"Preposterously" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time more than enough for becoming learned? This is evident by only computing the time of the day, besides the advantages of the night, of which a good part is more than sufficient for sleep. But we now preposterously compute not the years we have studied, but the years we have lived. Tho geometricians and grammarians, and the professors of other arts, spent all their lives, however long, in treating and discussing their respective arts, does it thence follow that we must ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... engagements and hurry and worry; and then in the midst of this active life there stands the chapel with its summons to us to pause and give the reflective life its chance. That is one of the chief offices of religion in this preposterously busy age. Religion gives one at least a chance to stop and let God speak to him. It sends the multitudes away and takes one up into the solitude of the soul's communication with God. One of our Cambridge naturalists told me once of an experiment he had made ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... always to the lowest game; eagerly snuffing up the most tainted and rankest scents; feeding their vanity with a notion of the strength of their digestion of poisons, and most ostentatiously avowing whatever would most effectually startle the prejudices of others.(2) Preposterously seeking for the stimulus of novelty in abstract truth, and the eclat of theatrical exhibition in pure reason, it is no wonder that these persons at last became disgusted with their own pursuits, and that, in consequence ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... appreciate the thoughts of others (specially of the best authors), and to express their own in suitable and perspicuous words.... But now, in many places, we see the reverse of all this. Before they can speak (passing by preposterously, the matters essential to ultimate success), the boys are made to proceed, or rather leap, to higher subjects; 'real' subjects, as we have learned to call them. Pedagogues of this stamp seem to ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... a Word, it was known whom he was to personate. But, in the New Comedy, when Athens was conquered by the Macedonians, and the Poets were fearful lest their Masks should be construed to resemble any of their New Governors, they formed them so preposterously as only to move Laughter; horomen goun (says He) tas ophrys en tois prosopois tes Menandrou komodias hopoias echei, kai hopos exestrammenon to SOMA. kai oude kata anthropon physin. "We see therefore what strange Eyebrows there are to the Masks used in Menander's Comedies; and how the Body ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... and conceit. His verses drip with fine love-honey; but it has been so clarified in meta-physics that much of its flavour and sweetness has escaped. Very often, too, the conceit embodied is preposterously poor. You have as it were a casket of finest gold elaborately wrought and embellished, and the gem within is a mere spangle of paste, a trumpery spikelet of crystal. No doubt there is a man's heart beating underneath; but so thick is the envelope of buckram ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... mothers exchanged glances of tender approbation, for, clinging to Corporal Baverstock's hand, and taking preposterously long steps in the endeavour to keep pace with his strides, was Tilly Ann, in her best starched white frock, and with her yellow hair curled in a greater profusion of corkscrew ringlets than her ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... seemed in a preposterously good humour, and bidding Gonzaga lead the way he followed, with Guidobaldo at his side. They crossed the courtyard, where his men were ranged, armed to the teeth, and at the door of the archway leading to the inner court they paused for ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... up a type which I have never seen more faithfully presented on the stage. And there is M. Brasseur. He is a kind of French Arthur Roberts, but without any of that extravagant energy which carries the English comedian triumphantly through all his absurdities. M. Brasseur is preposterously natural, full of aplomb and impertinence. He never flags, never hesitates; it is impossible to take him seriously, as we say of delightful, mischievous people in real life. I have been amused to see a discussion in the papers as to whether "La Veine" ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... awakened in him a preposterously impossible suspicion which, now that he had a chance to glance about the room, was confirmed instantly—absolutely. It was astounding—utterly unbelievable—and yet on all the walls, in every corner, there ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... pretty and almost white, with a certain modesty and sweetness of mien. Before them went a young American, with a jaunty Scotch cap and a visage of supernatural gravity, as the master of ceremonies which he had probably planned; arm in arm with him walked a portly chieftain in black broadcloth, preposterously adorned on the breast with broad flat disks of silver in two rows. Behind the bridal couple came the whole village in pairs, men and women, and children of all ages, even to brown babies in arms, gay in dress and indescribably serious ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... mind by newspaper accounts of a new ship. Is it not that she is expected to make so many knots? Compared with that, what does the average man know of the fighting she can do, when she has reached the end of that preposterously misleading performance called her trial trip? The error is of the nature of a half-truth, the most dangerous of errors; for it is true that, as compared with land forces, the great characteristic of navies is mobility; but it is not true that, between different classes of naval ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... vision—as to which she had it a couple of years ago; I was thoroughly with her in her deprecation of the idea that Peggy should be sent, to crown her culture, to that horrid co-educative college from which the poor child returned the other day so preposterously engaged to be married; and, if she had only been a little more actively with me we might perhaps between us have done something about it. But she has a way of deprecating with her long, knobby, mittened hand over her mouth, and of looking at the same time, in a mysterious ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... should do anything as 'they' do! This place, then, call it what you will, is inhabited by a lean, tall, sullenly silent race who live in preposterously ugly little wooden houses of the most naked cleanliness ... God of my Fathers! the hideousness of the huddle of those huts where I finally found the cousin! He was a seller of letter-paper and cheap chromos and he knew nothing of the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... self-refuted: 'A hired partisan' had come to one of Coleridge's political lectures with the express purpose of bringing the lecturer into trouble; and most preposterously he laid himself open to his own snare by refusing to pay for admission. Spies must be poor artists who proceed thus. Upon which Coleridge remarked—'That, before the gentleman kicked up a dust, surely he would down with the dust.' So far the story will not do. But what follows is possible ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... German officer, a tall young man excessively slender and blonde, compressed into his uniform like a girl in her stays, and wearing, well over one ear, a flat black wax-cloth cap like the "Boots" of an English hotel. His preposterously long moustache, which was drawn out stiff and straight, and tapered away indefinitely to each side till it finished off in a single thread so thin that it was impossible to say where it ended, seemed to weigh upon ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... summary of his personal attributes, which, in his own mind, he has taken remarkable pains to render as despicable as possible, and which, in hers, her imagination contrives not only to rehabilitate, but to imbue with a preposterously ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... charmer. Why hadn't I remembered then? I, too, had my recollections of Barbara Wallace. About seven years before, I had first seen her, a slim, dark little thing of twelve or fourteen, very badly dressed in slinky, too-long skirts that whipped around preposterously thin ankles, blue-black hair dragged away from a forehead almost too fine, made into a bundle of some fashion that belonged neither to childhood nor womanhood, her little, pointed face redeemed by a pair of big black eyes with a ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... exact truth, there is always a danger that he will not be believed. Yet, in spite of the risk, it must be said plainly that at this point Denry actually thought of marriage. An absurd and childish thought, preposterously rash; but it came into his mind, and—what is more—it stuck there! He pictured marriage as a perpetual afternoon tea alone with an elegant woman, amid an environment of ribboned muslin. And the picture appealed ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... further than into the memory, and there mix themselves with fallacies and falses; thus they are beneath the rational things of the understanding. From these any one may seem to converse rationally, but he will converse preposterously; for in such case he thinks as a crab walks, the sight following the tail: it is otherwise if he thinks from the understanding; for then the rational sight selects from the memory whatever is suitable, whereby ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... her Sunday clothes, and her Bible and Prayer-book, and class-book and pencil, on the oak chest at the foot of the bed. She brushed and combed the silver-haired terrier, who looked abjectly depressed whilst this was doing, and preposterously proud when it was done. She washed her own hair, and studied her Sunday-school lesson for the morrow whilst it was drying. She spread a colored quilt at the foot of her white one for the terrier to sleep on—a slur which he ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... Lavender now began to calculate on the remaining days of their stay in Borva! They seemed so few. He got up at preposterously early hours to make each day as long as possible, but it slipped away with a fatal speed; and already he began to think of Stornoway and the Clansman and his bidding good-bye to Sheila. He had said no more to her of any pledge as regarded ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... suffering, participated in the scheme to worry him. He could even forget her beauty—forget all, save the unholy fetters binding him. She seemed to imprison him in bare walls. He meditated on her character. She had no strength. She was timid, comfort-loving, fond of luxury, credulous, preposterously conventional; that is, desirous more than the ordinary run of women of being hedged about and guarded by ceremonies—"mere ceremonies," said Edward, forgetting the notion he entertained of women not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... under their roof. She had precisely the same shape of skull as Pope Alexander the Sixth; her organs of benevolence, veneration, conscientiousness, adhesiveness, were singularly small, those of self-esteem, firmness, destructiveness, combativeness, preposterously large; her head sloped up in the penthouse shape, was contracted about the forehead, and prominent behind; she had rather good, though large and marked features; her temperament was fibrous and bilious, her complexion pale and dark, hair and eyes black, form angular and rigid but ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... darkest corner of it. I only vaguely see the outline of a kneeling figure, evidently neither bulky nor obese, of a flat back and vigorous shoulders. His face is generally hidden in his hands, but once or twice he lifts it to scan the proportions of my late grandfather's preposterously fat cob, whose portrait hangs on the wall ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... evidence, furnished by themselves, the trades Unions, some member of which has committed this crime, will do well to drop the worn-out farce of offering a trumpery reward and to take a direct and manly course. They ought to accept Mr.——'s preposterously liberal offer, and admit him to the two Unions, and thereby disown the criminal act in the form most consolatory to the sufferer: or else they should face the situation, and say, "This act was done under our banner, though not by our order, and we stand by it." The Liberal will ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... back from the eyes, and the hair began right at the eyes and ran up over the head. The head itself was preposterously small and was supported on an equally preposterous, ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... not, in the stereoscope, flow into one: the result would be, that the buttresses would be wider at back than in front, as would also the pedestal, while the stick held by the boy would appear like two sticks united in front. This would be untrue to nature, false to art, preposterously absurd, and I pronounce it to be ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... Dyers, Calenderers, and Scourers. As we before observed, she was the fortunate sole heiress to her father's accumulation, which might amount to nearly thirty thousand pounds; but had been little gifted by nature. In fact, she was what you may style most preposterously ugly; her figure was large and masculine; her hair red; and her face very deeply indented with the small-pox. As a man, she would have been considered the essence of vulgarity; as a woman, she was the quintessence: so much so, that ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... the "Anacreon Recantatus," by Carolus de Aquino, a Jesuit, published 1701, which consisted of a series of palinodes to the several songs of our poet. Such, too, was the Christian Anacreon of Patrignanus, another Jesuit, who preposterously transferred to a most sacred subject all that the Graecian poet had dedicated ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... at her service, and as they did not mean to sleep in town, they started at a preposterously early hour, with a certain mirth and gaiety at thus eloping together, as the mother's spirits rose at the bare idea of seeing the first-born child for whom she had famished so long. Jock was such a perfect squire of dames, and so chivalrously charmed to be her escort, that her journey was delightful, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Christopher, considering hard and speaking with slow deliberation, "I think, only it is so preposterously silly, that I came to see you, or perhaps it was Caesar or Nevil ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... those myriads of other eyes and chignons and walking-dresses absorbed the impression in an instant, and left a dim, strange sense of loss, as if all women had suddenly become Woman. For the time, one would have been preposterously conceited to have felt his littleness in that crowd; you never thought of yourself in an individual capacity at all. It was as if you were a private in an army, or a very ordinary billow of the ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... and Sir Willoughby Patten were both knights. Tony Weller is a magnificent grotesque. He is a gargoyle, and his mouth, like the mouths of so many gargoyles, is always open. He is garrulous, exuberant, flowery, preposterously sociable. He holds that great creed of the convivial, the creed which is at the back of so much that is greatest in Dickens, the creed that eternity begins at ten o'clock at night, and that nights last forever. But Yuba Bill is a figure of a widely different ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... cleanliness and propriety. True, it was a very simple and, what may be styled, a home-made apartment. The walls, floor, and ceiling were of unpainted wood, but the wood was perfectly fresh, and smelt pleasantly of resin. The window was preposterously small, with only four squares of glass in it, and it was curtained with mere calico, but the calico was rose-coloured, which imparted a delightfully warm glow to the room, and the view from the window of pine-woods and cliffs, and snow-fields, backed by the distant sea, was magnificent. Two ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... shrine without a treasure. An empty symbol that would stand for nothing. Her personality had stamped itself on the house, even yet her influence lingered in the huge formal dining room where he sat. It had been her whim when they were alone to banish the large table that seemed so preposterously big for two people and substitute a small round one which was more intimate, and across which it was possible to talk with greater ease. Forbes was a man of fixed ideas and devoted to his mistress. Though ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... face what I am certain they say behind my back, I should hang myself. Illusion, delusion—delusion, illusion," he hummed it as if it were the refrain of a ballad; "it is nothing but that from the day we are born till the day we die, and the older we become the more preposterously are we deluded, until at last—but the Lord—to think of preaching," and he laughed—"you must have made me do it;" and he rose and played with his favourite toys, the wax apples, pitching them up to the ceiling alternately ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford |
