"Irony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... maiden, by words of such irony wounded, (As she esteem'd them to be) and deeply distress'd in her spirit, Stood, while a passing flush from her cheeks as far as her neck was Spreading, but she restrain'd herself, and collected her thoughts soon; Then to the old man ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... been a credible kind of a chap, that sailor," observed his father with a mild irony, which escaped his son, however; while his mother looked at him in some anxiety lest he should be going to sit there and make a fool of himself. "Well, and what ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... the pious friendship of the publisher that these opinions are bound between covers. They are the record of a stubborn, prejudiced, well-trained musician and well-read man, one who was not devoid of irony. Indeed, I believe he wrote much with his tongue in his cheek. But he was a stimulating companion, boasted a perverse funny-bone and a profound sense of the importance of being Old Fogy. And this is all I ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... public notice on the fame of Rodman, who by an irony of fate is now all but forgotten. Rodman, it may be remembered, was a promising young poet during the first decade of this century. Out of a scandalous youth whose verses made their appearance in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... sermons regularly begin by: "This gospel tellith.... This gospel techith alle men that ..." and he continues his arguments in a clear and measured style, until he comes to one of those burning questions about which he is battling; then his irony bursts forth, he uses scathing similes; he thunders against those "emperoure bishopis," taken up with worldly cares; his speech is short and haughty; he knows how to condense his whole theory in one brief, clear-cut phrase, easy to remember, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... situation for Florent, but in a very extraordinary and most mysterious fashion. He would have liked to find some employment of a dramatic character, or in which there should be a touch of bitter irony, as was suitable for an outlaw. Gavard was a man who was always in opposition. He had just completed his fiftieth year, and he boasted that he had already passed judgment on four Governments. He still contemptuously shrugged his shoulders ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... showed the habit of her mind. Others talked of the delicacy of her sex, advised her to withdraw from perils and dangers, and had no comprehension of the feelings within her breast that made this impossible. The gentle irony of her reply to these self-constituted tutors (not one of whom showed himself her equal in conduct or reason), is as good as her indignant reproof at a later period to the general, whose ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... this whisky nowadays!" he observed absently, with quiet irony. I wanted to hear the ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... many similar subtleties of speech, seem to have fired the imagination of Chuang Tz[)u], 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., with the result that he put much time and energy into the glorification of Lao Tz[)u] and his doctrines. Possessed of a brilliant style and a master of irony, Chuang Tz[)u] attacked the schools of Confucius and Mo Ti (see below) with so much dialectic skill that the ablest scholars of the age were unable to refute his destructive criticisms. His pages abound in quaint anecdotes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... you."—Helen paused, looking upon him, and that look had in it a delicate affinity to a caress. But the young man's manner, though faultlessly courteous, was lacking in any hint of enthusiasm. Helen could have imagined, and that angered her, something of irony in his tone. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... have mistaken the identity of the boy's father. For he stood now, holding the Master's arm; while a few paces above them was the little man, pale but determined, the expression on his face betraying his consciousness of the irony of the situation. ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... never been explained why Jefferson Davis was chosen President of the Confederacy. He did not seek the office and did not wish it. He dreamed of high military command. As a study in the irony of fate, Davis's career is made to the hand of the dramatist. An instinctive soldier, he was driven by circumstances three times to renounce the profession of arms for a less congenial civilian life. His final renunciation, which proved to be of the ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... later he transposed Hartley's advice, not without irony: "Let nothing induce [the English Whigs] to join with the Tories in supporting and continuing this wicked war against the Whigs of America, whose assistance they may hereafter want to secure their own liberties, or whose country ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... please. When I discovered that young Wintermill couldn't be depended upon to rescue his best friend, I stepped into the arena, so to speak," said Mr. Thorpe with fine irony. "I sensed the situation perfectly. Percy was young and strong and enduring. He would be a long time dying in the natural order of things. What Anne was looking for—now, keep your seat, my boy!—what she wanted was a husband who could be depended upon to leave her a widow before it was too ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... want of breath had forced him to wait and really hear it, a sensation came over him of old times when Edward Underwood had argued with him; and it was with much less heat that he returned, with an effort at irony, 'And so you take the bread out of the mouths of the others to support my fine gentleman in ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Unfortunately, at the angle of the fence stood a beautiful Madrono-tree, brilliant with its scarlet berries, and endeared to me as Consuelo's favorite haunt, under whose protecting shade I had more than once avowed my youthful passion. By the irony of fate Chu Chu caught sight of it, and with a succession of spirited bounds instantly made for it. In another moment I was beneath it, and Chu Chu shot like a rocket into the air. I had barely time to withdraw my feet from the stirrups, to throw up one arm to protect my glazed ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... mask, that frozen moment of expression, would develop the quality of tragic irony. In it Clytemnestra comes out to greet the returning Agamemnon. She has her handmaids carpet the road for him with purple tapestries; she makes her speeches of welcome; she alludes to the old sacrifice of Iphigenia; she tells him how ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... and 6 dilate with keen irony on the fate of the first half of Israel's sin—the calf. It was thought a god, but its worshippers shall be in a fright for it. 'Calves,' says Hosea, though there was but one at Beth-el; and he uses the feminine, as some think, depreciatingly. 'Beth-aven' or the 'house of vanity,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... open eyes, eyes that were disposed to caricature the peculiarities of others. This trait, much clarified and spiritualized in later life, became a distinct, ironic note in his character. Possibly it attracted Heine, although his irony was on a ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... a veiled irony in her retort, although it was accompanied by a smile: "I don't. I have to take that chance. I have no other choice at this ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... a little by surprise at the dignity and formality of the captain, touched their hands civilly to each other, and smiled. Eve, not a little amused at the scene, watched the whole procedure; and then she too detected the sweet melancholy of the one expression and the marble-like irony of the other. It may have been this that caused her to start, though almost imperceptibly, and ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... very keen, and that he has conjectured for some time the mistrust with which he inspired me. If he wanted to mock me a little, I will pardon him; a good man unjustly suspected has a perfect right to revenge himself by a little irony. I ordered the horses to be put to my carriage to take him over to the railroad, and the abbe and I accompanied him as far as the station. There cannot be too much regard shown to honest people who have been ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... to overestimate the value of all this work in industry. The Prime Minister, speaking last year on this subject, said, "It is a strange irony, but no small compensation, that the making of weapons of destruction should afford the occasion to humanize industry. Yet such is the case. Old prejudices have vanished, new ideas are abroad; employers and workers, the ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... barbarians, sir, who live as you see us, only in a state of simplicity and nature,"—there was irony in every syllable the impudent scoundrel uttered—"we poor wretches, or rather our ancestors, made the discovery, that for the purposes of convenience, having, as you perceive, no pockets, it might be well to convert all our currency into 'promises.' Now, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... misguidedness, such a tough and stubborn race. The arrow that is to fly far must be discharged from a well distended bow: if, therefore, anything is necessary for greatness, it is a fierce and tenacious opposition, an opposition either of open contempt, or of malicious irony, or of sly silence, or of gross stupidity, an opposition regardless of the wounds it inflicts and of the precious lives it sacrifices, an opposition that nobody would dare to attack who was not prepared, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Kieran could retort, she seemed to realize the monumental irony of what she had just said, and ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... irony with which Talma delivers this speech, when he finds that resentment at Pyrrhus, and not affection for himself, has made her thus anxious to rivet the chains which her former cruelty had hardly weakened, is most striking, and he seems at once ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... Nature was spoilt by irony and straining after effect—for example, in The Fig Tree; and although The Lotos Flower is a gem, and the North Sea Pictures shew the fine eye of a poet who, like Byron and Shelley, can create myths, his personifications as a whole are affected, and his personal feeling is forced ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... watched the terror which these formidable beings inspired, and the business-like manner in which they addressed themselves to their task, as he noticed the jaunty destroyers of his race succumbing one by one to fate, or ignominiously attempting to "get away," he would feel that the "irony of the situation" was complete. In a vague way he would grasp the fact—hitherto undreamt of in his dove's philosophy—that, if the pigeon is preyed upon by man, man in his turn is ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... far from correct, for on the very next night Vertua presented himself at the Chevalier's bank again, and staked and lost much more heavily than on the night preceding. But he preserved a calm demeanour through it all; he even smiled at times with a sort of bitter irony, as though foreseeing how soon things would be totally changed. But during each of the succeeding nights the old man's losses increased like a glacier at a greater and greater rate, till at last it was calculated that he had paid over thirty thousand Louis d'or ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... should be to keep us constantly in mind that, as Lassalle said, "the sword is never right," and to shudder with him at the fact that "the Lie is a European Power"? In no previous war have we struck that top note of keen irony, the closing of the Stock Exchange and not of the Church. The pagans were more logical: they closed the Temple of Peace when they drew the sword. We turn our Temples of Peace promptly into temples of war, and exhibit our parsons as the most pugnacious characters ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... by the contempt which every one showed her poet, paid back scorn for scorn by going to her boudoir during these performances. She was followed by the prelate. His Vicar-General had just been explaining the profound irony of the epigram into which he had been entrapped, and the Bishop wished to make amends. Mlle. de Rastignac, fascinated by the poetry, also slipped into the boudoir ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... bitterest irony. "What is a woman's honor, sir, when you or any man has patched and sewed and sought to make it whole again? I will not say the word ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... scarcely any traveller worth remarking. Mr. Kinglake, the author of Eothen, to be sure, was a host in himself. And Mr. Thackeray, in his Journey from Cheapside to Cairo, proved himself a fit companion of that gentleman. But a certain sneering humor, a certain mephistophelian irony, in these persons, prevent one from feeling entirely at ease with them, or believing, in fact, in their complete sincerity. It is not so with the author of Nile Notes, than whom a June breeze is not more bland, and moonlight not less gairish or oppressive. This conviction, indeed, strikes ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... she said, with a singular expression of irony, "that you are a poet. You must talk about the forests and moorlands with Mlle. Helouin, who also adores these things. For my part I ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... have remotely contributed to form the historian of the Roman empire. 1. From the Provincial Letters of Pascal, which almost every year I have perused with new pleasure, I learned to manage the weapon of grave and temperate irony, even on subjects of ecclesiastical solemnity. 2. The Life of Julian, by the Abbe de la Bleterie, first introduced me to the man and the times; and I should be glad to recover my first essay on the truth of the miracle which stopped the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem. ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... "Where have you been burying yourself, Evan? Didn't I just tell you that he is the biggest man in the State? Oh, no"—with heavy irony—"he isn't identified with the machine—not at all; he merely owns it and runs it. We may think we can swing a safe majority in the legislature, and the 'antis' may be just as firmly convinced that they can. But before either side can ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... revelation of his country's predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do. without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy which belonged to his temperament. He suffered in youth, and suffered badly, from the romantic malady of his century, and that other malady of Russia, both expressed ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... King, her sarcasm for his courtiers. Perhaps little of this latter quality appears in the pages bequeathed to us, written, as they are, in a somewhat cold, formal style, and we may assume that her much-dreaded irony resided in her tongue rather than in her pen. Yet we are glad to possess these pages, if only as a reliable record of Court life during the brightest period of the reign of ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... and eat your dinner Christian-like, without remarks! You have never got over the spoiling you, received when you lay wounded under this roof. I shall indulge you no longer." Shaking her long forefinger at him. "Your familiarity needs to be checked." Her manner of grave and kindly irony removed all impression of rebuke from this speech, which Major Favraud received very coolly, spoiled child that he really was, rubbing his hands as he took the foot of the table. At the sight of the bouilli before him, from which a savory steam ascended to his epicurean nostrils, he said, ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... medicine, and, having set the glass upon the center table, returned to her cot, where, after a still interval, she snored faintly. Upon this, his expression became that of a man goaded out of overpowering weariness into irony. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... I sketch an upland green, And put the figure in Of one on the spot with me? - For now that one has ceased to be seen The picture waxes akin To a wordless irony. ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... has been aptly called "a land of unrest." In the eighteen-forties the country witnessed many plans, "pronunciamientos" and revolutions, which could not escape the vigilant mind of Madame Calderon, who often refers to them with a spice of delicate satire and irony which is not unkindly. After the long period of peaceful if unexciting viceregal rule, the government of the new republic had become the prey of political groups, headed by men who coveted the presidency chiefly impelled by a "vaulting ambition" which, in ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... glass, Paul saw that this person was Oliver Torrey. Anxiously his eyes roved over the wreck in quest of other survivors, but none could he discern. Irony of fate! had all of the others ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... agape, until presently the weapon wavered and was lowered and the woman's voice, touched with irony, brought him ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... ancestor of mine," he said and his wife once more laughed, though this time his anxiety fancied there was irony in it. "All right," she said, "but wouldn't it have been quite as respectful and much more cheerful to send him on a visit to some painter who takes in dingy ancestors and ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... There was the irony in it that so puts up a boy's dander. "Dinna think," said Tommy, hotly, "that I'm fleid at you, though I have no beard—at least, I ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... Colonel to himself, "This phantom lies like an expert. Purifying this kind by fire don't work. I'll sound him a little further, give him another chance or two to work his gift." Then aloud—with deep irony— ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... she turned on him. "You think you are sure of me, don't you?" she cried. And in her tone at once were defiance and irony. ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... of you," I said, without any irony. "But I like freedom, and when you were at home it ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... easy to understand the irony with which a man who thought thus of love contemplated the business of "love-making," and the ceremonial discipline of Continental courtship. The whole unnumbered tribe of wooing and plighted lovers were for him ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... half-smile at the irony of her own position, which, until to-day, she had accepted without after-thought, and which of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... be glossed over in the old way. In neither era, consequently, could an honest novelist freely follow his observations upon Southern life in general. The mind of the herd bore down upon him and crushed him into the accepted molds. It seems a curious irony that the Negroes who thus innocently limited the literature of their section should have been the subjects of a little body of narrative which bids fair to outlast all that local color hit upon in the South. Joel Chandler Harris is not, strictly speaking, a contemporary, ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... my faith to that, miss, if I was you," says Ryan, respectfully, but with a touch of the fine irony which is bred and born ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... long silence in the chamber. The two friends sat wrapped in thought. They had seen so much of life, they had had so many blessings of fortune, culture, position, wealth, that there was a grim irony in their sitting here helpless in the face of coming death. To their reverie, moreover, the mention of love could not but give color. No woman has ever come to speak of love entirely unmoved, though her heart may have been deadened or crushed ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... expenses, the enormous dividend requirements of heavily capitalized corporations has necessitated high prices, a large business, and the danger of overproduction, and a virtual monopoly has made it possible to lift prices to a level that pinches the consumer. By a grim irony of circumstance, these giant and often ruthless corporations have taken the name of trusts, but they do not incline to recognize that the people's rights are in their trust. Not every trust is harmful to society, and certainly trusts need not be destroyed. ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... far more highly cultivated than their brothers, whose intellects are always early absorbed in business, and too often injured by pleasure. The same, I believe, in spite of all that has been written about the frivolity of the girl of the period, holds true of that class which is, by a strange irony, called 'the ruling class.' I suspect that the average young lady already learns more worth knowing at home than her brother does at the public school. Those, moreover, who complain that girls are trained now too often merely as articles for the so-called 'marriage market,' must remember ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... Manuello with a sweeping bow, "the coffee I make is very soothing. It will give you a long, soft sleep." There was an undertone of subtle irony that was entirely lost upon ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... irony in the thought that the power of his vague but compelling vitality, which ever sweeps us on in spite of ourselves, might not have been his, if it had not been for those definite religious doctrines of the ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... 'equal popularity' of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair is referred to. 'A very remarkable book,' the reviewer continues; 'we have no remembrance of another containing such undoubted power with such horrid taste.' There is droll irony, when Charlotte Bronte's strong conservative sentiments and church environment are ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... restless eyes searched the other's impassive face for some trace of the irony he suspected. They were as wide asunder as the poles, these two, in their political views; and mistrusted as Andre-Louis was by all his colleagues of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, he was by none mistrusted so thoroughly as by this vigorous republican. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... mater,' said Henry with a touch of irony, 'I must do some work to-night. Sir George has ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... Peggy had one trait more striking than another, it was her perfect, simple faith in what people said; irony was a mystery to her; lying, a myth,—something on a par with murder. She thought Kate meant so; and reaching out for the pretty wicker-flask that contained her daily ration of old Scotch whiskey, she dropped a little drop into a spoon, diluted it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the titles of the papers which make up his collected—or more properly, selected—works (for there was much matter of evanescent interest not reprinted) sufficiently shows. Some things in his own line he has done perfectly; he has written many pages of magnificently mixed argument, irony, humour and eloquence, which, for sustained brilliancy, richness, subtle force and purity of style and effect, have simply no parallels; and he is without peer the prince of dreamers. The use of opium no doubt stimulated ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... full irony. "So long as you're aware of this, it's well and good," she said. And smiling a saturnine smile, she resumed, addressing herself to T'an Ch'un: "Miss, you know very well how busy our lady has been and how little she could afford the time to keep this tribe ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... manage the cause more discreetly, more genteelly than we do. I am ready to rest and see the salvation of the Lord." On their rounds the letters came to Martha Wright, the gentle Quaker, who commented with the fine irony of which she was master: "It strikes me favorably. It would be a fine thing for Mrs. Hooker to preside over the Washington convention, while her sister, Catharine Beecher, was inveighing against suffrage, for the benefit of Mrs. Dahlgren and others. Perhaps she is right in thinking ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... out that conclusion, and then I worked backwards, keeping well in view the idea of 'restraint.' But that quality which is little sister to restraint, and is yet far more repulsive to the public mind than vehemence, emerged to misguide my pen. Irony, in fact, played the deuce. I found myself writing that a nation which, in its ardour for beauty and its reverence for great historic associations, has lately disbursed after only a few months' hesitation L250,000 to save the Crystal Palace, where the bank holidays of millions of toilers have been ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... wants to. Are you tired of sitting in prison? Go. Are you tired of going? Sit. They robbed you? Keep still. They beat you? Bear it. They have killed you? Stay dead. That's certain. And I'll carry off Savka; I'll carry him off!" His curt, barking phrases, full of good-natured irony, perplexed the mother. But his last words aroused ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... vouchsafed no further reply. Meantime Mark, who for some minutes had been rummaging amongst a pile of books on a side-table, took the word. He spoke in a peculiarly slow, quiet voice, and with an expression of still irony in his face not easy ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... their subterranean home, as well as their counsellor, guardian, and ruler. In the capacity of ruler he was assisted by his wife, a hideous, horrible, old witch with "crooked, copper-fingers iron-pointed," with deformed head and distorted features, and uniformly spoken of in irony in the Kalevala as "hyva emanta," the good hostess; she feasted her guests on lizards, worms, toads, and writhing serpents. Tuouen Poika, "The God of the Red Cheeks," so called because of his bloodthirstiness and constant ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... likely to, no doubt!" said the policeman, in quiet irony. "What rascality are you up to now, Dirk? Can't you be ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... Sterling. "Here is a problem for you and all of us to solve. This forlorn object is representative, and stands here to-night preaching us a serious sermon. He was deserted on the Club steps—left there, perhaps, as a piece of clever irony; he might be son to some of us. ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... stationed at Rivermouth—sometimes drops in of an evening, and sometimes the rector from Stillwater; the lieutenant the oftener. He was there last night. I should not be surprised if he had an eye to the heiress; but he is not formidable. Mistress Daw carries a neat little spear of irony, and the honest lieutenant seems to have a particular facility for impaling himself on the point of it. He is not dangerous, I should say; though I have known a woman to satirize a man for years, and marry him after all. Decidedly, ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... English hearers, and the effect of his conversion was tremendous. Into the theological controversy of the next twenty years we have no mind to enter. Through it all Newman retained his serenity, and, though a master of irony and satire, kept his literary power always subordinate to his chief aim, which was to establish the truth as he saw it. Whether or not we agree with his conclusions, we must all admire the spirit of the man, which is ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... tent and the dwindling number of the Freja's survivors moving about on their hands and knees in its gloomy half-light. Their hair and beards were long, their faces black with dirt, monstrously distended and fat with the bloated irony of starvation. They were no longer men. After that unspeakable stress of misery ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... in voice or action, but there was unmistakable irony. A curious sense of coldness came upon her, as if out of the heart a distant storm-cloud an icy breath had ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... 40. IRONY is the utterance of pointed remarks, contrary to the actual thoughts of the speaker or writer—not to deceive, but to add force to the remark. Examples.—"No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... or a tone of conversation that offended her, and made her repent it. Happily, Mr. Egremont did not wish her to be otherwise. One day, when she had been betrayed into rattling and giggling, he spoke to her afterwards with a cutting irony which bitterly angered her at the moment, and which she never forgot. Each irksome duty, each privation, each disappointment, each recurrence of the sweeping sense of desolation and loneliness had had one effect—it had sent her to her knees. She had no one else to go to. She turned to her ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some one—to hold back the battle from Paris—and incidentally from me. The relief had its bitterness, I can tell you. I had been prepared to play the whole game. I had not even had the chance to discover whether or not I could. You, who know me fairly well, will see the irony of it. I am eternally hanging round dans les coulisses, I am never in the play. I instinctively thought of Captain Simpson, who had left his brother in the trenches at Saint-Quentin, and still had in him the kindly sympathy that had helped ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... photograph you can only glimpse the soul. Words can portray the form of a speech, but the spirit, the life, are missing and we turn away disappointed. That sweet, well modulated voice, full of tender pathos, of biting sarcasm, of withering irony, of swelling rage, of glowing fervor, according as the occasion demanded, was a most faithful vehicle to Bernard; conveying fully ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... An irony was in that Latin diminutive! He spread his pale hands. "Your United States officials perhaps exaggerate. I am very doubtful if we have smugglers here ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... Bazarov. There is a story that some one recently gave him a beating; but he was avenged upon him; in an obscure little article, hidden in an obscure little journal, he has hinted that the man who beat him was a coward. He calls this irony. His father bullies him as before, while his wife regards him as a fool ... ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... erected the grand fabric of his theological system. In his most celebrated work, "The City of God," he holds up to derision the gods of antiquity, and with blended logic and irony makes them contemptible as objects of worship, since they were impotent to save the soul. In his view the grand and distinguishing feature of Christianity, in contrast with Paganism, is the gift of eternal life and happiness. It is not the morality which Christ and his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... house and came out into the wet mist. Then, turning to the right, in the direction which Trumet, with unconscious irony, calls "downtown," they climbed the long slope where the main road mounts the outlying ridge of Cannon Hill, passed Captain Mayo's big house—the finest in Trumet, with the exception of the Daniels mansion—and descended into the hollow beyond. Here, at the corner where ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... once heard said by a genial and humane Irish officer concerning a proposal to treat with the leaders of a Zulu rebellion. 'Kill them all,' he said, 'it's the only thing they understand.' He meant that the Zulu chiefs would mistake moderation for a sign of fear. By the irony of human history this sentence has become almost true of the great German people, who built up the structure of modern metaphysics. They can be argued with only by those who have the will and the power to ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... Mr. Price's recent remark concerning the missing bookkeeper's "good start" came to Albert's mind and he smiled, slightly. "I should say not," he observed, with delicate irony. ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... doubt shrugged his shoulders, for in a tone of crushing irony and scorn, he exclaimed: "Noble ladies! whom do you call noble ladies, pray? The brainless fools who only think of displaying themselves and making themselves notorious?—the senseless idiots who pique themselves on surpassing lewd women in audacity, extravagance, and effrontery, ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... of anarchy with us when there is any talk of government transportation. The official who sold me tickets might have been training himself for a position on the municipal line, he was so civilly explanatory as to my voyage; so far from treating my inquiries with the sardonic irony which meets question in American ticket-offices, he all but caressed me aboard. He had scarcely ceased reassuring me when the boat struck out on the thin solution of dark mud which passes for water in the Thames, and scuttled ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... shows itself in our love of certain kinds of fiction. We know that some of the happy endings in the plays and in the novels are often far-fetched; but we like to have the happy endings, or the "poetic justice" endings, or the "irony of fate" endings, just the same. When the child makes up his endings to fit his sense of justice or beauty, we must not condemn him, as we are often tempted to do, by calling his fabrication a "lie," for that at once ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... and I'll let the padre know whom he has got before I take leave of him. I'll give him a souvenir that won't make him sleep any sounder to-night. Oyez, Padre Jarauta!" continued he, calling out in a tone of irony; ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... Venice of today, like a flower of that period preserved. Let us strike her off. Let us strike off, too, Madame Gorka, the truthful creature who could not even condescend to the smallest lie for a trinket which she desires. It is that which renders her so easily deceived. What irony!... Let us strike off Florent. He would allow himself to be killed, if necessary, like a Mameluke at the door of the room where his genial brother-in-law was dallying with the Countess.... Let us strike off the American himself. I have met such a case, a lover weary of ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... aspect of the case for the time being did not concern her. The death of her mother had been a stunning shock, and when she crossed over to the hotel—what irony, by the bye, to think she had been born there thirty-nine years ago, in the old inn that had preceded the twice rebuilt hotel!—when she crossed the street with Minna, it had been with blazing, tearless eyes ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... mistaken when I thought he said she was on this side of the water," I suggested, with bitter, biting irony. ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... the smart of my raw and bleeding hands. The old feeling of callousness and indifference to my fate was once more upon me, and as I gazed at the crazy-looking raft which I had constructed with such a lavish expenditure of painful toil, I smiled in grim irony of myself that I should have done so much to preserve that life which now seemed of such little worth, and which promised soon to become an unendurable burden to me. A reaction from the excitement that had ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... du Maurier go deeper into vices, virtues, habits, and motives, and are at the root of his pictorial commentaries. He has given us true pictures of the manners of his time; and those manners he has satirised with more politeness and irony, perhaps, than broad humour. He worked well with Keene in double harness, and his pictures are at once a foil and a complement of that genius's work and point de vue. He has satirised everything, and his art has been admirably adapted to the depth of the civilisation he ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... There was a certain irony in asking if one had heard of John Lavington! Even from a post of observation as obscure as that of Mrs. Culme's secretary the rumour of John Lavington's money, of his pictures, his politics, his charities and his hospitality, ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... The guests made room, and the host, rushing up, cried, "Welcome, my lord! What will your lordship please to eat?" The prince's answer was very expressive. Stretching out his foot, so that his slipper sparkled and glittered, he took his golden robe in his hand, and said with bitter irony, "Welcome, my lord coat! welcome, most excellent robe! What will your lordship please to eat? For," said he, turning to his surprised host, "I ought to ask my coat what it will eat, since the ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... coming across honest enthusiastic David with little remarks, each skillfully discordant with the rising sentiment. Was he droll, Talboys did a bit of polite gravity on him; was he warm in praise of some gallant action, chill irony trickled on him ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... man by the superficial but rather subtle qualities by which he has achieved success, it seems a sort of irony to think what he might have done and did not do for the country of his birth. What did he ever do for Canada? Before the war—nothing. He made huge fortunes here. He created mergers here. He started consolidated companies here that in time ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... ourselves unlawful words. If you are happy, Noah Webster offers to your tongue ten thousand epithets in which you may express your exhilaration; and if you are righteously indignant, there are in his dictionary whole armories of denunciation and scorn, sarcasm and irony, caricature and wrath. Utter yourself against some meanness or hypocrisy in all the blasphemies that ever smoked up from perdition, and I will go on to denounce the same meanness and hypocrisy with ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... am I, who did not wish to return this way to-night, dragging a mousme by the hand, actually carrying an extra burden in the shape of a mousko on my back. What an irony ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... heapest hoards," etc.—merely a periphrasis for man, and scarcely fitting, except in irony, to a ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... irony: "That's simple enough. If we had ten thousand men we could comb the thirty-odd miles of lake and examine every motor on it, thus narrowing the search down to motors capable of a speed—why are they ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... run away. Yet he would not die without the customary ceremonies of washing and burial. Shall he make a libation of the poison? In the spirit he will, but not in the letter. One request he utters in the very act of death, which has been a puzzle to after ages. With a sort of irony he remembers that a trifling religious duty is still unfulfilled, just as above he desires before he departs to compose a few verses in order to satisfy a scruple about a dream—unless, indeed, we suppose him ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... some day the bitter knowledge swept Down on my life,—bearing my treasured freight To founder on the shoals of scorn,—what Fate Smiling with awful irony had kept Till life grew sweeter,—that my god was clay, That 'neath thy ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... from those anxieties, have food in abundance and need not struggle to obtain it. Such is the Gentle, who swims blissfully in the broth of the putrefying Adder. Others—and, by a strange irony of fate, these are generally the most gifted—only manage to eat by dint of craft ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... he has done it?" said Marian, alarmed, and not quite understanding Edmund's tone of irony, "Cannot you ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... What irony lurks in blind chance that I should owe this woman my life—this woman whose home I had come to confiscate, whose friends I had arrested, who herself was now my prisoner, destined to the ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... peace of mind that you aren't forced to give me credit for it," said Frederik in lifeless irony. "I'll go in now, if I may. I shall not stay long. And then for New York. It's the best place I know of for hastening one's journey through and out of the 'man-built hell' you spoke about. Oh, and I gave Lawton directions ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... immediately flashed East, and Wickersham came posting back to Denver with the worst case of monopoly fright he had ever experienced. The day after his arrival the Tribune had something to say in every department of his nefarious mission, and every reference to him bristled with biting irony and downright accusation. Never was a "good fellow and a thoroughbred" so ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... of mind is not straightforward and sincere, if he speaks with a double meaning, in irony or sarcasm, the stress is a combination of the radical and final, known as compound stress (><). This is analogous to the compound inflection. See ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... turned to Mrs. Archer. "If Louisa's health allowed her to dine out—I wish you would say to Mrs. Lovell Mingott—she and I would have been happy to—er—fill the places of the Lawrence Leffertses at her dinner." He paused to let the irony of this sink in. "As you know, this is impossible." Mrs. Archer sounded a sympathetic assent. "But Newland tells me he has read this morning's Times; therefore he has probably seen that Louisa's relative, the Duke of St. Austrey, ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... catch the irony. "Yes, it would be cheaper and simpler to put a hard-hit soldier ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... Washington on the fourth of July, while drums were beating, and standards flying. One of the captive negroes raised his hand, loaded with irons, and waving it toward the starry flag, sung with a smile of bitter irony, "Hail ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... raillery; and the Connoisseur[7], by its gay and sparkling effusions, had forwarded the advance of the public mind to that last stage of intellectual refinement, in which alone a relish exists for delicate and half latent irony. The plain and literal citizens of an earlier period, who conned over what was "so nominated in the bend," would have misapprehended that graceful playfulness of satire, elegant and fanciful as ever charmed the leisure of the literary loungers of Athens. For, in the writings ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Roosevelt's coming into the Presidency as he did, but there was irony as well. An evil chance dropped William McKinley before an assassin's bullet; but there was a fitting irony in the fact that the man who must step into his place had been put where he was in large measure by ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... irony, bowing with a chivalrous humility that drove her nearly mad, but he never ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... Remark the irony of fate. This affair had no sooner been settled, Mr. Gurr's claims cut at the very root, and the Treasury regulation apparently set beyond cavil, than the Chief Justice pulled himself together, and, taking his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... friends by writing to them on ruled paper, as if I had not got past pothooks and hangers. Sealing-wax I have none on my establishment; wafers of the coarsest bran supply its place. When my epistles come to be weighed with Pliny's, however superior to the Roman in delicate irony, judicious reflections, etc., his gilt post will bribe over the judges to him. All the time I was at the E. I. H. I never mended a pen; I now cut 'em to the stumps, marring rather than mending the primitive goose-quill. I cannot bear to pay for articles I used ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... irony it is that, while our brothers and sons are fighting like lions on the battlefield and millions of men and women at home are heroically bearing their losses and are sending up urgent prayers to the Almighty for the speedy termination of the war, certain leaders of the people and the people's ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... religious and philosophical thought. They were also skeptical as to the sincerity and usefulness of many current practises and institutions of the Catholic and Protestant branches of the church; their wit, irony, and satire were directed, however, not against religion, but against the obnoxious externals of ecclesiasticism. This attack was provoked by the obvious fact that the reaction employed the institutional state church as a weapon with which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... found in those passages where men are represented as being deceived and tricked by the gods. Anything so deep would be beyond humour. He very probably conceived that the gods, whom he represented as similar to men, were sometimes not above playing severe practical jokes on them. The so-called irony of Sophocles in like manner, is too ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... grave, and the sun and the moon rise and set, and the flowers and the children blossom and fade, and the endless years come and go, bringing peace, bringing war; bringing harvest, bringing famine; bringing life, bringing death; and, beholding these, still said to the multitude in its terrible irony, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... between our servants, but of an insult which Spain has received from France in the face of all Rome. Yes, all Rome has witnessed this insult, and these miserable Romans have even dared to dishonor us with irony and satire, and to mock and deride Spain, while they ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... respects even to that of Australian savages, who at least allow mothers to rear their own children. And this philosopher, the most radical enemy love has ever known—practically a champion of promiscuity—has, by a strange irony of fate, lent his name to the purest and most exalted form ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the disgust of the Duchess. And it was not the way with her Grace to hide such sorrows in the depth of her bosom. When affronted she would speak out, whether to her husband, or to another,—using irony rather than argument to support her cause and to vindicate her ways. The shafts of ridicule hurled by her against her husband in regard to his voluntary abasement had been many and sharp. They stung him, but never for a moment influenced him. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... then, my mind running on the end of de Barral, on the irresistible pressure of imaginary griefs, crushing conscience, scruples, prudence, under their ever-expanding volume; on the sombre and venomous irony in the obsession which had ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... names had been renowned for ages, stood there to answer for the crime of possessing a distinguished name. While looking upon this group of nobles, gathered before that merciless tribunal, where judgment was almost certain condemnation, the public accuser, with cruel irony remarked, "Of what can Madame Elizabeth complain, when she sees herself at the foot of the guillotine, surrounded by her faithful nobility? She can now fancy herself back again in the gay festivities ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... facto assailants of Wakefield's theory usually assume that he wished to keep labour divorced from the soil and in a state of permanent political and industrial inferiority. That is sheer nonsense. There are few more odd examples of the irony of fate in colonial history than that the man who warred against the convict system, fought the battle of colonial self-government, was ever the enemy of the land-shark and monopolist, who denounced low wages, and whose dream it was that the thrifty, well-paid colonial ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... The tone of irony was now unmistakable. It angered the colonel, but he did not know what to say. The spirit of military subordination is not favorable to retort, nor ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... scramble into that saddle and go," retorted Bobby with a momentary return to his usual good-natured irony, "and to leave ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... knew was ironically directed against myself, I did not care. So long as I was to be with my companions and of them, irony did not matter. I caught the twinkle in his eye and laughed. He was as joyous as Narcisse. The gladness of the July morning danced in his veins. He pulled the violin and bow out of the old baize bag and fiddled as we walked. It must have ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Gloster founded here on a magnificent scale a monastery of Austin Canons. This glory has now departed. The Reformation and the Bridges family between them made a clean sweep of everything. The abbey was used as a quarry for building the family mansion, which has by the irony of fate likewise disappeared. Monastic odds and ends may be discovered here and there worked into houses and garden walls. A gateway on the R. of lane leading to station is made up of such fragments. A heap of debris to the E. of the church indicates the whereabouts ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... of Toodlam. And at that time, still so recent, this contempt from her had been accepted as being almost reasonable. Sophia had hardly ventured to rebel against it, and Mr Whitstable himself had been always afraid to encounter the shafts of irony with which his fashionable future sister-in-law attacked him. But all that was now changed. Sophia in her pride of place had become a tyrant, and George Whitstable, petted in the house with those sweetmeats which are ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... [Footnote: We have gone some way since these words were written in our Old Age Pensions.] Here he puts his finger on the very spot where one thoughtless cruelty of bureaucratic legislation is most shown. For many faithful servants of the State come in their last extremity to this destiny. This irony of legislation shone out lately in its true colours when it was discovered that, of over a thousand survivors of the Indian Mutiny, a large proportion, who were invited to the demi-centenary celebration dinner, came ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... first wild Californian dream, his English visit, the revelation of Gray Eagle, the final collapse of his old beliefs, were whirling through his brain to the music of this clear young voice. And by some cruel irony of circumstance it seemed now to even mock his later dreams of expiation as it also called back his unhappy experience of ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... a Psalm, which she had often heard her father quote, came into her mind and repeated themselves over and over. She had smiled with a bitter irony sometimes when she had heard him speak them in a tone of utter thankfulness, while she had been quite unable to imagine how he could use them of himself. But now—now—surely they ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... Many begin by setting up proudly against God what they call the rights of reason, and by and by we see this reason, which has revolted against its Principle, vacillate, doubt of itself, and at last, losing itself in a bitter irony, wrap itself, with all beside, in the ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... what's the fact; if you don't like to hear it, you can avail yourself of the open air. You give it mouth enough, you do; but give it mouth in your own building at least,' remonstrated E. W. B. with stern irony. 'Don't give it mouth in this building, till you're called upon. You have got some building of your ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... time, however, to indulge in reflections on the irony of fortune. All through the afternoon, while the sharp-set Confederates were sweeping away the profits which the Northern sutlers had wrung from Northern soldiers, Stuart's vigilant patrols sent in ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... long ears, my man; but sure it's kind for ye,' retorted Mr. Callaghan, his eye twinkling wickedly. I fear that his subtle irony was lost upon its subject. 'Of coorse I'm not used to ye're foreign food. Our vittles at home are a dale dacenter, ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... method which Mr. White recalls in his studies of scamps and snobs; he allows them, as Thackeray allows Barry Lyndon and the rest, to tell their own stories, and in their unconsciousness of their own natures he finds play for an irony as keen and graphic as anything in fiction. He deals with the actual English world, and the pleasure he gave us was such as to make us resolve to return to Thackeray's vision of his own contemporaneous English world at the first opportunity. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... his life the King could not tell why he refrained from again attempting to embrace her—and yet he did refrain, standing and listening while she reproved him, and to his ears there seemed to be something of irony and something of mirth in ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... sort yourself," returned Myner, with more than his usual flippancy of manner, but, as I was gratefully aware, not a trace of his occasional irony ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mid-day to-morrow," the Princess pursued, "unless, of course, Victoria refuses to accompany me." Her voice took a tinge of irony. "Possibly your wishes may persuade her, Augustin, if ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... world of men and women, and could only think of the inhumanity of man to man, and of the infinite pain silently endured by many hearts in that Purple Land. The only mystery still unsolved in that ruinous estancia was Don Hilario, who locked up the wine and was called master with bitter irony by Ramona, and who had thought it necessary to apologise to me for depriving me of his ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... over "Wisdom and Destiny," or perhaps over "The Book of Pity and of Death." On the other hand, it seemed quite natural to think of her smiling her mocking smile over a work of delicate, or even of bitter, irony, such as Anatole France's story of Pilate at the Baths of Baies, or study of the Penguins. He could not think that she cared for sentimental books, though she might perhaps have a taste for works ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... fought out by physical force—a struggle which, in the case of man, whom Franklin defines as a tool-making animal, is decided by the weapons peculiar to the species; and the decision is irrevocable. This is the well-known principle of right of might—irony, of course, like the wit of a fool, a parallel phrase. The honor of a knight may be called the ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the High Priestess said, not without irony. "And it does not appear seemly that an ordinary mortal ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... What inimitable irony in this epithet! The God of dulness raging! A stagnant pool in a passion; a canal insane; a mouton enrage, as the French says; or a snail in a tumultuous state of excitement, were but types of ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... House of Commons; his honour was proof, as we have seen, against the most insidious temptations; yet, since one man cannot have all the virtues, he was distinctly stupid. It would have been a hopeless speech anyhow; but, to make matters worse, he had, in the most important part of it, attempted irony. And at the beginning of the ironical passage even the Tariffadical word-painters had to confess that it was their own stalwarts who ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... manner, the most perfect humour and irony is generally quite unconscious. Examples of both are frequently given by men whom the world considers as deficient in humour; it is more probably true that these persons are unconscious of their own delightful power through ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler |
