"Irrational" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his liability to fear quite freely in these notes. His fear of animals was ineradicable. He had had an overwhelming dread of bears until he was twelve or thirteen, the child's irrational dread of impossible bears, bears lurking under the bed and in the evening shadows. He confesses that even up to manhood he could not cross a field containing cattle without keeping a wary eye upon them—his bull adventure rather increased than diminished that disposition—he ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... with a definite sense of well-being. And yet, because of the irrational and unexpecting nature of Omega, he almost died before reaching the Wee Coven ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... and the sphere among solids, are the most capacious. The theory of the regular solids was taught in his school, and his disciple, Archytas, was the author of a solution of the problem of two mean proportionals. Democritus of Abdera treated of the contact of circles and spheres, and of irrational lines and solids. Hippocrates treated of the duplication of the cube, and wrote elements of geometry, and knew that the area of a circle was equal to a triangle whose base is equal to its circumference, and altitude equal to its radius. The disciples ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... greater part of next day much after the manner of the preceding, and concluded that it would be highly irrational to shoot game, having plenty of provisions; yet I suspect our being too lazy to hunt, influenced us not a ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... comprehension and sympathy ready for me in his large and susceptible mind? But the thought only flickered feebly now and then, and died out before it could become a wish. The horror I had of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by an irrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely around my own, as we automatically perform the gesture we feel ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... is very remarkable that something like this tattowing was practised among the Thracians of old, and was actually considered as an indication of nobility. So says Herodotus in Terps. 6. The notion is no way irrational, that early and semi-civilized people had no other way of distinguishing ranks, than by making visible differences on the skin. The original inhabitants of Britain, it is probable, meant the same thing by their use of colouring substances. Though it ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... to substitute knowledge for guess-work came the studies of the experimental physiologists—in particular, Marshall Hall in England and Francois Magendie in France; and the joint efforts of these various workers led presently to the abandonment of those severe and often irrational depletive methods—blood-letting and the like—that had previously dominated medical practice. To this end also the "statistical method," introduced by Louis and his followers, largely contributed; and by the close of the first third of our century ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the participation of women in public affairs will impair the quality and character of home service is irrational and contrary to the tests of experience. Does an intelligent interest in the education of a child render a woman less a mother? Does the housekeeping instinct of woman, manifested in a desire for clean streets, pure water and unadulterated food, destroy her efficiency ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... something rational corresponding to three out of four primary passions—against delight was to be set joy; against grief there was nothing to be set, for that arose from the presence of ill which would rather never attach to the sage. Grief was the irrational conviction that one ought to afflict oneself where there was no occasion for it. The ideal of the Stoics was the unclouded serenity of Socrates of whom Xanthippe declared that he had always the same face whether on leaving the house In the morning ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... secretions, is at times so modified by anger as to rival the venom of the serpent in fatality, and it has no specific; and a careful analysis of the pathological relations of such poison proves that further experimentation and expectation is as irrational as the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... much? You might surely have given some hint of the cause. It is an additional reason for wishing you here. If I had, before I left New-York, sufficiently reflected on the subject, I would never have consented to this absurd and irrational mode of life. If you will come with Mr. Monroe, I will see you to New-York again; and if you have a particular aversion to the city of Philadelphia, you shall stay a day or two at Dr. Edwards's, ten miles from town, where I can spend the greater ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... perfectly certain that had Jane's family seen her then and been told that she was doing this remarkable thing for a woman she had never seen before that day, named Mary O'Shaughnessy, and also for a certain red-haired person of whom it had never heard, it would have considered Jane quite irrational. But it is entirely probable that Jane became really rational that night for the first time in her ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... thousand, eligible to offices in the Departments. The fifty thousand were in their turn to choose five thousand, who should be eligible to places in the Government and the Legislature. The actual appointments were to be made, however, not by the electors, but by the Executive. With the irrational multitude thus deprived of the power to bring back its old oppressors, priests, royalists, and nobles might safely do their worst. By way of still further precaution, Sieyes proposed that every Frenchman who had been elected to the Legislature ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... that aspirations 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... intellectual ones. All kinds of false ideas people have about one another which we are not seeing about us on every hand, false philosophies and religions, heresy trials, lockouts and strikes—all the irrational things people say and do to each other thousands of miles away are being produced by the way people are being fooled by their own precious insides. Each man is doing things that are unfair and wrong thousands of miles away, because ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the very life of man is the sentiment about antiquity. Irrational it may be, if you will, but never will it be stifled. Physical science strengthens rather than weakens it. Social science, hate it as it may, cannot touch it. In the socialist, William Morris, it is stronger than ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... coward, and no hoodwinked witness. He could tell his tale, when it was demanded of him, with such truth, and with such punctuality, and on such ample grounds, that a conviction of the truth instantly fell on all who heard him. 'Sirs,' said those who heard him break silence, 'it is not irrational for us to believe it,' with such solid arguments and with such an absence of mere suspicion and of all idle tales did he speak. On one occasion, on a mere 'inkling,' he woke up the guard; only, it was so true an inkling that it saved the city. ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... won't let you fancy me of such an irrational state of simplicity as not to be fully aware that you, with your 'nature of the fields and forests,' look down disdainfully and with an inward heat of glorying, upon me who have all my pastime in books—dead and seethed. Perhaps, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... their lives. At any time they had it in their power to alter their purposes, and in that fact we have an essential point of difference between eccentricity and insanity. We may regard their conduct as singular, because they made an unusual disposition of their property; but it was no more irrational than if the one had left his estate to the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," and the other had devoted his to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... fiendish noises which can be made by man or machinery. The whack of heavy falling bodies, the sudden shivering splinter of chopped logs, the crystal shatter of pounded ice, the crash of a tree hurled to the earth by a hurricane, the irrational, persistent chaos of noise made by switching freight-trains, the explosion of gas, the blasting of stone, and the terrific grinding of rock upon rock which precedes the collapse—all these have been in my touch-experience, and contribute to my idea of ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... crocodiles, rats, and onions, do we not see nations, who think themselves wiser than they, worship bread, into which they imagine, that through the enchantments of their priests, the divinity has descended. Is not the Bread-God the idol of many Christian nations, who, in this respect, are as irrational, as ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... to have their own way with the disease and the patient, and that they shall enjoy the simple privilege of locking him up, dieting him, and taking possession of his worldly goods and interests, as one who, by his irrational habits, or his outrages on the laws of physiology, or the fitness of things, or some other neology, has satisfactorily established his utter incapacity to take charge of his own affairs. No! This is not a cruel age; the rack, the wheel, the boot, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... is that kind of miniature 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 ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... is not he who feels no fear For that were stupid and irrational; But he, whose noble soul his fear subdues, And bravely dares the danger nature ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... even to the 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, nor did they show the stake of wood that had been put into the fire and prepared ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... apprehend to Elysium, but which I record that the society of less fortunate lands may avail itself of the advantage, and adopt the regulation in its moral police. Immediately that it was clearly ascertained that two persons of different sexes took an irrational interest in each other's society, all the world instantly went about, actuated by a purely charitable sentiment, telling the most extraordinary falsehoods concerning them that they could devise. Thus it was the fashion to call at one house and announce that you had detected the unhappy ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... refusal. The precept, Do as you would be done by, is here supreme, and it is to this class of duties that that precept applies, and the limits of our right to inflict pain on other creatures, whether rational or irrational, will be ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... 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
... common reason directed even pagan wise men wholly to interdict swearing in ordinary conversation, or about petty matters, as an irrational and immoral practice, unworthy of sober and discreet persons. "Forbear swearing about any matter," said Plato, cited by Clem. Alex. "Avoid swearing, if you can, wholly," said Epictetus. "For money ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... concluding narrative is by far the most meritorious part of the business. Still, the people are so very convulsive and tumble down so many places, and are always knocking other people's bones about in such a very irrational way, that I object. The way in which earthquakes won't swallow the monsters, and volcanoes in eruption won't boil them, is extremely aggravating. Also their habit of bolting when they are going ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... mad after the irrational methods of Cupid, he had sufficient sense not to examine too minutely into the reasons for this sudden passion. He was in love, and admitting as much to himself, there was an end of all argument. The long lane of his youthful ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... now, lastly, note how our Lord here touches the deep thought that this ignorance, which is sin, and is more properly named hatred, is utterly irrational and causeless. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... hundred, call me a horse." "But, suppose," said I, "the party should lose, on whom you sport your money, even as the birds did?" "We must first make all right," said the landlord, "as I told you before; the birds were irrational beings, and therefore couldn't come to an understanding with the others, as you and the young woman can. The birds fought fair; but I intend you and the young woman should fight cross." "What do you mean by cross?" ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... extremely quiet. It was regarded by all but the two persons immediately concerned as an eccentric mistake. Even Colonel Hitchcock, to whom Louise was almost infallible, could not trust himself to discuss with her, her decision to marry Dr. Sommers. It was all a sign of the irrational drift of things that seemed to thwart his energetic, honorable life. Even Sommers's attitude in the frank talk the two men had about the marriage offended the old merchant. Sommers had met his distant references to money matters by saying bluntly that he and Louise had decided ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... 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 ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... have been expected, by the aid of medicine, but a new branch of "legal medicine" came into being. It was, indeed, medicine which drew attention to the diseases and deaths of the victims in orphan asylums, victims of artificial or irrational feeding, in conjunction with wet nursing; it was medicine which passed in review one by one all those individual cases which proclaim this legal fact: children have no civil rights. Medicine now entered into another sphere where the victims were not "cases," but ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... action was granted by the statute of the Twelve Tables in cases of mischief done through wantonness, passion, or ferocity, by irrational animals; it being by an enactment of that statute provided, that if the owner of such an animal is ready to surrender it as compensation for the damage, he shall thereby be released from all liability. Examples of the application of this enactment may be found in kicking by a horse, or goring by ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... the material elements of thought, we are enabled, without any further appeal to experience, to base thereon a division by dichotomy. Thus when man has been defined as a rational animal, we have at once suggested to us a division of animal into rational and irrational. ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... Cambridge profess to give a liberal education; but you have only to look at their modern buildings to see that their teachers themselves do not know a good building from a bad one. They, like all the rest of us, think that taste in art is an irrational mystery; they trust in the expert and usually in the wrong one, as the ignorant and superstitious trust in the wrong priest. For as religion is merely mischievous unless it is tested in matters of conduct, so taste ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Saviour, who shall come to have mercy upon the miserable, and to seek that which was lost. Isaiah has, further, first taught that, by the redemption, the consequences of the Fall would disappear in the irrational creation also, and that it should return to paradisaic innocence, chap. xi. 6-9. He has first announced to the people of God the glorious truth, that death, as it had not existed in the beginning, should, at the end also, be expelled, chap. xxv. 8; xxvi. 19. The ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... 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, the very principle and system of a representation based on property ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... [3683]Lucian; but with them he hath the gout, dropsies, apoplexies, palsies, stone, pox, rheums, catarrhs, crudities, oppilations, [3684]melancholy, &c., lust enters in, anger, ambition, according to [3685]Chrysostom, "the sequel of riches is pride, riot, intemperance, arrogancy, fury, and all irrational courses." ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... 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
... is more abominable before God than the irrational creature: for it is said of the sinner (Ps. 48:21): "Man when he was in honor did not understand; he hath been compared to senseless beasts, and made like to them." But an irrational animal, such as a mouse or a dog, cannot receive this sacrament, just as it cannot ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... that he was not in his right mind—that this handsome, courteous gentleman was mildly insane. In spite of his fine manner and bearing, his every word had been irrational. She hazarded ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... 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 ostracism under ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... where he had met the mountain girl, thought of her with irrational longing, and suddenly she was there ...
— The Helpful Hand of God • Tom Godwin
... should have broken up his night's sleep. He knew those attacks of the boy's by heart; there was exactly one chance in one hundred that his presence should be necessary. He had sent a safe remedy, telephoned a severe but soothing message, and mentally prayed now for patience to meet the irrational, angered eyes of maternity, and to administer a reproof equally gentle and deterrent—gentle, for of course the woman's nerves had to be allowed for; she had been nursing this boy for months. The Doctor slipped into his long, ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... 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 ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... some hideous nightmare dream. As in a dream, the balancing weights of reasoning and morality began to melt before the heat of that which burned within; as in a dream, the uncurbed inner motives began to strive furiously. Then a sudden fierce anger, quite like the savage irrational anger of an ugly dream, flamed up quickly and fiercely. He opened his lips as though to vent his rage, but for an instant his tottering reason regained a momentary poise. Checking himself with an effort ten thousand ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... 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 Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... was moving. Something made his legs move. He walked on through the shrouds of Death until he felt a taut singing in his nerves. An irrational fear sprang out in him, cascading down his spine, and Cully shuddered. Ahead there was something. Two motives: get there because it (they?) calls; ...
— Cully • Jack Egan
... Quixotic to anticipate much diminution in the supply and demand of either frivolity or spectacle, both of which may furnish quite innocuous pleasure. But each is the antithesis of dramatic art; and whatever view one holds of the methods of the American capitalist, it is irrational to look to him for the intelligent ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... appearance. This was the sort of little device which really made them 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 ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... wondered if he had more to say, thinking Dick must be unusually dull, even for a poet, if he couldn't understand such a plain state of things, and then took an irrational satisfaction in carefully folding these last pages and putting them in the envelope with what he had written first. He addressed the envelope to Dick, sealed and weighed it, got up and stretched himself and felt distinctly better. He had, in a way, confessed, and it was having the effect ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Irrational methods have often amazingly good results, and the Hull Grammar School provided its head-master's only son with the rudiments of learning, thus enabling him to become in after years what John Milton himself, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... 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 ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... we take the same view as to the terms in use to denote the proper time in music which have descended to us from barbarous times. For example, what can be more irrational than the general term allegro, which only means lively; and how far we often are from comprehending the real time, so that the piece itself contradicts the designation. As for the four chief movements,—which are, indeed, ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... must be clearly proved, because perhaps after all it may be only a providential mercy, or an exaggeration, or a mistake, or an imposture. Well, this is precisely what I had said, which the writer, who has given occasion to this Volume, considered so irrational. I had said, as he quotes me, "In this day, and under our present circumstances, we can only reply, that there is no reason why they should not be." Surely this is good logic, provided that miracles do occur in all ages; and so ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... vast period of time, and that the practice of burning it is very widespread. They have been so familiarized with the custom and certain more or less vague excuses for its perpetuation that they show no realization of how strangely irrational and devoid of obvious meaning the procedure is. The reasons usually given in explanation of its use are for the most part merely paraphrases of the traditional meanings that in the course of history have come to be attached to the ritual act or the words used to designate it. Neither the ethnologist ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... footsteps of Christianity, one may illustrate it by the parallel feelings which in our own generation, amongst the Portuguese, for instance, have dogged the movements of free-masonry. We in England view this panic as irrational: and amongst ourselves it would be so; for British free-masonry conceals nothing worse than it professes. But, on the Continent, it became a mask for shrouding any or every system of anti-social doctrine, or, again, for playing into the hands of treason and conspiracy. There ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... And this belief, among others, he handed on to me. On the cinder playground of the Academy we Republicans used to wage, during campaigns, pitched battles for the Tariff. It did not take a great deal of courage to be a Republican in our city, and I was brought up to believe that Democrats were irrational, inferior, and—with certain exceptions like the Hollisters—dirty beings. There was only one degree lower, and that was to be a mugwump. It was no wonder that the Hollisters were Democrats, for they had a queer streak in them; owing, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... saying, "I'm really listening, but I must have dozed for a second." At times he would gaze wonderingly at the ceiling, lose himself following the lines of the panels, or counting the little square panes in the window-sashes. He sometimes slept, but not quite soundly; half his somnolence was busy with irrational calculations ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Sandeau and Gautier, the victims in these two stories, were neither spiteful, nor mendacious, nor irrational, so they are probably true. The second was possibly due to Balzac's odd notions of "business being business." The first, I have quite recently seen reason to think, may have been a sort of reminiscence of ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... into a 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 as a whole ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... down on the seat, his legs dangling out of the car, fighting down a sudden irrational wave of panic. He pushed the container to the other end of ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... deny that fear is the type of asthenic manifestations. Yet is it not the mother of phantoms, of numberless superstitions, of altogether irrational and chimerical religious practices? ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... one of the numerous misrepresentations of this lively lady, which it is worth while to correct; for if credit should be given to such a childish, irrational, and ridiculous statement of the foundation of Dr. Johnson's faith in Christianity, how little credit would be due to it. Mrs. Piozzi seems to wish, that the world should think Dr. Johnson also under the influence ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... the public peace, if not to the rights of the Union, would engage the citizens to whom the contagion had not communicated itself to oppose the insurgents; and if the general government should be found in practice conducive to the prosperity and felicity of the people, it were irrational to believe that they would be disinclined to its support. If, on the contrary, the insurrection should pervade a whole State, or a principal part of it, the employment of a different kind of force might become unavoidable. It appears that Massachusetts found it necessary to raise troops for repressing ...
— The Federalist Papers
... but strengthened and enlarged. Sins against body and mind were sins against the race, and it was their creed that the stronger, fuller and more nearly complete they made their lives the richer and fuller would be the life that succeeded them. They scouted as utterly unproved and irrational the idea that they could live after death, excepting as the plant lives by adding to the material life and well-being of other plants. But at that time the spring and vigor of youth were in their heart and brain, and it seemed to them a glorious thing to live and do their part in the advancement ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... proclaim with 'most miraculous organ,' that dogmatisers about any such 'figment of imagination' would, in a rational community, be viewed with the same feelings of compassion, which, even in these irrational days, ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... From this day there commenced for him an existence of anxieties, emotions, alarms, and irrational terrors which gave him nostalgia for his native land ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... subject were foreign to those of his party, and notwithstanding his political connection with, and friendship for Fox, he rose from his seat greatly agitated, and denounced the revolution as "an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, tyrannical democracy." In his speech, Burke, after paying some high compliments to the genius and character of Fox, and adverting to the danger of his opinions as sanctioned by the authority of so great a name, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... woman's idea of maternal love, fidelity, and duty. The shameful accounts we read, every week in the Christian year, my lords and gentlemen and honourable boards, the infamous records of small official inhumanity, do not pass by the people as they pass by us. And hence these irrational, blind, and obstinate prejudices, so astonishing to our magnificence, and having no more reason in them—God save the Queen and Confound their politics—no, than smoke has in coming ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... instance, animal in horses and man, thus also each will be indigent of the other, viz. this subject, and that which is in the subject; or rather the common element, animal, and the peculiarities, as the rational and irrational, will be indigent. For elements are always, indigent of each other, and that which is composed from elements is indigent of the elements. In short, this sensible nature, and which is so manifest to us, is neither body, for ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... because she isn't guilty!" said Alston with violence, and did not even remember to be glad no legal brother was present to hear so irrational an explosion. He hurried on lest she should call satiric attention to its thinness. "And as for Madame Beattie, she'll get nothing out of it. For the necklace being ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... in the things about us. It may be said of him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a 'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical, 'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... very wild and irrational, have been advanced to explain the origin of what is seen in these relics of Ancient America. If it had been the fashion to explore and study them as their importance deserves, as Egypt and Nineveh have been explored and studied, our knowledge of them would now be much ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... things that distinguish such a woman as I have described to you from a common thief. There is the insane desire to steal—merely for stealing's sake—a morbid craving. Of course in a sense it is stealing. But it is persistent, incorrigible, irrational, motiveless, useless. ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... or antipathy to each progressive proposal in particular; his pygmy hope that life will one day become somewhat better, punily shivering by the side of his gigantic conviction that it might well be infinitely worse. To Voltaire, far different from this, an irrational prejudice was not the object of a polite coldness, but a real evil to be combated and overthrown at every hazard. Cruelty was not to him as a disagreeable dream of the imagination, from thought of which he could save himself ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... he brought it back to me without explanation. I could not get a ray of light on the reason of his refusal; but he looked lowering and unhappy. Had he some mystical instinct that it is just such accidental and irrational wealth that is the doom of all peasantries? Perhaps he dimly felt that the boy's pirate tales are true; and that buried treasure is a thing for robbers and not for producers. Perhaps he thought there was a curse on such capital: on the coal of the coal-owners, on the gold of the gold-seekers. ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... the first place, the majority of Englishmen have no thought-out purpose in life beyond the call of "duty," which is an empty ideal until we know what our duty is. Confusion of means and ends is especially common in this country, though it is certainly to be found everywhere. The passion for irrational accumulation is one example of the error, which causes the gravest social inconvenience. The largest part of social injustice and suffering is caused by the unchecked indulgence of the acquisitive instinct by those ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... young lady's champion against her chosen husband. Besides, you have seen them only once. The young lady has become your sister's friend; and I wonder that your sister, even on her behalf, has not checked you in this irrational ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... consider. Jean—the girl of his fondest dreams, who had forsaken him and fallen under the spell of the courtly manners of the suave soldier-engineer. What would Jean think? If she loved the man she would never believe in his guilt. She would believe, with a woman's irrational loyalty, that he, Hedin, had in some manner contrived to place the coat in Wentworth's possession, and he knew that the engineer would never cease to proclaim that he had been made the dupe of a scheming lover. The case against the man must be plain. When Jean could be shown that ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... children—though the good God knows that should help; for they are love incarnate. Certainly it is not respect, for respect is a stale, cold comforter, and love is deeper than respect, and often lives without it—let us whisper the truth in shame. What, then, is this irrational current of the stuff of life, that carries us all in its sway, that brings us to earth, that guides our destiny here—makes so vastly for our happiness or woe, gives us strength or makes us weak, teaches us wisdom or leads us ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... mercenary soldiery, on the citizens; and our unhappy Demos finds that it has jumped out of the reek into the fire. Now our democratical man was swayed by the devices and moods of the moment; his son will be swayed by the most irrational and most bestial of his appetites; be bully and tyrant, while slave of his own lusts. Your thorough blackguard of every species comes of this type, and the worst of all is he who achieves the tyranny of a state. See, then, how, even ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... guilty was cast upon her sex). There is 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 ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... smart, and clever exposure of Popery, with its irrational assumptions, and soul-destroying errors. The work is timely, and its circulation will ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... shaking violently, looking down at Mihul and fighting the irrational conviction that she had just ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... retentive; and he was collecting for himself a body of magnanimous and semi-intellectual nonsense, which he supposed to be the natural thoughts and to contain the whole duty of the born American. To be pure-minded, to be patriotic, to get culture and money with both hands and with the same irrational fervour—these appeared to be the chief articles of his creed. In later days (not of course upon this first occasion) I would sometimes ask him why; and he had his answer pat. "To build up the type!" he would cry. "We're all committed to that; ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... struggle has indeed been a long one, and yet no other moral movement involving so many and so great social changes ever made more rapid progress. You and your fellow-laborers are truly to be congratulated on the full and abundant harvest your faithful seed-sowing has brought to humanity. The irrational sentiment, based upon the methods and customs of barbarous times, is rapidly yielding to reason. The world is learning—women are learning—that character, even womanly character, does not suffer from too ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... that a throng pressed at my back, drawing nearer and nearer; that I was already half surrounded, swept, dragged, coaxed into a vast prison-house where there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, where their worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched. I can neither explain nor justify the storm of irrational emotion that swept me as I stood in that moment, staring down the length of the silent corridor towards the music-room at the far end, I can only repeat that no personal bravery sent me down it, but that the negative emotion of fear was swamped in this vast sea of ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... conspiracy; that its leaders had secretly plotted, 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 new ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Church and an insistence upon uniformity which made unity impossible. In the light of his own inheritance his ecclesiastical positivism seems strange. Perhaps it was the course of his experience which made this irrational positivism natural. Few men in his generation suffered greater persecutions under the unwarranted supposition on the part of contemporaries that he had a liberal mind. In reality, few men in his generation ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... pause, during which I went on coolly mixing and tempering my colours; 'and I cannot wonder at it, for you must be heartily sick of us all. I myself am so thoroughly ashamed of my companions, and so weary of their irrational conversation and pursuits—now that there is no one to humanize them and keep them in check, since you have justly abandoned us to our own devices—that I think I shall presently withdraw from amongst them, probably within this week; and I cannot ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... substitutionary character is denied. There is much preaching about Christ's death which fails to be a preaching of Christ's death, and therefore to be in the full sense of the term Gospel Preaching, because it ignores this. The simplest hearer feels that there is something irrational in saying that the death of Christ is a great proof of love to the sinful unless there is shown at the same time a rational connection between that death and the responsibilities which sin involves, and from which that death delivers. Perhaps one should beg pardon for using so simple ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... Brahman; where the sun is compared to honey, the object is to illustrate the enjoyment of the Vasus and other gods; but what similar object could possibly be attained by directing us to view Prakriti as a goat? Such a metaphorical view would in fact be not merely useless; it would be downright irrational. Prakriti is a non-intelligent principle, the causal substance of the entire material Universe, and constituting the means for the experience of pleasure and pain, and for the final release, of all intelligent souls which are connected with it from all eternity. Now ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... uneasy pacing, but now with an irrational and supporting sense of duty done. He had dug his grave that morning; now he had carved his epitaph; the folds of the toga were composed, why should he delay the insignificant trifle that remained to do? He paused and looked long in the face of the sleeping ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... 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 ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... inmost or highest degree may be called the entrance of the Lord to the angel or man, and His veriest dwelling-place in them. It is by virtue of this inmost or highest that a man is a man, and is distinguished from irrational animals, for these do not have it. From this it is that man, unlike the animals, is capable, in respect to all his interiors which pertain to his mind and disposition, of being raised up by the Lord to Himself, of believing in the Lord, of being moved ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the sense of the beautiful, just what it is in anything that makes us distinguish beauty in it, cannot now be determined. It will be enough for us to know that literature makes a large appeal to a sense of the beautiful in us, a sense not fortuitous and irrational, though varying, but normal and almost universal, dependent upon natural laws of development. Truth is also difficult of definition, but we may understand that when out of experience, as through a process of reasoning, we have reached a conclusion that ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... Prohack was not now a man,—he was a grievance; he was the most deadly kind of grievance, the irrational kind. A superlatively fine cigar did a little—not much—to solace him. He smoked it with scientific slowness, and watched the restaurant empty itself.... He was the last survivor in the restaurant; and fifteen waiters and two hundred and fifty electric ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... scarcely be excited in the individual; the power to tyrannize would certainly not be delegated by a society neither frenzied by inebriation nor rendered impotent and irrational by disease. Pregnant, indeed, with inexhaustible calamity is the renunciation of instinct, as it concerns our physical nature. Arithmetic cannot enumerate, nor reason perhaps suspect, the multitudinous sources of disease in civilized life. ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... was of a murderous force, ten thousand bolts of irrational lightning raging around the country, striking a thousand times ...
— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley
... of which we are ignorant is an example; we may be as sure of what he tells us as if we had seen it ourselves; yet he may be mistaken; strictly speaking, his word is only probable evidence. But did not Newman substitute faith for reason? Yes, in a sense; but not in a sense in which it is of itself irrational to do so. How much could the reason of any of us tell us of Central Africa? We know of it by testimony, do we not? not by reason. From our own notions alone we could not tell whether it was a desert or a forest; whether it was inhabited or uninhabited; whether full-grown human beings or dwarfs ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... complied, and the curious, seeing that he appeared to be the more irrational of the two, and far more likely to get into mischief, set off in pursuit. The skipper crossed the road, and began ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... goes forward step by step. He regards "impossible" as a description for that which we have not at the moment the knowledge to achieve. He knows that as we amass knowledge we build the power to overcome the impossible. That is the rational way of doing the "impossible." The irrational way is to make the attempt without the toil of accumulating knowledge. Mr. Edison is only approaching the height of his power. He is the man who is going to show us what chemistry really can do. For he is a real scientist who regards the knowledge for which he is always searching as ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... the ridicule and contempt of the world has crushed truth in the embryo or stifled it in the cradle, which makes me so eager to examine and support those opinions which mankind generally condemn as visionary and irrational.' In later times these interests became a bond between W. R. Greg and Miss Martineau. He finally let the subject drop, with the conviction that years of practice had brought it no farther on its way either to scientific ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... "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
... own walk in life, and that very morning she had noticed him crossing a street in the young woman's company. Vane, as it happened, had met Kitty Blake by accident and had asked her to accompany him on a visit to Celia. Evelyn did not think she was of a jealous disposition, and jealousy appeared irrational in the case of a man whom she had dismissed as a suitor; but the thing undoubtedly rankled in her mind. While she was considering it, Jessy Horsfield entered ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... in the sweet voice that almost reduced Matilda to tears. The abandon and inconsequence were so oddly mingled with the strange determined strength that the elderly woman was confused and irrational. ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... woman. . . . Alas for him! He, too, might have discovered what Byron did; for were not his errors avenged upon him within, more terribly even than without? His cries are like the wails of a child, inarticulate, peevish, irrational; and yet his pain fills his whole being, blackens the very face of nature to him: but he will not confess himself in the wrong. Once only, if we recollect rightly, the truth flashes across him for a moment, and the clouds ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... that!" exclaimed Eugenia impatiently. She appeared vaguely to resent Miss Chris's assurance. She was feminine enough to experience an irrational jealousy at the idea of a vacancy which she had done her best to create. It destroyed an example ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... "excellent British Constitution," and say whether it is simple. On the contrary, it is the most complicated, irrational, and ridiculous contrivance ever devised as a government of enlightened men. Its admirers say that this complexity is a virtue, on account of the nice balance of powers between King, Lords, and Commons, ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... ready to classify certain of our most essential desires as brutish—hunger and thirst, the urgence of sleep, and especially sexual longing. We know of blind animal rage, of striking, biting, scratching, howling, and snarling, of irrational fears and ignominious flight. We share our senses with the higher animals, have eyes and ears, noses and tongues much like theirs; heart, lungs, and other viscera, and four limbs. They have brains which stand them in good stead, although their heads are not ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... of the nominating convention as a piece of party machinery. He thought it absurd to talk of a man's having a right to become a candidate for office without the indorsement of his party. He believed it equally irrational to allow members of the party to consult personal preferences in voting. The members of the party must submit to discipline, if they expected to secure control of office. Confusion again reigned. The presiding ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... for ordinary enthusiasm, he had still less for downright madness, and he hastily begged his friend to defer the volcanic question until after luncheon. Merton's language surprised him, it seemed so wildly irrational, and uttered with so much seriousness. In his appearance also there were signs of degeneracy: he was thin and pale and rather shabbily dressed, and wore a broad-brimmed rusty black felt hat, which ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... question was to be construed according to the spirit, the word life must be understood to mean reign, and that therefore the term for which the grant had been made had expired. This was surely the sound opinion: for it was plainly irrational to treat the interest of James in this grant as at once a thing annexed to his person and a thing annexed to his office; to say in one breath that the merchants of London and Bristol must pay money because he was naturally alive, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... revive the old problem of how far a sense of duty can triumph over the power of love. Her devotion to her deformed brother is wrong, because it is unnecessary. But even if this were not the case, it would be irrational in a woman so eminently sensible and unromantic as she is shown to be in the first half of the story. Almost at the beginning of her voluntary service she is represented as realising 'the hideous fate to which she has condemned herself in her ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... nature to possess such a freedom. But in every such instance he confounds the will with one of the passive susceptibilities of the mind. Thus, for example, Collins argues that liberty would be a great imperfection, because "nothing can be more irrational and absurd than to be able to refuse our assent to what is evidently true to us, and to assent to what we see to be false." Now, all this is true, but it is not to the purpose; for no one contends that the intelligence is free in assenting to, or in ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... us the difficulties with which they too, as well as that of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties none the less exist; the fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational, if our conscience did not forbid us to listen to it. The objections, with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with William de Blyenburg; and it will be seen from this with how little justice the denial of evil as a positive ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... marriage ceremony is quite useless as a magic spell for changing in an instant the nature of the relations of two human beings to one another. If a man marries a woman after three weeks acquaintance, and the day after meets a woman he has known for twenty years, he finds, sometimes to his own irrational surprise and his wife's equally irrational indignation, that his wife is a stranger to him, and the other woman an old friend. Also, there is no hocus pocus that can possibly be devized with rings and veils and vows and benedictions ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... labor contains as clear and rational a meaning as these that follow: organization of the workshop, organization of the army, organization of police, organization of charity, organization of war. In this respect, the argument of the economists is deplorably irrational. No less certain is it that the organization of labor cannot be a utopia and chimera; for at the moment that labor, the supreme condition of civilization, begins to exist, it follows that it is already submitted to an ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... goddesses, necessarily forced man to the creation of a Fate, to which Jupiter himself was subjected, more blind, more crushing, more appalling to the imagination (because while retaining his entire individuality, man was yet forced to submit to its irrational and pitiless decrees) than was even the hopeless fatalism consequent upon the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... know what to say or what to do. He realized more fully than ever that his brother was not himself. He was growing wilder and more irrational ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... the thing—love. It caused the trouble. It was more terrible than frost or famine. Women were all very well, in themselves good to look upon and likable; but along came this thing called love, and they were seared to the bone by it, made so irrational that one could never guess what ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... and a determination of their will as a satisfactory reason for embracing or rejecting an opinion is the habit of many educated people; to me, this seems little less irrational than to apply the nose to a picture, and to decide on its genuineness by ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... bloodshed, Durnford ordered the white volunteers under his command not to fire, with the result that the rebels fired, killing several of his force and wounding him in the arm. This incident gave rise to an irrational indignation in the colony, and for a while he himself was designated by the ungenerous nickname of 'Don't fire Durnford.' It is alleged, none can know with what amount of truth, that it was the memory of this undeserved insult ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... 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
... close, making comforting little noises. It was no use, he reflected sadly. Science just wasn't Ellie's long suit; she didn't know a cold vaccine from a case of smallpox, and no appeal to logic or common sense could surmount her irrational fear of hypodermics. "All right, nobody's going to make you do anything you don't ...
— The Coffin Cure • Alan Edward Nourse
... in his esteem, and more and more to Lanyard's exasperation, the evil flavour of that overnight incident lasted; it tinctured distastefully his first waking thoughts; and through all that fourth day at sea his mood was dark with irrational depression. ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph |
