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Illusory   /ɪlˈusəri/   Listen
Illusory

adjective
1.
Based on or having the nature of an illusion.  Synonym: illusive.  "Secret activities offer presidents the alluring but often illusory promise that they can achieve foreign policy goals without the bothersome debate and open decision that are staples of democracy"






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"Illusory" Quotes from Famous Books



... own in Paris—it was quite another to find them flaunting in the heart of hostile England; and I fear I should have made a fool of myself, if the man had not been on the other side of the street, and I at a one-pane window. There was something illusory in this transplantation of the wealth and honours of a family, a thing by its nature so deeply rooted in the soil; something ghostly in this sense of home-coming so far ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... journeys, and the reading of books? The weariness entailed, the mere continuity of looking or attending, quite apart from tiresome accompanying circumstances, make the apparently real act, what we expect to be the act of enjoyment, quite illusory; like Coleridge, "we see, not feel, how beautiful things are." Later on, all odious accompanying circumstances are utterly forgotten, eliminated, and the weariness is gone: we enjoy not merely unhampered by accidents, but in the very way our heart desires. ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... not, however, the timeless mind rather a gratuitous fiction? And is not the notion of eternity being given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon us the block-universe, and of denying that possibilities exist?—just the point to be proved. To say that time is an illusory appearance is only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that the frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time may be ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... the conception of genus, family, order, class, &c.—no class of animals is of so much importance as that of the Sponges. In it the fluctuating forms vary with such unexampled indefiniteness and variability as to make all distinction of species quite illusory. Oscar Schmidt has already pointed this out in the siliceous sponges and keratose sponges; and I, in my monograph, in three volumes, on the Calcareous Sponges (the result of five years of most accurate investigations of this small ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... industrialism, and by the unpreparedness and want of organization in the new intelligent elements in the State. I have compared the human beings in society to a great and increasing variety of colours tumultuously smashed up together, and giving at present a general and quite illusory effect of grey, and I have attempted to show that there is a process in progress that will amount at last to the segregation of these mingled tints into recognizable distinct masses again. It is ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... different kinds of results one only is definitive—the statement of an author who can have had no information on the fact he states is null and void; it is to be rejected as we reject an apocryphal document.[169] But criticism here merely destroys illusory sources of information; it supplies nothing certain to take their place. The only sure results of criticism are negative. All the positive results are subject to doubt; they reduce to propositions of the form: "There are chances for or against the truth of ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... find gradations, or a sufficient number of uniting links between two things, they become united or made one thing, and any classification of them must be illusory. Classification is only possible where there is a shock given to the senses by reason of a perceived difference, which, if it is considerable, can be expressed in words. When the world was younger and less experienced, people were shocked at what appeared great differences between ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... Home Rule controversy was emphasised Englishmen asked what sort of persecution Irish Protestants had to fear from a Parliament in Dublin, and appeared to think all such fear illusory unless evidence could be adduced that the Holy Office was to be set up at Maynooth, equipped with faggot and thumb-screw. Of persecution of that sort there never has been, of course, any apprehension in modern times. Individual Catholics and Protestants live side by side ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... that Mr. Palmer, the leg-maker, might be able to adapt some form of arm to my left shoulder, as on that side there remained five inches of the arm-bone, which I could move to a moderate extent. The hope proved illusory, as the stump was always too tender to bear any pressure. The hospital referred to was in charge of several surgeons while I was an inmate, and was at all times a clean and pleasant home. It was filled with men who had lost one arm or leg, ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell

... identify my guest. Take his measure out of the corner of my eye and understand him. Very well, I have been the victim of a hallucination which my senses accepted as real. And which I was able to murder only by pretending I too believed it real. Therefore, having committed this illusory crime, there results this ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht

... Using a Thought-Form as at cut-post, or observation point. How things appear when viewed from a Thought-Form. A wonderful phase of occult phenomena. Advantages and disadvantages of this form of clairvoyant visioning. Hindu Psychic Magic, and how it is performed. Remarkable illusory effects produced by Hindu Magicians. All is explained when the principle of the creation and projection of Thought-Forms is understood. Why the Hindus excel in this phase of occultism. An interesting description of Hindu Magic feats. The power of concentrated ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... The old, illusory France has collapsed [he wrote to Brandes on December 20, 1870, two days after the engagement at Nuits]; and as soon as the new, real Prussia does the same, we shall be with one bound in a new age. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... . sees the one plan fulfilled through all the manifold lives, the single consciousness winning its purpose by virtue of all the ideas, of all the individual selves, and of all the lives. No finite view is wholly illusory. Every finite intent taken precisely in its wholeness is fulfilled in the Absolute. The least life is not neglected, the most fleeting act is a recognized part of the world's meaning. You are for the divine view ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... GREENWOOD and Mr. JOSEPH KING. The former is so devoted to animals that he would not turn upon a worm; the thought of bloodshed so shocks the latter that he welcomes any suggestion of peace however illusory. But, when Mr. KING described a proposal of Sir GEORGE'S as "infected with Prussianism," that gallant knight promptly invited him to repeat his language outside the House; and Mr. KING, nothing daunted, declared his readiness "to meet the hon. Member where he likes and with whatever weapons he likes." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various

... windows were bright and speckless, and the door-stone was as clean as a white boulder at ebb tide. On the door-stone stood a clean old woman, in a dark-striped linen gown, a red kerchief, and a linen cap, talking to some speckled fowls which appeared to have been drawn towards her by an illusory expectation of cold potatoes or barley. The old woman's sight seemed to be dim, for she did not recognize Adam till he said, "Here's the key, Dolly; lay it down for me in the ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... of Kedgaon may seem to some a descent from great to small. Not so; it is rather an ascent from the false to the true, from the impure to the pure, from the illusory to the real. For Kedgaon is the home, and center of the work, of Pundita Ramabai, perhaps the most learned, and certainly the most influential Christian woman in India. The very name pundita is given only to those of high intellectual attainments. A Hindu ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong

... licence. Deputies from witchdom attended from all parts, even from Scotland. When reproached by some of his slaves for failing to come to the rescue in the torture-chamber or at the stake, their lord replied by causing illusory fires to be lit, bidding the doubters walk through the harmless flames, promising not more inconvenience in the bonfires of their persecutors. Lycanthropic criminals were also brought up who had prowled about ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams

... sedulously cultivated candour for my whole term of existence, that I hope I may flatter myself that I am not a novice in the great art of retracting a conclusion arrived at under premises which, though probable, have proved to be illusory. I therefore freely confess that I have allowed probability to weigh too much with me in my estimation of these young men." I almost jumped for joy as I cried out that I knew he would think so when he came ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge

... mind of Davis hardened. He became possessed by a lofty and intolerant confidence, an absolute conviction that, in spite of all appearances, he was on the threshold of success. We may safely ascribe to him in these days that illusory state of mind which has characterized some of the greatest of men in their over-strained, concluding periods. His extraordinary promises in his later messages, a series of vain prophecies beginning with his speech at the African Church, remind one of Napoleon after Leipzig refusing the Rhine ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... mountain squall twisted the branches of the trees, Ramuntcho entered his deserted house where the gray of death seemed scattered everywhere. A little of winter had passed over the Basque land, a little frost, burning the annual flowers, ending the illusory summer of December. In front of Franchita's door, the geraniums, the dahlias had just died, and the path which led to the house, which no one cared for, disappeared under the mass ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti

... may so decay as inevitably to bring about war. Of the dully unresponsive pacificist and the jingo patriot, quick to anger, the latter no doubt is the more dangerous to the cause of true freedom, yet both are "undesirable citizens." He who believes that peace is illusory and spurious, unless it be based upon justice and liberty, will be proud to battle, if battle he must, for the ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke

... with at the outset of his enterprise could not but confirm him in his illusory hopes. Whilst he was at Lyons, engaged in preparations for his departure, Duke Charles of Savoy, whose territories were the first he would have to cross, came to see him on a personal matter. "Cousin, my good friend," said the king to him, "I am delighted to see you at Lyons, for, if you ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... one of two courses. Either it must discriminate in their favor or it must discriminate against them. The third alternative—that of being what is called "impartial"—has no real existence; and it is essential that the illusory nature of a policy of impartiality should in the beginning ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... to enjoy greatly this theory of his own final extinction, and he exclaims with infinite self-satisfaction, "this pure and ennobling sense of truth he would scorn to barter for the selfish and illusory hope of an eternity of personal existence." This is quite a jolly ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various

... the imperfect condition into which, according to the Pythagoreans, a being falls, when he detaches himself from the Monad, or God. Spiritual beings, emanating from God, are enveloped in the duad, and therefore receive only illusory impressions. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... point of attack, namely, the Black Knight at KB3, can be supported by as many Black units as White can bring up for the attack, but the defensive efficiency of one of Black's pieces is illusory, because it can be taken by a White piece. The plan would be as follows: White threatens Black's Knight for the third time with Kt-K4, and Black must reply QKt-Q2, because covering with R-K3 would cost the "exchange," as will appear from a comparison of the value of ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker

... about that other wife, which involved the worst wound to her hereditary pride, mingled themselves as a newly-embittering suspicion with the earliest memories of her illusory love, eating away the lingering associations of tenderness with the past image of her husband; and her irresistible belief in the rest of Baldassarre's revelation made her shrink from Tito with a horror which would perhaps have urged some passionate ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... his best conditions and was clearly enjoying the pipe he used but rarely. Ann at his feet on the porch-step read aloud to him with indifference to all but the man she now and then looked up to with the loving tenderness his brief betterment fed with illusory hope. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and the rest? The talker owned that there was a great deal about these which was to his purpose, but, upon the whole, the criticism was too desultory and fragmentary, and the quotation was illustrative rather than representative, and so far it was illusory. He had a notion that Hunt's stories from the Italian poets were rather more in the line he would have followed, but he had not read these since he was a boy, and he was not prepared to ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... that if one could have persuaded him to stand still for five minutes it would have been actually possible to see him grow. He grew at the rate of about an inch a week for the best part of a year. When he had finished he looked like nothing on earth. At one time we cherished a brief but illusory hope that he was going to turn into some sort of an imitation of a St. Bernard; but the symptoms rapidly passed off, and his final and permanent aspect was that of a rather ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay

... other side of her hedge lay enticing freedom. It seemed at times as though to be again in the little office of the Golden Eagle Hotel would be a more perfect happiness than this she now enjoyed—but that, too, was illusory. How could she repay the money she had used? The moment she left Marshall Haney she would not only be poor, she would be profoundly in his debt. Where could she find the money to repay him and to make ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... settlers of that region and day, represented various states of society and degrees of refinement, and to those to whom she was not as a blissful reminiscence of long ago, she appeared as a revelation, new and straight from heaven, a fancy, a dream! It seemed meet to them that she arrived in the illusory sunset of a sweet spring day, like some lovely forecast of the visions of ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... thousand vapours which are most inodorous, the extent becomes visible by details which escape in the first chaotic glimpse. It is the moment of creation, all is bright, the fog disappears, becomes peopled, is animated, forms appear, they move, they are agitated, they are no illusory shadows; but, on the contrary, essentially material, which cross and recross at every moment. What beatitudes! what joyous life! Never, even for the Epicureans, were so many felicities assembled together. Those who like to wallow in filth, can find it here to their heart's content; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various

... he had been the victim of some kind of illusory perception, he vigorously restrained his feelings. Then the music presently ceased, and every one applauded and began to talk at once, laughing, changing seats, complimenting the player, and behaving naturally and easily as though nothing out of the way had happened. ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... of physical matter. Anyone who has seen a clever Shadow-Play, and has compared what goes on behind the screen on which the shadows are cast with the movements of the shadows on the screen, may have a vivid idea of the illusory nature of the shadow-actions, and may draw therefrom several not ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... reminded one of the phantom towns which men had thrown up breathlessly and abandoned when the search for gold had proved illusory. Only permanency could dig the gold of fertility from the prairie, and thus far the people who had made a brief attempt to cope with it had been in too much of a hurry. Those abandoned quarter-sections had defeated the men ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... in a few cases were victorious at the polls. "The balance of power has at length got into the hands of the working people, where it properly belongs," triumphantly exclaimed the Mechanics' Free Press of Philadelphia in 1829. But the triumph was illusory. Dissensions appeared in the labor ranks. The old party leaders, particularly of Tammany Hall, the Democratic party organization in New York City, offered concessions to labor in return for votes. Newspapers unsparingly denounced "trade union politicians" ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... Route' (1898), and finally 'Derniers Jours de Pekin' (1903). Many exquisite pages are to be found in Loti's work. His composition is now and then somewhat disconnected; the impressions are vague, almost illusory, and the mirage is a little obscure, but the intense and abiding charm of Nature remains. Loti has not again reached the level of Madame Chrysantheme, and English critics at least will have to suspend their judgment for ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti

... great things. They may positively glow—before election—with enthusiasm at the prospect they imagine political victory may open to them. Time after time, I was struck by the change in their attitude after the briefest enjoyment of this illusory power. Men are elected during some wave of reform, let us say, elected to legislate into practical working existence some great ideal. They want to do big things; but a short time in office is enough to ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger

... warms as he dwells on the illusory picture of ancient virtue, and contrasts it with the degeneracy of his own day. "Et vero prisca haec tanta severitas, desertaque illa et inculta vita, quando dies noctesque nostri armati concursabant, ac in bello et Maurorum sanguine assidui versabantur; vere quidem ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott

... the destitute. The overburdened towns, already suffering from the general dearth, could give no aid. So-called "zones of cultivation" established within the immediate areas of effective military control about the cities and fortified camps proved illusory as a remedy for the suffering. The unfortunates, being for the most part women and children, with aged and helpless men, enfeebled by disease and hunger, could not have tilled the soil without ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley

... true source of being, thought, and happiness. Kapila taught that the spirit became free from all mundane fetters as soon as it perceived that all phenomena were only passing reflections produced by nature upon the spirit, and as soon as it was able to shut its eyes to those illusory visions. Both systems therefore, and the same applies to all the other philosophical systems of the Brahmans, admitted an absolute or self-existing Being as the cause of all that exists or seems to exist. And here lies the specific difference between Kapila and Buddha. Buddha, like Kapila, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... confer upon the colored inhabitants all the privileges and immunities of citizens if they could read and write, and even a chance to hold office if they could show possession of a sufficient income or of a professional title of some sort, their usual inability to do either made their privileges illusory. Their only share in public concerns lay in performing military service at the behest of their superiors. Even where the language of the constitutions did not exclude the colored inhabitants directly or indirectly, practical authority ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... amount far exceeding all the advantages offered in exchange. Even were it intended to relieve our consumers, it was evident that so long as the exemption but partially covered our importation such relief would be illusory. To relinquish a revenue so essential seemed highly improvident at a time when new and large drains upon the Treasury were contemplated. Moreover, embarrassing questions would have arisen under the favored-nation clauses of treaties ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... whose strength they had begun to fear. The accession of O'Brien, however, the prestige of his name, and the influence of his example, was expected to do much towards reviving the drooping fortunes of the Association. Nor was the anticipation illusory. From the day on which O'Brien became a Repealer, down to the date of the secession, the strongest prop of the Conciliation Hall was his presence and support; he failed indeed to counteract the corrupt influences that gnawed at the vitals of the Association and ultimately destroyed it; ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various

... are the people who, during a gleam of illusory sunshine yesterday, were so nonchalantly parting with their blood—of which, by the by, your bread and cucumber eating, and cold water drinking Persian has little enough, and that little thin enough at any time. These rag-bedecked, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... trade, fishery, travel, copyright, political crimes, barbarities in war-time, &c. But this war shows quite clearly that education—before anything else—should be a matter of international consideration and regulation. Behold, how illusory are all international restrictions when the education of a nation is quite excluded from any control! When the Nitzschean education of Germany teaches the German youth to despise all neighbours, all nations and races as inferior ones, ...
— The New Ideal In Education • Nicholai Velimirovic

... equally useful to verify the exactness of the indications given by the apparatus by making readings several times a day on a scale of tides placed alongside of the float. Nine times out of ten the rise of the waves renders such readings very difficult and the control absolutely illusory. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various

... Your request for my aid I have engaged in mediation between Your Government and the Government of Austria-Hungary. While this action was taking place, Your troops were being mobilized against my ally Austria-Hungary, whereby, as I have already communicated to You, my mediation has become almost illusory. In spite of this, I have continued it, and now I receive reliable news that serious preparations for war are going on on my eastern frontier. The responsibility for the security of my country forces me to measures of defence. I have gone to the ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History

... *Liber free liberty, deliberate Ligo bind obligation, allegiance, alliance *Linquo, lictum leave delinquent, relict, derelict *Litera letter illiterate, obliterate Locus place collocation, dislocate Loquor, locutus speak soliloquy, elocution Ludo, lusum play prelude, illusory /Lux, lucis light lucid, luminary Lumen, luminis / *Magnus great magnate, magnificent *Malus bad, evil malaria, malnutrition Mando order mandatory, commandment Manus hand manual, manufacture *Mare sea maritime, submarine *Mater mother maternal, alma mater *Medius middle mediocre, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... gr-ndm-ther was right just now, when she said she was not my first love. 'Twas one of those banale expressions" (here Mr. P. blushed once more) "which we use to women. We tell each she is our first passion. They reply with a similar illusory formula. No man is any woman's first love; no woman any man's. We are in love in our nurse's arms, and women coquette with their eyes before their tongue can form a word. How could your lovely relative love me? ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... said anything: she used to go stiffly by, hardly moving aside: but his illusory courtesy used to give her a secret pleasure. Only the evening before, at six o'clock, as he was going downstairs, he had met her for the last time: she was carrying up a bucket of charcoal. He had not noticed it, except that he did remark ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... themselves at the cost of infinite damage to others; that the doctrine tended to encourage the poor in their improvidence, and in a debasing acquiescence in ills which they might well remedy; that the rewards were illusory and the result, after all, of luck, whose empire should be bounded by the grave; that its terrors were enervating and unjust; and that even the most blessed rising would be but the disturbing of a still more ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... Bonaparte was not deceived. In this, as well as in many other things, the perspicacity of his genius enabled him to comprehend all the importance of a consecration bestowed on him by the Pope; more especially as Louis XVIII., without subjects, without territory, and wearing only an illusory crown, had not received that sacred unction by which the descendants of Hugh Capet become the eldest ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... Pradjna—"highest of the six paramita, principal means of attaining Nirvana, knowledge of the illusory character of all existence." ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... process and fertility is automatically adjusted to the death-rate. Whenever a population reaches a certain stage of civilisation and nervous development its procreativeness, quite apart from any effort of the will, tends to diminish. The seeming effect of birth-control is illusory. It is Nature, not human effort, ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis

... Court of Rome will struggle to the last moment, and by every possible means, against the realization of this twofold combination. It is easily understood that it may appear to accept civil and even political reforms, taking care always to render them illusory. But it knows too well that secularization and the code Napoleon, once introduced into the edifice of the temporal power, would undermine it and cause it to fall, simply by removing its principal supports—clerical privileges and canon law. ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... it was on the scale of banditry rather than revolution; but Mexico was far worse off after years of the war than it had been in 1913, and disregard of American rights was still the cardinal policy of the Government. Carranza's security, however, was illusory. In the Spring of 1920 Presidential elections were announced at last, and Carranza's attempt to force Ygnacio Bonillas, his Ambassador in Washington, into the Presidential chair led to a revolt which eventually ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan

... fountains, and silvery streams of living water, and cool shady resting-places for weary caravans. Hope is still my consolation in travelling through this thirsty dreary wilderness. Better to feed the mind with these expectations, even should they be illusory, than sighing and groaning ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... institutions, it is seldom that we are so fortunate as to find definite landmarks by which we can accurately mark the chronological course of their development. The giving of definite dates for the progress of ideas is in most cases both misleading and illusory, as, except in instances of violent revolution, changes are apt to be gradual, rather than immediate and arbitrary. But we can indicate the periods of progress by comparing them with the contemporary political changes, and roughly designate their eras by the dates of prominent political ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams

... shall have been deciphered, studied, and translated, it will probably be found that they contain a tolerably full indication of what Assyrian science really was, and it will then be seen how far it was real and valuable, in what respects mistaken and illusory. At present this mine is almost unworked, nothing more having been ascertained than that the subjects whereof the tables treat are various, and their apparent value very different. Comparative philology seems to have been largely studied, and the works ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson

... reality Sarpi had more of the eighteenth century than of the sixteenth in his turn of mind, and stood far aloof from the doctrines over which his contemporaries contended, and the expectations entertained of his countrymen were illusory. The city was placed under an interdict, and the orders that were faithful to Rome departed across the Lagoon, singing hymns. The Pope looked about for means of coercion when Henry mediated. He owed ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... nature is sad and downcast. The ghost appears, and sings that it is the spirit of Tsunemasa, and has come to thank those who have piously celebrated his obsequies. No one answers him, and the spirit vanishes, its voice becoming fainter and fainter, an unreal and illusory vision haunting the scenes amid which its life was spent. The priest muses on the portent. Is it a dream or a reality? Marvellous! The ghost, returning, speaks of former days, when it lived as a child in the palace, and received the Azure Mountain lute from ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford

... might be those of no terrible Demons, but of the wild's savage children whom I had seen, halting, curious and mute, in the light of the morning. The tremor of the ground (if not, as heretofore, explicable by the illusory impression of my own treacherous senses) might be but the natural effect of elements struggling yet under a soil unmistakably charred by volcanoes. The luminous atoms dissolved in the caldron might ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... child was called for; but the attendants refused to obey, the soldiers rebelliously went off duty, throwing down their arms. Then I, who in my wisdom had soared far above all weakness of heart and to whom emotions were illusory, went myself to the apartment where, with their arms, women fenced the child like a flower surrounded by the menacing branches of a tree. He saw me and stretched out eager hands and struggled to come to me, for he longed to be free from the love that imprisoned him. Crying, "I am come ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore

... their main body that had already crossed the bridge. The commander of the Russian advance guard was himself quite astounded at the success that the fortune of war had thrown into his lap: had not the fog rendered the scouting on both sides illusory, and had not chance allowed him to fall in with this gap in the English columns, the chances would, considering the narrowness of the road, have been much more favourable to the English than for him, and the battle would probably have ended with ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann

... in a perverted age, are carried by their very genius all the more certainly to ruin. All that, in a more favorable period, would have raised them to be stars in the art firmament, now made them fall like some ignis fatuus, the brilliant light of which owes its illusory existence only to miasma. This striking fact appears, at first sight, inexplicable; but it is easy to understand, if we consider the different character of the two arts. Plastic art had formerly emulated painting, and thus, especially in relief, had suffered unmistakable ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement

... the efforts to give an air of authenticity to the story, which sometimes make us smile, and sometimes rather bore us, in other novels are all to the purpose; for there is a real point in putting such a story in the mouth of the sufferer, and in giving us for the time an illusory belief in his reality. It is one of the exceptional cases in which the poetical aspect of a position is brought out best by the most prosaic accuracy of detail; and we imagine that Robinson Crusoe's island, with all his small household torments, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... biological instinct is impossible. The choice of a vocation, determined by fugitive whims and chance fancies, by mere imitation, by a hope for quick earnings, by irresponsible recommendation, or by mere laziness, has no internal reason or excuse. Illusory ideas as to the prospects of a career, moreover, often falsify the whole vista; and if we consider all this, we can hardly be surprised that our total result is in many respects hardly better than if everything were left entirely to accident. Even on the height of a ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg

... Stevenson warns us that "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive," beautifully portraying the emptiness and illusory character of achievement. And, of those who have attained, Mr. E. F. Benson exclaims, "God help them!" These sayings are typical of a widespread literary fashion. Now to slander Mistress Joy to-day is a serious matter. For we are coming to realize that she is a ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... prejudgment of Mordecai, even if their communication had been free from that peculiar claim on himself strangely ushered in by some long-growing preparation in the Jew's agitated mind. This claim, indeed, considered in what is called a rational way, might seem justifiably dismissed as illusory and even preposterous; but it was precisely what turned Mordecai's hold on him from an appeal to his ready sympathy into a clutch on his struggling conscience. Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... interdependence of parts wholly understood which appeals to the intellect, and satisfies it: they would please the mind, though the order they embody were purely imaginary, just as science would delight it, were the order of nature itself illusory. Creative art would thus still have a ground of being under a sceptical philosophy; man would delight to dream his dream. But it is not necessary to take this ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... visual process, which we began in the last chapter, will serve now to free us from a series of illusory concepts which have been connected by the onlooker-consciousness with the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... betrothed! But after all, it is far more sensible than real love-making, where if the pleasure be more acute, the pangs are therefore the greater. She addresses to him the tenderest counterfeit verses; he returns them in kind. She even simulated such an illusory sadness that the duke has sent his own jester, who has but just arrived at court, to amuse her (ahem!) dullness, until ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... wisely—"sapienter descendunt in infernum," as the ancients have it; and some of these latter will even lie on their backs, after a fall, and lift up their voices, and prove to you that in the nature of things they ought to have gone up, and their being down is monstrous; illusory. ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade

... professional students, the young medical men have the worst reputation for their reckless indulgence in an erotic life. They know most, and it is psychologically not surprising that just on that account they are most reckless. The instinctive fear of the half knower has left them; they live in an illusory safety, the danger has become familiar to them, and they deceive themselves with the idea that the particular case is harmless. If the steps to be taken were to be worked out at the writing desk in cool mood and sober deliberation, the knowledge would at least often be a certain help, ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... the working-men's demands in France as in Britain were granted, but the relief they promised was illusory, for prices still went up, leaving the recipients of the relief no better off. And as the wages payable for labor are limited, whereas prices may ascend to any height, the embittered laborer fancied he could better his lot by an appeal to the force ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... greatest interest and astonishment. Many of course refused to believe it. Some there were who having been shown them refused to believe their eyes, and asserted that although the telescope acted well enough for terrestrial objects, it was altogether false and illusory when applied to the heavens. Others took the safer ground of refusing to look through the glass. One of these who would not look at the satellites happened to die soon afterwards. "I hope," says Galileo, "that he saw them ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... which are the variations of the magnetic field in which its source is placed. It could not, therefore, be strictly considered as independent of the earth; and the theoretical advantage which might be expected from this alteration would be somewhat illusory. ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... great deal, I suppose: on the first floor the editor writes that property is robbery, and advocates an equal division of property; on the second floor he spends the money he gets out of the people by holding illusory hopes of an approaching spoliation of the rich, and advocating investment in a fraudulent enterprise like Panama.... You always accuse me of want of humour, but I have sufficient to appreciate The Voice of the People on the first floor and the voice of the ball ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... concept of a set of conditions was the precise and exact concept of nature, which he consequently reduplicated, having one nature before experience and another after. The first thus became mythical and the second illusory: for the first, said to condition experience, was a set of verbal ghosts, while the second, which alone could be observed or discovered scientifically, was declared fictitious. The truth is that the single nature or set of conditions ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... Queen and her Ministers, however, insisted that the neutralisation clause (the Third Point) should be made effective, not left illusory, and incorporated in the principal and not in a supplementary treaty. Modified in this and other particulars, an ultimatum embodying the Austrian proposals, which stipulated, inter alia, for the cession of a portion ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... Another anticipation proved illusory. We all realized that in the circumstances Ireland could come to a financial arrangement with Great Britain on easier terms than at any time in her history; that to settle at once would be highly profitable; and more particularly, that ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... Installed in narrow brains, incapable of entertaining two related ideas, it is to become a cold or furious monomania, fiercely and unrelentingly destroying a past it curses, and attempting to establish a millennium, and all in the name of an illusory contract, at once anarchical and despotic, which unfetters insurrection and justifies dictatorship; all to end in a conflicting social order resembling sometimes a drunken orgy of demons, and sometimes a Spartan convent; all aimed at replacing the real human being, slowly formed by ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... still flickering and darting overhead, I cried, "But you are risking your lives for some fantastic whim, some wild superstition of yours. You are mad to brave such a storm! You expose your child to undoubted peril that you may ward off some illusory evil. Let me bear her to the inn, and follow me thither." And I was going to lift the senseless form in my arms when the woman sternly ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... doated as much as if she were a brilliant pearl in the palm of their hand. Seeing that she was endowed with natural gifts of intelligence and good looks, they also felt solicitous to bestow upon her a certain knowledge of books, with no other purpose than that of satisfying, by this illusory way, their wishes of having a son to nurture and of dispelling the anguish felt by them, on account of the desolation and void in their ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... hostility between France and England. I had hoped some years ago that the future might establish a friendly understanding between the two nations, based upon their obvious interest in the first place, and perhaps a little on the interchange of ideas; but I fear it was illusory, and that at some future date, at present undeterminable, there will be another war between them, as in the days of our fathers. I have thought sometimes of trying to found an Anglo-French Society or League, the members ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... standing there, pale, trembling, and quite forgetting all she had been enjoined to do. Lionel, with those restless, fatigued eyes, regarded her for but a second—then he turned away, shaking his head. He had seen that illusory phantom so often! ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... and studied in the Middle Temple; and he was afterwards called to the bar, but literary pursuits withheld him from practicing. He had brought with him from Ireland his translations from Anacreon; and published these by subscription in 1800, dedicated to the Prince Regent (then the illusory hope of political reformers), with no inconsiderable success. Lord Moira, Lady Donegal, and other leaders of fashionable society, took him up with friendly warmth, and he soon found himself a well-accepted guest in the highest circles in London. No clever young fellow—without ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... and where consequently there is illusion and deception. Mother Juliana is aware that the crucifix is not really bleeding, as it seems to do, and she explicitly distinguishes such a vision from her later illusory dream-presentment of the Evil One. This dream while it lasted was, like all dreams, confounded with reality; whereas the other phenomena, even if made of "dream-stuff," were rated at their true value. Hence it seems to me that if such things have any outward independent reality, to ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... the whole region, including the present North Carolina—fittingly completes the history of Sir Walter's American enterprise. The failure of the colony has been freely charged to his own neglect, occasioned by the turning of his mind to more brilliant prospects presented by the illusory "El Dorado," whereby so many ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... France, a hammering on the stage alone heralds the rising of the curtain to disclose illusory realms of romance. Precisely so with Mr. Staff, upon the door of whose lodging, at nine o'clock the next morning, a knocking announced the first overt move against his peace ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance

... explain the exact significance of this step, and the consequent disappointment when it was found that the arrangement was illusory and destitute of practical value, it is necessary to go back a little, and trace the course of events in the ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... difficulty? Illusion is the best proof of insanity; and a serious endeavour was certainly made to fasten an illusion on the plaintiff about a sum of L. 14,000. But the proof was weak, and went partly on an assumption that all error is hallucination; this is illusory, and would, if acted on, set one half the kingdom imprisoning the other half; and after all, they did not demonstrate that the plaintiff was in error. They advanced no undeniable proof that Mr. Richard Hardie has not embezzled this L. 14,000. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... always clear and simple, but very profound and significant. The Ground and the Abyss of the soul is one substance with the eternal and absolute Godhead. Finite strivings, isolated purposes, selfish aims, centrifugal pursuits are vain and illusory. We lose our lives in so far as we live {76} in self-will and in self-centred joys. The way home, the way of salvation, is a return to that Ground-Reality from which we have gone out—a return to union and oneness of Life with the ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... dramatic performance is composed, and without this care for detail—which must be precise, logical, profound, vigilant, unerring, and at the same time always unobtrusive and seemingly involuntary—there can be neither cohesion, nor symmetry, nor an illusory image consistently maintained; and all great effects would become tricks of mechanism and detached exploits ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... remains unproductive unless it allies itself with the understanding of another; copy nature, not copies merely! He equals Bacon in his high estimation of sensuous experience in contrast to the often illusory conclusions of the reason, and of the value of induction; but he does not conceal from himself the fact that observation is merely the first step in the process of cognition, leaving the chief role for the understanding. This, supplementing the defect of experience—the impossibility ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... fled thither for refuge. So formidable indeed became the pretensions of the Scot kings that they forced the ablest of our Norman sovereigns into a complete change of policy. The Conqueror and William the Red had met the threats of the Scot sovereigns by invasions which ended again and again in an illusory homage, but the marriage of Henry the First with the Scottish Matilda robbed the claims of the Scottish line of much of their force while it enabled him to draw their kings into far closer relations with the Norman throne. King David not only abandoned the ambitious dreams of his predecessors ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... of | science. For him science had a | public, democratic, and collaborative | character, individual efforts | contributing to its general success. | In science, as Bacon conceives it, | truly effective results (not the | illusory achievements of magicians | and alchemists) can be attained only | through collaboration among | researchers, circulation of results, | and clarity of language. Scientific | understanding is not an individual | undertaking. The extension of ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon

... the country districts by the deliberate plans of the Sinn Feiners, and in the towns, or rather in Dublin, by a sense of the futility of all war, and in particular this war, whose aims were vague enough to the statesmen, and appeared almost illusory to the worker. Hence anyone reading the Workers Republic could have noticed whole passages that might have been taken direct from the ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... strange, illusory power memory has in dealing with the past, of creating a scene and an emotion that not only never existed, but that could not possibly ever have existed. When I look back to my own commonplace, ordinary, straightforward boyhood, wrapped ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... fingers stumbled and stuttered over the straps so that when at last she led the bay out and swung up to the saddle there was no sound or sight of the cowpunchers. But a young moon was edging above the eastern mountains and by that light, now only an illusory haze, she hoped to ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand

... my passion for your tone and word-poems is the only reason why I do not give up my activity as a conductor. Small as may be the result that I can achieve, it is not, I think, altogether illusory. We have arranged a Wagner week; and the "Flying Dutchman," "Tannhauser," and "Lohengrin" have taken firm ground and cast deep roots here. All the rest is moonshine to me with the sole exception of Berlioz's "Cellini." For this work I retain my great predilection, which you will ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... night, if we watch a short time some star will suddenly seem to drop from its place, and, after a short plunge, to disappear. This appearance is, however, partly illusory. While true stars are immense bodies at an enormous distance, Shooting Stars are very small, perhaps not larger than a paving stone, and are not visible until they come within the limits of our atmosphere, by the friction with which they are ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... The citizen owes it to society to ask of every proposed program of change, "Will it, within a reasonable period, bring equality of opportunity?" To rest satisfied with less—a so-called tendency of certain reforms in the right direction may be wholly illusory—is not only to abandon one's rights and those of one's children, but to rob society of the only possible assurance of ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... meanwhile came among them, and prevented the calamity. He told the young man that the dishes before him, the wine he was drinking, the vessels of gold and silver that appeared around him, and the very guests themselves were unreal and illusory; and to prove his words, he caused them immediately to vanish. The bride alone was refractory. She prayed the philosopher not to torment her, and not to compel her to confess what she was. He was however inexorable. She at length ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... leads me to attempt divinations of her past, until I find myself evolving a story which is not only of vast complexity, but has got painted into it merely the colours of my own hopes and aspirations. It is a story necessarily illusory, necessarily bound to make life seem even worse than before. Yet it is a grievous thing NEVER to distort actuality, NEVER to envelop actuality in ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... persons of the political and religious worlds who reside at Neuilly. The Marquise de Rieu wishes me to be a candidate, in her country, for a senatorial seat which has become vacant by the death of an old man, who was, they say, a general during his illusory life. I shall consult with priests, women and children—oh, eternal wisdom!—of the Bineau Boulevard. The constituency whose suffrages I shall attempt to obtain inhabits an undulated and wooded land wherein willows frame the fields. And it is not a rare ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... were once a great and flourishing body in England; but their dignity being interwoven with the illusory splendour of feudal institutions, declined on the advance of moral cultivation: they became in time vulgar mountebanks and jugglers, and in the reign of Elizabeth were suppressed as rogues and vagabonds. Banished from the highways they betook ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various

... little town we found that the first impression, gained from a distance, was illusory. Many shacks and camps, at first mistaken for the white men's houses, were found to be occupied by natives. They were a drunken, rascally rabble, spending their gains from the sale of fish and oil in a debauch that would last as long ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker

... agitated at one moment by the prospect of an Afghan invasion of India, at another by the fear of an overland march against Delhi of the combined armies of Napoleon and the Tsar. These apprehensions were equally illusory; but while they lasted they supplied the excuse for a constant stream of embassies, some from the British sovereign, others from the viceregal court at Calcutta, and were reproduced in a bewildering succession of Anglo-Persian Treaties. Sir John Malcolm, Sir Harford Jones, Sir Gore Ouseley, and Sir ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... frightful state; and will not survive the destruction of my House and Family. That is the one consolation that remains to me. You will have fine subjects for making Tragedies of. O times! O manners! You will, by the illusory representation, perhaps draw tears; while all contemplate with dry eyes the reality of these miseries: the downfall of a whole House, against which, if the truth were known, there is no solid complaint. I cannot write farther of it: my soul is so troubled ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... his knees, resting his palms on the carpet so recently vacant of illusory snake. "Yo' got me convinced, suh," he admitted. "No mo', ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett

... bargain. He had never formed to himself an idea that a heifer so gentle would toss and fling him over. The blow was stunning. But no one compassionates the misfortunes of the covetous, though few perhaps are in greater need of compassion. And leaving poor Captain Higginbotham to retrieve his illusory fortunes as he best may among "the expectations" which gathered round the form of Mr. Sharpe Currie, who was the crossest old tyrant imaginable, and never allowed at his table any dishes not compounded with rice, which played Old Nick with the Captain's constitutional ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... visible realities, the more sagacious grew its expression, the more lifelike its gestures and movements, and the more intelligibly audible its voice. Its garments, too, glistened so much the brighter with an illusory magnificence. The very pipe, in which burned the spell of all this wonderwork, ceased to appear as a smoke-blackened earthen stump, and became a meerschaum, with ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... suffering; that men pay for their dreams with pain." He let the full import of that drive home. "The verdict was, that if you'd forget your public and look for truth, paint with restraint and less brilliant illusory abandon, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... more keenly aware of the cost, and alive to reducing and removing the evil conditions. Moreover, their interest is stimulated by the fact that they are the first to gain by any temporary economies, and the more so because of the illusory belief sure to persist, that they are the ultimate as well as the ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that "there was a king's son, who, being expelled ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... away; disappear &c 449. Adj. unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. visionary &c (imaginary) 515; immaterial &c 137; spectral &c 980; dreamy; shadowy; ethereal, airy; cloud built, cloud formed; gossamery, illusory, insubstantial, unreal. vacant, vacuous; empty &c 187; eviscerated; blank, hollow; nominal; null; inane. Phr. there's nothing in it; an ocean of dreams ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... was too narrow for the deployment of Germany's strength; the way was also barred by the elaborate fortifications of Verdun, Toul, and Nancy. Strategy pointed conclusively to the Belgian route, and its advantages were clinched by the fact that France was relying on the illusory scrap of paper. Her dispositions assumed an attack in Lorraine, and her northern fortifications round Lille, Maubeuge, and Hirson were feeble compared with those of Belfort, Toul, and Verdun. Given a rapid and easy march through Belgium, the ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard

... a diametrically opposite view. So far from Soul and Sin being co-eternal with God they are not really existent at all. Both are illusory. There is only one existent entity. It is the Divine Spirit, and it has neither personality nor any personal qualities. All apparent separate existences are delusive. Meditation, of the same absorbing type held necessary by the other, is the only way to reach the stage of enlightenment which ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... on the darkness, saw the varied panorama of his misfortunes unroll itself upon it before him. The obscurity did not permit him to see the flowers of the earth, nor those of the heavens, which are the stars. The very absence of light produced the effect of an illusory movement in the masses of foliage, which seemed to stretch away, to recede slowly, and come curling back like the waves of a shadowy sea. A vast flux and reflux, a strife between forces vaguely comprehended, agitated the ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... self-intelligence; they are blind reasoners, for they see from the falsities which they confirm; falsity closes the sight, just as truth opens it. They do not see any truth in the light of truth nor justice from a love for it but from the light of confirmation, which is an illusory light. They appear in the spiritual world like headless faces or like faces resembling human faces on wooden heads, and are called reasoning animals for rationality is potential in them. Those have outer enlightenment from themselves who think and speak solely ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg

... forebodings of the effects of this elective system applied to the upper House. He believed that the dream that he had of seeing the colonies form eventually "a monarchical government, presided over by one nearly and closely allied to the present royal family," would be proved quite illusory by the legislation in question. "Nothing," he added, "like a free and regulated monarchy could exist for a single moment under such a constitution as that which is now proposed for Canada. From the moment that you pass this constitution, the progress must be rapidly towards ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot

... present I leave England to deal with her: England who keeps her busy with childish things, and soothes her vanity with illusory diplomatic successes, such as the exequatur of the Madagascar Consuls (which the settled policy of the residents would have achieved in time) and with useless concessions amidst the fogs of Lake Chad, or on the Niger, or in ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam

... phrases, and if he fell into such a weakness, his biographer would not, like Goldsmith, be inclined to sanction the error. A villain is induced to reform, indeed, by the sight of Amelia's excellence, but Fielding is careful to tell us that the change was illusory, and that the villain ended on a gallows. We are made sensible that if Adams had his fancies they were foibles, and therefore sources of misfortune. We are to admire the childlike character, but not to share its illusions. The world is not made of moonshine. Hypocrisy, cruelty, avarice, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not, he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them, and ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... as to misrepresent the facts in their defence. The difficulty was how to explain the association of the State Attorney and State Secretary, in whose good intentions and integrity there was a general belief. The solution was to be found in the illusory promises of reform under the heading of franchise and reorganization of the finances and other matters. These proposals, it was believed by Mr. Kruger and his party, would secure the support of the two above-named officials, as well as entice ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick

... are folded in a silent ball of sleep, All the flowers are faded from the asphalt isle in the sea, Only we hard-faced creatures go round and round, and keep The shores of this innermost ocean alive and illusory. ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence

... true, only in America, only in Texas, in Nebraska, in Arizona or somewhere—somewhere that, at old Fawns House, in the county of Kent, scarcely counted as a definite place at all; it showed somehow, from afar, as so lost, so indistinct and illusory, in the great alkali desert of cheap Divorce. She had him even in bondage, poor man, had him in contempt, had him in remembrance so imperfect as barely to assert itself, but she had him, none the less, in existence unimpeached: the Miss Lutches had ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... You say the room was not real, and yet you saw it; had you wished, you might have touched it, which is certainly all the evidence you have of the existence of the room in which we are now sitting. Hypnotism is not a cause of hallucination, as is commonly supposed, but of fact. Its effects are not illusory, but real. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that they are as real as anything else, and that all the phenomena of nature are mere illusions of the senses, which they undoubtedly are. But whichever side we take, all appearances are the result of the same general cause—that of mental ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale

... the standard of virtue was to be raised, and how to discern what was illusory or misleading. The Master's answer was, "Give a foremost place to honesty and faithfulness, and tread the path of righteousness, and you will raise the standard of virtue. As to discerning what is illusory, ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... They are not high enough to obstruct the view, nor to mar its ocean-like effect. In the middle distance you may see a farm windmill from sail to platform, but away across the snow-plain sea you catch only the uppermost part of the white sails. The rest is concealed from view by the illusory rise of the foreground toward the horizon—for this twenty-mile stretch of prairie has an illusory curve similar to that seen from all ocean shores. But now the sun has disappeared and the windmills, houses, groves, and fences which looked like black etchings against the flame-colored sky ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... have found no reliable accounts of slaves in this region—some traditions which I have investigated proved unreliable and illusory. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... the Lover in the King, must have made her the happiest that ever was, if relying less on her Merit, or warned by a recent Experience, she had guarded against some of her own Sex, whom she must think envied her Elevation, and watch'd her Ruin; but as an illusory Conceit that a Passion which had subsisted for many Years, would never be extinguished, brought her into the very Misfortune from which Leutinemil's Death had ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon

... mirage of the desert, ever and anon arose to entrance and disappoint the longing eyes of thoughtful men in this century—a free, universal, and legitimate council of the Church. But the hopes founded on these promises were as illusory as any previously conceived. Instead of a formal and unambiguous ratification of the terms by Charles himself, the Cardinal of Chatillon was treated only to complaints about the causeless rising of the Protestants, and expressions ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... alarms. They began to comprehend that the insatiate Revolution was irritated even by the concessions they had made; that the blind fury of factions which had not paused before royalty surrounded by its guards, would not hesitate before the illusory inviolability decreed by a constitution; and that their lives, those of their children, and those of the royal family which remained, had no longer any assurance of safety ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... pointed out, Buddha is not called Deva or Isvara in the Lotus simply because he is above such beings. He declares that he has existed and will exist for incalculable ages and has preached and will preach in innumerable millions of worlds. His birth here and his nirvana are illusory, kindly devices which may help weak disciples but do not mark the real beginning and end of his activity. This implies a view of Buddha's personality which is more precisely defined in the doctrine known as Trikaya or the three bodies[91] and ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... trial of his virtue was yet to come. The main object of our trip down the River of Barks—the terminus ad quem of the expedition, so to speak—was a bear. Now the bear as an object of the chase, at least in Canada, is one of the most illusory of phantoms. The manner of hunting is simple. It consists in walking about through the woods, or paddling along a stream, until you meet a bear; then you try to shoot him. This would seem to be, as the Rev. Mr. Leslie called his book against the deists of the eighteenth century, "A Short ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke

... say that, and yet I suppose that though such a notion of death, say, no longer survives in the consciousness, it does survive in the unconsciousness, and that any vivid accident or illusory suggestion would have force to ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells

... with that which is according to nature, that which is more really filled with more real being will more really and truly enjoy true pleasure; whereas that which participates in less real being will be less truly and surely satisfied, and will participate in an illusory and less real pleasure? ...
— The Republic • Plato

... be gradually reached. There is likely to be a continual increase in the practice of submitting disputes to arbitration, and in the realization that the supposed conflicts of interest between different states are mainly illusory. Even where there is a real conflict of interest, it must in time become obvious that neither of the states concerned would suffer as much by giving way as by fighting. With the progress of inventions, ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell

... Brittany every one of her contingents, more especially that of Fougeres, which was known to be a hot-bed of "Chouannerie." He hoped by this means to weaken its strength in these formidable districts. This devoted soldier made use of the illusory provisions of the new law to declare that he would equip and arm at once all recruits, and he announced that he held at their disposal the one month's advanced pay promised by the government to these exceptional levies. Though ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac

... it is with minds maimed by the cruel machinery of life, natures stunted and starved by adverse and innutritive condition, that the artist in man must be satisfied. With what pathetic little flashes of faculty, what fleeting and illusory glimpses of insight, what waifs and strays of attractiveness, must he work and be happy, and with what a thankfulness that the tenth rate is ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne

... stipulated, would form part of this illusory space-navy. He volunteered the Horus for it. That ship would signal to the Mekinese when they arrived. It would make the king's proposal to surrender, on the Mekinese promise to spare the civilian population of Kandar. If the enemy admiral agreed to these terms and the ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... in Wall Street for several weeks, and this had culminated in a small, and probably a sham, tempest, with more stage thunder and lightning than any real. However, it was on that very account just the sort of cataclysm to overwhelm phantom and illusory ships of fortune like Arthur Carrolls. That week he acknowledged to himself that his career in the City was over, that it was high time for him to shut up his office and to shake the dust of the City from his feet, for fear of worse to come. Arthur Carroll had a certain ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... sympathetic dissent ran through the meeting. "There have been times when I was ready to think that the fault was not in me, but in my office, in the church, in religion. We all have these moments of clouded vision, in which we ourselves loom up in illusory grandeur above the work we have failed to do. But it is in no such error that I stand before you now. Day after day it has been borne in upon me that I had mistaken my work here, and that I ought, if there was any truth in me, to turn from it for reasons which I will give at length should I be ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... dance of all. Even if the historian tries to go deeper, if he deals with economic conditions, with social organisations, with the study of the tendencies of the currents of thought, even then he is in the midst of shadows, the illusory shadows cast by unseen realities. This world is full of forms that are illusory, and the values are all wrong, the proportions are out of focus. The things which a man of the world thinks valuable, a spiritual ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant

... having shown that some alleged differences between the play and the novel are illusory, and that a certain technical difference, though possibly real, is superficial and slight, I come to the fundamental difference between them—a difference which the laity does not suspect, which is seldom ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett

... attention is recalled to the potion which he had been pleased to drink, and with which Thessala had deceived him, then he realised for the first time that he had never had pleasure with his wife, unless it had happened in a dream: thus it was but an illusory joy. And he says that if he does not take vengeance for the shame and disgrace inflicted upon him by the traitor who has seduced his wife, he will never again be happy. "Now quick!" he says, "as far as Pavia, and from here to Germany, let no castle, town, or city remain in which search ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes

... impressive books and other art-works of the world were produced by ordinary men, they would express more fear of women's pursuit than love of their illusory beauty. But ordinary men cannot produce really impressive art-works. Those who can are men of genius: that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. Accordingly, we observe ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... kind of Heaven-scaling Ixion; and to him, as to the old one, the just gods were very stern! The ever-revolving, never-advancing Wheel (of a kind) was his, through life; and from his Cloud-Juno did not he too procreate strange Centaurs, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory Hybrids, and ecclesiastical Chimeras,—which now roam the earth ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... we were told in an earlier lecture, refuted the heresy of polygenism, was moved to undertake his inquiries by a desire to maintain the accuracy of the Mosaic tradition as to the common origin of mankind. It is a little curious to reflect that illusory anthropology, accepted on the authority of Moses and of Rousseau, the belief in Adam, and the belief in the free and happy savage, have perhaps done more than scientific research into primitive culture to maintain our faith ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... The German people were ready to surrender their personal liberty for the advantages which the contract gave them. They preferred the security of despotism to the risks of liberty. But the German people have discovered that the security was illusory, that the advantages were negative, and that the risks of despotism are infinitely greater than ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... demonstration of Homer's defeat. Few have ever heard of these productions; how many have read them? Curiously, about the same time an epic was being composed in England which might have given to the foolish contentions of Saint Sorlin some illusory plausibility. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... attentive or quick-sighted very little, or not at all, the more knowing or orthodox: since subtlety, in those who make profession to teach or defend truth, hath passed so much for a virtue: a virtue, indeed, which, consisting for the most part in nothing but the fallacious and illusory use of obscure or deceitful terms, is only fit to make men more conceited in their ignorance, and more obstinate ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke

... individual existences. Being associated with this principle of illusion, Brahman is enabled to project the appearance of the world, in the same way as a magician is enabled by his incomprehensible magical power to produce illusory appearances of animate and inanimate beings. Maya thus constitutes the upadana, the material cause of the world; or—if we wish to call attention to the circumstance that Maya belongs to Brahman as a /s/akti—we may say that the material cause ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut



Words linked to "Illusory" :   unreal, illusion



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