"Irrational" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... abnormal, irrational, disturbing to human senses. With the mining work over, an irritability grew upon Grantline's men. And perhaps since the human mind is so wonderful, elusive a thing, there lay upon these men an indefinable sense ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... said his heart sunk within him to hear a poor untaught creature desire to be taught to know God, and he such a wicked wretch, that he could not say one word to her about God, but what the reproach of his own carriage would make most irrational to her to believe; nay, that already she had told him that she could not believe in God, because he, that was ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... make use of our machines (as well as their sad condition of neglect will allow), but in other cases we behave in an extraordinarily irrational manner. Thus if we sally out and get caught in a heavy shower we do not, unless very far gone in foolishness, sit down and curse the weather. We put up our umbrella, if we have one, and if not we hurry home. We may grumble, but ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... toward the West. A brown or dark gray stone, as in Edinburgh, is the principal material used, and gives the city a very substantial appearance. Most of the town, being new, has wide and straight streets; in the older part, they are perverse and irrational, as old concerns are apt obstinately to be. They have an old Cathedral here (now Presbyterian) of which the citizens seem quite proud, I can't perceive why. Architecturally, it seems to me a sad waste of stone and labor. The ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... do no violence to a suppliant, no, not even if he were his own foe; since how irrational must it be to stigmatise robbers of temples as sacrilegious and yet to regard him who tears the suppliant from the altar ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... will deny that fear is the type of asthenic manifestations. Yet is it not the mother of phantoms, of numberless superstitions, of altogether irrational ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... carries a special and often fatal handicap. The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped. But though an idea that is true is thus not likely to prevail, an idea that is attacked enjoys a great advantage. The evidence behind it is now supported by sympathy, the sporting instinct, sentimentality—and sentimentality is as powerful as an ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... variegated and contradictory mass of feelings and reactions to feelings, which the natural human being with his superstitions, his sympathies, his antipathies, his loves and his hates, his surmises, his irrational intuitions, his hopes and fears, is of necessity bound to experience as ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... revolutions in the fine arts of which they have ever been the subject, has as yet attracted comparatively little notice; an invention which serves but to demonstrate that the present age, with all its boasted enlightenment, may yet not be very unfitted for the reception of superstitions the most irrational and gross, is largely occupying the attention of the community, and filling column after column in our public prints. We shall venture to take up the quieter invention of the two as the genuine one,—as the invention which will occupy most space a century hence,—and direct the attention of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... conquest of the single will—the will of the 'one only man'—not unchecked of commons only, unchecked by barons, unchecked by the church, unchecked by council of any kind, the pure arbitrary absolute will, the pure idiosyncrasy, the crowned demon of the lawless, irrational will, unchained and armed with the sword of the common might, and clothed with the divinity of the common right; that this was a conquest unspeakably more debasing than the conquest 'commonly so called,'—this, which left no nobility,—which clasped its collar ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... twenty-four years old, that I had experienced a great many adventures by night, and yet that I had never had the slightest difficulty of any sort with such solitary women in the streets after midnight! But nothing of what I have so far told you ever came to have any importance, since that irrational fear always left me as soon as I reached home, or saw any one else in the street, and I would scarcely recall it a few minutes afterwards, any more than one would recall a stupid mistake which had no result of ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... human actions are due to selfishness more or less refined? It is very unwise to apply tests and use arguments concerning animals which, if applied with equal strictness to human conduct, would prove human society irrational ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... satires he was not attacking the orthodoxy of the Auld Lights from the bulwarks of any other creed. His criticism was altogether destructive. From his own conception of a wise and loving God he satirised what he conceived to be their irrational and inhuman conception of Deity, whose attitude towards mankind was assuredly not that of a father to his children. Burns's God was a God of love; the god they worshipped was the creation of their creed, a god of election. It is quite true that Burns made many friends amongst ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... after intellectual freedom had nothing whatever to do with the movement. Dante, who struck the Papacy as hard blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself and Luther himself, when they began their work; were far enough from any intention of meddling with even the most irrational of the dogmas of mediaeval Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to Socinus, or even to Muenzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being the slave of the Papacy the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... geometrical interpretation itself. One of the most recent developments of algebra is the algebraic theory at number, which is devised with the view of removing these difficulties. The harmony between arithmetical and geometrical measurement, which was disturbed by the Greek geometers on the discovery of irrational numbers, is restored by an unlimited supply of the causes of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... not give the German Fatherland; and the absolute security of that frontier rests not upon a monopoly nor a community, still less upon a balance of power, but on the opinion held on both sides of that frontier that all power is irrational and futile as a guarantee of peace ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... being sufficiently obvious that want of Instruction concerning Religion does in a Sceptical Age dispose Men to Scepticism and Infidelity, which often terminates in downright Atheism; let us see whether, or no, Ill, by which I mean, all irrational Instruction in regard of Religion, ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... If there is any thing irrational or inconsistent, any thing false or ridiculous, in this view of the subject, it should be remembered that it has been long taught, not only in common schools, but in our academies and colleges, as serious, practical truth; ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... of those who appraise the relative worth of Dickens and Thackeray to fall into hostile camps, swearing by one, and at the other, has its amusing side but is to be deprecated as irrational. Why should it be necessary to miss appreciation of the creator of "Vanity Fair" because one happens to like "David Copperfield"? Surely, our literary tastes or standards should be broad enough to admit into pleasurable companionship both ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Intellectualism, as he conceived it, was pure pedantry; it impoverished and verbalised everything, and tied up nature in red tape. Ideas and rules that may have been occasionally useful it put in the place of the full-blooded irrational movement of life which had called them into being; and these abstractions, so soon obsolete, it strove to fix and to worship for ever. Thus all creeds and theories and all formal precepts sink in the estimation of the pragmatist to a local and temporary grammar ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... no doubt that my mother is innocent. She whom I have been commanded to slay is a woman. That woman is again my mother. She occupies, therefore, a place of greater reverence. The very beasts that are irrational know that the mother is unslayable. The sire must be known to be a combination of all the deities together. To the mother, however, attaches a combination of all mortal creatures and all the deities.'[1210]—In consequence of his habit of reflecting long ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... of propinquity, joined to reasons of self-love and a real passion which had no means of satisfaction except by marriage, led Paul on to an irrational love, which he had, however, the good sense to keep to himself. He even endeavored to study Mademoiselle Evangelista as a man should who desires not to compromise his future life; for the words of his friend de Marsay did sometimes rumble in his ears like a warning. But, in the first ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... for anything but remorse to any of the three. It is just to Comte to remark that he always assumed that the contributors to the support of a thinker should be in all essentials of method and doctrine that thinker's disciples; aid from indifferent persons he counted irrational and humiliating. But is an endowment ever a blessing to the man who receives it? The question is difficult to answer generally; in Comte's case there is reason in the doubts felt by Madame Comte ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... God the Avenger, to whom the nursery-maid and the overtaxed parent are so apt to appeal. You stab your children with such a God and he poisons all their lives. For many of us the word "God" first came into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational restraint, as Bogey, as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye. God Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to leave Fear to mind her charges and enforce her disciplines, while she goes off upon her own aims. But indeed, the teaching of God Bogey is an outrage ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... Europe were to recede before the irrational resistance of the Sultan, they would be disgraced in the eyes of the world, and the Christian population of the Turkish Empire would be doomed to extermination, according to the plan of the Porte. Terrible word, but true in ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... a religion with the celestials, to subvert which requires great caution, persistency and strength. If anything can be justified by old custom, or even precedent, it is considered to be unassailable, no matter how harmful or irrational it ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... the various boats. At the Havre boat I took the fore, he the aft gangway. Thousands passed over, men and women, vague human forms encumbered with queer projecting excrescences of impedimenta. They all seemed alike—just a herd of Britons, impelled by irrational instinct, like the fate-driven lemmings of Norway, to cross the sea. And all around, weird in the conflicting lights, hurried gnome-like figures mountainously laden, and in the confusion of sounds could be heard the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... the detective melancholy; but he had not yet begun to reflect on how the passing of a dearly loved husband would change the life of Mrs. Pendean. He suddenly felt himself thrust out of the situation forever, yet resented his own conviction as irrational. ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... dislike. I was a kind of poaching gipsy of literature. I had not only a willingness to eat any wild thing from a hedgehog to a beechnut or a wild raspberry, but also an uncanny power of finding out literary game, raising it, and trapping it, not by the stately methods of the scholar but by some irrational and violent intuition. Instead of reading slowly, patiently, and laboriously, as no doubt I ought to have read, i.e., as my tutors would have liked me to read, I used to dive headlong into some poet, old or young. Even if I could only "get at ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... was what she chiefly admired in her favourite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage—nothing superfluous. No flushes—that most irrational of all pleas that a reasonable being can set up:—that any one should claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and colour, without reference to the playing of the game, or the individual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves! She held this to be a solecism; ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... have seen in my walks the irrational creatures of God, the birds and the beasts, governed by a kindly instinct in attendance on their young, often has it come into my head that love and charity, far more than reason or justice, formed the tie that holds the world, with all ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... music of Beethoven because of its predominant reliance on "beauty" as way of communicating idealized concepts. Also, since the music intimately reflects the cravings and thought-processes of the natural human mind, which in numerous ways is emotionally and intellectually irrational, the music may itself be ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... free from superstition, though not always from intolerance. Adoration of the priesthood is not at all in her line. For politics she cares nothing, except in Victoria where naturally she espouses her father's side warmly, but in an irrational, almost stupid, way. Art is a dead letter to her, and so is literature, unless an unceasing and untiring devotion to three-volume novels be counted under that head. To music, according to her lights, she professes, and often feels, ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... the divinity of the Emperor. And precisely therein lies their present problem. For one may say, I think, with confidence that this attitude cannot endure, and is already disappearing. Western thought is an irresistible solvent of all irrational and instinctive ideas. Men cannot be engineers and pathologists and at the same time believe that a man is a god. They cannot be historians and at the same time believe that their first Emperor came down from heaven. Above all, they cannot be politicians and abstain from analysing ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... that?" he was finally able to exclaim in great wonderment. "Is it possible that you don't see it as clear as day? Don't you see, my son, that all this proves plainly that the reforms of the ministers are irrational?" ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... think themselves in love, and gave the salt to the whole affair. Moreover, there was this ground for it, that had her lord once roused from the straw-yards of his prize cattle, there was a certain stubborn, irrational, old-world prejudice of pride and temper in him that would have made him throw expediency to the winds, then and there, with a blind and brutal disregard to slander and to the fact that none would ever adorn his diamonds as she did. So that Cecil had not only her fair fame, but her ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... struggling awhile to keep down his softer feelings, pulled out the letter and flung it on the floor beside her, as ungraciously as he could. Catherine caught and perused it eagerly; then she put a few questions to me concerning the inmates, rational and irrational, of her former home; and gazing towards the ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... clerical Yolland we saw and heard very little. Harold was much relieved to find that even before his brother could move beyond the sofa, he was always out all day, for though he had never spoken a word that sounded official, Harold had an irrational antipathy to his black attire. Nor did I hear him preach, except by accident, for Arghouse chapelry was in the beat of the other curate, and in the afternoon, when I went to Mycening old church, he had persuaded Mr. Crosse to let him begin what was then a great innovation—a children's service, ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... function; series. sum, difference, complement, subtrahend; product; multiplicand, multiplier, multiplicator^; coefficient, multiple; dividend, divisor, factor, quotient, submultiple [Math.]; fraction, rational number; surd, irrational number; transcendental number; mixed number, complex number, complex conjugate; numerator, denominator; decimal, circulating decimal, repetend; common measure, aliquot part; prime number, prime, relative prime, prime factor, prime pair; reciprocal; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... by sewing tennis-balls or making cardboard boxes or calico, and on the other, not simply not to pay her, but to impoverish her because she bears and makes sacrifices to rear children, is the most irrational aspect of all the evolved and chancy ideas and institutions that make up the modern State. It is as if we believed our civilization existed to make cheap cotton and tennis-balls ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... 19% in 2004, largely because of higher international oil and gas prices. Overall prospects in the near future are discouraging because of widespread internal poverty, the burden of foreign debt, the government's irrational use of oil and gas revenues, and its unwillingness to adopt market-oriented reforms. Turkmenistan's economic statistics are state secrets, and GDP and other figures are subject to wide margins of error. In particular, the rate ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... faint, blue, nocturnal dimness. Green and red and yellow lights dotted the surface of the lake, and the waves beat, with a slow, gurgling rhythm, against the strand beneath the garden fence; now and then the irrational shrieks of some shrill-voiced little steamer broke in upon the stillness like an inappropriately lively remark upon a solemn conversation. I had half forgotten my purpose, and was walking aimlessly ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... have been represented as gloomy, superstitious, severe, irrational, and of a licentious tendency. But when other systems shall have produced a piety as devoted, a morality as pure, a patriotism as disinterested, and a state of society as happy, as have prevailed where their doctrines have been most prevalent, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... can't be cured. Has there not also been a world of discontent in our Borders? 'Tis no wonder, that the fiery Serpents are so Stinging of us; We have been a most Murmuring Generation. It is not Irrational, to ascribe the late Stupendious growth of Witches among us, partly to the bitter discontents, which Affliction and Poverty has fill'd us with: it is inconceivable, what advantage the Devil gains over men, by discontent. Moreover, the Sin of Unbelief may be ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... to depend, as in a good state of things it would, on personal conditions. Where it depends, as in this and most other countries, on conditions of property, the contradiction is even more flagrant. There something more than ordinarily irrational in the fact that when a woman can give all the guarantees required from a male elector, independent circumstances, the position of a householder and head of a family, payment of taxes, or whatever may be the conditions imposed, ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... irrational instincts, and making spirit and blood obedient and docile to it. Such also were most of his companions, for though they were dashed to the ground and dragged along by the Cyclops, they said not a word about Odysseus, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Bergson thus, with all their obvious and immense divergences, concurred in this respect, important from our present point of view, that their influence tended to transfer authority from the philosophic reason to those 'irrational' elements of mind which reach their highest intensity in the vision and 'rage' of the poet. James's vindication of drunken exaltation as a source of religious insight was not the least symptomatic passage ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... yonder continues as he formerly was. The man in brown, who so unseasonably interrupted his pleasantry, is an officer of justice, and has probably taken him before a magistrate, to answer some one of his numerous creditors. You must know," added he, "that the people of the moon, however irrational themselves, are very prompt in perceiving the absurdities of others: and this lively wit, who, as you see, wants neither parts nor address, acts as strangely as the wretch he has been ridiculing. He inherited a large estate, which brought him in a princely revenue; and yet his ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... those which curse the existence of the majority upon this earth, criminals will continue to be produced. And if we concede that these anomalies are directly or indirectly brought about by false and irrational methods of educating the youth of the country, we must also allow that education helps to manufacture criminals ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... There is an irrational contempt of danger, which approaches nearly to the folly, if not the guilt of suicide; there is a ridiculous perseverance in impracticable schemes, which is justly punished with ignominy and reproach. But in the wide regions of probability, which are the proper province ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... determine the cause of the horror which that idea evokes within my own feeble imagination, I am able to distinguish different elements of the emotion,—particular forms of terror responding to particular ideas (rational and irrational) suggested by the revelations of science. One feeling—perhaps the main element of the horror—is made by the thought of being prisoned forever and ever within that unutterable Viewlessness which occupies ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... Infancy. Warm Dress for Infants; and why. Investigations in France, and Results. Dangers from the opposite Extreme. Effects of too much Clothing. Rule of Safety. Featherbeds; why unhealthy in Warm Weather. Best Nightgowns for Young Children. Clothing; how to be proportioned. Irrational Dress of Women. Use of Flannel next the Skin. Evils of Tight Dresses to Women. False Taste in our Prints of Fashions. Modes in which Tight Dresses operate to weaken the Constitution. Rule of Safety as to Looseness of Dress. Example of English Ladies ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... aroused passion; and Olof, as, after years of self-scrutiny, he had come to know himself: ambitious and weak-willed; unscrupulous when something was at stake, and yielding at other times; possessed of great self-confidence, mixed with a deep melancholy; balanced and irrational; ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... shorthand class and stood wearily by the window, too discouraged even to remove her hat. The shorthand was a failure; the whole course was a failure. She had not the instinct for plodding, for the meticulous attention to detail that those absurd, irrational lines and ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... "Construction Tests'' which required the planful handling of concrete material, Adolf proceeded unintelligently. He showed no foresight, was rather slow, but by following out a trial and error procedure and with some repetition of irrational placing of the pieces he finally succeeded. Moderate ability to profit by trial and error was shown, but for his age the performance on this type of test was poor. On our "Puzzle-Box,'' which calls for the analysis of a concrete situation, a test that is done by boys of his ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... than a relaxation, it has also, I think, to be kept free from the restrictions imposed upon it by the fierce pedantries of those who would define a general form for it. Every art nowadays must steer its way between the rocks of trivial and degrading standards and the whirlpool of arbitrary and irrational criticism. Whenever criticism of any art becomes specialised and professional whenever a class of adjudicators is brought into existence, those adjudicators are apt to become as a class distrustful of their immediate impressions, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... standing at ease in Nature, Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irrational things, Imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they, Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less important than I thought, Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or the Tennessee, or far north or inland, A river man, or a ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... refers doubtless to the effect, upon the Government of the day, of the dread of Revolution in England. There were a few partisans of France and of the Revolution in England; and the panic which followed, though irrational, was widespread. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, a Bill was passed against seditious Assemblies, the Press was prosecuted, some Scottish Whigs who clamoured for reform were sentenced to transportation, while one Judge expressed regret that the practice of torture ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... side of the truck cab opened. A small man got out. Silently, he went to the rear of the trailer and swung up out of sight. Jill climbed into the opened door. Lockley followed her. He still felt an irrational uneasiness, but he put it down to habit. The past ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... wicked generation. His opinions were as pedantic as his life was abstemious, and no one was permitted to differ from him without being held guilty rather of a crime than of a mistake. He was an aristocratic pedant, to whom the living forces of humanity seemed but irrational impulses of which he and such as he were the appointed school- masters. To such a temperament a man of genius is instinctively hateful. Cato had spoken often in the Senate, though so young a member of it, denouncing the immoral habits of the age. He now rose to match himself against ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... coming to wreck the camp in a moment of mad intoxication, he would have made allowances for the cause. Before resorting to extreme measures in defending his charge, he first would have sought to bring them to their senses. Drunken men are men unbalanced, irrational. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... here-a-little-there-a-little plan, while they do no harm, do little good. They are but topical remedies, which cannot restore the pristine vigor of a ruined constitution. What we need is a reform as thorough-going as that which has been effected in the Spanish language. Shall we ever have it? or will the irrational conservatism of the educated classes, in all time to come, prevent a consummation so desirable, and so desiderated by the philologist? Max Mueller thinks that perhaps our posterity, some three hundred years hence, may write as they speak,—in other words, that our orthography will by that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... properly applied to substances. But of substances, some are corporeal and others incorporeal. And of corporeals, some are living and others the reverse; of living substances, some are sensitive and others insensitive; of sensitive substances, some are rational and others irrational.[58] Similarly of incorporeal substances, some are rational, others the reverse (for instance the animating spirits of beasts); but of rational substances there is one which is immutable and impassible by nature, namely God, another which in virtue of its creation is mutable and passible ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... over other forces, it becomes to the individual and to society the most destructive and baneful gift which refinement and culture may bestow. Campe proposes to limit the use of the word "Empfindsamkeit" to the justly proportioned manifestation of this susceptibility; the irrational, exaggerated development he would designate "berspannte Empfindsamkeit." "Empfindelei," he says, "ist Empfindsamkeit, die sich auf eine kleinliche alberne, vernunftlose und lcherliche Weise, also da ussert, wo sie nicht hingehrte." Campe goes yet further in his ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... ludicrous, ridiculous, chimerical, ill-judged, mistaken, senseless, erroneous, inconclusive, monstrous, stupid, false, incorrect, nonsensical, unreasonable, foolish, infatuated, paradoxical, wild. ill-advised, irrational, preposterous, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... irrational custom," went on Professor Haddock, "prevents respectable young ladies from making love, a thing they would enjoy doing, whilst mercenary girls do it too much and without getting any enjoyment out of it. It is indeed deplorable. But M. Leon Blum ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... heaven, was angry when he engaged the Erymanthian boar, or the Nemean lion? or was Theseus in a passion when he seized on the horns of the Marathonian bull? Take care how you make courage to depend in the least on rage. For anger is altogether irrational, and that is not courage which is ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... the emotions of the animals which are called irrational (for after learning the origin of mind we cannot doubt that brutes feel) only differ from man's emotions, to the extent that brute nature differs from human nature. Horse and man are alike carried away by the desire of procreation; but the desire of the former is equine, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... melange that one could hardly recognize for one thing or another, certainly not as examples of any well-meaning styles which have lasted until to-day. The straight line now disappeared in favour of the most dissolute and irrational curves imaginable, and the sober majesty of the gardens of Louis XIV became a tangle of warring elements, fine in parts and not uninteresting, effective, even, here and there, but ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... produce violent intoxication. While we were in Nepal, a shopkeeper, who attended the camp, smoked so much Charas that he died. From the accounts given me by those who saw him, he became stupid, but not irrational, and complained of nothing except thirst, for which he two or three times drank water. As it was not looked upon as any thing extraordinary, I did not hear of the circumstance till some hours after the man’s death. He did not intend to kill himself; but, in the course of his indulgence, ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... from a spirit, but merely fortuitious. 3. That the inconstancy of such notices, in cases equally important, proves they did not proceed from any such agent. 4. That as our most distinct dreams had nothing in them of any significancy, it would be irrational and vain to think that they came from heaven. And, 5. That as men were not always thus warned or supplied with notice of good or evil, so all men are not alike supplied with them; and what reason could we give, why one man or one woman should not have the ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... interwoven in the Soul of Man. "So it is in that of a Wolf;" However irrational, ungenerous, and unsocial the love of liberty may be in a rude Savage, he is capable of being enlightned by Experience, Reflection, Education, and civil, and Political Institutions. But the Nature of the Wolf is, and ever will be confined to running in the forest to satisfy his ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... indifference, yet the agent himself, so far as a sober reflection upon the moral character of the process, and a distinct perception of the dreadful issue of it, are concerned, is much of the time as destitute of self-knowledge as an irrational brute itself. For, were sinful men constantly self-examining, they would be constantly in torment. Men can be happy in sin, only so long as they can sin without thinking of it. The instant they begin to perceive and understand what they are doing, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... inefficiency—he loved her timidity, and, oh, how he had loved her love! He had made her promise to be jealous! Eleanor was not a reasoning person—probably no jealous woman is; but she did recognize the fact that what made him love her then, made him impatient with her now. This seemed to her irrational; and so, of course, it was!—just as the tide is irrational, or the turning of the earth on its axis is irrational. Nature has nothing to do with reason. So, in its deep and beautiful and animal beginnings, Love, too, is irrational. It has to ascend to Reason! But Eleanor did not know ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune, from which these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... beings to damn them, or command a sinner to repent and come to Christ, and condemn him for not doing it, if it were not in his own power upon moral suasion to obey, &c. It is true indeed, that in comparison of the irrational insect and inanimate creation, man is a noble creature, both as to his formation, I am wonderfully made, Psal cxxxix. 14. and also in his intellectual parts, but much more in his primeval state and dignity, ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... majority of Vedic hymns consists in simple invocations of the fire, the water, the sky, the sun, and the storms, often under the same names which afterward became the proper names of Hindu deities, but as yet nearly free from all that can be called irrational or mythological. There is nothing irrational, nothing I mean we cannot enter into or sympathize with, in people imploring the storms to cease, or the sky to rain, or the sun to shine. I say there is nothing irrational in it, though perhaps it might be more accurate to say ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... the young readers, it is hoped that no worse effect will result than to make them wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the Plays at full length (such a wish will be neither peevish nor irrational). When time and leave of judicious friends shall put them into their hands, they will discover in such of them as are here abridged (not to mention almost as many more, which are left untouched) many surprising events and turns of fortune, which for their ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... regarded as binding upon their consciences by the great mass of the Western Asiatics. Western Asia was a seething-pot, in which were mixed up a score of contradictory creeds, old and new, rational and irrational, Sabaism, Magism, Zoroastrianism, Grecian polytheism, teraphim-worship, Judaism, Chaldae mysticism, Christianity. Artaxerxes conceived it to be his mission to evoke order out of this confusion, to establish in lieu of this extreme diversity an ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... fertile and healthy Archipelago larger than Great Britain. The haste, the secrecy, the sharp practice, of the New Zealand Company were forced on the Wakefields by the mulish obstinacy of careless or irrational people. Their land-purchasing might have taken place legally, leisurely, and under proper Government supervision, had missionaries been business-like, had Downing-Street officials known what colonizing meant, and had Lord Glenelg been fitted ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... healthfully provided for in this manner than by confining the child to a warm atmosphere. Young children should never be dressed decollete—in low necks and short sleeves. That fashion is a dangerous one which leaves the neck, shoulders, and arms uncovered. To this irrational custom may be traced a vast amount of the suffering and many of the deaths of early life; doubtless, also, in many cases it lays the foundation of consumption, which manifests itself a little later. But, it is said, the child will be 'hardened' by having its chest and limbs thus exposed. ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... shoulders over Percival's note. It was irrational, no doubt, but Thorne had a right to please himself, and might as well take care of his pride, since he had not much else to take care of. So he attempted no persuasion, but simply sent any Fordborough news and forwarded occasional letters from Mrs. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... have the Bible and I am glad to say it behind me. This magnificent chapter,* a portion of which I read as our lesson this morning, gives precisely the same idea of faith as that which I am going to outline. What is faith? Faith is a purely rational faculty. It is not irrational, but it is perfectly understandable. Suppose there is a man suddenly accused of a crime, and I never saw him before, I do not even know his name; but I go into court when he is brought up for trial, and I say that I have faith in that man, and I do not ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... principles, and which possibly may not exist at all. Nor will we think so meanly of the taste, the good feeling, and the good sense of these men, as to believe that they think themselves at all flattered by any admiration founded on such an irrational contempt. They well know that Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, have been admired, together with Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin, and they do not themselves desire to be put upon a separate list. The author ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... like all other faculties, as long as it is controlled by reason. But what if the fear be not rational, but irrational? What if it be, in plain homely English, blind fear; fear of the unknown, simply because it is unknown? Is it not likely, then, to be afraid of the wrong object? to be hurtful, ruinous to animals as well as to man? Any one will ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... which I anticipated the hour of one, and the disclosure of the unknown undertaking to which I had bound myself, was irrational and morbid. But, honestly, I doubt it; my tendency has always been that of many other weak characters, to act impetuously, and afterwards to reproach myself for consequences which I have, perhaps, in reality, had little or no ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... necessity be linked with the logical fact. It is possible to will economically without willing morally; and it is possible to conduct oneself with perfect economic coherence, while pursuing an end which is objectively irrational (immoral), or, better, an end which would be so judged in a superior ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... to humanity, it is a disgrace under the marriage bond just as much as apart from the hypocritical blessing of the church or the law. If the public prostitute is a being who deserves to be treated as a pariah, it is hopelessly irrational to withhold every sort of moral opprobrium from the woman who leads a similar life under a different set of external circumstances. Either the prostitute wife must come under the moral ban, or there must be an end to the complete ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... for an hour upon her own resources, though in situations which scarcely seemed to admit of any occasion for taxing those resources; and often I have felt anger towards myself for what appeared to be an irrational or effeminate timidity, and have struggled with my own mind upon occasions like the present, when I knew that I could not have acknowledged my tremors to a friend without something like shame, and a fear to excite his ridicule. No; if in anything I ran ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... a Quaker in many of her observances. To that creed she adhered with a rigorous determination. She had so often manifested her political sympathies, which were intensified to an irrational degree as appeared from passionate disclosures, that her father was led to observe that she was more a Tory at heart than General ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... their student days long past descended upon the friends. Frederick was still in a state of excitement and irrational recklessness. He pinned his faith to the moment, ready to stake his yesterday and his morrow upon it. The twilight of the room brought back memories of youthfully blissful times. He had found his old friend again and a new friend of the same warmth of temperament and ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... as an element dialectically required, must be pinned in and kept and consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say anything of the sort.[69] Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational, and NOT to be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final system of truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality, a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if possible, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the Hindoos turns on the battles between the Asuras, the irrational demons of the air, the comets, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... laugh that seemed to her the first irrational flaw in something exquisitely reasonable, and ran down the dark stairs. She attended imaginatively to the sound of his footsteps; as on her first excited night in country lodgings the summer before she had sat up in bed listening to horse's hooves beating through the moonlit village street, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... like Aaron Burr, and thus misled their followers. The impulse to inflict death or imprisonment or confiscation on anybody was infrequent or short-lived; the desire for such punishment lingered only in an irrational wish for vengeance on Jefferson Davis. But, if the leading class in the society and public life of the South were morally responsible for a great treason and rebellion, it might seem not only just but wise to exclude them from ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... they will shirk your most stringent proofs. You can make no impression upon their wills. They will believe any thing but that God has interrupted the course of nature in favour of any one but themselves. In short, if we wish to see human reason in its most irrational mood, we have but to enter into conversation with a Protestant who asserts and thinks that he believes the Bible miracles to be true, and urge upon him the proofs of such modern miracles as are recorded of St. Frances of Rome. You will perceive first, ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... suppose, whether I am speaking in jest or earnest. In the most solemn earnest, I assure you; though such is the strange course of our popular life that all the irrational arts of destruction are at once felt to be earnest; while any plan for those of instruction on a grand scale, sounds like a dream, or jest. Still, I do not absolutely propose to decorate our public ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... as ills, seeing that "everything is right"? Let {59} Mr. Wells once take his principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... nor could human wit have succeeded. The exasperated Duke was contumacious, irrational; the two Majesties kept pulling different ways upon him. Matters grew from very bad to worse; and Mecklenburg continued long a running sore. Not many months after this (I think, still in 1729), the irrational Duke, having got money out of Russia, came home again from Dantzig; to notable increase ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to them who are county councillors, builders, contractors, navvies, glaziers, decorators, and so forth. There is but a tiny residue of persons who do not swell and sparkle. And of these glum bystanders at the carnival I am one. Our aloofness is mainly irrational, I suppose. It is due mainly to temperamental Toryism. We say 'The old is better.' This we say to ourselves, every one of us feeling himself thereby justified in his attitude. But we are quite aware that such a postulate would not be ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... the human race is compared to the Yahoos, and placed in a loathsome and ridiculous light. They are represented as most irrational creatures, frequently engaged in wars or acrimonious disputes as to whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh, whether it be better to kiss a post or throw it into the fire, and what is the best colour of a coat!—referring to religious disputes between Catholics and Protestants. He says, that among ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things. Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy. Such is the irrational element ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... types of series than there are finite numbers. There are probably more points in space and more moments in time than there are finite numbers. There are exactly as many fractions as whole numbers, although there are an infinite number of fractions between any two whole numbers. But there are more irrational numbers than there are whole numbers or fractions. There are probably exactly as many points in space as there are irrational numbers, and exactly as many points on a line a millionth of an inch long as in the whole of infinite space. There is a greatest of all infinite numbers, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... of the Third Estate as the House of the People, and not as the House of a privileged class, the Ministry and Parliament of 1831 virtually conceded the principle of Universal Suffrage. In this point of view the ten-pound franchise was an arbitrary, irrational, and impolitic qualification. It had, indeed, the merit of simplicity, and so had the constitutions of Abbe Sieyes. But its immediate and inevitable result ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... cried out against for schismatics and sectaries; as if, while the temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrational men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... that the Emperor in Rome should have known anything about the owners of a farm in Como. But Domitian's evil nature lay like a blight over the whole empire, and his cruelty, mean-spirited as well as irrational, was as likely to touch the low as the high. Angered by some officer's careless story of an insolent soldier's interview with Marcus's grandfather, he used a spare moment to order the confiscation of the rich acres and the slaves of the ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... friend; but I want to know first, whether you admit the resolution of all things into their elements to be a rational explanation of them, and the consideration of them in syllables or larger combinations of them to be irrational—is this your view? ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... I do not doubt you will be astonished, Sir, by such resistance, and by so long a course of inconstancy; so many graces, so much ingratitude; but the sequel will astonish you still more, when you shall see this manner of acting grow stronger with my age, and that reason, far from correcting so irrational a procedure, has served only to give more force and more scope to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... As it is, I shall have to turn back ingloriously, re infecta. The guide will tell everybody at Pontresina that I went on, in spite of the accident; and then it would get into the English papers, and all the world would say that I was so dreadfully cruel and heartless. People are always so irrational in their ethical judgments. Oswald's quite dead, that's certain; nobody could fall over such a precipice as that without being killed a dozen times over before he even reached the bottom. A very painless and easy death too; ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen |
