wisdom, and to be freed from ...

— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato

... have already demonstrated to "Prussian." Another word about this opinion of his. The more cultivated and general the political understanding of a people is, all the more does the proletariat—at least at the beginning of the movement—dissipate its energies in irrational, useless, and brutally suppressed revolts. Because it thinks along political lines, it perceives the cause of all evils in the wills of men, and all remedies to lie in force and the overthrow of a particular form of the State. In proof whereof we cite the ...

— Selected Essays • Karl Marx

... still unreasonably prejudiced, and with the prejudice he was now admitting a feeling akin to jealousy. It was evident that Patricia's admiration for his father extended over to his father's wife; and meaning consistently to dislike Mrs. Honoria, he was irrational enough to want Patricia to dislike ...

— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... finer than any I have seen in England, and totally free from weeds.' And a few months later an anonymous English traveller, passing the same way, wrote: 'In so infant a settlement, it would have been irrational to expect that abundance which bursts the granaries, and lows in the stalls of more cultivated countries. There was, however, that kind of appearance which indicated that with economy and ...

— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace

... of higher value than we yet understand. Faith is absolutely essential in a great democratic society. When we cease to believe in God we cease to believe in man, and when our faith in man goes, democracy becomes a vast, irrational engine of tyranny and corruption. In the last analysis democracy rests in the belief that there is something of the divine in every man, and that through every life there shines a glimpse of the eternal order. For Government rests, not in the will of the ...

— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... of no gloomy turn, and I have a thousand ways of amusing myself. Indeed of late I have been terribly frightened lest I must give them all up; my fears have gone to extravagance; do not wonder; my life is not quite irrational, and I trembled to think that I was growing fit only to consort with dowagers. What an exchange, books and drawings, and every thing of that sort, for cards! In short, for ten weeks I have had such pains ...

— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... mistake weathered blocks and glacial action; though the mistake has, I know, been made in two or three quarters of the world. I have often fought with Hooker about the physicists putting their veto on the world having been cooler; it seems to me as irrational as if, when geologists first brought forward some evidence of elevation and subsidence, a former Hooker had declared that this could not possibly be admitted until geologists could explain what made the earth rise and fall. It seems that I erred greatly ...

— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... Mr. Jocelyn had not carefully gauged his syringe, and the over-amount of morphia thrown into his system so stimulated him that his words appeared exceedingly irrational to the young man, whose judgment was based on unusual shrewdness and common-sense. He was greatly puzzled by the sudden change in his companion. It was evident that he had not been drinking, for his breath was untainted and his utterance was natural. But his face was flushed, ...

— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... utter inability to understand the 'human spirit in its aspirations'; and it is then that he shows most plainly his own diabolic nature, pouring out his cynical contempt and gnashing his teeth at what he deems Faust's irrational disgust for all those bestialities that seem to him (Mephistopheles) ...

— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... crocodiles, rats, and onions, do we not see nations, who think themselves wiser than they, worship bread, into which they imagine, that through the enchantments of their priests, the divinity has descended. Is not the Bread-God the idol of many Christian nations, who, in this respect, are as irrational, as ...

— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach

... their parents, yet in the nature of things, it is impossible that they should yield the same hearty respect and veneration to the unworthy as to the worthy, nor does God require a child to pay an irrational honor to his parents. If his parents are atheists, he cannot honor them as Christians. If they are prayerless and profane, he cannot honor them as religious. If they are worldly, avaricious, over-reaching, unscrupulous as ...

— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... full confidence," he said, "and I have put before you the exact sum total of the matter as I see it. You think me irrational,—absurd. Good. Then I am content to be irrational and absurd. In any case you can scarcely deny that what I have stated is a simple fact,—a ...

— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... sex, that they should discover or invent lovers for each other), in which case he was not to be feared and would probably not accept the invitation; or else he would accept the invitation and in this event prove himself a creature too irrational to demand further consideration. The latter clause of Ralph's argument might have seemed incoherent; but it embodied his conviction that if Mr. Goodwood were interested in Isabel in the serious manner described by Miss Stackpole he would not care to present himself at Gardencourt ...

— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James

... to paying an exorbitant price for the actual inch which is all I have any use for. This method of simplification—fixing the minimum payment on the basis of the maximum bulk, weight, and distance—seems to me essentially irrational. In some cases, indeed, it cuts against the Express Company. When I first had occasion to move from one abode to another in New York—a distance of about a quarter of a mile—I thought with glee "Now the famous express ...

— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... pathological treatise by a physician. Who would write of the sweating sickness with indignation, or describe zymotic diseases with resentment? Condorcet's pertinacious anger against theology is just as irrational as this would be, from the scientific point of view which he pretends to have assumed. Theology, in fact, was partly avenged of her assailants, for she had in the struggle contrived to infect them with the bitter contagion of ...

— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley

... was deficient in that pleasant smiling softness which should belong to any keeper of a house of public entertainment. In her general mode of life she was stern and silent with her guests, autocratic, authoritative and sometimes contradictory in her house, and altogether irrational and unconciliatory when any change even for a day was proposed to her, or when any shadow of ...

— La Mere Bauche from Tales of All Countries • Anthony Trollope

... there is nothing back of it. This we practice toward our friends and those who do us good and give us pleasure with goods, honor and favor, or who do not offend us with words nor with deeds. Such meekness irrational animals have, lions and snakes, Jews, Turks, knaves, murderers, bad women. These are all content and gentle when men do what they want, or let them alone; and yet there are not a few who, deceived by such worthless meekness, cover over their anger and excuse it, saying: "I would indeed not be ...

— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther

... watches, draw a dozen live pigeons in succession out of an empty box, send rings into ladies' handkerchiefs at the other end of the hall, catch a bullet out of an exploded pistol in his hand, and perform other marvels equally irrational and disturbing. From this raree-show Father Higgins had gone home feeling that he had witnessed something about as unearthly as he was likely to be confronted ...

— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... got—even although they don't minister directly to my narrative at all. I want to set out my own queer love experiences too, such as they are, for they troubled and distressed and swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to contain all sorts of irrational and debatable elements that I shall be the clearer-headed for getting on paper. And possibly I may even flow into descriptions of people who are really no more than people seen in transit, just because it amuses me to recall what they said and ...

— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... of separation. Mere custom has so great a part in our affections, that though a routine may have been dull and distasteful, if it has any extenuating circumstances at all, we change it with a certain irrational regret. After all, his office-life was associated with much contraband merriment; and, unconsciously, his associates had taken a valuable part in his training, humanised him in certain directions, as he had humanised ...

— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... debt. At the same time, however, total exports rose by perhaps 30% in 2003 and 19% in 2004, largely because of higher international oil and gas prices. Overall prospects in the near future are discouraging because of widespread internal poverty, the burden of foreign debt, the government's irrational use of oil and gas revenues, and its unwillingness to adopt market-oriented reforms. Turkmenistan's economic statistics are state secrets, and GDP and other figures are subject to wide margins of error. In particular, the rate of ...

— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... the law has at last become acknowledged, if not always in practice, at least in theory. And if monarchies and aristocracies still do exist, it is not because all concerned in the decision have deliberately decided for them, but because it is safer to endure irrational institutions that are old, than to undertake the sudden establishment of rational institutions that are new. Only in the social field the feeling of the equality of men has not yet permeated them enough to rouse their souls against the present division of society ...

— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... anxiety changed to an irrational anger at his words. "Old fool! She has only fainted," I returned. "Get me ...

— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... of as little value. Your mother's wishes, though allowed to be irrational and groundless, are to be gratified by the disappointment of mine, which appear to be just and reasonable; and, since one must be sacrificed, that affection with which you have inspired me and those benefits you confess to owe to me, those sufferings ...

— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown

... indeed been a long one, and yet no other moral movement involving so many and so great social changes ever made more rapid progress. You and your fellow-laborers are truly to be congratulated on the full and abundant harvest your faithful seed-sowing has brought to humanity. The irrational sentiment, based upon the methods and customs of barbarous times, is rapidly yielding to reason. The world is learning—women are learning—that character, even womanly character, does not suffer from too much ...

— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... One does not like to think of himself as a chance hit of the irrational physical elements; neither does he feel at ease with the thought that he is the result of any break or discontinuity in natural law. He likes to see himself as vitally and inevitably related to the physical order as is the fruit to the tree that bore it, or the ...

— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... reasons of propinquity, joined to reasons of self-love and a real passion which had no means of satisfaction except by marriage, led Paul on to an irrational love, which he had, however, the good sense to keep to himself. He even endeavored to study Mademoiselle Evangelista as a man should who desires not to compromise his future life; for the words of his friend de Marsay did sometimes ...

— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac

... this. If there is any thing irrational or inconsistent, any thing false or ridiculous, in this view of the subject, it should be remembered that it has been long taught, not only in common schools, but in our academies and colleges, as serious, practical truth; as the only means ...

— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch

... cleared on this subject if they would read a charming and unpretentious little book, "An English Girl's Adventures in Hostile Germany," by Mary Littlefair, published by John Long, Ltd. The authoress saw and heard absurd Press charges on the other side, and something, too, of the irrational hatred of war-time, but the little book is a record of almost nothing but kindness, and gives fresh hope to those who had begun to despair of human nature.[63] Here are two cases of singular beauty from Nauheim. A postman "happened to know of a poor ...

— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton

... consequence is that, as things now are, we Males have to lead a kind of bi-lingual, and I may almost say bi-mental, existence. With Women, we speak of "love", "duty", "right", "wrong", "pity", "hope", and other irrational and emotional conceptions, which have no existence, and the fiction of which has no object except to control feminine exuberances; but among ourselves, and in our books, we have an entirely different vocabulary and I may almost say, idiom. "Love" ...

— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott

... Foster laid a soothing hand on hers. "Kathleen's condition is not surprising under the circumstances; the shock of finding Spencer's dead body was quite enough to produce hysteria and irrational conduct. When herself, her explanations will clear up the mystery. Therefore, why harbor ...

— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... as it is possible for an intelligent being to be. I had convinced myself, experimentally, that human existence, human nature, was a bottomless pit and an uncommonly filthy one at that. Reaction was inevitable. Then I understood why men have invented gods, subscribed to irrational systems of theology, hailed and accredited transparently ridiculous miracles. Such lies are necessary to certain stages of development simply for the preservation of sanity, just as, at another stage, sanity, for its own preservation, is necessarily driven to declare their falsehood. ...

— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... to rational judgment—and rational judgment must be the only basis of arbitration—is the danger of emotionalism. The average man is yet largely irrational. When cool and self-possessed, and when his prejudices and traditions do not interfere, he can pass rational judgment upon questions in which his own interests are not concerned; but when his passions are ...

— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... a relaxation, it has also, I think, to be kept free from the restrictions imposed upon it by the fierce pedantries of those who would define a general form for it. Every art nowadays must steer its way between the rocks of trivial and degrading standards and the whirlpool of arbitrary and irrational criticism. Whenever criticism of any art becomes specialised and professional whenever a class of adjudicators is brought into existence, those adjudicators are apt to become as a class distrustful of their ...

— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... cases we do make use of our machines (as well as their sad condition of neglect will allow), but in other cases we behave in an extraordinarily irrational manner. Thus if we sally out and get caught in a heavy shower we do not, unless very far gone in foolishness, sit down and curse the weather. We put up our umbrella, if we have one, and if not we hurry home. We may grumble, but it is not serious grumbling; we accept the ...

— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett

... into its own dens, and the pious faith speaking boldly everywhere with all freedom. Only defile not yourselves with the Arians, for this teaching is not of the Apostle but of the daemons, and of their father the devil: barren and irrational and of an unsound mind, like the irrational deeds of ...

— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... the alchemists, that of forming a universal medicine was perhaps not the most irrational. It was only when they pretended to cure every disease, and to confer longevity, that they did violence to reason. The success of the Arabian physicians in the use of mercurial preparations naturally led ...

— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster

... exist at all. Nor will we think so meanly of the taste, the good feeling, and the good sense of these men, as to believe that they think themselves at all flattered by any admiration founded on such an irrational contempt. They well know that Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, have been admired, together with Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin, and they do not themselves desire to be put upon a separate list. The author concludes ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... the ship and all inner doors closed, sealing the ship into sections. Bors was already at the board in the control room. He did not accept the predictions of Talents, Incorporated as absolute truth. It bothered him that such irrational means of securing information should be so accurate. So he compromised in his own mind to the point where, when Talents, Incorporated gave specific information, it was possible; no more. Then, having admitted so much, he acted on the mere possibility, and pretended to be ...

— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... Muscovite does not seem to Americans a reasonable explanation of the present actions of Germany and Austria-Hungary, except so far as irrational panic can be said to be an explanation. Against possible, though not probable, Russian aggression, a firm defensive alliance of all Western Europe would be a much better protection than the single might of Germany. It were easy to imagine ...

— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... God, the most important is, to put out of their hearts any expectation of perfection, according to their notions, in this world. This expectation is at the bottom of a great deal of the worldliness we hear so much reprehended, and necessarily gives to little things a most irrational importance. ...

— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps

... was influenced in the smallest degree by the religion of his wife. It is true that at a later day, the religion of the Queen, and the presence at Court of her Catholic attendants, enhanced the fury of an unthinking storm of anti-Catholic feeling. But it was only a small aggravation of an irrational outburst ...

— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik

... were very common in those irrational and anarchic times. Sometimes the laborers refused to work. Sometimes the capitalists refused to let the laborers work. In the violence and turbulence of such disagreements much property was destroyed and many lives ...

— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... all irrational. Hugo's supremacy was not that he was the greatest artist in essentials, for here Dumas was immeasurably his superior. It was not that he knew best the heart of man, or had apprehended most thoroughly the conditions of life; for Balzac so far surpassed him in these sciences that ...

— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... any coalition with governments that rest on force. "It is not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord," that the kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. It is as irrational to try to propagate Christianity by coercive measures of any description, as it would be to try to make plants grow by ...

— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... interwoven in the Soul of Man. "So it is in that of a Wolf;" However irrational, ungenerous, and unsocial the love of liberty may be in a rude Savage, he is capable of being enlightned by Experience, Reflection, Education, and civil, and Political Institutions. But the Nature of the Wolf is, and ever ...

— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams

... to you this morning," said Oisille, "that those who thought themselves wiser than other men, since by the sole light of reason they had come to recognise a God, creator of all things, were made more ignorant and irrational not only than other men, but than the very brutes, and this because they did not ascribe the glory to Him to whom it was due, but thought that they had gained the knowledge they possessed by their own endeavours? For having erred in ...

— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... hilltop where he had met the mountain girl, thought of her with irrational longing, and suddenly she was there ...

— The Helpful Hand of God • Tom Godwin

... twenty-four years old, that I had experienced a great many adventures by night, and yet that I had never had the slightest difficulty of any sort with such solitary women in the streets after midnight! But nothing of what I have so far told you ever came to have any importance, since that irrational fear always left me as soon as I reached home, or saw any one else in the street, and I would scarcely recall it a few minutes afterwards, any more than one would recall a stupid mistake which had no result ...

— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various

... this problem will tend to solve itself. With the substitution of the more rationalized standards of self-interest and group loyalty for the irrational taboo control of reproductive activities, there will be as much freedom for women to choose whether they will accept maternity as there is now, in the period of transition from the old standards to the new. ...

— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... because perhaps after all it may be only a providential mercy, or an exaggeration, or a mistake, or an imposture. Well, this is precisely what I had said, which the writer, who has given occasion to this Volume, considered so irrational. I had said, as he quotes me, "In this day, and under our present circumstances, we can only reply, that there is no reason why they should not be." Surely this is good logic, provided that miracles ...

— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... gay and happy, yet be guilty of such injustice and inhumanity, that he could take pride in works which not even money had made his own, and live with undiminished splendor, when his credit itself began to fail, seemed to her incongruities so irrational, that hitherto ...

— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney

... the expedition was enforced upon him by the church, and by the unanimous wish of his nobility. In any other situation, or in a milder age, his character might have stood higher than that of the adventurous Coeur de Lion. But in the Crusade, itself an undertaking wholly irrational, sound reason was the quality of all others least estimated, and the chivalric valour which both the age and the enterprise demanded was considered as debased if mingled with the least touch of discretion. So that the merit of Philip, compared ...

— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott

... phrase self-improvement, a course of self-worsening might improve them. I have known men—and everybody has known them—who would approach nearer to perfection if they could only acquire a little carelessness, a little absent-mindedness, a little illogicalness, a little irrational and infantile gaiety, a little unscrupulousness in the matter of the time of day. These considerations should be weighed before certain hobbies are dismissed as being unworthy of ...

— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett

... of the soul, or rather this elevation and glory of thought, which draws with it the will and the affections, not by means of blind faith or supernatural grace, not through an irrational and mystical impulse, but by the strength of a reformed intellect and by a palpable and well-considered enthusiasm, which science and the contemplation of Nature alone can give, this is the keynote of the poem. It is composed of two parts, each of which is divided into five ...

— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... his heart sunk within him to hear a poor untaught creature desire to be taught to know God, and he such a wicked wretch, that he could not say one word to her about God, but what the reproach of his own carriage would make most irrational to her to believe; nay, that already she had told him that she could not believe in God, because he, that was so ...

— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... responsibility than the shallow acceptance of mere creeds, because a man's good or evil deeds become a series of actions with inevitable consequences. If you teach him that he can throw off the results of a bad life, and of all it has entailed upon his fellow man, by a brief spell of penitence, or a blind, irrational faith in the sacrifice of a Being he has neglected and ignored during the greater part of that life, you really are only pandering to the selfish and cowardly side of ...

— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)

... near to the old life as might be. Afterwards he would forget everything: Bessie, who had wrecked the Melancolia and so nearly wrecked his life; Beeton, who lived in a strange unreal city full of tin-tacks and gas-plugs and matters that no men needed; that irrational being who had offered him love and loyalty for nothing, but had not signed her name; and most of all Maisie, who, from her own point of view, was undeniably right in all she did, but oh, at ...

— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling

... of dismissing it as indifferent. But he could not be certain of her freedom from social prejudice. He remembered the singular shock with which he himself had first learnt what he was; a state of mind quite irrational, but only to be dismissed with an effort of the trained intelligence. Irene would undergo the same experience, and it might affect her thought of ...

— The Crown of Life • George Gissing

... leaves, or Gangja, are taken in the same manner, and both produce violent intoxication. While we were in Nepal, a shopkeeper, who attended the camp, smoked so much Charas that he died. From the accounts given me by those who saw him, he became stupid, but not irrational, and complained of nothing except thirst, for which he two or three times drank water. As it was not looked upon as any thing extraordinary, I did not hear of the circumstance till some hours after the man’s death. He did not intend to kill ...

— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton

... always inquire how he knows that it is more than an unessential incident—the mere ticking of the clock, which he mistakes for its function. And there seems to be no reply to this inquiry, any more than to the further, not irrational, question, why trouble oneself about matters which are out of reach, when the working of the mechanism itself, which is of infinite practical importance, affords scope for all ...

— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... was of a murderous force, ten thousand bolts of irrational lightning raging around the country, striking a ...

— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley

... thoughtful eyes revealed an arch gaiety sometimes; but this was infrequent; the sort of wisdom which looked from their pupils did not readily keep company with these lighter moods. Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly. She felt none of those ups and downs of spirit which beset so many ...

— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... your life. That talk four years ago might have been irrational. But now—not on your life.... The world has come to an end.... Oh, Lord, look who's coming! Lane, did you ever in your life see such ...

— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... wind and dust they had shaken off some ancient weakness that was theirs, that without loss of femininity they had become more like ourselves in the sense that they were more self-centred and less irrational? ...

— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson

... their lives. At any time they had it in their power to alter their purposes, and in that fact we have an essential point of difference between eccentricity and insanity. We may regard their conduct as singular, because they made an unusual disposition of their property; but it was no more irrational than if the one had left his estate to the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," and the other had devoted his to sending ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various

... of √2 (the ratio of the diagonal of a square to its side). The occasion for this method of approximation to √2 (which can be carried as far as we please) was the discovery by the Pythagoreans of the incommensurable or irrational in this ...

— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... SONGS, SCRAPS OF POETRY, &c., by ROBERT BURNESS: a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping it; but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty, and unbounded good-will to every creature, rational and irrational.—As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of life; but as I believe they are really his own, it ...

— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... follows, that the emotions of the animals which are called irrational (for after learning the origin of mind we cannot doubt that brutes feel) only differ from man's emotions, to the extent that brute nature differs from human nature. Horse and man are alike carried away by the desire of procreation; but the desire of the former is equine, the ...

— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza

... practical education has led to the creation of various kinds of vocational schools, including a large variety of correspondence schools for those who wish specific training. There are still thousands of boys and girls who enter industrial occupations in the most haphazard way, and yield to irrational impulse in choosing or giving up a particular job or a place to live in; similar impulse induces them to mate in the same haphazard way, and as lightly to separate if they tire of each other; but the very fact that enlightened public opinion does not countenance these practices, ...

— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... altercations with fellow prisoners. He was in solitary confinement several times, and forfeited almost all of his good time. Frequently became mildly excited, singing, shouting, praying and cursing in the most irrational manner. This state of excitement persisted unremittingly for seventy-two hours on one occasion. He declared that his lungs were rotting with tuberculosis or some other foul disease, and that he was suffocating. ...

— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... increasing one, which may be called the class of half-unbelievers, who are to be found in various degrees of approximation to a state of absolute infidelity. The system, if it deserve the name, of these men, is grossly irrational. Hearing many who assert and many who deny the truth of Christianity, and not reflecting seriously enough to consider that it must be either true or false, they take up a strange sort of middle opinion of its qualified truth. They conceive that there must be something in it, though ...

— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... well-being of the offender. It confounds the person with the deed in wholesale condemnation. It renders evil for evil; it provokes still further retaliation; and erects a single fault into the occasion of a lasting feud. It is irrational, brutal, and inhuman; ...

— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... engagement, and Rose still trembled from the excitement of that occasion, still debated fearfully with herself on the bride's chances of happiness. Her own marriage was an event so inconceivable that merely to glance at the thought appeared half immodest and wholly irrational. ...

— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... is decided to move? Husbands have tried it vainly, and parents; and though the husband and the parents are not dealing with the same kind of woman, you see the same elemental power in her under both conditions of rebel wife and rebel daughter to break conventional laws, and be splendidly irrational. That is, if she can be decided: in other words, aimed at a mark and inflamed to fly the barriers intercepting. He fancied he had achieved it. Alvan thanked his fortune that he had to treat with parents. The consolatory ...

— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... itself, saith he, by those workings of heart, convictions of conscience, and accusations, that every thought maketh within them, together with the fear that is begotten in them, when they transgress, or do those things that are irrational, or contrary to what they see they shall do. I might add further, that the natural proneness that is in all men to devotion and religion, that is, of one kind or another, doth clearly tell us, that they by the book of nature, which book ...

— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... and her future husband were each in turn enthusiastically toasted by other guests in bumpers of French wine. He adds that these compliments were "so moist and numerous that they became more and more indistinct, noisy and irrational" and that before they ended "Nearly every one stood up singing his own favorite song. There is a stage of emotion which can only be expressed in noises. That stage had been reached. They put me in mind of David Culver's bird shop where many song birds—all of a different feather—engage ...

— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller

... feel Mayakin's hand over him, but later he became reconciled to this, renounced everything, and resumed his restless, drunken life, wherein there was only one consolation—the people. With each succeeding day he became more and more convinced that they were more irrational and altogether worse than he—that they were not the masters of life, but its slaves, and that it was turning them around, bending and breaking them at its will, while they succumbed to it unfeelingly ...

— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... ere again she sought The prisoner's tower, as she was wont before: From which the sad Philander hoped and thought That love to him the dame no longer bore. Lo! Fortune for her an occasion wrought, (To evil deed propitious evermore) To give effect, with memorable ill, To her irrational ...

— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... still is a good deal of mutual ill-feeling both in Germany and in England cannot be denied. Rivalry between nations is always accompanied by feeling which is all the stronger when it is instinctive and therefore, though not unintelligible, apt to be irrational. But what in this case is really at the bottom of it? There have no doubt been a number of matters that have been discussed between the two Governments, and though they have for the most part been settled, the manner in which they have been ...

— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson

... ever commits a first crime of violent nature, such as murder, after thirty; if he begins before, he may go on up to any age. But youth is the season for commencing those wrong calculations which belong to irrational hope and the sense of physical power. You thus read in the newspapers that the persons who murder their sweethearts are generally from two to six and twenty; and persons who murder from other motives than love—that is, from revenge, avarice, or ambition—are generally ...

— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... experience, of views sympathetically exchanged with her audience on the best way of knitting children's socks, or of putting up preserves for the winter. It was, I am sure, to this personal accent—the moral equivalent of her dimple—that Mrs. Amyot owed her prodigious, her irrational success. It was her art of transposing second-hand ideas into first-hand emotions that so endeared her to ...

— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton

... reference of the Translator, I can find no such case alluded to in the chapter. But Caelius Aurelianus mentions two modes of treatment employed by Asclepiades, into both of which the use of wine entered, as being "in the highest degree irrational and dangerous." [Caelius Aurel. De Morb. Acut. et Chron. lib. I. cap. xv. ...

— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... also the chief beauty of the irrational soul of the mind, that is, of the lower animal—which is singleness. The simplicity, the integrity, the one thing at a time, of a good animal's eyes is a great beauty, and is apt to cause us to exaggerate our sense of their expressiveness. An animal's ...

— The Children • Alice Meynell

... is the foundation of the fittingness of the Incarnation of the Divine Person, as above stated (Q. 3, A. 8). But as in rational creatures we find the likeness of image, so in irrational creatures we find the image of trace. Therefore the irrational creature was as capable of ...

— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... ambition, reign in almost every breast; a constant desire to supplant, and a continual fear of being supplanted, keep the minds of those who have any views at all in a state of unremitted tumult and envy; and those who have no aim in their actions are too irrational to have a notion of social comforts. The love, as well as the pleasures, of society, is founded in reason, and cannot exist in those minds which are filled with irrational pursuits. Such indeed might claim a place in the society ...

— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott

... if we had seen it ourselves; yet he may be mistaken; strictly speaking, his word is only probable evidence. But did not Newman substitute faith for reason? Yes, in a sense; but not in a sense in which it is of itself irrational to do so. How much could the reason of any of us tell us of Central Africa? We know of it by testimony, do we not? not by reason. From our own notions alone we could not tell whether it was a desert or a forest; whether it was inhabited or uninhabited; whether full-grown ...

— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various

... made the detective melancholy; but he had not yet begun to reflect on how the passing of a dearly loved husband would change the life of Mrs. Pendean. He suddenly felt himself thrust out of the situation forever, yet resented his own conviction as irrational. ...

— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... so that he could look at the boy. He might have known it, he exclaimed to himself. It was just such an extreme act of mercy, this assuming the care of a stranger in a wilderness, as he had ever known Christians to do in that city of irrational faiths, Ephesus. ...

— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... anything distinct from "a true conjunction of the mind with God.[13]" "God is not without or above law: He could not make men either sinful or miserable.[14]" To believe otherwise is to suppose an irrational universe, the one thing which a rational man cannot ...

— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... nature. Food he has not at hand; rest is not at his command; he must run, weary himself, endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold, and all the inclemency of the elements and seasons; and as the ignorance in which he was born and bred gives him or leaves him a multitude of false and irrational ideas and superstitious prejudices, he is likewise the slave of a number of errors and passions, from which civilized man is exempted by the science and knowledge of every kind that an improved state of society has produced."—Volney's ...

— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... create, but he could not weigh coolly and impartially what was created. His whole make forbade it. He was impatient, passionate, reckless, furious in his likes and dislikes. His fervid enthusiasm for one author dictated a splendid tribute to a friend; while an irrational prejudice against another called out a terrific diatribe against a foe. In either case, there might be "thoughts that breathe and words that burn"; still, there was but little of true criticism. The matchless papers on Spenser and Homer represent one class, and the articles on Hazlitt and ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... Owen for a time went on walking his room, and then sank again into his chair. Abominably irrational as his method of arranging all these family difficulties will no doubt seem to all who may read it, to him it had appeared not only an easy but a happy mode of bringing back contentment to everybody. ...

— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... casts a reasonable shadow, gracious Hien," remarked Tsin Lung, turning towards the other with courteous deference. "Shall we bring a scene of irrational carnage to an end and agree to regard the incomparable Thang-li's benevolent tongue as an ...

— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... feature of Heuschrecke himself. We are enabled to assert that he hung on the Professor with the fondness of a Boswell for his Johnson. And perhaps with the like return; for Teufelsdrockh treated his gaunt admirer with little outward regard, as some half-rational or altogether irrational friend, and at best loved him out of gratitude and by habit. On the other hand, it was curious to observe with what reverent kindness, and a sort of fatherly protection, our Hofrath, being the elder, richer, ...

— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... originated the above scheme. I had been for months at my wit's end, forming plan after plan for the evangelisation of Erewhon, when by one of those special interpositions which should be a sufficient answer to the sceptic, and make even the most confirmed rationalist irrational, my eye was directed to the following paragraph in the Times newspaper, of one of the ...

— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... the reaction. Society, capricious in its indignation as it had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and petted darling. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry. He was persecuted with an irrational fury. Much has been written about those unhappy domestic occurrences which decided the fate of his life. Yet nothing is, nothing ever was, positively known to the public, but this, that he quarrelled with his lady, and that she refused ...

— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... themselves in them before they begin to debate upon their causes or influence. And it is in this way that art is the pioneer of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows not why, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the world that we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner; and after the facts have been thus vividly brought before us and have had time to settle and arrange themselves in our minds, some day there will be found the ...

— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... they be stigmatised as ills, seeing that "everything is right"? Let {59} Mr. Wells once take his principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as a mark ...

— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... case, very improbable, but which will make the issue clear and definite. Imagine that a man of highly magnetic personality, endowed with a wonderful power of infecting others with his own ideas however irrational, in short a typical religious leader, is convinced that the world will come to an end in the course of a few months. He goes about the country preaching and distributing pamphlets; his words have an electrical effect; and the masses of the uneducated and half-educated ...

— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury

... Christmas morning he called, knocking loudly at the door, and (having received his instructions) left presents for the good and a rod for the bad. Those who have since been in Germany have found this custom relinquished; it was considered profane and irrational. Yet they have not found the children better, nor the mothers more careful of their offspring; they have not found their devotion more fervent, their faith more strong, nor ...

— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... you. But you must pardon me, for my heart is distracted,—distracted,—distracted!" Then she sat down upon the floor, and burst into tears. What was he to do? He thought that the woman should either give him up altogether, or not give him up. All this fuss about it was irrational! He would not have made love to Clara Van Siever in her room if she had not told him ...

— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... was absolutely irrefutable, and yet there remained in his bold heart an irrational fear that after all she could eat him. Such is the extraordinary influence of ...

— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... the time; such expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did not know when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her. Chiefly I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind thorny with irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as one believing quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things. So I suppose it had to be; life was coming to me in new forms and with new requirements. It was essential to our situation ...

— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... security which all the armaments of Prussian militarism could not give the German Fatherland; and the absolute security of that frontier rests not upon a monopoly nor a community, still less upon a balance of power, but on the opinion held on both sides of that frontier that all power is irrational and futile as a guarantee of peace between ...

— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various

... him as a sudden opportunity. No, no," the girl went on, with a generous ardor in her face, following further the train of her argument, which she appeared to find extremely attractive, "I know what you are going to say and I deny it. I am not fanciful, or sophistical, or irrational, and I know perfectly what I am about. Men are so stupid; it 's only women that have real discernment. Leave me alone, and I shall do something. Blanche is silly, yes, very silly; but she is not so bad as her husband accused her of being, in those dreadful words which he will live to ...

— Confidence • Henry James

... chill of your aura frightens the spirits away, and you obtain no manifestations; but if you go in a mood of faith, which practically means confident expectation, the phenomena follow, and you depart a convert. I use this illustration in no scoffing spirit. The presupposition is not irrational. It amounts, in effect, to saying that you must go some way to meet God before God can or will come to you. This seems a curious coyness; but as God is finite and conditioned, a bit of a character ("a strongly ...

— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... communal exclusiveness—the resistance to the indiscriminate establishment of strangers, is an intense traditional feeling in the peasant. "This gallows is for us and our children," is the typical motto of this spirit. But such exclusiveness is highly irrational and repugnant to modern liberalism; therefore a bureaucratic government at once opposes it, and encourages to the utmost the introduction of new inhabitants in the provincial communes. Instead of allowing ...

— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... not the only person irritated. After one of these fragments of conversation Langham also walked rapidly home in a state of most irrational petulance, his hands thrust with energy into the pockets of ...

— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... with various gesticulations and enigmatical expressions. The ceremonies he uses are various. Sometimes he creeps into the oven where he sweats, howls, and roars, and now and then grins horribly at his patient. Altogether I cannot conceive of a more irrational manner of performing Esculapian duties, than that adopted by the "faculty" ...

— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... education; but you have only to look at their modern buildings to see that their teachers themselves do not know a good building from a bad one. They, like all the rest of us, think that taste in art is an irrational mystery; they trust in the expert and usually in the wrong one, as the ignorant and superstitious trust in the wrong priest. For as religion is merely mischievous unless it is tested in matters of conduct, so taste is mere pedantry or frivolity unless it is tested on things of use. ...

— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock

... themselves with the affairs of mortals. But he felt sometimes, as all men feel, the need of a supreme celestial Guide: in the noble Ode which Ruskin loved he seems to find it in Necessity or Fortune (Od. I, xxxv); and once, when scared by thunder resounding in a cloudless sky, recants what he calls his "irrational rationalism," and admits that God may, if He will, put down the mighty and exalt the low (I, xxxiv). So again in his hymn for the dedication of Apollo's Temple on the Palatine (I, xxxi) a serious ...

— Horace • William Tuckwell

... it is placed beyond the need of scientific support and beyond the range of scientific criticism. It is a belief which no imaginable future advance in physical discovery can in any way impugn. It is a belief which is in no sense irrational, and which may be logically entertained without in the least affecting our scientific habit of mind ...

— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... guerilla. Now one obtained the advantage, now the other. His nerves demanded relief from the friction, but he could offer them no holiday, not one single day's holiday. Twice every day he had to manoeuvre and persuade that ponderous, irrational body in his father's bedroom. Maggie helped the body to feed itself at table. But Maggie apparently ...

— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence, again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of the rogueries of a child. See the good-humoured ...

— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... the mode in which my father met the criticisms of Macaulay. He did not, as I thought he ought to have done, justify himself by saying, "I was not writing a scientific treatise on politics, I was writing an argument for parliamentary reform." He treated Macaulay's argument as simply irrational; an attack upon the reasoning faculty; an example of the saying of Hobbes, that When reason is against a man, a man will be against reason. This made me think that there was really something more fundamentally erroneous in my father's conception of philosophical method, as ...

— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill

... a conviction, which even reason could not dispel, that whatever secret tragedy or wrong had signalized this house, its perpetration had taken place in this very room. It was a fancy, but it held, and under its compelling if irrational influence, I made a second and still more minute survey of the room to which this conviction had imparted so ...

— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green

... contradiction of Rossetti. Morris's anarchists represented his life's work to him. He did not help them from that personal and irrational charity which made Rossetti want to give a penny to a beggar in the street. This may be regarded as a supersubtle distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important fact about Morris that—to quote Mr. Compton-Rickett—"human nature ...

— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... we have reason to be persuaded that, BY SUCH GENTLE STEPS, things ascend upwards in degrees of perfection. It is a hard matter to say where sensible and rational begin, and where insensible and irrational end: and who is there quick-sighted enough to determine precisely which is the lowest species of living things, and which the first of those which have no life? Things, as far as we can observe, lessen and augment, as the quantity does in a regular cone; where, though there be a manifest odds ...

— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke

... edition of the "Principia," Newton says, "It is ten years since, being in correspondence with M. Leibnitz, and having instructed him that I was in possession of a method of determining tangents and solving questions involving maxima and minima, a method which included irrational expressions, and having concealed it by transposing the letters, he replied to me that he had discovered a similar method, which he communicated, differing from mine only in the terms and signs, as well as ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various

... faade, the wooden cupolas over the five domes, and the pointed arches in the narthex, are deviations from Byzantine traditions dating in part from the later Middle Ages Nothing could well be conceived more irrational, from a structural point of view, than the accumulation of columns in the entrance-arches; but the total effect is so picturesque and so rich in color, that its architectural defects are easily overlooked. The external ...

— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... of knowledge in the higher or philosophical sense is admitted to be possible. Right opinion is again introduced in the Theaetetus as an account of knowledge, but is rejected on the ground that it is irrational (as here, because it is not bound by the tie of the cause), and also because the conception of false opinion is given up as hopeless. The doctrines of Plato are necessarily different at different times of his life, as new distinctions are realized, ...

— Meno • Plato

... his shoulders over Percival's note. It was irrational, no doubt, but Thorne had a right to please himself, and might as well take care of his pride, since he had not much else to take care of. So he attempted no persuasion, but simply sent any Fordborough news and forwarded ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... operates. As the rules of navigation never steered a ship, so the law of gravity never moved a planet. A bare order or law of nature was not the cause of nature. To confound order or law with cause is to speak unadvisedly—unintelligently; it is perfectly irrational. Would you cut off executive authority in a government and continue its existence without a person or society to exercise, judge and ...

— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880

... Good Breeding, which reigns among the Coxcombs of the Town, has not yet made its way into the Country; and as it is impossible for such an irrational way of Conversation to last long among a People that make any Profession of Religion, or Show of Modesty, if the Country Gentlemen get into it they will certainly be left in the Lurch. Their Good-breeding will come too late to them, and they will ...

— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... assures us that male and female are one in Christ. Also under the law there were prophetesses as well as prophets, and the effusion of the Spirit in the latter days as prophesied by Joel was to be equally on sons and daughters, servants and handmaids. To believe otherwise is irrational and inconsistent with the divine attributes, and would charge the Almighty with partiality and injustice to one-half of His rational creation. Therefore I believe it would be wrong to admit it, although asserted in the most plain and positive ...

— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... take care of it, which he saw could not be done without some of those Actions which are common to the rest of the Animals. Thus it was plain to him, that there were three sorts of Actions which he was obliged to, viz. 1. Either those by which he resembled the Irrational Animals. Or, 2. Those by which he resembled the Heavenly Bodies. Or, 3. Those by which he resembled the necessarily self-existent Being: And that he was oblig'd to the first, as having a gross Body, consisting of several Parts, and different ...

— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail

... all the irrational humours of men, it should seem that the philosophers themselves are among the last and the most reluctant to disengage themselves from this: 'tis the most restive and ...

— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... demands of a noble philosophy. If it were a question of marriage, I could readily understand his insisting that his bride should comply with his views in this respect. But I was merely a guest of Miss Kingsley, an acquaintance whom he might never see again. His conduct seemed to me irrational and strange. I could not believe that he had cast me off because of an unwillingness to offend his hostess, for he had appeared wholly absorbed in my presence until her impertinent speech in regard to my property had put an abrupt ...

— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... alter their purposes, and in that fact we have an essential point of difference between eccentricity and insanity. We may regard their conduct as singular, because they made an unusual disposition of their property; but it was no more irrational than if the one had left his estate to the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," and the other had devoted his to ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various

... expression of the inside of it, merely a result, almost accidental. And he was astounded and disgusted that he, with his professed love of architecture and his intermittent study of it, had not perceived this obvious truth for himself. He never again looked at a house in the old irrational way. ...

— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... all, and rapidly dwindling in numbers—could be allowed to keep a fertile and healthy Archipelago larger than Great Britain. The haste, the secrecy, the sharp practice, of the New Zealand Company were forced on the Wakefields by the mulish obstinacy of careless or irrational people. Their land-purchasing might have taken place legally, leisurely, and under proper Government supervision, had missionaries been business-like, had Downing-Street officials known what colonizing meant, and had Lord Glenelg ...

— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... two thousand every week is he not more excusable...." To which the Bencher replies that possibly it is Fielding's 'Wavering Principles' that have "brought him to the Necessity of writing for Bread." [4] From all which we may assume that Fielding's superiority to what he calls the "absurd and irrational Distinction of Parties [which] hath principally contributed to poison our Constitution" [5] was very little understood by the ...

— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... disposition on the part of many farmers to regard fertilizers only as stimulants, due to the irrational use of certain materials, but a good commercial fertilizer is a carrier of some or all of the necessary elements that we find in stable manures. They may carry nitrogen, phosphoric acid, or potash,—any one or two or the three,—and ...

— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee

... never even considered, the impossibility of a man knowing in a sort of way that which he does not know at all; for our assumption was, that he knows that which he does not know; than which nothing, as I think, can be more irrational. And yet, after finding us so easy and good-natured, the enquiry is still unable to discover the truth; but mocks us to a degree, and has gone out of its way to prove the inutility of that which we admitted ...

— Charmides • Plato

... for neither the double washstand, nor the thus far unimagined bathroom, nor even indeed the humble and serviceable screen, had been realized, in these dark ages of which I write. Accordingly, like the irrational ostrich, which defends itself by the simple process of not looking at its pursuers, Emma Jane had kept her Latin letter in her closed hand, in her pocket, or in her open book, flattering herself that no one ...

— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... wrath. "Refused you! Pah! Pooh! That's nothing! That signifies absolutely nothing! It's meaningless! It's a detail. You get well—do you hear? You go and get well; then try it again! Then you'll see! And if she is an idiot—in the event of her irrational persistence in an incredible and utterly indefensible attitude"—he choked up, then fairly barked at Siward—"take her anyway, sir! Run off with her! Dominate circumstances, sir! take charge of events! ... But you can't do it till you've clapped yourself ...

— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... by the old lady on the previous day forbade any notion that this preposterous idea sprang from a mind touched by the infirmities of age, and yet her stipulation was so peculiar, so irrational that I pondered long over my duty in the case. What Mrs. Drainger wanted was, in one sense, absurdly simple—merely the revision of her will, scarcely more than the retyping of that simple document; but I was conscious of a deeper demand; as though, to ...

— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... drawing, and make the wretched choice of perishing without, rather than find safety within? The deepest reason is an alienated heart, a rebellious will. But the reason for alienation and rebellion lie among the inscrutable mysteries of our awful being. All sin is irrational. The fact is plain, the temptations are obvious; excuses there are in plenty, but reasons there are none. Still we may touch for a moment on some of the causes which operate with many hearers of God's merciful call to enter in, ...

— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them, with many other wild, impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, "that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational, which some philosophers ...

— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift

... were I to say who is the "funkiest" oarsman before a race that I know. I mean by "funk," not the under-estimating of one's chances—for some of the most nervous men have a very shrewd idea of them—but the irrational excitement which keeps the brain constantly thinking of the impending race, and prevents the sufferer from sitting still or having any comfort, or, in the most serious cases, any sleep, for two or three days before it. It is a real malady, which is most ...

— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... figures and the sphere among solids, are the most capacious. The theory of the regular solids was taught in his school, and his disciple, Archytas, was the author of a solution of the problem of two mean proportionals. Democritus of Abdera treated of the contact of circles and spheres, and of irrational lines and solids. Hippocrates treated of the duplication of the cube, and wrote elements of geometry, and knew that the area of a circle was equal to a triangle whose base is equal to its circumference, ...

— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... state of things it would, on personal conditions. Where it depends, as in this and most other countries, on conditions of property, the contradiction is even more flagrant. There something more than ordinarily irrational in the fact that when a woman can give all the guarantees required from a male elector, independent circumstances, the position of a householder and head of a family, payment of taxes, or whatever may be the conditions imposed, the very principle and ...

— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill

... damn them, or command a sinner to repent and come to Christ, and condemn him for not doing it, if it were not in his own power upon moral suasion to obey, &c. It is true indeed, that in comparison of the irrational insect and inanimate creation, man is a noble creature, both as to his formation, I am wonderfully made, Psal cxxxix. 14. and also in his intellectual parts, but much more in his primeval state and dignity, when all the faculties of the mind ...

— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... his cigar in exasperation, and the dry night air was vibrant with half-whispered but perfervid curses. She was irritating, erratic, irrational, irresponsible—preposterous, simply preposterous—damn that kind of women anyhow! They pretended to be a lot, but there wasn't ...

— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott

... Balder had felt her touch, first as a benediction; then it chilled him, through remembrance of a deed forever debarring him from aught so pure and innocent as she. The subtleties of his philosophy might have cajoled him anywhere save in her presence. There, he felt unmistakably guilty; yet from irrational dread that she, whose intuitions seemed so swift and deep, might grasp the cause of his discomposure, he strove to hide it. Last of all the world should ...

— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... him, and his wife is altogether out of the picture. If I had only seen her face, I might have forgotten all about her in a few days. But the mask, the charm, the mystery! I can't get her out of my thoughts; I am irrational in all I do; an absolute ...

— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath

... and Cornell, it was argued, was no less irrational. In failing to charge them with inefficiency he subjected himself to the graver charge of inconsistency, since his letter of acceptance and inaugural address declared in substance that efficient officers ...

— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... maids" from Derry and Toms; and that very clever chemist who had mended Juliet Duff's nose when she fell on the ice at Princes'—they would both be there. Honoria said nothing to Vivie and Vivie said nothing to Honoria about the inhibition, but together with her irrational jealousy of Eoanthropos dawsoni and irritation at the growing contentedness with things as they were on the part of Rossiter, it made her a trifle more reckless in ...

— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... Bulloigne. He talks extravagantly in his passion; but, if I would take the pains to quote an hundred passages of Ben Jonson's Cethegus, I could easily shew you, that the rhodomontades of Almanzor are neither so irrational as his, nor so impossible to be put in execution; for Cethegus threatens to destroy nature, and to raise a new one out of it; to kill all the senate for his part of the action; to look Cato dead; and a thousand other things as extravagant he says, but ...

— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden

... decisive feature of Heuschrecke himself. We are enabled to assert that he hung on the Professor with the fondness of a Boswell for his Johnson. And perhaps with the like return; for Teufelsdrockh treated his gaunt admirer with little outward regard, as some half-rational or altogether irrational friend, and at best loved him out of gratitude and by habit. On the other hand, it was curious to observe with what reverent kindness, and a sort of fatherly protection, our Hofrath, being the elder, richer, and as he fondly imagined far more practically influential of the ...

— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... that want of Instruction concerning Religion does in a Sceptical Age dispose Men to Scepticism and Infidelity, which often terminates in downright Atheism; let us see whether, or no, Ill, by which I mean, all irrational Instruction in regard of Religion, has not the ...

— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham

... be fortunately so done as to prove delight to any of the young readers, it is hoped that no worse effect will result than to make them wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the Plays at full length (such a wish will be neither peevish nor irrational). When time and leave of judicious friends shall put them into their hands, they will discover in such of them as are here abridged (not to mention almost as many more, which are left untouched) many surprising ...

— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... selves;' so he called him, and he came and told his tale so punctually, and affirmed its truth with such ample grounds, that Mansoul fell presently under a conviction of the truth of what he said. The preacher did also back him, saying, 'Sirs, it is not irrational for us to believe it, for we have provoked Shaddai to anger, and have sinned Emmanuel out of the town; we have had too much correspondence with Diabolonians, and have forsaken our former mercies: no marvel then, if the enemy both within and without should ...

— The Holy War • John Bunyan

... that the greatest cruelties may be exercised quite unconsciously when cruelty has become a habit, and that at the same time, the mind may feel great sympathy and commiseration towards other persons and even towards irrational animals, is illustrated in the case of Tameriane the Great. In his Life, written by himself, he speaks with the greatest sincerity and tenderness of his grief at having accidentally crushed an ant; and yet he ordered melted lead to be poured down the throats of certain persons who drank wine ...

— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... the multitude to be one of these; it was only in critical times, when some idolatrous act was insisted on by the magistrate, that the specific nature of Christianity was tested and detected. Then at length it was seen to differ from all other religious varieties by that irrational and disgusting obstinacy, as it was felt to be, which had rather suffer torments and lose life than submit to some graceful, or touching, or at least trifling observance which the tradition of ages ...

— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man. But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, ...

— Moby-Dick • Melville

... She would certainly give him back the ring and bid him bestow it at once upon Miss Boncassen. Inconstant boy! Then she would get up and wander away for a time and rebuke herself. What right had she even to think of inconstancy? Could she be so irrational, so unjust, as to be sick for his love, as to be angry with him because he seemed to prefer another? Was she not well aware that she herself did not love him;—but that she did love another man? She had made up her mind to marry him in order that she might be a duchess, and ...

— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope

... their hearts any expectation of perfection, according to their notions, in this world. This expectation is at the bottom of a great deal of the worldliness we hear so much reprehended, and necessarily gives to little things a most irrational importance. ...

— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps

... of the sinful human race. Philo, in his poetic fancy, speaks of God associating with the virgin soul and generating therein the Divine offspring of holy wisdom;[363] the Christian creed-makers enunciated the irrational dogma of the immaculate conception of Jesus. So, too, the earliest philosophical exponents of Christianity, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, may have derived many of their detailed ideas from Philo, but they converted—one might rather say perverted—his ...

— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich

... that I have scarcely been able to perceive them with the Microscope, and yet have they been regular, and since (as far as I have yet examin'd it) there seems to be but one and the same cause that produces both these effects, I think it not irrational to suppose that these pretty figur'd Stars of Snow, when at first generated might be also ...

— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... the following December. As our feelings had become excited on the questions of the day, as well as those of other irrational beings around us, we might have passed a most uncomfortable time in the trunk, but for one circumstance. So great had been the hurry of our mistress in thus shutting us up, that we had been crammed in in a way to leave it impossible to say ...

— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... cause, the mechanist can always inquire how he knows that it is more than an unessential incident—the mere ticking of the clock, which he mistakes for its function. And there seems to be no reply to this inquiry, any more than to the further, not irrational, question, why trouble one's self about matters which are out of reach, when the working of the mechanism itself, which is of infinite practical importance, affords ...

— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... class and stood wearily by the window, too discouraged even to remove her hat. The shorthand was a failure; the whole course was a failure. She had not the instinct for plodding, for the meticulous attention to detail that those absurd, irrational lines ...

— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the case, who is delirious by fits, and is at the time in a state of actual delirium; yet further, if it be committed in a fit of insane drunkenness, and so forth, it is evident, that in such cases, the internal man, or mind, is not present in the external, scarcely any otherwise than in an irrational person. Adulteries in these instances are predicated by a rational man according to the above circumstances; nevertheless the perpetrator is charged with blame by the same rational man as a judge, and is punished by the law; but after death those adulteries are imputed ...

— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... Emma caught the half reproachful gaze of her gray eyes, and had hard work to refrain from telling Grace that the hateful shadow was soon to be lifted. For Emma and Kathleen West had had a private confab, during which both girls had laughed and cried and laughed again in a most irrational manner. ...

— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower

... only found in subterranean cavities connected with certain specimens of the volcanic formation in South America, dating from a time posterior to the arrangements of the earth for our species. Whence the first pymelodes cyclopum? Will it, to a geologist, appear irrational to suppose that, just as the pterodactyle was added in the era of the new red sandstone, when the earth had become suited for such a creature, so may these creatures have been added when media suitable for their existence arose, ...

— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... strange and unmatchable English artist of the Eighteenth Century, William Hogarth, of the mad house in London know as Bedlam. If he were here, he might draw a companion picture of the Tombs. The one is as much as the other a crazy, incoherent, irrational, futile place, yet embodying very accurately a certain aspect of the civic attitude toward the insanity of vice and crime of the day. There is nothing intelligent, purposeful, trenchant or radical about it; it is planted in ignorance and grows ...

— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... unmusical to an English ear, is good Italian metre; possibly an intentional and deliberate example of the poet's Italian predilections, and if so certainly a less irrational and inexplicable one than the intrusion of some villanously bad Italian lines and phrases into the ...

— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... consciousness, that his appearance and conduct while under the influence of liquor, might be such as not only to frighten, but estrange his child's affection from him; and he seemed touched by the thought, for his manner changed, though he was still to a degree irrational. ...

— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur

... launched upon a vigorous defense of the nominating convention as a piece of party machinery. He thought it absurd to talk of a man's having a right to become a candidate for office without the indorsement of his party. He believed it equally irrational to allow members of the party to consult personal preferences in voting. The members of the party must submit to discipline, if they expected to secure control of office. Confusion again reigned. The presiding officer left the chair ...

— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... and Dr. Earle were influenced by their observation that even in those suffering from mania much of their behavior could not be described as irrational. If you will allow me I will quote a ...

— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various

... swept, dragged, coaxed into a vast prison-house where there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, where their worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched. I can neither explain nor justify the storm of irrational emotion that swept me as I stood in that moment, staring down the length of the silent corridor towards the music-room at the far end, I can only repeat that no personal bravery sent me down it, but that the negative emotion of fear was swamped ...

— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood

... intended; he thought it was about to rain, and he was late. As he went along he became calmer, and when he was fairly indoors he had passed into a despair entirely inconsistent—superficially—with the philosopher Baruch, as inconsistent as the irrational behaviour in Bedford Square. He could well enough interpret, so he believed, Miss Hopgood's suppression of him. Ass that he was not to see what he ought to have known so well, that he was playing the ...

— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford

... answer," commented Carew. "A man couldn't feel it; it's irrational. Miss Gladwyne speaks with a certainty that our guide will come, though she has nothing to base her calculations on—she doesn't know the distance or the difficulties ...

— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss

... dependent on the eating of certain foods? Most of man's irrational ideas have some reason in them, and probably man's knowledge that without food life would come to an end, joined to his idea of deathlessness, led him to believe that there was a certain food which produced immortality just as ordinary food supported life. On it gods ...

— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch

... children in the eye of the law. Quite recently a judge decided that "a woman is not a parent in the eye of the law," and therefore powerless in things relating to her children. She is excluded from the guardianship of them. Yet so curiously irrational is this same English law that, should any woman wronged by a man become mother to an illegitimate child, upon her falls the whole onus of its maintenance until it is sixteen years old. The man gets off scot-free; for the world which condones an offence ...

— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... suit has ordinarily to be brought where the defendant, the alleged wrongdoer, resides, which means generally where no part of the transaction giving rise to the action took place. What could be more irrational? "Granted that no state can of its own volition make its process run beyond its borders * * * is it unreasonable that the United States should by federal action be made a unit in ...

— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... sceptics and freethinkers who began at that time a long and not ineffectual criticism of the miraculous claims of Christianity. Locke endeavoured to convince such minds that Christianity was in reality not an irrational code of doctrines, but a truly practical scheme of life. In this endeavour he was preceded by Richard Baxter, who had written on the 'Unreasonableness of Infidelity,' and was followed during the eighteenth century by many who in the old Dissenting ...

— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant

... and intelligent behavior or, through license, in sexual debauchery, still, at those times when his life or liberty is threatened, his instinct-emotional nature will inhibit either social thought or sex ideas, and present him as merely an irrational ...

— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... housing scheme is right. But any healthy person can see that banging brass cymbals together must be right. A page of statistics, a plan of model dwellings, anything which is rational, is always difficult for the lay mind. But the thing which is irrational any one can understand. That is why religion came so early into the world and spread so far, while science came so late into the world and has not spread at all. History unanimously attests the fact that it is only mysticism ...

— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... uncontrollable fury in his heart, the irrational fireman, both fists uplifted, made a wild onslaught upon ...

— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman

... I anticipated the hour of one, and the disclosure of the unknown undertaking to which I had bound myself, was irrational and morbid. But, honestly, I doubt it; my tendency has always been that of many other weak characters, to act impetuously, and afterwards to reproach myself for consequences which I have, perhaps, in reality, had little or ...

— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu

... anything to do with Him when Christ presents Himself in the character which makes man His debtor for ever. All men, as St. Paul says, have not faith: it is a melancholy fact, whether we can make anything of it or not. Discounting, however, this irrational or inexplicable opposition, which is not expressed in the mind but in the will, how are we to present the Atonement so that it shall excite the least prejudice, and find the most unimpeded access to the mind of our own generation? This is the question ...

— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney

... know, I suppose, whether I am speaking in jest or earnest. In the most solemn earnest, I assure you; though such is the strange course of our popular life that all the irrational arts of destruction are at once felt to be earnest; while any plan for those of instruction on a grand scale, sounds like a dream, or jest. Still, I do not absolutely propose to decorate our public ...

— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... she felt herself more and more involved in the tangled skein of his mysterious life. His sudden and reckless abandonment of the old love which had ruined him, and the new and equally irrational regard which he now professed for her, filled her with a ...

— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... (Can a man solemnly sign the vith Article, and yet so write?)—"A philosophical view [of the doctrine of the Trinity] recommends itself as easiest to believe." (p. 87.) The "view" expressed in the Athanasian Creed is we presume that which is stigmatized as "one felt to be so irrational, that it calls in the aid of terror." (p. 87.) The Reverend writer does not name the Athanasian Creed, indeed. It is not the general fashion of Essayists and Reviewers,—from Dr. Temple to Professor Jowett,—to speak plainly. ...

— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... ages of the world, except the social, yet irrational ancient superstitions of Greece and Rome, mankind have vainly thought to propitiate the Almighty beneficence, by ridiculous acts of austere self-torment; and even the ignorant or designing followers of the pure ...

— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr

... inclination to laugh, but I restrained myself; and a sudden and very irrational impulse made me say that she was a relation of mine. The words had no sooner escaped me than I bit my lip, for this stupid lie could only do me harm, but it was decreed that I should do nothing at Stuttgart but commit ...

— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... is essentially superficial, and such will be its effects. It has no better measure of right and wrong than that of visible beauty and tangible fitness. Conscience indeed inflicts an acute pang, but that pang, forsooth, is irrational, and to reverence it is an illiberal superstition. But, if we will make light of what is deepest within us, nothing is left but to pay homage to what is more upon the surface. To seem becomes to be; what looks fair ...

— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... of these great offices of State, any one of which might have taxed the powers of a tried administrator, in the feeble hands of a child appears at first sight a trifle irrational; but there was always method in Henry's madness. In bestowing these administrative posts upon his children he was really concentrating them in his own person and bringing them directly under his own ...

— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... principal kinds. Either, as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the other error, that which the mind admits when affected strongly by emotion. Thus, for ...

— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... vitality in Error. Truth, indeed, for the most part, shoots over the heads of the masses; or if an error is prostrated for a moment, it is up again in a moment, and as vigorous as ever. It will not die when the brains are out, and the most stupid and irrational errors ...

— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... read to you this morning," said Oisille, "that those who thought themselves wiser than other men, since by the sole light of reason they had come to recognise a God, creator of all things, were made more ignorant and irrational not only than other men, but than the very brutes, and this because they did not ascribe the glory to Him to whom it was due, but thought that they had gained the knowledge they possessed by their own endeavours? For having erred in their minds by ascribing to themselves ...

— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... intelligent being to be. I had convinced myself, experimentally, that human existence, human nature, was a bottomless pit and an uncommonly filthy one at that. Reaction was inevitable. Then I understood why men have invented gods, subscribed to irrational systems of theology, hailed and accredited transparently ridiculous miracles. Such lies are necessary to certain stages of development simply for the preservation of sanity, just as, at another stage, sanity, for its own preservation, is necessarily ...

— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... Christians, our only realistic expectation is that because of our Christian belief and practice, our conflicts will increase and intensify rather than diminish. The only peace we may hope to have is an irrational peace, an "in-spite-of" peace, the peace of the depths beneath the storm-tossed surface; in other words, "the peace of God, which passes all understanding."[2] To suggest how this may be achieved in some areas of life is ...

— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe

... science and a wide knowledge of it is most unusual; but there can be no mistaking the genuine feeling which Charles Kingsley had for the latter. It took one very practical form in his zeal for sanitation. In 1854 when the public, so irrational in its moments of excitement, was calling for a national fast-day on account of the spread of cholera, he heartily supported Lord Palmerston, who refused to grant it. He held it impious and wrong to attribute to a special ...

— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... prostitute is better than the nun, for the one makes men happy, the other is dedicated to a painful and shameful celibacy; that the law against adultery is a sort of sacrilege; that women should be common and should go naked; and that it is irrational to die for one's country or for any other ideal. . . . It is noteworthy that the representative of the Christian standpoint accepts tacitly the assumption that happiness is the supreme good, only he places that happiness in ...

— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... had a curious and disconcerting sense of responsibility for his dancing exasperation, she felt she was to blame for it, just as years ago she had felt she was to blame for his tears when he had urged her so desperately to marry him. Some irrational instinct made her want to allay him. It is the supreme feminine weakness, that wish to allay. But she was also clinging desperately to her resolution to proclaim her other forthcoming engagements. Her will hung on to that as a man hangs on to a mountain path in a thunderburst. She stood ...

— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... utterly pointless and unmeaning, it has given currency to the theory that all the horrors of that September were the irrational and spontaneous act of some hundreds of gaolbirds, whose eyes were stained with the vision of blood, and who ran riot in their impunity. So that criminal Paris, not revolutionary Paris, was to blame. In reality, the massacres were organised by the Commune, paid for by the Commune, ...

— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... the Erymanthian boar, or the Nemean lion? or was Theseus in a passion when he seized on the horns of the Marathonian bull? Take care how you make courage to depend in the least on rage. For anger is altogether irrational, and that is not courage which is void ...

— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... the difficulties with which they too, as well as that of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties none the less exist; the fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational, if our conscience did not forbid us to listen to it. The objections, with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with William de Blyenburg; and it will be seen from this with how little justice the denial ...

— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... something thought, that had made you melancholy, and filled your mind for a while with those unsubstantial and indefinable regrets for the past which we are all apt to feel at certain moments of our life. There are few of us who do not encounter, now and again, some of that irrational spirit of sadness which, when over-indulged, drives men to madness and self-destruction. I used to know well what it was before I knew you; but since I have had the hope of having you in my house, I have banished it utterly. In that I think I have been stronger than you. Do not speak under the influence ...

— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... been built between it and Philosophy, behind which each could go her own way without troubling the other. But what are they doing now? They are tearing down this wall, and, under the pretext of making us rational Christians, are making us very irrational philosophers.... We are agreed that our old religious system is false; but I cannot say with you that it is a patchwork of bunglers and half-philosophers. I know nothing in the world in which human acuteness has been more displayed or exercised than in that."[158] ...

— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... of deeper guilt and more aggravated ruin. The Gospel has appeared transcendently beautiful and glorious to all who have been savingly enlightened by the Holy Spirit—while, to the impenitent and skeptical, it seems obscure, irrational, and incomprehensible. The former rejoice in the scriptures, just as they are, and willingly yield to the obedience of faith: the latter are ever anxious to lower the standard of divine truth to the level of their views of fitness, and ...

— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin

... Sir, by such resistance, and by so long a course of inconstancy; so many graces, so much ingratitude; but the sequel will astonish you still more, when you shall see this manner of acting grow stronger with my age, and that reason, far from correcting so irrational a procedure, has served only to give more force and more scope ...

— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... hand—galls us and puts us to shame by his daily errors; the long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass as our own wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious humours and irrational persistence. ...

— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... taking of prisoners had always been one of those irrational Terran customs which no Ulleran regarded with ...

— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr

... with the sensibility of the woman. . . . Alas for him! He, too, might have discovered what Byron did; for were not his errors avenged upon him within, more terribly even than without? His cries are like the wails of a child, inarticulate, peevish, irrational; and yet his pain fills his whole being, blackens the very face of nature to him: but he will not confess himself in the wrong. Once only, if we recollect rightly, the truth flashes across him for a moment, and ...

— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... assert that body is not a subject, but one of the elements in each, as for instance, animal in horses and man, thus also each will be indigent of the other, viz. this subject, and that which is in the subject; or rather the common element, animal, and the peculiarities, as the rational and irrational, will be indigent. For elements are always, indigent of each other, and that which is composed from elements is indigent of the elements. In short, this sensible nature, and which is so manifest to us, is neither body, for this does not of itself move the senses, nor quality; for ...

— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... remedied, why should they be stigmatised as ills, seeing that "everything is right"? Let {59} Mr. Wells once take his principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as a mark ...

— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... which He would fain blow into a flame. He shows them and us the reason for overwhelming fear as being a deficiency in faith. And He casts all into the form of a question, thus softening rebuke, and calming their terrors by the appeal to their common sense. Fear is irrational if we can exercise faith. It is mere bravado to say 'I will not be afraid,' for this awful universe is full of occasions for just terror; but it is the voice of sober reason which says 'I will trust, and not be ...

— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... cowardly bourgeois or fat priests. For instance: a father accumulates a million by energetic and clever exploitation, and leaves it to his son—a rickety, lazy, ignorant, degenerate idiot, a brainless maggot, a true parasite. Potentially a million rubles is a million working days, the absolutely irrational right to labour, sweat, life, and blood of a terrible number of men. Why? What is the ground of reason? Utterly unknown. Then why not agree with the proposition, gentlemen, that our profession is ...

— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... cry, a heavy body projected itself upon him, grasping wildly at his hair. An arm, clothed in some silken material, encircled his throat. He felt himself choking. And at the same moment a strange and irrational terror seized him. He seemed in the grasp of something uncanny, something inhuman, in spite of its very human cries. With a shudder he sprang to his feet, unable to locate the missing electric torch, and shaking the shrieking figure from ...

— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks

... three years ago in Butte. There is not one man who was here, who, I believe, was in any way, shape or form responsible for such outrages. I find that the ultra-Socialistic members of the unions in Butte denounced these men for coming here, in a manner as violent—and I may say as irrational—as the denunciation [by the capitalistic writer] in the article you sent me. Doubtless the gentleman of whom you speak as your general manager is an admirable man. I, of course, was not alluding to him; but I most ...

— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... this in Pan. The love-making of the hero is characterized by the same irrational impulses, the same extravagant actions, as in Sult and Mysterier. But they are now less frequent and less involved. The book as a whole is toned down, so to speak, from the bewildering tangle of unrestraint in the first two. There is quite sufficient of ...

— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun

... far as the same hath been directly avowed, of the said proceedings at the Mogul's court, was as altogether irrational, and the pretended object as impracticable, as the means taken in pursuit of it were fraudulent and dishonorable, namely, the restoration of the Mogul in some degree to the dignity of his situation, and to his free agency in the conduct of his affairs. For the said Hastings, at the very time in ...

— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... to see mothers seriously damaging the constitutions of their children out of compliance with an irrational fashion. It is bad enough that they should themselves conform to every folly which our Gallic neighbours please to initiate; but that they should clothe their children in any mountebank dress which Le petit Courrier des Dames ...

— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... of literature. I had not only a willingness to eat any wild thing from a hedgehog to a beechnut or a wild raspberry, but also an uncanny power of finding out literary game, raising it, and trapping it, not by the stately methods of the scholar but by some irrational and violent intuition. Instead of reading slowly, patiently, and laboriously, as no doubt I ought to have read, i.e., as my tutors would have liked me to read, I used to dive headlong into some poet, old or young. Even if I could only "get at him" for an odd half-hour, I could bring back with ...

— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... a document which reveals as much to the social historian as the skeleton of an ichthyosaurus reveals to the palaeontologist. It sums up an epoch. A whole world can be inferred from it. Pretty, elegant, irrational, and entirely useless, this exquisite and costly toy might stand as a symbol for the life ...

— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield

... prince of this house, Mahomet Tughlak, was a very remarkable character. Possessed of extraordinary accomplishments, learned, temperate, and brave, he plunged upon wholly irrational and inpracticable schemes of conquest which were disastrous in themselves and also from the methods to which the monarch was driven to procure the means for his wild attempts. One portion after another of the vast empire broke into revolt and at the end of the century the ...

— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... It adds perceptibly to the difficulty which some readers experience in picking up the threads of a play; and it deprives other readers of a real and appreciable pleasure of anticipation. There is a peculiar and not irrational charm in looking down a list of quite unknown names, and thinking: "In the course of three hours, I shall know these people: I shall have read their hearts: I shall have lived with them through a great crisis in their lives: some ...

— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... handsome, nor ancient, nor remarkable in any point of view. We found in it a monument of the revolution, which I never saw elsewhere, and which I never expected to see at all. The age of reason was a sadly irrational age.—The tablet containing the rights and duties of man, disposed in two columns, like the tables of the Mosaic law, is still suffered to exist in the church, though shorn of all its republican dignity, and degraded into the ...

— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... who had whispered, "there was Boullard, the tee-totum. I call him the tee-totum because, in fact, he was seized with the droll but not altogether irrational crotchet, that he had been converted into a tee-totum. You would have roared with laughter to see him spin. He would turn round upon one heel by the ...

— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... experimental physiologists—in particular, Marshall Hall in England and Francois Magendie in France; and the joint efforts of these various workers led presently to the abandonment of those severe and often irrational depletive methods—blood-letting and the like—that had previously dominated medical practice. To this end also the "statistical method," introduced by Louis and his followers, largely contributed; and by the close of the first third of our century the idea was gaining ground ...

— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... the stinginess of hard-hearted patrons, had driven him into a cursed company of door-keeping herds, to meet the irrational brutality of those uneducated mischievous animals called footmen, house-porters, poetasters, mumpers, apothecaries, attorneys, and such like beasts of prey," who were, like himself, sometimes barred up for hours in the menagerie of a great man's antechamber. In his addresses ...

— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... the laws, and that by such emergency the cause of twenty-five millions of people, I may say of the whole human race, should have been so materially injured. Any other sorrow for the death of Louis is irrational ...

— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... singing, chatting, laughter, and amusements, perpetually succeed each other. It must be allowed, that reckoning all these advantages, no hesitation was necessary in the choice; in fact, I was so content with mine, that I never once repented it; nor do I even now, when, free from the irrational motives that influenced me at that time, I weigh in the scale of reason every action ...

— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... the city, urging them to forbid the two painters to sing in the Via Ripetta. The authorities, however, replied that it would be a thing unheard of in Rome to prevent anybody from singing and playing the guitar where he pleased, and it was irrational to ask such a thing. So Signor Pasquale determined to put an end to the nuisance himself, and promised Michele a large reward if he seized the first opportunity to fall upon the singers and give them a good sound drubbing. Michele at once procured a stout ...

— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... most defile. How shall a cause to Nature be appealed, When, under pressure of their common foe, Her sisters shun the Mother and disown, On pain of his intolerable crow Above the fiction, built for him, o'erthrown? Irrational he is, irrational Must they be, though not Reason's light shall wane In them with ever Nature at close call, Behind the fiction torturing to sustain; Who hear her in the milk, and sometimes make ...

— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... a creature thrown even for an hour upon her own resources, though in situations which scarcely seemed to admit of any occasion for taxing those resources; and often I have felt anger towards myself for what appeared to be an irrational or effeminate timidity, and have struggled with my own mind upon occasions like the present, when I knew that I could not have acknowledged my tremors to a friend without something like shame, and a fear to excite his ridicule. No; if in anything I ran into excess, it was in this very ...

— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... minute," Mallory interrupted, thoroughly bewildered and simultaneously afflicted with an irrational sense of deja vu. "This gentlewoman you speak of—would she by any ...

— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young

... men cried out against for schismatics and sectaries; as if, while the temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrational men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it can not be united into a continuity, ...

— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey

... spiritual methods of physicking. Children were taken out of school in order that they might attend the prophesyings and get all knowledge by supernatural intuition. Logic and other worldly methods of arriving at truth were superseded by dreams, discernings of spirits, and similar irrational processes. The public madness was immense, tempestuous, and unequalled by anything of the kind since the "jerks" which appeared in the early part of this century under the thundering ministrations of Peter Cartwright. That nothing might be lacking to make the movement a fact in history, it ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... had ceased to be regarded as binding upon their consciences by the great mass of the Western Asiatics. Western Asia was a seething-pot, in which were mixed up a score of contradictory creeds, old and new, rational and irrational, Sabaism, Magism, Zoroastrianism, Grecian polytheism, teraphim-worship, Judaism, Chaldae mysticism, Christianity. Artaxerxes conceived it to be his mission to evoke order out of this confusion, to establish in lieu of this extreme diversity ...

— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson

... abnormal, irrational, disturbing to human senses. With the mining work over, an irritability grew upon Grantline's men. And perhaps since the human mind is so wonderful, elusive a thing, there lay upon these men an indefinable sense of impending disaster. Johnny Grantline ...

— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... way of visiting the larder, and "picking" little fragments of pies, or cold fowl, even a cold potato, the smallest mug—a quarter of a pint of the Goliath ale between them, or, if it was to be had, a sip of port wine. These women were very irrational in their feeding; they actually put vinegar on cold cabbage; they gloated over a fragment of pickled salmon about eleven o'clock in the morning. They had a herring sometimes for tea—the smell of ...

— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies

... his fellowmen. That second visit to Peter Westley——" Mrs. Travis spoke quickly to hide her bitterness. "He was so sure that what he had made was good—an inventor has always, my dear, an irrational love for the thing he has created—and to have it spurned! He was supersensitive, super—everything. Then my own health went to pieces. I suppose I simply was not getting enough to eat to give me the strength to meet the mental strain under which I had to live—and you were coming. ...

— Highacres • Jane Abbott

... friend and professional adviser, Mr Rugg, back with him. Mr Rugg had had such ample experience, on the road, of Mr Pancks's being at that present in an irrational state of mind, that he opened his professional mediation by requesting that gentleman to take himself out of the way. Mr Pancks, crushed and ...

— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... necessities of the race. Colleges and universities, established and conducted by the Freedmen's Bureau and Northern churches and societies, sprang up like mushrooms, and the teachers, ignorant, fanatical, without self-poise, proceeded to make all possible mischief. It is irrational, cruel, to hold the Negro, under such strange conditions, responsible for all the ill consequences of bad education, unwise teachers, reconstruction ...

— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... day is darkness, but the Father of life through our reason has taught us to mitigate the exceeding bitterness of our end; otherwise, we that are above all other creatures in the earth should have been at the last more miserable than they. For in the irrational world, between the different kinds, there reigns perpetual strife and bloodshed, the strong devouring the weak and the incapable; and when failure of life clouds the brightness of that lower soul, which is theirs, the end is not long ...

— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson

... reason: simply because some stock he held or didn't hold went up or down or something on a rumour in the street that Mr. Russell Sage was extremely ill! He said that this brought him to his senses. He says to me, 'Mater, I've not met Mr. Sage, you know, but from what I hear of him it would be irrational to place myself in a position where I should have to experience emotion of any sort at news of the old gentleman's taking-off. An event so agreeable to the natural order of God's providence, so plausible, so seemly, should not be endowed with any arbitrary and artificial significance, ...

— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... of the Third Estate as the House of the People, and not as the House of a privileged class, the Ministry and Parliament of 1831 virtually conceded the principle of Universal Suffrage. In this point of view the ten-pound franchise was an arbitrary, irrational, and impolitic qualification. It had, indeed, the merit of simplicity, and so had the constitutions of Abbe Sieyes. But its immediate and ...

— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... it seemed, was at last giving way to the terror that must have been haunting him for months past. His movements became feverish, erratic, irrational. He traveled in strange directions and by strange means, by bullock-cart, by burro, by dug-out, sometimes on foot and sometimes on horseback. Sometimes he stayed over night at a rubber-gatherers' camp, sometimes he visited a banana plantation, bought ...

— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... Yet, in an irrational mood, I would read—I would frequently steal off to some quiet spot in the neighbourhood, and employ myself in various histories, of which reading I was always very fond. My favourite retreat was up in an old pollarded willow-tree, secure ...

— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.

... were traversed by the harsh regret of his warlike past, of that one long, intoxicating clash of arms, unique in the magnitude of its glory and disaster—the marvellous work and the special possession of his own generation. He felt an irrational tenderness towards his old adversary and appreciated emotionally the murderous absurdity their encounter had introduced into his life. It was like an additional pinch of spice in a hot dish. He remembered the flavour with sudden melancholy. He would never taste it again. It was all ...

— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... ought to be clearly understood that in his series of satires he was not attacking the orthodoxy of the Auld Lights from the bulwarks of any other creed. His criticism was altogether destructive. From his own conception of a wise and loving God he satirised what he conceived to be their irrational and inhuman conception of Deity, whose attitude towards mankind was assuredly not that of a father to his children. Burns's God was a God of love; the god they worshipped was the creation of their creed, a god of election. It is ...

— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... of the ranch had turned out to be a heavy burden. It could not be managed, at least by her, in the way Auchincloss wanted it done. He was old, irritable, irrational, and hard. Almost all the neighbors were set against him, and naturally did not take ...

— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey

... by the children to be, Christ: early on Christmas morning he called, knocking loudly at the door, and (having received his instructions) left presents for the good and a rod for the bad. Those who have since been in Germany have found this custom relinquished; it was considered profane and irrational. Yet they have not found the children better, nor the mothers more careful of their offspring; they have not found their devotion more fervent, their faith more strong, nor their morality ...

— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... which Mr. Port labored in his dealings with his niece was his inability—due to his Philadelphia habit of mind—to keep up with the exceptionally rapid flow of her ideas. On the present occasion, while he still was engaged in consideration of the irrational proposition that he should court the desperate misery that attends a bilious man at sea by as good as asking to be taken on a yacht voyage, he suddenly found his ideas twisted off into another direction by the reference to his sister's ...

— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier

... Opinion that a Man may naturally know enough to attack or defend himself, without the Assistance of Art: Man, tho' the only reasonable Creature, finds himself deprived of what irrational Creatures naturally possess; and he requires for his Improvement the Assistance and Practice of others; the grand Art of War, and that of using the Sword, which has been practised thro' so many Ages, still find new Inventions; and it may be said, that as there is no Place, in whatever ...

— The Art of Fencing - The Use of the Small Sword • Monsieur L'Abbat

... rule of policy strong enough to counteract the benefits of extended patronage enjoyed during wars by corrupt ministers; to allay the puerile love of glory cherished by weak princes; or to subdue the demoniacal passions and irrational prejudices artfully excited by rulers, and too ...

— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... not seem to Americans a reasonable explanation of the present actions of Germany and Austria-Hungary, except so far as irrational panic can be said to be an explanation. Against possible, though not probable, Russian aggression, a firm defensive alliance of all Western Europe would be a much better protection than the single might of Germany. It were easy to imagine also two new "buffer" States—a reconstructed ...

— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... for him! He, too, might have discovered what Byron did; for were not his errors avenged upon him within, more terribly even than without? His cries are like the wails of a child, inarticulate, peevish, irrational; and yet his pain fills his whole being, blackens the very face of nature to him: but he will not confess himself in the wrong. Once only, if we recollect rightly, the truth flashes across him for a moment, and the ...

— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... discipline enables them to achieve great results? All discipline is in one sense narrow. Quaker quietude and retirement probably conserved mental energy instead of dissipating it. In an age of superstition and irrational religion, their minds were free and unhampered, and it was the dominant rational tone of their thought that enabled science to ...

— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher

... the failure to do this at the last session of Congress are well known and deeply to be regretted. With the opening prospects of increased prosperity and national greatness which the acquisition of these rich and extensive territorial possessions affords, how irrational it would be to forego or to reject these advantages by the agitation of a domestic question which is coeval with the existence of our Government itself, and to endanger by internal strifes, geographical divisions, and heated contests for political power, or for any ...

— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... contortions and consolidations of visage, squintings and blinkings and upcastings of eyes.... Then, too, the discretion assumed by these Hogarthic studies of selecting the tune and verses to be sung makes the psalmody, instead of an integral and affecting portion of the service, as distracting and irrational an episode as the jigs and country dances scraped between the acts of a tragedy.'[1164] There would be no difficulty, he thought, in getting educated persons to discharge the office for little remuneration or none, if it were not for the troublesome and often disagreeable parish ...

— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... skin there show a bright spot, the size of half a bean, is he clean or is he unclean?" Moses: "Unclean." "And," continued Korah, "if the spot spread and cover all the skin of him, is he then clean or unclean?" Moses: "Clean." "Laws so irrational," said Korah, "cannot possibly trace their origin from God. The Torah that thou didst teach to Israel is not therefore God's work, but thy work, hence art thou no prophet and Aaron is no high ...

— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... he continued, "those who pursue philosophy rightly, study to die; and to them, of all men, death is least formidable. Judge from this. Since they altogether hate the body and desire to keep the soul by itself, would it not be irrational if, when this comes to pass, they should be afraid and grieve, and not be glad to go to that place where, on their arrival, they may hope to obtain that which they longed for throughout life? But ...

— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato

... battens, as must also his mercenary soldiery, on the citizens; and our unhappy Demos finds that it has jumped out of the reek into the fire. Now our democratical man was swayed by the devices and moods of the moment; his son will be swayed by the most irrational and most bestial of his appetites; be bully and tyrant, while slave of his own lusts. Your thorough blackguard of every species comes of this type, and the worst of all is he who achieves the tyranny of a state. See, then, how, even as the tyrannic state is the most utterly enslaved, so ...

— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... I am too gloomy and irrational. Paolo must be right. I always had These moody hours and dark presentiments, Without mischances following after them. The camp is my abode. A neighing steed, A fiery onset, and a stubborn fight, Rouse my dull blood, and tire my body down To quiet slumbers when the day is o'er, And night above ...

— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker

... rational corresponding to three out of four primary passions—against delight was to be set joy; against grief there was nothing to be set, for that arose from the presence of ill which would rather never attach to the sage. Grief was the irrational conviction that one ought to afflict oneself where there was no occasion for it. The ideal of the Stoics was the unclouded serenity of Socrates of whom Xanthippe declared that he had always the same face whether on leaving the house In the morning ...

— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock

... Brutus, a young man who had saved his life by taking advantage of the fact that a madman was esteemed sacred by the Romans, and assuming an appearance of stupidity [Footnote: Brutus in Latin means irrational, dull, stupid, brutish, which senses our word "brute" preserves.] at a time when his tyrannical uncle had put his brother to death that he might appropriate his wealth. Upon hearing the question of the king, the oracle said that the portent foretold the fall of Tarquin. The sons then asked who ...

— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... SCRAPS OF POETRY, &c., by ROBERT BURNESS: a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping it; but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty, and unbounded good-will to every creature, rational and irrational.—As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of life; but as I believe they are really his own, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of ...

— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... product of ages of taboo and religious mysticism. Home training and social pressure unite to force woman into the mould wrought out in the ages when she has been the object of superstitious fear to man and also a part of his property to utilize as he willed. Being thus the product of wholly irrational forces, it is little wonder that only in recent years has she had any opportunity to show what she in her inmost soul desired, and what capabilities ...

— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... thrilled by the touch of a companion whose heart beats against and consonantly with mine, I catch glimpses of the possibilities of a free life of the spirit when it shall be released from earth and gravitation, and I conjecture the breadth of a future existence. This will only seem irrational to such as have squeezed out their souls flat between the hard edges of dollars, or have buried them among theologic texts which they are too self-wise to understand. History and the experience of ...

— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... and stood wearily by the window, too discouraged even to remove her hat. The shorthand was a failure; the whole course was a failure. She had not the instinct for plodding, for the meticulous attention to detail that those absurd, irrational lines and hooks and ...

— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... involving so many and so great social changes ever made more rapid progress. You and your fellow-laborers are truly to be congratulated on the full and abundant harvest your faithful seed-sowing has brought to humanity. The irrational sentiment, based upon the methods and customs of barbarous times, is rapidly yielding to reason. The world is learning—women are learning—that character, even womanly character, does not suffer from too much breadth ...

— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... of 2Samuel (xxi.-xxiv.) are, admittedly, an appendix of very peculiar structure. The thread of xxi. 1-14 is continued in xxiv. 1-25, but in the interval between the two passages occurs xxi. 15-xxiii. 39, in a very irrational manner, perhaps wholly due to chance. In this interposed passage itself, again, the quite similar lists xxi. 15-22 and xxiii. 8-39 are very closely connected; and the two songs, xxii. 1-51, xxiii. 1-7, are thus an interpolation within an interpolation. This want of order is imitated by the ...

— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... study to perform good actions, and shrink from deeds of lawlessness and sedition, and you will have nothing to fear from your Governors. I know that some fear, however irrational, is felt in the presence of the Judge; but as far as my purpose can avail, with the help of God and the rulers of the State[748], I can promise you that all things shall be done with justice ...

— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... believe all the quaint and romantic and inconsistent and impossible things that come to your knowledge concerning the Village. That is its special and sacred privilege: to be unexpected and always—yes, always without exception—in the spirit of its irrational and sympathetic role. It needs Kipling's ambiguous "And when the thing that couldn't has occurred" for a motto. And yet—and yet—like all true nonsense, this nonsense is rooted in a beautiful and ...

— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... and which possibly may not exist at all. Nor will we think so meanly of the taste, the good feeling, and the good sense of these men, as to believe that they think themselves at all flattered by any admiration founded on such an irrational contempt. They well know that Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, have been admired, together with Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin, and they do not themselves desire to be put upon a separate list. ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... to inquire what are the true ends of society and government? Man is a gregarious animal—a social being. He may exist in solitude, but he cannot enjoy life: he cannot perfect his nature. Those who have watched and studied closely the habits of those irrational animals, who live in communities, as the ant, the bee, and the beaver, have observed not only a settled system and subordination, but the existence of some wonderful faculty, like articulate speech, by which communication takes place from one to another; a power essential to order. Man, ...

— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood

... precedent, and quoted the Roman supper; but it ought to be recollected that those suppers were at three o'clock in the afternoon, and should be a subject of contempt, instead of imitation, in Grosvenor Square. Women, 180however, are not quite so irrational as men, in London, for they generally sit down to a substantial lunch about three or four; if men would do the same, the meal at eight might be relieved of many of its weighty dishes, and conversation would be a gainer by it; for it ...

— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... be in the Book. About half a Century ago, there seem'd a degree of incredulity as to the possibility of Courage in a Taylor. ELLIOT'S LIGHT HORSE, at that time compos'd of Taylor-Volunteers. effectually overcame that prejudice. It remain'd to dissolve another still more irrational prepossession, that a Taylor cannot be a Poet. And this Volume will be a victorious Host against an Army of such Prejudices. Indeed the Force is greater than such a Combat requires: for stubborn as other Prejudices may still be, our litterary ...

— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield

... century the Handelian type of opera was the laughingstock of musical critics; they wondered how any audiences could have endured to sit through it, and why the fashionable society of London should have neglected native music for what Dr. Johnson defined as "an exotic and irrational entertainment." The modern reader's impression of an Italian opera of Handel's days is a story about some ancient or mediaeval hero whose very name is often to most people unknown; if he happens to be someone as famous as Julius ...

— Handel • Edward J. Dent

... quite poisonous to the human system as impure water; and seeing that the noxious qualities of the latter are caused by animalcules, and that the method used for purifying infected air are those most generally destructive to insect life, it is not irrational to conclude that the poisonous qualities of bad water and bad air ...

— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... she says in her diary, 'that the wheat appeared finer than any I have seen in England, and totally free from weeds.' And a few months later an anonymous English traveller, passing the same way, wrote: 'In so infant a settlement, it would have been irrational to expect that abundance which bursts the granaries, and lows in the stalls of more cultivated countries. There was, however, that kind of appearance which indicated that with economy and ...

— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace

... least, was more the offspring of greed and hope than reason. It was to temporise, to be wary and watch the Master, to be silent and supply no further aliment to his suspicions, and to depend entirely (as well as I make out) on the chance that their victim was as greedy, hopeful, and irrational as themselves, and might, after all, betray his life ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to an irrational anger at his words. "Old fool! She has only fainted," I returned. "Get me ...

— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... this for a certain vulgar quality, with a vulgar little name of five letters. No one could have less of that than Narcissus. He was often, on the contrary, quite painfully diffident. No, it was not 'cheek,' Reader; it was a kind of irrational innocence. I don't think it ever occurred to him, till the bills came in at the half-years, what 'charge it to my account' really meant. Perhaps it was because, poor lad, he had so small a practical ...

— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... respite in suicide, but not thus might escape a father's heavy accounting. He has no thought of such evasive shift. In all the worlds, it seems to Pierre, there is none but he to pity Paul. But for the irrational hope of in some way ministering to stresses of this afflicted son, that guilty, wretched parent would, with bared brow and unflinching front, ...

— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee

... Translator, I can find no such case alluded to in the chapter. But Caelius Aurelianus mentions two modes of treatment employed by Asclepiades, into both of which the use of wine entered, as being "in the highest degree irrational and dangerous." [Caelius Aurel. De Morb. Acut. et Chron. lib. I. cap. xv. not xvi. Amsterdam. ...

— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... yourself than with Biscoe, suddenly take offence with me because I didn't join you in standing between a good man and his dinner; while I, with a spoilt meal of my own for a grievance, choose to feel an irrational concern for the Master's, turn round on my comrade who has spoilt that, and ask, What the devil is wrong with Protestantism, that it has never an ounce of tact? Or why, if it aims to be unworldly, must it always overshoot its mark and ...

— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... race. Colleges and universities, established and conducted by the Freedmen's Bureau and Northern churches and societies, sprang up like mushrooms, and the teachers, ignorant, fanatical, without self-poise, proceeded to make all possible mischief. It is irrational, cruel, to hold the Negro, under such strange conditions, responsible for all the ill consequences of bad education, unwise teachers, reconstruction villainies, ...

— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... is that, as things now are, we Males have to lead a kind of bi-lingual, and I may almost say bi-mental, existence. With Women, we speak of "love", "duty", "right", "wrong", "pity", "hope", and other irrational and emotional conceptions, which have no existence, and the fiction of which has no object except to control feminine exuberances; but among ourselves, and in our books, we have an entirely different vocabulary and I may ...

— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott

... of navigation never steered a ship, so the law of gravity never moved a planet. A bare order or law of nature was not the cause of nature. To confound order or law with cause is to speak unadvisedly—unintelligently; it is perfectly irrational. Would you cut off executive authority in a government and continue its existence without a person or society to exercise, judge and ...

— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880

... the Departments. The fifty thousand were in their turn to choose five thousand, who should be eligible to places in the Government and the Legislature. The actual appointments were to be made, however, not by the electors, but by the Executive. With the irrational multitude thus deprived of the power to bring back its old oppressors, priests, royalists, and nobles might safely do their worst. By way of still further precaution, Sieyes proposed that every Frenchman who had been elected to the Legislature since 1789 should ...

— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... safe to discuss religion with the Semples. Their God (whom they have inherited intact from their remote Puritan ancestors) is a narrow, irrational, unjust, mean, revengeful, bigoted Person. Thank heaven I don't inherit God from anybody! I am free to make mine up as I wish Him. He's kind and sympathetic and imaginative and forgiving and understanding—and He has a ...

— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster

... Piece of Good Breeding, which reigns among the Coxcombs of the Town, has not yet made its way into the Country; and as it is impossible for such an irrational way of Conversation to last long among a People that make any Profession of Religion, or Show of Modesty, if the Country Gentlemen get into it they will certainly be left in the Lurch. Their Good-breeding will come too late to them, and they will be thought ...

— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... to do with her?" he groaned. "She cut off her hair?" Mrs. Richie repeated, astounded; "but why? How perfectly irrational!" ...

— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland

... consequences. It was not inspired by the "holy glee" with which in Wordsworth's sonnet Liberty fights against a tyrant, but by the faltering boldness, the drifting, purposeless unresolve of statesmen who did not desire it, and by the irrational violence of a Press which did not understand it. It was not a necessary war; its avowed object would have been attained within a few weeks or months by bloodless European concert. It was not a glorious war; crippled by an incompatible alliance and governed by the Evil ...

— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... ill-considered, ludicrous, ridiculous, chimerical, ill-judged, mistaken, senseless, erroneous, inconclusive, monstrous, stupid, false, incorrect, nonsensical, unreasonable, foolish, infatuated, paradoxical, wild. ill-advised, irrational, preposterous, ...

— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... your so thinking; but, if I may form any judgment from your father's manner, I must suppose that you were mistaken. You will understand that I do not say this as any reproach to you. Quite the contrary. I think your father is irrational; and you may well have failed to anticipate ...

— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... seen her then and been told that she was doing this remarkable thing for a woman she had never seen before that day, named Mary O'Shaughnessy, and also for a certain red-haired person of whom it had never heard, it would have considered Jane quite irrational. But it is entirely probable that Jane became really rational that night for the first time in her ...

— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the not irrational belief that as "either sex alone is half itself," and "each fulfils defects in each," there was created for every male soul some feminine spirit, whose heart was capable of responding to the finest pulses of his; one who could meet his largest requirements; one who could alone render his ...

— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... controversy suffice of themselves (if proof were needed) to establish the truth of this assertion. The rhetorical emphasis laid by Home Rulers on the baseness of the arts which carried the Act of Union is, as an argument in favour of repealing the Act, little else than irrational. The assumed infamy of Pitt does not prove the alleged wisdom of Gladstone; and to urge the repeal of an Act which has stood for nearly a century, because it was carried by corruption, is in the eye of reason as absurd as to question ...

— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... agreed her fate had been quickly settled, it seems to me that (accepting the magical and supernatural elements on which the whole thing rests) it was perfectly reasonable. I fancy that Wagner, after some years with his very stupid wife, Minna, was getting thoroughly angry with the irrational curiosity of women and the idiotic demands which they make on their life-mates. Anyhow, though he gives Elsa some very beautiful music to sing, he does not spare her in drawing her character. It is one of the few characters he did attempt to draw, ...

— Wagner • John F. Runciman

... laugh that seemed to her the first irrational flaw in something exquisitely reasonable, and ran down the dark stairs. She attended imaginatively to the sound of his footsteps; as on her first excited night in country lodgings the summer before she had sat up in bed listening to horse's hooves ...

— The Judge • Rebecca West

... girls! these wicked girls!" Mrs. Corfield had said with a mother's irrational anger when speaking of the circumstance to her husband. "We bring up our boys only for them to take from us. As soon as they begin to be some kind of comfort and to repay the anxiety of their early days, then a wretched little huzzy steps in and makes one's life ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... Wells once take his principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as a ...

— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... culture, and not to any intention, on his part, of treating God and the angels with levity. The whole aim of the story is a moral and religious one. The narrator is trying to show that sympathy and mercy are better than selfish ambition, and that war is not only immoral but irrational. The conversation between God, the angels, and the Devil is a mere prologue, intended to bring Napoleon and Ivan-angel on the stage and lay the foundation of the plot. The story-teller's keen sense of fun and humor is shown in many ...

— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof

... society rose before Alexey Alexandrovitch's imagination. "Daryalov, Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin, Dram.... Yes, even Dram, such an honest, capable fellow...Semyonov, Tchagin, Sigonin," Alexey Alexandrovitch remembered. "Admitting that a certain quite irrational ridicule falls to the lot of these men, yet I never saw anything but a misfortune in it, and always felt sympathy for it," Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, though indeed this was not the fact, and he had never felt ...

— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... power to alter their purposes, and in that fact we have an essential point of difference between eccentricity and insanity. We may regard their conduct as singular, because they made an unusual disposition of their property; but it was no more irrational than if the one had left his estate to the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," and the other had devoted his to ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various

... persons immediately concerned as an eccentric mistake. Even Colonel Hitchcock, to whom Louise was almost infallible, could not trust himself to discuss with her, her decision to marry Dr. Sommers. It was all a sign of the irrational drift of things that seemed to thwart his energetic, honorable life. Even Sommers's attitude in the frank talk the two men had about the marriage offended the old merchant. Sommers had met his distant references to money matters ...

— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... victims of a quick and powerful contagion which spread the insane spirit of violence at a rapid rate, affecting many during the course of the day, who in the early part of the morning had not partaken of its influence. To no other principle than this can we attribute the wanton and irrational outrages of many of the people. Every one acquainted with such awful visitations must know that their terrific realities cause them, by wild influences that run through the whole masses, to forget all the decencies and restraints of ordinary life, until fear and shame, and becoming respect for ...

— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton

... of course, this mutual antagonism was racial, and therefore natural; and the irrational violence of prejudice and malignity developed at a later day was inevitable with the ever-increasing conflict of interests. No foreigner really capable of estimating the conditions could have seriously entertained any hope of a rapprochement. The barriers of racial feeling, ...

— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... Jocelyn had not carefully gauged his syringe, and the over-amount of morphia thrown into his system so stimulated him that his words appeared exceedingly irrational to the young man, whose judgment was based on unusual shrewdness and common-sense. He was greatly puzzled by the sudden change in his companion. It was evident that he had not been drinking, for his breath was untainted and his utterance was natural. But his face was flushed, and ...

— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... danger of losing the well-knit organization of a common life; second, the tendency to reduce variety in national civilization, to assimilate all to a common type and thus to discourage individuality, and produce a "remorseless mechanism—vast, irrational;" third, the evils arising from the fact that waves of emotion, the passion of the mob, tend in our day ...

— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... to whom the nursery-maid and the overtaxed parent are so apt to appeal. You stab your children with such a God and he poisons all their lives. For many of us the word "God" first came into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational restraint, as Bogey, as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye. God Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to leave Fear to mind her charges and enforce her disciplines, while she goes ...

— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... what it is in anything that makes us distinguish beauty in it, cannot now be determined. It will be enough for us to know that literature makes a large appeal to a sense of the beautiful in us, a sense not fortuitous and irrational, though varying, but normal and almost universal, dependent upon natural laws of development. Truth is also difficult of definition, but we may understand that when out of experience, as through a process of reasoning, we have reached ...

— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith

... utmost to keep it from their knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating influence in life. The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life. They will read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they ...

— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... series, whence comes this correspondence? Why should knowledge illuminate the object. The doctrine of the Vijnana vadins, that it is knowledge alone that shows itself both as knowledge and as its object, is also irrational, for how can knowledge divide itself as subject and object in such a manner that knowledge as object should require the knowledge as subject to illuminate it? If this be the case we might again expect that knowledge as knowledge should also require another knowledge to manifest it and ...

— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... as we move forward, are still at a greater distance from each other. As a question becomes more complicated and involved, and extends to a greater number of relations, disagreement of opinion will always be multiplied; not because we are irrational, but because we are finite beings, furnished with different kinds of knowledge, exerting different degrees of attention, one discovering consequences which escape another, none taking in the whole concatenation of causes ...

— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... away. I mistrust her as I would a trap, and I long for her as I long for a sherbet when I am thirsty. I yield to her charm, and I only approach her with the apprehension that I would feel concerning a man who was known to be a skillful thief. To her presence I have an irrational impulse toward belief in her possible purity and a very reasonable mistrust of her not less probable trickery. I feel myself in contact with an abnormal being, beyond the pale of natural laws, an exquisite or detestable creature—I don't ...

— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant

... science. Through the whole Hindoo Pantheon you will look in vain for anything resembling those beautiful and majestic forms which stood in the shrines of ancient Greece. All is hideous, and grotesque, and ignoble. As this superstition is of all superstitions the most irrational, and of all superstitions the most inelegant, so is it of all superstitions the most immoral. Emblems of vice are objects of public worship. Acts of vice are acts of public worship. The courtesans are as much a part of the establishment of the temple, as much ministers ...

— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... conceived for Baron Justus's charming daughter had become a species of passion. Under any other circumstances, the novelist, who delighted in such cases, would not have failed to meditate ironically on that feeling, easy enough of explanation. There was much more irrational instinct in it than Montfanon himself suspected. The old leaguer would not have been logical if he had not had in point of race an inquisition partiality, and the mere suspicion of Jewish origin should have prejudiced ...

— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... limited monarchy. Aristotle, if he had lived in our day, would have supported the constitutional government. But, with all deference to the Stagirite, a government which sacrifices the life of the proletaire to that of the proprietor is quite as irrational as one which supports the former by robbing the latter; neither of them deserve the support of a free man, ...

— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... Looking into the heart of the thing, one may perhaps call that of Burns a still uglier phenomenon, betokening still sadder imperfections in mankind's ways, than the Scandinavian method itself! To fall into mere unreasoning deliquium of love and admiration, was not good; but such unreasoning, nay irrational supercilious no-love at all is perhaps still worse!—It is a thing forever changing, this of Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is ...

— Sacred Books of the East • Various

... which even reason could not dispel, that whatever secret tragedy or wrong had signalized this house, its perpetration had taken place in this very room. It was a fancy, but it held, and under its compelling if irrational influence, I made a second and still more minute survey of the room to which this conviction had imparted ...

— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green

... doctrines, above what some other learned Protestants have said, is not so much by way of assertion or justification of them, as to shew what reasons they may justly be thought to proceed upon, and so not to be go irrational or impious as they are ordinarily accounted; and this only in order to the peace of the christian world, that we may have as much charity to others and not as high animosities, live with all men as sweetly ...

— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler

... algebra is the algebraic theory at number, which is devised with the view of removing these difficulties. The harmony between arithmetical and geometrical measurement, which was disturbed by the Greek geometers on the discovery of irrational numbers, is restored by an unlimited supply of the causes ...

— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... be shipped for New Orleans and a market. But Mr. Parker had no ulterior motive when he avowed his regret that the Constitution had failed to prohibit the importation of slaves from Africa, and hoped that the duty he proposed would prevent, in some degree, a traffic which he pronounced "irrational and inhuman." It would have been difficult to have found a Virginian of that day who would not have taken down his shotgun on hearing that there were miscreants prowling about his kitchen doors in the hope of buying up the strongest young ...

— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay

... display the flatness and triviality which mar by no means all but too many of their English imitations. Some of the faults which are part cause of these others they indeed have—the apparently irrational catalogues of birds and beasts, stuffs and vegetables; the long moralisings; the religious passages sometimes (as it may seem to mere moderns) interposed in very odd contexts; the endless descriptions of battles and single combats; the absence ...

— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... tragedy of thought inspired by continual and never-satisfied meditation on human destiny and the dark perplexity of the events of this world, and calculated to call forth the very same meditation in the minds of the spectators. This enigmatical work resembles those irrational equations in which a fraction of unknown magnitude always remains, that will in no way admit of solution. Much has been said, much written, on this piece, and yet no thinking head who anew expresses himself on it, will ...

— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... elicited a genus and difference out of the material elements of thought, we are enabled, without any further appeal to experience, to base thereon a division by dichotomy. Thus when man has been defined as a rational animal, we have at once suggested to us a division of animal into rational and irrational. ...

— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... external, visible acts of bodily performance, but they were retained so far as they were spiritual, the names remaining, but the things being changed. For the Saviour commands us to present offerings, though not of irrational animals or of incense, but spiritual offerings—praise, glory, and thanksgiving, and also liberality and good deeds toward the neighbor. He would have us circumcised with a circumcision not of the flesh, but spiritual and of the heart; and have us observe the Sabbath, for he wishes us to ...

— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... joined to reasons of self-love and a real passion which had no means of satisfaction except by marriage, led Paul on to an irrational love, which he had, however, the good sense to keep to himself. He even endeavored to study Mademoiselle Evangelista as a man should who desires not to compromise his future life; for the words of his friend de Marsay did sometimes rumble in his ears like a warning. But, in the first ...

— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac

... and the curious, seeing that he appeared to be the more irrational of the two, and far more likely to get into mischief, set off in pursuit. The skipper crossed the road, and began gently to ...

— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs

... different parts of the world, but they forget to mention "the moving why they did it." The consequence is that, in this age of instantaneous communication, we know what is going on in other countries, but it seems very irrational. The rational elements have been lost ...

— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... Kickapoo, or Hottentot. Of course we can't afford to take these structures down under a bonus of five hundred per cent upon the prime cost of our lot and plaster. Can we? I ask the question. I ask it of business men. It would be irrational to suppose that we can. And yet there was a rascally corporation which asked me to do this very thing—this very thing! I did not reply to their absurd proposition, of course; but I felt it a duty to go that ...

— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... incense has been in use for a vast period of time, and that the practice of burning it is very widespread. They have been so familiarized with the custom and certain more or less vague excuses for its perpetuation that they show no realization of how strangely irrational and devoid of obvious meaning the procedure is. The reasons usually given in explanation of its use are for the most part merely paraphrases of the traditional meanings that in the course of history have come to be attached to the ritual act or the ...

— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... Haim's daughter or any other girl, and to publish or conceal the betrothal as he chose and as she chose. Yes, useless! He felt, inexplicably, a criminal. He felt that he had committed an enormity. It was not a matter of argument; it was a matter of instinct. The old man's frightful and irrational resentment was his condemnation. He could not ...

— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... not attacking the orthodoxy of the Auld Lights from the bulwarks of any other creed. His criticism was altogether destructive. From his own conception of a wise and loving God he satirised what he conceived to be their irrational and inhuman conception of Deity, whose attitude towards mankind was assuredly not that of a father to his children. Burns's God was a God of love; the god they worshipped was the creation of their creed, a god of election. It is quite true that ...

— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... certainly every man who ever attempted to write under the influence of an alcoholic stimulant knows to be false. Drugs—including alcohol—which are supposed to stimulate what we might term a rational imagination, only stimulate an irrational fancy. They seem to the person affected to cause a play of imagination, but they really produce only a state of nervous action which causes their subject to feel appreciation of otherwise trifling mental pictures that in themselves are flimsy nothings. Let a man so affected try to impart to another ...

— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... Paul, knowing that he was a friend of the sculptor, and also because the name of Vedrine is one of the two or three which the fashionable world has chosen to honour in spite of its natural and implanted tastes, and regards with an irrational admiration by way of pretending to artistic originality. That the coarse rude figure should not be put on dear Herbert's tomb she was determined, but she was at a loss for ...

— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... the "New Era" there has been such prophesying of: here we all are, arrived at last;—and it is by no means the land flowing with milk and honey we were led to expect! Very much the reverse. A terrible new country this: no neighbors in it yet, that I can see, but irrational flabby monsters (philanthropic and other) of the giant species; hyenas, laughing hyenas, predatory wolves; probably devils, blue (or perhaps blue-and-yellow) devils, as St. Guthlac found in Croyland long ago. A huge untrodden haggard country, the "chaotic battle-field of Frost ...

— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... the nativities of his sons; and what is remarkable, his prediction relating to his son Charles, was accomplished. The incident being of so late a date, one might hope that it would have been cleared up; but, if it be a fact, it must be allowed that it forms a rational exultation for its irrational adepts. Astrologers were frequently, as may easily be understood, put to their wit's end when their predictions did not come to pass. Great winds were foretold, by one of the craft, about the year 1586. No unusual storms, however, happened. Bodin, to save the reputation ...

— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... beautiful splendor, and there is nothing back of it. This we practice toward our friends and those who do us good and give us pleasure with goods, honor and favor, or who do not offend us with words nor with deeds. Such meekness irrational animals have, lions and snakes, Jews, Turks, knaves, murderers, bad women. These are all content and gentle when men do what they want, or let them alone; and yet there are not a few who, deceived by such worthless meekness, cover over their anger and excuse it, saying: "I would indeed not ...

— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther

... divines there appeared one of eminence who declared against this theory: Dr. Shuckford, chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty George II, in the preface to his work on The Creation and Fall of Man, pronounced the whole theory "romantic and irrational." He goes on to say: "The original of our speaking was from God; not that God put into Adam's mouth the very sounds which he designed he should use as the names of things; but God made Adam with the powers of a man; he had the use of an understanding to form notions ...

— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... part of the output is to raise the charges on it. This comes about without much aid from competition, for when all producers find their capacity overtaxed, they have no motive for contending sharply for business. Underbidding has for its purpose attracting business from rivals and is an irrational operation when all have orders enough and to spare. Competition is largely in abeyance when the business any one can have ...

— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark

... all the doormats on the staircase of her home. Other children feel themselves forced to utter certain words or to go through certain rhythmical movements. They fully understand that the fear in their mind is irrational and devoid of foundation, but they are unable to expel it. Often it is hugged as a jealous secret, so that the childish suffering is only revealed to others years afterwards, when adult age has brought freedom from it. We will do ...

— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron

... special and often fatal handicap. The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped. But though an idea that is true is thus not likely to prevail, an idea that is attacked enjoys a great advantage. The evidence behind it is now supported by sympathy, the sporting instinct, ...

— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... Harrow you might see the Scottish Express on the North-Western main line. For a moment I did not realise that the train was German, that the purpose of its journey was to kill me and my fellow-men. But it is too easy to sentimentalise, to labour the stark fact that war is a grotesque, irrational absurdity.... ...

— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson

... exalted and impressionable, a natural mystic, she had probably always been, far more so in temperament, indeed, than her husband; but although she left home on that journey a frail and heartsick woman, she returned a different creature altogether, blurred and confused in mind, with clouded memory and irrational fancies. ...

— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... judgment so quickly that the two operations cannot be distinguished. Such decisions may appear to be precipitate or impulsive, but they are not really so. But the young man who has the disease of fear in his brain cells will act on an impulse which is purely irrational, because it is based on a blind terror and not on ...

— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook

... decided Bart. "The damage to the statue was bad enough, but breaking him up as my appearance did just now is the limit. I hope Mr. Leslie doesn't hear of my unfortunate escapade, and I hope the colonel doesn't undertake to hurt my chances. He's an irrational firebrand when he takes a dislike to anybody, ...

— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman

... mere tools, with which they can build up a pedestal for their solitary statue, and who sacrifice every feeling which should sway humanity, and every high work which genius should really achieve, to the short-sighted gratification of an irrational and outrageous selfism. As for my manners, I flattered myself that they advanced in measure with my mind, although I already emulated Napoleon. I soon overcame the fear which attended my first experiments in society, ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various

... dialectically required, must be pinned in and kept and consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say anything of the sort.[69] Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational, and NOT to be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final system of truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality, a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if ...

— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... of the Whigs! Behold the only Republic that can be established in England except by force! And who can doubt the swift and stern termination of institutions introduced by so unnatural and irrational a process. I would address myself to the English Radicals. I do not mean those fine gentlemen or those vulgar adventurers who, in this age of quackery, may sail into Parliament by hoisting for the nonce the false colours of the movement; but I mean that ...

— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli

... seem that Christ worked miracles unfittingly on irrational creatures. For brute animals are more noble than plants. But Christ worked a miracle on plants as when the fig-tree withered away at His command (Matt. 21:19). Therefore Christ should have worked miracles also ...

— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... massacres they have been charged with, and (setting aside partiality for our own countrymen) allow them to be carefully examined, it will be found that we have invariably been the aggressors; and when we have given serious cause of offence, can we be so irrational as to express astonishment that a savage should seek revenge? The last massacre was that of "The Boyd's" crew; every impartial person who reads the account of that melancholy transaction must acknowledge the unfortunate captain was most ...

— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle

... cruelties may be exercised quite unconsciously when cruelty has become a habit, and that at the same time, the mind may feel great sympathy and commiseration towards other persons and even towards irrational animals, is illustrated in the case of Tameriane the Great. In his Life, written by himself, he speaks with the greatest sincerity and tenderness of his grief at having accidentally crushed an ant; and yet he ordered melted lead to be poured down the throats of certain persons who drank ...

— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... in man is the inspiration of all human progress. Faith in man, I say. Faith sees something which the eye does not see. Faith sees something which the reason does not perceive. Faith is not irrational, but it perceives a transcendent truth, over beyond that which the sense perceives. Faith is always intermixed with hope and with a great expectation, either with a hope because it sees something which is not yet but will be, or else with a hope because it sees something which is not yet ...

— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser

... found dead without marks of violence," Graham said, "I might consider such a possibility, irrational as ...

— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp

... whole sky is overshadowed with gloom. On such a night the spirit sinks, cheerfulness abandons the heart, and an indefinable anxiety depresses it. This impression is not peculiar to man, who, on such occasions, is only subject to the same instinctive apprehension which is known to influence the irrational animals. The clouds are gathering in black masses; but there is, nevertheless, no opening between them through which the sky is visible. The gloom is unbroken, and so is the silence; and a person might imagine that the great operations of Nature had been suspended and stood ...

— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence, again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of the rogueries of ...

— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... and may altogether misrepresent his native capacities. The protest of human nature against the world and its oppressions is the strong side of every rebellion; it was the moral side of utilitarianism, of the rebellion against irrational morality. ...

— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana

... and we may perhaps add the Anglo-French school of book-collecting, works on lines which to a normal lover of books must at first appear rather mysterious and strange, if not absolutely irrational. The closest analogy which it is in our power to suggest is the almost parallel sentiment and policy in regard to other branches of inquiry—china, furniture, numismatics. The Frenchman and his English disciple have no respect whatever as ...

— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... is not irrational to expect that Government, or some of the varied Local Authorities, will assist in the working out of a plan which, in so marked a manner, will relieve the rates and taxes or ...

— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... carries him past the courtesies of equal speech, to pour out the vials of prophetic rebuke, when he contemplates the hopeless struggle of those who are the salt of the earth, "amidst the throng and noises of vulgar and irrational men" (Tenure of Kings), and he rates them to their face as "owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs" (Sonnet xii.); not because they will not listen to him, but "because they "hate learning more than toad or ...

— Milton • Mark Pattison

... to make the playing of his part any the easier. It filled him in fact with a continual fear of giving himself away by doing something he had done before. It was really a most irrational fear; but there it was. Under the circumstances his sustained babble and blink were ...

— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston

... nations who have embraced Christianity, can by no means be called the inheritance or subjects of Jesus, since they have since the days of Constantine and the Counsel of Nice renounced his doctrines, and perverted his religion into "a fabulous, irrational and blasphemous superstition,"[fn29] for as much as all of them, except a handful of Unitarian Christians, are worshippers of three Divine Beings united by an ineffable union; and by far the greater part of them ...

— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English

... nature. But to diminish the activity of these forces, by copious depletion of the body, to be followed by a regimen so severe as to withhold, almost absolutely, the nourishment and support nature demands, is, in my view, to say the least, irrational." ...

— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... not killed or maimed for life in a railway accident, had begun by treating a delay of one hour in all her arrangements for the evening as a trifle. But she had soon felt that, though a trifle, it was really very upsetting and annoying. It gave birth to irrational yet real forebodings as to the non-success of her little party. It meant that the little party had "started badly." And then her other grand-nephew, Louis Fores, did not arrive. He had been invited for supper at seven, and should have appeared at five minutes to seven at the latest. But ...

— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... us, there seems, through the will of Deity—for to what else can we refer it?—a fixed, invariable connection between what we term cause and effect. Nor do we demand of any class of mere effects, in the inanimate or irrational world, that they should regulate themselves otherwise than the causes which produce them have determined. The roe and the tiger pursue, unquestioned, the instincts of their several natures; the cork rises, and the stone sinks; and no one thinks of calling either ...

— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton

... money is a disease. My saving and hoarding as I do is irrational, and I know it. It pains me to pay five cents for a streetcar ride, or a quarter of a dollar for a dinner. My pleasure in accumulating property is morbid, but I have felt it from the time I was a foot peddler ...

— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald

... this subject were foreign to those of his party, and notwithstanding his political connection with, and friendship for Fox, he rose from his seat greatly agitated, and denounced the revolution as "an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, tyrannical democracy." In his speech, Burke, after paying some high compliments to the genius and character of Fox, and ...

— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... important years. It is at this time that he lays the foundation for all later learning, that he forms his habits of study and his attitude toward education, and that his life is given the bent for all its later development. Nothing can be more irrational, therefore, than to put the most untrained and inexperienced teachers in charge of the younger children. The fallacious notion that "anyone can teach little children" has borne tragic fruit in the stagnation and mediocrity of many lives whose powers ...

— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts

... had not thought seriously of matrimony. A wife and children he regarded as desirable appendages for declining years—for the quiet and shade of that evening toward which every active man looks with such irrational confidence. But for the heat of the day—for the climb up the hill—they would be unnecessary encumbrances. Transley always took a practical view of these matters. It need hardly be stated that he had never been in love; ...

— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... directed even pagan wise men wholly to interdict swearing in ordinary conversation, or about petty matters, as an irrational and immoral practice, unworthy of sober and discreet persons. "Forbear swearing about any matter," said Plato, cited by Clem. Alex. "Avoid swearing, if you can, wholly," said Epictetus. "For money swear by no god, ...

— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow

... in bed than I was conscious of the nervous tension and depression of the weather, and the effect grew stronger as the day proceeded. It was in vain that I resisted; in vain that I set forth upon my customary morning's walk; the irrational, unchanging fury of the storm had soon beat down my strength and wrecked my temper; and I returned to the residencia, glowing with dry heat, and foul and gritty with dust. The court had a forlorn ...

— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... himself to preserve so much as his reputation in this respect; for in the first place he knew they were resolved to convict him, and in the next, he said, where there was no fault, there was no shame; that his first wife was a Socinian, an irrational creature, and was entitled to the advantages of no nation nor people because she was no Christian, and accordingly the Scripture says, with such a one have no conversation, no, not so much as to eat with them. But an appeal was lodged against him by Solomon ...

— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward

... to be a vile drudge?' I cries the fatalist. Nonsense! A man is not an irrational creature, but a reasoning being, and has something within him beyond mere brutal instinct. The greatest victory which a man can achieve is over himself, by which is meant those unruly passions which are not convenient to the time and place. David did not do this; he gave the ...

— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... nature to possess such a freedom. But in every such instance he confounds the will with one of the passive susceptibilities of the mind. Thus, for example, Collins argues that liberty would be a great imperfection, because "nothing can be more irrational and absurd than to be able to refuse our assent to what is evidently true to us, and to assent to what we see to be false." Now, all this is true, but it is not to the purpose; for no one contends that the intelligence is free in assenting to, or in dissenting ...

— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe

... them from windows. This is enough. Nobody believes that the thing would ever have been done; but the lively and repeated discussion of it shows how the feelings of the ignorant are perverted, and the passions of party-men are stimulated in Ireland, when unscrupulous leaders arise, proposing irrational projects. The consequences have been seen in Popish and Protestant fights in Ulster, and in the midnight drill of Phoenix Clubs in Munster, and in John Mitchell's passion for fat negroes in the Slave States of America. In Ireland such notions are regarded now as a delirious ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... to show, that aspirations after intellectual freedom had nothing whatever to do with the movement. Dante, who struck the Papacy as hard blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself and Luther himself, when they began their work; were far enough from any intention of meddling with even the most irrational of the dogmas of mediaeval Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to Socinus, or even to Muenzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From ...

— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... that critical Conjuncture, there happen'd to be a Dwarf, who was dumb, but not deaf, in the King's Apartment. Nobody regarded him: He was an Eye and Ear-witness of all that pass'd, and yet no more suspected than any irrational Domestic Animal. This little Dwarf had conceiv'd a peculiar Regard for Astarte and Zadig: He heard, with equal Horror and Surprize, the King's Orders to destroy them both. But how to prevent those Orders from being put into ...

— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire

... disturbed you so much? You might surely have given some hint of the cause. It is an additional reason for wishing you here. If I had, before I left New-York, sufficiently reflected on the subject, I would never have consented to this absurd and irrational mode of life. If you will come with Mr. Monroe, I will see you to New-York again; and if you have a particular aversion to the city of Philadelphia, you shall stay a day or two at Dr. Edwards's, ten miles from town, where I can spend the ...

— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... on them: a newspaper-holder with embroidered ribbons; a corner table on which stood a beer mug representing the fat body of a monk; an old chromic print showing a volunteer taking leave of his big family as he starts for the front. These things appealed to Daniel somewhat as an irrational dream. Then, taking a deep breath, he fixed his eyes on Jason Philip. In his mind's eye he looked back over many years; he saw himself standing at the fountain in Eschenbach. Round about him glistened the stones and cross beams of the houses. Jason Philip was hurrying by ...

— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... that I am acquainted with all the fiendish noises which can be made by man or machinery. The whack of heavy falling bodies, the sudden shivering splinter of chopped logs, the crystal shatter of pounded ice, the crash of a tree hurled to the earth by a hurricane, the irrational, persistent chaos of noise made by switching freight-trains, the explosion of gas, the blasting of stone, and the terrific grinding of rock upon rock which precedes the collapse—all these have been in my touch-experience, and contribute to my idea of Bedlam, of a battle, ...

— The World I Live In • Helen Keller

... confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man. But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, ...

— Moby-Dick • Melville

... about local alterations in morals. The momentary dominance of an impulse ordinarily weak, the whim of a ruler, the self-interest of classes, superstitious interpretation of omens, the attribution of some success to a prior act which may have had nothing to do with it such accidental and irrational sources of morals, and the resulting codes, are numberless. But as in the process of organic evolution the various obscure physiological alterations which produce variations of type are all overruled and guided in a few directions ...

— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... no longer afraid of life, but, in the courage of their joyousness, feasibly close to all its breathing facts. Men and women refuse any longer to allow their most vital instincts to be branded with obloquy, and the fulness of their lives to be thwarted at the bidding of an impure and irrational fiction of propriety. On every hand we find the right to happiness asserted in deeds as well as words. The essential purity of actions and relations to which a merely technical or superstitious irregularity attaches is being more and more acknowledged, and the fanciful barriers ...

— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... the place to add a few words about Catholicism. Soon after its origin and promulgation, the Christian religion, through rational and irrational heresies, lost its original purity. But as it was called on to check barbarous nations, harsh methods were needed for the service, not doctrine. The one Mediator between God and man was not enough, ...

— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... the patroon have remained content with his bottle?" he grumbled. "But his mind must needs run to this frivolous and irrational proceeding! There's something reasonable in pilfering a purse, but carrying off a woman—Yet she's ...

— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... and bad in things of use, including buildings. Oxford and Cambridge profess to give a liberal education; but you have only to look at their modern buildings to see that their teachers themselves do not know a good building from a bad one. They, like all the rest of us, think that taste in art is an irrational mystery; they trust in the expert and usually in the wrong one, as the ignorant and superstitious trust in the wrong priest. For as religion is merely mischievous unless it is tested in matters of conduct, so taste is mere pedantry or frivolity unless it is tested ...

— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock

... least of all have anything to do with Him when Christ presents Himself in the character which makes man His debtor for ever. All men, as St. Paul says, have not faith: it is a melancholy fact, whether we can make anything of it or not. Discounting, however, this irrational or inexplicable opposition, which is not expressed in the mind but in the will, how are we to present the Atonement so that it shall excite the least prejudice, and find the most unimpeded access to the mind of our own generation? This is the ...

— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney

... creed; but they had ceased to be regarded as binding upon their consciences by the great mass of the Western Asiatics. Western Asia was a seething-pot, in which were mixed up a score of contradictory creeds, old and new, rational and irrational, Sabaism, Magism, Zoroastrianism, Grecian polytheism, teraphim-worship, Judaism, Chaldae mysticism, Christianity. Artaxerxes conceived it to be his mission to evoke order out of this confusion, to establish in lieu of this extreme diversity ...

— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson

... respects she was peculiar. There were things, too, that troubled the family and made them reserved and inclined to be oversensitive. Not only were they very poor, but there had been insanity on the mother's side, and Charles, himself, had at one time been in brief confinement for irrational actions. Mary, too, had occasionally shown signs of madness, but no one anticipated the dreadful event ...

— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... are involved in them, I am far from passing my time disagreeably. My mind is of no gloomy turn, and I have a thousand ways of amusing myself. Indeed of late I have been terribly frightened lest I must give them all up; my fears have gone to extravagance; do not wonder; my life is not quite irrational, and I trembled to think that I was growing fit only to consort with dowagers. What an exchange, books and drawings, and every thing of that sort, for cards! In short, for ten weeks I have had such ...

— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... feeling was one of irrational resentment. If such a change was to come, why had it not come sooner? Here was she, a woman not yet old, who had paid with the best years of her life for the theft of the happiness that her daughter's contemporaries were taking as their due. There was no sense, no sequence, in it. She had had ...

— Autres Temps... - 1916 • Edith Wharton

... was not their hunger, which had been a little before satisfied with abundance of flesh, but the wickedness of these men, that provoked them [to destroy the princes]; for if it so please God, that wickedness might, by even those irrational creatures, be esteemed a ...

— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... half the homes known to Harry and to Rosalie was in constant rupture by upheavals thence. Not so behind the gamboge door. Rosalie always granted it to men that, as was commonly said, servants worked better for men. Men kept out of the irrational creatures' way; that was about it. The conduct of her life gave her the like advantage. Giving her orders before she left the house, she was out all day and never unexpectedly in. Positively the servants welcomed her on ...

— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... great fear that the participation of women in public affairs will impair the quality and character of home service is irrational and contrary to the tests of experience. Does an intelligent interest in the education of a child render a woman less a mother? Does the housekeeping instinct of woman, manifested in a desire for clean streets, pure water ...

— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... met like flame and wind. It was irrational and wonderful and conclusive. But after all, it might not have come to quite so swift a climax if Marna, following Kate's advice, had not confided the ...

— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... The qualification "true," excludes from the circle of goods, not only all those things which might satisfy only irrational or immoral wants (compare Mischler, Grundsaetze der Nationaloekonomie, 1856, I, 187), but also vindicates the fundamental idea of the whole system of Political Economy, as a subject of moral as well ...

— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... merely an occasion upon which one party was denounced unreasonably and the other was lauded unreasonably. No party has ever deserved quite the abuse that each party has got in turn, and nobody has ever deserved the praise that both parties have got in turn. The old political meeting was a wholly irrational performance; it was got together for the purpose of saying things that were chiefly not so and that were known by those who heard them not to be so, and were simply to be taken as a tonic ...

— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson

... to represent as anger raised to heaven, was angry when he engaged the Erymanthian boar, or the Nemean lion? or was Theseus in a passion when he seized on the horns of the Marathonian bull? Take care how you make courage to depend in the least on rage. For anger is altogether irrational, and that is not courage which is void ...

— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero