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More "Ridiculous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... herself, and the idea, coupled with the sense of her present grewsome and doleful condition, was so truly absurd and ridiculous that she could not restrain a ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... have got to learn your limitations; or if not your limitations, the limitations made for you by the ridiculous and unlovely ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... produced, by informing her, that prognostications had been for a long period discountenanced, and that formerly when the ancient augurs, after the ceremonies of their successful illusions were over, met each other by accident in the street, impressed by the ridiculous remembrance of their impositions, they could not help laughing in each other's faces. Madame V——laughed too; upon which Monsieur O——, very good humouredly told her, that as a soothsayer, she certainly ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... decided to take direct notice of Rand's presence. "Colonel Rand, I'm sorry to say that, in her present condition, my sister doesn't know what she's saying. It's bad enough for my stepmother to bring an outsider into what's obviously a family matter, but when my sister begins making these ridiculous accusations ..." ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... big girl with rather a heavy face and strong, capable-looking hands. Despite her manners, which were undeniably bad, Joan would almost have described her as distinguished but for the fact that the word sounded ridiculous ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... pardon," said Cayrol, humbly; "I appear ridiculous to you, but my happiness is stronger than I am, and I cannot hide my joy. You will see that I can be grateful. I will spend my life in trying to please you. I have a surprise ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... him afresh. His idealism had made him ridiculous in the eyes of the townsfolk. He had spent money he could ill spare in a hopeless cause, which was not even a worthy one. And now everybody was laughing at him or sneering—he grew hot with shame. That his motives were honourable only heightened the ludicrousness of his action: it seemed ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... being caught asleep he purchased one and began to read a leading article. It commenced with these words: "There are certain playwrights taking themselves very seriously; might we suggest to them that they are in danger of becoming ridiculous . . ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... don't you think it would be nicer and kinder of you not to try and make me feel uncomfortable, even if I do assume a dress which is ridiculous in your eyes, though quite common enough in the country where we are about to sojourn?' There was no answer except that which appeared in their hanging heads. He was a good father and they all knew it. He was quite satisfied ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... habit to retain the old form of words and the time-honoured ceremonies. Still this force is powerful; the dislike of voluntary change forbids amendment even of formularies which have long ceased to be understood, and have often become ridiculous because their meaning has been lost. It is by no means an uncommon thing for the rustic story-teller to be unable to explain expressions, and indeed whole episodes, in any other way than Uncle Remus, when called upon to say who Miss Meadows was: "She wuz in de tale, Miss Meadows ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... deceived me and the friend had stretched me on a bed of pain. I could not clearly distinguish what was passing in my head; it seemed to me that I was under the influence of a horrible dream and that I had but to awake to find myself cured; at times it seemed that my entire life had been a dream, ridiculous and childish, the falseness of which had just been disclosed. Desgenais was seated near the lamp at my side; he was firm and serious, although a smile hovered about his lips. He was a man of heart, but as dry as a pumice-stone. An early experience had made ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... Dick's mind jumping, at one bound, to the truth. What an ass he had been going to make of himself, and what a time he would have had if he hadn't found out the trick in time! As it was, he could not help laughing at the idea of his own ridiculous position, and the ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... was my intention to menace or insult the Government of France is as unfounded as the attempt to extort from the fears of that nation what her sense of justice may deny would be vain and ridiculous. But the Constitution of the United States imposes on the President the duty of laying before Congress the condition of the country in its foreign and domestic relations, and of recommending such measures as ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... listened to all that young Allison had to tell them concerning the glorious victory that had not yet been won, the brothers bent their steps toward the post-office, where they found a crowd of men and boys who seemed to be trying to make themselves ridiculous. They acted in the same senseless way that those travelling companions did whom Marcy Gray found on the train when he left Barrington, and could not have been more excited and jubilant if the five war ships and two transport steamers, that were to operate ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... alone, and I was not sure whether the honours remained with him or with me. He had never for a moment lost his dignity, nor had he even looked ridiculous when calmly rearranging his tie and collar. I laughed to myself bitterly as I prepared to follow them. I was determined to lay the whole matter before ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... evening school in the village; that is to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in the society of youth who paid two pence per week each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented a small cottage, and Mr. Wopsle ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... ship with all hands before striking his colors, and they believed him implicitly. This was the hero who was described as "a Jew by persuasion, a Frenchman by birth, an American for convenience, and so diminutive in stature as to make him appear ridiculous, in the eyes of others, even for him to enforce authority among a hardy, weatherbeaten crew should they do aught against his will." He was big enough, nevertheless, for this night's bloody work, and there was no doubt about his authority. While the British tried to climb over ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... absurd and ridiculous to suppose that any person, however great, or learned, or wise, could employ language correctly without a knowledge of the things expressed by that language. No matter how chaste his words, how lofty his phrases, how sweet the intonations, or mellow the ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... myself. Something outside myself, as it seemed, was saying that there was no way of escape; that it was monstrous to suppose that all these bursting shells would not smash the ambulance to bits and finish the agony of the wounded, and that death was very hideous. I remember thinking, also, how ridiculous it was for men to kill one another like this and to make ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... the outset reconcile ourselves to the fact that the birth-rate is voluntarily controlled.... Certain persons who instruct us in these matters hold up their pious hands and whiten their frightened faces as they cry out in the public squares against 'this vice,' but they can only make themselves ridiculous." ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... seniors and six members of the Transition made up the party, with little Desiree Legrand tagged on at the last as a mascot, because Stella and Carrie had pointed out that twelve pupils and one mistress would make thirteen at table if they had tea together, and though Miss Morley had scoffed at such ridiculous superstition, she took Desiree all the same to break the possible bad luck. They had the satisfaction of assembling in the hall for the start exactly as their companions ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... year, if it please the Lord that I live so long; but the jest was, the Clerk begins the 25th psalm, which hath a proper tune to it, and then the 116th, which cannot be sung with that tune, which seemed very ridiculous. After church to Sir W. Batten's, where on purpose I have not been this fortnight, and I am resolved to keep myself more reserved to avoyd the contempt which otherwise I must fall into, and so home and six and talked and supped ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... very hot at one time, as to whether the Boer guns were better or not than ours, and the ridiculous statements one both read and heard from persons who knew little about the matter, were rather amusing and perhaps a little annoying. I unhesitatingly state that on all occasions the British Naval guns inch for inch outranged and ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... nature on examination. It is so disguised that one fails to recognise it, so subtle that it deceives the scientific, so elusive that it escapes the doctor's eye: experiments seem to be at fault with this poison, rules useless, aphorisms ridiculous. The surest experiments are made by the use of the elements or upon animals. In water, ordinary poison falls by its own weight. The water is superior, the poison obeys, falls downwards, and takes ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... long time at a cavalier old man, was condemned to swallow up a whole box of his proper pills. "Very well," I say, "that must be egregious. It is cannot be possible," but they bring a little box not more grand nor my thumb. It seemed to be to me very ridiculous; so I returned to my hotel at despair how I could possibility learn a language what meant so many differents ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... his strong hands, and put his arm about her shoulders like a vise, turning her face toward him at the same time. Julia, furious with the nervous fear that this scuffling would be overheard, and that Carter would make her ridiculous, glared at him, and they remained staring fixedly at each other for ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... in the height of the fashion. In the present day his costume would be thought supremely ridiculous for a man; but when he wore it, it was considered perfectly enchanting. It consisted of a gown—similar to a long dressing-gown, nearly touching the feet—of blue velvet, spangled with gold fleur-de-lis, and lined with white satin; ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... absolutely ridiculous! Besides, how do you know Mr. Babson is bad? Has he ever hurt ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... followed by a great number of persons wherever he goes, who must be always talking in his praise. And yet he must not venture to sing in public: for then all men would immediately perceive not only his ignorance, but his presumption and folly likewise. And would it not be ridiculous in him to spend his estate to ruin his reputation? In like manner, if any one would appear a great general, or a good pilot, though he knew nothing of either, what would be the issue of it? If he cannot make others believe it, it troubles him, ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... A most ridiculous country: to crown Kathlyn again (for the third time!) and then to lock her up! Next to superstition as a barrier to progress there stands custom. Everything one did must be done as some one else had done it; the initiative ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... every stroke, and so are always rising or falling in curves. All of this genus use their tails, which incline downward, as a support while they run up trees. Parrots, like all other hook-clawed birds, walk awkwardly, and make use of their bill as a third foot, climbing and ascending with ridiculous caution. All the gallinae parade and walk gracefully, and run nimbly; but fly with difficulty, with an impetuous whirring, and in a straight line. Magpies and jays flutter with powerless wings, and make no dispatch; herons seem incumbered ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... Prussian Germany is any theory of honour mixed up with such things; any more than with poisoning or picking pockets. No French, English, Italian or American gentleman would think he had in some way cleared his own character by sticking his sabre through some ridiculous greengrocer who had nothing in his hand but a cucumber. It would seem as if the word which is translated from the German as "honour" must really mean something quite different in German. It seems to mean something more like what ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... know," replied the young lady, with a sigh. "By the by, I had forgotten—it is very childish, and I am almost ashamed to mention it—but when you see Miss Fonblanque, you will have to make yourself a little ridiculous; and I am sure the part in no way suits you. We had agreed upon a watchword. You will have to address an earl's daughter in these words: 'Nigger, nigger, never die'; but reassure yourself," she added, laughing, "for the fair patrician ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Romans working a mine, even through the soil of Veii, so as to be sure of reaching not only the town and the citadel, and even the temple, is considered by Niebuhr as extremely ridiculous. He deems the circumstance a clear proof of the fiction that attaches to the entire story of the capture of Veii. The whole seems to be an imitation of the siege ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... absolutely succeeded in getting his shoes, his handkerchief, and his hat; but an attempt to take off his cravat had awoke the sleeper. In this case, the prisoner was marched off under sundry severe threats of vengeance; for the robbee was heated with the run, and really looked so ridiculous that his anger was ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... into Pieker's store!—that certainly would surprise Arthur. True it was Tess he'd "dared," but of course he had not dreamed SHE, Missy, would ever take it up. He considered her unathletic—sort of ridiculous. Wouldn't it be great to "show" him? She visioned the amazement, the admiration, the respect, which would shine in his eyes as, insouciantly and yet with dash, she deftly manoeuvred Gypsy's reins and cantered right into ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... said coldly, "'proper' and 'reasonable,' in the connection you have used them, would be ridiculous if they weren't disgraceful. I have been patient with a certain amount of rash talk, yes—and conduct, but this must be the end. I had intended to have you leave Shadrach this morning, then later. Either that or I'll be forced to make my excuses to James Polder." ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... with him, and her constant endeavours to raise enemies against France, prevailed upon him to issue the decree, which I could only regard as an act of madness and tyranny. It was not a decree, but fleets, that were wanting. Without a navy it was ridiculous to declare the British Isles in a state of blockade, whilst the English fleets were in fact blockading all the French ports. This declaration was, however, made in the Berlin Decree. This is what was called the Continental system! ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... only no beauty in goodness but no deforming in iniquity, alike without reverence for God and fear of his adversary, blind as a mole to all worth and all unworth throughout the universe, yet knowing and boastful of knowledge, by means of which he sees only "the ridiculous, the unsuitable, the bad, but for the solemn, the noble, the worthy is blind ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... burn as he abruptly turned off to the right, for, somehow, he knew that she was peeping at him through the blinds and that something about his tall, rangy figure was appealing to her sense of the ridiculous. ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... care for slanderous reports, so long as I keep my own self-esteem, and know myself to be virtuous and true? If there were really a stain upon my purity it would kill me; I could not survive it. It is the princely blood in my veins doubtless that gives rise to such pride in me; very ridiculous, perhaps, in an actress, but such ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... bores. Wonder if it'll have that effect on me? Ach Himmel! how that woman bores me. No, there's no denying it—there's my pouch, old man—I hate the poor; their virtues are only a shade more vulgar than their vices. This Leadbatter creature is honest after her lights—she sends me up the most ridiculous leavings—and I only hate her the ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... sin art thou forbidden, my son," returned Buddha, "but on account of the ridiculous and unsavoury plight to which thy knavery and disobedience have reduced thee. I have now appeared to remind thee that this day all my apostles meet on Mount Vindhya to render an account of their mission, and to inquire whether I am to deliver thine ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... flattering to national vanity and professional narrowness; and though they involved those that supported them in the most glaring contradictions, and some absurdities even too ridiculous to mention, we have always been, and in a great measure still are, extremely tenacious of them. If these principles are admitted, the history of the law must in a great measure be deemed, superfluous. For to what purpose is a history of a law of which it is impossible ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... streets of Edinburgh appears rather peculiar. Others I found at particular periods to be thickly inhabited. My first course was to direct my course through the rain to G.B.'s dwelling, where I found him reading a large Bible. He appears to have carried fanaticism to a ridiculous pitch, unworthy of his education and station in life. He put into my hands a tract (composed I am afraid by himself), with injunctions to read it. I intend to send it to you as a curiosity. His brother Charles, whom I best knew, used ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... phenomena of nature, and fix it on its own phenomena. "I have not leisure for physical speculations," he said, with characteristic irony, "and I will tell you why: I am not yet able, according to the Delphic inscription, to know myself, and it seems to me very ridiculous, while ignorant of myself, to inquire into what I am not concerned in." Weary of disputes about the origin of the universe, he turned to the one field in which the current method of abstract reasoning could be fruitfully applied—the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... gate. You know full well that, were some one to summon together all your knights for this cause, the best of them would not dare to step forward. If it is true that you have no one to defend your spring, you will appear ridiculous and humiliated. It will redound greatly to your honour, forsooth, if he who has attacked you shall retire without a fight! Surely you are in a bad predicament if you do not devise some other plan to benefit ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... different purpose: Peter is indeed a sort of metrical Cobbett. Cobbett is, however, more mischievous than Peter, because he pollutes a holy and how unconquerable cause with the principles of legitimate murder; whilst the other only makes a bad one ridiculous and odious. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... have given up the happy months we had planned to spend in Dresden. Henry and I can only stay at home to pray that her preposterous mania will wear itself out in short order, as she will find herself unfitted for the ridiculous task which she insists upon attempting against the earnest wishes of us who have been more than father and mother to her. Of course, she has talked volumes of her affection for us, and of her gratitude, which we do not want—we only want her ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... or modern story, Charles?" asked Ernest; "I have no fancy for modern ghost stories. They all end in so ridiculous a way that one feels vexed at having taken the trouble of ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... recovering his pupil his mind went instantly back to their original connection, and he had in his confusion of ideas, the strongest desire in the world to resume spelling lessons and half-text with young Bertram. This was the more ridiculous, as towards Lucy he assumed no snob powers of tuition. But she had grown up under his eye, and had been gradually emancipated from his government by increase in years and knowledge, and a latent sense of his own inferior tact ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... The very chairs and tables shouted at him; he looked ridiculous. How in her wildest dreams could she have entertained the idea of holding ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Chestertonian romance—and all the rest are the inventor's secret. Imprimis, a body of men and an idea, and the rest must follow, if only the idea be big enough for a man to fight about, or if need be, even to make himself ridiculous about. ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... to feel that this burden is shared by others. This is, why no one dares take the initiative, or express himself openly; but each awaits other opinions, to adopt or oppose them. They exchange fewer affirmations than suggestions. They proceed by insinuation; then they utter commonplaces, ridiculous suppositions, asides, provocative, as it were, of ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... Puss!' replied the Doctor. 'Don't you know it's always somebody's birth-day? Did you never hear how many new performers enter on this - ha! ha! ha! - it's impossible to speak gravely of it - on this preposterous and ridiculous business called Life, ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... more approachable, and the Egyptian, barred from the divine, found it on earth. He prayed to scorpions, sang hymns to scarabs, coaxed the jackal with psalms; with dances he placated the ibis. It was ridiculous but human. He too would have a part, however insensate, in the ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... ball of paper, and raised his arm to fling it away. Then suddenly his lips relaxed in a smile and a light of relief sprang into his eyes. It was all nonsense, of course—just some foolish, woman's whim or fancy, some ridiculous idea she had got into her head which five minutes' talk between them would dispel. He had been a fool to take it seriously. He unclenched his hand and smoothed out the crumpled sheet of paper. Tearing it into very small ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... contented himself with a comparatively humble anonymous dress, a doublet of dark velvet slashed with white satin. The Duke of Roxburgh as David Bruce, the captive King of Scotland, encountered no rival royal prisoner, though a ridiculous report had sprung up that a gentleman representing John of France was to form a prominent feature of the pageant, to walk in chains past the Queen. This stupid story not only wounded the sensitive vanity of the French, to ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... partook of the loyalty of a clanswoman, the hero-worship of a maiden aunt, and the idolatry due to a god. No matter what he had asked of her, ridiculous or tragic, she would have done it and joyed to do it. Her passion, for it was nothing less, entirely filled her. It was a rich physical pleasure to make his bed or light his lamp for him when he ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... full of happiness. His bosom's lord sat lightly on its throne. Natt's face was excruciatingly ridiculous, and Paul laughed at the sight of it. Then Natt laughed, and they both laughed together, each at, neither with, the other. "I don't know nothing, I don't. Oh, no!" chuckled Natt, inwardly. Once he made the ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... pupil's love of detail by this time, and Viva put her head on one side and stared at her with gratified admiration. If she had asked her mother, she would have looked tired and sighed, and said, "My dear child! how should I know? Don't ask ridiculous questions," but Mamzelle Paddy knew better ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... relief to be again in motion, although our progress was slow, and it was a question every rod whether the guide could go on. We had the day before us; but if we did not find a boat at the inlet a day might not suffice, in the weak condition of the guide, to extricate us from our ridiculous position. There was nothing heroic in it; we had no object: it was merely, as it must appear by this time, a pleasure excursion, and we might be lost or perish in it without reward and with little sympathy. We had something like a hour and a half of stumbling through the swamp when suddenly ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... dangling over a gulf below? There is no help for it. Imagine yourself a sack of meal, if you can, and expect as little sympathy as would be accorded to that article. Are you moved to a keen sense of the ridiculous, as a curve in the road discloses the figures of your elongated party, unused to riding, and rendered the more grotesque by their mountain-equipment? A laugh unshared is no laugh at all, so you may as well smother it at once. Does the scenery through which you are passing awaken emotions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... the science and practice of arms could not? If he doth not achieve success in this untried task which he hath undertaken from a spirit of boyish unsteadiness, the entire body of Brahmanas here will be rendered ridiculous in the eyes of the assembled monarchs. Therefore, forbid this Brahmana that he may not go to string the bow which he is even now desirous of doing from vanity, childish daring, or mere unsteadiness.' Others replied, 'We shall not be made ridiculous, nor shall we incur the disrespect ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... scene of the play opens when Pillage is at the zenith of his power; a stage direction orders that "The Levee enters, and range themselves to a ridiculous tune"; a partition of places ensues under the allegory of the business arrangements of a theatrical manager; and the author explains that by this levee scene he hopes that persons greater than author-managers may learn to despise sycophants. Close on the ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... "What might be sport to her might be death to him. A man at his age is not too old to fall in love with a young lady of hers. But he is too old not to be extremely ridiculous to such a young ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are almost alone on this side of the ship. Is it not proof? If I were right, the men and women in there—dancing, playing cards, chattering—would be crowding this rail. Can you imagine humans like that? But they can't see what I see, for I am a ridiculous old fool who remembers things. Ah, do you catch that in the air, Miss Standish—the perfume of flowers, of forests, of green things ashore? It is ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... could be drawn up. He had a dim recollection of ladies in a blue and white boat, and a tall man in a red silken jacket, who stood in the bow with an oar. Now, however, the pond was so small that a boat would have looked ridiculous. The Consul often wondered how it could have so diminished in size. It must, he thought, be the rushes which encroached upon it; and although he continually told the gardener to keep his eye upon them, it ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... been, in their day, popular. It was soon found, however, that he repeated himself, and the sameness of handling began to tire his readers. His "two travellers," with whom he opens his stories, have become proverbially ridiculous. But he has depicted scenes in modern history with skill, and especially in French history. His Richelieu is a favorite; and in his Life of Charlemagne he has brought together the principal events in the career ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Instead of drawing a circle with his wand round the House of Lords, and ordering them to pacify America, on the terms he prescribed before they ventured to quit the circumference of his commands, he brought a ridiculous, uncommunicated, unconsulted motion for addressing the King immediately to withdraw the troops from Boston, as an earnest of lenient measures. The Opposition stared and shrugged; the courtiers stared and ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... revolution (in spite of certain cross accidents) but secured its absolutely peaceful acceptance throughout the country. There are no doubt visionary and fantastic spirits in the Republican ranks, and ridiculous proposals have already been mooted. For instance, it has been gravely suggested that all streets bearing the names of saints—and there are hundreds of them—should be renamed in commemoration of Republican ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... fun choosing it, too. Don't you like my furniture? I love it. I hovered around it again and again; but I didn't dream of having it in my room, it was so expensive. It's real French enamel, you know, and happens to be a craze of fashion at present. I thought it was ridiculous to buy it, but Leslie insisted that it was the only thing for my room; and those crazy, extravagant children went and bought it when I ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... peculiar sensitiveness toward being discovered with his car at a disadvantage, said seriously: "I see a racing machine coming, and when it passes us I hope you people will act as if we had stopped here only to lunch, and not because this ridiculous belt chose to break itself ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... merry satire on the sentimental movement, but is not to be connected directly with Sterne, since Goethe is more particularly concerned with the petty imitators of his own "Werther." Baumgartner in his Life of Goethe asserts that Sterne's Sentimental Journey was one of the books found inside the ridiculous doll which the love-sick Prince Oronaro took about with him. This is not a necessary interpretation, for Andrason, when he took up the first book, exclaimed merely "Empfindsamkeiten," and, as Strehlke observes,[41] it is not necessary here to think of a single ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... serious expression of countenance: (31) You are pleased to laugh at me. Pray, do you find it so ridiculous my wishing to improve my health by exercise? or to enjoy my victuals better? to sleep better? or is it the sort of exercise I set my heart on? Not like those runners of the long race, (32) to have my legs grow muscular and my shoulders leaner in proportion; ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... to be vain of his person, how effeminate! If such a one happens to have genius, it seldom strikes deep into intellectual subjects. His outside usually runs away with him. To adorn, and perhaps, intending to adorn, to render ridiculous that person, takes up all his attention. All he does is personal; that is to say, for himself: all he admires, is himself: and in spite of the correction of the stage, which so often and so justly exposes a coxcomb, he usually dwindles down, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... the shame of the disease. And this,' certifies the narrator, 'I know to be true, by the relation of divers honest men of that parish. And truly if one of the jury had not been wiser than the others, she had been condemned thereupon, and upon other as ridiculous matters as this. For the name of witch is so odious, and her power so feared among the common people, that if the honestest body living chanced to be arraigned thereupon, she ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... a more ridiculous doctrine, than that a man's opinion of his own actions is the true standard for measuring them, and the certificate of their real qualities!—that his own estimate of his treatment of others; is to be taken as the true one, and such treatment ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... that dear old clergyman clergyman's sore throat. I frighten him so that he can't sing. He doesn't know what to do with me, or say to me. He doesn't know what to call me. He can't call me Jevons, and he won't call me Jimmy, and he knows it would be ridiculous to call me James. Besides, he agitates me and ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... called forth by mine to make myself understood. Naturally, however, I was not flattered, but on the contrary entirely discomfited. Angry I could not well be, for the deprecating manner in which all, excepting of course the boys, yielded to their perception of the ridiculous, and the distress they showed at their failure in self-control, made me seem the aggressor. It was as if they were very sorry for me, and ready to put themselves wholly at my service, if I would only refrain from reducing them ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... Voltaire and Rousseau were clever men; but he took every opportunity of depreciating them. Of D'Alembert he spoke with a contempt which, when the intellectual powers of the two men are compared, seems exquisitely ridiculous. D'Alembert complained that he was accused of having written Walpole's squib against Rousseau. "I hope," says Walpole, "that nobody will attribute D'Alembert's works to me." ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... somewhat aimless life, considered as loafing, became all at once a duty. At first he had a theological student, from somewhere across the river, come to stay in the house and read service for him on Sundays. But he was a ridiculous animal, whose main idea of a minister's duties was to intone the responses in a sonorous manner. He used to practice this on week days in his surplice, and I remember especially the cadence with which he delivered the sentence: ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... crooked by nature. So now the hedgehog said to the hare, "You seem to imagine that you can do more with your legs than I with mine." "That is just what I do think," said the hare. "That can be put to the test," said the hedgehog. "I wager that if we run a race, I will outstrip you." "That is ridiculous! You with your short legs!" said the hare, "but for my part I am willing, if you have such a monstrous fancy for it. What shall we wager?" "A golden louis-d'or and a bottle of brandy," said the hedgehog. "Done," said ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... and then, in increasing numbers, individuals: brother deceiving brother and friend friend; adulterers each after the wife of his neighbour; the official bully Pashhur, Jehoiakim the atrocious and petty in contrast to his sire the simple and just Josiah, the helpless and ridiculous Sedekiah, the bustling and self-confident Hananiah(801)—with the fit word and in sharp irony Jeremiah etches them separately, in the same vividness as the typical figures of the harlot watching for her prey like the Arab robber in the desert, the fowler ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... Gentiles that persecuted that way, were constrained, through the evidence of the truth, to acknowledge, that such mighty works showed forth themselves in him, though they out of malice imputed it to ridiculous and blasphemous causes. And besides, the apostle used to provoke(231) to the very testimony of five hundred, who had seen Jesus rise from death, which is not the custom of liars, neither is it possible for ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... partly, perhaps, in consequence of having been early shut in upon itself by its dissent from the mass of society on most public questions; but in this circle Jeffrey was adored by men, women, and children alike, on account of his extreme kindliness of disposition. He was almost, to a ridiculous degree, dependent on the love of his friends; and the terms in which he addresses some of them, particularly ladies, sound odd in this commonsense world. Thus, the wife of one of his friends is, 'My sweet, gentle, and long-suffering Sophia.' He pours out ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... commander, but with his death had passed away all that made the title justifiable. It was a relic of greatness that had departed, and to one like Gordon, who had a keen sense of humour, it must have sounded ridiculous in the extreme. The army consisted of about 3000 Chinese, with 150 officers, the latter being principally foreigners. The officers were by no means wanting in pluck, nor deficient in military skill, but there appears ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... have but little respect myself. I have not thought often on theatric performances, and of late not at all. A chief ground of my observations on your piece proceeded from having taken notice that an English audience is apt to be struck with some familiar sound, though there is nothing, ridiculous in the passage; and fall into a foolish laugh, that often proves fatal to the author. Such was my objection to hot-cockles. You have, indeed, convinced me that I did not enough attend to your piece, as a farce; and, you must excuse me, my regard for you and Your wit ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... you," Forrest answered. "It is overrun just now with the wrong sort of people. There is nothing to do but gamble, which doesn't interest me particularly; or dress in a ridiculous costume and paddle about in a few feet of water, which appeals ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... came to Chaerea's turn to communicate the parole, the emperor was accustomed to give him some ridiculous or indecent phrase, intended not only to be offensive to the purity of Chaerea's mind, but designed, also, to exhibit him in a ridiculous light to the subordinate officers and soldiers to whom he would have to communicate it. Sometimes the password ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... to my husband last night, Mrs. Littleton, that it was ridiculous for us to be living side by side without knowing one another, and that I was going to call. We moved in three weeks before you, so I'm the one who ought to break the ice. Otherwise we might have stared at each other blankly for three months, ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... others. I had lately the pleasure to pass some months with the author in the country, where I prevailed upon him to do what I had long desired, and favour me with his explanation of several passages in his works. It happened that just at that juncture was published a ridiculous book against him, full of personal reflections, which furnished him with a lucky opportunity of improving this poem, by giving it the only thing it wanted—a more considerable hero. He was always sensible of its defect in that particular, and owned he had let it pass with the hero it had purely ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... the self- sacrificer, because he is so sane, because in him all pettiness and detachment are swept away. He appears mad only to those who stand at the opposite point of view, but in his eyes it is they who are ridiculous. In fact, each must be counted crazy or wise according to the view we take of what ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... success as a matter of course, and did not anticipate much annoyance to her from her present mode of life, ... because I have known her derive extreme amusement and diversion from circumstances and associates that would have been utterly distasteful to me. Her love and perception of the ridiculous is not only positive enjoyment, but a protection from annoyance and a mitigation of disgust. My father desires his love to you, and bids me thank you for your kindness in sending him the newspapers. With regard to that last ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... ground, I was sent to Mansfield, and our guardians took under their control Charlotte Kunz and the spirits who are writing through Mr. Mansfield. The enemies of the truth, that departed spirits may use men as their writingrnediums must explain the answers by assertions which in most cases appear most ridiculous, for instance, I heard the assertion, that Mansfield opens the letters. But he returns sealed letters as he receives them; although we would not deny the possibility of temptation to open one or the other letter of persons, with whom his guardians were not congenial, and therefore ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... absurdity; just as if the two carmen were to go and put on their Sunday clothes, and stick a feather in their hat besides, in order to be as dignified and fantastic as possible. They then "go at it," and cover themselves with mud, blood, and glory. Can anything be more ridiculous? Yet, apart from the habit of thinking otherwise, and being drummed into the notion by the very toys of infancy, the similitude is not one atom too ludicrous; no, nor a thousandth part enough so. I am aware that a sarcasm is but a sarcasm, and need ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... my fault, you know, Victorine," she said, with an affected air, "if I am considered superior to my elder sister. It is ridiculous in Caliste to be angry about that. She ought to conquer her great pride, and then she will be more agreeable and more beloved. She fears me for a rival, Victorine. She is not jealous of Felicie Durand—indeed, I know she would prefer her being elected before me; but I cannot help being ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... the charge that they were Radicals at all. It denounced the attempt of any man to interfere by violence with slaves or Slavery where protected by the supreme law of the land. It repudiated as stale and ridiculous the charge of Abolitionism against them. And declared that such an accusation is without a shadow of truth ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... soft snow. But Maida and Billy were thrown, whirling, on to the ice. Billy kept his grip on Maida and they shot down the hill, turning round and round and round. At first Maida was a little frightened. But when she saw that they were perfectly safe, that Billy was making her spin about in that ridiculous fashion, she laughed so hard that she was weak when they ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... accustomed to the free play of her limbs; its colour harmonising worse with her dark skin. Forgetting the progress Pocahontas had made in English, he said with slight caution to Mistress Audley, in his blunt fashion, "You will spoil the little savage, Madam, if she is thus allowed to be made ridiculous by being habited in the dress of a civilised dame. I owe her a debt of gratitude for saving my life; but that does not blind me to her faults, and the sooner she is sent back to her father the better for ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... discovered that the veiled figure to whom he had poured out his tale of love was none other than Teresa, and that the laughter had proceeded from her mistress, whom the faithless waiting-maid regaled at her lover's expense. Thus ended this ridiculous matter. Goldoni was not, however, cured by his experience. One other love-affair rendered Udine too hot to hold him, and in consequence of a third he had to fly from Venice just when he was beginning to flourish there. At length he married ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... under the star-rich skies, to be a watcher of the dawn and eve, to live in forest places or on sun-nurtured plains, to merge himself once more in the fiery soul hidden within. But the mocking voice would not be stifled, showing him how absurd and ridiculous it was "to become a vagabond," so the voice said, and finally to die in the workhouse. So the eternal spirit in him, God's essence, conscious of its past brotherhood, with the morning stars, the White Aeons, in its prisonhouse writhed with the meanness, till at last he cried, "I will struggle ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... battle, the delighted adoption of vehement rites, till yesterday unknown, adopted and practised now with all that absence of tact, measure, and correct perception in things of form and manner, all that slowness to see when they are making themselves ridiculous, which belongs to the people of ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... been very careless in translating the Santi Parva. Their version is replete with errors in almost every page. They have rendered verse 78 in a most ridiculous way. The first line of the verse merely explains the etymology of the word Dandaniti, the verb ni being used first in the passive and then in the active voice. The idam refers to the world, i.e., men in general. K.P. Singha's version ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... three preceding proverbs mean, that although a man may be very fond of his relations, property, and what not, still there are certain extremes to be avoided, for if even approached, they verge into the ridiculous. ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... favour of giving up the struggle, many will become disheartened. When once a spirit gets hold of a people it works marvels, and this fact we must take into consideration. I know it will be of no use to continue the war if everybody around me lays down his arms. It would be ridiculous for me to go on. We must be very sensible in this matter, and have no disunion. You know repentance always comes ...
— The Peace Negotiations - Between the Governments of the South African Republic and - the Orange Free State, etc.... • J. D. Kestell
... too, for you know it is settled that Marcus Daly is president. I promised the position to him as a part of the trade. It would be ridiculous for me, who it is known am not a copper expert, to be president of a new copper company in which Marcus Daly is a large owner and is supposed to have a prominent hand. Besides, in certain parts of the country his name will stand much better than mine, and it means much to all ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... over to her fellow-passengers all the years Miss Mavis had been engaged. In the blank of our common detachment things that were nobody's business very soon became everybody's, and this was just one of those facts that are propagated with mysterious and ridiculous speed. The whisper that carries them is very small, in the great scale of things, of air and space and progress, but it's also very safe, for there's no compression, no sounding-board, to make speakers responsible. And then repetition at sea is somehow not repetition; monotony is in ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... got out the word larvae, a faint sense of the ridiculous seemed to take hold of the Scarabee, and for the first and only time during my acquaintance with him a slight attempt at a smile showed itself on his features. It was barely perceptible and gone almost as soon as seen, yet I am pleased ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... further than that, if you drew yourself up toward ninety degrees, you parted with your defenses and left yourself exposed to mischance. The legend was that in those upper reaches you might be divine; but you were much likelier to be ridiculous. Your public wanted just about eighty degrees; if you gave it more it blew its nose and put a crimp in you. In the morning, especially, it seemed to her very probable that whatever struggled above the good average was not quite sound. Certainly very little of that superfluous ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... work, as we have already pointed out, in decorative art; in which 'a redundancy of useless or ridiculous ornament is called richness, and the inability to appreciate simple and beautiful, or grand and noble forms, receives the name of genius.' The connection is curious, likewise, between this ingenuity of poetry and that of the machinery ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... the crowds on the ramparts of the city, and their curiosity was excited as to the purport of the contemplated parley. It is safe to say that no one suspected a demand for capitulation, as nothing could appear more ridiculous under the circumstances. ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... on both sides, but at any rate it is certain that our foes were confident of being able to win by massed surprise, and their effort was made with an adroitness not less astonishing than the audacity of its conception. After this it will be ridiculous for anybody to contend that the Boers are not brave fighters, though they lack the daring by which alone fights like that of Saturday can be decided. Their tactics have changed little since the ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... however, according to the Emperor's desire, declined. But his Cardinals were not under the same restrictions, and to an attentive observer who has watched the progress of the Revolution and not lost sight of its actors, nothing could appear more ridiculous, nothing could inspire more contempt of our versatility and inconsistency, than to remark among the foremost to demand the nuptial benediction, a Talleyrand, a Fouche, a Real, an Augereau, a Chaptal, a Reubel, a Lasnes, a Bessieres, a Thuriot, a Treilhard, a Merlin, with a hundred other equally ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... soldier, excited by the flattering remarks of the duke, imparted itself to Wenlock. Could he make up his mind to turn draper's assistant in the City, as he had been meditating doing yesterday, while so brilliant a prospect had opened itself up before him? The thought were ridiculous. ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... poetical composition . . . a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have succeeded. . . But it was a long time before such a change was effected. We find Ariosto, many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth for magic, and preferring the ridiculous and incoherent excursions of Boiardo to the propriety and uniformity of the Grecian and Roman models. Nor did the restoration of ancient learning produce any effectual or immediate improvement in the state of criticism. Beni, one of the most celebrated critics of the sixteenth ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Gower, should be applied the flattering appellation of "the father of our poetry;" though, as Johnson says, he was the first of our authors who can be said to have written English. To Chaucer, however, are we indebted for the first effort to emancipate the British muse from the ridiculous trammels of French diction, with which, till his time, it had been the fashion to interlard and obscure the English language. Gower, on the contrary, from a close intimacy with the French and Latin poets, found it easier to follow the beaten track. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... the Rio Grande were only a miserable and ridiculous farce. Valois, leaving failure behind him, learns on nearing the Louisiana line, that the proud Pelican flag floats no longer over the Crescent City. It lies now helpless under the guns of fearless Farragut's fleet. So he cannot even revisit the home of his youth. Maxime Valois smuggles ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... failed to realise that no progress whatever had been made. I tried to check the craving for chloral, but I could as easily have checked the rising tide: and where the lifelong assiduity of older friends had failed to eradicate a morbid, ruinous, and fatal thirst, it was presumptous if not ridiculous to imagine that the task could be compassed by a frail creature with heart and nerves of wax. But the whole scene was now beginning to have an interest for me more personal and more serious than I have yet given hint of. The constant fret and fume ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... excursive, sensible, whimsical, intelligent being that he appears in his writings. Scarcely an adventure or character is given in his works that may not be traced to his own party-colored story. Many of his most ludicrous scenes and ridiculous incidents have been drawn from his own blunders and mischances, and he seems really to have been buffeted into almost every maxim imparted by him for the instruction ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... a sense of the ridiculous. I like the man. Anyone who could, on the spur of the moment, describe the steward as the munitionnaire deserves to rank as one of the world's humourists. But Prior is apparently in no condition to see a joke. He says he will have the munitionnaire instantly bringing in his hand "un ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... a vague tendency voiced by some critics to advance the theory that the real future democracy of art depends on the verdict of the man in the street. This is ridiculous. The future of art depends on no one class of men, aristocratic or democratic. It depends on all men. Art is neither democratic nor aristocratic. It knows no class - it is concerned with life at large - elemental life. Art is praise ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... of the trade, and simper: "Is that right?" As though anybody thought business principles were gospel principles! As though they expected a man was going to love his neighbor as himself, when he was making a bargain with him! It provokes me to see you make yourself so ridiculous! You ought to know that every man acts on the principle, that "Wealth is the chief good;" and you ought to know, too, that there the slaveholders have the advantage of you entirely. They do right to work, and grind it ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... laughing scorn? If Miss Hargrove had divined the past, or had received a hint concerning it, why should she not shun his society? He was half-desperate, and yet felt that any show of embarrassment or anger would only make him appear more ridiculous. The longer he thought the more sure he was that the girls were beginning to guess his position, and that his only course was a polite indifference to both. But this policy promised to lead through a thorny path, and to what? In impotent ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... at the seal and sea-lion. Of all the feet that I have looked at I know only one more utterly ridiculous than the twisted flipper on which the sea-lion props his great bulk in front, and that is the forked fly-flap which extends from the hinder parts of the same. How can it be worth any beast's while to carry such an absurd apparatus with it just for the sake of getting out ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... ludicrous, ridiculous, chimerical, ill-judged, mistaken, senseless, erroneous, inconclusive, monstrous, stupid, false, incorrect, nonsensical, unreasonable, foolish, infatuated, paradoxical, wild. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... "Lydia, Lydia!" she called after her. Lydia turned. "Do you realize what dress you've got on?" Lydia looked down at her robe; it was the blue flannel yachting-suit of the Aroostook, which she had put on for convenience in taking care of her aunt. "Isn't it too ridiculous?" Mrs. Erwin meant to praise the coincidence, not to blame the dress. Lydia smiled faintly for answer, and the next moment she ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... point. If it is mischief you are at, you will have a hard time to get ahead. While we are radical we mean to be rational. While we intend to give every male citizen of the United States the rights common to all, we do not intend to be forced by our enemies into a position so ridiculous and absurd as to be broken down utterly on that question, and whoever comes here in the guise of a Radical and undertakes to practice that, probably will not make much by the motion. I am not surprised ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... cried; "a ridiculous mistake! I beg your pardon ten thousand times! They are for the Widow Jones. Here is what I intended for you, dear, dear Belle," and I thrust another package into ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... combinations that they detract from the effectiveness of the debate in which they occur rather than add to it. The distance from a forceful figure to an absurd figure is so short that a debater has to be on his guard against using expressions that will impress his audience as ridiculous or even funny. A mixture of highly figurative language with literal language and commonplace ideas, and a mixture of several figures are especially to be guarded against. As an example of the extent to which figures may be mixed ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... with a punt-pole as long as a ship's mast and as light as a broom-straw, bumping and skipping along in the utter darkness on the other side of the Moon; scaling mountains, bridging yawning chasms, and skimming over sombre sea-beds!" I laughed, for it aroused my active sense of the ridiculous. ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... and indignation against the workers fill one's soul at the spectacle of the ridiculous strike methods so often employed and that as often frustrate the possible success of every large labor war. Or is it not laughable, if it were not so deadly serious, that the producers publicly discuss ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... them with one or two impudent characters to whom we give a hard time if we uncover them. Had she heard the tale that was going around that South America and the French Riviera had survived the Last War absolutely untouched?—and the obviously ridiculous rider that they had blue skies there and saw stars every third night? Did she think that subsequent conditions were showing that the Earth actually had plunged into an interstellar dust cloud coincidentally with the start ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... not. But you try my patience a little now and then. Surely it's better that I should save you from making these ridiculous mistakes. Once or twice this week I've heard most absurd remarks of yours repeated. Please remember that it isn't only yourself you—stultify. Politics may be a joke for you; for me it is a serious pursuit. I mustn't have people ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... Marie Antoinette experienced upon her entrance into the French Court, was the necessity of observing a system of etiquette to which she had been unaccustomed, and soon pronounced, with girlish vehemence, insupportable. Barriere copies a ridiculous anecdote in illustration of this from the manuscript fragments of Madame Campan: "Madame de Noailles" (this was the first lady of honor to the dauphiness) "abounded in virtues; I cannot pretend to deny it. Her piety, charity, and irreproachable morals rendered ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... a man all at once, because you are nothing of the sort, and nothing makes a lad look more ridiculous than to see him trying to be a man before his time. You know the story of the toad ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... hand, and they bent their entire energies to their accomplishment. General Sandford held the arsenal, an important point, indeed a vital one, and let him claim and receive all the credit due that achievement; but to assume any special merit in quelling the riots in the streets is simply ridiculous. That was the work of the police and the military under ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... could be, when a thought passed through my brain that made me laugh outright. I had heard of people coming down in bursted balloons, but I was the first who had ever gone up in one. The idea appeared so ridiculous that it really made me feel warmer." Think of this aerial babe in the woods, with Nature's awful forces warring about him and the earth lost to view, laughing himself warm over a joke at the expense of his terrible situation! Truly, "he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... loud enough to be heard by the crews, for they had been taught that the unnecessary screaming of orders makes an officer seem ridiculous, and injures the ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... like to be placed in a ridiculous position and the captain turned on the little darky ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... foregone intimations of the man he was—irresistible in attack, not impregnably defensive. Nor did he seem in this instance humanely considerate: if mademoiselle's estimate of the mind of the girl was not wrong, then Mr. Barmby's position would be both a ridiculous and a cruel one. She had some silly final idea that the poor man might now serve permanently to check the more dreaded applicant: a proof that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a trundle bed full of pickanninies and they kept popping their heads up. They were so ridiculous—with their little pigtails sticking up all over their heads, ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... inquiries; shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says. To be curious about that which is not my business while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous."[54] ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... shouldn't or you for her; but he does wish—well, that you'd gone to California when you planned to, etc., etc. Now the season's pretty nearly over, and I know that a few weeks one way or the other never did matter to you and won't now. Of course, it has its ridiculous side, but I really think it would comfort John Fulton quite a little if he heard that you had left Aiken. You see he's half crazy with grief and insomnia, and he's got it in his head that if Lucy had fewer other people ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... dispute about the different value of the pieces of eight rated by Mr. Creed at 4s. and 5d., and by Pitts at 4s. and 9d., which was the greatest husbandry to the King? he proposing that the greatest sum was; which is as ridiculous a piece of ignorance as could be imagined. However, it is to be argued at the Board, and reported to the Duke next week; which I shall do with advantage, I hope. I went homeward, after a little discourse with Mr. Pierce the surgeon, who tells me that my Lady Castlemaine hath now ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... intellect was in a childish phase as compared to that of modern times. Observe, however, childishness does not necessarily imply universal inferiority: there may be a vigorous, acute, pure, and solemn childhood, and there may be a weak, foul, and ridiculous condition of advanced life; but the one is still essentially the childish, and the other ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... to circumstances. It was replied that would be war. If war were to be declared we should do as much mischief as possible, and go to Cronstadt, not to the Black Sea. We should have our ships beyond the Bosphorus when Russia occupied the Dardanelles, and shut us in. This would make us ridiculous. ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... belief, upon a mere intellectual conviction, was then believed and preached. To doubt was to secure the damnation of your soul. This absurd and devilish doctrine shocked the common sense of Thomas Paine, and he denounced it with the fervor of honest indignation. This doctrine, although infinitely ridiculous, has been nearly universal, and has been as hurtful as senseless. For the overthrow of this infamous tenet, Paine exerted all his strength. He left few arguments to be used by those who should come after him, and he used none that have ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... revisiting a place which had so seasonably afforded us a friendly shelter and such unlooked-for convenience for our purposes, can only be estimated by those who have experienced them; and it is only to strangers to such feelings that it will appear ridiculous to say that even the nail to which our thermometer had been suspended was ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... by every kind of cunning, they are quite open about even the most flagrant mental diseases, should they happen to exist, which to do the people justice is not often. Indeed, there are some who, so to speak, are spiritual valetudinarians, and who make themselves exceedingly ridiculous by their nervous supposition that they are wicked, while they are very tolerable people all the time. This however is exceptional; and on the whole they use much the same reserve or unreserve about the state of their moral welfare as we do ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... their inventions do no more harm than make them ridiculous, they are only laughed at and let alone, but when one of them develops a talent for invention which molests or injures others, especially when it takes the form of confidential communication to the governor of what he sees, and still more of what he does not see, such retribution ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... it is becoming very squabbly and tiresome, and there is a good deal of "talking over," which is one of the weakest sides of "communal life." It is petty and ridiculous to quarrel when Death is so near, and things are so big and often so tragic. Yet human nature has strict limitations. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald came out from the committee to see what all the complaints were ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... were expected to be his clerks, not his advisers. At first he was regarded by the leading classes with derision rather than fear,—so mean was his personal appearance, so spiritless his address, so cold and dull was his eye, and so ridiculous were his antecedents. "The French," said Thiers, long afterward, "made two mistakes about Louis Napoleon,—the first, when they took him for a fool; the second, when they took him for a man of genius." It was not until he began to show a will of his own, a determination to be his own prime minister, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... dyspepsia, said that "her inside had been coming up for a fortnight," and still continued to do so, although during the last few days "she had swallowed a pint of shot in order to keep her liver down." The old woman's diagnosis of her own case was ridiculous; her treatment of it, if continued, would have killed her; but both were suggestive, as indications that something was really amiss. The reasoning of Rousseau, who contended that the evils of the modern world were due to a departure from primeval conditions which were perfect, and that a ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... he has done, but what he won't do, my dear. Here he is in love with a young woman in every way suitable, and who is ready to say yes whenever he asks her, and he won't ask, and is not going to ask, because of a ridiculous crotchet he has got in ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... the faithful from every distant region often meet at Mecca, and induce each other to extend their commercial adventures to new regions, it may possibly have been, that some Moors originally from Spain, may even have reached Mozambique before the time of De Gama; but it is ridiculous to suppose that all the Moors on the African coast had been Spaniards. The overthrow of the great Moorish kingdom of Granada only took place five or six ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... again. She wasn't at all a nice girl to play with. The rose-cakes she pronounced "nasty." When Lota explained about Lady Green, she stared and said it was ridiculous, and that there was no such person. She turned up her nose at Pocahontas's journal, and declared that Lota wrote it herself! "Did you ever hear of such a thing?" asked Lady Bird afterward of Lady ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... pleased to call the Carolina doctrine, has attempted to throw ridicule upon the idea that a State has any constitutional remedy, by the exercise of its sovereign authority, against "a gross, palpable, and deliberate violation of the Constitution." He calls it "an idle" or "a ridiculous notion," or something to that effect, and added, that it would make the Union a "mere rope of sand." Now, sir, as the gentleman has not condescended to enter into any examination of the question, and ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... thankful and glad to have silk stockings. Nonsense, your legs are warm enough. I don't believe you. Now, Richard, how perfectly ridiculous! There is no left or right to stockings. You have no time to change. Shoes are a different thing. Well, hurry up, then. Because they are made so, I ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... was scarcely seven years old when she was violated by Schechem." (2) The opinion held by some that Jacob wandered about eight or ten years between Mesopotamia and Bethel, savours of the ridiculous; if respect for Aben Ezra, allows me to say so. (3) For it is clear that Jacob had two reasons for haste: first, the desire to see his old parents; secondly, and chiefly to perform, the vow made when he fled from his brother (Gen. xxviii:10 and xxxi:13, and xxxv:1). (4) We ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... rising artist, it notes his progress, encourages him, blames him, urges him on, checks him. It takes such a one into its favour, is extremely wroth with such another. It is, of course, sometimes in the wrong; it is subject to ridiculous infatuations, and unjust revulsions of feeling; yet it lives, and it vivifies, and it is worth ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... simple-minded man, without much self-assertion or any strong opinions of his own. He was quite content to do as Verrio bid him, even imitating him and following him through his figurative mysteries, and floundering with him in the mire of graceless drawing and gaudy colour and ridiculous fable. He had at least as much talent as his master—probably even more. But he never sought to ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... "Ridiculous! Your fear put that notion into your head. Now if you go to telling that story round here—even once—I'll have the Captain shut you up in the steerage with the Chinamen. You go to telling the wrongs you suffer from your superior officer and you'll ...
— The Shipwreck - A Story for the Young • Joseph Spillman
... you, on purpose that you may fetch it. I hope you will do so on the 18th, for which you have already received the invitation. You will find Morier also here. Is not that furious and ridiculous article in the "Morning Chronicle" on the second volume (the first article, as yet without a continuation) by the same man (of Jesus College?) on whose article in the "Ecclesiastic" on Hippolytus' ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... that it was my intention to menace or insult the Government of France is as unfounded as the attempt to extort from the fears of that nation what her sense of justice may deny would be vain and ridiculous. But the Constitution of the United States imposes on the President the duty of laying before Congress the condition of the country in its foreign and domestic relations, and of recommending such measures as may in his opinion be required by its interests. From the performance ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... think, fallen in love, or that you wish to marry, although you are young. I am annoyed that you should dream of wishing to marry a simple rustic, the daughter of my lodge keeper. It is so supremely ridiculous that I can hardly ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... BURKE was a pugilist who occasionally exhibited himself as "the Grecian Statues," and upon one occasion attempted a reading from SHAKSPEARE. As he was very ignorant, and could neither read nor write, the effect was extremely ridiculous, and helped to give ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... forward to with great pleasure; crowds attend them; and their supporters are usually picked men, who have a reputation for talent and wit. Crimes never come under their consideration: it is always something extremely ridiculous, or some ludicrous failing, that is turned into contempt and held up to risibility. It is quite amazing to what an extent the genius of the improvvisatores go at times; they display consummate art and knowledge of human nature, quick repartie, subtle arguments, absurd conjunctions, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... permanent and ornamental figure-head, the duties properly pertaining to the office being discharged by the Vice-Chancellor. He was the active and dominant centre of University life, and, as such, took cognizance of numerous details which would now be deemed too petty, and even ridiculous, for a personage of his dignity and importance. So great, however, was the pressure of judicial and other business that it was necessary that he should be relieved of part of the burden, and thus we often find commissaries sitting in his ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... was any way sensible of, it could never be for an old man, and much to that purpose. But all this would not do, in a day or two I received this eloquent epistle from him." Here Mrs. Behn inserts a translation of Van Bruin's letter, which was wrote in French, and in a most ridiculous stile, telling her, he had often strove to reveal to her the tempests of his heart, and with his own mouth scale the walls of her affections; but terrified with the strength of her fortifications, he concluded to make more regular approaches, to attack her at a farther distance, and try ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... you; do you mean that mother made you indorse that certificate? Nancy, do try to be clear!" He was uneasy now; perhaps some ridiculous legal complication had arisen. "Some of their everlasting red tape! Fortunately, I've got the money all right," he ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... never had so happy a summer before as the one when I was a Brother of Pity. I heard Nurse saying to Mrs. Jones that "there was no telling what would keep children out of mischief," for that I "never seemed to be tired of that old black rag and that ridiculous face." ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... priesthood. While her poetic temperament was moved by the sublime conception of a God ruling over the world of matter and the world of mind, revealed religion, as her spirit encountered it, consisted only in gorgeous pageants, and ridiculous dogmas, and puerile traditions. The spirit of piety and pure devotion she could admire. Her natural temperament was serious, reflective, and prayerful. Her mind, so far as religion was concerned, was very much in the state of that of any intellectual, high-minded, uncorruptible Roman, ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... lumber were in the third. Could I expect him, after the sour similitudes he had used in reference to our expected visitor, to turn out of his habitation and disarrange all his habits for her convenience? The bare idea of proposing the thing to him seemed ridiculous; and yet inexorable necessity left me no choice but to make the hopeless experiment. I walked back to the tower hastily and desperately, to face the worst that might happen before my ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... run by the most unprincipled scoundrel I have ever met. He was a civilian speculator who saw the chance to fatten on the British prisoners. He fleeced us in two ways. Not only were his prices extortionate, but he gave a ridiculous exchange for British currency, especially gold. After considerable persuasion and deliberation he would change a half sovereign for 7-1/2 marks—7s. 6d. We complained but could get no redress for such a depreciation. Other coins were ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... respect. Their marriages were performed by mutual consent only, without the blessing of the Church; they were buried by those of their own country and complexion, in the common field, without any Christian office; perhaps some ridiculous heathen rites were performed at the grave by some of their own people. No notice was given of their being sick, that they might be visited; on the contrary, frequent discourses were made in conversation, that ...
— An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, • Joshua Coffin
... neighbors designated by the title of 'Sieur George. It was his wont to be seen taking a straight—too straight—course toward his home, never careening to right or left, but now forcing himself slowly forward, as though there were a high gale in front, and now scudding briskly ahead at a ridiculous little dog-trot, as if there were a tornado behind. He would go up the main staircase very carefully, sometimes stopping half-way up for thirty or forty minutes' doze, but getting to the landing ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... upon the seashore in any such connection as to imply that the stars too were innumerable, or that their number came within any degree of comparison with the ocean sands, must have seemed to Abraham in the highest degree mysterious, even as it has appeared to scoffers, in modern times, utterly ridiculous; for, though the first glance at the sky conveys the impression that the stars are really innumerable, the investigations of our imperfect astronomy seem to assure us that this is by no means the case. And, as the patriarch sat, night after night, at his tent door, and, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... you?" The idea seemed to amuse Connemorra greatly, as if it had some utterly ridiculous aspect. "Yes, I might as well explain," he said. "I haven't had anyone interested enough to ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... was at noon, but two hours earlier Tignol took the train at the St. Lazare station. And with him came Caesar, such a changed, unrecognizable Caesar! Poor dog! His beautiful, glossy coat of brown and white had been clipped to ridiculous shortness, and he crouched at the old man's feet ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... seemed awkwardly constricted in ill-fitting, blue cotton overalls such as American laborers wear over street-clothes. Their huge bodies seemed about to break through the flimsy bindings, and the carriage of their striking heads made the garments ridiculous. Most of them had fairly regular features on a large scale, their mouths wide, and their lips full and sensual. They wore no hats or ornaments, though it has ever been the custom of all Polynesians to put flowers ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... Seatonian prize-poet. The patrons of this poor lad are certainly answerable for his end, and it ought to be an indictable offence. But this is the least they have done; for, by a refinement of barbarity, they have made the (late) man posthumously ridiculous, by printing what he would have had sense enough never to print himself. Certes, these rakers of 'Remains' come under the statute against resurrection-men. What does it signify whether a poor dear dead dunce is to be stuck up in Surgeons' ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... who might have done exceedingly well in the World, had not their Characters and Spirits been totally depress'd and Nicodemiz'd; and I will add (says Mr. N. BLOOMFIELD) taylor'd into nothing? In the REHEARSAL, the Author, to make the most ridiculous part of it still more ridiculous, tells us, that it was written to a Taylor, and by a Taylor's Wife. And even the discerning SPECTATOR has given into this common-place raillery in the Monkey's Letter to her Mistress. He has made the Soul which inhabited Pug's Body, in recounting the humiliating State ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... proper sphere even his errors are respectable; but that in the two concluding divisions he passes into the province of the natural philosopher, and that there his respectability ceases for the time, and he becomes eminently ridiculous. The anti-geologists,—men of considerably smaller calibre than the massive Dutch divine of the seventeenth century,—also enter into a field not their own. Passing from the theologic province, they obtrude ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... It is not worth while to inquire whence this ridiculous legend of king or Saint Jovarus has been derived. The origin of Christianity in Abyssinia will be considered on an after occasion, when we come to the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... qualities raised to the highest pitch of intensity, it was not considered derogatory to them personally to have watched over the infancy and childhood of primeval man. The raillery in which the Egyptians occasionally indulged with regard to them, the good-humoured and even ridiculous roles ascribed to them in certain legends, do not prove that they were despised, or that zeal for them had cooled. The greater the respect of believers for the objects of their worship, the more easily do they tolerate the taking of such liberties, and the condescension of the members ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... an irrepressible quavering, frightening them away in one great commotion of wings and rustling branches!... But no, I'm master of myself. One bound at exactly the right moment and my feeble prey is panting under me. Oh, the ridiculous effort of a weak animal—its tiny ineffectual claws and pointed wings beating against my face! My jaws will open to the splitting point and my perfect nose wrinkle ferociously, for the joy of holding a living, terrified body. I'll know the intoxication ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... at the command to be perfect. That finite man may be perfect in this sinful world sounds ridiculous to many unregenerated hearts. This is because they do not understand God nor his power to deliver man from sin. With the many exhortations and commands to perfection contained in the Holy Scriptures is it not singular that man will yet say, "We can not be perfect in this life"? Many people who oppose ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... liberty, understood in its common sense. A man is free who is neither loaded with irons nor confined in prison, nor intimidated like the slave with the dread of chastisement: in this sense the liberty of man consists in the free exercise of his power; I say, of his power, because it would be ridiculous to mistake for a want of liberty the incapacity we are under to pierce the clouds like the eagle, to live under the water like the whale, or to become king, emperor, or pope. We have so far a sufficiently clear idea of the word. But this is no longer the case ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... like it; she seemed willing to go on camping here as long as I wished; she was wondering why I was so backward and so bashful; she was in my hands; why hold back? Why not use my power? If I did not I should make myself forever ridiculous to all men and to all women—who, according to my experience, were never in higher feather than when ridiculing some greenhorn of a boy. This thing must end. My affair with Virginia must be brought to a crisis and pushed ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... friends was hastily got up to do honour to the superb fish, and on that occasion Fred and his father well-nigh quarrelled on the point of, "who caught the salmon!" Mr Sudberry insisting that the man who hooked the fish was the real catcher of it, and Fred scouting the ridiculous notion, and asserting that he who played and landed it was entitled to all the honour. The point was settled, however, in some incomprehensible way, without the self-denying disputants coming to blows; and everyone agreed that it was, out of sight, the best salmon that had ever been eaten ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... him, auntie," said Kate, with a sagacious smile. "Colonel Thorp thinks that the whole future of his company and of the Province depends solely upon Ranald. It is quite ridiculous to hear him, while all the time he is abusing him for ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... This was so ridiculous that I laughed aloud, though I felt little like laughing. "What amuses you?" the lady asked in some surprise. "I am sure I can see nothing ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order with their Georges and Garter, the guards with their embroidered coats, and the like—sufficient in truth within awhile to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now King Henry, making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's house, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... you expect, when you take one's breath away, creeping in like a burglar, and letting cats out of bags like that? Get up, you ridiculous boy, and tell me all ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... an old maiden sister of Matthew Bramble, of some forty-five years of age, noted for her bad spelling. She is starched, vain, prim, and ridiculous; soured in temper, proud, imperious, prying, mean, malicious, and uncharitable. She contrives at last to marry captain Lismaha'go, who is content to take "the maiden" for the sake of ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... unfair than the manner in which the scoffers and alarmists have represented the missionaries. We, who have thus vindicated them, are neither blind to what is erroneous in their doctrine or ludicrous in their phraseology; but the anti-missionaries cull out from their journals and letters all that is ridiculous sectarian, and trifling; call them fools, madmen, tinkers, Calvinists, and schismatics; and keep out of sight their love of man, and their zeal for God, their self-devotement, their indefatigable industry, and ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... life being a conflict, why, you "ordinary" Christians are all wrong. Satan never tempts us, though he tempted our Lord; it comes natural to us to go into Canaan with one bound; the old-fashioned saints were ridiculous in "fighting the good fight of faith." Look at the characters in the Bible, "resisting unto blood, striving against sin"; what blunderers they were to do that!... In our enlightened day nobody is "chastened"; it ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... destruction! Keep the beaten Sicilian rebel from overpowering his victorious masters! Keep the felon convicted from rushing to the gallows in spite of the respite granted him! Can human wit imagine a more ridiculous pretext than this, of affecting to hold the balance even, when you are preventing the conqueror from improving his victory, and only preventing the vanquished from attempting what without a miracle he cannot do, cannot, even with all your assistance, venture to try? But ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... if before to-night he could have felt as he now did. It had all come over him suddenly with a rush. When he talked with her at the hotel in San Blanco he was filled with thoughts of his future, and assumed as granted his footing upon her plane. How absurd, how ridiculous this seemed now! ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... said Rodin, shrugging his shoulders. "Did not Mdlle. de Cardoville present me to him as her liberator, when I denounced you as the soul of the conspiracy? Did I not restore to him his ridiculous imperial relic—his cross of honor—when we met at Dr. Baleinier's? Did I not bring him back the girls from the convent, and place them in the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Loo said. "But not pro-American either. I find much that is ridiculous in the propaganda of both the ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... his object, for the impatient monarch listened gladly, and all the more willingly in proportion to the more brilliant eloquence with which the clever connoisseur of mankind placed Barbara in contrast to all the obscure, insignificant, and ridiculous personages whom he pretended to have met. The peculiar charm which her individuality thus obtained corresponded with the idea which the monarch himself had formed of the expected guest, and it flattered him to hear ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... out in as grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of Henry and Elizabeth as his gabble and rhodomontade, his want of personal dignity, his buffoonery, his coarseness of speech, his pedantry, his contemptible cowardice. Under this ridiculous exterior, however, lay a man of much natural ability, a ripe scholar with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of mother wit and ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... Emperor Alexander has taken the liberty to tell you a story, and your credulity must have greatly delighted him. Can you seriously believe that the King of Prussia would in his infatuation go so far as to hope that I should accept propositions of so ridiculous a description? Truly, even if I were a vanquished and humiliated emperor, I should stab myself with my own sword rather than submit to such a disgrace. It seems I have not yet engraved my name deeply enough into the marble tablets of history, and I shall prove to these overbearing princes, who ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... looked at him in perplexity. Evidently the suggestion seemed to her very naive and ridiculous. If this strange proposal had been made to her by a child, she would certainly have been angry and have scolded it, but as he was a grown-up man and very stout and she could not scold him, she only shrugged her ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... this," Tallente declared. "If you had had a seat to offer me or a post in your Cabinet, I should have been compelled to decline it, just as I have declined that ridiculous offer of a peerage. I have consented to lead the Democratic Party in ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... said Cayrol, humbly; "I appear ridiculous to you, but my happiness is stronger than I am, and I cannot hide my joy. You will see that I can be grateful. I will spend my life in trying to please you. I have a surprise for you to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Robert Elsmere has been produced, things are not much better. M. Guy de Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style, strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears. M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, "L'homme de genie n'a jamais d'esprit," is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... smugly with a philanthropic smile while the widow and the orphan weep around my knees, is something I should be forever unable to achieve. Harriet's hospital was not a charity—it was something to keep the ridiculous creature busy—her yacht, her picture gallery, her stud-farm, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... that prevents them from being much dazzled by this species of elevation. A man who to good nature adds the general rudiments of good breeding, provided he rest contented with a simple and unaffected manner of behaving and expressing himself, will never be ridiculous in the best society, and so far as his talents and information permit, may be an agreeable part of the company. I have therefore never felt much elevated, nor did I experience any violent change in situation, by the passport which my poetical character ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... is an evident allusion of De Faria to the ridiculous reports so often propagated among the Portuguese and Spaniards of those days, of heavenly champions aiding them in battle against ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... Further, if it sufficed to add a little, then as a consequence it would suffice to throw one drop of water into an entire cask. But this seems ridiculous. Therefore it does not suffice for a small ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... no position can render ridiculous, and there are some quite the reverse: of the latter class was Ferguson of Pitfour. Ferguson's notion of the essential quality of a Lord Advocate was tallness. "We Scotch members," said he, "always vote with the Lord Advocate, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... I'll sing to him This night, that he may pass away in music. How foolish will he peer amid the shades When Orpheus asks, 'Hast thou heard Nero sing?' If he must answer 'No!' I would not have him Arrive ridiculous amid the dead. ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... my wife should make a favorable impression on my people, and in turn she was fretting about my general appearance. Out of a saddle a cowman never looks well, and every effort to improve his personal appearance only makes him the more ridiculous. Thus with each trying to make the other presentable, we started. We stopped a week at my brother's in Missouri, and finally reached the Shenandoah Valley during the last week in November. Leaving my wife to speak for herself and the ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... moved by a ridiculous impulse, which he just succeeded in suppressing, to say to Mrs. Sawbridge, "Yes, I admit it looks very well. But the essential point, you know, is ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... strange it seems 985 Not to believe, and yet too credulous; Thy weal and woe are both of them extremes; Despair and hope make thee ridiculous: 988 The one doth flatter thee in thoughts unlikely, In likely thoughts the ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... favour. Lord Blandamer would think it so ungracious. Lady Blandamer, to be sure, counted for very little; it was ridiculous, in fact, to think of ringing the minster bells for a landlady's niece, but Lord Blandamer would certainly ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... lover, as a rule, is concealed from the persons he meets, or unintelligible to them. In either case it is ridiculous. A man in love is alternately transported and tormented by brilliant and gloomy illusions. In spite of the cold, cutting wind, the young fool of love was driven restlessly out to roam the streets and alleys of the port. He thought ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... (and which your lordship read before this play was acted) that were omitted on the stage; and particularly one whole scene in the third act, which not only helps the design forward with less precipitation, but also heightens the ridiculous character of Foresight, which indeed seems to be maimed without it. But I found myself in great danger of a long play, and was glad to help it where I could. Though notwithstanding my care and the kind reception it had ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... that the Tlascalan caziques have given their daughters as wives to some of the Spaniards. I was talking to you of marriage, last night, and what you said about your age was ridiculous. You are a man, and a warrior. I now offer you the hand of my sister Amenche. She loves you, as Maclutha and I have seen for some time. From what you said, I gather that your religion would not regard the ceremony as binding, did she not accept your God; but I do not think she would raise ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... in a chair by the side of his table, read out passages from the theme, and ridicule them before the others. It was a terrible ordeal for a bashful or awkward boy. Those of a more robust nature, or whose performance had nothing ridiculous in it, profited by the discipline. But it certainly took all the starch and courage out of me. I never sat down to write my theme without fancying that grinning and scornful countenance looking at my work. So I used to write as few sentences as I thought would answer so that I should not ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... of puppy love, and certain ones felt grateful to Eve Burton for showing them so pretty a bit of sport. Even those very agreeable people, the Carrols, were disgusted with Fitz, as are all good people when a guest of the house makes a solemn goose of himself. But Fitz was not in the least ridiculous to himself, which was important; and he was not ridiculous to Eve, which was ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... waste our moments in extravagances. Understand my case. There is no such thing as indifference in the married state. Not to love one's husband," she continued, "is to hate him. The Count, ridiculous in all else, is formidable in his jealousy. In mercy, then, to me, observe caution. Affect to all you speak to, the most complete ignorance of all the people in the Chateau de la Carque; and, if anyone in your presence mentions the Count or Countess de St. Alyre, be sure you say ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... liquidated their cost. These trousers, it is just as well to state, had arrived months before from Poole, along with a suit of Rutter's and the colonel had forwarded a draft for the whole amount without examining the contents, until Alec had called his attention to the absurd width of the legs—and the ridiculous spread of the seat. My Lord of Moorlands, after the scene in the Temple Mansion, dared not send them in to St. George, and they had accordingly lain ever since on top of his wardrobe with Alec as chief ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... like to think about them. And the people who are born wrong and sick. But by-and-by we shall have weeded them out, or improved the breed. And why not spend your energies on doing that, instead of singing litanies, and taking ridiculous pains not to eat ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of our movements, I mean; but at least we can state roughly where we were during any hour of the day, even if we have to trust to luck to find witnesses to prove the truth of words. His attitude of silence, Isobel, is ridiculous." ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... tell you I am quite unmoved. No interest is superior to that of science—the science of archaeology. I tell you I have just made a discovery of the highest importance. I have but a short time left; you, you and your ridiculous machine, have scared away my imbeciles of workmen; they will not return until you have gone away; the leg of my derrick is smashed; I demand, I ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... True, it is not his calling; but what is there so very incongruous in a father's "taking care" of his own children? Fathers love their children, and will toil night and day for them, even for the very small ones. Is there any thing ridiculous, then, in their taking them in their arms, and overlooking their childish sports? A man may take a lamb in his arms without losing an iota of his dignity, and without being caricatured in any one of our weeklies. It is quite time that these precious little human lambs ceased to be the subjects ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... have stepped on this, too," he muttered, with a reproachful glare at Anderson, who had never in his life felt so at a loss. He was divided between consternation and an almost paralyzing sense of the ridiculous. He was conscious that a laugh would be regarded as an insult by this very angry and earnest young girl. But at last Eddy tendered him the bag ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... we should be very religious? I am sure it's the only way to be very happy: I mean happy always, and underneath. Leo says the great mistake is being too religious, and that people ought to keep out of extremes, and not make themselves ridiculous. But I think he's wrong. For it seems just to be all the heap of people who are only a little religious who never get any good out of it. It isn't enough to make them happy whatever happens, and it's just enough to make them uncomfortable if they play cards on a Sunday. I know ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like to make you laugh, well enough, when I can. But then observe this: if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible nature, it is very well; but if that is all there is in a man, he had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head of his profession. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... circumstances Weise began more and more to curse the day when he had had tattooed upon his arm that ridiculous jingle about Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. It caused him serious annoyance if one of his comrades noticed a scrap of the motto peeping out from under his sleeve, and wanted to see ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... wailed back at her. "I'm not ridiculous! You! you'll find judgment-day ridiculous, I don't doubt—oh, good Lordy! stop your ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... worlds through a natural world-selection, and thus, by the result of its existence, fully legitimate its conformity to {168} the end in view? With this deduction, we do not make, as it may seem, an awkward attempt at rendering the whole standpoint ridiculous by a wild phantasy; but we quote it from a celebrated and otherwise very meritorious book, namely the "Geschichte des Materialismus" ("History of Materialism"), by the too early deceased Friedrich Albert Lange. The reader will find it, in the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... advice before their departure. One seems to have commended itself to him as specially available for practice. "A man who had been drinking freely," said the moralist, "should never go into a new company. He would probably strike them as ridiculous, though he might be in unison with those who had been drinking with him." Johnson propounded another favourite theory. "A ship," he said, "was worse than a gaol. There is in a gaol better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind; ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... roof I wish I could see how she looked when she was riding the waves on the prow of a gallant vessel. That's where she ought to be, I heard a man say. He said Hope squatting on a portico roof may look ridiculous, but Hope breasting the billows ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... so to speak, in England, where we read that Charles II and the Duke of Yorke attended the first performance of Tarugo's Wiles, or the Coffee House, a comedy, in 1667, which Samuel Pepys described as "the most ridiculous and insipid play I ever saw in my life." The author was Thomas St. Serf. The piece opens in a lively manner, with a request on the part of its fashionable hero for a change of clothes. Accordingly, Tarugo puts off his "vest, hat, perriwig, and sword," and serves the guests to coffee, while ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... a little battle, and innumerable little apotheoses. I began to doubt the greatness of the cause made up of such infinitesimals. It is easy to serve ideas in which we have ceased to heartily believe, but it is impossible to fight for those that have become to us the least in the world ridiculous. Perhaps Valeria's death had unconsciously disheartened me for an enterprise which had been, however remotely, its occasion. Perhaps many of her words, whose force I had successfully resisted during her lifetime, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... good woman, I suppose; but she is ridiculous," Mrs. Copley went on. "Don't be ridiculous, whatever you are. You can't do any good to ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... stand boldly for the principle that might makes right, that he who can crush his competitors in the race for pleasure and profit has an indisputable claim on whatever he can grasp, and that the principle of mutual consideration is antiquated and ridiculous. Such principles and privileges may comport with the elemental instincts and interests of unrestrained, primitive creatures, but they do not harmonize with requirements of social solidarity and efficiency. Social evolution in the past has come only as the struggle for individual ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... might satisfy Louise de la Valliere or please Doris Keane, is an anachronistic figure and she is aware of it. She prefers, on the whole, the brass bedsteads of the summer hotels. Mr. M. himself feels ridiculous. He never enters the room without a groan and a remark on the order of "Good God, what a colour!" His personal taste finds its supreme enjoyment in the Circassian walnut panelling, desk, and tables of the directors' ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... into a dignified silence; but he was thinking, I fancy, how very pleasant it would be for him to pay three or four hundred dollars for the Splash; not that he would care much for the money, but it would make him appear so ridiculous in the eyes ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... remembered her cousin, a lively young officer, who often used to tell her, laughing, that when "his spouse nagged at him" at night, he usually picked up his pillow and went whistling to spend the night in his study, leaving his wife in a foolish and ridiculous position. This officer was married to a rich, capricious, and foolish woman whom he did not respect ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... cemis. When they go to their cemis they shun the Christians, and will not allow them to go into the houses where they are kept; and if they suspect any of our people will come, they take away their cemis into the woods and hide them, for fear we should take them away; and, what stems most ridiculous, they are in use to steal the cemis from one another. It happened once that some Christians rushed into one of these houses, when presently the cemi began to cry out; by which it appeared to be artificially ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... some people to Ekaterinburg a couple of days before the Czecho-Slovaks are scheduled to take it, and I guess you know too how it happened that so many MOTOR TRUCKS came all the way from Archangel to Ekaterinburg so as to be on hand when a certain Indian officer shows up, the ridiculous ranter raved.... But...." ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... that of Lockhart, and indeed seems to have believed that one cause at least of his inability to obtain a hearing was Lockhart's jealousy for his own Spanish Ballads. Be that as it may—and Lockhart was certainly sufficiently small-minded to render such a suspicion by no means ridiculous or absurd—I feel assured that Borrow's metrical work will in future receive a far more cordial welcome from his readers, and will meet with a fuller appreciation from his critics, than that which until now it has ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... "Some of these were ridiculous, but some of them were of such a character as nothing but an object of real grandeur could have excited. She was described by some, who had indistinctly seen her passing in the night, as a monster moving on the waters, ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... few minutes Reynolds did not speak. He was interested, but the undertaking seemed so utterly hopeless and ridiculous that he hesitated. If he had the slightest clue as to the man's whereabouts ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... opinions are well known, in regard to this department of English literature, which, by his ridiculous parodies, he succeeded for a time in throwing into the shade, or, in the language of his admiring biographer, made ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... ridiculous position for a Hidalgo of Spain. But his dignity was to suffer still greater damage. In another moment she had bundled him into an alcove behind the arras at the chamber's end, a tiny closet that was no better than a cupboard contrived ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... said. "I asked her a lot of things, and she looked into a crystal globe and told me what she saw. It was quite interesting, but unfortunately I went a little further than I meant to. I asked her some ridiculous ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was most cordial, though there was a merry twinkle in his eye while speaking to me that made me feel he might still be laughing inwardly at my ridiculous descent of Mr. Gratiot's staircase. With a very grand manner indeed, and with much use of his hands, as is the fashion of ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... such as Frank had on, were called. She had been wondering all the time what the name was. It was only the other day that Gertie had used the word in saying that she wished Eddie—no, Ed—could afford a new one. What a ridiculous ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... had all that work for nothing, Phil," yawning as he said this X-Ray tried to look sympathetic; but was really too sleepy to be anything but ridiculous. ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone
... no clew. Imagine, if you can, a Lorenzo or a Grand Louis in a tightly-buttoned frock coat! There must be some logical connection between the habit and the age, since crimson velvet and gold brocade would have made Eldon Parr merely ridiculous. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... unexpected change in the weather, the patient or pupil seems to require a different mode of treatment: Would he persist in his old commands, under the idea that all others are noxious and heterodox? Viewed in the light of science, would not the continuance of such regulations be ridiculous? And if the legislator, or another like him, comes back from a far country, is he to be prohibited from altering his own laws? The common people say: Let a man persuade the city first, and then let him impose new laws. But is a physician only to cure his patients ...
— Statesman • Plato
... to procure a slave for himself! All the best slave-hunters, and the boldest and most energetic scoundrels, were the negroes who had at one time themselves been kidnapped. These fellows aped a great and ridiculous importance. On the march they would seldom condescend to carry their own guns; a little slave boy invariably attended to his master, keeping close to his heels, and trotting along on foot during a long march, carrying a musket much longer than himself: a woman ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... His demeanour was profoundly sphinx-like, and he seemed to enjoy the sense that his hearers were anxious to learn what he was able but unwilling to impart. His knowledge and accomplishments it would, at this time of day, be ridiculous to question; and on the main concerns of human life—Religion and Freedom—I was entirely at one with him. All the more do I regret that in society he so effectually concealed his higher enthusiasms, and ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... you arrive at the seal and sea-lion. Of all the feet that I have looked at I know only one more utterly ridiculous than the twisted flipper on which the sea-lion props his great bulk in front, and that is the forked fly-flap which extends from the hinder parts of the same. How can it be worth any beast's while to carry such ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... boldly to the real heathen, settles down in a comfortable house and garden prepared by those into whose labors he has entered. A remedy for this evil might be found in appropriating the houses and gardens raised by the missionaries' hands to their own families. It is ridiculous to call such places as Kuruman, for instance, "Missionary Society's property". This beautiful station was made what it is, not by English money, but by the sweat and toil of fathers whose children have, notwithstanding, no place on earth which they can call a home. The Society's ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... was confused with the greatest nonsense and lies. They did not doubt the fact of there having been in its time a creation of man, but they believed that the first one had emerged from a bamboo joint and his wife out of another, under very ridiculous and stupid circumstances. They did not consider homicide as wrong, and the taking of as many lives as possible was a great honor. Consequently, the valiant and those who were feared set the heads of those who perished at their hands on the doors ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... strange accident sticketh at this day fast in the minds of all the inhabitants of this country." A malicious and bigoted monk, who discharged the office of chief legend-maker to the Benedictine Abbey, in the vicinity of Mascon, fabricated this ridiculous story for the purpose of bringing the Governor into disrepute. An account of another diabolical visitation, suggested, it is probable, by the one just described, was issued from the press, under the title of "The Devil of Mascon," during the lifetime of Boyle, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... even stronger. The theory is obviously ridiculous. It was a weak cover-up. The best I could ...
— The Smiler • Albert Hernhunter
... any more idea of singing than an old crow. It's ridiculous, but Rich will have his way. I tell you flatly, Lavinia, if Quin plays the part of Captain Macheath he'll be laughed at and so shall we, and the piece ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... to break in on me for; and Madame Mauer, in spite of her squint and her smile, was both sensible and good—broke, moreover, to the ridiculous coincidences and unfathomable dramas of Naapu. Why hadn't she treated the girl for hysterics? But I gathered presently that there was one element in it that she couldn't bear. That element, it appeared, was Ching Po, perfectly ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... And what ridiculous forms it takes! Here is Mrs. Powell writing to me from Birmingham, and she says she has heard that you have taken in the daughter of some wealthy parvenu, for a consideration, to train her in the ways of decent society! Just the kind ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... Of course, I suppose there's only one thing, and how can I stop it? What for? You ridiculous old boy! What a changeable old fellow you are!—Off, to see what I can do. After eleven o'clock to-morrow, you'll feel comfortable.—If the Governor is sweet, speak a word for the Old Brown; and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... peasants, shouting the psalms of their fathers and the hope of a good time coming; no costly rugs to carpet the way of the King, but the sweat-stained garments of working people and branches wrenched off by Galilaean fists. What was he, this King of the future, ridiculous or sublime? ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... you can. Make her think better of all this nonsense. My wife and my sisters could never be rivals; it is ridiculous to suppose such a thing. But, indeed, I believe we should all be much better friends if you were in your own house ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... He falls in love with a widow who has already promised her hand to a man infinitely Ralph's superior. Ralph, however, unable to understand why she should not want him, persists in his wooing. She makes him the butt of her jokes, and he finds himself in ridiculous positions. The comedy amuses us in this way until her lover returns and marries her. The characters of the play, which is written in rime, are of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... short grass. The strata are inclined at an angle of 45 degrees. I here got two or three fine mosses. All the Mishmees have the idea, that on some hills at least rain is caused by striking trees of a certain size with large stones, some hills are again free from this charm; it was ridiculous to hear them call out not to throw stones whenever we approached one of these rainy hills. The people appear to get dirtier the farther we advance. I saw plenty of snow on two high peaks, and had a ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... department is perfectly familiar with them all in the works of Virey, Courtet, Bory de St. Vincent, Edwards, La Marck, Quetelet, &c. It has not the slightest claim to originality, except for the ridiculous ingenuity, with which it carries out the more cautious follies of these infidel philosophers, into the most glaring absurdities; and sets their ingenious physiological speculations, in broad contradiction to the most authentic and unquestioned truths of history. We certainly should not have ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... frown or word. Should not people be willing to accommodate? Of course they should. Prove it by putting your dripping umbrella against the lady with the nice moire antique silk. It may ruffle her temper; but that's her business, not yours; she shouldn't be ridiculous because well dressed. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... smaller, brown-faced, gray-haired man, who lay back on the bench with his two hands clasped round his knee, and with his eyes fixed on the southern heavens, while he murmured to himself the lines of some ridiculous old Devonshire ballad or replied in monosyllables to the rapid and eager ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
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