"Illogical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... illogical to conclude that travel is useless because we travel ill. But granting the usefulness of travel, does it follow that it is good for all of us? Far from it; there are very few people who are really fit ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... that I should use a pen that should be ever dedicated to an exposition of unalterable moral principle to transcribe Mrs. Tretherick's own theory of this interval and episode, with its feeble palliations, its illogical deductions, its fond excuses, and weak apologies. It would seem, however, that her experience had been hard. Her slender stock of money was soon exhausted. At Sacramento she found that the composition of verse, although appealing to the highest emotions of the human heart, and ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... known, determined criminals run at large, only punishing them occasionally, by a temporary deprivation of their liberty in short and determinate sentences. We can see to-day that it is a thoroughly illogical proceeding. The man determined upon a life of crime is of no use to himself at large, and he is both a danger and expense in his community. He commonly gives evidence in his character and his acts of this determination—evidence ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... lunch with him was a bore; a tete-a-tete with him assumed the proportions of a visitation; his slowness and stupidity had become proverbial in that club; and yet almost the only foundation for it had been Dysart's attitude toward him; and men's estimate of him was the more illogical because few men really cared for Dysart's opinions. But Dysart had introduced him, elected him, and somehow had contrived to make the public accept his half-sneering measure of Grandcourt as Grandcourt's true stature. And the man, being shy, reticent, slow ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... masters the illogical feeling of the lamented critic, difficulties arise. We have grown very velvet-tongued in these days. There was no nonsense about our predecessors; if the leading lady was plain, they said so, whilst if one of us were to suggest that the heroine, whose beauty is talked of tiresomely ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... complete till years afterwards. I have just digressed a little about Parsifal, because it, and not the Mastersingers, is the true contrary and complement to Tannhaeuser. Parsifal is pitilessly logical, Tannhaeuser wildly illogical; Parsifal preaches the gospel of renunciation, of the will to dwarf and stunt one's physical, mental and moral growth: Tannhaeuser preaches nothing at all, but is an affirmation of the necessity and moral loveliness of healthy relations between the two sexes, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... shock Mrs. Charnock Poynsett," said Lady Tyrrell. "You illogical woman! The poor are to demand better houses, and the squires ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with no definite purpose, could do nothing. Meanwhile the bourgeoisie, which had not moved a finger to carry the alliance of February 10th into effect, soon perceived that the working-men did not propose to become its tools, and that the illogical manner in which it had abandoned its law-abiding standpoint threatened danger. It therefore resumed its law-abiding attitude, and placed itself upon the side of Government as ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... she disapproved of her manner of life as weak and illogical. You could not love Bessie any more than you could love an ironclad. She bore the same resemblance to a woman that an iron building does to a house. She was not in reality harder than tin or granite or asphalt, or her father; but it would not be an over-statement ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... was trying to shake off a haunting feeling that was enveloping him like a mist—a feeling that everything the young Englishman was saying he had heard before. It left him dazed, and made Durwent's voice sound far away. He tried to dismiss it as an illogical prank of the mind, but the thing was relentless. He could not rid himself of the thought that sometime in the past—months, years, perhaps centuries ago—this pitiful ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... illogical position is maintained ostensibly from first to last, much in the same spirit as in the two foregoing passages, written at intervals of thirteen years. But they are to be read by the light of the earlier one—placed as a lantern to the wary upon the threshold of his ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... attempt the philosophy of the complex vision is bound to recognize, and include in its rational form, much that remains mysterious, arbitrary, indetermined, organic, obstinately illogical. For the illogical is not necessarily the unintelligible, so long as the reason which we use is that same imaginative and clairvoyant reason, which, in its higher measure, sustains the vision of the ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... loving mother to throw her child into the Ganges. Nature never prompted men to exterminate each other for a difference of opinion concerning the baptism of infants. These crimes have been produced by religions filled with all that is illogical, cruel and hideous. These religions were produced for the most part by ignorance, tyranny, and hypocrisy. Under the impression that the infinite ruler and creator of the universe had commanded the destruction of heretics and infidels, the church ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... be quarrelled with as illogical, but the feeling that led to it was beautiful beyond question; and, indeed, all her ideas on ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... class of arguments—intellectual grievances. The suffragist tells us that it is unchivalrous to oppose woman's suffrage; that it is insulting to tell woman that she is unfit to exercise the fran- chise; that it is "illogical" to make in her case an exception to a general rule; that it is mere "prejudice" to withhold the vote from her; that it is indignity that the virtuous and highly intelligent woman has no vote, while the drunkard has; and that the woman of property has no vote, while her male underlings ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... the buildings, however, merely typified the incongruous and illogical disorganization of the people themselves. For instance, here was a big, strong, well-fed fashionably groomed young man, walking along the street, carrying no heavier burden than a light walking stick, while just beside him was a half-starved old woman, almost bent double under the weight ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... self-protective power of the legal adult. This passage "from status to contract" was too long delayed (the position of women after the affirmation of liberty and equality for men in modern forms of government being so illogical as to cause much disturbance in the body politic), but it has, after all, been rapid in its final steps. To-day the ideal of equal rights between the sexes and in relationship of men and women to society-at-large is fully accepted by a majority of ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... all know at what a supernaturally early age the purple-born are appointed to high titular positions in the State Administration or in the army. In Russia, where the "right divine of kings to govern wrong" is pushed to its most logical or illogical consequences, this royal custom flourishes to excess. At the mature age of eight, Alexander was appointed Chancellor of the University of Finland. His brother Constantine was nominated in early youth High Admiral of the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... regarded, not merely as the giver of the water which made the desert fertile, but as himself the personification and the giver of the vital powers of water. The fertility of the land and the welfare of the people thus came to be regarded as dependent upon the king's vitality. Hence it was not illogical to kill him when his virility showed signs of failing and so imperilled the country's prosperity. But when the view developed that the dead king acquired a new grant of vitality in the other world he became the god Osiris, who was able to confer even greater ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... a reversal of the flow of time is no more illogical than the conception of a change of the rate of the flow of time. It is inconceivable, because it is beyond ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... reasoning was not illogical, but those who were working in secret for the furtherance of their own ambition, oared little to be convinced, and their myrmidons obeyed them blindly, and gloated over the wild, bombastic language of the demagogic press, which, though they did not understand ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... is governed by logic. Truth as well as Providence is always on the side of the strongest battalions. An illogical opinion only requires rope enough to ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... strove, unhelped by Christian faith, to enter at the strait gate into the paths of virtue, that there were four characters of mind which were protective or preservative of all that was best in man, namely, Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance,[142] these were afterwards, with most illogical inaccuracy, called cardinal virtues, Prudence being evidently no virtue, but an intellectual gift: but this inaccuracy arose partly from the ambiguous sense of the Latin word "virtutes," which sometimes, in mediaeval language, signifies ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... he entirely failed. For one thing, he has never known the order of the alphabet either in English, German, or French. Our "Pictorial Completion Test,'' which gauges simple apperceptive abilities, he failed to do correctly, making three illogical errors. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... greater part of those two hours upstairs in her bedroom, pondering on her mother's preposterous notion of collecting the rents herself. Alone, she would invent conversations with her mother, silencing the foolish woman with unanswerable sarcastic phrases that utterly destroyed her illogical arguments. She would repeat these phrases, repeat even entire conversations, with pleasure; and, dwelling also with pleasure upon her grievances against her mother, would gradually arrive at a state of dull-glowing ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... The joyous look on his face was gone now—his hand had fallen to his side. "It gets to be more of a muddle every day—" and then he added, with the illogical reasoning of youth—"all the lawyers that ever lived couldn't paint a picture like ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... our comments the pamphlets of Captain Maconochie, not only because they illustrate the hasty and illogical reasonings, the utter forgetfulness of elementary principles, into which such reformers are apt to lapse; but also for the still better reason, that they contain a suggestion of real value; a contribution towards an efficient prison-discipline, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... not only been illogical, he had also been slightly disingenuous. He did not believe that his companion was in love; he had argued the false to learn the true. The true was that Roderick was again, in some degree, under a ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... everybody. Looking at the squire, I thought to myself, 'My father has faults, but he has been cruelly used,' and immediately I forgave the old man; his antipathy to my father seemed a craze, and to account for it I lay in wait for his numerous illogical acts and words, and smiled visibly in contemplation of his rough unreasonable nature, and of my magnanimity. He caught the smile, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of Wilhelm Meister; he is not above considering the art of cooking potatoes or the question of whether human beings once had tails, and in his theological moods he will expound St. John's Epistles, or the principles of Christianity. The bookman, in fact, is a quite illogical and irresponsible being, who dare not claim that he searches for accurate information in his books as for fine gold, and he has been known to say that that department of books of various kinds which come under the head of "what's what," and "why's why," and "where's where," are not literature. ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... these few sentences contain and sum up the results of a lifetime of earnest thought, or represent all the opinions and beliefs of the earliest philosophers! And should we find therein no recognition of a personal God, would it not be most unfair and illogical to assert that they were utterly ignorant of a God, or wickedly denied his being? If they say "there is no God," then they are foolish Atheists; if they are silent on that subject, we have a right to assume they were Theists, for it is most natural to believe in God. And yet it has ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... that miserable reptile, instead of this honest man? Beside, think of the illogical position. If this man is a spy, you have to admit that there is a war between your people and his, and that your ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... All that was illogical in our social code Only a man, wavering and changeable Their Christian charity did not extend so far as that There are mountains that we ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... Four were horribly shaken by the initial attempt at communication with the natives. Nothing in Ciriimian experience had prepared them for creatures intelligent but illogical, individually perceptive ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... Darien," he remarked, in a needlessly loud and cheerful voice; and though the claim, thus expressed, was illogical, it was not inappropriate. He did feel as if he were a primitive adventurer just come to the New World, instead of a modern traveler just come ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... there are no happy people to be seen.... Life is a nasty business for everyone. When I am serious I begin to think that people who have an aversion for death are illogical. So far as I understand the order of things, life consists of nothing but horrors, squabbles, and ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent? ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... Jacobins, who held that an absolute equality should be maintained by the despotism of the government over the people, interpreted more justly the democratic principles which were common to both parties; and, fortunately for their country, they triumphed over their illogical and irresolute adversaries. "When the revolutionary movement was once established," says De Maistre, "nothing but Jacobinism ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... women are devoted, full of finesse, inclined to melancholy." Elsewhere, he informs us that "most women who ride horseback well are not tender." "Hands like those of a Greek statue announce a mind of illogical domination; eyebrows that meet indicate a jealous tendency. In all great men the neck is short, and it is rare that a tall man possesses ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... Halleck is to take the command of the army, together with Hooker. I almost believe it, because it is nameless, and here all that is illogical is, eventually, probable. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... finally that she may lead them to the salvation which she offers to all beings in the Universe."[580] The two edicts are not consistent but such inconsistency is no reproach to a statesman nor wholly illogical. The Emperor reprimands extravagance in doctrine and ceremonial and commends Confucianism to his subjects as all that is necessary for good life and good government, but when he finds that Buddhism conduces to the same end he accords his patronage and politely ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... irregular comparison of adjectives and adverbs, all syntactical subtleties (cf. the sequence of tenses, oratio obliqua, the syntax of subordinate clauses, in Latin; and the famous conditional sentences, with the no less notorious on and me in Greek), all conflicting and illogical uses of auxiliaries (cf. etre and avoir in French, and sein and haben in German), besides a host of other old enemies. Some of these things of course are not wholly memory work, especially the syntax, ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... itself, contenting itself with teaching the patient that his trouble is psychic in origin; that it is based on exaggerated suggestibility and uncontrolled emotionalism; that it is made out of false ideas about the body, illogical conclusions, and unhealthy feeling-tones; and that it may be cured by a kind of moral hygiene, which breaks up these old habits and replaces them with new and better ones. It tries to inculcate the cheerful attitude of mind; ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... something exasperatingly uncertain and illogical about it all. Was it possible that St. Pierre Boulain was playing a huge joke on him? Even that was inconceivable. For there was Carmin Fanchet, a fitting companion for a man like Black Roger, and there was Marie-Anne, who, if it had been a joke, would not ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... histories of former ages (which they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every instance of oppression and persecution which has been made by that body or in its favor, in order to justify, upon very iniquitous because very illogical principles of retaliation, their own persecutions and their own cruelties. After destroying all other genealogies and family distinctions, they invent a sort of pedigree of crimes. It is not very ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the wild extravagance of her speech and temper, Clarence did not know that when women are most illogical they are apt to be most sincere, and from a man's standpoint her unreasoning deductions appeared to him only as an affectation to gain time for thought, or a theatrical display, like Susy's. And he was turning half contemptuously away, when ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... our academy the 'brown-study color'; and it would clearly have been supererogatory to lay the same tint upon it. No, sir; we avoid repetitions even in our prayers, deeming them to be so many proofs of an illogical ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... grave offence to favour the election of persons opposed to the Roman Catholic Church and whose opinions may tend to endanger its position. The idea that the Pope's political utterances can ever be considered as ex cathedra is too illogical to be presented seriously to the world by thinking men. Leo the Thirteenth is undoubtedly a first-rate statesman, and it might be to the advantage not only of all good Catholics but of all humanity, and of the cause of peace itself, to follow his advice ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... to know what is. This, too, goes on day after day during shearing, just when the days are growing hot and hotter still, the spare herbage browning, and the water becoming scanty and scantier. And for a recompense? There is none in working with sheep. They are quiet, peaceable, stupid, illogical, incapable of exciting affection, very capable of rousing wrath; far different from the terrible excitement of a bellowing herd of long-horned cattle as they break away in a stampede, among whom is danger and ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... heart. A French infidel declared that, should he be told that the most remarkable miracle was occurring close by his house, he would not take a step out of his way to see it. Pride never surrenders; it prefers rather to take an illogical position than to bow even to the authority of reason. Furious, beside itself, and absurd, it revolts against evidence. To all reasoning, to undeniable evidence, the infidel—the man without religion—opposes his own will: "Such is my determination." ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... is as diverse from the living Lord God, the creator of heaven and earth. Nay, this equivoque on God is as mischievous as it is illogical: it is the sword ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... before he spoke she had no means of knowing; probably, at most, two or three minutes. But to the woman gazing out blindly through the cobweb-covered window into the night, it might well have been hours. For some illogical reason, which she could not have explained to herself, she had the feeling that the victory in the coming struggle would lie with the one who kept silent the longer. To break the nerve-wrecking spell would ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... planet, and all humanity merely an ant hill that he could grind under foot. Just let the enemy come! He could hold his own against the whole lot! . . . Then, when his common sense brought him out of his heroic delirium, he tried to calm himself with an equally illogical optimism. They would not come. He did not know why it was, but his heart told him that they would ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the Indian students at Hampton, and had occasion to travel with them, he found they were free to occupy in the hotels any rooms they could pay for, whereas he must either go without or take a room in the servants' quarters. He regarded these experiences as interesting illustrations of the illogical nature of race prejudice. The occupants of these hotels did not resent mingling with members of a backward race whose skin happened to be red, but they did object to mingling on the same terms with members of another backward race whose skin happened to be black. It apparently never entered his ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... Lorraine, Roussillon, and Flanders.[337] To these sacrilegious schemes the French patriots opposed the dogma of Rousseau—the indivisibility of the general will. "Perish 25,000,000 Frenchmen rather than the Republic one and indivisible." This perfervid, if illogical, exclamation of a Commissioner of the Convention reveals something of that passion for unity which now fused together the French nation. Some peoples merge themselves slowly together under the shelter of kindred beliefs and institutions. Others ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... made quite a study of biology, and all that sort of thing," said he; "and, although a good deal of a skeptic, and inclined to follow Huxley, I can't bring myself to conceive of life without organism. Such theorizing is, to my mind, on a par with the illogical search for the philosopher's stone and ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... illogical treatment was the best, or his patience gave out; for he answered with passionate ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... them taking it, I am sorry to say, for a line of secular poetry, exclaimed at the stiffness and coldness. Pica then put in her oar, and began to argue that honour must be earned, and that it was absurd and illogical to claim it for the mere accident of seniority or relationship. Jane, not at all conscious of being an offender, howled at her that this was her horrible liberalism and neology, while Metelill asked what was become of loyalty. "That ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "You are illogical, and indecent; and you know there's a limit I don't choose to let you pass.—You're wrong, too. You've only to look about you, here, with unbiassed eyes, to see which race the prettiest girls belong to.—But never mind! You only launch out in this way that you may not be obliged to discuss ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... creative force which invertedly mimics that of Love; but the difference between them is that Love is eternal and Fear is not. Love as the Original Creative Motive is the only logical conclusion we can come to as to why we ourselves or any other creation exists. Fear is illogical because to regard it as having any place in the Original Creative Motive involves a ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... animals, it was Descartes who first had the really admirable daring to describe them as machina; the whole of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did: what we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called "free will"; ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... had practical experience of the scientific stove. I want the old-fashioned, unsanitary, wasteful, illogical, open fireplace. I want the heat to go up the chimney, instead of stopping in the room and giving me a headache, and making everything go round. When I come in out of the snow I want to see a fire—something that says to me with a cheerful crackle, "Hallo, old man, cold outside, isn't it? Come ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... greatly experienced in this noble science, but none have yet been able so to express it as to bring it (as we hope to have done) within the range of the certain sciences. Henceforward, we trust it will form a part of the public education, and not be subject tot he barbarous modes pursued by illogical though earnest and zealous disciples; and that the great and glorious Constitution that has done so much to bring it to perfection, will, in its turn, be sustained and matured by the exercise of what is really in itself so ancient ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... consumed, says John of Salisbury, "than the Caesars required to make themselves masters of the world," and in which the combatants, having spent at last their whole stock of dialectic ammunition, resorted to carnal weapons, passing suddenly, by a very illogical metabasis, from "universals" to particulars. Both parties appealed to Aristotle. By a singular fortune, a pagan philosopher, introduced into Western Europe by Mohammedans, became the supreme authority of the Christian world. Aristotle was the Scripture ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... high mantel-shelf and her head against her hand, Celia stood looking down on the vacant hearth. There was something of weariness in the attitude. What a delicate bit of porcelain she seemed! Allan had a sudden, illogical vision of a fire of blazing logs, and himself and Celia sitting ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... the rooms on the first and second floor to make a visitation. The first door that I opened revealed the meaning of the phrases which I took for mad ravings; and I saw the length to which covetousness goes when it survives only as an illogical instinct, the last stage of greed of which you find so many examples among misers in ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... as a work of art than 'Parsifal' or 'Die Meistersinger,' in which the chorus takes its proper place. It is scarcely necessary to point out that, opera being in the first instance founded upon pure convention, there is nothing more illogical in the judicious employment of the chorus than in the substitution of song for speech, which is the ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Vanini was in part remitted, evidently public opinion already making itself felt. His tongue was cut out, but strangulation preceded the burning alive. Here one cannot help noting the illogical, the puerile—if such words are applicable to devilish wickedness—aspect of such Inquisitorial sentences. If these hounders-down of common-sense and the reasoning faculty really believed, as they affected to believe, that men who possessed and exercised ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... self-sacrifice of the sailors. I was the proudest when the last of them referred to Aristides and the reports which he had sent home from America, and said that without some such study as he had made of the American character they never could have understood such an act as they were now witnessing. Illogical and insensate as their system was, their character sometimes had a beauty, a sublimity which was not possible to Altrurians even, for it was performed in the face of risks and chances which their happy conditions relieved them from. At the same time, the orator ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... burial-places. Many of the epidemics of disease that decimate the populations of Eastern countries, and sometimes travel into the West, originate from these abominable caravans of the dead and kindred irrationalities of the illogical ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... oneself out of court, not have a leg to stand on. judge hastily, shoot from the hip, jump to conclusions (misjudgment) 481. Adj. intuitive, instinctive, impulsive; independent of reason, anterior to reason; gratuitous, hazarded; unconnected. unreasonable, illogical, false, unsound, invalid; unwarranted, not following; inconsequent, inconsequential; inconsistent; absonous|, absonant[obs3]; unscientific; untenable, inconclusive, incorrect; fallacious, fallible; groundless, unproved; non sequitur[Latin: it does ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... example, no first-class English novelist or dramatist would dream of allowing to his pen the freedom in treating sexual phenomena which Continental writers enjoy as a matter of course. The British public is admittedly wrong on this important point—hypocritical, illogical and absurd. But what would you? You cannot defy it; you literally cannot. If you tried, you would not even get as far as print, to say nothing of library counters. You can only get round it by ingenuity and ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... any claim. Many of the most distinguished statesmen have been charged with certain moral lapses in the heat of political fights, which, in almost every instance, are ignored by the victims, their silence being significant to some, illogical to others; yet the fact remains that the press goes to the greatest extremes. No family secret is considered sacred to the American politician in the heat of a campaign; to win, he would sacrifice the husband, father, mother, and children ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... sagacity. Have we made an erroneous interpretation of the document? Is there anything illogical ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... creed, with its vivid appeals to the senses: is it not a question whether the utterly unimaginative and illogical Negro can be taught the facts of Christianity, or indeed any religion at all, save through his senses? Is it not a question whether we do not, on the whole, give him a juster and clearer notion of the very truths which you hold in common with us, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Cavell—the whole stupefying revelation of the German hatred and greed towards this country, and of the qualities latent in the German character. Now we know—that it is they, or we—since they willed it so. And this old, illogical, unready country is only just arriving at its full strength, only just fully conscious of the sternness of its own resolve, only just putting out its full powers, as the German power is weakening, and the omens are ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... There is nothing so illogical as accidents. They are bound by no rules, and we cannot profit by one, as we might wish, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... dwindling of late, and now threatened to die out altogether, the irrepressible old Dr. Jones capturing patients up to Fitzpiers's very door. Fitzpiers knew only too well the latest and greatest cause of his unpopularity; and yet, so illogical is man, the second branch of his sadness grew out of a remedial measure proposed for the first—a letter from Felice Charmond imploring him not to see her again. To bring about their severance still more effectually, she added, she had decided during his absence ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... of the magazines for August—I forget which—on the statistics of prayer. Not a nice name (perhaps it's not correct, but nearly so), and not a nice article, it seemed to me—but I only glanced at it; produced, like many other faulty things of the kind, by illogical superstition on the part of Christian clergy, most of whom preach a half-belief, some a whole belief, on the efficacy of prayer for temporal good. Then comes the hard unbeliever, delighted to prove, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... all very illogical, of course, and very absurd. If we can accept the four words, why not accept all six? If we credit the head of the text, why cavil at the tail? Sometimes the absurdity of such irrational behavior will break upon a man and set him laughing at his own stupidity. ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... that the firm of Denton, Day & Co. has come to a crisis in its business career, owing to the illogical stand recently taken by one of its members. From a paying investment it has turned into a philanthropical institution, and so long as it can live as such it will be a great benefit to hundreds. Further than this, I hear that one man has made an unjust fortune by withdrawing from the ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... was in the chair. After the speechifying was over, and the stereotyped, though rather illogical, appeal had been made for voters of the one party to cast the straight ticket, and for those of the other faction to scratch, the colonel ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... you. It cannot be sooth That you talk like an angry illogical girl. Yes, banish the Hebrews, as wholly as ruth. Be cold in your wrath as the Neva's chill swirl, Snub friendly remonstrance, blunt satire's keen blade. With a blot of black ink! Will it carry you far? A CAESAR must not be a fool or afraid; There's no place in earth's round ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... principles, the close of that storm of the Reformation, of that Catholic reaction, which ceased alike with the accession of Elizabeth. But it was far more than this. It was in itself a symbol of the Church of England as it stands to-day, of that quiet illogical compromise between past and present which Parker and the Queen were to mould into so lasting a shape. Every circumstance of the service marked the strange contrasts which were to be blended in the future of the English Church. The zeal of Edward ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... determined to award them according to my theory, and lest my reasons for bestowing them may not be perfectly clear to all, and the system of reasoning by which my results are attained appear somewhat illogical, I will endeavor to ...
— Silver Links • Various
... all her heart. She was all he had, as he was all the world to her. And so, as she gave ear to his long, illogical rigmarole of argument and defense, she slowly found that her pity and her love were making vital decisions for her. As of old, in poignant moments, her father lapsed at last into a denunciation of the Isbels and what they ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... back through the gate and Kit resumed his walk, struggling with an annoyance he felt was illogical. He knew something about Bell's household and imagined that Janet's life was not smooth. He was sorry for her, and it was, of course, unjust to blame her for her father's deeds. All the same, the favor she had sometimes shown him was embarrassing. ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... reason by synecdoche,—ornamental, but illogical;" and therewith, resolved to hear no more, my father rose ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... could double, evade, rebound. Put her in a hole, and she soon proved to you that its obscurity was the last place where she proposed to stay. She looked the latest thing evolved by the art of man. Her clothes were the prevailing fantastic creation, and yet, on her, they were not illogical. They were the plumage of an eccentric bird hatched to look that way. Her face, in its sandy monotone of color, fitted the art of her wonderful and yet not too noticeable hat, and her gloves and veil were the last word of style. Amelia had begun making herself, Raven used to think, long ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... they received Scripture only on the authority of the Church (which they held superior to the Word of God), and who allowed no explanation of it save their own private interpretation?—who were so illogical as to urge that the Church existed before the Scriptures as a reason for her superiority, and so ignorant as to maintain that pulai adou signified the power of Satan! Asked if they would do penance, the Germans refused: threatened with penalties, they held firm. Their ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... which the men who formed it could serve it better, and these are our laws which we obey not for our own good directly, but for the good of the State. From the point of view of the plain man in the street, it is all utterly illogical, for it would be logical to go and take from your neighbour whatever you wished, so long as you were strong enough to hold it. But, let us thank Heaven, no sane man is logical, and only a Professor would dare to make the claim. It is one of the prerogatives of his office, and ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... amusement for the public always imagine ourselves much better known to that public than we are, Miss West. It's our little vanity—rather harmless after all. We're a pretty decent lot, sometimes absurd, especially in our tragic moments; sometimes emotional, usually illogical, often impulsive, frequently tender-hearted as ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... feeble, infirm, debilitated, weakly, fragile, delicate, invalid, emasculated, enervated; vulnerable, assailable, unguarded, unprotected, exposed; frail, pliant, tender; peccable, fallible, errable, erring, indiscreet; impotent, ineffectual, inefficacious, ineffective; illogical, unsustained, inconclusive, lame, unsatisfactory; vacillating, irresolute, wavering, unstable; diluted, thin, insipid, vapid; slight, gauzy, sleazy, flimsy, brittle, fragile; unsound, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the air of one who thinks that he has nearly, if not quite, justified himself. "I am no worse than others," is an excuse for evil conduct, not altogether unknown in more highly favoured lands, and is often followed by the illogical conclusion, "therefore I am not to blame," but although Harold felt pity for his agreeable chance acquaintance, he could not admit that this explanation excused him, nor could he get over the shock which his feelings had sustained; it was, therefore, with comparatively little ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... matters—matters upon which a lawyer or a doctor should rather be consulted. He himself had never encouraged such confidences. What did he keep curates for? His curates had saved him many a long hour of talk with inconsequent men and illogical women who had come to him with their stories. What were to him the stories of men whose wives were giving them trouble? What were to him the stories of wives who had difficulties with their housemaids or who could not keep their boys from reading pirate literature? His curates managed ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... face to the wall and went to sleep, leaving Aunt Molly powdering her nose and asking mother, "Does it look all right now—" and adding, "Oh, I'm such a fool." In so illogical a world, the reader must not be allowed to think that Molly Brownwell lamented the folly of mourning for a handsome young gentleman in blue serge with white spats on his shoes and a Byronic collar and a fluffy necktie of the period. ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... air and bring peace and quiet to the earth again—when the town, sea and sky will be calm and beneficent. But it is only an illusion, preserved by the untiring hope of man and his imperishable and illogical desire for liberty. ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... her. She had those dark, dreamy eyes so suggestive of veiled mysteries; and her lips must have looked bewitching when they pouted. I expect they often did. They do so still; but the pout of a woman of forty-six no longer fascinates. To a pretty girl of nineteen a spice of temper, an illogical unreasonableness, are added attractions: the scratch of a blue-eyed kitten only tempts us to tease her the more. Young Hubert St. Leonard—he had curly brown hair, with a pretty trick of blushing, and was going to conquer ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... of value for any one accustomed to a decimal coinage: so unreasonable and illogical," the stranger continued blandly, turning over the various pieces with a dubious air ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... trained on the Assembly's Catechism, interpreted in good sound West Windsor fashion. In theory she never deviated one iota from the solid ground of the creed of her childhood. But while she held inflexibly to her creed in all its generalizations, she made all those sweet illogical exceptions which women of her kind are given to making. In general, she firmly believed that everybody who failed to have a saving faith in the vicarious atonement of Christ would be lost. In particular, ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... are excellent, but they seem to me curiously unorthodox. There is an inletting of new views upon the subject of the Christian Revelation, against which the Protestantism of the Church of England—in many respects illogical and anomalous, as it appears to its opponents—will have to fight a hard and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... most impossible books that man ever wrote. A book which one could almost prove never could be written, and which, as an illogical conclusion, but a stubborn fact, has been written, nevertheless. "Harrington" is an Abolition novel, the scene of which is laid in Boston, with a few introductory chapters of plantation-slavery in Louisiana. Its principal merit is its burning ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... Lass staggered and leaped joyously with the glory of the open sea. She seemed alone on the bosom of the ocean; and for the life of me I could not but feel that I was embarked on some desperate adventure. The notion was utterly illogical; that I knew well. In sober thought, I, a reporter, was shadowing a respectable and venerable scientist, who in turn was probably about to investigate at length some little-known deep-sea conditions or phenomena ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... dramatic. A man's profession only enters into the drama of his life when it comes into conflict with his nature. The result of this conflict is tragic in Mrs Warren's case, and comic in the clergyman's case (at least we are savage enough to laugh at it); but in both cases it is illogical, and in both cases natural. I repeat, the critics who accuse me of sacrificing nature to logic are so sophisticated by their profession that to them logic is ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... lived a hundred years he would never have become a man; he was penetrated with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical; so that I ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... of a religion, one's verdict will largely depend upon the point of view from which the religion in question is regarded. It is manifestly unjust and illogical to apply modern standards to an ancient religion, not that such a religion would necessarily suffer by the comparison involved, but because of the totally different conditions under which religion developed in antiquity from those prevailing in modern times. The close association, ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... rested in complete satisfaction. It was not that he did not desire more light; it was simply that he could not conceive that there might be more light. And granting his premise that the Bible was directly inspired by God, he was not illogical in holding with a pathetic and patient faith to the doctrines of ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... to that of under-gardener? If the latter had been accepted, why on earth should there be hesitation regarding the former? So marvelled Nicholas, having, of course, no clue to the inner workings of Antony's mind. And even if he had had, the workings would have appeared to him illogical and unreasonable. It is truly not fully certain whether Antony understood them himself. He only knew that whereas it would be possible, though difficult, for him to remain in the neighbourhood of the Duchessa as Michael Field, gardener, to remain ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... improving—but Dash came uppermost. The order of our thoughts should be the order of our writing.) Goes he muzzled, or aperto ore? Are his intellects sound, or does he wander a little in his conversation? You cannot be too careful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illogical snarl he makes, to St. Luke's with him! All the dogs here are going mad, if you believe the overseers; but I protest they seem to me very rational and collected. But nothing is so deceitful as mad people to those who ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... not at all complicated. It would not have been possible for a woman to have spent her girlhood with the cleverest mother of her day and have emerged from her training either obstinate or illogical. Lady Lothwell listened to as much of the history of Robin as her mother chose to tell her and plainly felt an amiable interest in it. She knew much more detail and gossip concerning Mrs. Gareth-Lawless than the Duchess herself did. She had heard of the child who was ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... round on me and throw them in my face. All my life you have set me an example of selfishness and obstinacy. Can you wonder that I have profited by it? You have made me as hard as yourself, and you now profess surprise at the determination your training has forced upon me. You are illogical. It is your fault, not mine. There was bound to be a clash some day. It has come sooner than I expected, that's all. Up till now my inclinations have gone with yours, but this seems to be the parting of the ways. As I reminded you before, I am my own mistress, and I will submit to ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... understand the matters of which the essay treats. Furthermore, they must examine the conclusions and note how they are reached. In this way they will learn to discriminate between opinion and established fact; between logical and illogical reasoning. Since the author, in accomplishing his purpose, has paid special attention to orderly arrangement, to clear and forceful statement, and to a skillful choice of words, so these matters must be the subject of careful study on ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... almost as important as my story and much more exciting. To begin the foundation of that extension was like setting in motion the siege of a city! It was extravagant—reckless—nevertheless assisted by a neighbor who was clever at any kind of building, I set to work in boyish, illogical enthusiasm. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... judge; and what he has written should be taken cum grano salis. His book was intended to defend the action of the court that destroyed so many innocent lives, but no man can read it without being thoroughly convinced that the decision of the court was both illogical and cruel. There is nothing in this country to equal it, except it be the burning of the witches at Salem. But in stalwart old England the Popish Plot in 1679, started by Titus Oates, is the only occurrence in ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... and, as we believe, the sincere recognition of a personal God and of a future state. In point of fact, then, all Materialists have not been Atheists; and even were we convinced that Materialists professing religion were illogical or inconsequent reasoners, we should not be justified in ascribing to them those consequences of their system which they explicitly disclaim and disavow. Still it is competent, and it may be highly useful, to entertain the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... well-known remorseless logic, what would have become of me if Harriet Buxton had not been beside me in my delirium, with nothing but a clinical thermometer on her knee, and a white apron around her waist. Do not, I beg you, for I shall shock all your strict habits of mind by taking refuge in blind, illogical instinct and reiterating my firm conviction that though I perish, truth is so, and that Nature had a better use for Harriet's lap and waist. She had! (as you used to say in the old emotional ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... that when driving to meet her he had sometimes changed from one cab to another upon the way, because the second seemed to have the faster horse. But now that he was on the ground he realised that she was very exact to her word, and that she would neither be early nor late. And yet, in the illogical fashion of a lover, he soon forgot that it was he who was too soon, and he chafed and chafed as the minutes passed, until at about quarter to one he was striding gloomily about with despondent features and melancholy forebodings, imagining a thousand miserable reasons for ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... with tears; she was unhappy, and, as always, this knowledge roused in Maudelain a sort of frenzied pity and a hatred, quite illogical, of all other things existent. She was unhappy, that only he comprehended: and for her to ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... on every face, and it grew more intense every minute that Luther Ward's speech droned on, though it was only a dry, illogical rehash of political issues that could not have called that look into any face. It was as if the audience listened eagerly through it because every word of it was bringing them nearer to something that was to follow. What was it? What did Green River want? What was it waiting ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... encouragement for the effort to overcome other obstacles. Money may be only a representative of value, but its absence operates marvellously like the want of the value itself, and the primitive people of those days, and especially that class to which the schoolmaster belonged, had a habit, however illogical, of considering it a ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... like 'L'Ingenu' of Voltaire, struck, as was Huron, with all that was illogical in our social code; but she did not make, after his fashion, a too literal application of its rules, and knew where to draw the line, if she found herself on the point of making some hazardous remark, declaring frankly: "I was about to say something ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... given their readers more genuine delight than Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902). The most absurd and illogical situations and characters are presented with an air of such quiet sincerity that one refuses to question the reality of it all. Rudder Grange established his reputation in 1879, and was followed by a long list of stories ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of a lack of mental equipoise. We find scattered throughout his works the most brilliant, irrefutable, and logical truths side by side with the most inane, illogical, and stolid crudities. Among other men of genius who showed signs of degeneration we may include Alexander Stevens, Joel Hart, Adams, Train, Breckenridge, Webster, Blaine, Van Buren, Houston, Grant, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... good a priori grounds for supposing that the dreams of adults too are full of meaning and are logical; that there is a wish in every dream and that the wish is fulfilled in the dream. The reason dreams appear illogical is due to the fact that if the wish were to be expressed in its logical form it would not square with our everyday habits of thought and action. We should be disinclined to admit even to ourselves that we have ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... logic-mongers,—how all the learned and logical are accused by other learned and logical of false assumptions, of invalid reasoning, of foregone conclusions, of pride and prejudice and passion. One would say that the result of your profound researches was only to make you more intensely illogical than you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... these she handles so innocently at times as almost to provoke a smile; but where can she have acquired her knowledge of those inner realities, that are interwoven with all that is profoundest and most illogical in passion, with all that is most unexpected, most impossible, and most eternally true? We feel that one must have lived for thirty years beneath burning chains of burning kisses to learn what she has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... perilous passage. Then I was rewarded by a sight seldom accorded to humans. It was worth all the fatigue, cold, and bruises, for that appallingly illogical cloud cap took a new vagary. It split and lifted a little, and there, not three hundred yards away, in the twilight of that cold wet cloud, on that mountain in the sky, were two bull elk in deadly combat. Their far branching horns were locked together, and they swayed ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... and the Malay Archipelago dates, says De Candolle, 'from an epoch impossible to realise.' Its diffusion, as that great but very oracular authority remarks, may go back to a period 'contemporary with or even anterior to that of the human races.' What this remarkably illogical sentence may mean I am at a loss to comprehend; perhaps M. de Candolle supposes that the banana was originally cultivated by pre-human gorillas; perhaps he merely intends to say that before men began to separate they sent special messengers on in front ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... represent them more forcibly than the rival candidates? I do not for a moment imagine that the M. P. invariably agrees with the politics of his electors; I only inquire why he should have to profess to,—why should he pay this homage of hypocrisy to an illogical ideal? Theoretically we do not elect our M. P. because he wants to get on, but because we want to get on or the country to get on; because we want certain measures carried, not because he wants certain measures carried. Therefore it is to our interest to get the most skilled ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... one stop to regret the one-sided and illogical construction of the human mind, that a fair judgment in such matters seems to require incompatible qualities. Your impartial critic or historian is generally a man who leaves out of account nothing but the essential. His impartiality means ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... wasted, is a mistake, for they have value as being indications of things much more real than themselves, namely, of the stages of evolution of the human mind. The fact that a certain god-figure, however grotesque and queer, or a certain creed, however childish, cruel, and illogical, held sway for a considerable time over the hearts of men in any corner or continent of the world is good evidence that it represented a real formative urge at the time in the hearts of those good people, and a definite stage ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... incomprehensible to me, having as yet no knowledge of the illogical workings of an artistically poetic and musical temperament. But I drew my own conclusions, and it was not surprising that I considered the devout father the true one, and the unbeliever perverted through evil influence. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... tricks you and ends ill. But in that case there is worse behind, for the ill-ending does not inherently issue from the plot - the story HAD, in fact, ENDED WELL after the great last interview between Richard and Lucy - and the blind, illogical bullet which smashes all has no more to do between the boards than a fly has to do with the room into whose open window it comes buzzing. It MIGHT have so happened; it needed not; and unless needs must, we have no right to pain our readers. I have had a heavy case of conscience of the same ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by its own votes, and such a body of men is always in danger of becoming a mutual admiration society, and if this happens its public utility is at an end. In the present instance the action of the French Academy was illogical, ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... a child you are! have you just found out that? How delightfully illogical a woman can be! It stands to reason that I cannot be in ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... and physical condition when, the body tired and the brain betwixt dozing and waking, thought becomes a feverish process, the mind snatching vivid pictures from the day's experience and weaving them into as illogical a pattern as that of the crazy quilt over her shoulders. All day long she had ridden in the swaying, lurching, jerking stage until now in her chair, as she slipped a little forward, she experienced the ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... Africa will, within any reasonable time, drive out of culture the slave-grown cotton of America. If this be so, of what use can it be to make irritating speeches in the House of Lords against a state of things by which we are content to profit? Lord Brougham and Lord Grey are not men of such illogical minds as to be incapable of understanding that it is the demand of the English manufacturers which stimulates the produce of slave-grown American cotton. They are, neither of them, we apprehend, so reckless or so wicked as to close our factories and to throw some two millions ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... dispute in the SCHOOL WORLD about the heuristic method. Somebody had been disrespectful to Martindale House and the thing was rankling almost unendurably. It seemed to be a relief to him to show his son very fully the essentially illogical position of his assailant. He was entirely inattentive to Benham's carefully made conversational opportunities. He would be silent at times while Benham talked and then he would break out suddenly with: "What seems to me so unreasonable, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... And in some illogical, dogmatic way women seem to have, she had attached this antagonistic influence to his new abode. Was ever anything so absurd! "You'll never finish Romilly here." ... Why not? Was this her idea of the luxury that saps the springs of action and brings a man down to ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... own minds,"[27]—and that this has happened, not only to the convulsionists, but (by the confession of many of the ancient fathers[28]) also to the greatest saints. But he protests against the conclusion, as illogical, that the convulsionists never speak by the spirit of God, because they do ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... of a mode of reasoning so utterly illogical, were as obvious to the mind of the young lawyer as to anybody else; and the compliance which he exhibited to a requisition which his own sense readily assured him was as foolish as it was presumptuous, was as degrading to his moral character from ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... able to admire the contrasts of virulence and weakness, of petty hatred and impossible aspirations which had of late revealed themselves to him in a new light. Have we not most of us assisted at the breaking of the Image of Baal, at the destruction of an imaginary representative of an illogical ideal? ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... what L'Africanne would have been if Scribe had lived and the authors had put it into shape. The work we have is illogical and incomplete. The words are simply monstrous and Scribe certainly would not have kept them. This is the case in the passage in ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... could not logically justify. I do not mean to; but, perhaps, sometimes I do. What of it? When my children were small, and my little boy came and climbed up in my lap and expressed himself in all sorts of illogical and foolish ways, telling me every sort of thing he wanted, impossible things, unwise things, things I could not get for him, things I would not get if I could, because I thought myself wiser than he, did these things trouble me? I ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... required to salute, nor is any man leading a horse, since the sudden motion so near the horse's head might make it restive. There will always be occasions when it is inconvenient, impractical, or illogical to render or require the return of a salute. The intent of the regulation is not that it embarrass or demean the individual, but that it serve as a signal of recognition and greeting between members of the military brotherhood. According to regulations, in all services, ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... and overpowered, while Napoleon saw himself forced to treat with an opponent who, though beaten, was still undaunted and active. If the victor had been fighting for life, his position would have been morally strong; fighting as a world-conqueror, it was illogical; fighting as equal with equal to repel aggression, it was comprehensible. This last was the attitude into which he was forced by the campaign of Aspern, Essling, Wagram. Francis, whose power he had meant to crush, upon whom a few short ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... thousand a year, if he will,—a hundred thousand millions a year wouldn't buy me from you—my own!" In another burst, "Let him ride in his carriage, if he chooses,"—rather, as if such a course would imply the most degraded weakness; but, as I have said before, she was illogical, if affectionate,—"let him ride in his carriage. I would rather walk barefoot through the world with you than ride in a hundred carriages, if every one of them was lined with diamonds ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Indeed Mr. Coleridge's own poetical practices render this story incredible; for, during many years of his authorship, his diction was wholly at variance with such a rule, and the strain of his poetry as illogical as can be well imagined. When Mr. Bowyer prohibited his pupils from using, in their themes, the above-mentioned names, he did, we humbly submit, prohibit them from using the best means of purifying their taste and exalting ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... of his system unnecessarily difficult, to say nothing of his illogical arrangement in the grammar of the art of memory, which he makes the first of his ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... essay of substantial worth. "The Toll of the Sea," a poem by Harold Gordon Hawkins, shows considerable merit despite irregularities. "Memories," by Arthur Goodenough, well sustains the high poetical reputation of its author, though it is cruelly marred by the illogical and censurable "simplified" spelling which the young editors see fit to employ. One line affords a silent but striking instance of the utter senselessness and confusion of the new ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... looked at him reflectively a moment. "I am very illogical, I fear. I once told myself that anything I might want to do to help Littleton would be over your dead body, almost. And, now, I never make a move without looking to you for the encouragement and support that make it perfectly satisfactory. I ought to have ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... conflict between trained minds—in this his soul took delight, in this he sought and found the joy of battle and of victory. Yet he would not allow his serenity to be ruffled by any foe whom he considered unworthy of his steel; he refused to argue with people whom he knew to be hopelessly illogical—definitely refused, though with such tact that no wound was given, even to ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... the most dissimilar things, the most unforeseen, the most contradictory, the most incongruous; it is merciless, without sequence or connection, full of inexplicable, illogical, and contradictory catastrophes, such as can only be classed as miscellaneous facts. This is why the artist, having chosen his subject, can only select such characteristic details as are of use to it, from this life overladen with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... quivered. The driver stopped his chatter, conscious that he had gone too far, and then, with somewhat illogical perversity, he proceeded to express his vexation at ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... way aft without rejoinder. "Invalid's pessimism," was my private comment. And yet the sick man was whole for the time being; the virile spirit was once more master of the recreant members; and it was with illogical relief that I found those I sought standing almost ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... be able to do anything at all. Leaders to-day do not keep their party together by bribes, but they can dissolve. Party organisation is efficient because it is not composed of warm partisans. The way to lead is to affect a studied and illogical moderation. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... villains; and I am not hot. But my tendency is to take that fellow by the throat with both hands, and throttle him. Having thoroughly accomplished that, I should prepare to sift the evidence. Unscientific, illogical, brutal, are such desires, as you need not tell me. And yet, madam, they are manly. I hate slow justice; I like it quick—quick, or none at all, I say, so long as it is justice. Creeping justice is, to my mind, little better than slow revenge. My opinions are not ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... two days before, whose manner towards his father struck me as an ideal blending of affectionate comradeship with old-fashioned respect.[E] True, this was in Philadelphia, "the City of Homes," and even there it may have been an exceptional case. I am not so illogical as to pit a single observation against (presumably) a wide induction; I merely offer for what it is worth one ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... where she was brought up, she had in youth had an awakening of fervent mystical piety in the Catholic form. That form she could not keep. Popular religion of all kinds, with its deep internal impossibilities, its "heaven and hell serving to cover the illogical manifestations of the Divinity's apparent designs respecting us," its "God made in our image, silly and malicious, vain and puerile, irritable or tender, after our fashion," lost all sort of ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... occurs in us, with its unchecked illogical stream of images and ideas, moving towards no assigned end, combined in no ordered chain, is merely what we usually call day-dream. But where a definite wish or purpose, an end, dominates this reverie and links up its images and ideas into ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... illogical, of course; it left the question whether slaves are population or chattels for theorizers to wrangle over, and for future events to decide. It was easy for James Wilson to show that there was neither rhyme nor reason in it: but he ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... escapes easily. It possesses the secret of some fourth mental dimension, known only to the naive and the illogical, or perhaps supralogical. He has brilliant intuitions, hunches, premonitions, the acute perceptions of some two or three extra senses that have been bred or schooled ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... of law, why not all? If some self-adaptations should arise, why not others? If any varieties of color, why not all the varieties we see? No attempt is made to explain this except by reference to the fact that 'purpose' and 'contrivance' are everywhere visible, and by an illogical deduction they could only have arisen by the direct action of some mind, because the direct action of our minds produce similar 'contrivances;' but it is forgotten that adaptation, however produced, must have the appearance of design." (p. 280)[17] After referring to the ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... morally to produce the best work and the finest healthiest children. The children are the forthcoming bearers of the world's burdens and responsibilities. To them belongs the future, and already too many social problems of the present age are due to the unhygienic and illogical mating of the ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... overpowered me but never seduced my intelligence became a reality to them. She was a shadow with which my senses diverted themselves. Then why do I look upon the business as illogical? The illogical thing is not that I feel tired from striking her who had no tangible existence, but that I should be able to reason beyond the reach of my senses. Yes, that I should succeed in wresting ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht |
