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More "Nonsensical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... done all these nonsensical licenses, you are giving your common sense, I will tell you something nice," Mr. Rayne interrupted, as Guy rattled off his idle chat. In a moment Guy's limbs that had been lying carelessly around in the ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... attempt to correct the nonsensical reading of the old copies, unrolled; but if enrolled itself makes sense, it does so only by introducing tautology. Besides, it leads us away from what I believe to be ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... that the debt to Hannah could be paid as soon as her brother returned, that she felt as if some heavy weight had been lifted from her, and looked, spoke, and acted like a different child from the one of a few moments since; "if you please, Aunt Marian. Lily goes on for some time in such a nonsensical way and then comes out with something so clever and droll that we cannot help laughing. I would like to hear the rest of it; and there is Bessie's ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... and amulets and witchcraft, which brought ridicule upon the last struggles of paganism. These aberrations of Nature-Mysticism will be dealt with in their later developments in my seventh Lecture. St. Augustine, after mentioning some nonsensical incantations of the "abracadabra" kind, says, "A Christian old woman is wiser than these philosophers." In truth, the spirit of Plato lived in, and not outside Christianity, even in the time of Porphyry. And on the cultus of angels and spirits, which was closely connected with theurgic ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Mac Murrough, and that killed Phadrig the O'Donoghoe in single combat at the fight of Shoch-knockmorty, and bit off his nose, calling it a sweet morsel of revenge, what does he do but tell me I was mad, and that he would have none of my nonsensical tales of the savage Irish. So I said I couldn't stand to hear my family insulted, and then—would you believe it? he would have it that it was I that was insolent, and when I was not going to apologize for what I ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her. But she bade herself, sternly, not to shrink. For without some reasoned comprehension of it—as now dawned on her—the ways of human beings, of animals, of plants and, so some say, even of minerals, are unintelligible, arbitrary, and nonsensical. It is the push of life itself, essential, fundamental, which makes us "feel in that way"—the push of spirit yearning to be clothed upon with flesh, made visible and given its chance to enter the earthly ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... question is, Why should anybody be called upon to say how he knows that which he does not know? You are assuming that laws are agents—efficient causes of that which happens—and that one law can interfere with another. To us, that assumption is as nonsensical as if you were to talk of a proposition of Euclid being the cause of the diagram which illustrates it, or of the integral calculus interfering with the rule of three. Your question really implies that we pretend to complete knowledge ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... his discourse, form the most prodigious contrast that ever was known. The collection of all his speeches, letters, sermons, (for he also wrote sermons,) would make a great curiosity, and, with a few exceptions, might justly pass for one of the most nonsensical books in the world. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... Gessner, Bodmer, and the like, who saw a muse in every sheep and every herdsman, the imitation of nature was the gospel in which every one believed. This, at best, meant nothing at all, and closely analyzed, it is half nonsensical, in so far as this definition presupposes art to be something that exists outside the domain of nature. But man belongs within the domain of nature; he must be included within this domain, and at most can complete or enlarge it; and for this reason ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... telling me anything about your nonsensical dream, Tom," said I, affecting contempt, really in a panic; "let us talk about something else; but it is quite plain that this dirty old house disagrees with us both, and hang me if I stay here any longer, to be pestered with indigestion and—and—bad nights, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... some trick of this sort is played, the newspapers opposed to it always describe it as "a senseless joke." What is the good of saying that? Every joke is a senseless joke. A joke is by its nature a protest against sense. It is no good attacking nonsense for being successfully nonsensical. Of course it is nonsensical to paint a celebrated Italian General a bright red; it is as nonsensical as "Alice in Wonderland." It is also, in my opinion, very nearly as funny. But the real answer to the ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... called, "A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy." 'Sentimental'! what is that? It is not English: he might as well say, 'Continental' [!]. It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea; yet one fool makes many. And this nonsensical word (who would believe it?) is become a fashionable one!' ('Journal', February 11, 1772). In 1773, Goldsmith puts it in the 'Dedication' to 'She Stoops':— 'The undertaking a comedy, not merely 'sentimental', was very dangerous;' and Garrick (forgetting ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Italy and the dear priest; and then they had seen nothing of the country, they had only seen Naples; before leaving dear Italia they must see more of the country and the cities; above all, they must see a place which they called the Eternal City, or some similar nonsensical name; and they persisted so that the poor governor permitted them, as usual, to have their way; and it was decided what route they should take—that is, the priest was kind enough to decide for them, and was also ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... to talk to a man in this way—who saw the woman in her and did not treat her as a child. She was inclined to think that perhaps for a girl the converse of his method was the case; an older man, a man beyond the range of anything "nonsensical," was, perhaps, the most interesting sort of friend one could meet. But in that reservation it may be she went a little beyond the converse of ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... be nonsensical procrastination. Does not the doctor declare that a year will not better ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... recollect a story, told as truth, of a man—let us call him Wakefield—who absented himself for a long time from his wife. The fact, thus abstractedly stated, is not very uncommon, nor, without a proper distinction of circumstances, to be condemned either as naughty or nonsensical. Howbeit, this, though far from the most aggravated, is perhaps the strangest instance on record of marital delinquency, and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities. The wedded couple lived in London. The man, under ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cone over a novel for you! But, if you will have my opinion, I think it Theodore Book's worst performance; far inferior to the Surgeon's Daughter; a set of fools making themselves miserable by their own nonsensical fancies and suspicions. Let me hear your opinion, for I will ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... a supernatural Being, and what none can conceive, none ought to worship, or even assert the existence of. Who worships a something of which he knows nothing, is an idolater. To talk of, or bow down to it, is nonsensical; to pretend affection for it, is worse than nonsensical. Such conduct, however pious, involves the rankest hypocrisy; the meanest and most odious species of idolatry; for labouring to destroy which, Atheists are called ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... it Dryden's Virgil, to show that this is not that Virgil so admired in the Augustaean age; but a Virgil of another stamp, a silly, impertinent, nonsensical writer.[464] None but a Bavius, a Maevius, or a Bathyllus carped at Virgil; and none but such unthinking vermin admire his translator.[465] It is true, soft and easy lines might become Ovid's Epistles or Art of Love; ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... nonsensical minuteness was followed here, and many trivialities were emphasized. Juvenal tells us, in his Seventh Satire, written about 130 A.D., that "a teacher was expected to read all histories and know all authors as well as his finger ends. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... an envious, ill-natured, proud, sullen, and ambitious spirit"—clearly not the portrait of a friend. Lord Campbell thought the St. Paul sermon contemptible, and General Stanhope, in the debate, called it nonsensical and incoherent. It seems to me the very reverse, even if we abstract it from its stupendous effect. Sacheverell, no doubt, was a more than usually narrow-minded priest; but in judging of the preacher ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, "the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on"—without getting us a step farther. And yet you want ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... forward, on any account, listen to the sound of weeping, or see, with the exception of her parents, any relatives outside the family circle. Then alone will she be able to go through this existence in peace and in quiet.' No one heeded the nonsensical talk of this raving priest; but here am I, up to this very day, dosing myself with ginseng ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... morning.... I am glad you have not deferred sitting for your picture till you came to Liverpool, for it would have encroached much upon our time together. I remember when I returned from abroad, a school-girl, I thought I had forgotten my mother's face. This copy of yours will save me from that nonsensical morbid feeling, and you will surely not forget mine.... You bid me, if anything should go ill with me, summon you across the Atlantic. Alas! dear H——, you forget that before a letter from that other ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... contrary notwithstanding. You is the form of the pronoun in the second person plural, and must, if we would speak correctly, be used with the corresponding form of the verb. The argument that we use you in the singular number is so nonsensical that it does not merit a moment's consideration. It is a custom we have—and have in common with other peoples—to speak to one another in the second person plural, and that is all there is of it. The Germans speak to one another in the third person plural. The ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... incredible capers that even Matrona Semyonovna burst out laughing and retreated to her own room upstairs. The hunchback old woman laid the table; we sat down to supper. At supper Kolosov told all sorts of nonsensical stories; the lieutenant's guffaws were deafening; I peeped from under my eyelids at Varia. She never took her eyes off Kolosov ... and from the expression of her face alone, I could divine that ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... am here today as one of Mr Rushton's employees should be an answer to the charge that Socialists are too lazy to work for their living. And as to taking advantage of the ignorance and simplicity of working men and trying to mislead them with nonsensical claptrap, it would have been more to the point if Mr Grinder had taken some particular Socialist doctrine and had proved it to be untrue or misleading, instead of adopting the cowardly method of making vague general charges that he cannot substantiate. He would find it far more difficult ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... laugh. Aunt Jane's foot is a yard long ef it's a' inch, but I'll find it stuffed to-morrer mornin', even ef the guyaskutus has to be chained to the mantel. An' it'll take me a good hour to empty it, for he always puts a lot o' devilment in it, an' I give him a beatin' over the head every nonsensical thing I find in it. We have a heap o' ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... let in their friends, and keep out their enemies. Never was there a more propitious season for the accomplishment of their purpose. The country is covered with rich harvests of Indian corn; flocks and herds are every where fat in the fields; and the liberty and equality doctrine, nonsensical and wicked as it is, (in this land of tyrants and slaves,) is for electioneering purposes sounding and resounding through our valleys and mountains in every direction. The city of Richmond and the circumjacent country are in arms, and have been so for ten or twelve days past. ...
— An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, • Joshua Coffin
... word sentimental. John Wesley, writing of this word "sentimental" as used in Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," says: "Sentimental, what is that? It is not English, it is not sense, it conveys no determinate idea. Yet one fool makes many, and this nonsensical word (who would believe it) is become a ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the hill billy, "if you hadn't lost it somethin' might have fell on you. That's what I always think when I have to move on." And he repeated with a nonchalant air a nonsensical ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... alive, she is here," he muttered with ever fresh amazement. He felt that he had lost Lisa. His wrath choked him; this blow had fallen too suddenly upon him. How could he so readily have believed in the nonsensical gossip of a journal, a wretched scrap of paper? "Well, if I had not believed it," he thought, "what difference would it have made? I should not have known that Lisa loved me; she would not have known it herself." He could ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... everybody's conduct but his own. He humbly gave the Modern generals to understand that he conceived, with great submission, they were all a pack of rogues, and fools, and confounded logger-heads, and illiterate whelps, and nonsensical scoundrels; that, if himself had been constituted general, those presumptuous dogs, the Ancients, would long before this have been beaten out of the field. "You," said he, "sit here idle, but when I, or any other valiant ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... through the human heart have been affected emotionally by the nonsensical teachings of the King's Highway. These teachings are commonly known us 'Narrow-Gauge Ideas.' If these nerves are rendered insensible, there is scarcely any trouble of that kind again. We can, by an intricate operation, paralyze ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... power to inflict diseases, and that these ought to be named after them, although many there are who, in their theology, lay great stress on this supposition, ascribing them rather to God than to nature, which is but idle talk. We dislike such nonsensical gossip as is not supported by symptoms, but only by faith—a thing which is not human, whereon the gods ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... what shall we do with ourselves? I'm sure I wish I didn't know 'twas Christmas day at all. It makes a fellow feel queer and nonsensical—homesick, I suppose they call it—and all that sort of thing. I vote we obliterate the fact, by chopping as hard ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... more honest and more liberal to have brushed away the nonsensical indictment in a sentence. Would the Treasury have put Shakespeare on trial for "Hamlet" or "Lear," or would they have condemned the writer of "The Song of Solomon" for immorality, or sent St. Paul to prison for his "Epistle to ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... you were," she said, "to think that Mr. Holmes meant to be anything but kind! You mustn't get such nonsensical ideas. Mr. Holmes, just to prove that you don't bear any malice, you must let me drive you out to the farm for dinner. No, I really won't let you refuse. I insist. There's plenty of room in the car—the chauffeur will go back in one of the farm ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... Krespel happened just then to be expatiating upon), naturally paved the way for the remark that now the practice was the exact opposite of this, the vocal score erroneously following the affected and abrupt transitions and rapid scaling of the instrumentalists. "What is more nonsensical," I cried, leaping from my chair, running to the piano, and opening it quickly, "what is more nonsensical than such an execrable style as this, which, far from being music, is much more like the noise of peas rolling across the floor?" ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... veiled allusion to his secret passion relieved and gratified the overcharged bosom of Ferdinand. He pursued the subject with enjoyment. Anybody but Glastonbury might have thought that he had lost his senses, he laughed so loud, and talked so fast about a subject which seemed almost nonsensical; but the good Glastonbury ascribed these ebullitions to the wanton spirit of youth, and smiled out of sympathy, though he knew not why, except ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... being well furnished, I became in thought the heroine of all the foolish, improbable adventures I met with. Shakspeare and others having furnished me with dresses and decorations, every day of my life had its drama. Adventures the most improbable, situations the most trying, and conversation the most nonsensical among a visionary acquaintance of my own creating, became the constant amusement of my mind; or if I took a fancy to any new companion, that individual was metamorphosed into something equally unreal, and was soon looked ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... his humorous talk. His letters to the New York Tribune from Long Branch, Saratoga, etc., were widely read. He knew that he wrote absolute nonsense at times, but nonsense is greatly needed in this world, and exquisitely droll nonsensical nonsense is as uncommon as common sense. The titles of his various books are inviting and informing, as Seaweed and What We Seed. He wrote several parodies on sensational novels of his time. Griffith Gaunt, ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... to this nonsensical parleying. I have the money, and will pay it over when the young lady is given into my charge, but not before. ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... to enumerate various important physical differentiations which—— (Intervention by Hon'ble Chairwoman, reminding me that these were not in disputation.) I bow to correction, and kiss the rod by summing up the gist of my argument, viz., that it is nonsensical idiotcy to suppose that a woman can be the equivalent of a man either in intellectual gripe, in bodily robustiousness, or in physical courage. Of the last, I shall afford an unanswerable proof from my own person. It is notorious, urbi et ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... 12) is an old-fashioned Round. Many a band of little folks has been divided into groups and has sung the nonsensical rhymes until every boy and girl broke down in laughter. Do you poor modern people know how it was done? The school was divided into a half-dozen sections. The first section began to sing and when its members reached the end of the first line, the second section ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... and throughout your life, show your affection for her, and your admiration of her, not in nonsensical compliment; not in picking up her handkerchief, or her glove, or in carrying her fan or parasol; not, if you have the means, in hanging trinkets and baubles upon her; not in making yourself a fool by winking ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... tribe of authoresses, that come after you here daily, and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are the shadows. You encouraged that mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you, in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off, by that simple expedient of referring her to you; but there are more burrs in the wind. I came home t'other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, I am sure, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... "Your nonsensical praises of each other—your boastings of Sticklebacks, and Snooksbys, and Bankses; a set of mere humbugs and blockheads! And even this foolish woman, with her femininities and re-invigorating society, I believe to be a regular quack. By dad! one would think there had never been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... constitution?" She smiled, repeating in excellent English one of the nonsensical phrases he was fond of using. She tried to say it gayly, but he was not deceived, ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... storm, Tomobei kept up a nonsensical, running talk, full of the superstitious fear of the man of the lower classes. "Iya! The affair has been terrible, but misfortune is in the air.... What's that! Ah! Something passes by ... above. O'Iwa! O'Iwa!" He seized ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... for ennobling Monsieur Jourdain is performed in dance and music, and comprises the Fourth Interlude.) [The ceremony is a burlesque full of comic gibberish in pseudo-Turkish and nonsensical French, in which Monsieur Jourdain is made to appear ludicrous and during which he is outfitted with an extravagant costume, turban, ...
— The Middle Class Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere
... brandished the bludgeon and the bowie-knife over Congressional debate, sapped the foundations of loyalty, dried up the springs of patriotism, blotted out the testimonies of the fathers against oppression, padlocked the pulpit, expelled liberty from its literature, invented nonsensical theories about master-races and slave-races of men, and in due season produced a Rebellion fierce, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... wasted three sheets of paper upon such a nonsensical request as that," observed the turnkey. "Old Jackson wouldn't shell out sixpence to save her or anybody ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... to)—Ver. 824. Colman observes here: "Madame Dacier makes an observation on this speech, something like that of Donatus on one of Micio's above; and says that Micio, being hard put to it by the real circumstances of the case, thinks to confound Demea by a nonsensical gallimatia. I can not be of the ingenious lady's opinion on this matter, for I think a more sensible speech could not be made, nor a better plea offered in favor of the young men, than that of Micio in the ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... wouldn't do as a husband for Una, you are right, but I don't think for a moment that any such nonsensical idea ever crossed their minds. I like Neal. He's a fine, straightforward boy, and a ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... river. Then her mood changed, and she laughed at the absurdity of such fears, for she well knew that he must be perfectly familiar with London life and the London streets, so that any thing of this kind was nonsensical. Then she thought that perhaps no lawyer would undertake her case without money being paid at once. In fact, all the fears that could be suggested by an uneasy mind and a very vivid imagination came crowding before here as ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... imagination, suh. Turn yore eye whah you will, you'll see words that need refawmin', words that need our help, words that cry an' clamuh to be relieved of the stigma of their congested and nonsensical appearance; nouns, adjectives, verbs, all stuck in the hopeless mud of antiquity, an' holdin' out their hands for we-all to drag 'em out an' bring 'em up to date." He now gave me a list. "Look, suh, ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister
... absurd or nonsensical about it, Master Pawson," he said, firmly. "As I have told you, the castle will be put in a state ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... to resist the influence of her friend's gayety and flow of spirits. Edna's example was infectious, and Bessie was soon laughing heartily at her nonsensical speeches. There was no quiet for reading that morning. She had to practice tennis with Edna, and help her arrange the flowers; and finally she was carried off ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... orthodox indictment of him: it is cited as proof that his capacity for consecutive thought was limited, and that he was thus deficient mentally, and perhaps a downright moron. The argument, it must be obvious, is fundamentally nonsensical. What deceives the professors is the traditional prolixity of philosophers. Because the average philosophical writer, when he essays to expose his ideas, makes such inordinate drafts upon the parts of speech that the dictionary is almost ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... art, and is the production of a party of young persons. This statement is of itself, as we are well aware, enough to cause it to be looked upon with shyness. A periodical largely occupied with poetry wears an unpromising aspect to readers who have learned from experience what nonsensical stuff most fugitive magazine-poetry is; nor is this natural prejudice diminished by the knowledge that it is the production of young gentlemen and ladies. But, when they have read a few extracts which we propose ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... PUNCH,—I have had the advantage of reading the above letters before publication, and am of opinion that they are not one whit more nonsensical than letters about the Foudroyant and the Emmanuel Hospital that were printed early in the nineties. You may make what use you please ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... Highlands—an agitation which was vehemently applauded by the Radical press of London. One Radical correspondent reported in tones of triumph that the duke had been openly cursed by his tenants on his own private platform. The nonsensical nature of such statements is sufficiently illustrated by what happened on the occasion here in question. A number of tenants were gathered together on the platform for the purpose of receiving the duke, not with curses but with welcome; ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... differ on some points we agree on many, and one of the points on which we doubtless agree is the absurdity of Lord Salisbury's representation of the process of Natural Selection based upon the improbability of two varying individuals meeting. His nonsensical representation of the theory ought to be exposed, for it will mislead very many people. I see it is adopted by the Pall Mall. I have been myself strongly prompted to take the matter up, but it is evidently ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... acquire just reputation in that time, and so become known to us, and communicate to us all their advances in knowledge. Is not this delay compensated, by our being placed out of the reach of that swarm of nonsensical publications, which issues daily from a thousand presses, and perishes almost in issuing? With respect to what are termed polite manners, without sacrificing too much the sincerity of language, I would wish my countrymen to adopt just so much of European politeness, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... "you can do anything you want to if you only think you can do it." And she told her a marvelous tale of how I earned the money to go to college when things seemed determined to go against me. Which is all perfectly nonsensical; the chance of earning money to go to college fell right into my lap. Pearl only opened her eyes wider at Hinpoha's recital and answered with a sigh, "Oh, I ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... lodgings, to give her joy, and there suffered me to deal with her as I hoped to do, and by and by her husband comes, a sorry, simple fellow, and his letter to her which she proudly showed me a simple, nonsensical thing. A man of no discourse, and I fear married her to make a prize of, which he is mistaken in, and a sad wife I believe she will prove to him, for she urged me to appoint a time as soon as he is gone ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... we usually sung songs, among them very nonsensical ones, if only we could keep step well to their time. Often one of the teachers told us a story. Schaffner and Bagge could do this best, but we often met other pedestrians with whom we entered into conversation. How delightful ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... kind of connexion with the horrid rascal SIR EMERSOM TENNENT alludes to—with the blackguard. That he is a boaster, a talker, an idiot, a nincompoop; that he scatters "words, words, words," as Polonius did of old; that he is bombastic, wordy, prosy, nonsensical, and a fool, no one will deny. But he is no rogue, though he utters rogueries and drolleries. No one is justified ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... his jests of other times, on nights of feasting, seated before a plate of fresh oysters, in the fashionable Parisian restaurants. His elegant companions thought him mad as they listened to the nonsensical ideas aroused by wine, the sight of the shell fish and the recollection of certain fragmentary reading in his youth. "We're going to eat our grandfathers like the merry cannibals that we are." The oyster is one of the primitive manifestations of life on the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... are just being nonsensical!" Ruth said, speaking in a half-annoyed tone. "You are not absurd enough to suppose that either of those verses are arguments in favor of dancing, or against dancing, or indeed have anything to do with the subject? What is the use in trying ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... his most diverting "properties" is the set of "morals" he draws to everything, of nonsensical literalness and infantile gravity, the perfection of solemn fooling. Thus in the 'Lay of St. Cuthbert,' where the Devil has captured the heir ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... last ship landing was more than enough for the building of the gigantic, spidery, half-mile-high structure which would handle this planet's interstellar commerce. There was no excuse for an emergency! A boat landing was nonsensical! ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... between the two names, hers so nonsensical and his so dignified and strong, was no greater than that between the two people. In truth, their names were symbolic of their natures. It looked ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... assuredly have been expensive and inconvenient, and might perhaps have proved detrimental to the Maypole business. Wherefore, and because he looked with no favourable eye upon young girls, but rather considered that they and the whole female sex were a kind of nonsensical mistake on the part of Nature, he took occasion to retire and shake his head in private at the boiler; inspired by which silent oracle, he was moved to give Joe various stealthy nudges with his elbow, as a parental reproof and gentle admonition to ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... and highly-prized work among book collectors) are by Lear's hand. At Knowsley he became a permanent favorite; and it was there that he composed in prolific succession his charming and wonderful series of utterly nonsensical rhymes and drawings. Lear had already begun seriously to study landscape. When English winters began to threaten his health, Lord Derby started a subscription which enabled him to go to Rome as a student and artist, and no doubt gave him recommendations among Anglo-Roman society which laid the ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... now, my beloved, there is no such thing as good-bye; it is a word that has no real meaning; but it is so English and pretty and sweet and child-like and nonsensical that I could write it over and over ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... augmented. When the young men arrived the girls were lazily basking on the sand, and Nan was pretending to read a book to the other two. Only pretending, however, for Patty kept interrupting her with nonsensical remarks, and Marian teased her by slowly sifting sand through her fingers onto the pages of ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... makes them liable to be easily moved to either good or evil by their songs. Even the native Irish songs, as we are informed in Miss Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry, are sadly interpolated with nonsensical passages, which have been introduced to supply the place of lost or forgotten lines; and of humorous lyrical poetry, she says there was none in the language worth translating. Moore has given to the beautiful airs of Ireland beautiful words; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... "How nonsensical!" exclaimed Alexia impatiently. "If Mr. Whitney says you are not needed, isn't that enough? Beside he wrote it for Mrs. Whitney; I ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... would hear about the companions or about the separation. Some wanted to hear of his herding the cows in his youth. One shameless girl called out, "If you do not sing such and such a passage I will not listen." One mere child, by way of teaching the Boisnavi, sang some nonsensical syllables. The Boisnavi, listening to the different demands, gave a momentary glance at Kunda, saying: "Have you no commands ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... don't be so silly as to put faith in nonsensical dreams of that kind. Many a one like it I have had, if I would bother my head with them. Why, within the last ten days, while you were dreaming of finding a pot of gold on London Bridge, I was dreaming of finding a pot of ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... of harmony should sound absolutely false and nonsensical to the ear of one generation, which to the ear of another age sounded beautiful and natural—this is a puzzling fact. The shrill and unprepared dissonances which we now often consider very effective were thought to be ear-splitting ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... designates Eck and Faber as the authors of the Confutation. July 14 he wrote to Luther: "With his legerdemain (commanipulatione) Eck presented to the Emperor the Confutation of our Confession." (193.) August 6: "This Confutation is the most nonsensical of all the nonsensical books of Faber." (253.) August 8, to Myconius: "Eck and Faber have worked for six entire weeks in producing the Confutation of our Confession." (260.) Hence also such allusions in Melanchthon's letters as "confutatio Fabrilis," "Fabriliter scripta," and in the ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... Germans on the south-western frontier had not yet matured, we do not know. Anyway, General Beyers, in supporting the chairman, added that his cause was a clean one and there was no necessity for nonsensical flag-waving. They were there, he said, to pass a calm resolution and ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... some years ago had in it poisoned water. It was an attractive well with a house built around about it, and the neighbors came to me to say that I must under no circumstances drink from it. What if I had said, "I will decorate the well house that I may change the water?" It would have been as nonsensical as to say, "I will change the environment of a man who is wicked by nature, and thereby make him good." Judas had lived close to Jesus, he had been with him on the mountain, walked with him by the sea, was frequently with him, I am sure, in Gethsemane, for we read in John the ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... began. There are copy-books extant containing tales, some of which must have been composed while she was a young girl, as they had amounted to a considerable number by the time she was sixteen. Her earliest stories are of a slight and flimsy texture, and are generally intended to be nonsensical, but the nonsense has much spirit in it. They are usually preceded by a dedication of mock solemnity to some one of her family. It would seem that the grandiloquent dedications prevalent in those days had not escaped her youthful penetration. Perhaps the most characteristic feature in those ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... as a trustworthy man for any secret and perilous service. Nevertheless, although it was his own friend who had been murdered, Innes refused to try the murderers, on the ground that they were Spanish subjects; a reason which was simply nonsensical. He forwarded them to Wilkinson at Fort Warren. The latter sent them back to New Madrid. On their way they were stopped by the officer at Fort Massac, a thoroughly loyal man, who had not been engaged in the intrigues of Wilkinson and Innes. He sent to the Spanish commander at New ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... it be permitted to grow and to spread, if it be spoilt by the flattering and nonsensical assurance that it has been victorious,—then, as I have said, it will have the power to extirpate German mind, and, when that is done, who knows whether there will still be anything to be made out of the ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... about illures, tempts and often robs our domestic life of its sweetness, while the black man, with the wrong conception of freedom, often makes it impossible for our men to leave their homes unguarded." "Bah! away with such nonsensical babbling! You are saying, Mrs. Bruce, that which down in your innermost soul you do not believe. Such talk as that has given Southern women undesirable notoriety, and is making the world believe that to keep us pure it costs yearly hundreds of ignominious ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... unexpected question. What was her Purpose in Life? To get to the heart of the color of the world? That was rather vague. Also nonsensical when so formulated. She took refuge ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... though it may sound, unless he contradicted himself his description could not be a true one. It is easier for the ordinary reader to pass over the self contradictions, hardly even being aware of them, and grasp the underlying meaning: the trained logician is at once pulled up by the nonsensical form of the description and the meaning is lost in a welter of conflicting words. This, I think, is the real reason why some of the most brilliant intellectual thinkers have been able to make nothing of Bergson ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... their senses could deny such a thing; but we must be on our guard against make- believe duties. It is my duty to help mother by teaching Jack, and I give her two hours every morning; but when Fred comes into the schoolroom with some nonsensical request that would rob me of an hour or so, I am quite right not to give way to him. Do you think," warming into enthusiasm over her subject, "that Fred's violin playing ought to stand in the way of any real work that will benefit souls as ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... your flitting-time came, she would come to us gladly. We had it all arranged. You won't want to marry for a year or so, yet. You'll want to have some happy sweetheart days first. And you'll want to make a lot of those pretty, useless, nonsensical things other girls make when they marry. That's why I advised you to save your burglar money,—so you would have it for this. We'll have Aunt Grace come right away, so you can take a little freedom to be happy, and to make your plans. And you can initiate Aunt Grace into ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... got rather tired of this same scene. It was growing monotonous; so they did not come in such numbers. However, after the Israelites had marched round once, they began to march round a second time. Here was something new! Something still more nonsensical; and the people of Jericho came out on their walls again to flout them, and pass their jokes. When the Israelites had been round twice, they started to go round a third time, then a fourth, then ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... Grayson, we felt a wee bit out of patience; and if we did not give utterance aloud to our thoughts, I shrewdly suspect if those thoughts had formed themselves into words, those words would have sounded very much like, "Nonsensical sentimentality!" "strange infatuation!" but nothing could be said with propriety, and the engagement was fully entered into. Some time had necessarily to elapse before its fulfillment, however, for the lover was but twenty; but it was well understood, that ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... being a nonsensical couplet that had been made for the grim Doctor's benefit, and was hooted in the streets, and under his own windows. Hearing such remarks and insults, the Doctor would glare round at them with red eyes, especially if the brandy-bottle ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to be degraded by the transformations it suffers in reflection, when men try to find a place for it in their cosmic economy; for its essence is poetical, expressive, contemplative, and it grows more and more nonsensical the more people insist on making it a prosaic, commercial exchange ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... apprehensive! Santiago doesn't consider himself an Indian—and besides, he's not here. And what if he were! These are the nonsensical ideas of the newcomers. Let a few months pass and you will change your opinion, after you have attended a lot of fiestas and bailuhan, slept on cots, and eaten ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the water-side to the school-house made from the old hulk—I, little Jack of the Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest; I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirate-ship by a horrible Spaniard? Too nonsensical to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean. There is some one above. Fie, fie, Jack of the Beach! you are a child indeed; a child of the second childhood, old boy; you are beginning to dote ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... be shocked in its moral sense, as is the usual course of human nature. The rather wild vagaries of the converts, too, aroused distrust and disgust in the sober minds of the western pioneers. At religious meetings converts would often arise to talk in gibberish—utterly nonsensical gibberish. This was called a "speaking with tongues," and could be translated by the speaker or a bystander in any way he saw fit, without responsibility for the saying. This was an easy way of calling a man names without standing behind it, so to speak. The congregation ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... his somewhat frivolous and nonsensical tone, was a well-meaning fellow. When he was walking with Walter, he had intended to chaff him about his sudden burst of ill-temper, and jest away his spirit of revenge; but he saw that poor Walter was in no mood for jokes, and he quite lacked the moral courage to give good advice in a ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... here, madam," said Phoebe, "it's jes' nothin' at all. It's jes' the most nonsensical thing that ever was. I don't mind tellin' you about it; don't mind it a bit. She wants Mr. Hav'ley to marry Miss Dora Bannister, an' she's on pins an' needles to know if the young woman here is likely to ketch him. That's all there is 'bout it. She ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... thought of frightening me by all that nonsensical talk," retorted Andor quietly, "you had not thought perhaps that there are other lands in the world besides Hungary, and that I am not quite such an ignorant peasant as those whom you choose to despise. But you have been wasting your ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... for weeks beforehand—that Cashel was the most terrible fighting man of the day, and that Paradise had not dared to propose a renewal of the interrupted contest. And they listened with admiration and delight while the advocate proved that these things were incredible and nonsensical. ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... he was, perhaps, the most unintelligible speaker that ever perplexed an audience. It has been long since said by the historian, that a collection of the Protector's speeches would make, with a few exceptions, the most nonsensical book in the world; but he ought to have added, that nothing could be more nervous, concise, and intelligible, than what he ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... historian, but because they are in rhyme they have been hastily assumed to be spurious or even burlesque.[142] But the evidence of a rhyming formula is the opposite to this. It is evidence of their genuineness, and if some of the words appear to be nonsensical it is due to the fact that the sense of the old formula has been misunderstood, and ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... had sacrificed his life to the power and privileges of the clergy; and this peculiar merit challenged, and not in vain, a suitable acknowledgment to his memory. Endless were the panegyrics on his virtues; and the miracles wrought by his relics were more numerous, more nonsensical, and more impudently attested, than those which ever filled the legend of any confessor or martyr. Two years after his death he was canonized by Pope Alexander; a solemn jubilee was established for celebrating his ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... nor anybody else can abide. We congratulate them on clinging to all they have cast away, and on imitating everything which they came into existence to insult. And when we have established all these nonsensical analogies with a nonexistent nation, we wait until there is a crisis in which we really are at one with America, and then we falter and threaten to fail her. In a battle where we really are of one blood, the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... refusing to educate women as well as men—to give women the same civil and political rights as men? No mistake is so commonly made by clever people as that of assuming a cause to be had because the arguments of its supporters are, to a great extent, nonsensical. And we conceive that those who may laugh at the arguments of the extreme philogynists, may yet feel bound to work heart and soul towards the attainment ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... vintage, and doing my bits of business?—I say to myself, 'You are taking a lot of trouble, poor old chap; working to pile one silver crown on another, you will leave a fine property behind you, and the bailiffs and the lawyers will get it all; . . . or else it will go in nonsensical notions and crotchets.'—Look you here, child; you are the mother of yonder little lad; it seemed to me as I held him at the font with Mme. Chardon that I could see his old grandfather's copper nose on his face; ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... what they have to say. The press has been practically unanimous every morning in making fun of the piece and the author. If I enter a reading room I cannot pick up a paper without seeing: "Absurd as 'Hernani'; silly, false, bombastic, pretentious, extravagant and nonsensical as 'Hernani'." If I venture into the corridors of the theatre while the performance is in progress I see spectators issue from their boxes and slam the doors indignantly. Mlle. Mars plays her part honestly and faithfully, but laughs at it, even in ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... these observations romantic, a phrase in this place which would be tantamount to nonsensical, I shall be apt to retort, that you are embruted by trade, and the vulgar enjoyments of life—Bring me then back your barrier-face, or you shall have nothing to say to my barrier-girl; and I shall fly from you, to cherish the remembrances ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... within five feet of him, a book in her lap, her gaze bent briefly on the flitting buildings outside. He studied the reflection furtively until she took up the book and began to read. Up to this time he had wondered why some nonsensical idiot had wasted looking-glasses on the walls of a railway coach; now he was thinking of him ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... of them. Of what consequence was shame in the presence of a shopkeeper, of what consequence was the insignificant Hobotov or the wearisome friendship of Mihail Averyanitch? It was all trivial and nonsensical. ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... nestling close, patting his sleeve, talking little, sweet nonsensical words as if she had really been the little child she seemed. He looked down at her and smiled. How small she was, and child-like. He must remember that she was very young, and probably had never had much bringing-up. Serious ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... it is quite extraordinary what an appalling mass of nonsensical rubbish can be supplied to the public by politicians, by newspaper penny-a-liners, and by home royal geographo-parasites at large, who base their arguments on such unsteady foundation. It is quite sufficient for some people to open an atlas and place their fingers on a surface of cobalt blue paint ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... He left you first, and I must own The manners of the highest class Have latterly vexatious grown; And though perchance a lady may Discourse of Bentham or of Say, Yet as a rule their talk I call Harmless, but quite nonsensical. Then they're so innocent of vice, So full of piety, correct, So prudent, and so circumspect Stately, devoid of prejudice, So inaccessible to men, Their looks alone ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... "that this poor fellow is really what they say, a half-crazed gold-hunter? I hope not. It seems nonsensical. I never heard of there being gold in these mountains. Yet it may be so, and too much longing after gold is said to turn people crazy. I shouldn't ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... whom it is said in the Bible, 'They reigned, but not through Me; they were princes, but I did not know them.' Do you conceive now why I placed the king's picture before my store? why I burnt a lamp beneath it? I think this glorious portrait is more deserving of a sacred lamp than the Pope's nonsensical bull." ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... not its bulk. This is only another instance of the amazing indifference to the most easily ascertainable facts shown by Wagner's assailants, and of the truth that if you only assert a thing, however nonsensical, persistently enough, there will always be some who will believe it. I cannot be expected to go through in detail the whole string of aberrations which Nordau finds accumulated in Wagner. They are all of the same kind, and ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... power is limited, and perhaps no person ever possessed it in a perfect degree: some more frequently see coming events, or what is happening at a distance, than others; some see things dimly, others with great distinctness. The events seen are sometimes of great importance, sometimes highly nonsensical and trivial; sometimes they relate to the person who sees them, sometimes to other people. This is all that can be said with anything like certainty with respect to the nature of the second sight, a faculty for which there is no accounting, which, were it better developed, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... cartoons by Beccafumi. The patient skill of these compositions makes them a rare piece of decoration; yet even here the friend whom I lately quoted rejects this over-ripe fruit of the Sienese school. The designs are nonsensical, he declares, and all his admiration is for the cunning artisans who have imitated the hatchings and shadings and hair-strokes of the pencil by the finest curves of inserted black stone. But the true romance of handiwork at ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... present, Max," replied his sister, "for you are the child's godfather. She was named Marie. At this time her father nicknamed her Pussy, and Otto has multiplied that in the most nonsensical manner." ...
— Rico And Wiseli - Rico And Stineli, And How Wiseli Was Provided For • Johanna Spyri
... Etzooah they saw that the red man's open, friendly look had changed. He turned a hard, wary eye on them, just like all the other Kakisas. Stonor guessed that he must have visited his people in the interim, and have been filled up with their nonsensical tales. Affecting to notice no change, ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... this church—ruled as they are by such a spirit—as to my lords and masters; that I shall have no other God but this congregation; that I shall deny my own conscience for theirs; that I shall go about the trivial, nonsensical things they call my pastoral duties, in fear and trembling; that my ministry is to cringe when they speak, and do their will regardless of what I feel to be the will of Christ! Faugh!" Big Dan drew himself erect. "If this is what the call to the ministry means, ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... surprised Guardian of the Gates; "what a nonsensical idea! Go home to your mothers, my good girls, and milk the cows and bake the bread. Don't you know it's a dangerous thing to ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... your magic, common-sense Nonsensical appears, And stars of sober influence Shoot madly from their spheres. You lure us from the beaten track, From minding P.'s and Q.'s, To paths where white is always ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... one thing for us to do—have a drink and go to bed—for the club closes in ten minutes." He ordered a small bottle of wine, something I had never seen him drink, and talked in a light, nonsensical strain, for him a most unusual thing. In telling the story I had drawn out the little bunch of Russian violets and placed them on the table. They were very much wilted, but the odor seemed stronger and sweeter than ever. When we parted for the night I forgot the violets. The next day, ...
— A Few Short Sketches • Douglass Sherley
... was Tanist of Connaught, in the time of King Mac Murrough, and that killed Phadrig the O'Donoghoe in single combat at the fight of Shoch-knockmorty, and bit off his nose, calling it a sweet morsel of revenge, what does he do but tell me I was mad, and that he would have none of my nonsensical tales of the savage Irish. So I said I couldn't stand to hear my family insulted, and then—would you believe it? he would have it that it was I that was insolent, and when I was not going to apologize for what I had borne from him, he said he had always known how it would be trying to deal ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and you have done wrong! Upon my soul, Miss Danton, you have a mild way of putting it. Here, take back this nonsensical letter. I can't and won't ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... and more that is nonsensical has been written about furniture. Observation tends to justify belief that in general effect the nonsense has proved more potent than ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... for?" said the deacon, bringing a certain grave look on the faces of both the elder clergy, and a horror-stricken one upon Anne's; while Cecil pronounced her inevitable dictum, that at Dunstone Mr. Venn always preached in a gown, and "we" should never let him think of anything nonsensical. ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Father. Nonsensical ideas—probably his stomach is disordered. Remember the last time I ate lobster!—Come along in and have a glass of sherry, and you will forget all ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... sensation I straightway felt much cleverer than before, and thoughts began to rush with extraordinary rapidity through my head. From egotism we passed insensibly to the theme of love, which seemed inexhaustible. Although our reasonings might have sounded nonsensical to a listener (so vague and one-sided were they), for ourselves they had a profound significance. Our minds were so perfectly in harmony that not a chord was struck in the one without awakening an echo in the other, and in this harmonious striking of different ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... in deep thought; and the other went on delivering a sort of homily. Ingratitude was condemned in it, the sinfulness of pride was pointed out—together with the proverbial fact that it "goes before a fall." There were also some sound remarks as to the danger of nonsensical notions and the disadvantages of a quick temper. It sets one's best friends against one. "And if anybody ever wanted friends in the world it's you, my girl." Even respect for parental authority was invoked. "In the first hour of his trouble your father wrote ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... they had seen nothing of the country, they had only seen Naples; before leaving dear Italia they must see more of the country and the cities; above all, they must see a place which they called the Eternal City, or by some similar nonsensical name; and they persisted so that the poor governor permitted them, as usual, to have their way; and it was decided what route they should take, that is, the priest was kind enough to decide for them; and was also kind enough ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... it was absurd, and ridiculous, and nonsensical, and raked out a few other adjectives to give force to his sentiments, speaking in the most sour way possible; but it was very evident that he was highly pleased, and the steamer ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... everyone in her care of the baby. Even her aunt had to admit her superiority here. She was as careful, as wise and responsible as Miss Gordon could wish, and she often wondered how the reckless, nonsensical girl could be so suddenly transformed. But then Miss Gordon was still far from understanding ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... their minds have to grow up as well as their bodies. Mental nourishment is quite as necessary as physical nourishment; but it is nonsensical to apply them both in the same fashion. The mind has to be fed in a totally different manner to the body. The former is a delicate operation, that requires far more care and common sense than is necessary for the boiling of milk or the preparation ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... of the kind," I answered. "She lives with me, and she likes it very much. We are extremely comfortable, and our boat is not a canoe, or any such nonsensical affair. It is a large, ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... and again I glanced at other things. Nettie was always there in the background of my mind, regarding me enigmatically. It was part of my pose to Parload that I had a romantic love-affair somewhere away beyond the sphere of our intercourse, and that note gave a Byronic resonance to many of the nonsensical things I produced for ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... made to the degree of perfection it is. We do not, on any rational scheme of criticism, inquire into the variety of a man's excellences, or the number of his works, or his facility of production. Venice Preserved is sufficient for Otway's fame. I hate all those nonsensical stories about Lope de Vega and his writing a play in a morning before breakfast. He had time enough to do it after. If a man leaves behind him any work which is a model in its kind, we have no right to ask whether ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... need be afraid that I should tremble and shrink back as though I were about to run away with somebody's wife, or rather to be run away with quite contrary to my own inclination? Nothing at all. A mere nonsensical ordeal much less serious than a visit ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... multitude, the standing one has been that of flattering them into taxes, by calling the Government (or as they please to express it, the English Constitution) "the envy and the admiration of the world" Scarcely an Address has been voted in which some of the speakers have not uttered this hackneyed nonsensical falsehood. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... hear of some nonsensical plan," replied Joe, with a slight expression of contempt, "but I don't think it worth while to pay attention to things o' this sort. There's nothin' can beat good ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... consciences of two frail and fallible human beings. Well may we say with Michelet, that under such a system the priest ought to be truly a presbyteros, "a man who has seen, learned, and suffered much." A young priest as a father-confessor is not merely "a nonsensical contradiction," but a snare and a source of peril both to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... general propositions, we ought, in accordance with the common way of following all sciences, to admit it till some better hypothesis be found out. For to my mind to say that species were created so and so is no scientific explanation, only a reverent way of saying it is so and so. But it is nonsensical trying to show how I try to proceed in the compass of a note. But as an honest man, I must tell you that I have come to the heterodox conclusion that there are no such things as independently created species—that ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... "I'm going to save you two lads, no matter how idiotically you act or talk. I like you, in spite of your ridiculous ascetic airs and your nonsensical assumption of austerity. You can't make me angry nor lose my protection, no matter how rude and chilly you are. If you two don't appreciate the kind of entertainment we are offering you and haven't sense enough and manners enough ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... nothing to do but answer such nonsensical questions?" demanded Elliston, angrily. "Open this door ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... have been a nonsensical piece of woman's fancy, and puts her frying-pan into the fire again.... Pouf! A head comes ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... come over you, you silly girl?" he said; "why, you look like an officer's wife when she opens the News-letter after an action, and expects to find her husband among the killed and wounded. But I know the reason—you will persist in reading these nonsensical romances, day and night, and whimpering for distresses that never existed. Why, how the devil can you believe that Artamines, or what d'ye call him, fought singlehanded with a whole battalion? One to three is as great odds as ever fought and won, and I never knew any body ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... trouble. The black woman, allowed to dress and flaunt about illures, tempts and often robs our domestic life of its sweetness, while the black man, with the wrong conception of freedom, often makes it impossible for our men to leave their homes unguarded." "Bah! away with such nonsensical babbling! You are saying, Mrs. Bruce, that which down in your innermost soul you do not believe. Such talk as that has given Southern women undesirable notoriety, and is making the world believe that to keep us pure it costs yearly hundreds of ignominious human sacrifices, a thing ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... should two idiots, one a clown and the other a screaming lunatic, make sane men so different from themselves? Look here, Barker; I will give you a picture. A very well-bred young man of this century is dancing about in a frock-coat. He has in his hands a nonsensical seventeenth-century halberd, with which he is trying to kill men in a street in Notting Hill. Damn it! don't you see how they've got us? Never mind how you felt—that is how you looked. The King would put his cursed head on one side and call it exquisite. ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the two names, hers so nonsensical and his so dignified and strong, was no greater than that between the two people. In truth, their names were symbolic of their natures. It looked really pitiful ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... begin with, there was his mother who, instead of rolling off downtown to her shopping, as would have been her customary program, alighted from the taxicab with his father and himself. Moreover the interior of the shop did not seem quite the same. Nonsensical as it was to suppose it, there seemed to be in the atmosphere a subtle air of suspense quite new and unusual. Besides that, there were flowers on his father's desk; and what was more surprising, apparently he was the only one to notice ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... some of which must have been composed while she was a young girl, as they had amounted to a considerable number by the time she was sixteen. Her earliest stories are of a slight and flimsy texture, and are generally intended to be nonsensical, but the nonsense has much spirit in it. They are usually preceded by a dedication of mock solemnity to some one of her family. It would seem that the grandiloquent dedications prevalent in those days had not escaped her youthful penetration. Perhaps the most characteristic ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... of life.' We shall never forget Esmeralda. She looked so earnestly as we regarded attentively the line of her open hand." (Mr. Petalengro does not say that tears were to be seen trickling down those lovely cheeks of Esmeralda while this fortune-telling, nonsensical farce was being played out.) "Then we took her step by step through some scenes of her supposed future. We did not tell all. The rest was reserved for another day. There was a serious look on her countenance as we ended; but, reader, such secrets should not ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... But Ben, if unsupported, is somewhat disqualified from being what the Scotch would call a 'famous witness'—he was under the deepest pecuniary obligations to Shakspeare, and was through life, despite the nonsensical tradition of their quarrel, his hearty friend and boon-companion, with 'blind affection,' as he phrases it, as seen above, literally 'unto death,' and therefore bound by the strongest ties to keep his secret, if secret there were. Besides, Ben can be convicted of at least ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... remembered at all clearly how that Saturday morning passed. Afterward he had vague recollections of sitting in Clint Thayer's room and hearing Amy Byrd rattle off a great deal of nonsensical advice to him and Clint and Tim as to how to conduct themselves before the sacrifice (Amy had insisted that they should line up and face the grand-stand before the game commenced, salute and recite the immortal line of Claudius's gladiators: "Morituri te salutant!"); of ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Nantucket. His slight stutter only added to the effect of his humorous talk. His letters to the New York Tribune from Long Branch, Saratoga, etc., were widely read. He knew that he wrote absolute nonsense at times, but nonsense is greatly needed in this world, and exquisitely droll nonsensical nonsense is as uncommon as common sense. The titles of his various books are inviting and informing, as Seaweed and What We Seed. He wrote several parodies on sensational novels of his time. Griffith Gaunt, he made fun ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... the clock of Notre Dame; it could not have struck right, I am sure. So be calm, signor: you know that your anger makes no impression on me. Make haste and tell me what you want me to do. We lose precious time in this nonsensical sort of talk. I left some friends to come and receive your orders, and I must add that I intend returning to them as soon as I have fulfilled your commands. You need not shake your fist at me, nor get into a passion; it will ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... early example of a string of nonsensical incongruities, possessing, however, no further value, except perhaps as affording an insight into what was regarded at that time as ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... the orthodox indictment of him: it is cited as proof that his capacity for consecutive thought was limited, and that he was thus deficient mentally, and perhaps a downright moron. The argument, it must be obvious, is fundamentally nonsensical. What deceives the professors is the traditional prolixity of philosophers. Because the average philosophical writer, when he essays to expose his ideas, makes such inordinate drafts upon the parts of speech that the dictionary is almost emptied ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... she said, "to think that Mr. Holmes meant to be anything but kind! You mustn't get such nonsensical ideas. Mr. Holmes, just to prove that you don't bear any malice, you must let me drive you out to the farm for dinner. No, I really won't let you refuse. I insist. There's plenty of room in the car—the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... talents in poetry less conspicuous. Every occurrence, if their spirits are not too greatly depressed, is turned into a song. These songs are said to be incoherent and nonsensical. But this proceeds principally from two causes, an improper conjunction of words, arising from an ignorance of the language in which they compose; and a wildness of thought, arising from the different manner, in which the organs of rude and civilized people will be struck ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... of these last impressions I arrived in Vienna in a very cheerful frame of mind. I at once announced my return to Cornelius by sending him a small Venetian gondola, which I had bought for him in Venice, and to which I added a canzona written with nonsensical Italian words. The communication of my plan for the immediate composition of the Meistersinger made him almost frantic with delight, and until my departure from Vienna he remained in a state of ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... rules and tables with which his master has supplied him, and to have all his measures and weights at his fingers' ends, and yet to be so destitute of the arithmetical sense as to give without a moment's misgiving an entirely nonsensical answer to a simple arithmetical problem,—to say, for example, as I have known half a class of boys say, that a room is five shillings and sixpence wide. Such a boy, though his head may be stuffed with arithmetical information, has no knowledge ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... heard of stenographers before, who refused their employers, and who invariably quit their positions immediately afterward. But Dede had not even hinted at such a thing. No matter how baffling she was, there was no nonsensical silliness about her. She was level headed. But, also, he had been level-headed and was partly responsible for this. He hadn't taken advantage of her in the office. True, he had twice overstepped the bounds, but he had not followed it up and made a practice of it. She knew she could trust him. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... said St. Clare, mentally; but aloud he added, "Come, now, Marie, what do you think of the likeness? Don't be nonsensical, now." ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... story to Colonel Gaylord. He is an old man, and while he would not believe his son guilty of theft, still it would worry him. There is something else that happened that night—entirely uncriminal—but which we do not wish him to hear about. Therefore I am not going to let you go to him with this nonsensical tale that you have ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... understand. She liked me to play the lover "nicely"; she liked the effect of going about—we had lunches, we went to Earl's Court, to Kew, to theatres and concerts, but not often to concerts, because, though Marion "liked" music, she didn't like "too much of it," to picture shows—and there was a nonsensical sort of babytalk I picked up—I forget where now—that ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... beloved, there is no such thing as good-bye; it is a word that has no real meaning; but it is so English and pretty and sweet and child-like and nonsensical that I could write it over and ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Senator from New England rises up with tongue so thick, and with utterance so nonsensical, that he is led into the anteroom. He ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... that a knowledge of French is necessary in order to appreciate Voltaire or Hugo is nonsensical. For a student anxious to study the works of these masters, to set to work to learn the language of the writers would be like my building a flight of stairs to go down to supper. The stairs are already there. Some other person built them for me and ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... have been more honest and more liberal to have brushed away the nonsensical indictment in a sentence. Would the Treasury have put Shakespeare on trial for "Hamlet" or "Lear," or would they have condemned the writer of "The Song of Solomon" for immorality, or sent St. Paul to prison for his ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Phoebe, "it's jes' nothin' at all. It's jes' the most nonsensical thing that ever was. I don't mind tellin' you about it; don't mind it a bit. She wants Mr. Hav'ley to marry Miss Dora Bannister, an' she's on pins an' needles to know if the young woman here is likely to ketch him. That's ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... grammarians to the contrary notwithstanding. You is the form of the pronoun in the second person plural, and must, if we would speak correctly, be used with the corresponding form of the verb. The argument that we use you in the singular number is so nonsensical that it does not merit a moment's consideration. It is a custom we have—and have in common with other peoples—to speak to one another in the second person plural, and that is all there is of it. The ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... that among the people from whom the circle-squarers, perpetual-motioners, flat-earthed men and the like, are recruited, to say nothing of table-turners and spirit-rappers, somebody has not perceived the easy avenue to nonsensical notoriety open to any one who will take up the good old doctrine, that fossils are all ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... people of this church—ruled as they are by such a spirit—as to my lords and masters; that I shall have no other God but this congregation; that I shall deny my own conscience for theirs; that I shall go about the trivial, nonsensical things they call my pastoral duties, in fear and trembling; that my ministry is to cringe when they speak, and do their will regardless of what I feel to be the will of Christ! Faugh!" Big Dan drew himself erect. "If this ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... of twelve years when he was brought to me showed the mental powers of a stupid child of four. In a silly way he repeated every question which he heard without answering it; he talked steadily to himself in a nonsensical manner, mostly repeating nursery rhymes without end, never holding his attention to anything in the room, giving the impression that there was no attention whatever. The boy was a child of rich parents; he had his own teachers, but was for a ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... correspondent who wrote to ask him whether adhesion to the compromise had not rendered nonsensical the teaching given in a certain lesson upon the finding of the youthful Jesus in the temple, when, after they had read the verse, "How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" the teacher asked the children the name of Jesus' father ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... most diverting "properties" is the set of "morals" he draws to everything, of nonsensical literalness and infantile gravity, the perfection of solemn fooling. Thus in the 'Lay of St. Cuthbert,' where the Devil has captured the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... example of his companion's often strangely irresponsible way of looking at harmful facts. Roderick was silent sometimes for hours, with a puzzled look on his face and a constant fold between his even eyebrows; at other times he talked unceasingly, with a slow, idle, half-nonsensical drawl. Rowland was half a dozen times on the point of asking him what was the matter with him; he was afraid he was going to be ill. Roderick had taken a great fancy to the Villa Mondragone, and used to declaim fantastic compliments to it as they ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... father's cruelty, a daughter's anguish, a sweetheart's despair, and the ultimate suicide of both the lovers, is, albeit couched in uncouth and grotesque language, as pathetic as the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet." Robson gave every stanza a nonsensical refrain of "Right tooral lol looral, right tooral lol lay." At times, when his audience was convulsed with merriment, he would come to a halt, and gravely observe, "This is not a comic song"; but London, was soon unanimous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... stretched ahead a hundred yards clear and empty. And then I spotted her, crouched down right against the cowcatcher, that close I'd almost stepped on her. If we'd started up, we'd have run over her in a second. It was all so nonsensical, I never could make out her actions. Maybe she was trying to suicide. I grabbed her by the wrist and jerked her none too gentle to her feet. And she came along all right. Women do know when a ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... of Darinel the Shepherd and his damned unintelligible speculations, I would burn my own father along with them, if I found him playing at knight-errantry." So into the yard went "Olivante de Laura, the nonsensical old blockhead," "rough and dull Florismart of Hyrcania," "noble Don Platir," with nothing in him "deserving a grain of pity," Bernardo del Carpio, and Roncesvalles, and Palmerin de Oliva. What a delicious scene it is! The fussy barber, tired of reading titles and proceeding ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... "A ridiculous, nonsensical letter," replied Bonaparte, with a shrug; "a letter in which this fool demands of me to bring him back to France, and to indicate the place which I wish to occupy in his government. By my word, an idiot could not write a more crazy ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... in me and the feeling of sympathy and respect which you have awakened in me make it my duty to say a few words to you about your letter.... What? You say, too, that I meant to caricature the youth of Russia in Bazaroff? you repeat this—pardon the frankness of the expression—nonsensical accusation? Bazaroff,—this is my favorite child, for whose sake I quarrelled with Katkoff, upon whom I used all the color at my command. Bazaroff, this fine mind, this hero, a caricature? But it seems that there is nothing to be done in the case. Just ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... diseases, and that these ought to be named after them, although many there are who in their theology lay great stress on this supposition, ascribing them rather to God than to nature, which is but idle talk. We dislike such nonsensical gossip as is not supported by symptoms, but only by faith, a thing which is not human, whereon the gods themselves ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and my sister would pair off in such nonsensical speculations about Miss Havisham, and about what she would do with me and for me, that I used to want—quite painfully—to burst into spiteful tears, fly at Pumblechook, and pummel him all over. In these dialogues, my sister ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... secret passion relieved and gratified the overcharged bosom of Ferdinand. He pursued the subject with enjoyment. Anybody but Glastonbury might have thought that he had lost his senses, he laughed so loud, and talked so fast about a subject which seemed almost nonsensical; but the good Glastonbury ascribed these ebullitions to the wanton spirit of youth, and smiled out of sympathy, though he knew not why, except that his pupil ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... or grasp in them. Miss Wesley and her friend, and a tribe of authoresses that come after you here daily, and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are the shadows. You encouraged that mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you, in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off, by that simple expedient of referring her to you; but there are more burrs in the wind. I came home t'other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, I am sure, of the author ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... phrasing ready-made from the world about it, as it takes the street for its temple, and yet which may be at its inner point in the directest contact with God. Religion may suffer from aphasia and still be religion; it may utter misleading or nonsensical words and yet intend and convey the truth. The methods of the Salvation Army are older than doctrinal Christianity, and may long survive it. Men and women may still chant of Beulah Land and cry out in the ecstasy of salvation; the tambourine, that modern revival of the thrilling Alexandrine ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... by the unexpected question. What was her Purpose in Life? To get to the heart of the color of the world? That was rather vague. Also nonsensical when so formulated. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... personal matter from the seat of government. "It is to be lamented," he said, "that the editors of the different gazettes in the Union do not more generally and more correctly (instead of stuffing their papers with scurrility and nonsensical declamation, which few would read if they were apprised of the contents) publish the debates in Congress on all great national questions. And this, with no uncommon pains, every one of them might do." Washington evidently believed that there was no serious danger ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... a note to the clerk of the weather, and have a good, rousing snow-storm—say on the twenty-second. None of your meek, gentle, nonsensical, shilly-shallying snow-storms; not the sort where the flakes float lazily down from the sky as if they didn't care whether they ever got here or not and then melt away as soon as they touch the earth, but a regular business-like whizzing, whirring, ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... received my reason and my tastes from him too. And when my father gave me a watch and a compass I trusted that these things would point right. And when God gives me reason and tastes, must I then suppose that these point wrong? Wherefore did I receive them then? My reason calls it nonsensical to lead a wretched and miserable life, even for the sake of the Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth. How can this be pleasing to a supreme being? What can it matter to him? And my taste calls happiness desirable ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... he exclaimed; "if he should beget me a young breed of Whitecrafts like himself I would rather my daughter were dead than marry him. Then, on the other hand, Reilly; hang the fellow, had he only recanted his nonsensical creed, I could—but then, again, he might, after marriage, bring her over to the Papists, and then, by the Boyne, all my immense property would become Roman Catholic. By Strongbow, he'd teach the very rivers that run through it to sing Popish ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Esther—no one in their senses could deny such a thing; but we must be on our guard against make- believe duties. It is my duty to help mother by teaching Jack, and I give her two hours every morning; but when Fred comes into the schoolroom with some nonsensical request that would rob me of an hour or so, I am quite right not to give way to him. Do you think," warming into enthusiasm over her subject, "that Fred's violin playing ought to stand in the way of any real work that will benefit souls as well as bodies—that will ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... that has floated through the minds of most of us as we grew older and learnt more and more things. It is an idea extremely difficult to get into set terms. It is an idea very difficult to put so that we shall not seem nonsensical; and yet it is a very useful idea, and if it could be realized its realization would be of very practical value. It is the idea of a Dictionary of Ignorance ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... taste. In the second place, he began to discover that his kind-hearted employer was a monomaniac. In other words, that, although sane enough in all other matters, he was absolutely mad in regard to mechanical discoveries and inventions, and that most of the latter were absolutely nonsensical. ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... in this volume I find only one that seems to me "really funny," and that is "Uncle David's Nonsensical Story about the Giants and Fairies." Think of a giant so tall that "he was obliged to climb up a ladder to comb his own hair." But this bit of humor is not so good as a very modern nonsense-story entitled "The Giant's Shoes," which ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... trample it under foot, believe that it is the devil tempting you by his cunning, alluring words, as he tempted Eve, your mother. Would to God all here would make that rule,—never to look into an evil book, a filthy ballad, a nonsensical, frivolous story! Can a man take a snake into his bosom and not be bitten?—can we play with fire and not be burnt?—can we open our ears and eyes to the devil's message, whether of covetousness, ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... sex was still distasteful to her. But she bade herself, sternly, not to shrink. For without some reasoned comprehension of it—as now dawned on her—the ways of human beings, of animals, of plants and, so some say, even of minerals, are unintelligible, arbitrary, and nonsensical. It is the push of life itself, essential, fundamental, which makes us "feel in that way"—the push of spirit yearning to be clothed upon with flesh, made visible and given its chance to enter the earthly ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... otherwise, have little to do with the present narrative—except, indeed, that I had propounded, for the Veiled Lady's prophetic solution, a query as to the success of our Blithedale enterprise. The response, by the bye, was of the true Sibylline stamp,—nonsensical in its first aspect, yet on closer study unfolding a variety of interpretations, one of which has certainly accorded with the event. I was turning over this riddle in my mind, and trying to catch its slippery purport by the tail, when the old ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the sanity ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... do is to take the bits out of the box, look at them, and put them back again. Or, returning to Richard Middleton's excellent example: there is no such thing as London, there are only houses. No man has seen London at any time; the very word (meaning "the fort on the lake") is nonsensical; no human eye has ever beheld aught else but a number of houses; it is clear that this "London" is as mythical and monstrous and irrational a concept as many others of the same class. Well, people who talk like that are doubtless sent into the world for some useful but mysterious process; ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... some part of every dream and some detail of the dreamer's life during the previous waking state. This positively establishes a relation between sleeping states and waking states and disposes of the widely prevalent view that dreams are purely nonsensical phenomena coming from nowhere ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... forget Mme. Mergy, give up all the nonsensical and imprudent acts which your pride and your passions are making you commit; put all that on one side and think only ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... to Cummings, but he said he was bound to agree with the others and my dream was especially nonsensical. I said: "It seemed so real to me." Gowing replied: "Yes, to YOU perhaps, but not to ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... Why had they parted like enemies? How was it that some mist had shrouded from their eyes what mattered most, and had let them see nothing but damage done by cattle, bridles, pincers, and all those trivial things which now, as they remembered them, seemed so nonsensical? How was it that with the new owner they lived in peace, and yet had been on bad ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... stupid as to be Puseyites. I can scarcely believe that I have been the means of attracting one person here so utterly devoid of one remnant of brain as to believe the doctrine of baptismal regeneration." The doctrine, indeed, is so nonsensical to him, that, after some caricatures of it, he asserts that it would discredit Scripture with all sensible men, if it were taught in Scripture. God himself could not make Mr. Spurgeon believe it; and doubtless there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... than if you did it, Judy, come, now!" said Norton. "It's no such thing; it's only nonsense. Now Pink, don't be nonsensical!" ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... by better judgment. Meanwhile we must reckon the declared enemy of art as our best and most useful ally; for the object of his animosity is precisely art as understood by the "friend of art,"—he knows of no other kind! Let him be allowed to call our "friend of art" to account for the nonsensical waste of money occasioned by the building of his theatres and public monuments, the engagement of his celebrated singers and actors, and the support of his utterly useless schools of art and picture-galleries—to say nothing of all the energy, time, and ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... probably would have never returned. It is difficult to determine whether there were then any inhabitants in the more southern parts of Africa or not; yet, at any rate, this conqueror of the world would have made but a nonsensical adventure; his miserable ships, not contrived for a long voyage, would have become leaky, and foundered, before he could have doubled the Cape, and left his Majesty fairly beyond the limits of the then known world. Yet it would have been an august ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... of Gessner, Bodmer, and the like, who saw a muse in every sheep and every herdsman, the imitation of nature was the gospel in which every one believed. This, at best, meant nothing at all, and closely analyzed, it is half nonsensical, in so far as this definition presupposes art to be something that exists outside the domain of nature. But man belongs within the domain of nature; he must be included within this domain, and at most can complete or enlarge it; and for this reason alone art can never imitate a whole of which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... sitting for your picture till you came to Liverpool, for it would have encroached much upon our time together. I remember when I returned from abroad, a school-girl, I thought I had forgotten my mother's face. This copy of yours will save me from that nonsensical morbid feeling, and you will surely not forget mine.... You bid me, if anything should go ill with me, summon you across the Atlantic. Alas! dear H——, you forget that before a letter from that other ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... picture, and Gladys had already given Midge her own portrait framed in silver to stand on her dressing-table. The young guests all went away except the two Fultons, who were to stay to dinner. Mr. Maynard came home, and with a determination to keep Marjorie's spirits up, he was especially gay and nonsensical. ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... down except Paulsberg, who curtly refused. A man who wrote as much as he did could not sign his name to nonsensical notes, he said. And he rose and walked ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... is, and that there would be temptation; but there is a great deal to help one to keep right. And, oh! to have one's work in real good to Christ's poor, or in missions, instead of in all these outside silly nonsensical diversions that one doubts about all the time. If you would only let me go back with dear Sister Beata and Sister Elfleda ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... not have wasted three sheets of paper upon such a nonsensical request as that," observed the turnkey. "Old Jackson wouldn't shell out sixpence to save her or anybody else from ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... to the stock in the pasture. How stolid they were and how matter of fact and how sensible. They affected no high, nonsensical sentiments. Weren't they, after all, to be envied, rooted as they were in their solid simplicity? Why should human beings everlastingly try so hard to be different? He and Rose would have to get down to a genuine basis, and the quicker the better. Meanwhile he must remember that, whether ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... experience could not help but protest in his practical mind against such a determination of the invisible and the unknown to give him such nonsensical ideas. He had in play, in intellectual persiflage, and with some show of traditional reasonableness, called Nelia Crele "a river goddess." She was very well placed in his mind—a reckless woman, pretty, with a fine character for a masterpiece of fiction ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... the smith. "You know I love you for your own sake and for my mother's; but by St. Dunstan, who was a saint of my own craft, I will have the command of my own house; and if you leave me without any better reason but your own nonsensical suspicions, you must think how you will have the door open to you when you return; for you shall have no help ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... dear,—spelled caldy, but pronounced cawdy; the town where you are to take your nonsensical little fripperies to ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... with the horrid rascal SIR EMERSOM TENNENT alludes to—with the blackguard. That he is a boaster, a talker, an idiot, a nincompoop; that he scatters "words, words, words," as Polonius did of old; that he is bombastic, wordy, prosy, nonsensical, and a fool, no one will deny. But he is no rogue, though he utters rogueries and drolleries. No one is justified ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... woman, with more common sense than I almost ever met with. Great quickness in discovering characters, penetration in going to the bottom of them, and a pencil that never fails in a likeness— seldom a favourable One. She exacts and preserves, spite of her birth and their nonsensical prejudices about nobility, great court and attention. This she acquires by a thousand little arts and offices of friendship: and by a freedom and severity, which seem to be her sole end of drawing a concourse to her; ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... no use for you to get any nonsensical ideas," he said, "about what you will do and won't do; this is the only thing you can do; you have got to make a living, and you have got to pay your debts; beggars can't be choosers. The fact is, you have all lived on charity so long that ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... to provide against the rejection of his application. He strove to please. To adopt the metaphor of his nonsensical phrase, he laid brick upon brick on the tall chimney of his devoirs until, at length, the structure was stable and complete. The manners of the best society come around finally to simplicity; and as the girl's ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... possession of the chair in Erlangen, is written in the spirit of Darwin, whereas the second half which appeared at a later date is written in the contrary spirit. He then takes individual points of Fleischmann's treatise out of their context in order to execute a cheap and nonsensical criticism of them. Haeckel has evidently been giving instructions on the best manner of dealing with adversaries. And very docile disciples they are who imitate his method even to the extent of defaming and abusing ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... an old bachelor that had not, at some time or other, his nonsensical moment, when he would become tender and sentimental, talk about the concerns of the heart, and have some confession of a delicate nature to make. Almost every man has some little trait of romance in his life, which ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... it's nonsensical for you to have a secretary," she answered, "and that it would be much better for you to do your own work, and make a gift of the money to the institution, and then I could go and learn to be a nurse. I only mention these ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... in the state of mind in which he found himself, that he could not help exclaiming: "Ah! they chose a good site for it, and how stupid it was to let them do so! I know of nothing more nonsensical; Paris crowned and dominated by that temple of idolatry! How impudent it is, what a buffet for the cause of reason after so many centuries of science, labour, and battle! And to think of it being reared over Paris, the one city in the world which ought never to have ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... when Uncle Remus went off into these rhapsodies. However nonsensical they might seem to others, to the child they were positively thrilling, and he listened with rapt attention, ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... that when your flitting-time came, she would come to us gladly. We had it all arranged. You won't want to marry for a year or so, yet. You'll want to have some happy sweetheart days first. And you'll want to make a lot of those pretty, useless, nonsensical things other girls make when they marry. That's why I advised you to save your burglar money,—so you would have it for this. We'll have Aunt Grace come right away, so you can take a little freedom to be happy, and to make your plans. ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... you to come downstairs again," he said. "It is Fosco's fault, Miss Halcombe, not mine. He has started some nonsensical objection to his wife being one of the witnesses, and has obliged me to ask you to join us in ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... said he, taking the eldest daughter's hand and laughing at himself. "You think my ambition as nonsensical as if I were to freeze myself to death on the top of Mount Washington only that people might spy at me from the country roundabout. And truly that would be a noble pedestal for a ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... could hold his own against any smitten swain who had so far entered the lists against him. As a companion, Anne honestly acknowledged nobody could be so satisfactory as Gilbert; she was very glad, so she told herself, that he had evidently dropped all nonsensical ideas—though she spent considerable ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Chivers, and especially from the "Eonx of Ruby." Chivers, according to Taylor's showing, had become infatuated with Poe, and adorned his verses with every sort of beautiful word which he could coin, the result being as nonsensical a medley as was ever known. Earlier in the evening, Taylor, Fields, and myself had each of us been giving a lecture, and this led Taylor to speak of a recent experience of his while holding forth in one of the smaller towns ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... new Objection to Clarissa, in that she talked so much of Religion, which he call'd Canting. Nay, Sir, said Bellario, 'I cannot see how she can be said to cant; for her religious Reflections are neither nonsensical or affected, but such as naturally arise from a pious Mind in her several Situations; and if you are a Christian, Sir, I am sure you cannot, on Consideration, dislike that Part of her Character.' Mr. Dellincourt said, ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... so silly as to put faith in nonsensical dreams of that kind. Many a one like it I have had, if I would bother my head with them. Why, within the last ten days, while you were dreaming of finding a pot of gold on London Bridge, I was dreaming of finding a ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... week previous. She compared us to Judas Iscariot, who betrayed his master with a kiss. She said there were those amongst us who would surely have to suffer deep affliction for not attending to the manifestations of truth within.—I have been guilty of much levity and nonsensical conversation and have also permitted thoughts to occupy my mind which should have been far distant, but I do not consider myself as having committed any wilful offence. Perhaps the reason I can not see my own defects is because my heart is hardened. O, may it become more and ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... casually took a volume of what is called, "A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy." 'Sentimental'! what is that? It is not English: he might as well say, 'Continental' [!]. It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea; yet one fool makes many. And this nonsensical word (who would believe it?) is become a fashionable one!' ('Journal', February 11, 1772). In 1773, Goldsmith puts it in the 'Dedication' to 'She Stoops':— 'The undertaking a comedy, not merely 'sentimental', was very dangerous;' and Garrick (forgetting Kelly and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... is nonsensical allegory," said Varvara Petrovna, getting angry at last. "You haven't answered my question, why? ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... who make laws that neither they nor anybody else can abide. We congratulate them on clinging to all they have cast away, and on imitating everything which they came into existence to insult. And when we have established all these nonsensical analogies with a nonexistent nation, we wait until there is a crisis in which we really are at one with America, and then we falter and threaten to fail her. In a battle where we really are of one blood, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... who have travelled it is quite extraordinary what an appalling mass of nonsensical rubbish can be supplied to the public by politicians, by newspaper penny-a-liners, and by home royal geographo-parasites at large, who base their arguments on such unsteady foundation. It is quite sufficient for some people to open ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the moist and masticated end of his cigar and all such nonsensical ideas with it. Then he took a new cigar from ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... states to our confederacy? Has not the cry of war for the conquest of Mexico, for the expansion of reinstituted slavery, for the robbery of priests, and the plunder of religious establishments, yet subsided? Have the pettifogging, hair-splitting, nonsensical, and yet inflammatory bickerings about the right of search, pandering to the thirst for revenge in France, panting for war to prostrate the disputed title of her king—has the sound of this war-trumpet yet faded away upon our ears? Has the supreme and unparalleled ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... Avoid all nonsensical waste of strength, and gymnastic feats, before and during the march; play no jokes upon your comrades, that will make their day's work more burdensome. Young people are very ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... try to remain free from all external influences and impressions. Don't move. Avoid every use of a muscle. Don't let anything distract you. Just concentrate your attention on your psychic activities. Don't suppress one idea as unimportant, irrelevant, or nonsensical. Simply tell me what occurs to you in connection with ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... Jew as well, himself a venerable and historic relic, was misunderstood on both sides. In short, he was a man who particularly prided himself on having no nonsense about him; with the result that he was always doing nonsensical things. He seemed to be standing on his head merely to prove that ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... you, it is all so easy; it is within every man's reach. No education is necessary, no nonsensical argumentation. I offer you a short cut to Glory. You may be the merest clown—cobbler, fishmonger, carpenter, money-changer; yet there is nothing to prevent your becoming famous. Given brass and boldness, you have only to learn to wag your tongue ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... as if to say that discussion with such a nonsensical fellow was useless, and took his seat at his desk, where an unfinished pile ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... him now, no need! I've changed my mind. It was a nonsensical idea of mine. I won't give him anything, not a penny, I want my money myself," cried the old man, waving his hand. "I'll crush him like a beetle without it. Don't say anything to him or else he ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... conceive a supernatural Being, and what none can conceive none ought to worship, or even assert the existence of. Who worships a something of which he knows nothing is an idolater. To talk of, or bow down to it, is nonsensical; to pretend affection for it, is worse than nonsensical. Such conduct, however pious, involves the rankest hypocrisy; the meanest and most odious species of idolatry; for labouring to destroy which the Universalist is called 'murderer of the ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... I thought you might like a show. You may have your choice of the two. Miss Rae, by the way, says she's wild to know you; thought you were the most provoking man she ever saw; and that you were—nonsensical idea—engaged to Mae. All because you wouldn't look at her the other day when she passed you two, But you can go with Miss Hopkins, if ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... of a livid complexion and audacious look, without sprightliness; the result and indication of an envious, ill-natured, proud, sullen, and ambitious spirit"—clearly not the portrait of a friend. Lord Campbell thought the St. Paul sermon contemptible, and General Stanhope, in the debate, called it nonsensical and incoherent. It seems to me the very reverse, even if we abstract it from its stupendous effect. Sacheverell, no doubt, was a more than usually narrow-minded priest; but in judging of the preacher we must think also of the look and the voice and the gestures, and these probably ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... shortly. Somehow, I did not like the suggestion. "Betty is a child yet. For pity's sake, Sara, don't go putting nonsensical ideas ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Leibniz's ideas is anyhow unmistakable. If metaphysical thinking is nonsensical, its empire over the human imagination must still be confessed; if it is as chimerical a science as alchemy, it is no less fertile in by-products of importance. And if we are to consider Leibniz historically, we cannot do better ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... to this effect: "Ah! my dear lord, for Heaven's sake buy this necklace for the poor Duchess, who is dying to have it, and cannot indeed live without it." The fellow poured forth so much of this stupid nonsensical stuff that the Duke's patience was exhausted, and he cried: "Oh, get away with you, or blow your chaps out till I smack them!" The knave knew very well what he was after; for if by blowing out his cheeks or singing ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... frightened out of their wits by ghosts of all sorts and sizes in their winding sheets; or by a set of old beggarmen, dressed in women's clothes, armed with broomsticks, and dancing and howling out their nonsensical song ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... 'Twaddle, man! nonsensical havers and twaddle! If you hadn't met me you would have met somebody else; and if you hadn't met him, you would have foregathered wi' experience; and, man, experience is the best teacher ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... school of philosophers, who expounded Taste and the laws of the Picturesque. Some extracts from the work of one of these, Thomas Whately, whose Observations on Modern Gardening appeared in 1770, will show to what excesses the whole nonsensical business had been carried. "In wild and romantic scenes," says Whately, "may be introduced a ruined stone bridge, of which some arches may be still standing, and the loss of those which are fallen may be supplied ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... loose to do a thing like this? The brittle chalk smeared beneath my foot, but the representation remained, almost recognizable. On my way to the Savoy I saw it again, defacing a hoarding, and as I paid off my driver I thought I caught another glimpse of the nonsensical drawing on the side of ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... cried Ardan, angrily trying to throw the blame on something, and, like every angry man in such circumstances, bound to be rather nonsensical. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... conditions, it seemed, and she always did them well. Kitty had an idea, a very foolish one, of course, that she could only work when alone and quiet, say in her bedroom, or in the barn, or lying in the grass in the garden, or in the woods. All of which was inelegant, unladylike, and nonsensical. Kitty must get the better of such ideas at once, and must learn her lessons as Anna did, sitting primly at the square ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... effect. I am not going to attend to nonsensical gossip. Georgina is what she was then, and the same is right for me now as was right last year. I am not going to turn ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... entering another society, and perhaps with a manner a little confused. "Have you met Dr. Johnson?" my friends exclaimed. "Yes, I have." "And what passed between you?"'" and so on. All this at any rate is legendary outgrowth on the very face of it, and nonsensical even for that. But even the story itself, as told so circumstantially by Scott, is demonstrably mythical in most of its circumstances. Johnson was never in Glasgow except one day, the 29th of October 1773, and in October 1773 Smith was in London, and as we know from an incidental parenthesis in the ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... permitted to grow and to spread, if it be spoilt by the flattering and nonsensical assurance that it has been victorious,—then, as I have said, it will have the power to extirpate German mind, and, when that is done, who knows whether there will still be anything to be made out of the surviving ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... an abortive attempt to correct the nonsensical reading of the old copies, unrolled; but if enrolled itself makes sense, it does so only by introducing tautology. Besides, it leads us away from what I believe to be ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... his drowsy mind just roused from dreams, there turned and turned the queer nonsensical refrain: "I never—never—will desert Mr. Micawber. . ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... she can't be happy without being petted, I must pet her, and let her be nonsensical about me; but I think it is all great stuff, and that you will suit her much better than ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... toss of her head, as though the buzz of this nonsensical verbiage stung her ears, plunged at once into ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... those of whom it is said in the Bible, 'They reigned, but not through Me; they were princes, but I did not know them.' Do you conceive now why I placed the king's picture before my store? why I burnt a lamp beneath it? I think this glorious portrait is more deserving of a sacred lamp than the Pope's nonsensical bull." ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... impassivity, and in whose rigidity they believe they divine the majesty of the gods. Febrer recalled his jests of other times, on nights of feasting, seated before a plate of fresh oysters, in the fashionable Parisian restaurants. His elegant companions thought him mad as they listened to the nonsensical ideas aroused by wine, the sight of the shell fish and the recollection of certain fragmentary reading in his youth. "We're going to eat our grandfathers like the merry cannibals that we are." The oyster is one of the primitive manifestations of life on the planet—one ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of you indulge in so much smaller talk with men than with women? Because it is expected of you? Only by a few, and they make themselves very absurd by always trying to say nonsensical things to you. Men of this sort appear to have an impression that you are still children amused with a Jack-in-the-box which springs up in a very conceited hobgoblin way. Everybody likes a joke, and at times feels a childlike pleasure in speaking nonsense; but, believe me, sense ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... consider a treasure trove. Later writers doubt whether any such book existed, for it is hardly credible that the Puritan element which so largely composed the population of Boston in the first quarter of the eighteenth century would have encouraged the printing of any nonsensical jingles. ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... gate, and, I believe, singing or chanting some such words as, "Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?" and then something more which I have failed to recollect. It seemed to me that I must have been behaving in this nonsensical way for ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... words, I will proceed baldly to enumerate various important physical differentiations which—— (Intervention by Hon'ble Chairwoman, reminding me that these were not in disputation.) I bow to correction, and kiss the rod by summing up the gist of my argument, viz., that it is nonsensical idiotcy to suppose that a woman can be the equivalent of a man either in intellectual gripe, in bodily robustiousness, or in physical courage. Of the last, I shall afford an unanswerable proof from my own person. It is ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... even heard the name of Jesus except in swearing. Christmas Day was unheard of, and Thanksgiving a riddle; and when I asked the father if we might not have a hen for dinner on that occasion, he said there were none to spare for such nonsensical purposes." ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
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