"Baseless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are defeated candidates. One might suppose from their manner that eternal truths depended on their efforts, and that the city they seek to build would abide for ever. Could all this toil and expenditure be lavished on a transitory show, all this eloquence upon the baseless fabric of a vision, all this hatred and malice upon things that wax old as doth a garment and like a vesture are rolled up? One would think from his preoccupied zeal that every politician was laying the foundation stone of an everlasting Jerusalem, did not reason and experience ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... of the plains, manifested among the hills in the course of one day. The mere power of familiarity with the clouds, of walking with them and above them, alters and renders clear our whole conception of the baseless architecture of the sky; and for the beauty of it, there is more in a single wreath of early cloud, pacing its way up an avenue of pines, or pausing among the points of their fringes, than in all the white heaps that fill the arched sky of the plains from one horizon to the other. And of the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... Archbishop of CANTERBURY sought from the Government a clear statement of policy regarding the repatriation of enemy aliens, and incidentally paid a high tribute to the British Press, which, we were glad to hear, contains "nobody who desires to fabricate baseless statements." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... well as from the point of view of manners, the Lectures on Translating Homer are open to not a few criticisms. In the first place, the assumptions are enormous, and, in some cases at least, demonstrably baseless. One of Mr Arnold's strongest points, for instance, not merely against Mr Newman but against Homeric translators generally, is concerned with the renderings of the Homeric compound adjectives, especially the stock ones—koruthaiolos, merops, and the rest. The ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... transformed men into birds, and fables of a similar nature; such, too, are those stories which were generally believed by even the educated men of antiquity, but which the wisdom of modern times has long since shown to be utterly baseless, as, for instance, that bees grew from the entrails of the ox, and hornets from those of the horse. The principle of Pythagoras, that everything is continually changing and that nothing perishes, is true to a certain ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... a day the shrunken stream Spends its last water and runs dry; Clouds like far turrets in a dream Stand baseless in the burning sky. On such a day at every rod The toilers in the hay-field halt, With dripping brows, and the parched sod Yields to ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... mistaken for the bait. Gaily I cast my fly over K. and now he has snapped off my head. That story about a second French Division was false. K. merely quotes the number of my question and adds, "The rumour is baseless." Well, "tant pis," as Guepratte would say with a shrug of his shoulders. Our first step won't have the weight behind it we had permitted ourselves for some hours to hope. Everywhere ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... my way to study the subject,—which was one requiring study. I found, or thought that I found, that the conduct of the gentleman in his office had been indiscreet; but that charges made against himself affecting his honour were baseless. This I said, emphasising much more strongly than was necessary the opinion which I had formed of his indiscretion,—as will so often be the case when a man has a pen in his hand. It is like a club or sledge-hammer,—in using ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... himself what he could possibly do to prevent her from belonging to another. That galling thought made the blood gush from his gaping wound. How that woman and her lover must deride him! And to think that they had sought to turn him to ridicule by a baseless charge, an arrant lie which still and ever made him smart, all proof of its falsity to the contrary. He, on his side, had accused them in the past without much belief in what he said, but now the charges he had imputed to them ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... But I was minded to give thee that of which thou wast in quest, and I gave it thee. Howbeit, if thou hadst been the wise man thou takest thyself to be, thou wouldst not have chosen such a way as that to worm out thy good lady's secrets, nor wouldst thou have fallen a prey to a baseless suspicion, but wouldst have understood that what she confessed was true, and she all the while guiltless. I told thee that I loved a priest; and wast not thou, whom I love, though ill enough dost thou deserve it, turned priest? I told thee that there ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... ordinary criticisms of our senses only show that they have to be corrected by Reason, 117; more profound arguments show that the vulgar belief in external objects is baseless, and that the objects we see are nothing but perceptions which are fleeting copies of other existences, 118; even this philosophy is hard to justify; it appeals neither to natural instinct, nor to experience, for experience tells nothing of objects which perceptions ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... rushed into and over Lois's mind with such a sweep and confusion, that she hardly knew what she was thinking or feeling. All her positions were knocked away; all her assumptions were found baseless; her defences had been erected against nothing; her fears and her hopes were alike come to nought. That is, bien entendu, her old fears and her old hopes; and amid the ruins of the latter new ones were starting, in equally bewildering ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... children, were brought in during the afternoon. Ito was much disgusted by my interest in these people, who, he repeated, "are just dogs," referring to their legendary origin, of which they are not ashamed. His assertion that they have learned politeness from the Japanese is simply baseless. Their politeness, though of quite another and more manly stamp, is savage, not civilised. The men came back at dark, the meal was prepared, and we sat round the fire as before; but there was no sake, except in the possession of the old woman; and again the hearts of the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... the far-off Indian villages, miles away from a railway. Illiteracy, superstition, and false rumors existed at both ends of the line. Here is a man who has had no word from home since he left a year or more ago. He hears a baseless rumor or heeds some inborn fear that his child is sick, or his wife unfaithful, or that he has been cheated out of his property. Hundreds of homesick men whose whole lives have been bound up in the family circle pour in upon the secretaries, begging that they will write letters home for them. Here ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... condemnation of the waiting-woman and her lover, Knox tells a false story about 'shame hastening the marriage' of Mary Livingstone. Dr. Robertson, in his 'Inventories of Queen Mary,' refutes this slander, which he deems as baseless as the fables against Knox's own continence. Knox adds: 'What bruit the Maries and the rest of the danseris of the Courte had, the ballads of that age did witness, quhilk we for modesteis sake omit.' Unlucky omission, unfortunate 'modestei'! From Randolph's Letters it is known that ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Alan Hawke was awakened by the golden lances of morning which shivered gayly upon the Pennine Alps he proceeded to a most leisurely toilet, having first satisfied himself that his winnings of the night before were not the baseless fabric of a dream. He smiled as he fingered the crisp, clean notes, and gazed lovingly upon the dingy-looking but potent check drawn ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... across practically all the highroads to material success. Also, she felt in her brother's manner and tone a certain profound discouragement, a lack of the unconquerable spirit which had carried him so far so speedily. It is not a baseless notion that the man who has never been beaten is often destroyed by his first reverse. Ursula feared the spell of success had been broken ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... the barren hill upsprung With pointed rocks against the light, The crag sharpshadowed overhung Each glaring creek and inlet bright. Far, far, one light blue ridge was seen, Looming like baseless fairyland; Eastward a slip of burning sand, Dark-rimmed with sea, and bare of green, Down in the dry salt-marshes stood That house dark latticed. Not a breath Swayed the sick vineyard underneath, Or moved the dusty ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... must itself collapse immediately. Just or unjust, it lives by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in matter and in flesh: it is meteoric—suspended in mid-air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision so vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no base can seem more broad than such stupendous baselessness, and yet any man can bring it about his ears by being over-curious; when faith fails, a system based on faith ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... scene: was this charm of life to fade away, and, like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wreck behind? These thoughts disturbed her reason, she shook her head, as if to drive them out of it; a weight, a heavy one, was on her heart; all ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... some foundation for such a tale. Why should Felix have referred to Roger Carbury? And she did feel that there was something in her brother's manner which forbade her to reject the whole story as being altogether baseless. So she sat upon her bed and cried, and thought of all the tales she had heard of faithless lovers. And yet why should the man have come to her, not only with soft words of love, but asking her hand in marriage, if it really were true that he was in daily communication with another ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... baseless his hope had been, and he exonerated her from all blame. She had been kind and helpful till he spoiled it all by a fool's presumption. He had always exaggerated her social position and her attainments, but in the depths ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... understand the technique of rumors. The wise man does not scoff at them, for while they are often absurd, they are rarely baseless. People do not go about inventing rumors, except for purposes of hoax; and even a practical joke is never (to parody the proverb) hoax et praeterea nihil. There is always a reason for wanting to perpetrate the hoax, or a reason for ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... come to my home at Mansfield, and I will show him all I possess there, and render him a full account of all I have elsewhere, and if I can't fairly account for it without being suspected of receiving bribes, or gifts, or stealing, then he can repeat these baseless ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... herculean in its massive proportions, coupled with the sad look in his noble face, and which reminded me somehow or other of one of the pictures of the old Cavaliers of the Stuart days, made me resent the more the baseless imputation ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... court of law that the visitorship of an Oxford college ought to be transferred from the Jacobite university to the Crown; and so it came to pass that the Court of King's Bench solemnly ratified as a fact what historical criticism pronounces to be a baseless fable. The case in favour of William of Durham as the founder is so clear, that the antiquaries are ready to burst with righteous indignation, and one almost enjoys ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... surprise of many present, showed that the rights which women demand are just and reasonable, and ought to be granted. John M. Todd remarked that he was not so much impressed by the logical arguments in favor of suffrage as by the shallow and baseless arguments of the opposition. The friends of woman suffrage are becoming active and earnest in their efforts, and discussion is freely going on through the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... altogether thrown out by the capricious starlings of the prophet's mind. These plunges seemed to be gone into for exercise and by the way, like the curvets of a willing horse. Gradually the thing took shape; the glittering if baseless edifice arose; and the hare still ran on the mountains, but the soup was already served in silver plate. Carthew in a few days could command a hundred and fifty pounds; Hadden was ready with five hundred; why should they ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... servant, and Jeshurun, whom I have chosen," all the designations of God and Israel serve only for an introduction to the exhortation: "Fear not," by laying open the necessity which exists for the promise in [Pg 210] ver. 3, which, without such ca foundation, would be baseless. The context and the parallelism with "whom I have chosen" show that the designation, "servant of God" in these verses has no reference to a duty imposed, but to a privilege, a relation which is the pledge of divine aid to Israel. Jeshurun stands as a kind of nomen proprium, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... the inventor and after his death, even down to the present day, was the accusation of great ingratitude towards those who had helped him in his early struggles, and especially towards Alfred Vail. The more the true history of his connection with his associates is studied, the more baseless do these accusations appear, and in this connection the following extracts from letters to Alfred Vail and to his brother George are most illuminating. The first letter is ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... '"At the risk of my life, I, the prime minister, say: Formerly, when the nation was disunited and disturbed, there was no one who could give unity to it. The princes therefore stood up together; constant references were made to antiquity to the injury of the present state; baseless statements were dressed up to confound what was real, and men made a boast of their own peculiar learning to condemn what their rulers appointed. And now, when Your Majesty has consolidated the empire, and, distinguishing black ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... which he had told her, and so gently, that she was not to blame. It is words like these that bring tears swiftest. The tears had come, but the words had also sufficed to reduce the people across the way into baseless appearances, in which, for the moment, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... well as I could, I encouraged him to continue the attack; and certainly, if appetite waits on a good conscience, I had abundant evidence in his behalf. He grew merry and talkative, and, telling me some free tales, bore himself so naturally that I had begun to deem my suspicions baseless, when a chance word gave me new ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... oppressor in his fell career: Say, that, impatient of unjust command, Indignant Denmark spurns him from her land! He builds a lofty tower; the basis stands Fix'd in the stormy ocean's moving sands: The turrets in unstable grandeur rise, The baseless fabric shoots into the skies, Soon shall the glories of the ponderous hall Come thundering down, to crush him ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... of America; may the aristocracy of wealth, founded upon the virtues, the toils, and the blood of her Revolutionary armies, soon vanish, and, like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... over her. Should she end in the convent of Crowland? And suspecting, fearing, imagining all sorts of baseless phantoms, she hardened her heart ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... something against Miss Whichello. When she saw Cargrim look at Daisy, and Daisy look back to Cargrim, and remembered that their tongues were only a degree less venomous than her own, she was quite satisfied that a seed had been sown likely to produce a very fertile crop of baseless talk. The prospect cheered her greatly, for Mrs Pansey hated Miss Whichello as much as a certain personage she quoted on occasions is said to hate ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... messenger of woe, symbolically impotent and insignificant; a little dark speck in the wide westering light; a feeble stir of life creeping on the verge of a vast silent solitude; and full, withal, of baseless fears and futile plots, concerning the withered shred of existence that remained to her. She was just in the nick of time, she said to herself, when she saw the trio presently coming over the top of the hill. Ody was pointing out conciliatingly to the morose Rory how they'd ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... rule the roast, and be lord paramount over kitchen and larder. His disappointment was therefore great at finding all the solid joys of red deer and moor-game, kippered salmon and mutton hams, "vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision," leaving ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... As the editor of the "National Gazette" in Philadelphia, he becomes involved in the bitter quarrel between his chief, Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. His attachment to the cause of the French Revolution makes him publish baseless attacks upon Washington. By and by he retires to a New Jersey farm, still toying with journalism, still composing verses. He turns patriotic poet once more in the War of 1812; but the public has now forgotten him. He lives on in poverty and seclusion, and in his eightieth ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... worth mentioning the few hostile notices called forth by irritation and envy—a vice which so frequently stains the human soul. In one of these notices, which appeared, by the way, in a very filthy little newspaper, a certain scamp, guided by wretched gossip and baseless rumours about my chats in our prison, called me a "zealot and liar." Enraged by the insolence of the miserable scribbler, my friends wanted to prosecute him, but I persuaded them not to do it. Vice is its ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... with a free imagination, and without the possibility of being controverted. You may talk of your dreams; and you may tell what you heard a parrot say. Both Morpheus and the bird are incompetent witnesses; and your listener dare not attack your recital. The baseless fabric of a vision, then, shall furnish my theme—chosen with apologies and regrets instead of the more limited field of pretty ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... Japanese were to make up their minds to accelerate whatever process of synthesis were possible in China! Suppose, after all, I am not the victim of atmospheric refraction, and they are, indeed, as gallant and bold and intelligent as my baseless conception of them would have them be! They would almost certainly find co-operative elements among the educated Chinese.... But this is no doubt the lesser probability. In front and rear of China the English language ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... wantit - birling in a curricle - wi' pimatum on his heid - making a mess o' himsel' wi' nesty hizzies - a fair disgrace!" It was impossible to hear without admiration Kirstie's graduated disgust, as she brought forth, one after another, these somewhat baseless charges. Then she remembered her immediate purpose, and turned again on her fascinated auditor. "Do ye no hear me, tawpie? Do ye no hear what I'm tellin' ye? Will I have to shoo ye in to him? If I come to attend to ye, mistress!" And the maid fled the kitchen, which had become ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and superstitious manner, they have often been so egregiously misunderstood that many entire systems of interpretation—which were believed in for generations, and which fill many folios, now consigned to a happy oblivion— are clearly proved to have been utterly baseless. Colossal usurpations of deadly import to the human race have been built, like inverted pyramids, on the narrow apex of a single ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... good literary workmanship. It does not weary the reader with vague theories; nor does it give over much expression to the enthusiasm—not to say baseless encomium—for which too many female biographers have accustomed us to look. It is a simple and discriminative sketch of one of the most clever and lovable of the class at whom Carlyle sneered as 'scribbling ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... unquestionable authority that you have been keeping this woman since you returned from Ireland, perhaps before, and that you go in by the four o'clock train almost daily to see her.' Now I ask you if it is fair to make such accusations—such utterly false and baseless accusations—and then to refuse to hear what a fellow has to say in his defence? By Jove! if I caught the fellow who has been telling lies about me, I'd let him have it. Some of those Southdown Road people have been writing to her, that's about the long ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... allegation that homologous structures occur in different divisions of organic nature—not only does it fall to the ground, but positively becomes itself converted into one of the strongest arguments in favour of the theory. As soon as the allegation is found to be baseless, the very fact that it cannot be brought to bear upon any one of all the millions of adaptive structures in organic nature becomes a fact of vast significance on the ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joyousness of spirits. You wake every morning, see the gold upon the snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence. The valleys are but a stride to you; you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my insinuation, baseless enough at the beginning, was now but too well justified. Colonel Cockshott was on his raw-boned brown hunter, and even my brief acquaintance with horses enabled me to see that Wild Rose no longer regarded him with her ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... But how baseless this idea is found to be, when we come to see how easily and successfully the Phoenician people traversed northern, western and eastern oceans, and brought home the products of the whole world to enrich themselves and the peoples among whom ...
— Prehistoric Structures of Central America - Who Erected Them? • Martin Ingham Townsend
... the very last one of the four or five which had stood there, Mistress Elliott appeared upon the scene, to find her precious dainties faded like the baseless fabric of a vision, leaving behind them only a few broken bits of pie crust. A series of "short, sharp shocks" (as described in "The Mikado") then rent the air, summoning Prudence Ann and Delcy, the maid, to the scene of the calamity. Let ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... biscuit-box, an iron sauce-pan, several cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles, probably containing oil; while the clothes of the family and a few mats were thrown across the open rafters. Upon my first meeting with this exile he had conceived for me one of the baseless island friendships, had given me nuts to drink, and carried me up the den "to see my house"—the only entertainment that he had to offer. He liked the "Amelican," he said, and the "Inglisman," but the "Flessman" was his abhorrence; and he was careful to explain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that all previous perorations were to be surpassed. His subject was the wrath to come, and the transient quality of human life on earth. "Yea," he announced, in gradually-increasing thunder, "all shall go. And loike the baseless fabric o' a vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself—Yea, I say, all which it inherit shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial payjent faded, leave not a ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... very grave expression upon her face, while Alicia gently wiped her eyes and ardently wished that her honest Rudolph was here to defend his character and refute these baseless insinuations. At length her mother said ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... merely wished to prove to you that your aversion for me was entirely unfounded. You have proved to me that your love for Adolphus, in the abstract, is as baseless and unsubstantial. I am not sorry under the circumstances that it should have been murdered, for it was a poor exotic. Let us not attempt to analyse the mysterious nature of that passion which is too precious ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... this time. "My dear Mr. Ware," he said, as they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been brought them, "of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless and empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, and that all the spirits and demons and gods occupy themselves ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... all his time chuckling over the baseless rejoicings of the people of the town. He made himself acquainted with some of the white slaves, men who had been brought from England, and finding some of them very much discontented with their lot, he ventured to tell them that he was one of the pirates who had escaped, and offered them ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... laws of sequence and action which observed experience has formulated and is progressively formulating are given, then nothing else is required; no governance, no control, and no special design. So that in principle a Creator and Providence are baseless fancies; and this is further borne out by the fact, that when the Christian faith ventures on details as to the mode of Creation it is certainly and demonstrably wrong. If these propositions are to be controverted, it must be in the light of a knowledge which a large ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... allowed to have established this position:—That the system of metaphysical teleology for which we have supposed a candid theist to plead, is something more than a purely gratuitous system—that it does not belong to the same category of baseless imaginings as that to which the atheist at first sight, and in view of the scientific deductions alone, might be inclined to assign it. For we have seen that our supposed theist, while fully admitting ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... been announced. He alleged that the Old Squire, being on the stock "committees," had given Addison the premium, unjustly. For he thought (although no one else did) that his steers were the best on the grounds. The charge was a baseless one; for the Old Squire was not a member of the committee on steers that year, but only on ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... were veiled in gloom. An unaccountable action on the part of the antelope had plunged the State into disgrace. That charmer, on the representation that the previous day was her birthday, and that vast treasures had been sent in a hamper for its celebration (both baseless assertions), had secretly but most pressingly invited thirty-five neighbouring princes and princesses to a ball and supper: with a special stipulation that they were "not to be fetched till twelve." ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... brother might untimely stop the war proved baseless. The war went on despite the New Dawn's monthly exposure of its motive and sinister aims; despite its masterly paraphrase of a celebrated document declaring that this Government had been "conceived ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... haunt," I could get something to do when this dross is gone. In London there are sermons in stones, certainly, but not "good in everything,"—an observation I should take the liberty of making to the Swan if he were not now, alas! "the baseless fabric of a vision."'" ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for him the nickname of "Mad Jack Byron"; and his grand-uncle, who killed his neighbor in a duel, exhibited traits not very characteristic of a healthy mind. With such antecedents, it is not strange that he was subject to wild impulses, violent passions, baseless prejudices, uncompromising selfishness, irregular mental activity. The morbid element in his nervous system was also witnessed in the form of epilepsy, from which he suffered, more or less, during his whole life. The "vile melancholy" which Dr. Johnson ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Cicely, her school-books tucked away under her arm for the protection afforded by her mackintosh, the rain coming on faster and faster, walked the pavement, or waited on the doorstep, and now and again crossed the road in the baseless hope that she might not find the other side so wet, for a ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... than the average man, and to his wife he had confessed (strange memory nowadays), that he owed to her a moral redemption. His morality, in fact, no one doubted; the suspicions Mrs. Hannaford had once entertained when his coldness to her began, she now knew to be baseless. Absorbed in meditations upon bloodshed and havoc, he held high the ideal of chastity, and, in company agreeable to him, could allude to it as the safeguard of ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... decisions, much less to vacate its Charter, and professed to continue its elections of deputies, etc., and to pass and administer laws as aforetime. Dr. Palfrey's language presents all such pretensions and proceedings as baseless and puerile. ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... the eleventh hour in the life of this important patent, after a long period of costly litigation, Edison and his associates were compelled to assume the defensive against a claimant whose utterly baseless pretensions had already been thoroughly investigated and rejected years before by every interested party, and ultimately, on examination by the courts, pronounced legally untenable, if not indeed actually fraudulent. Irritating as it was to be forced ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... feverish being I shall still find myself in conscious existence?... Shall I yet be warm in life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable Sages and holy Flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of another world beyond death, or are they all alike baseless visions and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must only be for the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a flattering idea then is a world to come! Would to God I as firmly believed it ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... other reasons before adduced, we dismiss the hypothesis of animal transmutation as unproved and untenable. It pleases and satisfies superficial views, but confronted with the facts of nature, it vanishes like a baseless vision. Man is sui generis, sole and exclusive in organization, without pre-existing type or affinity to other species; and his alleged recent metamorphosis from a monkey, and his first and far more distant one from a ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... to teach them to speak the truth is nothing less than to teach them the art of lying. In your zeal to rule, control, and teach them, you never find sufficient means at your disposal. You wish to gain fresh influence over their minds by baseless maxims, by unreasonable precepts; and you would rather they knew their lessons and told lies, than leave them ignorant ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... that in those industries which are controlled by Jews no such attempts have been made to better the lot of the workers employed in them as have been made in those industries which are controlled by non-Jews. This charge, likewise, is wholly baseless, as anybody who desires to know the truth can readily ascertain. It was my good fortune and privilege, as one of the representatives of the public appointed by President Wilson, to serve as a member of the ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... for nobody could by possibility compile or compose anything more vile or despicable. Since I came here, a world of fine thoughts came into my head which I intended to immortalise in these pages; but they have all evaporated like the baseless fabric of a vision. ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the most part a baseless complaint, when this or that adept in science and art complains that just his branch is being neglected by contemporaries; for an able master has only to appear in order to concentrate attention upon himself. If Raphael should reappear today, we should bestow upon him a superabundance of honor and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... herself up, and write some long letters in connection with that business. After she had got into her own room, she was never sensible of how time was passing—never conscious of any feeling within her, except a baseless, helpless hope that the French police might yet be proved to have made some terrible mistake—until she heard a violent shower of rain come on a little after sunset. The noise of the rain, and the freshness it brought with it in the air, seemed to awaken her as if ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... interesting in itself. It is also a pregnant example of the contrast between the scientific and the emotional methods of regarding nature; and it admirably illustrates the differences between well-grounded, suggestive, hypotheses, and baseless speculations. ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... vile cascade Your thrift invites—to make a higher level. In vain: with tons of garbage overlaid, Your baseless bog sinks slowly to ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... surge, that sweeps the shores 250 Of Cerne, and the green Hesperides, And long-renowned Atlantis,[172] whether sunk Now to the bottom of the "monstrous world;" Or was it but a shadow of the mind, Vapoury and baseless, like the distant clouds That seem the promise of an unknown land To the pale-eyed and wasted mariner, Cold on the rocking mast. The pilot plies, Now tossed upon Bayonna's mountain-surge, High to the north his way; when, lo! the cliffs 260 Of Albion, o'er the sea-line rising calm And white, and ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... such a measure, which at best would end in answering a few questions of unprofitable curiosity; whilst, on the other hand, without a knowledge of the ground on which value depends, or without some approximation to it, Political Economy could not exist at all, except as a heap of baseless opinions. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... not one to give way to fears that might be baseless. "Let us sleep," he said, shrugging his shoulders. And he lay down where he was, pillowing his head on a fishing-net. Bale said nothing, but examined the door before he stretched himself across ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... a sample of the sympathy he might expect at head-quarters, Moss's prognostications, after all, were not quite baseless. He made the best of his solitary dinner, and then sallied out in the dark to try to find the porter's lodge once more and rescue his luggage. That functionary was still absent, and Mark was compelled himself to haul his belongings in under cover, and ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... expectation of being cured cheered him, but then a new fear entered. His servant might have failed to find the physician. Again he grew faint, passing instantly from the most unreasoning hopes to the most baseless fears, exaggerating the chances of a sudden recovery and his apprehensions of danger. The hours passed and the moment came when, in utter despair and convinced that the physician would not arrive, he angrily told himself that he certainly ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... and a sudden fear arose within him that Spanish reinforcements were on their way, and that Perez was merely fighting for time until they should arrive. This fear grew until it became belief, though a baseless one, and, hoisting sail as quietly as possible, he stole out of Santiago Bay on the fourth night after hostilities had opened. As thanks are cheap, Perez received ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... with and sometimes without my wife, of whom, through my mediation, she has become a favorite. I have married, and according to the general opinion reformed. Yet I suspect my reformation, like most others of the kind, will prove instable as "the baseless fabric of a vision," unless I banish myself entirely from her society. But that I can never do; for she is still lovely in my eyes, and I cannot control ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... on the cause of the righteous, Bondage has swept our free warriors away, Vain were our prayers as our dreams had been baseless, Sword of the foeman has carried the day. Hid be thy strand 'neath the snows everlasting, Frozen the waters that over thee break! Come to defend, O thou God of all mercies, Cause of the righteous and home of ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... event their conduct may be changed. But what England is to become on the crush of her internal structure, now seeming to be begun, I cannot foresee. Her monied interest, created by her paper system, and now constituting a baseless mass of wealth equal to that of the owners of the soil, must disappear with that system, and the medium for paying great taxes thus failing, her navy must be without support. That it shall be supported by permitting her to claim ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... strong one,' 'the prince who does good to men.' This has a strong resemblance in name and character to Asar, Osiris, of Egypt. But the connection which is proposed, from both names being written with the signs of an eye and a place, seems baseless, as the syllabic values of the signs were reversed in the two languages; either the writing or the sound of the name must be only a coincidence. Istar, another Sumerian deity, became softened in Semitic ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... third estate. One thing only has struck sound judgments as being somewhat like the struggle of burgherdom in the middle ages against the feudal aristocracy, and that is the struggle between the plebeians and patricians at Rome. They have often been compared; but it is a baseless comparison. The struggle between the plebeians and patricians commenced from the very cradle of the Roman republic; it was not, as happened in the France of the middle ages, the result of a slow, difficult, incomplete development on the part of a class which, through a long ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... naturally induced the counter error of a too great insistence on the consciousness and elaboration of Shakespere's art. The most elaborate theories of this art have been framed—theories involving the construction of perhaps as much baseless fabric as anything else connected with the subject, which is saying a great deal. It appears to me in the highest degree improbable that Shakespere had before him consciously more than three purposes; but these three I think that he constantly had, and that he was completely successful ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... not. It was impossible to doubt it, unfortunately. You remember what I told you of her ungovernable, wild fits of passion—which she expected me to reciprocate. She terrified me! And think how she tortured herself with baseless self-reproaches in the last ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... than man himself, and men might as well attempt to build up a world as to attempt to found a state without God. A government founded on atheistical principles were less than a castle in the air. It would have nothing to rest on, would not be even so much as "the baseless fabric of a vision," and they who imagine that they really do exclude God from their politics deceive themselves; for they accept and use principles which, though they know it not, are God. What they call abstract principles, or abstract ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... There is no "one rational order among a host of possible systems." There is no "true filiation of the sciences." The whole hypothesis is fundamentally false. Indeed, it needs but a glance at its origin to see at once how baseless it is. Why a series? What reason have we to suppose that the sciences admit of a linear arrangement? Where is our warrant for assuming that there is some succession in which they can be placed? There is no reason; no warrant. Whence then has arisen the supposition? To use M. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... speech, in movement, in conduct; enormously free, that is, as compared with our present conditions, in a Socialist State established upon the two great propositions I have formulated in Chapters III. and IV. So that the statement that Socialism will destroy freedom is a baseless one of no value as a general ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... handed over Pym's journal, he had not troubled himself about its publication. Having retired to Illinois at first and to the Falklands afterwards, he had no notion of the stir that the work had made, or of the fantastic and baseless climax to which our great poet ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... it meant to him and his prospects or what he could do about it. Hurt to the soul he stared at the wreck of a friendship. Nothing will more deeply sicken the heart of a naturally loyal man than to discover baseless his faith in some one ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... thus to interpret "now, my boys, calculate your ages, and you shall have the money"? BRADSHAW OF THE FUTURE says "let" the ages at first be 9, 6, 3, then assumes that the second occasion was 6 years afterwards, and on these baseless assumptions brings out the right answers. Guide future travellers, an thou wilt: thou art no Bradshaw ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... time for thought. Numberless acts of the past life rise up to the recollection, many a deed, and thought, and word, which must bring either pain or fear; principles undergo a test which the wrong and baseless cannot bear. Death looks terribly near. What can stand a man in good stead on an occasion like this? One thing, and one thing alone—sound Bible religion; a firm faith in Him who took our nature upon Him, and died for our sins, and ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... and to Neptune leav'st The easy victory and baseless fame? Why o'er thy shoulder hangs thine idle bow? Ne'er in our father's halls again, as erst Among th' Immortals, let me hear thee boast How thou with Neptune ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... positively baseless, or absolutely irrational, its massing of supposed data, and its attempted coherence approximate more highly to Organization and Consistency than did the inchoate speculations ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... fancies of the squarers of the circle, the inventors of perpetual motion, and the rest of the moonstruck dreamers, most persons will confess to themselves that they have had notions as wild, conceptions as extravagant, theories as baseless, as the least rational of ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... offices; hence party animosities, embittered by the jealousies of conscious weakness on one side, and a deep sense of unmerited exclusion and provocation on the other.... Hence on the one side a selfish, insolent, baseless ecclesiastical and political oligarchy, and, on the other side, an abused, an injured, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... for disbelieving Baudin's disclaimer. It was plain and candid; and there was nothing in his actions while he was in Australian waters which belied his words. The baseless character of the gossip promulgated by Lieutenant-Colonel Paterson, and the alleged exhibition of the map indicating the exact spot where the French intended to settle in Frederick Henry Bay, were disposed of by the fact that Baudin's ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... ought to be, we have only to learn whether it is truly poetical. It is a popular fallacy to suppose that poetical things are necessarily fanciful, or imaginative, or sentimental in other words, that poetry resides in that which is both baseless and valueless. In the popular thought, poetry is shut out of the realm of truth and reality. The reason, I suppose, is, that poetry demands more of truth and harmony and beauty than is commonly found in the actualities ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... closed in; and as they turned upon their walk, and the good man saw through the vista of garden and orchard a bright light flitting across an upper window of his house, the mad hope flashed upon him for an instant (such baseless fancies will sometimes possess the calmest minds) that she had waked,—his Rachel,—and was there to meet him. The next moment the light and the hope were gone. His fingers gave such a convulsive grip upon the hand of his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... classes most interested, or amongst the masses of the people". There are principally two reasons for the proposed reform, first that Sweden and Norway have a different Tariff-System, secondly, the frequent rivalry between Swedish and Norwegian trade articles of export. The first reason is baseless, as the different Tariff-Systems are of importance chiefly for the imports, and not for the exports[12:1]; the second reason loses its chief point by the fact that consuls are not commercial agents, that it is not their business to promote trade ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... hoary registers of time, unless perchance in the fool's calendar. Wisdom disclaims the word, nor holds society with those that own it. 'Tis fancy's child, and folly is its father; wrought of such stuffs as dreams are; and baseless as the fantastic visions of the evening." Oh, how many a wreck on the road to success could say: "I have spent all my life in pursuit of to-morrow, being assured that to-morrow has some vast benefit or other ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... censorious attitude toward Jackson, cast his influence for Adams and thereby secured his election on the first ballot. A few days later Adams offered Clay the secretaryship of state, which was accepted. The wholly unjust and baseless charge of "bargain and corruption'' followed, and the feud thus created between Adams and Jackson greatly influenced the history of the United ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... interview brought to humiliating discomfiture, but the influence of the disillusionment instantly retroacted with the effect of making the entire noble and romantic cult which had led up to this unlucky confrontation seem a mere farrago of extravagant and baseless sentiment. What on earth had Regnier been thinking of, to plan deliberately a situation calculated to turn a cherished sentiment into ridicule? If he had seriously thought his daughter capable of supporting the role he had assigned her, ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... unknown sea all this insubstantial pageant had faded like the baseless fabric of the vision that it was and left not ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... disposition, he grew to be not so tenderly regarded by his acquaintances as it is the lot of some of those persons to be. The winning and sanguine receptivity of his early life developed by degrees a moody nervousness, and when not picturing prospects drawn from baseless hope he was the victim of indescribable depression. The practical issue of such a condition was improvidence, originally almost an unconscious improvidence, for every debt incurred had been mentally paid off with a religious exactness from ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... when we believe with a true faith in Him. We are rooted in Him. His life flows into us. We draw nourishment from that soil. We are built on Him, and in our compact union find a real support to a life which is otherwise baseless and blown about like thistledown by every breath. The union which all these metaphors presupposes is a vital connection; the possession which is the first step in the Christian life is a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the 'rightful supremacy of the moral faculty over every other principle of human action.' Mackintosh thought that his best service, as he told Macvey Napier,[574] had been his 'endeavour to slip in a foundation under Butler's doctrine of the supremacy of the conscience, which he left baseless.' To slip in a foundation is a very delicate operation in logical as in material architecture; and the new foundation seems here to be in danger of inverting the edifice. The 'supremacy of conscience'[575] means with him that the 'moral sentiments' form a separate class. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... rot, might through its corruption have proved a real, not a merely imaginary, source of disease and death. Nor is it only the sanitary condition of a tribe which has benefited by this superstition; curiously enough the same baseless dread, the same false notion of causation, has indirectly strengthened the moral bonds of hospitality, honour, and good faith among men who entertain it. For it is obvious that no one who intends to harm a man by working magic on the refuse of his ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... often cited exceptions. Now, no one can deny that there is a pathological brilliance of good cheer in the works of Stevenson and other tubercular artists. The white plague is a powerful mental stimulant. It is a double-distilled extract of baseless optimism. But this optimism, like that resulting from other stimulants, is dearly bought. Its shrift is too short. And let nobody forget that for each variety of pathological optimism and brilliance and beauty there are ninety and nine corresponding sorts of pathological pessimism and dullness ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... reflexion the impulse of the moment, in any and every case all alike, great and small, good and bad, leaders and followers, or however else we may class them, were, in fact, equally insignificant and absurd, the idle sport of illusions, one as empty and baseless as another. The history of nations, the lives of individual men, are stripped, in this view, of all interest and meaning; nowhere is there advance or retrogression, nowhere better or worse, nowhere sense or consistency at all. Systems, however imposing, structures, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... Another equally baseless and equally injurious charge was that the House had violated the spirit of the Constitution by selecting a candidate who had a less number of electoral votes than Jackson. "The election of Mr. Adams," said Benton, "was ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... law would be uncertain to the minds of the people at large, so that they would not know what the juries would sanction and what condemn, and would not therefore know practically what their own rights and liberties were under the law, the objection is thoroughly baseless and false. No system of law that was ever devised could be so entirely intelligible and certain to the minds of the people at large as this. Compared with it, the complicated systems of law that are compounded of the law of nature, ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... that Christmas-day of old St. Colum broke the ancient spell. A thousand years away have rolled, 'Tis now ... "a baseless miracle." ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... the President his political enemies sought to convey the impression that he was incapacitated for the duties of his office. As one who came in daily contact with him I knew how baseless were these insinuations. As a matter of fact, there was not a whole week during his entire illness that he was not in touch with every matter upon which he was called to act and upon which he was asked to render judgment. The White House files contain numerous memoranda showing his interest in all ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... lives by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in matter and in flesh: it is meteoric—suspended in midair; it is the baseless fabric of a vision so vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no base can seem more broad than such stupendous baselessness, and yet any man can bring it about his ears by being over-curious; when faith fails a system ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... no greater error than to leave the two worlds, or the two 'judgments,' that of existence and that of value, contrasted with each other, or treated as unrelated in our experience. A value-judgment which is not also a judgment of existence is in the air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision. Existence is itself a value, and an ingredient in every valuation; that which has no existence has no value. And, on the other side, it is a delusion to suppose that any science can dispense with valuation. Even mathematics admits ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... and an assistant was called to show us the instruments. All observatories are much alike; therefore I will not describe this, except in its peculiarities. One of these was the presence of small, light, portable rooms, i.e., baseless boxes, which rolled over the instruments to protect them; two sides were of wood, and two sides of green silk curtains, which could, of course, be turned aside when the boxes, or little rooms, were rolled over the apparatus. Being covered ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... sake, to be civil to my charges (who were more interested in her than they had been in the Sphinx), and that, if she could have done so without hurting their feelings, she would have struck them dead. But my fears that their mental suggestions might obsess her were baseless. She did not speak when the golden billows parted to give us a first vision of the great Mystery of the Desert. I had led Monny by a roundabout way, and instead of seeing the Sphinx from the back, we came upon her face to face, as she gazed with her wonderful, all-knowing eyes, straight ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... we shall no longer worship in temples made with hands, neither in the mountains of Samaria, nor in the temples of Jerusalem, or Rome, or London. 'The cloud-capt towers-the gorgeous palaces-the solemn temples-yea, the great globe itself, shall dissolve, and, like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wreck behind.' Or in language far more solemn and striking, because they are the unerring words of truth, 'The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and the works that are therein, shall ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... protest against the new constitution, they assert that they will to the utmost of their ability resist the introduction and impede the working of the new constitution. Their abhorrence of Home Rule may be groundless, their threats may be baseless; their power to give effect to their menaces may have no existence. All that I now contend is that the strongest, and the most energetic, part of Irish society is in fact and in truth bitterly opposed, ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... the stolid asseveration of the German. "The home is sacred." The speaker's tone was so malevolent that Hamilton was impressed, in spite of himself. And then, suddenly, a suspicion upreared itself in his brain—a suspicion so monstrous, so absurd, so baseless, so extravagantly impossible, that he would have laughed aloud, but for the sincerity of the feeling manifested in the faces of the men before him. His eyes roved from Schmidt to the faded woman who was the man's ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... said that the potash in the fertilizer is in form of sulphate. Usually that profits the user nothing, and often the claim is baseless, but if it is a sulphate, the cost of the potash should have only 20 per cent added to the valuation of the potash, which usually will not add one dollar to the total cost of the ton of mixed fertilizer. Basing the ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... find it in the turmoil of worldly life, but only in his heart, and that only in calm meditation. But in this separation from real life he is likely to lose sight of all the limits of human nature, and seeking pure form he may easily lose himself in arbitrary and baseless conceptions. Reason will abstract itself too much from experience, and the practical man will not be able to carry out, in the crush of real life, what the contemplative mind has discovered on the peaceful path of thought. Thus, what makes ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... vain, and colourless, that he felt he would not rise from his bed for anything existence had to offer. He recalled his usual frame of mind, in which these things seemed attractive, with a dull wonderment that so baseless a delusion should be so strong and so general. He wondered if it were possible that it should ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... our hesitating timidity and plunging into the ice-cold waters of passions so keen and translunar as to have become chaste. It may be so—and, on the other hand, it may be that the old sly earth-gods will hold their indelible sway over us until the "baseless fabric" of this vision leaves "not a rack behind"! In any case, for our present purpose, the reading of Emily Bronte strengthens us in our recognition that the only wisdom of life consists in leaving all the doors ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... death-defying witnesses to its truth, or to treat it as an allegory or figure of speech, is to me a signal failure. It must be accepted as the keystone—for such it is—and seal to the great Christian doctrine of a future life, as a historical fact, or rejected as a baseless fable.' ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... corroborate the fact, many people insist that the flames burst out at once in different parts of the city; not allowing the wind to have any hand in it. So much for the plot. But the fabricators of plots in all countries build their conjectures on the "baseless fabric of a vision;" and it seems even a sort of poetical justice, that whilst this Minister is crushing at home plots of his own conjuring up, on the Continent, and in the north, he should, with ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... does not. Therefore he still hoped that with so many circumstances bringing an ever-increasing pressure upon her, Ida's spirit would in time be broken, her resistance would collapse, and he would have his will. Nor, as the sequel will show, was that hope a baseless one. ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... Scriptural Christianity with being on the high road to Calvinism, and prepared, by their faith in the corruption of human nature, and the atonement of Christ, for the most extreme views of the Divine decrees. Yet these bold and baseless assertions have their weight with those for whom they are intended, and many weak but good persons are held in passive bondage to these teachers and their creed, through the holy fear of moving a step towards infidelity. On the ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... which is intended to weaken our faith in our allies is like an actual enemy agent in our midst—seeking to sabotage our war effort. There are, here and there, evil and baseless rumors against the Russians—rumors against the British—rumors against our own American commanders in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... him, and rent him. "This fellow," said GRUBLET, "will get too uppish—I must show up his trash"; and accordingly he fulminated against his friend in the organ that he had by that time come to consider as his own. This baseless sense of proprietorship, in fact, it was that wrecked GRUBLET. In an evil moment for himself he tried to ride rough-shod over CHEPSTOWE, and that temporary genius dismissed him with a promptitude that ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... time on his childhood was poisoned by the idea of death. His nerves delivered him up to all sorts of little baseless sicknesses, to depression, to sudden transports, and fits of choking. His imagination ran riot with these troubles, and thought it saw in all of them the murderous beast which was to rob him of his life. How many ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... of this carefully premeditated and unscrupulous gulling and thwarting of the American Embassy. The accidental discovery of the circumstance that the baseless charge of espionage levelled against me was still hanging over my head somewhat worried me. I ascertained one exceedingly disturbing fact which was communicated to me within the camp. Had I committed ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... complement of officers. This measure, however agreeable it might have been to the horde of aspirants for commissions, was in itself calculated to destroy all self-respect in the soldiers, being based on the utterly baseless assumption that they required twice as many officers as whites, and was foredoomed to failure, because no esprit de corps can be created in a regiment which is from the first insignificant in respect to size. It is scarcely conceivable that any regular ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... made the Greeks the foremost nation of the world. They had seen the mythological conceptions of their ancestral country dwindle into fables; the wonders with which the old poets adorned the Mediterranean had been discovered to be baseless illusions. From Olympus its divinities had disappeared; indeed, Olympus itself had proved to be a phantom of the imagination. Hades had lost its terrors; no place could ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... later, while living in the palace at Helsingfors, I overheard a conversation between the Governor-General and his son, which revealed to me a staggering truth that I had never suspected. It was Oberg himself who had denounced my mother to the Minister of the Interior, and had made those cruel, baseless charges against her! Then I discerned the reason. She being exiled, her fortune, as well as that of my father, came to me. The reason they were scheming for Michael to marry me was in order to obtain control of my money. I saw at once how helpless I was in the ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... the reactionary powers. Its hand was seen in every act of the discontented masses. It became the "Red Spectre," and all the powers of Europe were now seeking to destroy it. Looming thus large to the outside world, those within the International knew how baseless were the fears of its opponents. They realized that internecine war was eating its heart out. During all this time, when it was credited and blamed for every revolt in Europe, there were incredible plotting and intrigue between the factions. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... admit his impotence to solve it; but he guessed a solution. Now, guessing in science is a very hazardous proceeding, and Lamarck's reputation has suffered woefully for the absurdities into which his baseless suppositions led him. ...
— Time and Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... pebbles with," which, when we remember the nature of its contents, leaves small doubt of the sender's guilt. "A supposition," says Mr. Bleackley, "that does not explain [these] two damning circumstances must be baseless." The nocturnal manifestations experienced by Cranstoun, and interpreted by his friend Mrs. Morgan as presaging Mr. Blandy's death, must also be explained. Further, it would be interesting to know how the defenders of Cranstoun account for the warning given him by Mary in the intercepted letter—"Lest ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead |
