"Baseless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... told with a due regard to its artistic completeness. Margaret and Lilian, the old ticket-porter and the young blacksmith, were the principal interlocutors. Like the melodrama of Victorine, it all turned out, of course, to be no more than "the baseless fabric of a vision," the central incidents of the tale, at any rate, being composed of "such stuff as dreams are made of." How it all came to be evolved by the "Chimes" from the slumbering brain of the queer, little old ticket-porter was ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabrick of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And, like this insubstantial pageant, faded, Leave not a rack behind."—Tempest, Act ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... Shakespeare may have had employment in one of them. There is, it is true, no tradition to this effect, but such traditions as we have about Shakespeare's occupation between the time of leaving school and going to London are so loose and baseless that no confidence can be placed in them. It is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an attorney's office than that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a high style,' and making ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... future life. He had been aware, once or twice before, of such a premonition, and, as with most men, half of him had rejected and half of him received the warning. To-day, however, there were reasons enough for thinking this no mere baseless superstition. With Maggie, with his father, with his sister, with his own life the decision had got to be taken, and it was with an abrupt determination that he would end, at all costs, the fears and uncertainties of these last weeks that he pushed back the hall-door ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... bitter was the feeling against the horseflesh fable—for fable, our anger notwithstanding, we insisted it was—that thinking meat-eaters began to look upon it as a bad omen, and to wonder why a baseless rumour should stir up so much indignation. Tales of this kind, whether or not they tallied with probability, had come to be pooh-poohed, to be treated with disdain. Hence it was rather odd that an anecdote so racy ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... the barren hill upsprung With pointed rocks against the light, The crag sharpshadowed overhung Each glaring creek and inlet bright. Far, far, one light blue ridge was seen, Looming like baseless fairyland; Eastward a slip of burning sand, Dark-rimmed with sea, and bare of green, Down in the dry salt-marshes stood That house dark latticed. Not a breath Swayed the sick vineyard underneath, Or moved the dusty southernwood. ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... positively baseless, or absolutely irrational, its massing of supposed data, and its attempted coherence approximate more highly to Organization and Consistency than did the ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... theoretically take it for granted that error cannot be useful, while they are teaching or allowing others to teach their children what they, the parents, believe to be untrue. Thus husbands who think the common theology baseless and unmeaning, are found to prefer that their wives shall not question this theology nor neglect its rites. These are only two out of a hundred examples of the daily admission that error may be very useful to ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... Christ when we believe with a true faith in Him. We are rooted in Him. His life flows into us. We draw nourishment from that soil. We are built on Him, and in our compact union find a real support to a life which is otherwise baseless and blown about like thistledown by every breath. The union which all these metaphors presupposes is a vital connection; the possession which is the first step in the Christian life is a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... it were the most dangerous of microbes. But now that I had enjoyed a little of the common experience of childhood, a great change had come upon me. Before I went to Clifton, my mental life was all interior, a rack of baseless dream upon dream. But, now, I was eager to look out of the window, to go out in the streets; I was taken with a curiosity about human life. Even from my vantage of the window- pane, I watched boys and girls go by with an interest which began to be ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... slumbering houses, and Mr. Thomson not altogether steady on his legs nor (to all appearance) easy in his mind. The pair had reached the middle of the bridge when (as I conceive the scene) the poor tippler started in some baseless fear and looked behind him; the child, already shaken by the minister's strange behaviour, started also; in so doing, she would jerk the lantern; and for the space of a moment the lights and the shadows would be all confounded. Then it ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... weddings few, the parties paupers all: Desire of gain with fear of want combined, Raised sad commotion in his wounded mind; Wealth was in all his thoughts, his views, his dreams, And prompted base desires and baseless schemes. Alas! how often erring mortals keep The strongest watch against the foes who sleep; While the more wakeful, bold, and artful foe Is suffer'd guardless and unmark'd to go. Once in a month the sacramental bread Our Clerk with ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... the company in its relations to that world. I had formed some attachments,—ties which have lasted through life thus far, and will always last,—but these attachments were immediate only, and, so far as I felt, were almost baseless; for not directly could I see and feel what was felt by the men I loved. Outside the narrow bounds of the company my world was all abstract. I fought for that world, for it appealed to my reason; but it was with effort that I called before my mind ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... habits,—and lest these should not suffice to convince grammatical fair ones that her feelings can at all resemble theirs, I will add that she was slightly proud and exacting, and as constant in her affection towards a baseless opinion as towards an ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... thrown away, she was not slow to discover the reason of his indifference. It became plain to her at once that there was some other attraction, to use her own expression. In short, it was evident that the hope she had so fondly cherished was a baseless delusion, and that she would "never make anything out of that man yonder," in the Countess' forcible phrase. The Countess seemed to have been a judge of character. Mme. Vauquer's aversion was naturally more energetic than her friendship, for her hatred ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... of this carefully premeditated and unscrupulous gulling and thwarting of the American Embassy. The accidental discovery of the circumstance that the baseless charge of espionage levelled against me was still hanging over my head somewhat worried me. I ascertained one exceedingly disturbing fact which was communicated to me within the camp. Had I committed any offence, ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... of their genesis and their dependencies. There is no "one rational order among a host of possible systems." There is no "true filiation of the sciences." The whole hypothesis is fundamentally false. Indeed, it needs but a glance at its origin to see at once how baseless it is. Why a series? What reason have we to suppose that the sciences admit of a linear arrangement? Where is our warrant for assuming that there is some succession in which they can be placed? There ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... He saw how baseless his hope had been, and he exonerated her from all blame. She had been kind and helpful till he spoiled it all by a fool's presumption. He had always exaggerated her social position and her attainments, but in the depths of his self-abasement and despair ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... in Europe seems the most baseless thing in the world; a sort of convention invented by diplomatists for some dark purpose of their own, one would suspect, if the lack of grasp upon the realities of any given situation were not the main characteristic of ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... is a blasphemer whom they gaze at with awe and terror. They had charged him with sinning on the strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered with a deliberate denial of it. Losing now all mastery over themselves, they pour out a torrent of mere extravagant invective and baseless falsehood, which in the calmer outset they would have blushed to think of. They know no evil of Job, but they do not hesitate to convert conjecture into certainty, and specify in detail the particular crimes which he must have committed. He ought to have committed ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... that the charge of the Englishman, baseless as it was, might make trouble for them, and cause them endless delays in getting back to Professor Henderson. Suddenly Jack made ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... has often little to do with a man's physical prowess. The list of anecdotes wherein the little fellow "puts it all over" the big bully is exceptionally long. Nor are more than a bare majority of the anecdotes baseless. In our own lumber woods a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound man with no other weapon than his two hands once nearly killed a two-hundred-pound blacksmith for pushing him off a bench. This phenomenon arises from the fact that the little man seems capable often of ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... Christian fiends should be incongruous with the angels, which they are not,)—but as the unreal opposed to the real. In all the hands of other poets, we feel that Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, Diana, are not merely impure conceptions, but that they are baseless conceptions, phantoms of air, nonentities; and there is much the same objection, in point of just taste, to the combination of such fabulous beings in the same groups with glorified saints and angels, as there is to the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... these American myths from the domain of historical traditions? Why should we try to make a king of Itzamna, an enlightened ruler of Quetzalcoatl, a cultured nation of the Toltecs, when the proof is of the strongest, that every one of these is an absolutely baseless fiction of mythology? Let it be understood, hereafter, that whoever uses these names in an historical sense betrays an ignorance of the subject he handles, which, were it in the better known field of Aryan or Egyptian lore, would at once convict him of not ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... was a dim sense of want; want stimulating power, and power stimulating want; and both so based upon each other that no one can say which is the true foundation, but rather that they must be both baseless and, as it were, meteoric in mid air. They have seen very little ahead of a present power or need, and have been then most moral, when most inclined to pierce a little into futurity, but also when most obstinately declining to pierce too far, and busy mainly with the present. They ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... condemnation of the waiting-woman and her lover, Knox tells a false story about 'shame hastening the marriage' of Mary Livingstone. Dr. Robertson, in his 'Inventories of Queen Mary,' refutes this slander, which he deems as baseless as the fables against Knox's own continence. Knox adds: 'What bruit the Maries and the rest of the danseris of the Courte had, the ballads of that age did witness, quhilk we for modesteis sake omit.' Unlucky omission, unfortunate ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... foundation for such a tale. Why should Felix have referred to Roger Carbury? And she did feel that there was something in her brother's manner which forbade her to reject the whole story as being altogether baseless. So she sat upon her bed and cried, and thought of all the tales she had heard of faithless lovers. And yet why should the man have come to her, not only with soft words of love, but asking her hand in marriage, if it really were true that he was in daily communication with another ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... yet merciless, being. Only a will as strong as her own could hope to cope with this smiling fury; and this he was determined to show, though, alas! he had everything to lose in a struggle that robbed her of nothing but a hope which was but a baseless fabric at best; for he was more than ever determined ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... hated Margaret, whom he called "Queen Breechless," and by other satirical and insulting names. Finally he took the bold step to call himself king of Denmark and Norway, a baseless claim which he proposed to enforce. He made a vow never to use a hat until he had driven out Margaret, and sent her a whetstone several yards long, advising her to use it to sharpen her scissors and needles instead of using a sceptre. He was much too hasty, as he had only a weak hold upon Sweden ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... mourned she her civilities When time unlocked the truth, that she had choked Her indignation at his former slights And slanderous sayings for a baseless hope, And wrought no tittle for her country's gain. I marvel why you mourn a frustrate tie With one whose wiles could wring ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... realization of human unity in Christ, of the dividing barriers of colour and race and caste-all these are essential elements in the Christian vision. The man of the world may, and probably will, pronounce each and all of them to be chimerical, the baseless fabric of a dream. He will find no thoughtful man who is genuinely ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Jew is only the religious caricature of the baseless morality and of right generally, of the merely formal ceremonies which pervade the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... lash along his steeds of fire; And shot along the air with glancing ray, Swift as a falcon darting on its prey; No planet's swift career could match his speed, That seem'd the power of fancy to exceed. The courier of the sky I mark'd with dread, As by degrees the baseless fabric fled That human power had built, while high disdain I felt within to see the toiling train Striving to seize each transitory thing That fleets away on dissolution's wing; And soonest from the firmest grasp recede, Like airy forms, with tantalizing ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... shall I define Thy shapeless, baseless, placeless emptiness? Nor form, nor colour, sound, nor size is thine, Nor words nor fingers can thy voice express; But though we cannot thee to aught compare, A thousand things to thee may likened be, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... she lay on her pillow and thought of the little intimate touches of tenderness which this baseless rumor had made her the beneficiary of at her neighbor's hands. She was selfish enough to take advantage of their mistaken kindnesses and to surrender to their vigorous elbows the work below stairs. That was her day of freedom; it was her dawn ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... tired the strange fancies of the squarers of the circle, the inventors of perpetual motion, and the rest of the moonstruck dreamers, most persons will confess to themselves that they have had notions as wild, conceptions as extravagant, theories as baseless, as the least rational of those ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... for their hiring in the court of an hotel which was adorned with an image of the Scottish saint.] To these I may add 'guillotine,' though Dr. Guillotin did not invent this instrument of death, even as it is a baseless legend that he died by it. Some improvements in it he made, and it thus happened that it was called ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... Assembly, 'You are bringing war into Attica, Aeschines—an Amphictyonic War.' But a packed group of his supporters refused to let me speak, while the rest were amazed, and imagined that I was bringing a baseless charge against him, out of personal animosity. {144} But what the true nature of these proceedings was, men of Athens—why this plan was contrived, and how it was executed— you must hear from me to-day, since you were prevented from doing so at the time. You will behold a business ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... they dread; Ruin, as with an earthquake shock, is here, [5] There, the heart-witherings of unuttered fear, And that sad death, whence most affection bleeds, Which sickness, only of the soul, precedes. Thy baseless wealth dissolves in air away, Like mists that melt before the morning ray: No more on crowded mart or busy street Friends, meeting friends, with cheerful hurry greet; Sad, on the ground thy princely merchants ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... expectations as to the present interview brought to humiliating discomfiture, but the influence of the disillusionment instantly retroacted with the effect of making the entire noble and romantic cult which had led up to this unlucky confrontation seem a mere farrago of extravagant and baseless sentiment. What on earth had Regnier been thinking of, to plan deliberately a situation calculated to turn a cherished sentiment into ridicule? If he had seriously thought his daughter capable of supporting the role he had assigned her, had there ever ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... their faults too," Terry insisted; and partly in self-defense, we all three began to look for those faults of theirs. We had been very strong on this subject before we got there—in those baseless speculations ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... rate of tonnage for universal distribution gratis. This will ensure its acceptance and its own beauty and intrinsic merits will secure its adoption by all nations, and the result will be human happiness. It will supersede all the baseless theories of science, religion, and morality which have hitherto confounded the ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... Strangford, 'is treated at length in a masterly note by Whitley Stokes in the 1st series of Max Muller's lectures (4th ed.) p. 255, where its earliest TANGIBLE form is shown to have been Iverio. Pictet's connection with Arya is quite baseless.' ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... founded and endowed for the perpetuation and propagation of the doctrines of our denomination, I had never entertained the faintest shadow of doubt as to the infallibility of our creed; but now all faith in it vanished like the baseless fabric of a dream. Here at the fountain head of wisdom, from which streams were supposed to flow for the healing of the nations, my faith in the beliefs of my ancestors fled, nevermore to return; here, where lived the great high priests of the sect, I ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... altogether thrown out by the capricious starlings of the prophet's mind. These plunges seemed to be gone into for exercise and by the way, like the curvets of a willing horse. Gradually the thing took shape; the glittering if baseless edifice arose; and the hare still ran on the mountains, but the soup was already served in silver plate. Carthew in a few days could command a hundred and fifty pounds; Hadden was ready with five hundred; why should they ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heard that a severe judgment had been passed upon Hugh's writings by a common friend. She knew that this had been repeated to Hugh, and judged rightly that it had hurt and wounded him. Her letter was to the effect that the judgment was entirely baseless, and that he was to pursue the line he had taken up without any attempt to deviate from it. It went to Hugh's heart that he had made little effort of late, owing to circumstances and pressure of work, to see her; but he knew that she was aware of his affection, and he had never doubted ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... one's head so to act. And there is of course a slow process going on in the world by which this moral restraint is becoming habitual and instinctive; but notably in the case of fear our instinct is a belated one, and results in many causeless and baseless anxieties which our reason in vain assures us ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Matilda, as carefully closing the door after her lover, she threw herself into his embrace. Alas, weak man! Like the baseless fabric of a dream, disappeared all the lately formed resolutions of ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... were her prospects, her connections, her standing in society. She begged me, but with a sigh, to reconsider my proposal, and termed my love an infatuation—a will o' the wisp—a fancy or fantasy of the moment—a baseless and unstable creation rather of the imagination than of the heart. These things she uttered as the shadows of the sweet twilight gathered darkly and more darkly around us—and then, with a gentle pressure of her fairy-like hand, overthrew, in a single sweet instant, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and almost herculean in its massive proportions, coupled with the sad look in his noble face, and which reminded me somehow or other of one of the pictures of the old Cavaliers of the Stuart days, made me resent the more the baseless imputation of his ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... years spent in confinement on the charge of murdering his wife, he solaced himself and perfected his art by the constant use of his beloved instrument, and this story must serve as the artist's excuse. Doubtless as many believers were found for this baseless ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... the assumptions from which it starts are under all circumstances false. But neither do I think the foreign free trader is essentially wiser than the protectionist, for he also starts from assumptions which are baseless in an exploiting country. The prohibitionists think they are encouraging production: they are doing the opposite, they are hindering and hampering production; and the free traders, in so far as they insist upon ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... government. I understand that he has never said as an individual whether he thought slavery right or wrong—and he is the only man in the nation that has not! Now such a policy may have a temporary run; it may spring up as necessary to the political prospects of some gentleman; but it is utterly baseless: the people are not indifferent, and it can therefore have no ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... was imputed that the measure originated in the conception of extending the limits of slave labor beyond those previously assigned to it, and that such was its natural as well as intended effect; and these baseless assumptions were made, in the Northern States, the ground of unceasing ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... the parent home. What was but picture to us becomes reality; remote allusions and derivations trouble no more: we see the pattern of the stuff, and understand the whole tapestry. There is a gradual clearing up on many points, and many baseless notions and crude fancies are dropped. Even the post-haste passage of the business American through the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers and ignorant valets de place, unable to hold intercourse with the natives of the country, and passing all his leisure ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... grand-uncle, who killed his neighbor in a duel, exhibited traits not very characteristic of a healthy mind. With such antecedents, it is not strange that he was subject to wild impulses, violent passions, baseless prejudices, uncompromising selfishness, irregular mental activity. The morbid element in his nervous system was also witnessed in the form of epilepsy, from which he suffered, more or less, during his whole life. The "vile melancholy" which Dr. Johnson ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... faint surprise, and not a disagreeable surprise, at sight of her. She dared not raise her eyes to his any more; but she felt that he looked at her once again, and not less favourably. Oh what a thrill of joy shot through her, awakened by even this intangible and baseless confirmation of her hope that she would learn to win him, through her new and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... that her jealousy of her lover was utterly baseless, she had had the sense to make no bones about it, but to strike her colours at once. That Anthony was not there to witness her capitulation did not affect her decision. If she was to have their intelligent assistance, the sooner others saw it and appreciated her plight, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... republic of America; may the aristocracy of wealth founded upon the virtues, the toils, and the blood of her revolutionary armies soon vanish, and like the baseless fabric of a vision, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... Take away His resurrection from the dead, and we have left beautiful precepts, and fair wisdom, deformed with a monstrous self-assertion and the constant reiteration of claims which the event proves to have been baseless. Either He has risen from the dead or His words were blasphemy. Men nowadays talk very lightly of throwing aside the supernatural portions of the Gospel history, and retaining reverence for the great Teacher, the pure moralist of Nazareth. The Pharisees put the issue more coarsely and truly ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... that the potash in the fertilizer is in form of sulphate. Usually that profits the user nothing, and often the claim is baseless, but if it is a sulphate, the cost of the potash should have only 20 per cent added to the valuation of the potash, which usually will not add one dollar to the total cost of the ton of mixed fertilizer. Basing the ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... captive souls, as yet in the limbo of existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought from the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these forms, the creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve like a baseless vision. It is a magnificent dream of the penetration ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... necessarily resulting from the use of baseless currencies have been terribly illustrated while these sheets have been passing through the press; I have not had time to examine the various conditions of dishonest or absurd trading which have led to the late 'panic' in America and England; this only I know, that no merchant deserving ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... light shows now in the east and at length the full moon rises, not blood-coloured as in our climates but straightway very luminous, and surrounded by an aureole of a kind of mist, caused by the eternal dust of the sands. And when we return to the baseless kiosk—lulled always by the Nubian song of the boatmen—a great disc is already illuminating everything with a gentle splendour. As our little boat winds in and out, we see the great ruddy disc passing and repassing ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... diatribe. He practises this intolerable artifice; he calls himself [Greek: philenripideios]; bespeaks an unfair confidence from the reader; he takes credit for being once disposed to favour and indulge Euripides. In this way he accredits to the careless reader all the false charges or baseless concessions which he makes on any question between Euripides and his rivals. Such men as Valckenaer it is who are biased and inflected beforehand, without perceiving it, by all the commonplaces of criticism. These, it is true, do not arise out of mere shadows. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Esq.), about one mile from the town of Hampton, and, as we there take our stand among the few remaining tombs, shout "Eureka, Eureka!" Whether the old parish church of Kigquotan was of wood, or of brick, we cannot at this day determine. "Like the baseless fabric of a vision" it has disappeared; but we opine it was wooden, from the fact, that the first church (and probably the second also) in Jamestown (both of which were destroyed by fire) was a wooden one; and the presumption ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the task of reorganizing the various institutions of State. But those who are ignorant of the march of events in the world and who fail correctly to distinguish loyalty from treason have by wild and baseless rumours instigated people's minds and caused the rowdies in various places to rise in insurrection. These insurgents commit all sorts of horrible crimes, such as murdering peaceful people, both native and foreign, robbing their property, burning ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Joel belonged to the priestly order, is as baseless as the similar one regarding Habakkuk, and as the supposition that the author of the Chronicles ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... unsightly reptiles, and to become in time a trodden clod, shall I be yet warm in life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable sages and holy flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of another world beyond death; or are they all alike, baseless visions, and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a flattering idea, then, is a world to come! Would to God ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by these incongruous additions, filled me with indignation and a kind of anger. In view of the errand I had come upon to Aros, the feeling was baseless and unjust; but it burned high, at the first moment, in ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... good literary workmanship. It does not weary the reader with vague theories; nor does it give over much expression to the enthusiasm—not to say baseless encomium—for which too many female biographers have accustomed us to look. It is a simple and discriminative sketch of one of the most clever and lovable of the class at whom Carlyle sneered as 'scribbling women.'... Of Maria Edgeworth, the woman, one cannot easily say too much in praise. ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... Indian villages, miles away from a railway. Illiteracy, superstition, and false rumors existed at both ends of the line. Here is a man who has had no word from home since he left a year or more ago. He hears a baseless rumor or heeds some inborn fear that his child is sick, or his wife unfaithful, or that he has been cheated out of his property. Hundreds of homesick men whose whole lives have been bound up in the family circle pour in upon the secretaries, begging ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... not. It was impossible to doubt it, unfortunately. You remember what I told you of her ungovernable, wild fits of passion—which she expected me to reciprocate. She terrified me! And think how she tortured herself with baseless self-reproaches in the last ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... after such violent agitation, is either sound or refreshing. Lovel's was disturbed by a thousand baseless and confused visions. He was a birdhe was a fishor he flew like the one, and swam like the other,qualities which would have been very essential to his safety a few hours before. Then Miss Wardour was a syren, or a bird of Paradise; her father a triton, or a sea-gull; and Oldbuck ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... of the last book was done, it occurred to me to wonder whether I might ever be able to afford to get for a week or two where the thermometer went below ninety degrees in summer. But this was a wild and baseless dream, whose irrationality I quickly recognized. For such books as those into which I had been coining a year of my young strength and heart, I received the sum of one hundred dollars apiece. The "Gypsy" publisher was more munificent. He offered one hundred ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... his heart, and that only in calm meditation. But in this separation from real life he is likely to lose sight of all the limits of human nature, and seeking pure form he may easily lose himself in arbitrary and baseless conceptions. Reason will abstract itself too much from experience, and the practical man will not be able to carry out, in the crush of real life, what the contemplative mind has discovered on the peaceful path of thought. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... intervals in the pages of Shakespeare's First Folio, and the selected letters formed words and sentences categorically stating that Bacon was author of the plays. Many refutations have been published of Mr. Donnelly's arbitrary and baseless contention. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... by the cross- roads I looked back and saw that man talking to the messenger, and he must have told him the truth.' The speaker pointed to Festus. They turned their indignant eyes full upon him. That he had sported with their deepest feelings, while knowing the rumour to be baseless, was soon ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... thousands, for ever invisible and inconceivable to the inhabitant of the plains, manifested among the hills in the course of one day. The mere power of familiarity with the clouds, of walking with them and above them, alters and renders clear our whole conception of the baseless architecture of the sky; and for the beauty of it, there is more in a single wreath of early cloud, pacing its way up an avenue of pines, or pausing among the points of their fringes, than in all the white heaps that fill the arched sky of the plains from one horizon to the other. And of the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the meaning and purpose of the change which is now coming over the world. The faiths and convictions of twenty centuries are passing away and the forms and institutions of a hundred generations of men are dissolving before us like the baseless fabric of a dream. A new morality is already shaping itself in the spirit; a morality based not on guess-work and on fancies; but on ascertained laws of moral health; a scientific morality belonging not to statics, like ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... is no fact; it is rather the baseless fancy of incompetent observers, to some extent acquiesced in, or at least not contradicted, by the proud Castilian, who cares not at all about the opinions of other nationalities, and who never takes the trouble to enlighten ignorance of the kind. ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... presently we turned away from it I think it was our last. But this solitude and desolation add infinitely to its charm; just as the mystery and romance that enshroud the far-off monasteries in their desolate mountain retreats would fall away as "the baseless fabric of a vision" if they were brought into the crowded and commonplace atmosphere ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... forward to the time when they will behold the whole of the colored inhabitants of America, in the far distant land of Africa. But let them not anticipate too much; they have yet one obstacle to overcome which threatens to overthrow their "baseless fabric;" or at any rate impede their progress. Their proceedings have not obtained the approbation of those, whose approbation is most needed, the colored people themselves. They are most strangely mistaken if they suppose that it is an ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... or decisions, much less to vacate its Charter, and professed to continue its elections of deputies, etc., and to pass and administer laws as aforetime. Dr. Palfrey's language presents all such pretensions and proceedings as baseless and puerile. ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... had been done the people of Kentucky, because of their conduct during the retreat. Baseless charges of their cowardice and treachery had been bandied about in the mouths of the unreflecting; the many had been made to suffer for the baseness of the few; and the shield of the state had been tarnished because of an inaction her ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... baseless conviction that time would yet bring about my meeting with Mary, partly irritated, ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... actualized states of the potential cause, and that the causal entity holds within it all the future series of effects, and that thus the effect is already existent even before the causal movement for the production of the effect, is also baseless. Sa@mkhya says that the oil was already existent in the sesamum and not in the stone, and that it is thus that oil can be got from sesamum and not from the stone. The action of the instrumental cause with them consists only in actualizing or manifesting what was ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... winnings in the tatters of feudalism, sports a coat of arms on his carriage, has liveries, talks of his honor as a gentleman, and expects from his servants the same respect that a baron of the Middle Ages received from his hinds. It is a dream of most baseless fabric. John and Thomas, with their dislike of the word servant, their surliness and their impudence, swing too far, perhaps, in the other direction, but they are more in unison with the spirit of the age than ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sometimes with and sometimes without my wife, of whom, through my mediation, she has become a favorite. I have married, and according to the general opinion reformed. Yet I suspect my reformation, like most others of the kind, will prove instable as "the baseless fabric of a vision," unless I banish myself entirely from her society. But that I can never do; for she is still lovely in my eyes, and I ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... never succeeded in ruining a party, at least he succeeded in discrediting some pestilent opinions. This he did, not so much by a brisk display of intellectual handiness, as by showing that a pompous superstructure was baseless. He makes us feel a position to be absurd, instead of merely thinking certain things ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... of Nelson's habit of thought, and not merely an egotistic expression of baseless discontent with others, that he avowed his dissatisfaction with the results of the night's work, stupendous and wholly unparalleled as they were. But his own condition, prostrated and with disabled head, was ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... whole is little better than a dream, a beautiful phantom of the imagination. These 'gorgeous palaces' of happiness and immortality, these 'solemn temples' of truth and virtue will dissolve, 'like the baseless fabric of a vision', when we awaken to real life and contemplate the true and genuine situation of man on earth. Mr Godwin, at the conclusion of the third chapter of his eighth ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... it so, experienced equally by the biographer and the historian, is the fact that the life of the Emperor has been blameless from the moral standpoint. On two or three occasions early in the reign accounts were published of scandals at the Court. They may not have been wholly baseless, but none of them directly involved the Emperor, or even raised a doubt as to his respectability or reputation. Take from history—or from biography for that matter—the vices of those it treats of, and one-third, perhaps one-half, of its ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... asleep that night it was with a smile upon his lips, for hope had crystallized into a baseless but none the less assured belief that he would find a ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... dream of a lost land of Lyonesse, of which only the Scillies remain; but the underlying truth of such romantic rumour must be carried back to Neolithic or earlier times. Though inaccurate in detail, such legends are rarely baseless. In places, such as Mount's Bay, there is still evidence of what the sea has taken; in other parts the evidence has been washed far from sight. The fact that the shallow seas extend far westward cannot be ignored; when we speak of a lost Lyonesse ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... alone. The birds sang their merriest as day closed in; and as they turned upon their walk, and the good man saw through the vista of garden and orchard a bright light flitting across an upper window of his house, the mad hope flashed upon him for an instant (such baseless fancies will sometimes possess the calmest minds) that she had waked,—his Rachel,—and was there to meet him. The next moment the light and the hope were gone. His fingers gave such a convulsive grip upon the hand of his little boy that Reuben cried out with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... classification of sensible phenomena—that is, to changes perceptible by the senses. Psychology, based, as it is, upon self-observation and self-reflection, is a "mere illusion; and logic and ethics, so far as they are built upon it as their foundation, are altogether baseless." Spiritual entities, forces, causes, efficient or final, are unknown and unknowable; all inquiry regarding them must be inhibited, "for Theology is inevitable if we permit the inquiry ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the queer people who called themselves Conscientious Objectors with cowardice, but the charge seemed a baseless one to Henry. He did not believe that he could endure the odium and obloquy which some of the Conscientious Objectors had borne. There was courage in the man who said, "I will fight for my country!" but that courage might be less than that of the man who said, "I will not fight for ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... Shakespeare—displayed his wretchedness, related his struggle with men and things, made his hearer aware of his baseless grandeur, his unrecognized political genius, his life without noble affections. Without saying a single definite word, he contrived to suggest to this charming woman that she should play the noble part of Rebecca in Ivanhoe, and love and protect him. ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... in itself. It is also a pregnant example of the contrast between the scientific and the emotional methods of regarding nature; and it admirably illustrates the differences between well-grounded, suggestive, hypotheses, and baseless speculations. ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... it is worth mentioning the few hostile notices called forth by irritation and envy—a vice which so frequently stains the human soul. In one of these notices, which appeared, by the way, in a very filthy little newspaper, a certain scamp, guided by wretched gossip and baseless rumours about my chats in our prison, called me a "zealot and liar." Enraged by the insolence of the miserable scribbler, my friends wanted to prosecute him, but I persuaded them not to do it. Vice is its ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... direction, and an intelligible purpose to these feelings, by fitting to them a scheme of philosophical opinions. But unfortunately the philosophic system of both was so far from supporting their own views and the cravings of their own enthusiasm, that, as in some points it was baseless, incoherent, or unintelligible, so in others it tended to moral results, from which, if they had foreseen them, they would have been themselves the first to shrink as contradictory to the very purposes in which their system had originated. Hence, in maintaining their own system they both found themselves ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Flying Corps on the Western Front, and the increased activity of the German airmen, created some natural depression, which might have been more pronounced had not Mr. PEMBERTON-BILLING seized the occasion to reiterate his charges of "Murder" already condemned as baseless by two judicial tribunals. The House will do anything in reason, but it refuses to accompany Mr. BILLING in his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... burst of faith Springing from depths of misery and pain Awed them a moment, like the lightning's flash, Cleaving the cloud. But gathering strength again, They sought the conflict. "Thou, who art so wise, Hast thou not learn'd how baseless is the joy And boasting of the hypocrite? His head Up to the heavens in excellence and pride May seem to mount, yet shall he swiftly fall Leaving no trace. Though still he toils to keep His sin a secret from his fellow-men, Like a sweet, stolen morsel, ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... they may entail, trusting to the Spanish people to gather behind my son's throne. With our glorious army, navy, and nation united before foreign aggression, we trust in God that we shall overcome, without stain on our honour, the baseless and unjust ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... within his means, and who is contented with the legitimate rewards of endeavor. The dreadful panic that checks the progress of civilization and paralyzes the commerce of the world, is the death angel that follows speculation. Everything is staked and hazarded on contingences that are as baseless as the fabric of a dream. The day of settlement comes and nobody is able to settle. The borrower is powerless to meet his note in the bank; the banker is powerless to pay his depositors, and confidence is stampeded like a herd of cattle. The timid and suspicious ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... conscience-stricken denier can say to his Saviour. And—blessed be God!—there is only one thing that a Saviour can say to a conscience-stricken denier. There must have been penitence with tears; there must have been full absolution and remission. And so we are not indulging in baseless fancies when we say that we know what passed in that conversation, of which no word ever escaped the lips of either party concerned. So then, with that knowledge, just let me dwell upon ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... night—and it happened that our hearts were veiled in gloom. An unaccountable action on the part of the antelope had plunged the State into disgrace. That charmer, on the representation that the previous day was her birthday, and that vast treasures had been sent in a hamper for its celebration (both baseless assertions), had secretly but most pressingly invited thirty-five neighbouring princes and princesses to a ball and supper: with a special stipulation that they were "not to be fetched till twelve." This ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joyousness of spirits. You wake every morning, see the gold upon the snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence. The valleys are but a stride to you; ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not so baseless as it may seem when presented as I have put it. All we know of the characters of the events of nature is based on the analysis of the relations of situations to percipient events. If situations ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... world of periphrasis and argument; nothing is so difficult to form with exactness, or even probability, when they relate to an early period; and nothing more carelessly received, and confidently circulated. The enormous statements of the Jewish exiles, and the baseless ones of the Moorish, are not peculiar to Llorente, but have been repeated, without the slightest qualification or distrust, by most modern ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... conjectures that the sovereigns referred to are Ferdinand and Isabella, but this appears to us a baseless supposition. The conduct of the Queen in the story is in no wise in keeping with what we know of Isabella's character. Queen Margaret doubtless heard this tale during her sojourn in Spain in 1525. We have consulted many Spanish works, and notably collections of ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Elizabeth and all the Tudors had, as jealously, but more energetically exercised.[A] Elizabeth left to her successor the royal prerogative strained to its highest pitch, with no means to support a throne which in the succeeding reign was found to be baseless. The king employed the style of absolute power, and, as Harris says, "entertained notions of his prerogative amazingly great, and bordering on impiety." It never occurred to his calumniators, who are always writing, without throwing themselves back into the age of their inquiries, that ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... self! A beast In passion, nay far worse than such, to feast On baseless anger against her whose least Stray word was kind; her daily ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... theory, according as he is impelled by vanity, envy, or diseased desire of change,—and who, while he would subvert and scatter into dust those structures of knowledge, reared by the wise men of this and other generations, has nothing to erect in their room but the baseless and air-built fabrics of a ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson |
