"Illusory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... things flow on in one boundless ocean of passivity, while there is no First Mover, no Self-active Agent in the universe. Indeed, Mr. Mill has expressly declared, that the distinction between agent and patient is illusory.(51) If this be true, we are persuaded that M. Comte has been more successful in delivering the world from the being of a God, than Mr. Mill has been in relieving it from the difficulties attending ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... suffice for these purposes, and therefore limited issues to that sum. The Secretary proposes no change of this limitation and places no reliance therefore on any increase of resources from increase of circulation. Additional loans in this mode would indeed almost certainly prove illusory; for diminished value could hardly fail to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... purifying it, not in any way of replacing it. But we must distinguish in it what is pure fact, and what is ulterior arrangement, in order to see what are the problems which really are presented, and what are, on the contrary, the false problems, the illusory problems, those which relate only ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... intimidation" during strikes fell into the domain of common law. Yet, even during the dock-labourers' strike in 1887, relief money had to be spent for fighting before the Courts for the right of picketing, while the prosecutions of the last few years menace once more to render the conquered rights illusory. ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... give them all the advantages they desired, without involving them in irksome obligations if there came a change of masters. "Venice fought for her own hand," let other nations as they might be led astray by illusory hopes of allies and friends bound by ties of gratitude. She well knew how to guard herself against the spirit of perfidy so active in the Middle Ages, as well as how to exercise that spirit ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... improvement of the race embodies a new ideal. We are familiar with legislative projects for compulsory certificates as a condition of marriage. But even apart from all the other considerations which make such schemes both illusory and undesirable, these externally imposed regulations fail to go to the root of the matter. If they are voluntary, if they spring out of a fine eugenic aspiration, it is another matter. Under these conditions the method may be carried out at once. Professor Grasset has pointed out one ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the upper House. He believed that the dream that he had of seeing the colonies form eventually "a monarchical government, presided over by one nearly and closely allied to the present royal family," would be proved quite illusory by the legislation in question. "Nothing," he added, "like a free and regulated monarchy could exist for a single moment under such a constitution as that which is now proposed for Canada. From the moment ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... aspect of the Home Rule controversy was emphasised Englishmen asked what sort of persecution Irish Protestants had to fear from a Parliament in Dublin, and appeared to think all such fear illusory unless evidence could be adduced that the Holy Office was to be set up at Maynooth, equipped with faggot and thumb-screw. Of persecution of that sort there never has been, of course, any apprehension in modern ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... recognizes very clearly the undesirability of granting concessions to foreigners and is ready to do so only because of necessity. The members of the Government realize that the lifting of the blockade will be illusory unless the Soviet Government is able to establish credits in foreign countries, particularly the United States and England, so that goods may be bought in those countries. For Russia to-day is in a position to export only a little gold, a little ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... spectral and fleeting as the campaign had been illusory now began. The whole Protestant world was aflame with indignation at the loss of Wesel. The States' government had already proposed to deposit Julich in the hands of a neutral power if the Archduke would abstain from military movements. But Albert, proud of his achievements ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... accessible in English, and in general to keep Americans in touch with the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the continent of Europe. No attempt will be made to give what Americans miscall "the best books," if by this is meant conformity to some high and illusory standard of past greatness; any twentieth-century book which displays creative power or a new outlook or more than ordinary interest or charm will be eligible for inclusion. Nor will the attempt be made to select books that merely confirm American standards of ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... called him 'the limit.' Whence came it, or was it ghost of scent—sheer emanation from memory? She looked round her. Nothing—not a thing, no tiniest disturbance of her hall, nor of the diningroom. A little day-dream of a scent—illusory, saddening, silly! In the silver basket were new cards, two with 'Mr. and Mrs. Polegate Thom,' and one with 'Mr. Polegate Thom' thereon; she sniffed them, but they smelled severe. 'I must be tired,' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... these and other better thoughts, the visitor, lightly humming a tune, now began indifferently pacing the poop, so as not to betray to Don Benito that he had at all mistrusted incivility, much less duplicity; for such mistrust would yet be proved illusory, and by the event; though, for the present, the circumstance which had provoked that distrust remained unexplained. But when that little mystery should have been cleared up, Captain Delano thought he might extremely regret it, did he allow Don Benito to ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... liberties of Spain; that it saw in his success the probable fulfilment of its designs upon the Floridas;[359] and that its chosen ground for proceeding against Great Britain, rather than France, was her refusal to conform her action to a statement of the Emperor's, the illusory and deceptive character of ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... reality; and where consequently there is illusion and deception. Mother Juliana is aware that the crucifix is not really bleeding, as it seems to do, and she explicitly distinguishes such a vision from her later illusory dream-presentment of the Evil One. This dream while it lasted was, like all dreams, confounded with reality; whereas the other phenomena, even if made of "dream-stuff," were rated at their true value. Hence it seems to me that if such things have any outward independent reality, to see ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... out of the fissures in sheets. But in a day all traces of the storm would disappear, and if, meanwhile, a sudden breath of wind had carried the vessel a few knots on her southward course, the hopes thus raised would prove illusory, and once more she would lie on a sea of molten lead, or, still worse, would be rocked on a long swell that had all the discomforts of a gale without its ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... his travels in Italy, France, and Germany, in the hope of recovering his powers of virility. He failed not, as usual, to meet with physicians who, from mercenary motives, held out to him the most illusory prospects of a perfect cure. At length, after six years passed in travelling and in vain attempts to regain the generative faculty, he returned to the candid and able physician from whom he had the truth, and whose opinion he ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... "As everything is illusory, we had better make our illusions as pleasant as possible. 'That,' he said, 'has been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... strand as much as possible. It was there that he met with the pitfalls. They were multiplied before him under three forms: the pitfall of water, the pitfall of snow, and the pitfall of sand. This last is the most dangerous of all, because the most illusory. To know the peril we face is alarming; to be ignorant of it is terrible. The child was fighting against unknown dangers. He was groping his way through something which might, perhaps, be ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... folded in a silent ball of sleep, All the flowers are faded from the asphalt isle in the sea, Only we hard-faced creatures go round and round, and keep The shores of this innermost ocean alive and illusory. ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... English that were on the northern bank from their main body that had already crossed the bridge. The commander of the Russian advance guard was himself quite astounded at the success that the fortune of war had thrown into his lap: had not the fog rendered the scouting on both sides illusory, and had not chance allowed him to fall in with this gap in the English columns, the chances would, considering the narrowness of the road, have been much more favourable to the English than for him, and the battle would probably have ended with the defeat of his forces. As it was, General Ivanov, ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... rest? The talker owned that there was a great deal about these which was to his purpose, but, upon the whole, the criticism was too desultory and fragmentary, and the quotation was illustrative rather than representative, and so far it was illusory. He had a notion that Hunt's stories from the Italian poets were rather more in the line he would have followed, but he had not read these since he was a boy, and he was not prepared ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... persuaded him to stand still for five minutes it would have been actually possible to see him grow. He grew at the rate of about an inch a week for the best part of a year. When he had finished he looked like nothing on earth. At one time we cherished a brief but illusory hope that he was going to turn into some sort of an imitation of a St. Bernard; but the symptoms rapidly passed off, and his final and permanent aspect was that of a rather badly ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... indeed would have been fruitless had the Queen still been hampered by danger from France. Fortunately for their cause the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis at this juncture freed Elizabeth's hands. By this treaty, which was practically concluded in March 1559, Calais was left in French holding on the illusory pledge of its restoration to England eight years later; but peace was secured and the danger of a war of succession, in which Mary Stuart would be backed by the arms of France, for a while averted. ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... Dutch government; and the treaty was finally concluded on March 25. It was signed by Great Britain, France, Spain, and the Batavian republic, while the Porte was admitted as an accessory power. It differed from the preliminary convention in no important respect, except in the illusory safeguards for the claims of the Prince of Orange, the secret arrangement for evading the cost of the French prisoners, and the provisions concerning Malta, pregnant with the seeds of future enmity. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... below."[2119]—Consequently, the new constitutional act withdraws from the nation the right to elect its deputies; it will simply elect candidates to the deputation and through three degrees of election, one above the other; thus, it is to take part in the choice of its candidates only through "an illusory and metaphysical participation."[2120] The right of the electors of the first degree is wholly reduced to designating one-tenth among themselves; the right of those of the second degree is also reduced to designating one-tenth among themselves; the right of those ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... saw it; had you wished, you might have touched it, which is certainly all the evidence you have of the existence of the room in which we are now sitting. Hypnotism is not a cause of hallucination, as is commonly supposed, but of fact. Its effects are not illusory, but real. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that they are as real as anything else, and that all the phenomena of nature are mere illusions of the senses, which they undoubtedly are. But whichever side we take, all appearances are the ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... of the sector chief to the dreaded words "delayed report" was a shocked negation, an illusory belief that it couldn't ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... he should proceed thither. To what end should he? No more now can he build castles in the air, basing them on the power of creditor over debtor. That bubble has burst, leaving him only the reflection, how illusory it has been. Although, for his nefarious purpose, it has proved weak as a spider's web, it is not likely Colonel Armstrong will ever again submit himself to be so ensnared. Broken men become cautious, and shun taking ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... That all things, good and permanent and true, come only out of suffering; that men pay for their dreams with pain." He let the full import of that drive home. "The verdict was, that if you'd forget your public and look for truth, paint with restraint and less brilliant illusory abandon, you'd be ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Middle Temple; and he was afterwards called to the bar, but literary pursuits withheld him from practicing. He had brought with him from Ireland his translations from Anacreon; and published these by subscription in 1800, dedicated to the Prince Regent (then the illusory hope of political reformers), with no inconsiderable success. Lord Moira, Lady Donegal, and other leaders of fashionable society, took him up with friendly warmth, and he soon found himself a well-accepted guest in the highest circles in London. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not, he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them, and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... "poet of poets and purest of men." And he is ours. Byron, with all his splendid energy and terrible scorn, quailed before the supreme problems of life; but Shelley faced them with a courage all the greater because it was unconscious, and casting aside all superstitious dreams and illusory hopes, yearned prophetically towards the Future, when freedom, truth and love shall supersede all other trinities, and realise here on earth that Paradise which theologians have only promised in a world ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... Dispositions more boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery, since there must be evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to grasp his share of it as a low one. A wider scope of view, and a deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station, all proved illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos. But Phoebe, in order to keep the universe in its old place, was fain ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the desert on a dark night is confusing to the most observant wayfarer. On either side, beyond the light of the car, illusory forest stands for mile upon mile. Up hill or down or across the level it is the same—a narrow, winding trail through dimly seen woods. The most familiar road grows strange; the miles are longer; you ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... he reflected; what were four years, after all? It must inevitably take a long time for Armageddon to ripen to yeast itself up. The episode of 1914 had been a preliminary skirmish. And as for the war having come to an end—why, that, of course, was illusory. It was still going on, smouldering away in Silesia, in Ireland, in Anatolia; the discontent in Egypt and India was preparing the way, perhaps, for a great extension of the slaughter among the heathen peoples. The Chinese boycott ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... As a religious philosophy it does not keep clear of the fallacy that an ascent though the unreal can lead to reality. "To suppose, as the mystic does, that the finite search has of itself no Being at all, is illusory, is Maya, is itself nothing, this is also to deprive the Absolute of even its poor value as a contrasting goal. For a goal that is a goal of no real process has as little value as it has content."[23] But, as Prof. Royce says, mysticism ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... was first realized under Jacobi at Siegburg, there has been a complete reversion to the system of combining the two classes in one institution. Parchappe, who opposed the separation of these classes, as illusory if justice is done to the incurable in the construction of the building provided for them, and mischievous if this is denied them, was constrained to admit, however, in view of the enormous number of lunatics in the Department of the Seine, that it was the least of two evils ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... up to him a face from which the mask had fallen, from which the illusory look of youth had fled. He turned away. . . And presently she began to speak again; ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... enemy's resistance proves more obstinate than originally anticipated, and it becomes clear that the original purpose is not to be attained with the available means, the expectation that after once engaging the enemy the fight can be broken off and the horses remounted will in most cases prove entirely illusory. ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... long held my fancy that we men may be the chief, and perhaps the only executives on earth; that we are detached on active service with, it may be only illusory, powers of free-will. Also that we are in some way accountable for our success or failure to further certain obscure ends, to be guessed as best we can; that though our instructions are obscure they are sufficiently clear to ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... reality Sarpi had more of the eighteenth century than of the sixteenth in his turn of mind, and stood far aloof from the doctrines over which his contemporaries contended, and the expectations entertained of his countrymen were illusory. The city was placed under an interdict, and the orders that were faithful to Rome departed across the Lagoon, singing hymns. The Pope looked about for means of coercion when Henry mediated. He owed much to Venice, which was the first of the Catholic Powers ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... the art of self-glorification, and their pan-German literature is certainly not only bold but ingenious in this respect. Is any one great outside Germany? Very well, let us trace his German origin. It may be remote, it may be hidden by centuries of illusory nationality, but it must be there. France has her apostles of superiority. Their style is more flexible, their pretensions less clumsy, but they neglect no opportunity of seducing us into a belief that France, and France only, is mistress of the human mind. Russia has her fervid declaimers of ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... with the rest of the coastwise ragtag, which was seeking harbor and holding-ground, came the ancient schooner Polly. Fog-masked by those illusory mists, she was a shadow ship like the others; but, more than the others, she seemed to be a ghost ship, for her lines and her rig informed any well-posted mariner that she must be a centenarian; with her grotesqueness ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... talent, appearing in a perverted age, are carried by their very genius all the more certainly to ruin. All that, in a more favorable period, would have raised them to be stars in the art firmament, now made them fall like some ignis fatuus, the brilliant light of which owes its illusory existence only to miasma. This striking fact appears, at first sight, inexplicable; but it is easy to understand, if we consider the different character of the two arts. Plastic art had formerly emulated painting, and thus, especially ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... inevitably be the dissolution of such laws into chaos. For a consistent scientific thinking that goes this way, therefore, nothing is left but to recognize chaos as the only real basis of an apparently ordered world, a chaos on whose surface the laws that seem to hold sway are only the illusory picturings of the human mind. This, then, is the principle of Indeterminacy as it has been encountered in the course of practical investigation into the electrical processes within ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... to the Jews. The law courts, at least, being the organs of the public conscience of Russia, were bound to condemn severely the sinister pogrom heroes. But this hope, too, proved illusory. In the majority of cases the judges treated act of open pillage and of violence committed against life and limb as petty street brawls, as "disturbances of the public peace," and imposed upon their perpetrators ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... given at the Industrial Commission showed, as to misrepresent the facts in their defence. The difficulty was how to explain the association of the State Attorney and State Secretary, in whose good intentions and integrity there was a general belief. The solution was to be found in the illusory promises of reform under the heading of franchise and reorganization of the finances and other matters. These proposals, it was believed by Mr. Kruger and his party, would secure the support of the ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... not understanding it? . . . Those who have railed at metaphysics as an occult science will be as ashamed of themselves as those who railed at chemistry on the ground that pursuit of the philosopher's stone was illusory. . . . In the matter of principles there are only those of Lavoisier, Claude Bernard, and Pasteur-the EXPERIMENTAL everywhere and always. Greetings, then, to the new science which is going to change the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... therefore, should not be needlessly affronted—but also as one of a class of whom nineteen out of every twenty will dangle before the publisher's eyes wiles and hopes and expectations of the most dangerous and illusory character,—which constitute indeed the very perils that it is his true function in life skilfully to evade. The Ballantynes were quite unfit for this function; first, they had not the experience requisite for it; next, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... to grumble; but if the case of unappreciated genius is hard, it goes harder still with the stomach whose claims are ignored. Slighted affection, a subject of which too much has been made, is founded upon an illusory longing; for if the creature fails, love can turn to the Creator who has treasures to bestow. But the stomach! . . . Nothing can be compared to its sufferings; for, in the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... some alleged differences between the play and the novel are illusory, and that a certain technical difference, though possibly real, is superficial and slight, I come to the fundamental difference between them—a difference which the laity does not suspect, which is seldom insisted upon ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... and degrees of refinement, and to those to whom she was not as a blissful reminiscence of long ago, she appeared as a revelation, new and straight from heaven, a fancy, a dream! It seemed meet to them that she arrived in the illusory sunset of a sweet spring day, like some lovely forecast of the ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... I leave England to deal with her: England who keeps her busy with childish things, and soothes her vanity with illusory diplomatic successes, such as the exequatur of the Madagascar Consuls (which the settled policy of the residents would have achieved in time) and with useless concessions amidst the fogs of Lake Chad, or on the Niger, or in regions whose possession ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... deciphered, studied, and translated, it will probably be found that they contain a tolerably full indication of what Assyrian science really was, and it will then be seen how far it was real and valuable, in what respects mistaken and illusory. At present this mine is almost unworked, nothing more having been ascertained than that the subjects whereof the tables treat are various, and their apparent value very different. Comparative philology seems to have been largely studied, and the works upon it exhibit great ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... in the usual licence. Deputies from witchdom attended from all parts, even from Scotland. When reproached by some of his slaves for failing to come to the rescue in the torture-chamber or at the stake, their lord replied by causing illusory fires to be lit, bidding the doubters walk through the harmless flames, promising not more inconvenience in the bonfires of their persecutors. Lycanthropic criminals were also brought up who had prowled about and devastated the sheepfolds. Espaignol and De l'Ancre were provided ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... change, space and the possibilities of the unknown, these are constant elements of our day- dreams; now and then actual life dangles visions of them before our eyes, alas! only to teach us that the aspirations which they inspire are, for the most part, illusory. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... corner of my eye and understand him. Very well, I have been the victim of a hallucination which my senses accepted as real. And which I was able to murder only by pretending I too believed it real. Therefore, having committed this illusory crime, there results this ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... illusory. Leigh Hunt, Wraxall and the rest made but ineffectual martyrs; the Bourbons straggled back into France and Spain, with such results as we see; George IV. weathered, by no merit of his own, a fresh series of storms at home; the clouds that lowered upon his house were made glorious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... ancients have it; and some of these latter will even lie on their backs, after a fall, and lift up their voices, and prove to you that in the nature of things they ought to have gone up, and their being down is monstrous; illusory. ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... of Toulouse; and would have inherited his dominions, had not that prince, desirous of preserving the succession in the male line, conveyed the principality to his brother, Raymond de St. Gilles, by a contract of sale which was in that age regarded as fictitious and illusory. By this means the title to the county of Toulouse came to be disputed between the male and female heirs; and the one or the other, as opportunities favoured them, had obtained possession. Raymond, grandson ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... paying the premiums, in whole or in part, are far more keenly aware of the cost, and alive to reducing and removing the evil conditions. Moreover, their interest is stimulated by the fact that they are the first to gain by any temporary economies, and the more so because of the illusory belief sure to persist, that they are the ultimate as well as the immediate bearers of ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... journeys, and the reading of books? The weariness entailed, the mere continuity of looking or attending, quite apart from tiresome accompanying circumstances, make the apparently real act, what we expect to be the act of enjoyment, quite illusory; like Coleridge, "we see, not feel, how beautiful things are." Later on, all odious accompanying circumstances are utterly forgotten, eliminated, and the weariness is gone: we enjoy not merely unhampered by accidents, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... this permanence, of which so much is thought, is an illusory guarantee, for it is often suspended by one Government or another, and the magistrates are constantly at the mercy of political crises. Their moral ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... advance of sugar produced by British free labour, and to give a great additional stimulus to slave labour." In support of this amendment the noble mover paraded a vast array of "facts and figures," which made a wonderful show of industry and knowledge; but his statistical statements were illusory as his logic was unsound. The awkward manner in which his amendment was expressed embarrassed his arguments and those of his party, justifying the description of him in the following passage of his memoir, written by Disraeli:—"He had not much sustained his literary culture, and of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... held to their disciples; requesting from each other those prayers which we are told that they mutually despised, and making pecuniary sacrifices during life to purchase what, if their accusers be correct, they deemed an illusory assistence ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... alike of public and private morality. The Roman character had broken down before the gradual inroads of an alien luxury and the opening of wide fields of empire to plunder. It is an age of incredible scandal, of mob law, of coups d'etat and proscriptions, saved only from utter gloom by the illusory light shed from the figures of a few great men and by the never absent sense of freedom and expansion. There still remained a republican liberty of action, an inspiring possibility of reform, an outlet for personal ambition, which facilitated the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... the advance would be imperilled; and, indeed, it is doubtful whether a tenth of the money required would be advanced, even in London, on those terms. For a similar reason any formal pledge of Irish rates and taxes, to make up deficiencies in working, would be illusory. At any rate, if Irish Land Purchase is to be continued under British credit (and it certainly will be a prior claim and charge), it is idle to expect Parliament to undertake the vast additional obligations involved in Irish railway ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... the disease called "Sereh," and the new race requires to be ameliorated in this important direction, too. Other qualities must also be considered, and any casual deterioration in other characters would make all progress illusory. For these reasons much time is ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... an air of authenticity to the story, which sometimes make us smile, and sometimes rather bore us, in other novels are all to the purpose; for there is a real point in putting such a story in the mouth of the sufferer, and in giving us for the time an illusory belief in his reality. It is one of the exceptional cases in which the poetical aspect of a position is brought out best by the most prosaic accuracy of detail; and we imagine that Robinson Crusoe's island, with all his small household torments, will always be more impressive ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. visionary &c (imaginary) 515; immaterial &c 137; spectral &c 980; dreamy; shadowy; ethereal, airy; cloud built, cloud formed; gossamery, illusory, insubstantial, unreal. vacant, vacuous; empty &c 187; eviscerated; blank, hollow; nominal; null; inane. Phr. there's nothing in it; an ocean of dreams ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... painstaking perusal of more than two hundred volumes yielded only meagre results, and in most of these illusory references I found not a single fact worth recording. This comparatively prodigious number included gazeteers, encyclopedias, geographies, military histories, general histories, State and National reports, journals of ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... with a person who had already been the object of her sensual passion. As ever, she had thrown herself into the new part with a certain imaginative fervour. Also it was quite possible that, for the moment, she believed what she said, and that this illusory sincerity had furnished her with that deep tenderness of accent, those despairing attitudes, those tears. How well he knew it all! She had a sentimental hallucination as other people have a physical one. She forgot that she was acting a lie, was no longer conscious whether ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... the general advance. Bread, meat, and vegetables were sold at prices greater than had ever before been known; while the wages of labour rose in exactly the same proportion. The artisan who formerly gained fifteen sous per diem now gained sixty. New houses were built in every direction; an illusory prosperity shone over the land, and so dazzled the eyes of the whole nation, that none could see the dark cloud on the horizon announcing the storm that ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... (practically an appointment) with Cyrus Redgrave at the Crystal Palace; would not that be more difficult to confess than anything she could reasonably suppose to have happened between Harvey and Mary Abbott? Yet more than ever she hoped to meet Redgrave, to hold him by a new link of illusory temptation, that he might exert himself to the utmost in promoting her success. For among the impulses which urged her forward, her reasons for desiring a public triumph, was one which Harvey perhaps never for a moment imagined—a desire to shine gloriously in the eyes of her ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... can you say distinctly that anything is white, when it may happen that that which is black may appear white? Or how are we to call those things evident, or to say that they are impressed faithfully on the mind, when it is uncertain whether it is really moved or only in an illusory manner? And so there is neither colour, nor body, nor truth, nor argument, nor sense, nor anything certain left us. And, owing to this, it frequently happens that, whatever they say, they are asked by some people,—Do you, then, perceive that? But they who put this question ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... the need of contenting his heart. Was not that gross superstition of Lourdes the hateful symptom of the excessive suffering of the times? On the day when the Gospel should be universally diffused and practised, suffering ones would cease seeking an illusory relief so far away, assured as they would be of finding assistance, consolation, and cure in their homes amidst their brothers. At Lourdes there was an iniquitous displacement of wealth, a spectacle so frightful as to make one doubt of God, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... being, thought, and happiness. Kapila taught that the spirit became free from all mundane fetters as soon as it perceived that all phenomena were only passing reflections produced by nature upon the spirit, and as soon as it was able to shut its eyes to those illusory visions. Both systems therefore, and the same applies to all the other philosophical systems of the Brahmans, admitted an absolute or self-existing Being as the cause of all that exists or seems to exist. And here lies the specific difference ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... man, of his organization, of his thought, but not, scientifically, of his mind. This entity, this occult cause, belongs to the metaphysic stage of theorizing. "There is no place," he cries, "for this illusory psychology, the last transformation of theology!"—though, by the way, so far as a belief in this abstract entity of mind is concerned, the metaphysic condition of our knowledge appears to be quite as old, quite as primitive, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... can better afford to wait for further and more certain evidence than to commit itself to theories which may prove stumbling-blocks to truth until that indefinite time when future investigations shall show their illusory nature. ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... actual existence of the universe, of the physical body, and of disease; Mrs. Eddy teaches that they are all illusory. The earth, the sun, the millions of stars, says Mrs. Eddy, exist only in erring "mortal mind"; and mortal mind itself does not exist. All phenomena of nature are merely illusory expressions of this fundamental error. "The compound minerals or aggregate substances composing the earth, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... she had gained the haven of her own apartment, when she pretty well went to pieces. So this was all, was it, that she owed her illusory appearance of success to? The amorous desires of a man old enough to be her father! Once more, she blissfully and ignorantly unsuspecting all the while, it was love that had made her world go round. The same long-circuited sex attraction that James ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... their hand. Seeing that she was endowed with natural gifts of intelligence and good looks, they also felt solicitous to bestow upon her a certain knowledge of books, with no other purpose than that of satisfying, by this illusory way, their wishes of having a son to nurture and of dispelling the anguish felt by them, on account of the desolation and void in their family ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... this kind so constant as not to render a rigorously accurate adjustment illusory? Therein lies the entire question, and for our part we hesitate to pronounce ourselves in the negative.—La ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... the insatiate Revolution was irritated even by the concessions they had made; that the blind fury of factions which had not paused before royalty surrounded by its guards, would not hesitate before the illusory inviolability decreed by a constitution; and that their lives, those of their children, and those of the royal family which remained, had no longer any assurance of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... preemptors to 62-1/2 cents per acre, with a credit of two years, will so diminish the sale of other public lands as to render the expectation of future revenue from that source, beyond the expenses of survey and management, illusory. The Secretary of the Interior estimated the revenue from the public lands for the next fiscal year at $4,000,000, on the presumption that the present land system would remain unchanged. Should this bill become a law, he does not believe ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... owing to which there seems to exist a material world comprehending distinct individual existences. Being associated with this principle of illusion, Brahman is enabled to project the appearance of the world, in the same way as a magician is enabled by his incomprehensible magical power to produce illusory appearances of animate and inanimate beings. Maya thus constitutes the upadana, the material cause of the world; or—if we wish to call attention to the circumstance that Maya belongs to Brahman as a /s/akti—we may say that the material cause of the world is Brahman in so far as it ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... of these illusory provisions (amongst others) in the clauses of the Treaty of Peace is especially charged with danger for the future. The more extravagant expectations as to Reparation receipts, by which Finance Ministers have deceived their publics, will be ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... older, he came nearer to it, and saw the mountain so different from what it had appeared, and the intervening space that, seen from afar, had looked so bare and sterile, all covered with fruit-trees and enriched with vineyards, he began to see how illusory the judgment of the senses may be; and the first doubt was planted in his young soul as he perceived that, while the mind may grasp Nature in her grandeur and majesty, the work of the sage must be to examine ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... mere chance influenced my decision in the end. It is a mighty force that of mere chance; absolutely irresistible yet manifesting itself often in delicate forms such for instance as the charm, true or illusory, of a human being. It is very difficult to put one's finger on the imponderable, but I may venture to say that it is Flora de Barral who is really responsible for this novel which relates, in fact, the ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... Wall Street for several weeks, and this had culminated in a small, and probably a sham, tempest, with more stage thunder and lightning than any real. However, it was on that very account just the sort of cataclysm to overwhelm phantom and illusory ships of fortune like Arthur Carrolls. That week he acknowledged to himself that his career in the City was over, that it was high time for him to shut up his office and to shake the dust of the City from his feet, for fear of worse ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... hills, seen through the clear, rarefied atmosphere, is most beautiful. It seems a peculiar feature of everything in the East - not only the cities themselves, but even of the landscape - to look beautiful and enchanting at a distance; but upon a closer approach all its beauty vanishes like an illusory dream. Spots that from a distance look, amid their barren, sun-blistered surroundings, like lovely bits of fairyland, upon closer investigation degenerate into wretched habitations of a ragged, poverty-stricken people, having about ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... warns us that "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive," beautifully portraying the emptiness and illusory character of achievement. And, of those who have attained, Mr. E. F. Benson exclaims, "God help them!" These sayings are typical of a widespread literary fashion. Now to slander Mistress Joy to-day is a serious matter. For we are ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... most shadowlike dance of all. Even if the historian tries to go deeper, if he deals with economic conditions, with social organisations, with the study of the tendencies of the currents of thought, even then he is in the midst of shadows, the illusory shadows cast by unseen realities. This world is full of forms that are illusory, and the values are all wrong, the proportions are out of focus. The things which a man of the world thinks valuable, a spiritual man must cast aside as worthless. The diamonds of the world, with their glare and glitter ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... hoped for, that are never realized; enjoyed, that are impalpable to sense; where that, which by common convention is called substantial and real, is very far inferior to that which is falsely termed illusory and vain; where life borders on immortality; and the spiritual world so closely overhangs the natural, that it is as difficult to separate them as it is in Switzerland to know which is Alps and which is Heaven;—there may oftentimes be much pleasure, perhaps ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... 10, the point of attack, namely, the Black Knight at KB3, can be supported by as many Black units as White can bring up for the attack, but the defensive efficiency of one of Black's pieces is illusory, because it can be taken by a White piece. The plan would be as follows: White threatens Black's Knight for the third time with Kt-K4, and Black must reply QKt-Q2, because covering with R-K3 would cost the "exchange," ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... certain formality of living might call haste they had no thought of repenting at leisure, or otherwise. They were, in fact, quite happy and contented. Marriage had shattered no illusions. If, indeed, they cherished any illusory conceptions of each other, the intimacy of mating had merely served to confirm those illusions, to shape them into realities. They were young enough to be ardent lovers, old enough to know that love was not the culmination, but only an ecstatic phase ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... for by time or long confinement. The mother was beautiful as a woman, the daughter beautiful as a child; not even love could say so much now. Their hair is long, unkempt, and strangely white; they make us shrink and shudder with an indefinable repulsion, though the effect may be from an illusory glozing of the light glimmering dismally through the unhealthy murk; or they may be enduring the tortures of hunger and thirst, not having had to eat or drink since their servant, the convict, was taken away—that is, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... eternity being given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon us the block-universe, and of denying that possibilities exist?—just the point to be proved. To say that time is an illusory appearance is only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that the frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time may be ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... 'moderate Socialist' proposes to use the bourgeois state with its fraudulent democracy, its illusory theory of 'unity of all the classes,' its standing army, police and bureaucracy oppressing and baffling the masses; the revolutionary Socialist maintains that the bourgeois state must be completely destroyed, and proposes the organization of a new state—the state of the organized ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... near at hand; towards this they strive with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling for first utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter with a shout, and almost at the same moment the other is beside him; and behold they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, a mere cat's cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the sense of joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few nor far apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the working-men's demands in France as in Britain were granted, but the relief they promised was illusory, for prices still went up, leaving the recipients of the relief no better off. And as the wages payable for labor are limited, whereas prices may ascend to any height, the embittered laborer fancied he could better his lot by an appeal to the force which his organization wielded. The only ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... profuse were the British, agitated at one moment by the prospect of an Afghan invasion of India, at another by the fear of an overland march against Delhi of the combined armies of Napoleon and the Tsar. These apprehensions were equally illusory; but while they lasted they supplied the excuse for a constant stream of embassies, some from the British sovereign, others from the viceregal court at Calcutta, and were reproduced in a bewildering succession of Anglo-Persian Treaties. Sir John Malcolm, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... the more I grow convinced that this is no mere fancy, but actual science," Mr. Gerard continued; "for, again, you might well imagine that one drinks for the dreams or other illusory effects it is said to produce. At first, perhaps, yes; but such effects speedily pass away, they pass away indeed before the tyranny has established itself, while it would still be possible to shake it off. No, the dreams ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... few years, while Oglethorpe was in personal charge at Savannah and supplies from England were abundant, there was an appearance of success, which soon proved illusory. Not only were the conditions unfit for silk and wine, but the fertile tracts were malarial and the healthy districts barren, and every industry suited to the climate had to meet the competition of the South Carolinians with their slave labor and plantation system. The ne'er-do-weels ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips |
