"Absurdity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the absurdity of which will make an Englishman laugh; but the corollaries drawn from it are serious, as they are intended to feed the hostile feeling still existing against this country; for he attempts to prove that from the time the Independence was ratified by George the Third, that we have ever ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... The absurdity of this statement was so great that it made the captain laugh instead of making him angry; but before he could say anything more to Maka, Mrs. Cliff approached him. "You must excuse me, captain," she said, "but really the time is very ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... that something unpleasant should happen to the boy and that the boy should be brought to his senses.... If anyone had hinted to him that the boy was just coming to his senses he would have listened as one listens to a patent absurdity. ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly assumed at once loco-motive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buz in the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of the said mysterious personage. But what gives an additional and more ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations is the curious fact, that if in a volume of poetry the critic should find poem or passage which he deems more especially worthless, he is sure to select and reprint it in the review; by which, on his own grounds, he wastes ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... they had for breakfast? She sniffed the air. "I think I can smell ham and cornbread," she said aloud, and laughed, partly at the absurdity of her fancy, chiefly at the idea of such attractive food. She aggravated her hunger by letting her imagination loose upon the glorious possibilities. A stealthy fluttering brought her glance back to the point where the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... raging! A stagnant pool in a passion; a canal insane; a mouton enrage, as the French says; or a snail in a tumultuous state of excitement, were but types of the satirical ideas implied in these words. What a description of labouring nonsense—of the Pythonic genius of absurdity, panting and heaving on ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... those who had supported an absurd proposition with ability over those who had maintained the cause of reason; and it was not superiority of mind which determined his judgment, for he really preferred the man who argued well in favour of an absurdity to the man who argued equally well in support of a reasonable proposition. He always gave out the subjects which were to be discussed; and they most frequently turned upon questions of religion, the different ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... "where he and his successors should have their episcopal see." Beda also tells us that the Metropolis of the East Saxons is London; so that when we, at the present day, speak of it as the Metropolis, we mean it is the chief ecclesiastical city of Essex; which shows the absurdity of a phrase very common at the present day. Sebert lived till 616 or later, but there is no distinct mention of his life in London. His supposed burial, whether in St. Paul's or at Westminster, belongs to ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... But the worst absurdity of all in the tariffist reasoning on this topic is the assumption that in no other respect than wage-rates is German industry affected by the fall of the mark. The wiseacres who point warningly to the exchanges as a reason for firm action on fabric gloves never ask how a falling currency ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... Halderman presiding, Colonel D. R. Anthony, Rev. William Starrett and other Republicans on the platform. Laing's Hall was packed with Irishmen and when he first mentioned woman suffrage all of them hissed, but after he pointed out the absurdity of letting the negroes vote and shutting out their own mothers and wives, the tide turned and they cheered for the women. The next meeting was at Lawrence, and here Mr. Train objected decidedly to the route marked out, saying it was too rough a trip for any man, and ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... measure, and without end, words entirely devoid of meaning? What can have a more ridiculous influence upon our taste, than for the first verses to which our attention is demanded, to consist of such strange and uncouth jargon? To complete the absurdity, and that we may derive all that elegance and refinement from the study of languages, that it is calculated to afford, our first ideas of Latin are to be collected from such authors, as Corderius, Erasmus, Eutropius, and the Selectae. To begin indeed with the classical writers, ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... me dee wi' my bairn?" she asked instantly, without sign of perplexity, smiling on the little one as at some absurdity in her arms rather ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... spoken very little during dinner; he was an intelligent lad, and he feared to utter some absurdity before so many grand people, amongst whom, with dilating eyes, he saw the king's attorney. Then he had been seized upon by Danglars, who, with a rapid glance at the stiff-necked old major and his modest son, and taking into consideration the hospitality of the count, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... theory been more grossly exaggerated and misrepresented than in its application to religion. True philosopher that he was, Marx realized the absurdity of attempting "to abstract religious sentiment from the course of history, to place it by itself."[70] He recognized that all religion is, fundamentally, man's effort to put himself into harmonious relation with, and to discover ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... divided in two; the Doctor seems to have forgotten that he has here placed his cross in the Roman form, and not as the Chinese write it; and it is certainly a strange way of cutting a thing in two, by enclosing it between two lines; but the learned seldom baulk at an absurdity, when a system is to be established. The Chinese character for five is ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... on earth can one govern men if one is denied the use of money, that sovereign means of sway? And he laughed bitterly; for the idea of an idyllic country where all great enterprises would be carried out in an absolutely honest manner seemed to him the height of absurdity. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... in common language, as I have already observed, frequently signifies wealth; and this ambiguity of expression has rendered this popular notion so familiar to us, that even they who are convinced of its absurdity, are very apt to forget their own principles, and, in the course of their reasonings, to take it for granted as a certain and undeniable truth. Some of the best English writers upon commerce set out with observing, that the wealth of a country consists, not in its gold and silver ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... beside the indignation with the natural order which any biological study would arouse except as the scientist perceives that indignation is, for him, beside the point and the religionist believes that it proceeds from not seeing far enough into the process. This is why there is an essential absurdity in any naturalistic system of ethics. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... be proved nor disproved by an appeal to them) and negatively in the sense that what we now know about memory actually conflicts with the "natural" view that past experience which we are unable to recall has been destroyed, which is commonly appealed to to show the absurdity of the rival ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... discordant straight line (its lower edge) to the costume,—its long, ungirdled waist, wrought into peaks before and behind, and its gathered swell below, is an instance in point, of utter disregard of Nature and deliberate violation of harmony, and the consequent attainment of discord and absurdity in every particular. It is rivalled only by the dress-coat, which, with quite unimportant variations, has been worn by gentlemen for fifty years. The collar of this, when stiff and high, quite equals the berthe in absurdity and ugliness; and the useless skirt is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the legislative authority of Parliament. Logically, indeed, there may be difficulty in drawing the precise line of demarcation between a plan for conferring on Ireland the minimum of legislative independence which could without absurdity be dignified with the name of Home Rule, and a plan for giving to the boroughs and counties of Ireland the maximum of law-making power which could, without fraud upon the intelligence of the English people, be comprehended within the elastic phrase "extension of Local Self-Government." But ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... they were married she ran the point of a lead pencil through her eye and it set up inflammation of her brain. And now all the poor fellow has to think of is how to make enough to pay for her keep at a private lunatic asylum. I don't mean to be flippant. It's the very absurdity of it all that makes the mystery of life—that renders it so hopeless for us to attempt to find our way through it by our own judgment. It is like the ants making all their clever, laborious plans, knowing ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... Blasphemy of Depreciating Moral Virtue, 1749. This was replied to in Massachusetts, by Rev. John Porter of North Bridgewater in The Absurdity and Blasphemy of Substituting the Personal Righteousness of Men, etc.; also by a sermon of Rev. Thomas Foxcroft, Dr. Charles Chauncy's colleague; and by Rev. Samuel Niles's Vindication of Divers Important ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... primitive knowledge was almost nothing. The Homeric poems regarded the earth as a circular plain bounded by the heaven, which was a solid vault or hemisphere, with its concavity turned downward. This absurdity was believed until the time of Herodotus, five centuries after; nor was it exploded fully in the time of Aristotle. The sun, moon, and stars were supposed to move upon or with the inner surface of the heavenly hemisphere, and the ocean was thought to gird the earth around as a great ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... sentence, but we do confess our astonishment that the vermilion pencil of the proof-reader suffered it to pass unchallenged. Leaving its bad English out of the question, we find, on referring to Mather's text, that he was never guilty of the absurdity of believing that Satan was less eloquent in English than in any other language; that it was the British (Welsh) tongue which a certain demon whose education had been neglected (not the Devil) could not speak; that Mather is not fool enough to say that the Fiend cannot prevail ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... self-evident.)] hence, although freedom is not a property of the will depending on physical laws, yet it is not for that reason lawless; on the contrary it must be a causality acting according to immutable laws, but of a peculiar kind; otherwise a free will would be an absurdity. Physical necessity is a heteronomy of the efficient causes, for every effect is possible only according to this law, that something else determines the efficient cause to exert its causality. What else then can freedom of the will be but autonomy, that is the property of the ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... from a principle of science, deduced a system of useful knowledge? Wrong opinions often involving contradictions, one of these maxims, as a touchstone, may serve well to show whither they lead. But yet, however fit to lay open the absurdity or mistake of a man's reasoning or opinion, they are of very little use for enlightening the understanding: and it will not be found that the mind receives much help from them in its progress in knowledge; which ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... Verrina, "when a man is smitten in a certain organ, commonly called the heart, he is apt to give utterance to that absurdity which the world denominates sentiment. Such ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... The government treated the Czech nation with special brutality. The persecutions in Bohemia were opposed not only to the liberal ideas of Czechs, but especially to their national feelings. The anxiety of the censor for the safety of the monarchy often bordered on absurdity. The word 'shocking' was deleted from a play, for instance, because it was English. Henry IV. was not allowed to be played 'until we reach a settlement with England,' and it was only when it was reported by the Vienna and Berlin papers ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... however, to anyone—was to get into the eleven. Had it been known it would have been thought the very height of absurdity, and have become such a standing joke that its realisation would have been rendered well nigh impossible. It proved that Buller had sound sense that he was able to see this. He did not much expect to succeed, but he meant to try all he knew, ever since ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... but as it would be sometimes difficult for him to procure a supply of these ready-cooked, I think we may safely conclude that he does not object to eating them raw. The fanciful ideas of these old naturalists are sometimes very amusing from their very absurdity. ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... solemnity of regard, "Captain Gauntlet, upon my honour, I am altogether innocent of that shallow device which you impute to my invention; and I don't think you do justice either to my intellect or honour, in supposing me capable of such insolent absurdity. As for your sister, I have once in my life affronted her in the madness and impetuosity of desire; but I have made such acknowledgments, and offered such atonement, as few women of her sphere would have refused; and before God I am determined to endure every ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... not believe what I have heard and seen, and what I am ready to swear to by any form of oath that can constrain incredulity itself to believe. But, supposing that I have deceived myself, and that this reality was a dream, and that to contend for it is an absurdity, will it not amuse you, Senor Peralta, to see, written in the form of a dialogue, the matters talked of by those dogs, or whoever the speakers ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... since, if these things as His effects exist in time only, this being the condition of their existence in themselves, then the actions of these beings must be simply His actions which He performs in some place and time. Thus, Spinozism, in spite of the absurdity of its fundamental idea, argues more consistently than the creation theory can, when beings assumed to be substances, and beings in themselves existing in time, are regarded as effects of a Supreme Cause, and yet as not [belonging] to Him and His ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... and tenderness, could not refine on what he has done both in good-nature and good-breeding: he even forbad any ringing of bells or rejoicings wherever they passed—but how your representative blood will curdle when you hear of the absurdity of one of your countrymen: the night after the massacre at St. Cas, the Duc d'Aiguillon gave a magnificent supper of eighty covers to our prisoners—a Colonel Lambert got up at the bottom of the table, and, asking for a bumper, called out to the Duc, "My Lord ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... the absurdity of showing pique, although he felt that there was something in the air which he did not understand. He came back laughing, with much apparent good-nature, and saying, "I thought I'd soon bring one or the other of you ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... that position been relinquished by us, because involving the absurdity that we should know and not know the things which ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... use and possession saves us from the absurdity of supposing that we do not know what we know, because we may know in one sense, i.e. possess, what we do not know in another, i.e. use. But have we not escaped one difficulty only to encounter a greater? For how can the ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... good day; and a little farther up the road I saw a dark plain chariot, no coronet, no arms, no footman only the man on the box, but the beauty of the horses assured me it must belong to Lilburne. Can you conceive such absurdity in a man of that age—and a very clever fellow too? Yet, how is it that one does not ridicule it in Lilburne, as one would in another man between fifty ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... jury, I have told you already why I consider this romance not only an absurdity, but the most improbable invention that could have been brought forward in the circumstances. If one tried for a bet to invent the most unlikely story, one could hardly find anything more incredible. The worst of such ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... all, his own life might not perhaps prove one of the most complex among human conundrums? He had often meditated on the inaccessibility of ideal virtues, the uselessness of persuasion, the commonplace absurdity, as he had thought, of trying to embody any lofty spiritual dream,—yet he was himself a man in whom spiritual forces were so strong that he was personally unaware of their overflow, because they were as much ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... escape in a boat with his confederates, after firing a train communicating with some barrels of powder in the hold. There is some improbability in this part of the story; but gunpowder plots have special privilege of absurdity. The guardsmen, however, discover the mischief that is brewing against them, just in time to escape through the cabin windows, and swim off to the boat, which is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... nature of Not-being is detected, and there is no longer any metaphysical impediment in the way of admitting the possibility of falsehood. To the Parmenides, the Sophist stands in a less defined and more remote relation. There human thought is in process of disorganization; no absurdity or inconsistency is too great to be elicited from the analysis of the simple ideas of Unity or Being. In the Sophist the same contradictions are pursued to a certain extent, but only with a view to their ...
— Sophist • Plato
... head. Upon notice of this sentence, the friars of Cuzco flocked to prison, and persuaded the unfortunate prince to receive baptism, on which he assumed the name of Don Philip. Though the Inca earnestly entreated to be sent to Spain, and urged the absurdity and impossibility that he could ever intend to rebel against the numerous Spanish colonists who now occupied the whole country of Peru, seeing that his father with 200,000 men was utterly unable to overcome only 200 Spaniards whom he besieged in the city ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... To this absurdity Seguin replied that we could not agree; but, as he did not wish to keep any of their prisoners, he would exchange the twenty-one for ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... curiously at Roger. She was very superstitious and she believed firmly in ghosts, and saw no absurdity in ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... regarded life quite differently. For the first time I realised the necessity to the individual to enjoy absolute personal freedom in love as in all else in life. All my previous ideas and prejudices appeared to me monstrous and iniquitous. I saw the falseness of all our ideas of morality, the absurdity of placing conventions before nature and the detestable character of our dealings with women and of our attitude in such matters. And with this suddenly awakened vision I looked anew on life, and it seemed to me that till then I had never ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... becomes the height of absurdity when the parenthesis are not even fitted into the frame of the sentence, but wedged in so as directly to shatter it. If, for instance, it is an impertinent thing to interrupt another person when he is speaking, it is no less impertinent to interrupt oneself. ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity, profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a so-called court of justice in England as a state paper—a bill of indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order that for two hundred years had been the right arm of the Church and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and stumbling through the roots of the heather. Roddy gazed at them with his fixed and mournful eyes. He couldn't share your excitement. He drew back his shoulders, bracing himself to bear it; his lips tightened in a hard, bleak grin. He grinned at the absurdity of your supposing that he could be interested ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... could the places thus named be always so situated, as to be central in respect to the nation, or the province in which they were included. Writers try to make it out this way: yet they do not seem satisfied with the process. The contradictory accounts shew the absurdity of the notion. It was a term borrowed from Egypt, which was itself an Omphalian region. Horus Apollo not knowing the meaning of this has made Egypt the centre of the earth: [736][Greek: Aigupton ge mese tes oikoumenes]. Pausanias mentions an Omphalus ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... tracing pedigrees, alluding especially to the affinity imagined betwixt the Egyptians and Chinese. On such subjects, it is certain, human ingenuity has been fruitful of extravagancies, and there is much less risk of absurdity if we abide by merely general inferences; but, on the other hand, it must be admitted, that these are often specious pretexts for avoiding the labours of enquiry, and have very rarely contributed any thing ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... the information to the world, would far better have gone their way and said nothing about it; and, as to polygamy, that "those who waxed the hottest against" the practice "are not as a rule the purest of our people" (p. 361); and that the Edmunds Law of 1882 "capped the climax of absurdity" (p. 683). ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... the Roman government, which was severely arraigned by the apostate, and defended by Priscus in a prolix and feeble declamation. The freedman of Onegesius exposed, in true and lively colors, the vices of a declining empire, of which he had so long been the victim; the cruel absurdity of the Roman princes, unable to protect their subjects against the public enemy, unwilling to trust them with arms for their own defence; the intolerable weight of taxes, rendered still more oppressive by the intricate or arbitrary modes ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... administration rather than a change of heart. Though this external change was a boundless blessing to Russia, there is but little evidence that Vlademer then comprehended that moral renovation which the gospel of Christ effects as its crowning glory. He saw the absurdity of paganism; he felt tortured by remorse; perhaps he felt in some degree the influence of the gospel which was even then faithfully preached in a few churches in idolatrous Kief; and he wished to elevate Russia above the degradation ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... a curious illustration of the strength of the current passion for moral maxims in season and out of season, that one scene which to the scoffers of that day seemed, as it cannot but seem to everybody to-day, a climax of absurdity and unbecomingness, was hailed by the party as most admirable, for no other reason than that it contained a number of high moralising saws. Constance, a young widow and a model of reason, takes upon herself to combat the resolution ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... is excellent metaphysical fooling in The Three Voices. But far the best parody in the book—and the most richly deserved by the absurdity of its original—is Hiawatha's Photographing. It has the double merit of absolute similarity in cadence and lifelike realism. Unluckily the limits ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... The feeling does your heart infinite credit, though a little counsel with your head would show you that your only absurdity ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... ceased to exist for me, and it was pleasant to reflect, as I finished my simple breakfast, that I should under professional conditions have been hurrying briskly into school for an hour of Latin Prose. The incredible absurdity and futility of it all came home to me. Half the boys that I teach so elaborately would be both more wholesomely and happily employed if they were going out to farm-work for the day. But they are gentlemen's sons, and so must enter what are called ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... La Planche and Hist. eccles., ubi supra. I need not call attention to the gross absurdity into which Jean de Tavannes falls (Mem. ii. 260, 261), when he makes Catharine, through policy and hatred of Mary of Scots and of the Guises, whom the Scottish queen supported, favor the malcontents! Can the younger Tavannes have been misled by the hypocritical representations ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... inferior wits were employed to write The Popiad, in which his translation is characterized, as unjust to the original, without beauty of language, or variety of numbers. Instead of the justness of the original, they say there is absurdity and extravagance. Instead of the beautiful language of the original, there is solecism and barbarous English. A candid reader may easily discern from this furious introduction, that the critics were actuated rather by malice than truth, and that they must judge with their ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... with M. d'Antin or M. de Torcy, and some ladies of the King's suite. I am angry to this day when I think of it. The King used often to laugh at my anger on this subject; and, whenever the Elector committed some new absurdity, he used to call to me in the cabinet and ask me, "Well, Madame, what have you to say to that?" I would reply, "All that the Elector does is alike ridiculous." This made the King laugh heartily. The Elector had a Marshal, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the compliment was graceful and well meant, but the utter absurdity of his position was now thrust upon him ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... many who still had the utmost confidence in General Buell, and they repelled with some asperity the reflections cast upon him by his critics. These admirers held him blameless throughout for the blunders of the campaign, but the greater number laid every error at his door, and even went to the absurdity of challenging his loyalty in a mild way, but they particularly charged incompetency at Perryville, where McCook's corps was so badly crippled while nearly 30,000 Union troops were idle on the field, or within striking ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... Visitation, though I hold them to have been more reputable, inasmuch as many of them were honest tradesmen and artisans, in some measure exiles for conscience' sake, who would have smiled at the high-flying nonsense of their descendants. Some of the more respectable were Jews. The absurdity of supposing a population of eight millions all sprung from gentle loins in the course of a century and a half is too manifest for confutation. The aristocracy of the South, such as it is, has the shallowest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... an absurdity, M. le Juge d'Instruction. M. de Gery is the young man of whom I have spoken to you. He came to the Territorial as a superintendent, and thought too much of this poor M. Jansoulet to remove the receipts for his payments; ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... madness, finds Hamlet's frequent levity and the buffoonery of Polonius alike regrettable —Shakespeare's favorite foible, he feels, is "that of raising a laugh." The introduction of Fortinbras and his army on the stage is "an Absurdity"; the grave-diggers' scene is "very unbecoming to tragedy"; the satire on the "Children of the Chapel" is not allowable ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... much amused by the mixture, which was now exhibited to him, of taste and incongruity, ingenuity and absurdity, genius and blunder; by the contrast between the finery and vulgarity, the affectation and ignorance of the lady of the villa. We should be obliged to STOP too long at Tusculum were we to attempt to detail all the odd circumstances ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... The absurdity of the whole thing began to dawn on me. There was Barber, an obscure little Londoner, daring to interrupt a great musical performance so that the audience might listen to him instead! Probably because I was the only one on the spot ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... sending His messenger and calling to Ephraim: 'Turn ye! Turn ye! why will ye die?' For Hosea, in the very act of pleading with Israel on God's behalf, to have declared that God had abandoned it, and ceased to plead, would have been a palpable absurdity and contradiction. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... contradictory stories told about him that one doesn't know what to believe. It seems incredible that he should be a monk; it is such an altogether foolish ending to an intellectual career. For whatever may be the form of faith professed by this particular fraternity, the absurdity of the whole system of religion remains the same. Religion's day is done; the very sense of worship is a mere coward instinct—a relic of barbarism which is being gradually eradicated from our natures by ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... rhapsodist. "At the sound of your [reason's] voice let the enemies of nature be still, and swallow their serpents' tongues in rage." "The eyes of reason restrain mankind from the precipice of the passions, as her decrees modify likewise the feeling of their rights." Many other passages of equal absurdity could be quoted, full of far-fetched metaphor, abounding in strange terms, straining rhetorical figures to distortion.[22] And yet in spite of the bombast, certain essential Napoleonic ideas appear in the paper much as they endured to the end, namely, those on heredity, on the equal division of property, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... extraordinary shape, hairbags and queues, frocks and frills, came into fashion for the men; powdered headdresses an ell in height, diminutive waists, and patches for the women. The deformity, unhealthiness, and absurdity of this mode of attire were vainly pointed out by Salzmann, in a piece entitled, "Charles ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... had read 212 Latin authors and 23 English, on his subject, and he was under considerable obligation to some of them, notably Weyer. But he endeavored to make first-hand observations, attended witch trials and traced gossip to its source. He showed, none better, the utter flimsiness and absurdity of the charges on which poor old women were done to death. He explained the performance of the witch of Endor as ventriloquism. Trying to prove that magic was rejected by reason and religion alike, he pointed out that all the phenomena might most easily be explained ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... a lesson, but not of this melancholy character, on the absurdity of attempting to brave the daylight heat of summer. It is so natural for an Englishman to look upon the mere natives of any place to which he may come in his travels, as cheats and ignoramuses, that we, as a matter of course, and most complacently, admitted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... new angle, the talk didn't run smoothly. Because, precisely as the half-back forgot his terrors and the hopes that had prompted them, and the absurdity of both—precisely as he began to feel, after all, that it was a very superb and grown-up thing to be a familiar friend of a married woman with a limousine and a respectful chauffeur, and wonderful clothes and an air of taking them all for ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... The absurdity of hoping to devise any such accessories whilst perched on a ledge in a remote island—a larger reef of the thousands in ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... bureaus are under the immediate orders of the Secretary of War, who, through them, in fact commands the army from "his office," but cannot do so "in the field"—an absurdity in military ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Welsh for son, and those to whom Mr. Skeat's modified maqui seems absurd will be pleased to find its absurdity indicated, if not proved, by a Greek author of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... village-green. Tabs entered instantly into the spirit of the game—the littleness and childishness of the attempt at quaintness. He liked the bijou privacy of the Court, its greenness and tidiness, and the absurdity of the narrow windows which glinted at him like spectacles. But there was ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... highest function. If they were not States, or were States out of the Union, their consent to a change in the fundamental law of the Union would have been nugatory, and Congress in asking it committed a political absurdity. The judiciary has also given the solemn sanction of its authority to the same view of the case. The judges of the Supreme Court have included the Southern States in their circuits, and they are constantly, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... "ever presented to Parliament." The appointment was much discussed, for the general feeling had been educated in the views of Lord Selborne, who asserted that no "person" connected with the Press nor any "gentleman in the wine trade" could be permitted to attain to such an honour as the Bench—an absurdity which has long since been dismissed. On one occasion, it is said, when a Beckett lived at No. 10, Hyde Park Gate South, Kensington Gore, he was instructed to hold himself in readiness, as magistrate, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... some of them are cleverer still and make their outspokenness and censure a means of imparting pleasure. As Agis the Argive,[417] when Alexander bestowed great gifts on a buffoon, cried out in envy and displeasure, "What a piece of absurdity!" and on the king turning angrily to him and saying, "What are you talking about?" he replied, "I admit that I am vexed and put out, when I see that all you descendants of Zeus alike take delight in flatterers and jesters, for Hercules had his Cercopes, and Dionysus his Sileni, and with ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... "What absurdity!" cried Moya. Then glancing at him she added quickly, "My father is a hired man. Most fathers who are worth ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... whether he was jealous of Tomassov, but I suspect that he might have been a little annoyed at him as at a sort of walking absurdity of the sentimental order. But these men of the world are impenetrable, and outwardly he condescended to recognize Tomassov's existence even more distinctly than was strictly necessary. Once or twice he had offered him some useful worldly advice with perfect tact and delicacy. ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... opened; and thus taken by surprise, whether from the effect of the horror which he felt, acting as it were hysterically on his nervous system, or that at the first moment he lost the sense of the guilt of the proposal in the feeling of its strangeness and absurdity, he flung her from him and burst into a fit of laughter. Irritated by this almost to frenzy, the woman fell on her knees, and in a loud voice that approached to a scream, she prayed for a curse both on him and on her own child. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... historians worth the name have told us something about that. But when we talk of science, we mean something with more ambitious pretences, we mean something which can foresee as well as explain; and, thus looked at, to state the problem is to show its absurdity. As little could the wisest man have foreseen this mighty revolution, as thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could have been anticipated in America; as little as it could have been foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would have been an outcome of the scientific culture ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... out. Lane sat there with a vague sense of absurdity in the situation. The click of a typewriter sounded from behind him. He wanted to hurry out. He wanted to think of other things, and twice he drove away memory of the girl he had just left at Doctor Bronson's office. Presently Smith returned, slipping along in his shiny black suit, flat-footed ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... knowledge of Celtic superstitions, and always castigates the right thing. Certain diseases of the brain were, till quite recently, believed to be curable if the afflicted man could procure a suicide's skull and take a drink out of it. Mr. Macdonald rightly dwells upon the absurdity of such a specific, but confesses that one might as well try to "bale out the Atlantic" as eradicate the foolish pagan notions that still linger in ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... his visitor's manner, touched by the unexpected poetry of his appeal, and yet keenly alive to the absurdity of an incomprehensible blunder somewhere committed, the editor gasped ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... no scollard, as they would say in Whitford, you know; but it has often struck me, that if folks would but believe that the Apostles talked not such very bad Greek, and had some slight notion of the received meaning of the words they used, and of the absurdity of using the same term to express nineteen different things, the New Testament would be found to be a much simpler and more severely philosophic book than "Theologians" ("Anthropo-sophists" ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... was not wholly emancipated from the state of Philistinism which Trenholme was railing at. Had he been less eager to secure a favorable verdict, or even less agitated by the unlooked-for condescension she was showing, he would have seen the absurdity of classing a girl of twenty with the lovers of art for art's sake, those earnest-eyed enthusiasts who regard a perfect curve or an inimitable flesh tint as of vastly greater importance than the squeamishness of the young person. Painters have their limitations as well as Mrs. Grundy, ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... Time by Geologists, which Have Been Tested, Have Proved Erroneous—the Danish Bogs; the Swiss Lake Villager; Horner's Nile Pottery; the Raised Beaches of Scotland; Lyell's Blunder in the Delta of the Mississippi; Sir Wm. Thompson's Exposure of the Absurdity of the Evolutionists' Demands for Time. Conflicting Geological Theories—the Wernerian, Huttonian, and Diluvian Theories; the Catastrophists and Progressionists; Eleven Theories of Earthquakes; Nine Theories of Mountains; False ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... than madness in the war, and have so pitiless a realisation of its essential futility. The boy forced his father to see—what indeed all along he had been seeing more and more clearly. The war, even by the standards of adventure and conquest, had long since become a monstrous absurdity. Some way there must be out of this bloody entanglement that was yielding victory to neither side, that was yielding nothing but waste and death beyond all precedent. The vast majority of people everywhere must be desiring peace, willing ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Mean by the Proposition I am Explaining, is, That it may without Absurdity be Doubted whether or no the Differing Substances Obtainable from a Concrete Dissipated by the Fire were so Exsistent in it in that Forme (at least as to their minute Parts) wherein we find them when the Analysis is over, that the ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... girl laughed aloud at the absurdity. "The poor Pretender! Don't hint your horrible suspicions to him, please, he'd never get ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... as man inhabits earth, commonsense (if your schoolmen had it) would suffice to teach that the circumfluent infinite which you call space—the countless Impalpable which divides earth from the moon and stars—is filled also with its correspondent and appropriate life. Is it not a visible absurdity to suppose that being is crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space? The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of life does not breathe. In the very charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation. Is ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... was not to be denied, for the classics were hateful to me. Naturally I was afraid to make such a damning admission. My father had succeeded in presenting my ambition as the height of absurdity and presumption, and with something of the despair of a shipwrecked mariner my eyes rested on the green expanses of those book-backs, Bohn's Standard Library! Nor did it occur to him or to me that one might be great in literature ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... often told us that the story of the prophet swallowed by a great fish was an absurdity. They say that, so long in the stomach of the monster, the minister would have been digested. We have no difficulty in this matter. Jonah, was a most unwilling guest of the whale. He wanted to get out. However much ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... finally led to the evolution of a theory or scheme of so-called "neutrality." A similar notion had been imperfectly developed in Maryland, when her legislature declared that she would take no part in a war. The idea was illogical to the point of absurdity, for by it the "neutral" State would at once stay in the Union and stand aloof from it. Neutrality really signified a refusal to perform those obligations which nevertheless were admitted to be binding, and it made of the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... that this same young man did not shrink from the presence of an old withered crone; that he had a certain timid liking for little maidens who had not yet outgrown the company of their dolls, the listener would be apt to smile, if he did not laugh, at the absurdity of the fable. Surely, he would say, this must be the fiction of some fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer, the trick of some playwright. It would make a capital farce, this idea, carried out. A young ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... more restive under the seeming absurdity of their persistent opposition, but before he could think of a polite way of ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... should always STAND. We must also look out for unaccustomed garments that may be required on the stage, and rehearse in them; for instance, hat, helmet, hood, cloak, etc. Without becoming accustomed to them by practice, the singer may easily make himself ridiculous on the stage. Hence comes the absurdity of a Lohengrin who cannot sing with a helmet, another who cannot with a shield, a third who cannot with gauntlets; a Wanderer who cannot with the big hat, another who cannot with the spear, a Jose who cannot with the ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... with regard to what people are so fond of calling psychism. You will not denounce it in the foolish way of many people, because in denouncing it you will know that you denounce all intellectual manifestations, an absurdity of which very few people are likely to be guilty; if you take your intellectual manifestations in the physical world as admirable things, to be always encouraged, strengthened, developed, then you will be compelled, by parity ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... their wisdom when I see them lavishing their admiration upon men such as he who now rules you. The love of power is very puerile; and this man is devoured by it, without having force enough to seize it wholly. By an utter absurdity, he is a tyrant under a master. Thus has this colossus, never firmly balanced, been all but overthrown by the finger of a boy. Does that indicate genius? No, no! when genius condescends to quit the lofty regions of its true home for a human passion, at least, it should grasp that passion in its ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ever styled themselves soldiers. The impossibility of relief, and the certain prospect of wanting every necessary of life, should your opponents confine their operations to a simple blockade, point out the absurdity of resistance....I am at the head of troops accustomed to success...and so highly incensed at your inhumanity, illiberal abuse, and the ungenerous means employed to prejudice them in the minds of the Canadians, that it is with difficulty I restrain them till ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... been as wise a measure as if he had been directed to trace the situation of Lilliput or Brobdignag. The latter are, indeed, confessedly, mere objects of imagination; and the former, destitute of any sufficient external evidence, bear so many striking marks of internal absurdity, as warrant our pronouncing them to be the fabric of imposture. Captain Cook's instructions were founded on an accurate knowledge of what had been already done, and of what still remained to do; and this knowledge pointed out ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... two-fold requirement of fitness for its use and of harmony with its surroundings. A log-house is the appropriate dwelling of the lumberer in the woods; but transplant it to a suburban lawn and it becomes an absurdity, and a double absurdity. It is not in harmony with the place, nor fit for the use of the citizen. Nothing more satisfactory in their place than the old English parish-churches; but transfer one of them from its natural atmosphere and surroundings to the midst of one of our ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... aspect of her own sister in a position of authority was the hugest absurdity, and when the blonde twin sauntered in, tardy, as usual, she joined the class as one of the lions. She intended to give Kate distinctly to understand that she was mixed primary pupil first and a Madigan afterward; that the substitute might ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... may imagine that poor old piano would have worn, to any one who could have taken in the full absurdity of the position. A venerable instrument like itself, after thirty-five years of honorable service, thus to be forced to exhibit a levity so unbefitting ...
— Harper's Young People, June 29, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... such a sharp expression came into the scarcely visible pupils of the blind man's half-shut eyes that (never suspecting that his blindness was feigned, but for the moment convinced that he had seen the old gentleman) I exclaimed, without thinking of the absurdity of my inquiry— ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the light of accepted astronomical theories (which regard our earth as uttterly insignificant compared with the rest of the universe) have pointed out the irrationality and absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all this unimaginable vastness of suns and systems should have any special interest in so pitiful a creature as man, an imperfectly developed inhabitant of one of the smaller planets ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... Brummell was the last of the beaus. The flame of beauism was expiring; but it flamed in its socket brighter than ever, and Beau Brummell made a more conspicuous figure in the supreme bon-ton of elegant absurdity, than any or all his predecessors. The only permanent beau on earth is the American savage. The Indians, who have been lately exhibiting their back-wood deformities in our island at shilling a-head, were prodigious dressers; Greek taste might ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... poor lady, who had pretty well passed the age when ladies are accustomed to have children, nevertheless determined not to give hope up, and even when she came to live at Castlewood, was constantly sending over to Hexton for the doctor, and announcing to her friends the arrival of an heir. This absurdity of hers was one amongst many others which the wags used to play upon. Indeed, to the last days of her life, my lady viscountess had the comfort of fancying herself beautiful, and persisted in blooming up to the very midst of winter, painting roses on her cheeks long after ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the doorway and looked back. "I'm so glad to have my mind settled about it," she said, with a pathos which overcame her absurdity and vulgarity. "I do work awful hard, and it doesn't seem as if I could lose my money." She appeared suddenly tragic in her cheap muslin and her frizzes. She looked old and her ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Indian girl's tendency to laugh increased, but whether because of fresh views of the absurdity of what had passed, or because of some faint perception of the negro's meaning, Lawrence had no power ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering after literary reputation, and has made more ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... our gentlemen of independent estates and fortune, the most useful as well as considerable body of men in the nation; whom even to suppose ignorant in this branch of learning is treated by Mr Locke[d] as a strange absurdity. It is their landed property, with it's long and voluminous train of descents and conveyances, settlements, entails, and incumbrances, that forms the most intricate and most extensive object of legal knowlege. The ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... respect for the past which had bequeathed to France her disorderly government and, above all, her church. His keen eye was continually discovering some new absurdity in the existing order, which, with incomparable wit and literary skill, he would expose to his eager readers. He was interested in almost everything; he wrote histories, dramas, philosophic treatises, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us. So to call such an act, to us appears no other than a naked, impudent absurdity, and we speak of it accordingly. But if, when the war had begun, and had become the cause of the country, the giving of our money and our blood, in common with yours, was support of the war, then it is not true that we have always opposed the war. With few individual exceptions, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... absurdity of separating what is inseparable even in imagination. Would it have been any consolation to the miserable Romans under the second triumvirate to have been asked insultingly, Is it Octavius, is it Anthony, or is it Lepidus that has caused this bitterness of affliction? and when the answer could ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... immortalized. According to Mr. Blaine, on March 27, 1863, Mr. Laird was loudly cheered in the House of Commons when he declared that "the institutions of the United States are of no value whatever, and have reduced the name of liberty to an utter absurdity." ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... which purchased it, simply because other States in the Union which she joined had assumed such power, a discriminating mind of Mr. Benjamin's acuteness should have seen that the very position proved the reverse of what he stated, and demonstrated, in the absurdity of Louisiana's secession, the equal absurdity of the secession of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... ignorant uppishness that does the mischief. A stranger on the planet might expect that its grotesque absurdity would provoke enough ridicule to cure it; but unfortunately quite the contrary happens. Just as our ill health delivers us into the hands of medical quacks and creates a passionate demand for impudent pretences that doctors can ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... first is the unusual intensity and prevalence of the religious temperament. This has a double effect, both conservative and alterative: ancient customs receive an unreasonable respect: they are not abolished for their immorality or absurdity; but since real interest implies some measure of constructive power, there is a constant growth of new ideas and reinterpretations resulting in inconsistent combinations. The second is the absence of hierarchy ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... without the excuse of the imperfectly educated Scythian. The reign of Catherine II. (1762-96), saw the rise of a whole generation of court poets. The great maxim, "Un Auguste peut aisement faire un Virgile," was seen in all its absurdity in semi-barbarous Russia. These wits were supported by the Empress and her immediate entourage, to whom their florid productions were ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... [Greek], or, "Above the Clouds," has a great deal of easy wit and humour in it, without the least degree of stiffness or obscurity; it is equally severe on the gods and philosophers; and paints, in the warmest colours, the glaring absurdity ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... The humour had passed from the situation. The man was a lunatic, a religious maniac. Again he addressed Barney Bill. "As I can't convince Mr. Finn of the absurdity of his request, I must ask you ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... small part of which (says Knappe) did really belong to "an American nigger." The disease spread, the flags were multiplied, the operations of war became an egg-dance among miniature neutral territories; and though all men took a hand in these proceedings, all men in turn were struck with their absurdity. Mullan, Leary's successor, warned Knappe, in an emphatic despatch, not to squander and discredit the solemnity of that emblem which was all he had to be a defence to his own consulate. And Knappe himself, in his despatch ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is characterized by its spontaneity, its disregard of the probable and possible, its vividness of detail. It is its own reward, and does not look to any result beyond itself. Little children's imaginations are of this type—it is their play world of make-believe. The incongruity and absurdity of their images have been compared to the dreams of adults. Lacking in experience, without knowledge of natural laws, their imagination runs riot with the materials it has at its command. Some adults still retain it to a high degree—witness ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... friends at Edinburgh, he had ordered her removal to Saint Kilda, and had supposed it effected long ago. The troubles of the time, which left no boat or men disposable, had caused the delay; and now, between his rage at any command of his having been disregarded, and his sense of his absurdity in bringing a friend of his prisoner to her very door, he was perfectly exasperated. He muttered curses as ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... Eucharist," spoken of in the Tract, was a false print for "Sacrament," I thought the mistake too pleasant to be corrected before I was asked about it. I was not unwilling to draw an opponent on step by step, by virtue of his own opinions, to the brink of some intellectual absurdity, and to leave him to get back as he could. I was not unwilling to play with a man, who asked me impertinent questions. I think I had in my mouth the words of the Wise man, "Answer a fool according to his folly," ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... he said, looking at the water. "She found out my pet besetting sin on the spot, and paid it off. My God, how she understood! And she said I was better than she was! Better than she was!" He laughed at the absurdity of the notion. "I wonder if girls guess at one-half a man's life. They can't, or—they wouldn't marry us." He took her gift out of his pocket, and considered it in the light of a miracle and a pledge of the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... he said, "if only you would reflect for a few moments, I feel sure you would realize the absurdity of such fancies. We did Wingrave a service in introducing him to society here, and I am sure that he appreciated it. If he wished for our ruin, why did he lend us eight thousand pounds on no security? Why does he lend us his yacht to ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lastly, if that law be of human institution, may it not be enacted in any state, with whatever extent or limitation the legislature shall think fit? For the notion of an unchangeable human law is an absurdity in government, to be believed only by ignorance, and supported by power. From hence it follows, that the children of the late Queen of France, although she had renounced, were as legally excluded from succeeding to Spain, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... slowly drawing on his tasselled nightcap, secured it firmly on his head, by tying beneath his chin the strings which he always had attached to that article of dress. It was at this moment that the absurdity of his recent bewilderment struck upon his mind. Throwing himself back in the rush-bottomed chair, Mr. Pickwick laughed to himself so heartily, that it would have been quite delightful to any man of well-constituted mind to have watched ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... the most ludicrous, it would be hard to determine. For some time they merely looked at each other, without speaking—the priest, probably, because he could not articulate—and his guest, perhaps, because his mouth was full—till the absurdity of the whole affair apparently striking them both at once, they mutually broke out into laughter, the violence of which threatened to convulse them. From this, however, the padre was the first to recover, when the intruder, mastering his muscles, regained his countenance ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... business. Thus Napier relates that it was while he was preparing to fight the battle of Salamanca that he had to expose to the Ministers at home the futility of relying upon a loan; it was on the heights of San Christoval, on the field of battle itself, that he demonstrated the absurdity of attempting to establish a Portuguese bank; it was in the trenches of Burgos that he dissected Funchal's scheme of finance, and exposed the folly of attempting the sale of church property; and on each occasion, he showed himself as well acquainted with these ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... only then realising the absurdity of her own remark. It augured well for her good sense that she could recognise the absurdity when it was ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... blamed for a great deal of rubbish he would have died rather than acknowledge. But it's a craze of the new, fatted Germany. It's a fancy type which could never really exist, any more than the Economic Man of the politicians. Mankind has a sense of humour which stops short of the final absurdity. There never has been, and there never could be a real Superman ... But there might ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... no questions, he expressed no opinions, he told no stories. He only smiled and broke into roars of laughter, even if there was no one to share his joy, as if convinced, at last, of the hopeless absurdity of life. Some one told of following him from Springfield to New Salem and of hearing him laugh all the way. Many had noted another peculiarity in the man. He seemed always to have a week's growth ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... Duke, do you imagine, now that I am in sound health and mind again, that I don't see the hideous absurdity of ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... Archie into the middle of its mighty bosom to search an answer there, and he would never reappear, or, if he haply might, it would be with sorry fragments of divers answers in his hands, incongruous to absurdity. Is not the same true of babbling ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... is undoubtedly fulfilled in the case on hand. It cannot, therefore be denied, that, in spite of this difference, in spite also of the absurdity of one article of the creed ascribed to him, Vardhamana Jnatiputra, the founder of the Nirgrantha—or Jaina community is none other than Buddha's rival. From Buddhist accounts in their canonical works as well as in other books, it may be seen ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... Jones Berwick and I am Berwick Jones? What an absurdity! Let reason work; the idea is preposterous! What does it mean? Can it mean any more than that you were known at one time as Jones Berwick and at another time as Berwick Jones? It is insanity to think that you are two persons ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... some point at which the theory of the inviolable better-for-worse marriage breaks down in practice. South Carolina has indeed passed what is called a freak law declaring that a marriage shall not be dissolved under any circumstances; but such an absurdity will probably be repealed or amended by sheer force of circumstances before these words are in print. The only question to be considered is, What shall the conditions ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... who found out how stupid I had been," she said. "When I discovered that our mysterious tenant was Bernard Maddison, of course I saw the absurdity ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... inflammatory bickerings about the right of search, pandering to the thirst for revenge in France, panting for war to prostrate the disputed title of her king—has the sound of this war-trumpet yet faded away upon our ears? Has the supreme and unparalleled absurdity of stipulating by treaty to keep a squadron of eighty guns for five years without intermission upon the coast of Africa, to suppress the African slave-trade, and at the same time denying, at the point of the bayonet, the right of that squadron to board ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... the absurdity of it. Heavens! She had her Ideal. The Right Man. He would probably be like Walter Babson—though more dependable. But whatever the nature of the paragon, he would in every respect be just the opposite of the creature who had been saying good-night ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis |
