"Irrational" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had gone by, and Dr. Parkman was going out to see Ernestine. Every mile which brought him nearer, brought added uncertainty as to what he should say when he reached her. What was there for him to say? The dead leaves of her hopes were all huddled in the hollow. Was he becoming so irrational as to think he could give life to things dead? Was she not right in wishing to cover them up decently and let them be? Was anything to be gained in blowing them about as last summer's leaves were being blown about now by the unsparing, uncaring ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... you this morning," said Oisille, "that those who thought themselves wiser than other men, since by the sole light of reason they had come to recognise a God, creator of all things, were made more ignorant and irrational not only than other men, but than the very brutes, and this because they did not ascribe the glory to Him to whom it was due, but thought that they had gained the knowledge they possessed by their own endeavours? For having erred in their minds by ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... progresses, it is not irrational to expect that Government, or some of the varied Local Authorities, will assist in the working out of a plan which, in so marked a manner, will relieve the rates ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... condemned by the German Government itself, but only after many years, and mainly because they were wasteful. Government representatives have told the Reichstag, as Herr Schleitwein did in 1904, that they must pursue a 'healthy egoism,' and forswear 'humanitarianism and irrational sentimentality.' 'The Hereros must be forced to work, and to work without compensation and for their food only. ... The sentiments of Christianity and philanthropy with which the missionaries work must be repudiated with all energy.' This is what ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence, again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of the rogueries of a child. See the good-humoured way in which he describes ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... a strong inclination to laugh, but I restrained myself; and a sudden and very irrational impulse made me say that she was a relation of mine. The words had no sooner escaped me than I bit my lip, for this stupid lie could only do me harm, but it was decreed that I should do nothing at Stuttgart but commit blunders. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... national spirit of Japan centres about the divinity of the Emperor. And precisely therein lies their present problem. For one may say, I think, with confidence that this attitude cannot endure, and is already disappearing. Western thought is an irresistible solvent of all irrational and instinctive ideas. Men cannot be engineers and pathologists and at the same time believe that a man is a god. They cannot be historians and at the same time believe that their first Emperor came down from heaven. Above all, they cannot be politicians ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... seems to me that (accepting the magical and supernatural elements on which the whole thing rests) it was perfectly reasonable. I fancy that Wagner, after some years with his very stupid wife, Minna, was getting thoroughly angry with the irrational curiosity of women and the idiotic demands which they make on their life-mates. Anyhow, though he gives Elsa some very beautiful music to sing, he does not spare her in drawing her character. It is one of the few characters he did attempt to draw, and by far the most important of them. ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... impossible explanation at which he grasped faded, as common sense showed him mercilessly that none of this was true. No guide, much less a guide like Defago, could have acted in so irrational a way, going off even without his rifle ...! The whole affair demanded a far more complicated elucidation, when he remembered the details of it all—the cry of terror, the amazing language, the grey ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... when he looked for the first time into the eyes of Jefferson Craig's newly made wife. For one instant he suffered a pang of jealousy—a queer, irrational feeling. It was as if he had lost his friend, as if this star-eyed creature before him could never find room for him again in her full heart. But he knew better in the next breath, for she lifted her face, ever so little, ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... for the manifestations of a child's adoring affection, so emotional, so irrational, so tangled with the affairs of the imagination. I simply could not endure the thought that "strange people" should know that my handsome father owned this homely little girl. But even in my chivalric desire to protect him from his fate, I was not ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... spring," Louise said to him, one day, in excuse of some irrational impulse that had driven her out of the house. And the quick picture she drew, of how, in her native land, the brief winter passed almost without transition into the scathing summer; her suggestion of unchanging leaves, brown barrenness, and and dryness; of grass burnt to cinders, of dust, drought, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... entirely different from what it had been last night. His words were cool and deliberate, his expression moody, but in nowise irrational. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... the Hindoos turns on the battles between the Asuras, the irrational demons of the air, the ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... with the Stoic philosophy and built them up into a system of indisputable grandeur, an ideal reconstruction of the universe, the powerful assurance of which inspired Manilius to sublime language when he was not exhausted by his efforts to master an ill-adapted theme.[41] The vague and irrational notion of "sympathy" is transformed into a deep sense of the relationship between the human soul, an igneous substance, and the divine stars, and this feeling is strengthened by thought.[42] The contemplation of the sky has become a communion. During the splendor ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Jim, what a horrible idea! and what an utterly irrational one. Who could possibly have any motive for harming ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... century the Handelian type of opera was the laughingstock of musical critics; they wondered how any audiences could have endured to sit through it, and why the fashionable society of London should have neglected native music for what Dr. Johnson defined as "an exotic and irrational entertainment." The modern reader's impression of an Italian opera of Handel's days is a story about some ancient or mediaeval hero whose very name is often to most people unknown; if he happens ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... 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 ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... Popish doctrines, above what some other learned Protestants have said, is not so much by way of assertion or justification of them, as to shew what reasons they may justly be thought to proceed upon, and so not to be go irrational or impious as they are ordinarily accounted; and this only in order to the peace of the christian world, that we may have as much charity to others and not as high animosities, live with all men as sweetly and amicably, and peaceably, and not as bitterly as is ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... short-sighted. I,' he admitted confidentially, 'cannot see twelve inches in front of me, but all the same I can make them play as I want, merely by fixing them with my eye.' In some respects the arbitrary way in which he used to arrange his orchestra was really very irrational. From his old days in Paris he had retained the habit of placing the two oboists immediately behind him, and although this was a fad which owed its origin to a mere accident, it was one to which he always adhered. The ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the soul, or rather this elevation and glory of thought, which draws with it the will and the affections, not by means of blind faith or supernatural grace, not through an irrational and mystical impulse, but by the strength of a reformed intellect and by a palpable and well-considered enthusiasm, which science and the contemplation of Nature alone can give, this is the keynote of the poem. It is composed of two parts, each of which is divided into five dialogues: the ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... she felt herself more and more involved in the tangled skein of his mysterious life. His sudden and reckless abandonment of the old love which had ruined him, and the new and equally irrational regard which he now professed for her, filled her with a ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... himself in the lift, was altogether barely five minutes. As yet the haze of his vast interval of sleep hung about him, as yet the initial strangeness of his being alive at all in this remote age touched everything with wonder, with a sense of the irrational, with something of the quality of a realistic dream. He was still detached, an astonished spectator, still but half involved in life. What he had seen, and especially the last crowded tumult, framed in the setting of the balcony, had a spectacular turn, like a thing witnessed from the box of a ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... disconcerted. It was only when the outer door closed with a bang that he seemed restored to consciousness. And as he heard the noise he sprang forward as if to recall his visitor. "Ah!" he exclaimed, with an oath, "the miserable old woman was mocking me!" And urged on by a wild, irrational impulse, he caught up his hat and darted out in pursuit. Madame Leon was considerably in advance of him, and was walking very quickly; still, by quickening his pace, he might have overtaken her. However, he did not join her, for he scarcely knew what excuse to offer ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... is the foundation of the fittingness of the Incarnation of the Divine Person, as above stated (Q. 3, A. 8). But as in rational creatures we find the likeness of image, so in irrational creatures we find the image of trace. Therefore the irrational creature was as capable of assumption as ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... as little value. Your mother's wishes, though allowed to be irrational and groundless, are to be gratified by the disappointment of mine, which appear to be just and reasonable; and, since one must be sacrificed, that affection with which you have inspired me and those benefits you ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... Harlem, and he recognises clearly enough that the only elephant-bearing jungle in the neighbourhood is Central Park, whence an animal would be compelled to take a Subway train to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, and lie in wait for him as he came home in the twilight. But irrational or no, there was the fact. To be quashed into pulp under one of those girder-like front legs, Gordon felt must be abominable. To make matters worse, Gordon has a young son who insists on being taken every Sunday morning to see the animals; and of all attractions in the ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... which was sung at Babylon, in the fiery furnace, by the three young men who were thrown into it, for not having adored the statue of Nebuchodonosor. They called upon all creatures, inanimate and irrational, to praise God, as David had done before; and St. Francis calls upon all to praise Him, because of His creatures. This has the same result; for inanimate creatures, as St. Jerome observes, only praise God by making Him known to men, and by placing before ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... our purpose, however, either to affirm or dis-affirm the inspirational claims of the Bible Genesis. We simply take its language as we find it, stript of its Masoretic renderings and irrational interpretations, and unhesitatingly aver that the three Hebrew words, translated in our common version—"whose seed is in itself upon the earth" —contains, when properly rendered, the key that unlocks the whole "mystery of life," or, as Dr. Gull emphasizes it, "the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... real contradiction of Rossetti. Morris's anarchists represented his life's work to him. He did not help them from that personal and irrational charity which made Rossetti want to give a penny to a beggar in the street. This may be regarded as a supersubtle distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important fact about Morris ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... to an irrational anger at his words. "Old fool! She has only fainted," I returned. "Get me ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... tell what is done in different parts of the world, but they forget to mention "the moving why they did it." The consequence is that, in this age of instantaneous communication, we know what is going on in other countries, but it seems very irrational. The rational elements have been lost in the ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered almost irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It turns the scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially possible that the key of all social evolution may be found in the dusty casket of some discredited creed. It cannot ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... that now grieves the eye."[133] The destruction of the cathedral was hastened by the alienation of Church lands by Bishop Patrick Hepburn, among the worst of the bishops; by the Privy Council in 1568 ordering the removal of lead from the roofs; by wind and weather; by Cromwell's troops; by an irrational zeal, which in 1630 broke down the carved screen and lovely wood-work; and lastly by the falling of the central tower, which destroyed the whole nave and part of the transepts. The passing away of such a colossal work of beauty is grievous, and ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... Conjuncture, there happen'd to be a Dwarf, who was dumb, but not deaf, in the King's Apartment. Nobody regarded him: He was an Eye and Ear-witness of all that pass'd, and yet no more suspected than any irrational Domestic Animal. This little Dwarf had conceiv'd a peculiar Regard for Astarte and Zadig: He heard, with equal Horror and Surprize, the King's Orders to destroy them both. But how to prevent those Orders from being put into Execution, as the Time was so short, was all his ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... 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. ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... his walk 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 ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... mended Juliet Duff's nose when she fell on the ice at Princes'—they would both be there. Honoria said nothing to Vivie and Vivie said nothing to Honoria about the inhibition, but together with her irrational jealousy of Eoanthropos dawsoni and irritation at the growing contentedness with things as they were on the part of Rossiter, it made her a trifle more reckless ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... the feathered kind, And formed of God without a parent's mind, Commits her eggs, incautious, to the dust, Forgetful that the foot may crush the trust; And, while on public nurseries they rely, Not knowing, and too oft not caring why, Irrational in what they thus prefer No few, that would seem wise, ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... only person irritated. After one of these fragments of conversation Langham also walked rapidly home in a state of most irrational petulance, his hands thrust with energy into the pockets ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reference of the Translator, I can find no such case alluded to in the chapter. But Caelius Aurelianus mentions two modes of treatment employed by Asclepiades, into both of which the use of wine entered, as being "in the highest degree irrational and dangerous." [Caelius Aurel. De Morb. Acut. et Chron. lib. I. cap. xv. not xvi. Amsterdam. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of Liberty is interwoven in the Soul of Man. "So it is in that of a Wolf;" However irrational, ungenerous, and unsocial the love of liberty may be in a rude Savage, he is capable of being enlightned by Experience, Reflection, Education, and civil, and Political Institutions. But the Nature of the Wolf is, and ever will be confined to running in ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... chilled him, through remembrance of a deed forever debarring him from aught so pure and innocent as she. The subtleties of his philosophy might have cajoled him anywhere save in her presence. There, he felt unmistakably guilty; yet from irrational dread that she, whose intuitions seemed so swift and deep, might grasp the cause of his discomposure, he strove to hide it. Last of all the world ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... man as a rational animal struggling against nature for subsistence. Archaeological evidence as to the reasonableness of primitive culture on its material side; doubts raised by man's irrational 'barbarities' on the social plane. Levy Bruhl's hypothesis of a 'savage logic' and the Greek analysis of wrongdoing as ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... perpetually succeed each other. It must be allowed, that reckoning all these advantages, no hesitation was necessary in the choice; in fact, I was so content with mine, that I never once repented it; nor do I even now, when, free from the irrational motives that influenced me at that time, I weigh in the scale of reason ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... that?" he was finally able to exclaim in great wonderment. "Is it possible that you don't see it as clear as day? Don't you see, my son, that all this proves plainly that the reforms of the ministers are irrational?" ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... frame of mind due for the most part to the reflex of a body made sick by an irregular and irrational life. This much, too, Franklin could have established of his own philosophy. Yet this was not all, nor was the total so ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... first, before I realized the wretched truth; I told you he was disappointed in me because I couldn't take a brilliant lead in society. Well, that was true; he was so. But I could see you weren't convinced. You had guessed what it took me much longer to see, because I knew how irrational it was. Yes; my husband was jealous of ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... physical illusions which we have are reflected automatically in our spiritual and 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 ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... 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 ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... glacial action; though the mistake has, I know, been made in two or three quarters of the world. I have often fought with Hooker about the physicists putting their veto on the world having been cooler; it seems to me as irrational as if, when geologists first brought forward some evidence of elevation and subsidence, a former Hooker had declared that this could not possibly be admitted until geologists could explain what ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... finger. It had been the most exasperating, humiliating, and shameful incident in the bishop's career. It was the afternoon for his fortnightly address to the Shop-girls' Church Association, and he had been seized with a panic fear, entirely irrational and unjustifiable, that he would not be able to deliver the address. The fear had arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then as now had come the thought, "If only I could smoke!" And he had smoked. It ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... irrational animal at best," quoth the sage, soliloquizing, "and is frightened by strange buggaboos! 'Tis but a piece of wood! how little it really injures; and, after all, the holes are but rests to the legs, and keep the feet out of the dirt. And this ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... a disease. My saving and hoarding as I do is irrational, and I know it. It pains me to pay five cents for a streetcar ride, or a quarter of a dollar for a dinner. My pleasure in accumulating property is morbid, but I have felt it from the time I was a foot peddler in Charlotte, Campbell, and Pittsylvania counties, in ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... continued, "those who pursue philosophy rightly, study to die; and to them, of all men, death is least formidable. Judge from this. Since they altogether hate the body and desire to keep the soul by itself, would it not be irrational if, when this comes to pass, they should be afraid and grieve, and not be glad to go to that place where, on their arrival, they may hope to obtain that which they longed for throughout life? But they longed for wisdom, and to be freed from association with that ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... moreover, that a good deal of mere sentimentalism or irrational selection had much to do with the movement of many Negroes from the South. "The unusual amounts of money coming in," says an observer, "the glowing accounts from the North, and the excitement and stir of great crowds leaving, work upon the feelings of many Negroes. They pull up and follow ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... his ode on Musick was performed at Stationers' hall; and he wrote afterwards six cantatas, which were set to musick by the greatest master of that time, and seem intended to oppose or exclude the Italian opera, an exotick and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... When one compares Jesus of Nazareth with the leaders in State and Church in the Jerusalem of His day, He seems the adult and they the children. And further, those who attempt to destroy religion as an irrational survival address themselves to the task of a Sisyphus. Although apparently successful today, their work will have to be done over again tomorrow. On no other battlefield is it necessary so many times to slay the slain. Again and again religion has been pronounced obsolete, ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... 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 to be wanting ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... nimbler Britons, you may have quite a nice little private thrill of your own, a thrill of pride in your precious stone, and begin to think with seriousness of the advantages of "home rule all round" in an England-for-the-English mood, and of the value of a nationalism that is as irrational as conjugal or mother love—and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... harmony with his work and environments. The backwoodsman, early settler, pioneer plainsman, mountain man were all like some infuriated beast of Promethean capabilities tearing at its own vitals. Driven by an irrational energy, they seemed intent on destroying not only the growth of the soil but the power of the soil to reproduce. Davy Crockett, the great bear killer, was "wrathy to kill a bear," and as respects bears and ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... we do make use of our machines (as well as their sad condition of neglect will allow), but in other cases we behave in an extraordinarily irrational manner. Thus if we sally out and get caught in a heavy shower we do not, unless very far gone in foolishness, sit down and curse the weather. We put up our umbrella, if we have one, and if not we hurry home. ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... irrational custom," went on Professor Haddock, "prevents respectable young ladies from making love, a thing they would enjoy doing, whilst mercenary girls do it too much and without getting any enjoyment out of it. It is indeed deplorable. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... feasibly close to all its breathing facts. Men and women refuse any longer to allow their most vital instincts to be branded with obloquy, and the fulness of their lives to be thwarted at the bidding of an impure and irrational fiction of propriety. On every hand we find the right to happiness asserted in deeds as well as words. The essential purity of actions and relations to which a merely technical or superstitious irregularity attaches is ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... between love and hate, between life and death. As Christians, our only realistic expectation is that because of our Christian belief and practice, our conflicts will increase and intensify rather than diminish. The only peace we may hope to have is an irrational peace, an "in-spite-of" peace, the peace of the depths beneath the storm-tossed surface; in other words, "the peace of God, which passes all understanding."[2] To suggest how this may be achieved in some areas of life is ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... edition of the "Principia," Newton says, "It is ten years since, being in correspondence with M. Leibnitz, and having instructed him that I was in possession of a method of determining tangents and solving questions involving maxima and minima, a method which included irrational expressions, and having concealed it by transposing the letters, he replied to me that he had discovered a similar method, which he communicated, differing from mine only in the terms and signs, as well as in the generation of the quantities." This would seem to be sufficient to set at rest any ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... is here made between the services rendered God by Christians and those which the Jews rendered. The thought is: The Jews' service to God consisted in sacrifices of irrational beasts, but the service of Christians, in spiritual sacrifices—the sacrifice of their bodies, their very selves. The Jews offered gold and silver; they built an inanimate temple of wood and stone. Christians ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... chapter,* a portion of which I read as our lesson this morning, gives precisely the same idea of faith as that which I am going to outline. What is faith? Faith is a purely rational faculty. It is not irrational, but it is perfectly understandable. Suppose there is a man suddenly accused of a crime, and I never saw him before, I do not even know his name; but I go into court when he is brought up for trial, and I say that I have faith in that man, ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... of propinquity, joined to reasons of self-love and a real passion which had no means of satisfaction except by marriage, led Paul on to an irrational love, which he had, however, the good sense to keep to himself. He even endeavored to study Mademoiselle Evangelista as a man should who desires not to compromise his future life; for the words of his friend de Marsay did sometimes rumble in his ears like a warning. But, in the first place, persons ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... to be: A movement of the irrational part of the soul, attended by a notable alteration of the body, on the apprehension of good or evil. The soul is made up of intellect, will, and sensible appetite. The first two are rational, the third irrational: the third ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... frivolous waste of time; and he had a similar dislike to evening parties; not on account of a puritanic disapproval of dancing, or of young people of different sexes meeting and having opportunities of getting acquainted with each other, but the hours were so irrational, and the conventional dress so unbecoming and dangerous to health, that he had prohibited Jane and Elsie from accepting the invitations that were showered on them when they had given up lessons and were supposed to be ready to come out. If people ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... in them, I am far from passing my time disagreeably. My mind is of no gloomy turn, and I have a thousand ways of amusing myself. Indeed of late I have been terribly frightened lest I must give them all up; my fears have gone to extravagance; do not wonder; my life is not quite irrational, and I trembled to think that I was growing fit only to consort with dowagers. What an exchange, books and drawings, and every thing of that sort, for cards! In short, for ten weeks I have had such pains in my eyes with the least application, that I ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... 30% in 2003 and 19% in 2004, largely because of higher international oil and gas prices. Overall prospects in the near future are discouraging because of widespread internal poverty, the burden of foreign debt, the government's irrational use of oil and gas revenues, and its unwillingness to adopt market-oriented reforms. Turkmenistan's economic statistics are state secrets, and GDP and other figures are subject to wide margins of error. In particular, the rate ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... let us brush aside the mythological extravagance and irrational errors in the entire cosmopolitan doctrine of a future life, but beware of rejecting the fact itself of immortality until we have better grounds than have yet been afforded by the accumulating insight of literary history. As the world moves on, and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... 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 ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... make the playing of his part any the easier. It filled him in fact with a continual fear of giving himself away by doing something he had done before. It was really a most irrational fear; but there it was. Under the circumstances his sustained babble and blink were ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... That does not, of course, mean that it has been irrational; quite the contrary. One fully admits that Prussia, being what she is, has every cause to hate the Cross, and every motive to vent the agonized fury of a lost soul upon things sacred to the ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... military autocrat, who himself battens, as must also his 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 as the tyrannic state is the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... income. A penny here, and a dollar there, placed at interest, goes on accumulating, and in this way the desired result is attained. It requires some training, perhaps, to accomplish this economy, but when once used to it, you will find there is more satisfaction in rational saving than in irrational spending. Here is a recipe which I recommend: I have found it to work an excellent cure for extravagance, and especially for mistaken economy: When you find that you have no surplus at the end of the year, and yet have a good income, I ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... Works, since they are irrational things, cannot glorify God, although they may be done to the glory of God, if faith be present. But at present we are inquiring, not into the quality of the works done, but into him who does them, who glorifies ...
— Concerning Christian Liberty - With Letter Of Martin Luther To Pope Leo X. • Martin Luther
... Puritans, soldiers whose discipline enables them to achieve great results? All discipline is in one sense narrow. Quaker quietude and retirement probably conserved mental energy instead of dissipating it. In an age of superstition and irrational religion, their minds were free and unhampered, and it was the dominant rational tone of their thought that enabled science to ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... providence," there he defines it as "based on the denial of God," and again he defines it as a belief that the universe is "self-existent and purely material." Even these do not suffice, for he also adopts Comte's "profound aphorism" that "Atheism is the most irrational form of metaphysics," and proves this by a fresh definition involved in the charge that "it propounds as the solution of an insoluble enigma the hypothesis which of all others is the least capable of proof, the least simple, the least plausible, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... practises, is that, while many influences combine to bring about that unfortunate result, the chief cause of this high mortality is the unsympathetic attitude of high school teachers toward the adolescent. But, you may ask, why unsympathetic? Because they regard them as fickle, unstable, and irrational, and so have but little patience with them. I'll admit that the adolescent seems all that at times, but that is only on the surface. The developmental changes—physical and moral—thru which he is passing often make the life during this period one of turmoil. From fourteen to eighteen—the normal ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... children of your first marriage as a mother should do. I have found them to be violent, and altogether unaware of the duties which their position should impose upon them. It was only yesterday that Lord Hampstead presumed to call me irrational. I have borne a great deal from them, and can bear no more. I wish you would have found some one better able to control their conduct." Then, with a stately step, she stalked out of the room. Under ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... hereafter, Bluewater; it is irrational to suppose that they who have loved each other so well in this state of being, are to be for ever separated ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... SONGS, SCRAPS OF POETRY, &c., by ROBERT BURNESS: a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping it; but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty, and unbounded good-will to every creature, rational and irrational.—As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of life; but as I believe they are really his own, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of human nature ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... blessings of ignorance. It makes a vast difference in one's mental comfort, I find, whether he accepts the present unquestioningly, with enthusiasm, and reconstructs the historic past as an agreeable duty, or whether he already bears the past, in its various aspects, in his mind, in involuntary but irrational expectation of meeting it, and is forced to accept the present as a painful task! Which of these courses to pursue in the future was the subject of my disappointed meditations, as we drove through the too Europeanized streets, and landed ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... This war, we may remark parenthetically, was the result of a century's outcry against the Venetian desire for aggrandizement. The Venetians, in fact, were not free from the mistake of those over-clever people who will credit their opponents with no irrational and inconsiderate conduct. Misled by this optimism, which is, perhaps, a peculiar weakness of aristocracies, they had utterly ignored not only the preparations of Mohammed II for the capture of Constantinople, but even ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Russia was drawing from the struggle in the west. In their wide-reaching view of European affairs, in their justice to the revolution, Shelburne and Pitt stood alone. Around them men were hardened and blinded by passion. The old hatred between nation and nation, which Pitt had branded as irrational, woke up fiercer than ever at the clash of arms, for with it was blended a resentment that had smouldered in English breasts ever since the war with America at the blow which France had dealt England in that hour of her weakness, and a disgust which only slowly ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... out from its confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man. But were the coming ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... 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 ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... takes to worshipping what is mortal and irrational[6] in him, and neglects to cherish what is immortal, these are the inevitable results. He never looks up again; he has lost all care for good report; by slow degrees the ruin of his life goes on, until it is consummated all round; all that is great in his soul fades, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... 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
... burst out irritably, "What on earth have you sold it for? Nothing would induce you to do so before when I asked you to; now, all at once you have taken a freak and parted with it without any consideration whatever. I never saw anything like women, so utterly irrational!" ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suicide, but not thus might escape a father's heavy accounting. He has no thought of such evasive shift. In all the worlds, it seems to Pierre, there is none but he to pity Paul. But for the irrational hope of in some way ministering to stresses of this afflicted son, that guilty, wretched parent would, with bared brow and ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... a little later 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, ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... bright spot, the size of half a bean, is he clean or is he unclean?" Moses: "Unclean." "And," continued Korah, "if the spot spread and cover all the skin of him, is he then clean or unclean?" Moses: "Clean." "Laws so irrational," said Korah, "cannot possibly trace their origin from God. The Torah that thou didst teach to Israel is not therefore God's work, but thy work, hence art thou no prophet and Aaron ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... algebraic theory at number, which is devised with the view of removing these difficulties. The harmony between arithmetical and geometrical measurement, which was disturbed by the Greek geometers on the discovery of irrational numbers, is restored by an unlimited supply of the causes of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to come to this unbounded catacomb, seems now singular to me: for by that time I could not have been sufficiently daft to expect to find another being like myself on the earth, though I cherished, I remember, the irrational hope of yet somewhere finding dog, or cat, or horse, to be with me, and would anon think bitterly of Reinhardt, my Arctic dog, which my own hand had shot. But, in reality, a morbid curiosity must have been within me all the time to read the real truth of ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... history and the necessities of the race. Colleges and universities, established and conducted by the Freedmen's Bureau and Northern churches and societies, sprang up like mushrooms, and the teachers, ignorant, fanatical, without self-poise, proceeded to make all possible mischief. It is irrational, cruel, to hold the Negro, under such strange conditions, responsible for all the ill consequences of bad education, unwise teachers, ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... a sudden opportunity. No, no," the girl went on, with a generous ardor in her face, following further the train of her argument, which she appeared to find extremely attractive, "I know what you are going to say and I deny it. I am not fanciful, or sophistical, or irrational, and I know perfectly what I am about. Men are so stupid; it 's only women that have real discernment. Leave me alone, and I shall do something. Blanche is silly, yes, very silly; but she is not ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... passion, the dupe of a distempered fancy, and as such unworthy of my respect and love. As I admitted this truth, I shuddered with that vague horror we feel in dreams, when we recoil from the brink of something, we know not what. I trembled when his lips opened, fearful he would say something more irrational and unmanly still. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Mr. Hanson, when he consulted me on the subject, not to permit the marriage. His preference of a young woman to an old one, and of his own wishes to those of a younger brother, seemed to me neither irrational nor extraordinary." ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... Investigations in France, and Results. Dangers from the opposite Extreme. Effects of too much Clothing. Rule of Safety. Featherbeds; why unhealthy in Warm Weather. Best Nightgowns for Young Children. Clothing; how to be proportioned. Irrational Dress of Women. Use of Flannel next the Skin. Evils of Tight Dresses to Women. False Taste in our Prints of Fashions. Modes in which Tight Dresses operate to weaken the Constitution. Rule of Safety as to Looseness of Dress. Example of English ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... passion as I dash on in that disconcerting fashion Is as ardently irrational as when we forged the link When you gave your little hand away to me, my own Amanda As we sat 'n the veranda till ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... free souls of poets, The loftiest bards of all ages strode before me Strange large men, long unwaked, undisclosed, were disclosed to me ... O my rapt verse, my call, mock me not! ... I will not be outfaced by irrational things, I will penetrate what is sarcastic upon me, I will make cities and civilizations defer to me This is what ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... an intrinsically bad one. Many indeed may be unable to believe that this object is capable of gathering round it feelings sufficiently strong; but this is exactly the point on which a doubt can hardly remain in an intelligent reader of M. Comte: and we join with him in contemning, as equally irrational and mean, the conception of human nature as incapable of giving its love, and devoting its existence, to any object which cannot afford in exchange an eternity of personal enjoyment." Never has the libel of humanity involved in the current theology ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... charm of womanhood, unless she attempts to improve it by some monstrous contrivance of her own; no times when good taste and womanly tact cannot so drape it that it will possess some attraction peculiar to her sex. And were it not so, how irrational, how wrongful is it to extinguish, I will not say the beauty, but, in part, the very humanity of all women, at all times, for the sake of hiding for some women the sign of their perfected womanhood at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... not feel the autumn wind, we could hear it in the tree-tops, and it had the sound of the sea. The sense of well-being and of joy was exquisite. The beauty of horses, timid creatures, sensitive and graceful and irrational as young girls, is a thing apart; and what is strange is that their vast strength does not seem incongruous with it. To be above that proud and lovely organism, listening, apprehensive, palpitating, nervous far beyond the human, to feel one's self almost ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... to the hilltop where he had met the mountain girl, thought of her with irrational longing, and suddenly ...
— The Helpful Hand of God • Tom Godwin
... immortality be dependent on the eating of certain foods? Most of man's irrational ideas have some reason in them, and probably man's knowledge that without food life would come to an end, joined to his idea of deathlessness, led him to believe that there was a certain food which produced immortality just as ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... rain, and he was late. As he went along he became calmer, and when he was fairly indoors he had passed into a despair entirely inconsistent—superficially—with the philosopher Baruch, as inconsistent as the irrational behaviour in Bedford Square. He could well enough interpret, so he believed, Miss Hopgood's suppression of him. Ass that he was not to see what he ought to have known so well, that he was playing the fool to her; he, with a grown-up son, to ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... 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 ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... chroniclers. You are safe if you believe all the quaint and romantic and inconsistent and impossible things that come to your knowledge concerning the Village. That is its special and sacred privilege: to be unexpected and always—yes, always without exception—in the spirit of its irrational and sympathetic role. It needs Kipling's ambiguous "And when the thing that couldn't has occurred" for a motto. And yet—and yet—like all true nonsense, this nonsense is rooted in a beautiful and disconcerting ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... but merely fortuitious. 3. That the inconstancy of such notices, in cases equally important, proves they did not proceed from any such agent. 4. That as our most distinct dreams had nothing in them of any significancy, it would be irrational and vain to think that they came from heaven. And, 5. That as men were not always thus warned or supplied with notice of good or evil, so all men are not alike supplied with them; and what reason could we give, why one man or one woman ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... his most irrational suspicion against beautiful White Fell was, to Sweyn, evidence of a weak obstinacy of mind that would but thrive upon expostulation and argument. But this evident intention to direct the passions of grief and anguish to a hatred ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... ceased to think. She did not know what she wanted; she simply felt that she needed to be struck. There had come upon her an instinctive, irrational desire to be maltreated, bruised, made to suffer in her flesh, to experience a violent shock, a sharp pain that would put a stop to what was going on in her brain. She could think of nothing but blows to bring matters to a ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... would observe, that even those nations who have embraced Christianity, can by no means be called the inheritance or subjects of Jesus, since they have since the days of Constantine and the Counsel of Nice renounced his doctrines, and perverted his religion into "a fabulous, irrational and blasphemous superstition,"[fn29] for as much as all of them, except a handful of Unitarian Christians, are worshippers of three Divine Beings united by an ineffable union; and by far the greater part of them are ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... is irrational and poor-spirited not to seek conveniences for fear of losing them, for upon the same account we should not allow ourselves to like wealth, glory, or wisdom, since we may fear to be deprived of all these; nay, even virtue itself, than which there is no greater ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... to detect the smallest fault in her, either of weakness or of hastiness, still less of anything like the pride she might actually have felt in her superiority. To keep her back now would be to accuse perfection of being imperfect; it would be as irrational as to call excellence a failing. More than that, it would have a bad effect on the whole community, a danger which ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... of suffrage to depend, as in a good state of things it would, on personal conditions. Where it depends, as in this and most other countries, on conditions of property, the contradiction is even more flagrant. There something more than ordinarily irrational in the fact that when a woman can give all the guarantees required from a male elector, independent circumstances, the position of a householder and head of a family, payment of taxes, or whatever may be the conditions imposed, the very principle and system of a representation based ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... your company, Mrs. Huntingdon,' observed he, after a brief 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, ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... wholesome enough, like all other faculties, as long as it is controlled by reason. But what if the fear be not rational, but irrational? What if it be, in plain homely English, blind fear; fear of the unknown, simply because it is unknown? Is it not likely, then, to be afraid of the wrong object? to be hurtful, ruinous to animals as well as to man? Any one will confess that, who has ever seen, a horse inflict on himself mortal ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... There was, of course, nothing to prevent a wealthy Roman from building his town house exactly like a country seat, or vice versa, if he had so chosen, but from considerations of purpose, apart from those of local space and view, it would have been altogether irrational to take either course. The conditions of his life in town and country differed even more widely than they do with us. The average Roman, moreover, was a lover of variety in respect of his habitation. We find in a somewhat later epigrammatist ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... of this irrational invasion of his afternoon; and so, having said just a word or two in reply to her last remark, he banished the ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... to his work with a zest. He had ripped up walls and ceilings and torn down irrational matchwood partitions, discovering some fine old oak wainscot and the blackened roof-beams of the original farmstead. In the upshot he transformed Harkings into a very fair semblance of a late Jacobean house, fitted with every modern convenience and extremely ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... 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
... haste Mr. Jocelyn had not carefully gauged his syringe, and the over-amount of morphia thrown into his system so stimulated him that his words appeared exceedingly irrational to the young man, whose judgment was based on unusual shrewdness and common-sense. He was greatly puzzled by the sudden change in his companion. It was evident that he had not been drinking, for his breath was untainted and ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... It was irrational, bone-crumbling fear—something that defied argument, that nothing could allay. It was like the elemental passion felt by the hunted animal—not fear of death, but the anguish of the live thing which must perforce struggle to escape death, although prolonged ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... 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 those ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... 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 lost, ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... witches, in the utility of torture for the discovery of the truth, the search for the elixir of life, the philosopher's stone, or the passion for tulips valued at several thousand guldens a bulb which took hold of Holland. Such irrational "suggestions" always have been existing, and still exist, in all spheres of human life—religious, philosophical, political, economical, scientific, artistic, and, in general, literary—and people clearly see the insanity of these suggestions only when they ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... a disposition on the part of many farmers to regard fertilizers only as stimulants, due to the irrational use of certain materials, but a good commercial fertilizer is a carrier of some or all of the necessary elements that we find in stable manures. They may carry nitrogen, phosphoric acid, or potash,—any one or two or the ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... remembered that Archibald, in what we may term his soporific period, had manifested a strong, although entirely irrational, repugnance to this east chamber. Perhaps he had been conscious of presences there which were imperceptible to normal and healthy senses! Be that as it may, he got bravely over his folly afterward, and in his twelfth year (his third, Sir Clarence would have called it) he permanently took ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... The crisis had come and she was passing it—she had passed it safely. They talked on fondly—five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, and still there were no untoward developments, no sign of anything evil or irrational. Penelope was her own adorable self. The spell ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... sense.[13] And, admitting the existence of those who, without having ever learnt to reason, always reason well, by a gift of nature, it would be easy to set against these exceptions innumerable cases in which ignorance of logic, the use of irrational methods, want of reflection on the conditions of historical analysis and synthesis, have robbed the work of specialists and historians of much of ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... despatched by the next mail to relieve his anxiety, would be left unopened in London; and Fritz might be expected to arrive (if he traveled without stopping) in the course of the next day or two. I put this reasonable view of the matter to Minna, and received a thoroughly irrational and womanly reply. ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... even for an hour upon her own resources, though in situations which scarcely seemed to admit of any occasion for taxing those resources; and often I have felt anger towards myself for what appeared to be an irrational or effeminate timidity, and have struggled with my own mind upon occasions like the present, when I knew that I could not have acknowledged my tremors to a friend without something like shame, and a fear to excite his ridicule. No; if in anything I ran into excess, it was in this very point of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the immoral obligation I never learned, but be it what it may, he had every facility given him to remain under lock and key, with a chair, a table, a mattress in a corner, and a litter of fallen plaster on the floor, in an irrational state of funk, and keeping up his pecker with such tonics as Mariani dispensed. This lasted till the evening of the third day, when, after letting out a few horrible screams, he found himself compelled to seek safety in flight ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the humours of animal nature. Does not the anthropologist tell us of a heraldry, with a large assortment of heraldic beasts, to be found among savage or half-savage peoples, as the "survival" of a period when men were nearer than they are or seem to be now, to the irrational world? Throughout the sprightly movement of the lads' daily life it was as if their "tribal" pets or monsters were with or within them. Tall Exmes, lithe and cruel like a tiger—it was pleasant to ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... of any obvious lapse of time, by other assemblages of organic beings of a different character. Everywhere they found evidence that the earth's crust had undergone changes of such magnitude as to render it seemingly irrational to suppose that they could have been produced by any process now in existence. If we add to the above the prevalent belief of the time as to the comparative brevity of the period which had elapsed since the birth of the globe, we can readily understand the general acceptance of some form ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... indifferent whither he is led, provided that she is the leader. And, my lord, if it be properly considered, it were infinitely better to remain possessed by the whole legion of vulgar mistakes, than to reject some, and at the same time to retain a fondness for others altogether as absurd and irrational. The first has at least a consistency, that makes a man, however erroneously, uniform at least; but the latter way of proceeding is such an inconsistent chimera and jumble of philosophy and vulgar prejudice, that hardly anything more ridiculous can be conceived. Let us therefore ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... prejudice he was now admitting a feeling akin to jealousy. It was evident that Patricia's admiration for his father extended over to his father's wife; and meaning consistently to dislike Mrs. Honoria, he was irrational enough to want Patricia ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... you that 1/2, meant nothing else than that the bottles represented twelve and a half cents each, with three years interest,—a fabulous sum, but lavished in a direction where the pledge of a dukedom had not been irrational, if the object could not have been otherwise accomplished. Next a row of Medoc claimed the enraptured attention; delicately overspread with the dust of years, but flashing through the filmy covering the undeniable blood of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... part in this way. Step in here; I will not keep you a minute;" and he took her into a room off the hall—"do not let us be children, Fanny; do not let us deceive each other, or ourselves: do not let us persist in being irrational if we ourselves see that we are so;" and ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... to particulars, by the assertion of each individual that he has a right to his opinion—a right which is sometimes claimed even in moral matters, though then palpably without foundation, but which does not appear altogether irrational in matters aesthetic, wherein little operation of voluntary choice is supposed possible. It would appear strange, for instance, to assert, respecting a particular person who preferred the scent of violets to roses, that he had no right ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... that fear is the type of asthenic manifestations. Yet is it not the mother of phantoms, of numberless superstitions, of altogether irrational and ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... [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
... perfection, but a very great imperfection of our 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 dissenting ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe |
