"Unreason" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... compassionate nature, and had a loving, patient and noble heart; prudent she was; the skilfulest and thriftiest of financiers; could well keep silence, too, and with a gentle stoicism endure much small unreason. Saupe says withal, 'Nobody liked a laugh better, or could laugh more heartily than she, even in her extreme old age.'—Christophine herself makes no complaint, on looking back upon her poor Reinwald, thirty years after all was over. Her final ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Therefore the unreason, the want of logic, and the absence of any just view of God, appear, more or less, throughout these statements. For where there is no ability, there can be no guilt. Just as soon as man ceases to have the power to do right, he ceases to have the power to do ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... understanding. Every patriot in this world believes his country better than any other country. Now, they cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it follows that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active manifestation—it is fond of shooting—patriotism would be well enough if it were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same feeling that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels us likewise ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... Gladstone for several years threw himself with the whole weight of his untiring tenacity and force. He plunged into masses of accounts, mastered the coil of interests and parties, studied legal intricacies, did daily battle with human unreason, and year after year ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... her logic of the heart, And wisdom of unreason, Supplying, while he doubts and weighs, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the private infamy of many who enforced the doctrines of the Church, had produced in earnest men a vigorous antagonism. Tyranny and unreason of low-minded advocates had brought religion itself into question; and profligacy of courtiers, each worshipping the golden calf seen in his mirror, had spread another form of scepticism. The intellectual scepticism, based upon an honest search for truth, could end only in making ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... and ideal activities which disease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order, cannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and life with continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, and strife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none, perhaps, deserves to be. There is inexperience in not considering that wherever ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... destruction of all authority. Our opponents' objection that we, too, once made use of these rights, will not hold water; for we made use of an unreasonable right, which was part and parcel of an unreasonable system, in order to overthrow the unreason of ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... dismissed, I think, as an indication of childish unreason, unworthy of any one who faces realities. It is still true that "the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... heart. Everything at last seemed to be working out to advantage. He could not but remember how so very few weeks ago he had been urgent that Richard should spend his summer at Little Beeding and lend a hand in the noble work of defending Stella Ballantyne against ignorance and unreason. But the twinge only lasted a moment. He had made a mistake, as all men occasionally do—yes, even sagacious and thoughtful people like himself. And the mistake was already being repaired. He looked across the meadow ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... scarcely avails himself of them even for his foundations or his skeleton framework. His critical faculty, stronger than his gift of adaptation, levels obstructions and marks the earth with ruin. He is more anxious to expose the strange unreason of former writers, the inadequacy of their knowledge, their want of aptitude in induction, than their services in storing material for the use of successors. The result is not to be the sifted and verified wisdom of two centuries, but a future system, to be produced when the rest have failed by ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... compare this with the prolonged splendour of Rome, France, and England. In philosophy they displayed decent talent, but even here their true merit is to have brought the wisdom of Asia into Europe, for they invented nothing. Greece was the home of syllogism and of unreason. 'Read Plato: at every page you will draw a striking distinction. As often as he is Greek, he wearies you. He is only great, sublime, penetrating, when he is a theologian; in other words, when he is announcing positive and everlasting dogmas, free from all quibble, and which are so clearly ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... dignity, his knowledge of men, and love of order and uprightness, he gave it that high place which it yet holds, and which it must hold; for when the decisions of the Supreme Court are questioned by a State or people, the fabric of our government is but a spider's web through which anarchy and unreason will stalk. ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... stealthy way of temporising with the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling; madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense. In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you consider well his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of the intellect. I know one who read the essays of Elia with intense delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. She had seen so well through the fun to its ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... conception of the cause, detailing them with the most rigid veracity. This author was unquestionably a man of the most honourable probity, and not destitute of intellectual ability; but he must serve as an useful example of that wrong-headed nature in some men, which has produced so many "Abbots of Unreason" in society, whom it is in vain to convince by a reciprocation of arguments; who assuming false principles, act rightly according to themselves; a sort of rational lunacy, which, when it discovers itself in politics and religion, and in the more common affairs ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... endeavour is to avoid being staggered and deeply affronted, or even surprised, by human vagaries. There are too many plain people who are always rediscovering human nature—its turpitudes, fatuities, unreason. They live amid human nature as in a chamber of horrors. And yet, after all these years, we surely ought to have grown used to human nature! It may be extremely vile—that is not the point. The point ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... Pepyzitae [Montanists] and also those who by this one opinion are worse than all heretics, in that they dissent from all as to the venerable day of the Easter festival, we subject to the same punishment, viz.: confiscation of goods and exile, if they persist in the same unreason. But this we especially demand of Christians, both those who are really such and those who are called such, that they presume not, by an abuse of religion, to lay hands upon the Jews and pagans who live peaceably and who attempt ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... as to the seat and centre of government. Those who hold it, vigorously maintain the right of the Many to govern, control, and command the Few. The need of some governing authority in a State can be denied by none but an Anarchist, a gentleman who lives two doors beyond Rousseau on the side of unreason. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... a continual progress towards greater elegance and convenience, which might be expected to occur did people copy the ways of the really best, or follow their own ideas of propriety, we have a reign of mere whim, of unreason, of change for the sake of change, of wanton oscillations from either extreme to the other—a reign of usages without meaning, times without fitness, dress without taste. And thus life a la mode, instead of being life ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... proper, cannot do so any longer without losing caste, without falling ipso facto out of court with men of education. It is enough for a man of letters if he has helped ever so little in the final staking out of the boundaries between reason and unreason!' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... faith,' there was a snarl and a rush. The police-sergeant checked it, but advised the Society to keep on going. The Society withdrew into the brake fighting, as it were, a rear-guard action of oratory up each step. The collapsed harmonium was hauled in last, and with the perfect unreason of crowds, they cheered it loudly, till the chauffeur slipped in his clutch and sped away. Then the crowd broke up, congratulating all concerned except the sexton, who was held to have disgraced his office ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... and the determination to arrest her purpose, the desire to possess her entirely and at once, excluded every other wish or plan, and to feel was to act with Anthony Clarke, for he was born to emotional experience as the sparks fly upward. He had ever been a creature of unreason, morbidly conscious of self—and naturally, for in him struggled the blood of three races. His father was Scotch, and his mother—Spanish on the spindle side and Irish by way of a most mercurial father—remained an unsolved problem all her days, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... insolence as without fear or flutter, of what he is and what others are. A courage to quell the proudest, an honest pity to encourage the humblest. Withal there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot: much vain unreason he hears; lays up without response. He is not there to expect reason and nobleness of others; he is there to give them of his own reason and nobleness. Is he not their servant, as we said, who can ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Unreason in Scotland, was a similar character to the Lord of Misrule in England. "This pageant potentate," as Stowe calls him, "was annually elected, and his rule extended through the greater part of the holydays conected with the festival days of Christmas." But these "fine and subtle ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... silence. In the agonizing silence she felt acutely her girlishness, her helplessness, her unreason, confronted by his strong and shrewd masculinity. At the bottom of her soul she knew how wrong she was. But she was ready to do anything to save Sarah Gailey from the distress of one particular humiliation. With the whole of her ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Love! That divine unreason of the gods, which lures man as a universal solvent of his sorrow, the great solution to the great enigma! Where was it? Bessie asked when Rob passed her door in the morning on his way to his solitary breakfast without a word of greeting or a kiss, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... deprive him, too, of his place among these great masters of free and exuberant farce. Diderot, at any rate, must rank in the second class among those who have attempted to tread a measure among the whimsical zigzags of unreason. The sincere sentimentalist makes a ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... fungus, growing on a rotten stump of national life. Greeks had been artists only when they had been conquerors, soldiers, traders, rulers. The Romans now held the world. In them, the eagle's brood, lay the hope of a new birth of the spirit. With a certain noble unreason, he dismissed the idea that by living in Athens he might fight the battle for Rome. If he was to fight at all, it was to be where the enemy was fiercest and the hope of victory least. Upon any easier choice his ancestors within him laid their ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... dead water of a pool whose shores are arid indeed. But I know that there are often in men's affairs unexpectedly—even irrationally—illuminating moments when an otherwise insignificant sound, perhaps only some perfectly commonplace gesture, suffices to reveal to us all the unreason, all the fatuous unreason, of our complacency. "Go ahead" are not particularly striking words even when pronounced with a foreign accent; yet they petrified me in the very act of smiling at myself in the glass. And then, refusing ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... not last? Is there any reason, in earth or Heaven, why we two should part? If there is—I will make that reason itself folly, and madness, and unreason. Dear, do not speak of this not lasting. Die, you say? Worse, far worse; as much as eternal death is worse than bodily dying. Last? Does any one know what for ever means, if we do not? Die, we must, in these dying bodies of ours, but part—no. Love has burned the cruel sense out of that ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... turned away from the wise, and written His decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... With sweet unreason she set aside authority when it clashed with her opinion. To Caius she had never been so attractive as now, when, for the first time to him, she was proving herself of kin to ordinary folk; and yet, so curiously false are our notions of sainthood that she ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... old friend Ben Gaynor had built a summer home there two years ago and had christened the pond among the trees. Lake Gloria! Mark King liked the appellation little enough, telling himself with thorough-going unreason that there was a silly name to fit to perfection a silly girl, but altogether out of place to tie on to an unspoiled Sierra lake. Ben would have done a better job in naming it Lake Vanity. Or Self-Regard. King could think of a score of designations ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... scope for further new speculations, as it had already discarded all other matters of interest? If everything was due to a reasonless fortuitous concourse of circumstances, reason could not proceed further in the direction to create any philosophy of the unreason. The magical ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... liked hunting better than anything else in the world—for instance. He was certain he knew his own mind, and therefore perfectly certain his passion for Isabella Waring would last for ever! Ready to swear eternal devotion with that delightful inconsequence of youth in its unreason, thinking to control an emotion as Canute's flatterers would have ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... The child was brimming over with unreason. Yet her eyes were like stars, and in an uncomprehended way the woman felt the charm of her beauty. No, she would never part ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... "My dear, I scent unreason. This is a high matter. If the French King compounds with Rome, it means war for Protestant England. Even ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... fountains for the time. But her sorrow for the world could not be sealed. And then came the thought that the insensible boy at her feet, escaping for a little while through sleep's primeval sanctity, was part of the robbed world also. Who had lost more than he by his unreason? If her heart did not melt then, it ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... and religion this curious and very John Bullish unreason is still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... incomprehensible—even to herself. Like most young women and men, she had been convinced from an early age that she was mysteriously unlike all other created beings, and—again like most young men and women—she could find, in the secrecy of her own heart, plenty of proof of a unique strangeness. But now her unreason became formidable. There she sat with her striking forehead and her quite unimportant nose, in the large austere drawing-room of the Spatts, which was so pervaded by artistic chintz that the slightest movement in it produced a crackle—and wondered ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... rules, than in his home, where there is a ruler. A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance, carries this mummery to the point of a methodical madness. The whole system is stiff with rigid unreason; like the Royal Court in Lewis Carroll. You would think the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly silent. You would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put it on to go away; therefore he takes off his hat to walk out and puts it on ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... know—quite mad. Her words had made me so. And when, to ask me that insistent question, she brought her face still nearer, I flung down the reins of my unreason and let it ride amain upon its desperate, reckless course. In short, I too leaned forward, I leaned forward, and I kissed her full upon those ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... logic of Rousseau finds in Karl Moor a practical interpreter. What the Frenchman had preached concerning the infamies of civilization, the badness of society and politics, the reign of injustice and unreason, the petty squabbles of the learned, the necessity of a return to nature,—all this seethes in the blood of Moor, but he does not content himself with indignant rhetoric or sentimental repining. He takes ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the superb unreason of women. Beata began to cry as I handed her over to Miss Leslie, who looked daggers at me, and I am quite sure called me, in her own mind, "A ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... when all the kindness and skill of all our friends can be no longer of any avail. Is it not our own fault, and shall we not so educate our girls that they shall not fall into it, since they comprehend its unreason? ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... was there, and after a while other tiny clouds came to bear it company, and to make a formidable shadow that all her philosophy could not drive away. Philosophy is not the bride's natural right; the honeymoon is a time of unreason; a crumpled rose-leaf in those first uncertain weeks may loom larger than all the far more serious storms of ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... a great deal worse," Elinor said, in her unreason; "the one might be borne, but the other I will not endure. Sympathy, yes! They will all be sorry for me—they will say they knew how it would be. Oh, I know I have not profited as I ought by what has happened to me. I am unsubdued. I am as impatient and as proud as ever. It is quite ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant |
