"Irrational" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... haste Mr. Jocelyn had not carefully gauged his syringe, and the over-amount of morphia thrown into his system so stimulated him that his words appeared exceedingly irrational to the young man, whose judgment was based on unusual shrewdness and common-sense. He was greatly puzzled by the sudden change in his companion. It was evident that he had not been drinking, for his breath was untainted and his utterance was natural. But his face was flushed, and he seemed possessed ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... inquiry (though perhaps it may be frivolous to take so much thought of what, no doubt, costs Pisistratus so little) by the last chapters in my nephew's story. I see this poor boy Leonard, alone with his fallen hopes (though very irrational they were) and his sense of shame. And I read his heart, I dare say, better than Pisistratus does, for I could feel like that boy if I had been in the same position; and conjecturing what he and thousands like him must go through, I asked myself, 'What can save him and ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... interrupted almost rudely. She was moved by a perfectly irrational impulse to stop him, to delay ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... done as to prove delight to any of the young readers, it is hoped that no worse effect will result than to make them wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the Plays at full length (such a wish will be neither peevish nor irrational). When time and leave of judicious friends shall put them into their hands, they will discover in such of them as are here abridged (not to mention almost as many more, which are left untouched) many surprising events and turns of fortune, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... was the strange irrelevancy, levity, the enmity—the irrational, baffling nature of the anguishing conversation, as if with the unapproachable men we ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... tray for a dozen people twice a day without sooner or later coming to grief with it. And here it is appropriate to say that in places where there is much heavy work it is only reasonable that wages should be higher than where the work is light. Whereas, upon such irrational grounds is our whole system of domestic service built, that this is hardly ever taken into consideration. Since the servant is told beforehand what he or she will have to do, it is taken for granted that the conditions are acceptable to them; whereas, the fact is that the capability ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... dupe of a distempered fancy, and as such unworthy of my respect and love. As I admitted this truth, I shuddered with that vague horror we feel in dreams, when we recoil from the brink of something, we know not what. I trembled when his lips opened, fearful he would say something more irrational and ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... to the irrational instincts, and making spirit and blood obedient and docile to it. Such also were most of his companions, for though they were dashed to the ground and dragged along by the Cyclops, they said not a word about Odysseus, nor did they show the stake of wood ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Bessy so late? Dusk was falling already—the early end of the cold slate-hued day. But Bessy always rode late—there was always a rational answer to Justine's irrational conjectures.... It was the sight of those chestnut flanks that tormented her—she knew of Bessy's previous struggles with the mare. But the indulging of idle apprehensions was not in her nature, and when the tea-tray came, and with it Cicely, ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... preliminary to the other question—How is the non-lover to be distinguished from the lover? In all of us there are two principles—a better and a worse—reason and desire, which are generally at war with one another; and the victory of the rational is called temperance, and the victory of the irrational intemperance or excess. The latter takes many forms and has many bad names—gluttony, drunkenness, and the like. But of all the irrational desires or excesses the greatest is that which is led away by desires of a kindred nature to the enjoyment of ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... and Dr. Earle were influenced by their observation that even in those suffering from mania much of their behavior could not be described as irrational. If you will allow me I will quote a sentence of ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... was not killed or maimed for life in a railway accident, had begun by treating a delay of one hour in all her arrangements for the evening as a trifle. But she had soon felt that, though a trifle, it was really very upsetting and annoying. It gave birth to irrational yet real forebodings as to the non-success of her little party. It meant that the little party had "started badly." And then her other grand-nephew, Louis Fores, did not arrive. He had been invited for supper at seven, ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... of us it must be only a minor avocation. The very books about the books in this boundless field, the compends of the compends, the reviews of the reviews, form in themselves a library great enough to stagger human weakness. Besides all this—in a sense a part of it, yet a miscellaneous and irrational part—come the newspapers, with their daily distraction. This is after all our world, and we cannot live in it and be absolute nonconformists. So we must submit to the newspaper, though it makes a heavy addition to our daily load of reading for information. But there is still another ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... decide everything by his own impression of the moment, eked out by the "appeal to Moliere's maid". The latter is the negation of all criticism. The former, spite of itself, is the historical method, but the historical method applied in an utterly arbitrary and irrational way. The former was the method of Johnson; the latter, of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly. Each in turn, as we have seen, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... is interwoven in the Soul of Man. "So it is in that of a Wolf;" However irrational, ungenerous, and unsocial the love of liberty may be in a rude Savage, he is capable of being enlightned by Experience, Reflection, Education, and civil, and Political Institutions. But the Nature of the Wolf is, and ever will be confined to running in the forest ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... prayer is nevertheless so far from necessarily introducing change into the purpose of the Unchangeable, that it has been all along taken, so to speak, into account by Him. If, then, with 'the Father of Lights' there is in this sense 'no variableness, neither shadow of turning,' it is not therefore irrational to pray for specific blessings, as we do in the Litany, because God works out His plans not merely in us but by us; and we may dare to say that that which is to us a free self-determination, may be not other than a foreseen element ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... SCRAPS OF POETRY, &c., by ROBERT BURNESS: a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping it; but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty, and unbounded good-will to every creature, rational and irrational.—As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of life; but as I believe they are really his own, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of human nature to see how ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... applying the scientists' notions to social conditions. "Is this reasonable?" they asked, or, "Is that rational?" Montesquieu insisted that divine-right monarchy is unreasonable. Voltaire poked fun at the Church and the clergy for being irrational. Rousseau claimed that class inequalities have no basis in reason. Beccaria taught that arbitrary or cruel interference with personal liberty is not in accordance with dictates of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... warily the interpreter has to tread here, every one knows who has dipped, even superficially, into the controversies among Platonists themselves. All admit the distinction between the rational and the irrational part or principle, the latter including, first, the sensibility, and secondly, the Plastic, or that lower which in obedience to its sympathies enables the soul to attach itself to, and to organize ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... irritated. This wild, excited boy was not the doggedly faithful youth she had always known. It seemed to her that he was hardly sane—that underneath his quiet manner and carefully repressed voice there lurked something irrational, something she could not cope with. She looked ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... said the doctor quietly, "will excuse anything you say, however wild and irrational. I am ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... teach. Yet all are called Christians, have been baptized, and enjoy the use of the Sacraments, although they know neither the Lord's Prayer, nor the Creed, nor the Ten Commandments, and live like the poor brutes and irrational swine." (Preface to the Small Catechism.) Remember, these people lived in that age when Luther was born and grew up, which Catholic writers picture to us as a ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... become acknowledged, if not always in practice, at least in theory. And if monarchies and aristocracies still do exist, it is not because all concerned in the decision have deliberately decided for them, but because it is safer to endure irrational institutions that are old, than to undertake the sudden establishment of rational institutions that are new. Only in the social field the feeling of the equality of men has not yet permeated them enough to rouse their souls against the present division of society into industrial lords on ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... either of weakness or of hastiness, still less of anything like the pride she might actually have felt in her superiority. To keep her back now would be to accuse perfection of being imperfect; it would be as irrational as to call excellence a failing. More than that, it would have a bad effect on the whole community, a danger which ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... proposed a game; but Polly, usually the quickest of the children, allowed the others to eclipse her, while her ears were strained for the expected summons. At last, when the message came, she started downstairs with a fluttering heart, her nerves a-quiver with irrational fear. ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... thus seen that the Bushido institution of suicide was neither so irrational nor barbarous as its abuse strikes us at first sight. We will now see whether its sister institution of Redress—or call it Revenge, if you will—has its mitigating features. I hope I can dispose ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... might conceivably generate in time a violent antipathy, not only to that particular toy, but to the class of toys resembling it. The aversion might even persist after he had forgotten about the original burns; later on he might even invent some reason to account for his seemingly irrational antipathy. In some cases, altering the external habit of action by changing the environment to affect the stimuli to action will also alter the mental disposition concerned in the action. Yet this does not always happen; a person trained to dodge a threatening blow, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... Society, capricious in its indignation as it had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and petted darling. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry. He was persecuted with an irrational fury. Much has been written about those unhappy domestic occurrences which decided the fate of his life. Yet nothing is, nothing ever was, positively known to the public, but this, that ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a moment. The silence in his breast was complete. But he felt a suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience when we enter an unlighted strange place—the irrational feeling that something may jump upon us in the dark—the absurd dread ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... century ahead of that. Possibly she was capable of dismissing it as indifferent. But he could not be certain of her freedom from social prejudice. He remembered the singular shock with which he himself had first learnt what he was; a state of mind quite irrational, but only to be dismissed with an effort of the trained intelligence. Irene would undergo the same experience, and it might affect her ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... he has found it necessary to throw away "pure reason" and to assume an inherent "irrationality" in the system of things. Why then, when it comes to this particular axiom of irrational common-sense, does he balk and ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... spent most of the day shopping for week-end necessities. On an irrational last-minute impulse—perhaps an unconscious surrender to the machine age—she dug in the grocery deep freeze and brought out a couple ...
— Weak on Square Roots • Russell Burton
... more of that hour of weak human idolatry. It was a revelation to me of the depths of despair and wretchedness into which one can sink when unsustained by manly fortitude or Christian principle. It is in such desperate, irrational moods that undisciplined, ill-balanced souls thrust themselves out from the light of God's sunshine and the abundant possibilities of future good. I now look back on that hour with shame, and cannot excuse it even by the fact ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... persisted, with so much pains, to come to this unbounded catacomb, seems now singular to me: for by that time I could not have been sufficiently daft to expect to find another being like myself on the earth, though I cherished, I remember, the irrational hope of yet somewhere finding dog, or cat, or horse, to be with me, and would anon think bitterly of Reinhardt, my Arctic dog, which my own hand had shot. But, in reality, a morbid curiosity must have ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... our rapid survey of the difficulties which attend the choice of a wife will explain up to a certain point this national frailty. Thus, after indicating frankly the aching malady under which the social slate is laboring, we have sought for the causes in the imperfection of the laws, in the irrational condition of our manners, in the incapacity of our minds, and in the contradictions which characterize our habits. A single point still claims our observation, and that is the first onslaught of the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... recklessness, were coming to wreck the camp in a moment of mad intoxication, he would have made allowances for the cause. Before resorting to extreme measures in defending his charge, he first would have sought to bring them to their senses. Drunken men are men unbalanced, irrational. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... scheme. I had been for months at my wit's end, forming plan after plan for the evangelisation of Erewhon, when by one of those special interpositions which should be a sufficient answer to the sceptic, and make even the most confirmed rationalist irrational, my eye was directed to the following paragraph in the Times newspaper, of one of the ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... Philosophy of the Ancients has been no less misrepresented than the Epicurean. Pyrrho may perhaps have carried it to rather an irrational excess;—but we must not believe with Beattie all the absurdities imputed to this philosopher; and it appears to me that the doctrines of the school, as explained by Sextus Empiricus, are far more suited to the wants and infirmities of human reason ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... rule of policy strong enough to counteract the benefits of extended patronage enjoyed during wars by corrupt ministers; to allay the puerile love of glory cherished by weak princes; or to subdue the demoniacal passions and irrational prejudices artfully excited by rulers, and too often cherished ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... sufficiently complete with us all." So spake my amiable and enlightened guide. The remainder of the day—during which we took a stroll to Montmorenci, and saw the house and gardens where Rousseau wrote his Emile—was spent in a mixed but not irrational manner: much accordant with my own feelings, and most congenial with a languid state of body which had endured the heats of Paris for a month, without feeling scarcely a breath of air the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... relating to his son Charles, was accomplished. The incident being of so late a date, one might hope that it would have been cleared up; but, if it be a fact, it must be allowed that it forms a rational exultation for its irrational adepts. Astrologers were frequently, as may easily be understood, put to their wit's end when their predictions did not come to pass. Great winds were foretold, by one of the craft, about the year 1586. No unusual storms, however, happened. ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... system, suit has ordinarily to be brought where the defendant, the alleged wrongdoer, resides, which means generally where no part of the transaction giving rise to the action took place. What could be more irrational? "Granted that no state can of its own volition make its process run beyond its borders * * * is it unreasonable that the United States should by federal action be made a unit in ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... enemies—secured the floor and launched upon a vigorous defense of the nominating convention as a piece of party machinery. He thought it absurd to talk of a man's having a right to become a candidate for office without the indorsement of his party. He believed it equally irrational to allow members of the party to consult personal preferences in voting. The members of the party must submit to discipline, if they expected to secure control of office. Confusion again reigned. The presiding officer ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... It was absurd—and irrational—and impossible. But Rilla believed it, for all that; and Mrs. Blythe believed it; and the doctor, though he smiled faintly in pretended derision, felt an odd confidence replace his first despair; and foolish and absurd or not, they all plucked up heart and courage to carry ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... me than any of the suggestions which have gone before, is the fact that it is irrational to suppose that the soul dies with the body. If that were true, how could we account for the enormous waste in discipline and culture, in education and affection? What is the meaning of the love that binds human beings together, if after a short "three-score-and-ten ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... religion is, then, rational because attacked along irrational grounds; the Church is also reasonable because she has not been swayed by the attraction of heresy nor listened to the glib fallacies of those who always want to make her something more or ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... bars. In some it took the form of the sleek stillness of the tiger; others were loud-voiced, restless, biting at their nails. Only to a few was it given to bear triumph soberly, with room for other thoughts; to the most it came as a tumultuous passion, an irrational joy, a dazzling bandage to their eyes, beneath which they saw, with an inner vision, wealth a growing snowball and victory their familiar spirit. Among the adventurers from the Cygnet there was, moreover, an intoxication of feeling ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... which, in short, the animal creation has grown, in at least its nobler specimens, altogether unwittingly, without thought or care on its own part, and without intelligence on the part of the operating law, from irrational to rational, and risen in the scale from the mere promptings of instinct to the highest exercise of reason,—from apes and baboons to Bacons and Newtons. The blind lead the blind;—the unseeing law operates on ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... men, even in old age, feel a certain anxiety, conscious or not, as they overtake a woman whose back view is in the least attractive. I confess that I felt a more than usual, indeed a quite irrational, perturbation of the blood, as, coming level with her, I dared to look into her face. As I did so she involuntarily turned to look at me—turned to look at me, did I say? "To look" is a feeble verb indeed to express the unexpected shock of beauty ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... rights and reasonable susceptibilities of other nations,—none of which is contravened by the step here immediately under discussion,—the annexation, even, of Hawaii would be no mere sporadic effort, irrational because disconnected from an adequate motive, but a first-fruit and a token that the nation in its evolution has aroused itself to the necessity of carrying its life—that has been the happiness of those under its influence—beyond ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... thought, that had made you melancholy, and filled your mind for a while with those unsubstantial and indefinable regrets for the past which we are all apt to feel at certain moments of our life. There are few of us who do not encounter, now and again, some of that irrational spirit of sadness which, when over-indulged, drives men to madness and self-destruction. I used to know well what it was before I knew you; but since I have had the hope of having you in my house, I have banished it utterly. In that I think I have ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... young man could appear so gay and happy, yet be guilty of such injustice and inhumanity, that he could take pride in works which not even money had made his own, and live with undiminished splendor, when his credit itself began to fail, seemed to her incongruities so irrational, that hitherto she had supposed ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... alienation of Church lands by Bishop Patrick Hepburn, among the worst of the bishops; by the Privy Council in 1568 ordering the removal of lead from the roofs; by wind and weather; by Cromwell's troops; by an irrational zeal, which in 1630 broke down the carved screen and lovely wood-work; and lastly by the falling of the central tower, which destroyed the whole nave and part of the transepts. The passing away of such a colossal ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... to his uneasy pacing, but now with an irrational and supporting sense of duty done. He had dug his grave that morning; now he had carved his epitaph; the folds of the toga were composed, why should he delay the insignificant trifle that remained to do? He ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... practice of burning it is very widespread. They have been so familiarized with the custom and certain more or less vague excuses for its perpetuation that they show no realization of how strangely irrational and devoid of obvious meaning the procedure is. The reasons usually given in explanation of its use are for the most part merely paraphrases of the traditional meanings that in the course of history have come to be attached to the ritual act or the words used to designate ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... they could hope to draw from fowling or fishing was too precarious to be depended upon; that there did not seem to be any chance of the winds changing to favour their escape, but that they must inevitably stay there and perish, if they let an irrational superstition deter them from the means which nature offered to their hands; that Ulysses might be deceived in his belief that these oxen had any sacred qualities above other oxen; and even admitting that they were the property of the god of the Sun, as he said they were, ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... to draw the following conclusions,—first, that having once fully admitted the existence of an infinite yet self-conscious Creator, we are not allowed to ground the irrationality of any other article of faith on arguments which would equally prove 'that' to be irrational, which we had allowed to be 'real'. Secondly, that whatever is deducible from the admission of a 'self-comprehending' and 'creative' spirit, may be legitimately used in proof of the 'possibility' of any further ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... to apply this thought to the institution of marriage; and he descends, in doing so, to the following irrational argument:—'Let us select the most necessary and most useful institution of human society: it is marriage. Yet the counsel of the saints deems the contrary side to be more honest; thus excluding the most venerable ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... drawing, and make the wretched choice of perishing without, rather than find safety within? The deepest reason is an alienated heart, a rebellious will. But the reason for alienation and rebellion lie among the inscrutable mysteries of our awful being. All sin is irrational. The fact is plain, the temptations are obvious; excuses there are in plenty, but reasons there are none. Still we may touch for a moment on some of the causes which operate with many hearers of God's merciful call to enter in, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... been malignant. That does not, of course, mean that it has been irrational; quite the contrary. One fully admits that Prussia, being what she is, has every cause to hate the Cross, and every motive to vent the agonized fury of a lost soul upon things sacred to the God ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... but by Miss Masters also, and he was well aware, as he thought of it all, that neither of them had given him any cause of offence. If she chose to make an appointment for a walk with Mr. Lawrence Twentyman and to keep it, what was that to him? His anger was altogether irrational, and he knew that it was so. What right had he to have an opinion about it if Mary Masters should choose to like the society of Mr. Twentyman? It was an affair between her and her father and mother in which he could have no ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... has become now to me as real as any commonplace fact. I think that mankind is still as it were collectively dreaming and hardly more awakened to reality than a very young child. It has these dreams that we express by the flags of nationalities and by strange loyalties and by irrational creeds and ceremonies, and its dreams at times become such nightmares as this war. But the time draws near when mankind will awake and the dreams will fade away, and then there will be no nationality in all the world but humanity, and no kind, no emperor, nor leader but the one God of mankind. ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... advantages of old age, if we contemplate it in another point of view; if we consider it as delivering us from the tyranny of lust and ambition; from the angry and contentious passions; from every inordinate and irrational desire; in a word, as teaching us to retire within ourselves, and look for happiness in our own bosoms. If to these moral benefits naturally resulting from length of days be added that sweet food of the mind which is gathered in the fields of science, I know not any season of life that is passed ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... arrangement of this conference is, in my opinion, the least objectionable, and at the same time it is the most promising help that in the present appallingly entangled situation America can give Europe. The Old World is poisoned. The virus of the most irrational hatred of its component sections against each other, inoculated into them by all sorts of false leaders of opinion, eats deeper and deeper and threatens to mortify all the roots of a wholesome life. May the United States of America ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... power to alter their purposes, and in that fact we have an essential point of difference between eccentricity and insanity. We may regard their conduct as singular, because they made an unusual disposition of their property; but it was no more irrational than if the one had left his estate to the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," and the other had devoted his to sending missionaries ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... contradiction of Rossetti. Morris's anarchists represented his life's work to him. He did not help them from that personal and irrational charity which made Rossetti want to give a penny to a beggar in the street. This may be regarded as a supersubtle distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important fact about Morris that—to quote Mr. Compton-Rickett—"human nature in the concrete never ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... on, with a generous ardor in her face, following further the train of her argument, which she appeared to find extremely attractive, "I know what you are going to say and I deny it. I am not fanciful, or sophistical, or irrational, and I know perfectly what I am about. Men are so stupid; it 's only women that have real discernment. Leave me alone, and I shall do something. Blanche is silly, yes, very silly; but she is not so bad as her husband accused her of being, in those dreadful words which he will live to repent of. ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... despondency and dejection. Until that time he had felt a strong and confident expectation of success, but his feelings had then been very suddenly changed. His confidence had arisen from the influence of a dream, his dejection from a cause more frivolous still; so that he was equally irrational in his hope and ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... turned unto the Lord their God. Every Sabbath morning, public worship is celebrated in the chapel at Cape Coast Town, when the beautiful liturgy of our Church is read; and the decorum which is observed by the natives, who read the responses, appears in striking opposition to the wild irrational service which they formerly offered at the temple of ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... tale could be told, were there need to tell it. Believe me when I affirm that this fire is holy, and most potent as well. Thou hast heard that heaven and earth are subject to my son because of his lordship over gods and men. But what shall I say of the power that he exercises over irrational animals, whether celestial or terrene? It is through him that the turtle is fain to follow her mate; it is through him that my pigeons have learned to caress his ringdoves with fondest endearments. And there is no creeping or living creature that has ever at ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... uniformity, the greater would be the room for our interpreting it as mere fortuity. But forasmuch as the progress of science has shown that within experience the method of the Supreme Causality is absolutely uniform, the hypothesis of fortuity is rendered irrational; and let us think of this Supreme Causality as we may, the fact remains that from it there emanates a directive influence of uninterrupted consistency, on a scale of stupendous magnitude and exact precision, worthy of our highest possible ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... absolutely irrefutable, and yet there remained in his bold heart an irrational fear that after all she could eat him. Such is the extraordinary influence of ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... this appeal, Hamilton leaned forward anxiously, pleadingly. Deep down in his heart he felt a glow of pride over the mildness and the reasonableness with which he had presented the case in its true light to this irrational, ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... multitudinous shimmerings of the tropic sun upon the bay. The deep dark shadow of the banking clouds drew a sharp line across the earth, and deep in that shadow lay the flying field, growing small and distant as the plane flew on. But specks raced across the wide expanse. In a peculiar, irrational fashion those specks darted toward a nearly invisible speck, and encountered other specks darting away from that nearly invisible speck, and gradually all the specks were turned about and racing for the angular, toy-block squares which were the hangars of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... I may form any judgment from your father's manner, I must suppose that you were mistaken. You will understand that I do not say this as any reproach to you. Quite the contrary. I think your father is irrational; and you may well have failed to anticipate ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... is not he who feels no fear, For that were stupid and irrational; But he whose noble soul its fear subdues, And bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from. As for your youth whom blood and blows delight, Away with them! there is not in their crew One ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... sense that if men and nations universally behaved as Christians, wars would cease. The ideal of the Kingdom of GOD involves the reign upon earth of universal peace. War is, therefore, in itself, an unchristian thing. It is, moreover, a barbarous and irrational method of determining disputes, since the factors which humanly speaking are decisive for success in war, viz. the organized and unflinching use of superior physical force, are in principle irrelevant to the rights or wrongs ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... illogical, of course, and very absurd. If we can accept the four words, why not accept all six? If we credit the head of the text, why cavil at the tail? Sometimes the absurdity of such irrational behavior will break upon a man and set him laughing at his own stupidity. Mr. Spurgeon had some such experience. 'Gentlemen,' he said, one Friday afternoon, in an address to his students, 'Gentlemen, there are many passages of Scripture which ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... type of outrage three years ago in Butte. There is not one man who was here, who, I believe, was in any way, shape or form responsible for such outrages. I find that the ultra-Socialistic members of the unions in Butte denounced these men for coming here, in a manner as violent—and I may say as irrational—as the denunciation [by the capitalistic writer] in the article you sent me. Doubtless the gentleman of whom you speak as your general manager is an admirable man. I, of course, was not alluding to him; but I most emphatically ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... an irrational custom," went on Professor Haddock, "prevents respectable young ladies from making love, a thing they would enjoy doing, whilst mercenary girls do it too much and without getting any enjoyment out of it. It is indeed ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... revelation, there is another, and that also, it is to be feared, an increasing one, which may be called the class of half-unbelievers, who are to be found in various degrees of approximation to a state of absolute infidelity. The system, if it deserve the name, of these men, is grossly irrational. Hearing many who assert and many who deny the truth of Christianity, and not reflecting seriously enough to consider that it must be either true or false, they take up a strange sort of middle opinion of its qualified truth. They conceive that there must be something in it, though by no ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... Irrational methods have often amazingly good results, and the Hull Grammar School provided its head-master's only son with the rudiments of learning, thus enabling him to become in after years what John Milton himself, the author of that terrible Treatise on Education ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... meekness. Now this is of two kinds. The one has a beautiful splendor, and there is nothing back of it. This we practice toward our friends and those who do us good and give us pleasure with goods, honor and favor, or who do not offend us with words nor with deeds. Such meekness irrational animals have, lions and snakes, Jews, Turks, knaves, murderers, bad women. These are all content and gentle when men do what they want, or let them alone; and yet there are not a few who, deceived by such worthless meekness, cover over their anger and excuse it, saying: ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... made his legs move. He walked on through the shrouds of Death until he felt a taut singing in his nerves. An irrational fear sprang out in him, cascading down his spine, and Cully shuddered. Ahead there was something. Two motives: get there because it (they?) calls; get ...
— Cully • Jack Egan
... and Elsner, Chopin's teacher, seem to have been affected a little by this irrational way of looking at music. Schumann, in a complimentary notice of Chopin's nocturnes, expresses his regrets that the composer should confine himself so strictly to the pianoforte, whereas he might have influenced ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... really discovered no such differing principles, and which possibly may not exist at all. Nor will we think so meanly of the taste, the good feeling, and the good sense of these men, as to believe that they think themselves at all flattered by any admiration founded on such an irrational contempt. They well know that Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, have been admired, together with Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin, and they do not themselves desire to be put upon a separate ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... of assault was not the living landlord, but the unburied past. It had little to do with socialism, or with high rents, bad times, and rapacious proprietors. Apart from all this was the hope of release from irrational and indefensible laws, such as that by which a patrician's land paid three francs where the plebeian's paid fourteen, because one was noble and the other was not, and it was an elementary deduction from the motives ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... and been told that she was doing this remarkable thing for a woman she had never seen before that day, named Mary O'Shaughnessy, and also for a certain red-haired person of whom it had never heard, it would have considered Jane quite irrational. But it is entirely probable that Jane became really rational that night for the first time in her ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... than this. The other branch of traditional material, namely that relating to custom, belief, and rite, rests upon a solid basis of historic fact; customs which are strange and irrational to this age are not in consequence to be considered the mere worthless following of practices which owe their origin to accident or freak; beliefs which do not belong to the established religion are not in consequence to be considered as mere superstition; rites ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... be an object in everything that even an irrational man says or does," Bell replied. "I have achieved some marvellous results by following up a single sentence uttered by a patient. Besides, on the evening in question you were particularly told to approach the ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... was granted by the statute of the Twelve Tables in cases of mischief done through wantonness, passion, or ferocity, by irrational animals; it being by an enactment of that statute provided, that if the owner of such an animal is ready to surrender it as compensation for the damage, he shall thereby be released from all liability. Examples of the application of this enactment may be found ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... should try to bar his flight, he hurries from the pursuit which he knew that the Edomite's malignant tongue would soon bring after him. The tragical end of the unsuspecting priest's kindness brings out the furious irrational suspicion and cruelty of Saul. He rages at his servants as leagued with David in words which have a most dreary sound of utter loneliness sighing through all their fierce folly: "All of you have conspired against me; there is none of ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... the more irrational kinds of animals among each other," said Alice, "for their whole life is well nigh a warfare; but the dog leaves his own race to attach himself to ours; forsakes, for his master, the company, food, and pleasure of his own kind; ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... the stray stall of a man selling chestnuts; and right away at the other end of the curve, Angus could see a dim blue policeman walking slowly. These were the only human shapes in that high suburban solitude; but he had an irrational sense that they expressed the speechless poetry of London. He felt as if they were figures ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... know, I suppose, whether I am speaking in jest or earnest. In the most solemn earnest, I assure you; though such is the strange course of our popular life that all the irrational arts of destruction are at once felt to be earnest; while any plan for those of instruction on a grand scale, sounds like a dream, or jest. Still, I do not absolutely propose to decorate our public buildings with sculpture wholly of this character; though ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... those catenated with pleasurable sensation, as the powers of digestion, continue to strengthen their habits without interruption. Thus though man in his sleeping state is a much less perfect animal, than in his waking hours; and though he consumes more than one third of his life in this his irrational situation; yet is the wisdom of the Author of nature manifest even in this seeming imperfection ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... disposition on the part of many farmers to regard fertilizers only as stimulants, due to the irrational use of certain materials, but a good commercial fertilizer is a carrier of some or all of the necessary elements that we find in stable manures. They may carry nitrogen, phosphoric acid, or potash,—any one ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... agent himself, so far as a sober reflection upon the moral character of the process, and a distinct perception of the dreadful issue of it, are concerned, is much of the time as destitute of self-knowledge as an irrational brute itself. For, were sinful men constantly self-examining, they would be constantly in torment. Men can be happy in sin, only so long as they can sin without thinking of it. The instant they begin to perceive ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... man ever commits a first crime of violent nature, such as murder, after thirty; if he begins before, he may go on up to any age. But youth is the season for commencing those wrong calculations which belong to irrational hope and the sense of physical power. You thus read in the newspapers that the persons who murder their sweethearts are generally from two to six and twenty; and persons who murder from other motives than ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had just appreciated as a special aspect of this irrational injustice of fate that these two men were alive and that Kurt was dead. All the crew of the Hohenzollern were shot or burnt or smashed or drowned, and these two lurking in the padded forward cabin ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... could create, but he could not weigh coolly and impartially what was created. His whole make forbade it. He was impatient, passionate, reckless, furious in his likes and dislikes. His fervid enthusiasm for one author dictated a splendid tribute to a friend; while an irrational prejudice against another called out a terrific diatribe against a foe. In either case, there might be "thoughts that breathe and words that burn"; still, there was but little of true criticism. The matchless papers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... whereby the community is in danger of losing the well-knit organization of a common life; second, the tendency to reduce variety in national civilization, to assimilate all to a common type and thus to discourage individuality, and produce a "remorseless mechanism—vast, irrational;" third, the evils arising from the fact that waves of emotion, the passion of the mob, tend in our day to sweep across ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... points in a parallel series, whence comes this correspondence? Why should knowledge illuminate the object. The doctrine of the Vijnana vadins, that it is knowledge alone that shows itself both as knowledge and as its object, is also irrational, for how can knowledge divide itself as subject and object in such a manner that knowledge as object should require the knowledge as subject to illuminate it? If this be the case we might again expect that knowledge ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... and certain forms of insanity*; but it has been found that there is much in the lives of ordinary men and women which bears a humiliating resemblance to the delusions of the insane. The connection of dreams, irrational beliefs and foolish actions with unconscious wishes has been brought to light, though with some exaggeration, by Freud and Jung and their followers. As regards the nature of these unconscious wishes, it seems to me—though as a layman I speak with diffidence—that ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... respects she was peculiar. There were things, too, that troubled the family and made them reserved and inclined to be oversensitive. Not only were they very poor, but there had been insanity on the mother's side, and Charles, himself, had at one time been in brief confinement for irrational actions. Mary, too, had occasionally shown signs of madness, but no one anticipated the dreadful event which took ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... been sounded, no bugle save that which sounds an alarm may be blown until the hour of reveille. The soldiers under the hill had been trumpeted to their last sleep; in a few hours I should hear the morning call: why should they never hear it again? Suddenly my irrational complaint was silenced as certain words of Saint Paul to the Corinthians reverberated in my mind. After all, it was well; one night was but a little longer than the other; and, those words being true, my troopers should wake ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... Infernal Dragon at length insinuate into them, with a Poison of Witchcraft that can't be cured. Has there not also been a world of discontent in our Borders? 'Tis no wonder, that the fiery Serpents are so Stinging of us; We have been a most Murmuring Generation. It is not Irrational, to ascribe the late Stupendious growth of Witches among us, partly to the bitter discontents, which Affliction and Poverty has fill'd us with: it is inconceivable, what advantage the Devil gains over men, by discontent. ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... an element dialectically required, must be pinned in and kept and consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system of truth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say anything of the sort.[69] Evil, it says, is emphatically irrational, and NOT to be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final system of truth. It is a pure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality, a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... cousin rather sternly. Her frivolous manner jarred upon him, and he forgot in his irrational displeasure that Miss Audley had known nothing of the terrible drama which had been so long enacting under ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... of course, this mutual antagonism was racial, and therefore natural; and the irrational violence of prejudice and malignity developed at a later day was inevitable with the ever-increasing conflict of interests. No foreigner really capable of estimating the conditions could have seriously ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... destitute, most wildly enthusiastic, and most inclined to destructiveness and to license. But also, as this band tumultuously carries out its violent action, each individual the most brutal, the most irrational, and most corrupt, descends lower than himself, even to the darkness, the madness, and the savagery of the dregs of society. In fact, a man who in the interchange of blows, would resist the excitement of murder, and not use his strength like a savage, must be familiar with arms. He must be accustomed ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... perfection. It is well and excellent not to go to the Bishop's house nor to the palace, but to stay peaceably at home. For if other people get excited, we are weak, and often we find our own soul excited, and doing unjust and irrational things, one to show that he knows more than another, and one from appetite for money. Yes, it is better to keep ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... leaders had secretly plotted, like Aaron Burr, and thus misled their followers. The impulse to inflict death or imprisonment or confiscation on anybody was infrequent or short-lived; the desire for such punishment lingered only in an irrational wish for vengeance on Jefferson Davis. But, if the leading class in the society and public life of the South were morally responsible for a great treason and rebellion, it might seem not only just but wise to exclude them from ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Leader of ages that are yet to be,—ages whose nobler advancements, whose rational and scientific advancements to the dignity and perfection of the human form, it was given to him and to his company to plan and initiate,—he declines to be held any longer responsible for the blind, demoniacal, irrational spirit, that would seize on his great instrument of science, and wrest it from its nobler object and intent, and debase it into the mere tool of the senses; the tool of a materialism more base and sordid than any that the world ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... sense and the most winning simplicity, could not but engage the attention of a swain so versed in the science of the fair as Roderic. From that distinguished moment, though he still felt uneasiness, it was no longer vacuity, it was no longer an uneasiness irrational and unaccountable. He had now an object to pursue. He was not now subjected to the fatigue of forming wishes for the sake of having them instantly gratified. When he reflected upon the present object of his desires, new obstacles continually started in his mind. Unused to encounter difficulty, ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... degree may be called the entrance of the Lord to the angel or man, and His veriest dwelling-place in them. It is by virtue of this inmost or highest that a man is a man, and is distinguished from irrational animals, for these do not have it. From this it is that man, unlike the animals, is capable, in respect to all his interiors which pertain to his mind and disposition, of being raised up by the Lord to Himself, of believing in the Lord, of being moved by love to the Lord, and thereby beholding Him, ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... their lifeless bodies, or migrating through various human or brute shapes, but that an unembodied life in God is reserved for the virtuous philosopher; that valour is nothing but knowledge, and virtue a knowledge of good; that the soul, on entering the body, is irrational or in a trance, and that the god, the star who formed its created part, influences its career, and hence its fortunes may be predicted by astrological computations; that there are future rewards and punishments, a residence being appointed for the righteous in his kindred star; for those whose ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... imposed the duties in question was to be construed according to the spirit, the word life must be understood to mean reign, and that therefore the term for which the grant had been made had expired. This was surely the sound opinion: for it was plainly irrational to treat the interest of James in this grant as at once a thing annexed to his person and a thing annexed to his office; to say in one breath that the merchants of London and Bristol must pay money because he was naturally ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... champion against her chosen husband. Besides, you have seen them only once. The young lady has become your sister's friend; and I wonder that your sister, even on her behalf, has not checked you in this irrational ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... with indignation upon the profaneness of the duel, having its rise in this irrational point of honor. Are you aware that you indulge the same sentiment on a gigantic scale, when you recognize this very point of honor as a proper apology for war? We have already seen that justice is in no respect promoted by war. ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... purpose answered in the Song proper is that of joining nature with ourselves, by addressing it in a series of invitations to magnify Him who is its God and ours alike, thus interpreting the feelings which nature maybe supposed to entertain. It is recognised that the irrational as well as the rational have their rightful spheres of action; and a wholesome sympathy is manifested with those portions of nature—which we think are lower than ourselves. With this may be compared Adam and ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them, with many other wild, impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, "that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational, which some philosophers ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... kind of miniature God the Avenger, to whom the nursery-maid and the overtaxed parent are so apt to appeal. You stab your children with such a God and he poisons all their lives. For many of us the word "God" first came into our lives to denote a wanton, irrational restraint, as Bogey, as the All-Seeing and quite ungenerous Eye. God Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to leave Fear to mind her charges and enforce her disciplines, while she goes off upon her own aims. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... by the appearance of the Saviour, who shall come to have mercy upon the miserable, and to seek that which was lost. Isaiah has, further, first taught that, by the redemption, the consequences of the Fall would disappear in the irrational creation also, and that it should return to paradisaic innocence, chap. xi. 6-9. He has first announced to the people of God the glorious truth, that death, as it had not existed in the beginning, should, at the end also, be ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... based. Such a knowledge the auditor ought certainly to have, but in presence of an exact drama he derives it from what he sees and not from remembrance of what he has read. The piece is, perhaps, somewhat irrational in making Aram a resident, under his own name, of the actual neighbourhood of his crime. It lowers the assumed nobility of his character, furthermore, by making this remorseful and constantly apprehensive murderer willing to yoke a sweet, innocent, and idolised woman ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... reputation alive. What this literary design was, we do not know with certainty. It is believed to have been a history of England, of which, as I have said, a fragment remains. Whatever the work may have been, it was an offence to Hamilton. With an irrational stubbornness, that may well astound us when we think of the noble genius that he thus wished to confine to paltry personal duties, he persisted that Burke should bind himself to his service for life, and to the exclusion of other interests. "To circumscribe my hopes," cried ...
— Burke • John Morley
... and resolves, he fights or he flies, and then wakes to confused memory of just what the author thinks fit to call to his recollection. It is very interesting and edifying, truly, to watch the movements of an irrational puppet! I do beg of you, when you take up the functions of the novelist, not to distribute this species of intoxication amongst your dramatis personae, more largely than is absolutely necessary. Keep them in a rational ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... indignant resolve to reject its venal decorations and other humbug, and to be the possessor of genuine though undemanded qualifications. He went to study in Paris with the determination that when he provincial home again he would settle in some provincial town as a general practitioner, and resist the irrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge in the interest of his own scientific pursuits, as well as of the general advance: he would keep away from the range of London intrigues, jealousies, and social truckling, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... with a consuming verbosity in those foreign tongues, which, had his companions understood a single word of that which he uttered, would have earned for him a beating that would have landed him within an inch of his life. However, they attributed all that he said to the irrational gibbering of ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... the excellence of Reason, and the progressive system of learning that was to educate human beings into a contempt for the Supernatural and Spiritual, and yet almost in the same breath you tell me you cannot rely on the evidence of your own senses! Was there ever anything more utterly incoherent and irrational!" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... society the most destructive and baneful gift which refinement and culture may bestow. Campe proposes to limit the use of the word "Empfindsamkeit" to the justly proportioned manifestation of this susceptibility; the irrational, exaggerated development he would designate "berspannte Empfindsamkeit." "Empfindelei," he says, "ist Empfindsamkeit, die sich auf eine kleinliche alberne, vernunftlose und lcherliche Weise, also da ussert, wo sie nicht hingehrte." ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... conduct, as well as her own heart, was before her in the same few minutes. She saw it all with a clearness which had never blessed her before. How improperly had she been acting by Harriet! How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling had been her conduct! What blindness, what madness, had led her on! It struck her with dreadful force, and she was ready to give it every bad name in the world. Some portion of respect for herself, however, in spite of all these ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen |
