"Irrational" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the cabinet, who, in a prolonged interview with the demented Emperor, argued earnestly on the part of Queen Victoria and her ministry against his purposed violation of the peace of Europe by undertaking an unprovoked, unjust and irrational war. ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... stream; and suddenly the thought leaped to my brain that the poor fool meant to drown himself. But I could hardly believe it. Surely he must merely be taking a desperate lover's ramble, a last sad visit to the scenes of his silly, irrational infatuation. If I went up to him, I should look a fool, too; so I hung behind, ready to turn upon ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... the week wore on, miracles happened; for every night one of the Gorgons turned into the beautiful girl she used to be before the Goddess of Reason, infuriated with the Irrational God who bestows on girls their quite unreasonable loveliness, had made her what she was. And night by night the Wanderer rubbed his eyes and wondered if he had been dreaming; for the guardians of the tower no longer hissed, but sighed ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... it will be said. And I have not pretended that they are anything else. But has not the mythological dream its content of truth? Are not dream and myth perhaps revelations of an inexpressible truth, of an irrational truth, of a truth that ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... 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 his utterance was natural. But ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... Christ presents Himself in the character which makes man His debtor for ever. All men, as St. Paul says, have not faith: it is a melancholy fact, whether we can make anything of it or not. Discounting, however, this irrational or inexplicable opposition, which is not expressed in the mind but in the will, how are we to present the Atonement so that it shall excite the least prejudice, and find the most unimpeded access to the mind of our own generation? This is the question to ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... grief, so the readings of the temperament-chart of the artist will be apt to resemble the variations of a barometer when changeable weather is about. Genius is thus as a rule variable to the verge of the irrational. ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... This burthens us with an incurable effect of unreality, and I do not see how it is altogether to be escaped. It is a disadvantage that has to be accepted. Whatever institution has existed or exists, however irrational, however preposterous, has, by virtue of its contact with individualities, an effect of realness and rightness no untried thing may share. It has ripened, it has been christened with blood, it has been stained ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... protection is a deceitful thing," as the Scotch translator of KING DAVID has it, and I entirely agree with him. I rather wish to be protected from a horse, than expect any succour from a creature so large, muscular and irrational. Far from being "courageous," as his friends say, the horse (I am not speaking of the war-horse) is afraid of almost everything, that is why I am afraid of him. He is a most nervous animal, and I am a nervous rider. He is afraid of a bicycle or a wheel-barrow, which do not ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... urging that he should leave the care of his property to another man. This was curious, but hardly to be taken into consideration, Herbert was capable and exact in his dealings; and yet for a moment or two George was troubled by a faint doubt. It appeared irrational, and he drove it out of his mind ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... are to be met with between St. James's and Limehouse, at every hour of the day; as numerous as Welsh parsons, and equally contemptible. How they swarm in all coffeehouses, theatres, public walks, and private assemblies; how they are incessantly employed in cultivating intrigues, and every kind of irrational pleasure; how industrious they seem to mimic the appearance of monkeys, as monkeys are emulous to imitate the gestures of men: And from such observations, I concluded, that to confine the greatest ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... commander, and compelled him to retire. After various complicated movements, the rival armies confronted one another at Talavera, where a dreadful conflict issued in victory to the British. The British, unsustained by proper support, through the negligence of the English government, and the irrational conduct of the Portuguese, were compelled to fall back. Before doing so, Wellesley accomplished another grand feat—the execution of the lines of Torres Vedras. This defensive position was skilfully selected, and as skilfully fortified. Such was the secrecy and celerity ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... noted, 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... absurdly so called), was the doctrine of the New Testament generally. But during the sixteen months of my aberration from the Catholic Faith, I presumed that the tenets of the divinity of Christ, the Redemption, and the like, were irrational, and that what was contradictory to reason could not have been revealed by the Supreme Reason. As soon as I discovered that these doctrines were not only consistent with reason, but themselves very reason, I returned at once to the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... these great offices of State, any one of which might have taxed the powers of a tried administrator, in the feeble hands of a child appears at first sight a trifle irrational; but there was always method in Henry's madness. In bestowing these administrative posts upon his children he was really concentrating them in his own person and bringing them directly under his own supervision. It was the policy whereby the early Roman Emperors imposed upon Republican Rome the ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... her shorthand class and stood wearily by the window, too discouraged even to remove her hat. The shorthand was a failure; the whole course was a failure. She had not the instinct for plodding, for the meticulous attention to detail that those absurd, irrational lines and hooks ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... might be arranged without bloodshed, Durnford ordered the white volunteers under his command not to fire, with the result that the rebels fired, killing several of his force and wounding him in the arm. This incident gave rise to an irrational indignation in the colony, and for a while he himself was designated by the ungenerous nickname of 'Don't fire Durnford.' It is alleged, none can know with what amount of truth, that it was the memory of this undeserved insult which caused Colonel Durnford to ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... guess-work came the studies of the experimental physiologists—in particular, Marshall Hall in England and Francois Magendie in France; and the joint efforts of these various workers led presently to the abandonment of those severe and often irrational depletive methods—blood-letting and the like—that had previously dominated medical practice. To this end also the "statistical method," introduced by Louis and his followers, largely contributed; and by the close of the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... truth, I am too gloomy and irrational. Paolo must be right. I always had These moody hours and dark presentiments, Without mischances following after them. The camp is my abode. A neighing steed, A fiery onset, and a stubborn fight, Rouse ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... am not the author of The Irrational Knot. Physiologists inform us that the substance of our bodies (and consequently of our souls) is shed and renewed at such a rate that no part of us lasts longer than eight years: I am therefore not now in any atom of me the person who wrote The Irrational Knot in ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... fidelity, and duty. The shameful accounts we read, every week in the Christian year, my lords and gentlemen and honourable boards, the infamous records of small official inhumanity, do not pass by the people as they pass by us. And hence these irrational, blind, and obstinate prejudices, so astonishing to our magnificence, and having no more reason in them—God save the Queen and Confound their politics—no, than smoke ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... be, Christ: early on Christmas morning he called, knocking loudly at the door, and (having received his instructions) left presents for the good and a rod for the bad. Those who have since been in Germany have found this custom relinquished; it was considered profane and irrational. Yet they have not found the children better, nor the mothers more careful of their offspring; they have not found their devotion more fervent, their faith more strong, nor their ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... home, shame opposed the best motions that offered to my thoughts; and it immediately occurred to me how I should be laughed at among the neighbours, and should be ashamed to see, not my father and mother only, but even every body else; from whence I have since often observed, how incongruous and irrational the common temper of mankind is, especially of youth, to that reason which ought to guide them in such cases, viz. that they are not ashamed to sin, and yet are ashamed to repent; nor ashamed of the action for which they ought justly to be esteemed fools, but are ashamed of the returning, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... the vast majority of the race, felt instinctively that in this scepticism and insurrection they could not abide, and they have struggled more or less blindly after explanation; determined not to desist till they had found it, and reaching a result embodied in a multitude of shapes irrational and absurd to the superficial scoffer, but of profound interest to the thoughtful. I may observe, in passing, that this is a reason why all great religions should be treated with respect, and in a certain sense preserved. ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... becomes a 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 most utterly enslaved, so the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... about us. It may be said of him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a 'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical, 'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth of the spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Thrale tells a good story of Johnson's irrational antipathy to the Scotch. A Scotch gentleman inLondon, "at his return from the Hebrides, asked him, with a firm tone of voice, 'what he thought of his country?' 'That it is a very vile country, to be sure, sir,' returned for answer Dr. Johnson. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... to my little room I did not mock Mrs. Hutch. I thought about her, thought long and hard, and to a purpose. I decided that she must hear me out once. She must understand about my plans, my future, my good intentions. It was too irrational to go on like this, we living in fear of her, she in distrust of us. If Mrs. Hutch would only trust me, and the tax collectors would trust her, we could ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... state of the crops, the prospects of the weather, the cattle market and the rise and fall of nations. It is the wisdom of the earth itself; shrewd, friendly, full of unaccountable instincts; obstinate and capricious, given up to irrational and inexplicable superstitions; sluggish, suspicious, cautious, hostile to theory, enamoured of inconsistencies, humorously critical of all ideals, realistic, empirical, wayward, ready to listen to any ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... contemned—my example he neglected to follow, and fell into the snare which was spread, as it were, before his very eyes. Yet the Count of Paris, in rashly contemning me, has acted only from a temper which misfortune and disappointment have rendered irrational and frantic. I am so far from bearing him ill-will, that, with your lordship's permission, and that of the present council, I will haste to the place of rendezvous with fifty lances, making up the retinue which attends upon each to at least ten men, which ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... that is to be found among the products of our schools may be traced, in a large measure, to our irrational and fictitious procedure in the matter of grading. We must keep records, of course, but it will be recalled that in the parable of the talents men were commended or condemned according to the use they made of the talents they had and were not graded according to a fixed ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... scenting the joyful possibility of escape, trotted hopefully to heel: but, being a dog of discernment, speedily detected the fraud, and retired to the hearth-rug in disgust. Thence he scrutinised his master's irrational method of taking exercise, unfeigned contempt in every line of him, from ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Everything in the world—be it a religious cult or a logical category, a human passion or a scientific law—is, so Hegel holds, the result of a process which involves the overcoming of a negative element. Without such an element to overcome, the world would indeed be an inert and irrational affair. That any rational and worthy activity entails the encounter of opposition and the removal of obstacles is an observation commonplace enough. A preestablished harmony of foreseen happy issues—a fool's paradise—is scarcely ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... unmusical to an English ear, is good Italian metre; possibly an intentional and deliberate example of the poet's Italian predilections, and if so certainly a less irrational and inexplicable one than the intrusion of some villanously bad Italian lines and phrases into the text of "Antonio ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... many exactions of court etiquette which to republican eyes seem extremely irrational and foolish. Louis could not cross the river to take his Spanish bride, neither could Maria Theresa cross the stream to be married on French soil; therefore Don Luis de Haro, as the proxy of Louis XIV., having the French Bishop of Frejus as his ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... in love with him for his charm, his intelligence, his good-humored gentleness, but she did not like this display of temper. It was not a controlled anger, but had something of the irrational in it. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... faithful few who clung to the old creed; but they had ceased to be regarded as binding upon their consciences by the great mass of the Western Asiatics. Western Asia was a seething-pot, in which were mixed up a score of contradictory creeds, old and new, rational and irrational, Sabaism, Magism, Zoroastrianism, Grecian polytheism, teraphim-worship, Judaism, Chaldae mysticism, Christianity. Artaxerxes conceived it to be his mission to evoke order out of this confusion, to establish in lieu of this extreme diversity ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... that follow in accordance with the degrees of order. This inmost or highest degree may be called the entrance of the Lord to the angel or man, and His veriest dwelling-place in them. It is by virtue of this inmost or highest that a man is a man, and is distinguished from irrational animals, for these do not have it. From this it is that man, unlike the animals, is capable, in respect to all his interiors which pertain to his mind and disposition, of being raised up by the Lord to Himself, of believing in the ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... he sought for reasons against this sentence, he knew the real reason to be that he could not face it. He hated suffering: a world which demanded suffering of him was wholly detestable, irrational, monstrous: he desired no more to do with it. What had he done to be used so? He knew himself for a harmless fellow, wishing hurt to no man. Then why on earth could he not be let alone? He had never ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that I grew cold before such irrational tyranny. "You are going the way to work, sir," I said, "to make me an atheist. I ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... the thing called the duel. Let us take the relation between man and woman, in that immortal duel which we call a marriage. Here again we shall find that other Christian civilisations aim at some kind of equality; even if the balance be irrational or dangerous. Thus, the two extremes of the treatment of women might be represented by what are called the respectable classes in America and in France. In America they choose the risk of comradeship; in France the ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... more angry with yourself than with Biscoe, suddenly take offence with me because I didn't join you in standing between a good man and his dinner; while I, with a spoilt meal of my own for a grievance, choose to feel an irrational concern for the Master's, turn round on my comrade who has spoilt that, and ask, What the devil is wrong with Protestantism, that it has never an ounce of tact? Or why, if it aims to be unworldly, must it always overshoot its mark and ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... this marriage were not the best thing for her! As if it were a hardship! To make sad eyes and draw a mouth because one is to be the wife of a rich general.... Irrational ... The ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... to feel Mayakin's hand over him, but later he became reconciled to this, renounced everything, and resumed his restless, drunken life, wherein there was only one consolation—the people. With each succeeding day he became more and more convinced that they were more irrational and altogether worse than he—that they were not the masters of life, but its slaves, and that it was turning them around, bending and breaking them at its will, while they succumbed to it unfeelingly and resignedly, and none of them but he ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... rational corresponding to three out of four primary passions—against delight was to be set joy; against grief there was nothing to be set, for that arose from the presence of ill which would rather never attach to the sage. Grief was the irrational conviction that one ought to afflict oneself where there was no occasion for it. The ideal of the Stoics was the unclouded serenity of Socrates of whom Xanthippe declared that he had always the same face whether ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... more convincing to me than any of the suggestions which have gone before, is the fact that it is irrational to suppose that the soul dies with the body. If that were true, how could we account for the enormous waste in discipline and culture, in education and affection? What is the meaning of the love that binds human beings together, if after a short "three-score-and-ten ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... this subject. We are presented in short with the old fable of the Twins suckled by the She-wolf in a slightly rationalized form. It was more likely to be true, if anything, in its original form, for in mythology nothing is so irrational as rationalization. That unfortunate She-wolf with her Twins has now been long discarded by criticism as a historical figure; but she still obtrudes herself as a symbolical legend into the first chapter of Roman history, and continues to affect the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the memory of that boyish, loving little note that she had found under the banjo, and for a minute her throat clutched so that she couldn't answer. She had moments of being so intolerably sorry for Francis that it hurt; quite irrational moments, when he seemed to need it not at all. ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... we must neither of us have any reason for saying it again." She looked at him gravely. "Surely you and I needn't arrange the lights before we show ourselves to each other. I want you to see me just as I am, with all my irrational doubts and scruples; the old ones and the ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... hardly know, I suppose, whether I am speaking in jest or earnest. In the most solemn earnest, I assure you; though such is the strange course of our popular life that all the irrational arts of destruction are at once felt to be earnest; while any plan for those of instruction on a grand scale, sounds like a dream, or jest. Still, I do not absolutely propose to decorate our public buildings with sculpture wholly of this ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... have been far too shy and timid in defending one of the oldest and strongest outworks of Christian theology. I mean the element of true prediction in Hebrew prophecy. It may be true that in a former generation too exclusive attention had been paid to it.... But the reaction has been excessive and irrational. A great mass of connected facts, and of continuous evidence, remains—which cannot be gainsaid. Even if the greater prophets can be brought down to the very latest date which the very latest fancies can assign to them, they depict and predict overthrows and vast revolutions in ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... of a religious character. But I could imagine that it might sometimes seem to a more rational taste to have too religious a character. I could imagine that those dancing men might indeed be dancing dervishes, with their heads going round in a more irrational sense than their bodies. I could imagine that at some moments it might suck the soul into what I have called in metaphor the whirlpool of Asia, or the whirlwind of a world whipped like a top with a raging ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... It is irrational to pretend that so durable an achievement was due to so transient a cause as Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn or desire for a son; vaster, older, and more deeply seated forces were at work. In one sense the breach was simply the ecclesiastical consummation of the forces which had long been making ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... and (setting aside partiality for our own countrymen) allow them to be carefully examined, it will be found that we have invariably been the aggressors; and when we have given serious cause of offence, can we be so irrational as to express astonishment that a savage should seek revenge? The last massacre was that of "The Boyd's" crew; every impartial person who reads the account of that melancholy transaction must acknowledge the unfortunate captain was most to blame. But that event took place nineteen years back; since ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... charming daughter had become a species of passion. Under any other circumstances, the novelist, who delighted in such cases, would not have failed to meditate ironically on that feeling, easy enough of explanation. There was much more irrational instinct in it than Montfanon himself suspected. The old leaguer would not have been logical if he had not had in point of race an inquisition partiality, and the mere suspicion of Jewish origin should have prejudiced him against Fanny. But he was just, as Dorsenne ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... had quite enough 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
... terror with which I anticipated the hour of one, and the disclosure of the unknown undertaking to which I had bound myself, was irrational and morbid. But, honestly, I doubt it; my tendency has always been that of many other weak characters, to act impetuously, and afterwards to reproach myself for consequences which I have, perhaps, in reality, had little ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... by modern standards, as to inspire perfect confidence, either in professional men or in the inhabitants. By some of the latter, indeed, were displayed evidences of panic unworthy of men, unmeasured, irreflective, and therefore irrational; due largely, it is to be feared, to that false gospel of peace which preaches it for the physical comfort and ease of mind attendant, and in its argument against war strives to smother righteous indignation or noble ideals by appealing to the fear of ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... to understand how upholders of the disappearing doctrine would ever bring themselves to maintain, even on their own premisses, that any creation of the Supreme Spirit could be "brute"—that is, inert and irrational! Regarded from the new view-point, all is what may, for present purposes, be called spiritual. And when man appeared upon the globe, he was not something introduced from without, different from and alien to the world of matter, but merely the outcome of a more intense activity of the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... and covetousness and irreligion; overweening arrogance, an impatient contempt for the rights of the weak, a mania for world dominion, and a veritable lunacy of power worship. There came also a fixed and irrational distrust of the intentions of other nations, for the evil which had crept into their own souls made them see evil in others, and that distrust was nurtured carefully and ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... required the planful handling of concrete material, Adolf proceeded unintelligently. He showed no foresight, was rather slow, but by following out a trial and error procedure and with some repetition of irrational placing of the pieces he finally succeeded. Moderate ability to profit by trial and error was shown, but for his age the performance on this type of test was poor. On our "Puzzle-Box,'' which calls for the analysis of a concrete ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... consciousness, that his appearance and conduct while under the influence of liquor, might be such as not only to frighten, but estrange his child's affection from him; and he seemed touched by the thought, for his manner changed, though he was still to a degree irrational. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... again she sought The prisoner's tower, as she was wont before: From which the sad Philander hoped and thought That love to him the dame no longer bore. Lo! Fortune for her an occasion wrought, (To evil deed propitious evermore) To give effect, with memorable ill, To her irrational and evil will. ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... money is 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 Virginia, until now. ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... as it is expiating its willfulness in more terrible and direct punishment. There is not a single spasm in that decayed and nerveless frame, not a single horror of all the gloomy forebodings and irrational shudderings of the sickening delirium, not a single mile of the grim dusty roads he wearily traverses, which is not needed to bring him to the truth. The soul may be so clouded that it may not even be taking note of its ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of genuine though undemanded qualifications. He went to study in Paris with the determination that when he provincial home again he would settle in some provincial town as a general practitioner, and resist the irrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge in the interest of his own scientific pursuits, as well as of the general advance: he would keep away from the range of London intrigues, jealousies, and social truckling, and win celebrity, however slowly, as Jenner had done, by the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... honest-minded about the girl, a something which gave people the feeling that they were very wise in liking her. Some people you are fond of against your will. When people cared for Phyllis it was with a quite irrational feeling that they were doing a sensible thing. They never gave any of the credit to her very real, though almost ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... illogical, of course, and very absurd. If we can accept the four words, why not accept all six? If we credit the head of the text, why cavil at the tail? Sometimes the absurdity of such irrational behavior will break upon a man and set him laughing at his own stupidity. Mr. Spurgeon had some such experience. 'Gentlemen,' he said, one Friday afternoon, in an address to his students, 'Gentlemen, there are many ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... fancied that he had been outwardly cool, chilled into subconscious calculation by the very violence of the shock ... The frenzy had come later when he found himself aboard a ferryboat bound for Oakland. He could not disentangle the mixed impulses which had sent him upon this irrational errand, but he remembered now that a consuming desire to see Hilmer had possessed him. Perhaps an itching for revenge again had sprung into life, perhaps a fury to release a measure of his scorn and contempt, perhaps a mere curiosity to glimpse once ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... themselves in them before they begin to debate upon their causes or influence. And it is in this way that art is the pioneer of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows not why, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the world that we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner; and after the facts have been thus vividly brought before us and have had time to settle and arrange themselves in our minds, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their good name served to prevent their speaking out. But Dr. Mayhew did not conceal or disguise his sentiments on this point any more than on others, such as the peculiar tenets of Calvinism. He explicitly and boldly declared the doctrine irrational, unscriptural, and directly contradictory."[20] He taught the strict unity of God as early as 1753, "in the most unequivocal and plain manner, in his sermons of that year."[21] What most excited comment and objection was that, in a foot-note to the volume of his sermons ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... thither, and communicate to him whatever impulse he pleases. In this sort of dream he raves and resolves, he fights or he flies, and then wakes to confused memory of just what the author thinks fit to call to his recollection. It is very interesting and edifying, truly, to watch the movements of an irrational puppet! I do beg of you, when you take up the functions of the novelist, not to distribute this species of intoxication amongst your dramatis personae, more largely than is absolutely necessary. Keep them in a rational state as long as you can. Depend upon it they will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... unreasonably. No party has ever deserved quite the abuse that each party has got in turn, and nobody has ever deserved the praise that both parties have got in turn. The old political meeting was a wholly irrational performance; it was got together for the purpose of saying things that were chiefly not so and that were known by those who heard them not to be so, and were simply to be taken as a tonic in order ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... his cousin rather sternly. Her frivolous manner jarred upon him, and he forgot in his irrational displeasure that Miss Audley had known nothing of the terrible drama which had been so long ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... old-fashioned doctrine of a religion of fear.' No! I am not. But I am preaching this plain fact, that a man who is in discord with God has reason to be afraid, and I come to you with the old exhortation of the prophet, 'Be troubled, ye careless ones.' For there is nothing more ignoble or irrational than security which is only made possible by covering over unwelcome facts. 'Be troubled'; and let the trouble ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the interpreter has to tread here, every one knows who has dipped, even superficially, into the controversies among Platonists themselves. All admit the distinction between the rational and the irrational part or principle, the latter including, first, the sensibility, and secondly, the Plastic, or that lower which in obedience to its sympathies enables the soul to attach itself to, and to organize into a suitable body those ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Circulation in Infancy. Warm Dress for Infants; and why. Investigations in France, and Results. Dangers from the opposite Extreme. Effects of too much Clothing. Rule of Safety. Featherbeds; why unhealthy in Warm Weather. Best Nightgowns for Young Children. Clothing; how to be proportioned. Irrational Dress of Women. Use of Flannel next the Skin. Evils of Tight Dresses to Women. False Taste in our Prints of Fashions. Modes in which Tight Dresses operate to weaken the Constitution. Rule of Safety as to Looseness of Dress. Example of English Ladies in Appropriateness ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... and ever-kind Henry Gower could not be to blame for her wretched plight; and, of course, she herself could not be to blame for it. So, until now there had been no scapegoat. Presbury therefore received the whole burden. He, alarmed lest a creature apparently so irrational, should in wild rage drive him away, ruin him socially, perhaps induce a sympathetic court to award her a large part of his income as alimony, said not a word in reply. He bade his wrath wait. Later on, when the peril was over, when he had a firm grip ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... Society, capricious in its indignation as it had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and petted darling. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry. He was persecuted with an irrational fury. Much has been written about those unhappy domestic occurrences which decided the fate of his life. Yet nothing is, nothing ever was, positively known to the public, but this, that he quarrelled with his lady, and that she refused to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... intoxication, he would have made allowances for the cause. Before resorting to extreme measures in defending his charge, he first would have sought to bring them to their senses. Drunken men are men unbalanced, irrational. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... seeing that "everything is right"? Let {59} Mr. Wells once take his principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... distinct or settled notion. Phaedrus evidently confounds them with tales; and Gay, both with tales and allegorical prosopopoeias. A fable, or apologue, such as is now under consideration, seems to be, in its genuine state, a narrative in which beings irrational, and, sometimes, inanimate, "arbores loquuntur, non tantum ferae," are, for the purpose of moral instruction, feigned to act and speak with human interests and passions. To this description the compositions of Gay do not always conform. For a fable, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... 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 pretend to romance with a girl! ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... with respect to a book which would pass better as being intended to destroy the idea of a Deity, than as one containing the oracles dictated and revealed by him. Nothing but a heap of absurdities could possibly result from principles so false and irrational; nevertheless, let us take another glance at the principal objects which this divine work continually offers to our consideration. Let us pass on to the Deluge. The holy books tell us, that in spite of the will of the Almighty, the whole human race, who had already been punished ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... the first I observed a unity, but in the other, a sort of division. And in that unity I conceived the rational soul, and the nature of truth and of the chief good to consist; but in this division I miserably imagined there to be some unknown substance of irrational life, and the nature of the chief evil, which should not only be a substance, but real life also, and yet not derived from Thee, O my God, of whom are all things. And yet that first I called a Monad, as it had been a ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... 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 ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... in a very special manner, to be honoured by the appearance of the Saviour, who shall come to have mercy upon the miserable, and to seek that which was lost. Isaiah has, further, first taught that, by the redemption, the consequences of the Fall would disappear in the irrational creation also, and that it should return to paradisaic innocence, chap. xi. 6-9. He has first announced to the people of God the glorious truth, that death, as it had not existed in the beginning, should, at the end also, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... relief at finding that Julian was not killed or maimed for life in a railway accident, had begun by treating a delay of one hour in all her arrangements for the evening as a trifle. But she had soon felt that, though a trifle, it was really very upsetting and annoying. It gave birth to irrational yet real forebodings as to the non-success of her little party. It meant that the little party had "started badly." And then her other grand-nephew, Louis Fores, did not arrive. He had been invited for supper at seven, and should have appeared at five minutes ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... abridgments;—which if they be fortunately so done as to prove delight to any of the young readers, it is hoped that no worse effect will result than to make them wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the Plays at full length (such a wish will be neither peevish nor irrational). When time and leave of judicious friends shall put them into their hands, they will discover in such of them as are here abridged (not to mention almost as many more, which are left untouched) many surprising events and turns of fortune, which for their infinite ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... God! because she isn't guilty!" said Alston with violence, and did not even remember to be glad no legal brother was present to hear so irrational an explosion. He hurried on lest she should call satiric attention to its thinness. "And as for Madame Beattie, she'll get nothing out of it. For the necklace being ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... 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
... little good. They are but topical remedies, which cannot restore the pristine vigor of a ruined constitution. What we need is a reform as thorough-going as that which has been effected in the Spanish language. Shall we ever have it? or will the irrational conservatism of the educated classes, in all time to come, prevent a consummation so desirable, and so desiderated by the philologist? Max Mueller thinks that perhaps our posterity, some three hundred years hence, may write as they speak,—in other words, that our orthography will ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the wooden cupolas over the five domes, and the pointed arches in the narthex, are deviations from Byzantine traditions dating in part from the later Middle Ages Nothing could well be conceived more irrational, from a structural point of view, than the accumulation of columns in the entrance-arches; but the total effect is so picturesque and so rich in color, that its architectural defects are easily overlooked. The external veneering of white and colored marble occurs ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... understanding, and a merely florid writer. There are two causes which have given rise to this calumny; namely, that narrowness of mind which leads men to suppose that the truth lies entirely on the side of their own opinions, and that whatever does not make for them is absurd and irrational; secondly, a trick we have of confounding reason with judgment, and supposing that it is merely the province of the understanding to pronounce sentence, and not to give in evidence, or argue the case; in short, that it is a passive, not ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Person is properly applied to substances. But of substances, some are corporeal and others incorporeal. And of corporeals, some are living and others the reverse; of living substances, some are sensitive and others insensitive; of sensitive substances, some are rational and others irrational.[58] Similarly of incorporeal substances, some are rational, others the reverse (for instance the animating spirits of beasts); but of rational substances there is one which is immutable and impassible by nature, namely God, another which in virtue ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... shall find that those only have arrested the attention of more than one or two generations which have satisfied this requirement. Every other romance, let it moralize ever so loudly, is still immoral; let it offer ever so much of so-called wisdom, is still irrational. The excellence of a romance, like that of an epic or a drama, lies in the apprehension and truthful exhibition of the course of ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... science, it must be (with some qualifications) the first; if two, the first and second, and so on. To choose one of the higher sciences, Chemistry or Physiology, without the others that precede, is irrational. Indeed, it would scarcely ever be done, and for this reason. A man cannot have mastered Physiology without having gone through Physics and Chemistry; and, although it is not necessary that he should retain a hold of everything in these previous sciences, yet he is sure to have ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... rebel agents on so strange a point as that of Bright's courage was doubly characteristic because the Southern people themselves had this same barbaric weakness of attributing want of courage to opponents, and owed their ruin chiefly to such ignorance of the world. Bright's courage was almost as irrational as that of the rebels themselves. Every one knew that he had the courage of a prize-fighter. He struck, in succession, pretty nearly every man in England that could be reached by a blow, and when he could not reach the individual ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... be seen, in the course of this work, that the writer is as earnest in recommending ladies who belong to the higher class of settlers to cultivate all the mental resources of a superior education, as she is to induce them to discard all irrational and artificial wants and mere useless pursuits. She would willingly direct their attention to the natural history and botany of this new country, in which they will find a never-failing source of amusement and instruction, at ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... realised that she was drawing upon, herself the very thing she was trying to avoid. But she had averted her face, afraid of the blue flame of his eyes, and his quick movement, silent and certain as the leap of a panther, filled her with a sudden irrational terror. She started to run. Then, her feet entangled in the rug which had slipped to the floor when she sprang up from her seat, she stumbled and ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... these legends are historically correct. Their value lies in the moral of them. And as for their real historical correctness, the Straussian argument that no such persons existed, because lies are told of them, is, I hold, most irrational. The falsehood would not have been invented unless it had started in a truth. The high moral character ascribed to them would never have been dreamed of by persons who had not seen living instances ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... Harrow you might see the Scottish Express on the North-Western main line. For a moment I did not realise that the train was German, that the purpose of its journey was to kill me and my fellow-men. But it is too easy to sentimentalise, to labour the stark fact that war is a grotesque, irrational absurdity.... ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... complied, and the curious, seeing that he appeared to be the more irrational of the two, and far more likely to get into mischief, set off in pursuit. The skipper crossed the road, and began gently to overtake ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... 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 face of horror when ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... more effectually and healthfully provided for in this manner than by confining the child to a warm atmosphere. Young children should never be dressed decollete—in low necks and short sleeves. That fashion is a dangerous one which leaves the neck, shoulders, and arms uncovered. To this irrational custom may be traced a vast amount of the suffering and many of the deaths of early life; doubtless, also, in many cases it lays the foundation of consumption, which manifests itself a little later. But, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... a street in the young woman's company. Vane, as it happened, had met Kitty Blake by accident and had asked her to accompany him on a visit to Celia. Evelyn did not think she was of a jealous disposition, and jealousy appeared irrational in the case of a man whom she had dismissed as a suitor; but the thing undoubtedly rankled in her mind. While she was considering it, Jessy Horsfield entered ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss |
