"Unreason" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sphinx had spoken and shown that she had some feeling, if only that of pique and unreason; and the despairing lover was able to take a little heart. After all, coquetry, even if carried to the verge of cruelty, holds more promise than ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... it seems, for the British Institution. Forster described it well—but I could do nothing better, than this wooden ware—(all the "properties", as we say, were given, and the problem was how to catalogue them in rhyme and unreason). ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... madness and folly is perfect sanity with me. After all, Alf, is there not an amount of unreason in ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... vaunts windily, but in the end nobody can follow after his own thinking and his own desire. At every turn he is confronted by that which is expected, and obligation follows obligation, and in the long run no champion can be stronger than everybody. So we succumb to this world's terrible unreason, willy-nilly, and Helmas has been made wise, and Ferdinand has been made saintly, and I have been made successful, by that which was expected of us, and by that which none of us had ever any real chance to resist in a world ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... three objects of his address, namely, to state fully and fairly his conclusions, to avoid giving unnecessary offence, and thirdly,] "while feeling assured of the just and reasonable dealing of the respectable part of the Scottish press, I naturally hoped for noisy injustice and unreason from the rest, seeing, as I did, the best security for the dissemination of my views through regions which they might not otherwise reach, in the certainty of a violent attack by ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... these truths at her, observe that the man rues them. He accepts himself as a slave: the slave (as I read this passage) to what is true in the idea of woman's purity. The insufferable creature of the smile is (as he says) the "mistaken and obtuse unreason of a she-intelligence"; but somewhere there was right in her demand. If man could but return, unstained! He must go forth, must explore the rays—of all the claims of woman on him this is most insistent; but ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... progress towards greater elegance and convenience, which might be expected to occur did people copy the ways of the really best, or follow their own ideas of propriety, we have a reign of mere whim, of unreason, of change for the sake of change, of wanton oscillations from either extreme to the other—a reign of usages without meaning, times without fitness, dress without taste. And thus life a la mode, instead of being life conducted in the most ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... inexorably in France as elsewhere; he predicted that if this new issue were made there would come a depreciation of thirty per cent. Singular, that the man who so fearlessly stood against this tide of unreason has left to the world simply a reputation as the most brilliant cook that ever existed! He was followed by the Abbe Goutes, who declared,—what seems grotesque to those who have read the history of an irredeemable paper currency ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... she confesses that she never likes what she has, but always craves what she has not—that she hates everything useful and prosaic and likes everything which people declare she ought to renounce. She is unreasonable, and he loves her unreason—it bewitches him: she is obstinate, and he loves to feel the strength of her tiny will, as if it were the manifestation of some phenomenal force in her nature. Her scorn for common things, her fastidiousness, her indifference to the little obligations ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... odors of impure assafoetida would mingle with the fumes of the incense; and wicked drinking choruses would rise up along with the holy canticles, in hideous dissonance, reminding one of the old orgies under the reign of the Abbot of Unreason. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to share bed and board through the lengthening years. For this first year—often the first months of it—marks the transition from love to conjugal affection, or witnesses a rupture which nothing less than omnipotence can ever mend. In the first year a serious readjustment must take place. Unreason, as a basis for the relation, must give way to reason; blind, ignorant, selfish little love must flutter away, so that friendship, clear-eyed and wise, may step in. There will come moments when wills clash and desires do not chime; these must be moments of ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... There was a slight echo of rancor in his own voice, still it was patient, with the patience of a man with a woman and her unreason. All his temper of the night before had disappeared. He was quite honest in saying that he wished to do what was right and honorable. He was really much more of a man than he had been the day before. He was conscious ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... her logic of the heart, And wisdom of unreason, Supplying, while he doubts and weighs, The needed word ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... man who loves England for being English will not mind how she arose. But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against all facts for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman) by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest. He may end in utter unreason—because he has a reason. A man who loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870. But a man who loves France for being France will improve the army of 1870. This is exactly what the ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... legislated against it. The tableau was enough—a sublimated symbol of the little papier-mache rigmarole of their daily lives, the immemorial spectacle of Good and Evil at death grips, limelighted for a moment by the cannon in France. The unreason and imbecility of the mob crowned themselves. Thought became ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... for argument. Indeed one of their evils is that they make a writer and his readers believe that he is exercising his reason when he is only moving from trite image to image. If eloquence is reason fused with emotion, writing, or speaking, full of dead metaphors is unreason fused with sham emotion. I add in illustration a further list of dead metaphors lately noticed: 'Branches of the same deadly Upas Tree. Turning a deaf ear to. The flower of our manhood. Taking off ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... is one of the few contemporary men of genius whose books are under-estimated rather than over-estimated. He is an author who has brought back to the world something of the copiousness, fancy, appetite, power, and unreason of the talk that, one imagines, was once to be heard in ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... miserable, he is still fixing his thoughts largely on gigantic strength and happiness, on a strength that has no limits, and a happiness that has no end. Doubtless there are other objections which can be urged without unreason against the influence of gods and visions in morality, whether in the cell or street. But this advantage the mystic morality must always have—it is always jollier. A young man may keep himself from ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Donald, cows distress me! They call up sad memories. I was chased by one in the park at Grantoun when I was a child. A fly had stung it, so it tried to kill me. This struck me as unreason run riot, and ever since then I have wished the Spaniards would go a step farther and make cow-fights the national pastime. I ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... her, till the hour when she could bear the room no more. She had fought with beasts there, and had prevailed. Yet unreason (as she had made herself call it) lifted a bruised head at the last. Papers! Papers, after such a kiss! Oh, the folly of the wise! Caught up she knew not whence, harboured in the mind she knew not how, the bitter words of an old Scots song tasted ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... not a spy signalling to the Prussians. Three quarters of an hour passed before her innocence was established and the staircases cleared of uniforms and dishevelled curiosity. The childish, impossible unreason of the suspicion against her completed in Sophia's mind the ruin of the reputation of the French people as a sensible race. She was extremely caustic the next day to her boarders. Except for this episode, the frequency of military uniforms in the streets, the price of food, and the ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... met by wrong as flagrant, rousing in its turn the indignation of injury to a pain unendurable. It is strange that the man who most keenly feels the wrong done him, should so often be the most insensible to the wrong he does. So dominant is the unreason of the moment, that the injury he inflicts appears absolute justice, and the injury he suffers absolute injustice. Yet such disputes turn seldom upon the main point at issue between the parties; it may not even once be mentioned, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... there yet lurked a thoughtful doubt concerning the result. For he knew that, in some shape or other, and that certainly not the true one, the affair would be spread over the country, where now prejudice against the Catholics was strong and dangerous in proportion to the unreason of those who cherished it. Now, also, it was becoming pretty plain that except the king yielded every prerogative, and became the puppet which the mingled pride and apprehension of the Parliament would have him, their differences must ere long be ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... could see them, feel them, hear them, address them - Halo-bedecked - And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason, Rigid in hate, Smitten by years-long wryness born ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better than cant,—and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning which enables them to supplant ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... occasionally perhaps combined in the same persons, the Middle Ages abound. The fidelity of Griseldis under the trials imposed upon her by her, in point of fact, brutal husband is the fidelity of a martyr to unreason. The story was afterwards put on the stage in the Elizabethan age; and though even in the play of "Patient Grissil" (by Chettle and others), it is not easy to reconcile the husband's proceedings with the promptings of common ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... that time, the Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.'s room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if they could suppose that ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... reasonable, put like that—at least, it seemed consistent with what appeared to the three to be the amazing unreason of all Frank's proceedings. They ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... be working out to advantage. He could not but remember how so very few weeks ago he had been urgent that Richard should spend his summer at Little Beeding and lend a hand in the noble work of defending Stella Ballantyne against ignorance and unreason. But the twinge only lasted a moment. He had made a mistake, as all men occasionally do—yes, even sagacious and thoughtful people like himself. And the mistake was already being repaired. He looked across the meadow that night at the lighted blinds of Stella's windows and ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... time when suspension means bankruptcy, and when all the kindness and skill of all our friends can be no longer of any avail. Is it not our own fault, and shall we not so educate our girls that they shall not fall into it, since they comprehend its unreason? ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... "the measure of all things," and all things must have been framed according to a plan or "model" which that mind supplied. Intelligence must be regarded as having a purpose, and as working towards an end, for it is this alone which distinguishes reason from unreason, and mind from mere unintelligent force. The only proper model which could be presented to the Supreme Intelligence is "the eternal and unchangeable model"[646] which his own perfection supplies, "for he is the most excellent of causes."[647] ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... first cause (Prakriti), such as the Sankhyaists postulate, could never call into being an orderly world, for how could unreason produce reason? Nor could atoms set in motion produce a planned or intelligent universe, as the Atomists falsely say. There must be an intelligent power controlling the atoms and contemplating ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... freely in solution, arrange themselves into shapes mathematically perfect, or particles of frozen moisture into the symmetrical and beautiful forms of snowflakes, you have nothing to say. You have not even invented a name to conceal your heroic unreason." ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... grow in the garden of the women." But I am anxious to close with a more polite German observation. Seume holds: "I cannot decide whether the women have as much reason as the men, but I am perfectly sure that they have not so much unreason." And yet: "How hard it is for women to keep counsel," and how many writers since Shakespeare have said this ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... pretended exhibitions of the tooth of Buddha can still inspire an ignorant multitude of people to place themselves in adoring procession and to debase themselves with the absurd rites of frenzy and unreason. Nor do I forget the fact that my countrymen are broken up into hundreds of sects, and their language frittered into hundreds of dialects. Yet, as I said, we are full of hope, and there can be no man so bold as to limit the capabilities of that blood ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... said Sir Richard solemnly; "it brings disorder. For religion we have the clergy, and for justice the lawyers, and for health the doctors. All outside of that partakes of license and unreason." ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... have despised science. "What!" you exclaim, "are we not foremost in all discovery,[9] and is not the whole world giddy by reason, or unreason, of our inventions?" Yes; but do you suppose that is national work? That work is all done in spite of the nation; by private people's zeal and money. We are glad enough, indeed, to make our profit of science; we snap up ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... fierce unreason should league and lie and defame and smite, We that know thee, how far below thee the hatred burns of the sons of night, We that love thee, behold above thee the witness written of ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... so. He tells me that whereas most men make the mistake of putting down womanly unreason to the score of their having too much heart, he puts it down to their having no heart at all, which he says is so mad a state that they are unrecognisable as ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... a grim-faced Calmuck who worshiped the great god of storms—many a Grecian peasant who did homage to Phoebus Apollo when the sun rose or went down—many a savage, his hands smeared all over with human sacrifice—shall sit down with Moses and Jesus in the kingdom of God."[56] To such wild unreason does the mind of man descend when ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... love for Ireland as "dearer than could be justified to reason." Englishmen might well have difficulty in justifying to their reason their affection for America; for to hear an Englishman speak of American peculiarities and eccentricities, it would often seem that to love such men would be pure unreason. But these criticisms are no true index to the British national feeling for the Americans as a people. Does a brother not love his sister because he says rude things about her little failings? Americans hear the criticisms and, their own hearts being alienated from Great ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... against the organised force of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted Gods. It is the Kingdom of Heaven within us fighting against the brute powers of the world; and it is apt to have those qualities of unreason, of contempt for the counting of costs and the balancing of sacrifices, of recklessness, and even, in the last resort, of ruthlessness, which so often mark the paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children of light. It ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... berth by a wooden bar, or I must have rolled out of it, 'what errand was I then upon, and to what Abyssinian point had public events then marched? No matter as to me. And as to them, if the wonderful popular rage for a plaything (utterly confounding in its inscrutable unreason) I had not then lighted on a poor young savage boy, and a poor old screw of a horse, and hauled the first off by the hair of his princely head to "inspect" the British volunteers, and hauled the second off by the hair of his equine tail to the Crystal Palace, why so much the better for all of ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... not at all. For hours after he reached his room in the hotel he paced it frantically. First cumulative anger, long held in leash, swept him like a forest fire, charring his reason into unreason. He had fought for Conscience and lost her. She had thrown her lot with the narrow minds and cast him adrift. He had placed all his trust in her and she had failed to rise above her heritage. But as the night wore on a nauseating reaction of self-indictment ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... our work in common has gone on we have grown in good-will. We are fighting our battle still, but do not see our victory yet. We are not opposing men and women, but the enemies of men and women—ignorance, prejudice, and injustice. Many people bring into a new movement the whole intensity and unreason of their personal desires and discontents, and the train of progress must carry all this luggage along with it. Woman suffrage means equality in and out ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the hour and the occasion lose their brutish emphasis and sink into humorous perspective. The sense of having some one for whom one's weakest and least effective moments are of interest and for whom one's weariness and unreason are only an additional bond, makes what were otherwise intolerable in our life easy and light ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... riddles, "Where does Mont Blanc end and where do I begin?" We do not want to be paralysed by philosophic doubt for the rest of our mortal lives on the hills. We prefer to be stirred to emotional life by those who are transported by love of beauty to the realms of unreason. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... is one of the plain man's most serious defects. As such, my endeavour is to avoid being staggered and deeply affronted, or even surprised, by human vagaries. There are too many plain people who are always rediscovering human nature—its turpitudes, fatuities, unreason. They live amid human nature as in a chamber of horrors. And yet, after all these years, we surely ought to have grown used to human nature! It may be extremely vile—that is not the point. The point is that it constitutes our environment, from which ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... unreason of the gods, which lures man as a universal solvent of his sorrow, the great solution to the great enigma! Where was it? Bessie asked when Rob passed her door in the morning on his way to his solitary breakfast without a word of greeting or a kiss, and finally left the house without remembering ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... himself and his circle, and on their mental descendants, of whom Cicero was the most brilliant: it made them look on the law and constitution of their State as eminently reasonable, and on rebellion against it as unreason, or as the Romans call it, lascivia, wanton disregard of principle. So far as I know, no great Roman lawyer was ever a revolutionary like Catiline or Clodius, nor yet an obstinate conservative like Cato, whose Stoicism was of the older and less Romanised type; the two ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... and action struck the chord which, in a man's heart, always responds to the touch of feminine unreason. She dropped into the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands, while Woburn watched the ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... vacillation between contraries becomes its only mode of progress, because it represents that childish form of prejudice which falls in love and cools, adores, and curses, with the same haste and unreason. A succession of opposing follies gives an impression of change which the people readily identify with improvement, as though Enceladus was more at ease on his left side than on his right, the weight of the volcano remaining the same. The stupidity of Demos is only equaled by its presumption. It ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Norumbia he heard that she had once been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August. He felt obliged to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it proved nothing for or against the ship, and confounded him more by her reason than by all her previous unreason. Reason is what a man is never prepared for in women; perhaps because he finds ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... maintain the right of the Many to govern, control, and command the Few. The need of some governing authority in a State can be denied by none but an Anarchist, a gentleman who lives two doors beyond Rousseau on the side of unreason. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of his friend Lord William Russell, attended his execution, vindicated his memory, and been spitefully deprived by James II. of his lectureship at St. Clement's. Burnet was drawn to the translation of "Utopia" by the same sense of unreason in high places that caused More to write the book. Burnet's is the translation given in ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... have done than vanish when I found out my mistake. It is but a short-sighted policy to wait for the mending of matters that are bound to get worse. The notion that her death was my fault is sheer unreason on the face of it; and I need no exculpation on that score; but I must disclaim the credit of having borne her death like a philosopher. I ought to have done so, but the truth is that I was greatly affected at the moment, and the proof ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... stay the route? Was there any reason for the Wickliffe boy's unreason? Was there also any chance for him?—there Adair stopped short, smiling a thought grimly to see how all unconsciously, all femininely, Allys drooped to Billy's ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... spilt their blood that they might have Christ's Kirk and Covenant regulated in their own peculiar way; and he will hold them as mere feather-brains who sacrificed their lands and their lives to an obstinate loyalty to the House of Stuart. Yet it is of such unreason, if unreason it be, that the warp and the woof of the historic annals of Scotland have been spun: it is this defiance of what the utilitarian philosopher calls the rules of common sense, as applied to human conduct, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... whatever may be the Master who orders all things,—(Reason or Unreason),—and although the social organization prepared by syndicalism might constitute a certain comparative stage in progress for the future, Olivier did not think it worth while for Christophe and himself to scatter the whole of their ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... break out from the isolation of men from the community and the separation of their thoughts from the social principles will be extinguished in blood and unreason; but if the distress first creates the understanding, and if the political understanding of the Germans discovers the roots of social distress, then these incidents would also be felt in Germany as the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... wood, and the grunt of his deep, straining breath. She found herself running her hands over her face and down her body and thinking, "Since he is like that, and I am like this, all will be well." That was quite meaningless; it must be true that one of the moon's rays was unreason. The barbed wire danced and fell to the ground, singing angrily. Richard had broken in two the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the matchless "Lord of Misrule" (also known as the "Abbot of Unreason" and the "Master of Merry Disports"), who, attended by his mock court, king's jester and grotesquely masked revelers, visited the castles of lords and princes to entertain them with strange antics and uproarious merriment. His reign lasted ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... etc., was held to be inapplicable to vessels licensed under the act of Congress to engage in the coasting trade;[842] as was also a Louisiana statute ordering masters and wardens of the port of Orleans to survey the hatches of all vessels arriving there and to enact a fee for so doing.[843] "The unreason and the oppressive character of the act" was held to take it out of the class of local legislation protected by the rule of the Cooley case.[844] Likewise, while control by a State of navigable waters wholly within its borders has been often ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... sisters, only in a vastly enhanced degree; and besides these, they have others, born of and nurtured by that terrible slavery system under whose black shadow they live and die. Their idleness, their lack of neatness and order, their dependence, their quick and sometimes cruel passions, their unreason, their contempt of inferiors, their vanity and arrogance, their ignorance, their lightness and superficiality, are all the outgrowth of its diabolical influences. They are, in fact, no more idle, thriftless, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... is mad unreason,—I feel that,—but it is no less true. I love you, but I will not marry you." She spoke with more resolution now. The first plunge was over, and with it her fear and trembling as ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the high cliff out to sea, passing over their heads, and they had the sensation that everything was passing over their heads and out of their control. Paynter felt as if his head had been blown off like a hat. But none of this gale of unreason seemed to stir a hair on the white head of the Squire, whose bearing, though self-important and bordering on a swagger, seemed if anything more comfortable than in the old days. His red face was, however, burnt like a sailor's, and his light ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... sacrifice, and poured the wine, And spoke the words I might not understand. I was unwise in all but the dear chance Which was my fortune, and the blind desire Which led my foolish steps to Love's abode, And youth's sublime unreason'd prescience Which raised an altar and inscribed in fire Its ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... child was brimming over with unreason. Yet her eyes were like stars, and in an uncomprehended way the woman felt the charm of her beauty. No, she would never ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... de Silva's composition, for their lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found passages like "the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty;" or again, "the high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... this curious and very John Bullish unreason is still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... weight of years was added, Christophine's problem grew ever more difficult. She was of a compassionate nature, and had a loving, patient and noble heart; prudent she was; the skilfulest and thriftiest of financiers; could well keep silence, too, and with a gentle stoicism endure much small unreason. Saupe says withal, 'Nobody liked a laugh better, or could laugh more heartily than she, even in her extreme old age.'—Christophine herself makes no complaint, on looking back upon her poor Reinwald, thirty years after all was over. Her final record of it is: "for twenty-nine years we lived ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... an occult moral and mental condition already existed in the years of Lincoln's life which we are now observing, although the profound cause of that condition lay wholly in the future, in the years which were still far away. There is a charm in the very unreason and mysticism of such a faith, and mankind will never quite fail to fancy, if not actually to believe, that the life which Lincoln had to live in the future wrought in some inexplicable way upon the life which he was living in the present. The explanation is not more ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Weller I should ask as Lord of Misrule, and Dr. Johnson as the Abbot of Unreason. I would suggest to Major Dobbin to accompany Mrs. Fry; Alcibiades would bring Homer and Plato in his purple-sailed galley; and I would have Aspasia, Ninon de l'Enclos, and Mrs. Battle, to make up a table of whist with Queen Elizabeth. ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... speak as all were lost. Things are not thus! Such desperation has unreason in it, And bleeds the hearts that crave ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... a compassionate nature, and had a loving, patient, and noble heart; prudent she was; the skilfulest and thriftiest of financiers; could well keep silence, too, and with a gentle stoicism endure much small unreason.—Life ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... enterprise, making the most of our lives. And I must tell you whatever quarrels or misunderstandings arise, they very seldom take place between people of different race; and consequently since there is less unreason in them, they are the more ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... passions of a mob, modified the opinions even of conservative men. "It is impossible to conceive of a more humiliating spectacle," said Sherman.[1052] "During the progress of events," wrote Weed, "the President was bereft of judgment and reason, and became the victim of passion and unreason."[1053] But up to this time the party had hoped to avoid a complete break with the Executive. Now, however, the question of passing the Civil Rights Bill over his veto presented itself. Not since the beginning of the government had Congress carried ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... motives of nations, do not belong to such an extent as is often supposed to the realm of politics. Political causes are often incidental causes and determine the time and place of wars but do not create them. Cramb (66) says that wars persist in spite of their unreason, because there is something transcendental that supports them, and this transcendental purpose is the desire for empire. Powers (75) says that nations fight for tangible things and also for intangible ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... prolonged splendour of Rome, France, and England. In philosophy they displayed decent talent, but even here their true merit is to have brought the wisdom of Asia into Europe, for they invented nothing. Greece was the home of syllogism and of unreason. 'Read Plato: at every page you will draw a striking distinction. As often as he is Greek, he wearies you. He is only great, sublime, penetrating, when he is a theologian; in other words, when he is announcing positive and everlasting dogmas, free from all quibble, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... paranoia to the pinnacle of unreason. He attacked the courts boldly, openly and publicly accused the judges of corruption, said they were in conspiracy with the Bar and the medical societies to do him up, added to this list of his enemies the Irish and the Catholic Church, because the prosecuting attorney in one county and the judge ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... that I shouldn't have come here to meet you. My gift is the thing that takes you: could there be a better proof than that it's to-night's display of it that has brought you to this unreason? It's indeed a misfortune that you're so sensitive to our poor arts, since they play such tricks with your power to see things as they are. Without my share of them I should be a dull, empty, third-rate woman, and yet that's the fate you ask me ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... loathsomely, are dropping from the body. These are peoples that have lost the power of astonishment at their own actions. When they give birth to a fantastic fashion or a foolish law, they do not start or stare at the monster they have brought forth. They have grown used to their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos; and the whirlwind is the breath of their nostrils. These nations are really in danger of going off their heads en masse; of becoming one vast vision of imbecility, with toppling cities and crazy country-sides, all dotted with industrious lunatics. One of these countries ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... broken-tipped sword he'd found behind the hangings; the dirt of the cold room, and his cold eye, wrapped up in his own concerns, scarcely resting on me. Then I remembered the solemn chapel roof and the bronzes about the stately tomb he'd lie in, and—d'ye see?—-the unreason of it all—the mad high humour of it all—took hold on me till I sat me down on a dark stair-head in a passage, and laughed till I could laugh no more. What else could I ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... Emily, spite of all unreason, such was the family opinion of Fred's propensity to fall in love, that Albinia's first suspicion lighted upon him, but as her eye fell on the pink envelope the handwriting concerned her even ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... envy of the gods, and you will win that peace of mind which distinguishes the wise from the unwise, and may be happy even in adverse circumstances; for the only real evil is the dominion of wickedness, that is to say the unreason which rebels against nature, and the only true happiness consists in the possession of virtue. He alone, however, can call virtue his who possesses it wholly, and sins not against it in the smallest particular; for there is no difference of degrees either ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... newspaper in mild protest at such unreason. "Me? I ain't sittin' in this game. Seems ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... laughter strange and cracked like the laugh of a very old woman, that mounted high and higher, welling from her throat as blood wells from a wound; and rocked herself to and fro and stared into the face of the dead stranger with wide eyes of unreason.... ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... and was capable, once more, of choosing between depravity and decency. But what had been taken out of his life seemed to leave a dreadful silence in his brain. And, at moments, this silence became dissonant with the clamour of unreason. ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... Unreason in Scotland, was a similar character to the Lord of Misrule in England. "This pageant potentate," as Stowe calls him, "was annually elected, and his rule extended through the greater part of the holydays conected with ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... soul that it is really the City of a Fearful Folk. That the inhabitants are not human in the ordinary sense is quite clear, yet it has only just begun to dawn on me after staying a week in the Town of Unreason with its monstrous landscape and grave, unmeaning customs. Do I seem to be raving? Let me ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... vainly to arrive at some certain opinions concerning his poems, and he weighed every line, not now for cadence and colour, but with a view of determining their ethical tendencies; and this poor torn soul stood trembling on the verge of fearful abyss of unreason ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... she had done. Her resentment of that undermined all the fairness of her logic, and even triumphed over the sword of her suspense. She never quite gave up the struggle, but in effect she passed the week that intervened pinioned in her unreason—bands that vanished as she looked at them, only to tie ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the Protestant minority. How that could be done under a measure so carefully safeguarded as, for instance, the Bill of 1912,[51] they never condescend to tell us. It is part of their policy never to enter into details, but to produce a general atmosphere of distrust and unreason. ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... brushwood. To the right lay the sea, sometimes at full tide, sometimes withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for the same sea. By that road he would travel over a swell of rising ground covered with short, withered grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason. Beyond the ridge, which was crowned with some sort of street-lamp, anything was possible; but up to the lamp it seemed to him that he knew the road as well as he knew the parade-ground. He learned ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... Street, Cheapside, before the coach had left the Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly well, I still felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of my sight longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of unreason I had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... out what was going on in the man's mind. Probably he did not himself rightly know. The discovery that he bore the same name as his employer had once might have set off some unpleasant train of subconscious reflection, accentuating the bitter sense of class distinction and the unreason of it, which he was only too prone to entertain. He did not want any "kindness" from rich people. He worked for them because he must, but he worked in a spirit of armed neutrality at the best, like so many of his kind, and he spat mentally upon ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... experiences. In religion as in everything else the father was a formalist, and such religious views as he held were those of the Aufklaerung, for which all forms of spiritual emotion were the folly of unreason. Religion was a permanent and sustaining influence in the life of Goethe's mother, but her religion consisted simply in a cheerful acquiescence in the decrees of Providence. Of the soul's trials and sorrows, as they are recorded in the annals of the religious life, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... I know—quite mad. Her words had made me so. And when, to ask me that insistent question, she brought her face still nearer, I flung down the reins of my unreason and let it ride amain upon its desperate, reckless course. In short, I too leaned forward, I leaned forward, and I kissed her full ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... however, awaited the Senora. Without asking any questions, without taking anything into consideration, perhaps, indeed, because she feared to ask or consider, she had assumed that she would immediately re-enter her own home. With the unreason of a child, she had insisted upon expecting that somehow, or by some not explained efforts, she would find her house precisely as she left it. Little had been said of its occupancy by Fray Ignatius and his brothers; perhaps she did ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... and the private infamy of many who enforced the doctrines of the Church, had produced in earnest men a vigorous antagonism. Tyranny and unreason of low-minded advocates had brought religion itself into question; and profligacy of courtiers, each worshipping the golden calf seen in his mirror, had spread another form of scepticism. The intellectual scepticism, based upon an honest search for truth, could end only ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... toiled a whole night, and in due time appeared as Tonelli's affectionate friend in all the butchers' and bakers' windows. But it had been too much to ask of him, and for a while he felt the shock of Tonelli's unreason and excess so much that there was ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... this world believes his country better than any other country. Now, they cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it follows that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active manifestation—it is fond of shooting—patriotism would be well enough if it were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same feeling that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels us likewise to go over the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... her he saw all her obstinacy, unreason, and selfishness; but when he was away he only ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... living jewel that holds the light when the sun has gone. Night fell, and the golden hide became a shimmer in the dark, as the outlaw moved restlessly to and fro in his prison. Then, of a sudden, with the unexpectedness and unreason of a dog's wolf-howl at the rising moon, there rose from the gloom of the corral a shrill, wild neigh that shattered the ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... I think, as an indication of childish unreason, unworthy of any one who faces realities. It is still true that "the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... the atmosphere of womankind still lingered to suggest the dear hands that were gone, and suddenly his eyes leaped to the letters left upon the table. It was Kitty's which he opened first, perhaps because it was nearest; but the torrent of inconsequential words confused him by their unreason and he turned to Lucy's, reading it ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... ever Come? Is endeavour But a vain twining and twisting of cords? Is faith but treason; Reason, unreason, But ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Presidency. His constant liberality and labors. His previous life; growth of his fortune; his noble use of it; sundry original ways of his; his enjoyment of the university in its early days; his mixture of idealism and common sense. First celebration of Founder's Day. His resistance to unreason. Bitter attacks upon him in sundry newspapers and in the Legislature; the investigation; his triumph. His minor characteristics; the motto "True and Firm'' on his house. His last days and hours. His political ideas. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... not as a rule a judge of good looks; and no doubt 'tis unreason in me to pity her the more for her comeliness. But as a ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... He knew his own vagabond unreason so well! No doubt he was mistaken. He had piled up the evidence as a charge is drawn up against an innocent person, whom it is always so easy to convict when we wish to think him guilty. When he should have slept he ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... deal worse," Elinor said, in her unreason; "the one might be borne, but the other I will not endure. Sympathy, yes! They will all be sorry for me—they will say they knew how it would be. Oh, I know I have not profited as I ought by what has happened to me. ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... familiarity of which suited every lip. Merely through enunciating it thus, the throng worked itself into a state of gaiety and became highly good natured. A fever of curiosity urged it forward, that kind of Parisian curiosity which is as violent as an access of positive unreason. Everybody wanted to see Nana. A lady had the flounce of her dress torn off; ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... should it not last? Is there any reason, in earth or Heaven, why we two should part? If there is—I will make that reason itself folly, and madness, and unreason. Dear, do not speak of this not lasting. Die, you say? Worse, far worse; as much as eternal death is worse than bodily dying. Last? Does any one know what for ever means, if we do not? Die, we must, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... course, the superb unreason of women. Beata began to cry as I handed her over to Miss Leslie, who looked daggers at me, and I am quite sure called me, in her own mind, "A ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... that she was mysteriously unlike all other created beings, and—again like most young men and women—she could find, in the secrecy of her own heart, plenty of proof of a unique strangeness. But now her unreason became formidable. There she sat with her striking forehead and her quite unimportant nose, in the large austere drawing-room of the Spatts, which was so pervaded by artistic chintz that the slightest movement in it produced a crackle—and ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... divined, and the determination to arrest her purpose, the desire to possess her entirely and at once, excluded every other wish or plan, and to feel was to act with Anthony Clarke, for he was born to emotional experience as the sparks fly upward. He had ever been a creature of unreason, morbidly conscious of self—and naturally, for in him struggled the blood of three races. His father was Scotch, and his mother—Spanish on the spindle side and Irish by way of a most mercurial father—remained an unsolved problem all her days, even ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Lily in the show-room: as a displayer of hats, a fashionable beauty might be a valuable asset. But to this suggestion Miss Bart opposed a negative which Gerty emphatically supported, while Mrs. Fisher, inwardly unconvinced, but resigned to this latest proof of Lily's unreason, agreed that perhaps in the end it would be more useful that she should learn the trade. To Regina's work-room Lily was therefore committed by her friends, and there Mrs. Fisher left her with a sigh of relief, while ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... nothing humorous or grotesque in her measure of a gentleman, for he realized that she was strung to a pitch of unreason and unnatural excitement, and that ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... with such a temper? On such moments as this I could feel something within me snapping. It was fury and unreason. How I loved him! And yet we had fought a thousand times over just such provocation. Over his shoulders I could see the still open door that led into the street. A heavy form was looming through the opening; out of the corner of my eye I caught the lines of the form stepping out ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... those natural and ideal activities which disease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order, cannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and life with continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, and strife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none, perhaps, deserves to be. There is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... "Think of that line: 'A woman who deliberates is lost.' We make danger, making all womanhood hang upon a point like this, and surrounding it with unnatural and preternatural dangers. There is a wanton unreason embodied in the life of woman now; the present 'virtue' is a morbid unhealthy plant. Nature and God never poised the life of a woman upon such a needle's point. The whole modern idea of chastity has in it sensual exaggeration, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... arid indeed. But I know that there are often in men's affairs unexpectedly—even irrationally—illuminating moments when an otherwise insignificant sound, perhaps only some perfectly commonplace gesture, suffices to reveal to us all the unreason, all the fatuous unreason, of our complacency. "Go ahead" are not particularly striking words even when pronounced with a foreign accent; yet they petrified me in the very act of smiling at myself in the glass. And then, refusing ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... the crowning point of unreason in the business! I said to my landlord, 'My good man, you are not aware that my excellent friend Jarndyce will have to pay for those things that you are sweeping off in that indelicate manner. Have you no consideration for HIS property?' ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... only real, how could it offer scope for further new speculations, as it had already discarded all other matters of interest? If everything was due to a reasonless fortuitous concourse of circumstances, reason could not proceed further in the direction to create any philosophy of the unreason. The magical ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... when, with the usual unreason, the swift and luxurious glide, lessening through easy gradations, ceased. I saw some lights in the rain outside. How should I know it was New York? We had even changed climates since we started. The passengers of my early days in the train had passed away. There was nothing to show. More, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... her, and merited. The word (she could guess it) was an impassable gulf, a wound beyond healing. It pronounced in a single breath the girl's right name and his pledge of a return to sanity. For it was the insanest he could do; it uttered anathema on his love of her; it painted his white glow of unreason and fierce ire at the scorn which her behaviour flung upon every part of his character that was tenderest with him. After speaking such things a man comes to his senses or he dies. So thought the baroness, and she was not more than commonly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... arranged everything, so that every traveller could have his own seat. At the Austerlitz station, however, a human avalanche assaulted the train. The doors were broken open, packages and children came in through the windows like projectiles. The people pushed with the unreason of a crowd fleeing before a fire. In the space reserved for eight persons, fourteen installed themselves; the passageways were heaped with mountains of bags and valises that served later travellers for seats. All class distinctions had disappeared. The villagers invaded by ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... The O'Donoghue. On an eminence, the centre of the earth, rises the feldaltar of Saint Barbara. Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns. From the high barbacans of the tower two shafts of light fall on the smokepalled altarstone. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies, naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly. Father Malachi O'Flynn in a lace petticoat and reversed chasuble, his two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mass. The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a plain cassock and mortarboard, his head and collar ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... other; with Balder at her side, Gnulemah was fearful of the world no longer. But her visions were all spiritual; even the kisses on her lips were to her a sacred miracle! Love makes children of men and women,—shows them the wisdom of unreason and the value of soap-bubbles. These lovers must meet the world, but the light and freshness of the Golden Age should accompany them. The man held the maiden's hand, and so faced the future with ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... visit me were some who had received a liberal education at the Colleges of Unreason, and taken the highest degrees in hypothetics, which are their principal study. These gentlemen had now settled down to various employments in the country, as straighteners, managers and cashiers of the Musical ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... were certain to increase. And why were all these poor wretches suffering the extremity of horror, but because they would not believe in miraculous images, and bones of dead friars, and the rest of that science of unreason and unfact, against which Vesalius had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by using reason and observing fact? What wonder if, in some burst of noble indignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had sold his soul, and his love ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and tactics. They are a proclamation and an avowal, and the worst enemy of Socialism would have found it difficult to pen a more damaging statement. Socialists rely not on reason or justice, but on unreason and passion, for the victory of their cause; and that fact is very much to be regretted, for it is bound to create prejudice and suspicion, and ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mild allowance for his unreason. There was in it—and for his reason really—one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had often before made, over some point of difference, her own terms with him. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he was knowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... aims and actions are divided between the sickly sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And I have written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to rid one's self once for all of the canting unreason of "equality and brotherhood," to rise above the coils of material getting, and to make noble and beautiful and free one's own life. Sodom would have been saved had the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and our hope to-day depends primarily, not on the elevation ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... they call the universe is left to the guidance of unreason and chance medley, or, on the contrary, as our fathers have declared, ordered and governed by a marvellous intelligence ...
— Philebus • Plato
... Gladstone for several years threw himself with the whole weight of his untiring tenacity and force. He plunged into masses of accounts, mastered the coil of interests and parties, studied legal intricacies, did daily battle with human unreason, and year after year carried on ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... saluted has not been good, or is still snappish, he says so, and is condoled with accordingly. Nay, the straighteners have gone so far as to give names from the hypothetical language (as taught at the Colleges of Unreason) to all known forms of mental indisposition, and have classified them according to a system of their own, which, though I could not understand it, seemed to work well in practice, for they are always able to tell a man what is the matter with him as soon as they ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... order and uprightness, he gave it that high place which it yet holds, and which it must hold; for when the decisions of the Supreme Court are questioned by a State or people, the fabric of our government is but a spider's web through which anarchy and unreason will stalk. ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... to some minds insuperable, and to deprive such of the symbols which lead to a final comprehension of the truth is no service to humanity or truth. The suppression of the Roman Catholic religion in Italy, if possible, would be only to leave its place vacant for unreason and anarchy, for the intellectual status of the common people does not admit of a more abstract belief. For that evil influence, however, which a recent writer has designated as Curialism, which to-day has its seat at the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... raging slowly quieted down. A pot that has been boiling furiously doesn't grow cool in a moment, but it ceases almost instantly to boil; and though it may cool slowly, it cools surely. There was not an end of prejudice and unreason the moment the people had disposed of those who were plundering them, but prejudice began to lose its force as soon as men had the opportunity to engage in calm discussion, and to look forward hopefully to the future. In the midst of bayonet and ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong. There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and in exhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a soldier—passe encore. But the death of Shelley was not his goal. And the death of the birds is so little characteristic of them that, as has just been said, no one ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... was right. It is better doubtless to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and unreason alike, for when we do this we have not even a rush candle to guide our steps, not even a poor sowlth to dance before us on the marsh, and must needs ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... I, "last season, but 'twere surely wild unreason Such tiny hope to freeze on as was offered by my Star, When she whispered, something sadly: 'I—we feel your going badly!'" "And you let the chance escape you?" ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... The unreason, brutality, and extravagance of the men; the tyranny of the Union; the growing insolence of the Union officials—Tressady's letters from home after a time spoke of little else. And Tressady's bankbook meanwhile formed a disagreeable comment ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... character, making wealth and position, and all those things which the worldly-minded seek, seem of slight value to him at times. It induced in him many and very varying moods. It carried him back often, even now in the strength of his young manhood, to the fine fancies and exquisite unreason of the fairy world in which those so sadly ill-balanced footsteps of his had first been set. To-day had proved, so far, an unlucky one, prolific of warfare between his clear brain and all too sensitive heart. For it was the burden ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... silver bullet as a token, but the doctor said that it belonged to him according to miners' law; and so it came to a moderate argument. Each was a thoroughly stubborn man, according to the bent of all good men, and reasoning increased their unreason. But the doctor won—as indeed he deserved, for the extraction had been delicate—because, when reason had been ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... doctor had supposed himself to be an entirely normal man, but he had been sitting only a very short time before he began to become aware of the silent murmurs of these three minds around him. The darkness set his own mind free from clouds of excitement and from mists of unreason. That was the first step. But it did more. It developed in him this marvellous faculty of the hearing of silence, called by some divination. All his senses were rendered amazingly acute. A perfectly ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... once allowed me to read a whole packet of letters from her to him. She does not object (as I have read under her hand) to her letters being shown about in MS., notwithstanding the anathema against all printers of the same (which completes the extravagance of the unreason, I think) and people are more anxious to see them from their presumed nearness to annihilation. I, for my part, value letters (to talk literature) as the most vital part of biography, and for any rational human being ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... the discrepancy is less than meets the eye. The House of Commons is a Representative Assembly; the rhetoricians and fencers represent the unreason and the pugnacity of the partisans. A country has the politicians it deserves. I have heard the most ignorant girls rage against Mr. Gladstone; damsels in their teens who knew nothing of life or its problems, nor could have studied ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... to excess. A man finds far more regulations and definitions in his club, where there are rules, than in his home, where there is a ruler. A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance, carries this mummery to the point of a methodical madness. The whole system is stiff with rigid unreason; like the Royal Court in Lewis Carroll. You would think the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly silent. You would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put it on to go away; therefore he ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... no instinctive prompting as to what is right and what is wrong, cohabitation, like many other points of the behavior, is left for reason or the will to determine; or, rather, as things now are to unreason; for reason is neither consulted nor enlightened as to what is proper and allowable in the matter. Nature's rule, by instinct, makes it devolve upon the female to determine when the approaches ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... another, will insist on confounding it with history proper, cannot do so any longer without losing caste, without falling ipso facto out of court with men of education. It is enough for a man of letters if he has helped ever so little in the final staking out of the boundaries between reason and unreason!' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sitting near the conductor, Meroni; but now jealousy sprang up in her. If Claude were with Adelaide Shiffney in that box while she sat alone! If Claude had really known all the time that Adelaide Shiffney was coming and had not told her, Charmian! Unreason, which is the offspring of jealousy, filled her mind. She ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and that it did not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of your system." ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... little that it should be historical this, hierarchical that, or biblical the other. It must be his primarily, because he cannot live a rational and pure life without it. An ordinarily decorous life, if you will; free from lust or passion, and without gross unreason, but nevertheless tame, unprogressive, dry and unproductive, without any absolute certainty except that of the helplessness of man. Such a life seemed to him hardly more than a synonym for death. "The fact is," as he writes ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... from her a sort of careless affection; and she told me that first night in Monterey that if she ever made up her mind to marry she thought she would select Adan: he was more tolerable than any one she knew. It is doubtful if he had crossed her mind since; and now, with all a woman's unreason, she conceived a sudden and violent dislike for him because she had treated him too kindly in her thoughts. I liked Adan Menendez; there was something manly and sure about him,—the latter a restful if not a fascinating quality. And I liked his appearance. His clear brown eyes had a kind direct ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton |
