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More "Absurd" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this letter of Orion's. Did you ever see the grotesquely absurd and the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined together? Mrs. Clemens said "Raise his monthly pension." So I wrote to Perkins to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... shade. What is a garden for? The pleasure of man. I should take much more pleasure in a shady garden. Am I to be sacrificed, broiled, roasted, for the sake of the increased vigor of a few vegetables? The thing is perfectly absurd. If I were rich, I think I would have my garden covered with an awning, so that it would be comfortable to work in it. It might roll up and be removable, as the great awning of the Roman Coliseum was, —not like the Boston one, which ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in dispelling some of the absurd ideas which are now current about Russia, I shall be content. If I win a little comprehension and kindly sympathy for them, I ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... now readily supported by everybody. But that their realization requires compulsion, and compulsion in the form of a dictatorship, is ordinarily not comprehended. And yet, it would be the greatest stupidity and the most absurd opportunism to suppose that the transition from capitalism to Socialism is possible without compulsion and dictatorship. The Marxian theory has long ago criticized beyond misunderstanding this petty bourgeois-democratic ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... in our hearts the rougher merits of the strong arm and the dextrous hand. Every month sees a larger proportion of officers coming from among those whose habits have been the reverse of luxury. It is hard to say which would be more mischievous and absurd: for these to spend their extra pay and rations in an effort to copy the traditional style of an English Guardsman, or to keep on in their old way of life, and pocket large savings that are supposed to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... What an absurd little goose you must be to ask such a thing! Servants are kept for ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... bread,—that cities and countries would honor in him, not Caesar, the lord of the earth, but a poet whose like the world had not produced before. And so he struggled, raged, played, sang, changed his plan, changed his quotations, changed his life and the world into a dream absurd, fantastic, dreadful, into an uproarious hunt composed of unnatural expressions, bad verses, groans, tears, and blood; but meanwhile the cloud in the west was increasing and thickening every day. The measure was exceeded; the insane ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... was a strong man. By his work at the forge he had strengthened his muscles till they were like iron. So was Kit a strong boy, but it would be absurd to represent him as a match for ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.
... of you, Jack," my father cried petulantly. "There is nothing practical about you. Instead of confining your attention to the working out of my noble scheme, you begin raising all sorts of absurd objections. It is a mere matter of detail how our descendants live, so long as they stick to the Djarmas. Now, I want you to go up to the bothy of Fergus McDonald and see about the thatch, and Willie Fullerton has written to say that his milk-cow ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... secretary of an embassy, whom I knew some years after, told me that a paid informer, with two other witnesses, also, doubtless, in the pay of this grand tribunal, had declared that I was guilty of only believing in the devil, as if this absurd belief, if it were possible, did not necessarily connote a belief in God! These three honest fellows testified with an oath that when I lost money at play, on which occasion all the faithful are wont to blaspheme, I was never heard ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... on board, this other Sanchez. I leaned over the edge of my bunk, and looked down on Haley, half resolved to ask if he had ever noticed this lieutenant, but the man was already sound asleep. The suspicion which had crept into my mind was so absurd, so unspeakably silly and impossible, that I laughed at myself, and dismissed the crazy thought. What, that fellow Black Sanchez! Bah, no! He had been at sea, of course; there was no denying that fact, for he knew ships, and spoke the lingo ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... added that a twisted interpretation of the Scriptures was as bad as adding to or taking from them, and that no one doubted that Paul was warning the elders against polygamy. Then I went a bit further, for by this time the absurd character of the questions was ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... angler aboard the steamer had told him about the sportsmanlike rules that obtain at Avalon, it seemed absurd to Colin for any one to try and catch so heavy a fish as the tuna seemed to be, with a rod and line that would be thought ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... you have observed was a pet expression with Rudolph, whenever he wished to intimate that he considered your remarks to be simply absurd. ...
— Tattine • Ruth Ogden
... me they have seen them doing it; and in a natural history book of my childhood there is a picture of a beaver with the end of a three-foot stick in his mouth, sucking the air out. Just as if the beavers didn't know better, even if the absurd thing were possible! The simplest way is to cut the wood early and leave it in the water a while, when it sinks of itself; for green birch and poplar are almost as heavy as water. They soon get waterlogged and go to the bottom. It is almost impossible for lumbermen to drive spool wood ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... great exactness the fineness of the powdered ore customary in practice. They show that having passed through such a sieve is no proof of sufficient powdering, not that all ores powdered and so sifted are unfit for assaying. This last would be an absurd and illogical conclusion. ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... Absurd as appeared the pretensions of the cibolero in regard to Catalina, Roblado had learned enough of late to make him jealous—ay, even to give him real uneasiness. She was a strange creature, Catalina de Cruces—one who had shown proofs of a rare spirit—one not to be bought and sold ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... so completely satisfactory, and so readily and candidly forthcoming, left no room for further doubt that Don Diego should have been false to his parole. And when presently Don Diego had withdrawn again, Captain Blood confessed to Pitt that it was absurd to have suspected him. Whatever his antecedents, he had proved his quality when he announced himself ready to die sooner than enter into any undertaking that could hurt his honour or ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... and agnostic days it may sound a little strange, and perhaps to some seem quite absurd, that the authorities of Harvard in 1791 felt obliged publicly to deny that Gibbon's History was used as a text-book at the University. But with the exception perhaps of Tom Paine, no one in this country had then ventured to assail the literal interpretation of the ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... And he gave a little sympathetic sigh. "To reconcile Northampton and Rome is rather a problem. Mary had better come out here. Even at the worst I have no intention of giving up Rome within six or eight years, and an engagement of that duration would be rather absurd." ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... line of Inca princes, whose exploits, and names even, by no means coincide with Garcilasso's catalogue; a circumstance, however, far from establishing their inaccuracy. But one will have little doubt of the writer's title to this reproach, that reads the absurd legends told in the grave tone of reliance by Montesinos, who shared largely in the credulity and the love of the marvellous which belong to an ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... that, "be that as it might, it was absurd to suppose that I should have given up my position in Chili for anything less in Brazil, and that all that had been offered by the Consul, or desired by me, was simply an equivalent to my Chilian command, with adequate reimbursement of ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... precentor was sure that the dean had been taken in by a clever impostor, which would not have been the case, he asserted, if the matter had been referred to him as it ought to have been. But Morningquest declared that there was no imposition about that voice, and as to antecedents, why, it was absurd to be too particular when everything else ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... better to do in these circumstances than to pour out abuse, occasionally varied by ridicule, on the Unionist leaders, of which Sir Edward Carson came in for the most generous portion. He was by turns everything that was bad, dangerous, and absurd, from Mephistopheles to a madman. "F.C.G." summarised the Balmoral meeting pictorially in a Westminster Gazette cartoon as a costermonger's donkey-cart in which Carson, Londonderry, and Bonar Law, refreshed by "Orangeade," took "an Easter ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... Saul in that house in Damascus and said, 'Receive the Holy Ghost.' An apostle stood by passive and wondering when the Holy Ghost fell on Cornelius and his comrades. In reality apostolic succession is absurd, because there is nothing to succeed to, except what cannot be transmitted, personal knowledge of the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To establish that fact as indubitable history is to lay the foundation of the Christian ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... doctor. "Look out for his knife. Bah! how absurd!" he added the next moment, calming down from ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... many of you indulge in so much smaller talk with men than with women? Because it is expected of you? Only by a few, and they make themselves very absurd by always trying to say nonsensical things to you. Men of this sort appear to have an impression that you are still children amused with a Jack-in-the-box which springs up in a very conceited hobgoblin way. Everybody likes a joke, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... gods—Per hostias dis supplicante. Supplicating or worshiping the gods with sacrifices, and trying to learn their intentions as to the future by inspection of the entrails. "Marius was either a sincere believer in the absurd superstitions and dreams of the soothsayers, or pretended to be so, from a knowledge of the nature of mankind, who are eager to listen to wonders, and are ore willing to be deceived than to be taught." Burnouf. See Plutarch, Life of Marius. He ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... None could think worse of the homes than he did. He spoke in a cross tone; we are all apt to do so, when vexed with ourselves. "What possesses Deerham to show itself so absurd just now? Ghosts! They only affect fear, it ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... it sound absurd? And they all voted for you—every one of them, with the exception ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... subject of free commerce between nations. That any industry, no matter how young might be the nation practicing it, or how peculiar the difficulties of its prosecution, should ever be the subject of home protection, he stamped as a fallacy too absurd to be argued. The journals venturing such an opinion were childish drivelers, putting forth views long since exploded before the whole world. He was still loud in this opinion when his little book of epigrams, The Raven of Zurich and Other ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... thee, O free and independent franchiser; but does not this stupid pewter pot oppress thee? No son of Adam can bid thee come or go, but this absurd pot of heavy-wet can and does, Thou art the thrall, not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetites, and this accursed dish of liquor. And thou pratest of thy 'liberty,' ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... "An absurd story, altogether!" says Olga, throwing up her head, a smile lightening her eyes as they meet Kelly's. At her tone, which is more amused than annoyed, Ronayne lets his hand fall into the water close to hers, and doubtless ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... hesitated. Her first impulse was to scornfully say no, but she quickly realized that would be undignified and absurd; so she said yes, coldly, and let him place his arm about her. The band was playing a particularly sensuous valse, which drove all young people mad that year, and—if the Count had danced well—this man's movements were heaven. Tamara did not speak a word. She ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... third branch of our inquiry, and have to ask whether there be any weekly rhythm of the sexual activity. A priori it might be answered that to expect any such weekly rhythm were absurd, seeing that our week—unlike the lunar month of the year—is a purely artificial and conventional period; while, on the other hand, it might be retorted that the existence of an induced weekly periodicity is quite conceivable, such periodicity being induced by the habitual difference ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... or eighteen, our "young ladies" are sorry specimens of feminality; and palpitators, cosmetics and all the modern paraphernalia are required to make them appear fresh and blooming. Man is equally at fault. A devotee to all the absurd devices of fashion, he practically asserts that "dress makes the man." But physical deformities are of far less importance ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... indignantly that it was my wont to win success, not by routine, but by ability. I added that I would abandon the test altogether unless they would agree not to put off their attendance at my lecture. In truth at this first lecture of mine only a few were present, for it seemed quite absurd to all of them that I, hitherto so inexperienced in discussing the Scriptures, should attempt the thing so hastily. However, this lecture gave such satisfaction to all those who heard it that they spread its praises abroad with notable enthusiasm, and ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... is now almost undone. The absurd liberalism of the day has given every corner of London a theatre, and has degraded the character of the stage in all. By scattering the ability which still exists, it has stripped the great theatres of the very means of representing dramatic excellence; while, by adopting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... more resolutely to public business, he remarked it as an unreasonable and absurd thing that artificers, using vessels and instruments inanimate, should know the name, place, and use of every one of them, and yet the statesman, whose instruments for carrying out public measures ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... marriage, as is the fate of many a beau, and was struck out of the list of visitors. Algernon generally occupied the baronet's disused town-house, a wretched being, dividing his time between horse and card exercise: possessed, it was said, of the absurd notion that a man who has lost his balance by losing his leg may regain it by sticking to the bottle. At least, whenever he and his brother Hippias got together, they never failed to try whether one leg, or two, stood the bottle best. Much of a puritan as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... beauty of its appearance, upon the efficiency of the instrument? The idea that the varnish of a Violin has some influence upon its tone has often been ridiculed, and we can quite understand that it must appear absurd to those who have not viewed the question in all its bearings. Much misconception has arisen from pushing this theory about the varnish either too far or not far enough. What seems sometimes to be implied by enthusiasts is, that the form of ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... He looked so absurd, with his small, angry face, with his outstretched finger, that even the soldier of the convoy, breaking the rule, said to him in an undertone as he led him ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... occurred, as is well known, on June 10, 1903, when, as the result of a military conspiracy, King Alexander, the last of the Obrenovi['c] dynasty, his wife, and her male relatives were murdered. This crime was purely political, and it is absurd to gloss it over or to explain it merely as the result of the family feud between the two dynasties. That came to an end in 1868, when the murder of Kara-George in 1817 by the agency of Milo[)s] Obrenovi['c] was avenged by the lunatic assassination ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... half-dozens, or, at the best, scores. Even of those it provided, but a small proportion was really forced to serve. Mr. Oppenheim tells us of an Act of Parliament (17 Charles I) legalising forcible impressment, which seems to have been passed to satisfy the sailors. If anyone should think this absurd, he may be referred to the remarkable expression of opinion by some of the older seamen of Sunderland and Shields when the Russian war broke out in 1854. The married sailors, they said, naturally waited ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... conviction; the average Philistine, if pressed for the reasons of his dislike, would either become inarticulate, ejaculating "faugh" and "pah" like an old-fashioned Scots Magazine, or else he would give some imaginary and absurd reason, alleging that all "littery men" were poor, that composers never cut their hair, that painters were rarely public-school men, that sculptors couldn't ride straight to hounds to save their lives, but clearly these imbecilities were mere afterthoughts; the average ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... us suppose the case of a pair of tongs that falls upon a man's foot, causing a cruel hurt. Will you claim that the tongs are punishable for that? The question is answered; I see by your faces that you would call such a claim absurd. Now, why is it absurd? It is absurd because, there being no reasoning faculty—that is to say, no faculty of personal command—in a pair of togs, personal responsibility for the acts of the tongs is wholly absent from the tongs; and, therefore, responsibility being absent, punishment cannot ensue. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wrong, or making an outcry against her as if she was—for really, except in the clumsy way of doing it, I can see nothing to blame in her refusal. She is treated as the aggressor. Now all she has done, or could do, was in her own defence, and nothing in the world can be more absurd than pretending that she is the cause of the war. If she beat the allies ever so much, she does not gain one inch of territory, while their real object is to strip her. As for L. N. considering himself aggrieved by her breaking off the negotiation and beginning to defend herself, it can only ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... known anything so absurd." Two bright red spots appeared in her cheeks. "Your attitude is most extraordinary. However, I shall go to the city this morning, Mr. Smart. Pray give me the credit of having ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... thought that, all this time, he was perhaps the dupe of boyish fantasies, was laid to-day. Sometimes he had felt, Why does no one sympathise with my views; why, though they treat them with conventional respect, is it clear that all I have addressed hold them to be absurd? My parents are pious and instructed; they are predisposed to view everything I say, or do, or think, with an even excessive favour. They think me moonstruck. Lord Eskdale is a perfect man of the world; proverbially shrewd, and celebrated for his judgment; he looks upon me as a raw boy, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... good woman of the house took them in and kept them has been briefly mentioned. At first nobody thought they would live a day, such little absurd attempts at humanity did they seem. But the young doctor came and the old doctor came, and the infants were laid in cotton-wool, and the room heated up to keep them warm, and baby-teaspoonfuls of milk given ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in fact conceive it in as much as we do conceive Unity, Being, Truth. The conception is so clear that its inexplicability (admitted) is of no account. Further, since the unity of our thought implies the absolute, and since the existence of things is known only to thought, it appears absurd that the absolute itself should be regarded as non-existent. The Absolute is substance in itself, the ultimate basis and matter of existence. All things are merely manifestations of it, exist in virtue of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... called to the task by some of the most influential organs of public opinion in France;"—she would not certainly affirm what she knew to be false, and the idea that she did receive a bona fide request of the above purport from such individuals, is too absurd to command belief for a moment. Would any one in his senses, who is "desirous of being represented as he is," put in requisition the pencil of an artist by which he would be sure ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... that is in the grave, where she has thrust herself.... But I have nothing to do with that.... I am not to blame! It would even be absurd to think that I am to blame."—Again it flashed into Aratoff's mind that even had she had "anything of that sort" about her, his conduct during the interview would indubitably have disenchanted her. That was ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... very absurd verses which had been publickly recited to an audience for money[711]. JOHNSON. 'I can match this nonsense. There was a poem called Eugenio, which came out some years ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... the ball it has always been toward the goal. Godwin believed that it was well to scan the faults of our fellows closely, in order to see, forsooth, whether they are not their virtues. The belief that mankind should by nature tend to evil, he considered absurd and unscientific, for the strongest instinct in all creation is self-preservation; and that certain men should love darkness rather than light was mainly because governments and religions have warped man's nature through oppression and coercion ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... at Glasgow, and a truly damnable jail, exhibiting the separate system in a most absurd and hideous form. Governor practical and intelligent; very anxious for the associated silent system; and much comforted by ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... where that leaves the Federation! When imitation is carried to the point of identity ..." Federation Councilman Mavig shook his head once more, concluded, "It is utterly absurd, in direct contradiction to everything we have understood to date! You've regarded yourselves as human beings, and believed that your place was among us. And we can ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... management. Of la belle Fanny, all I learned was, that she was a professional actress of very considerable talent, and extremely pretty; that Curzon had fallen desperately in love with her the only night she had appeared on the boards there, and that to avoid his absurd persecution of her, she had determined not to come into town until the morning of the rehearsal, she being at that time on a visit to the house of a country gentleman in the neighbourhood. Here was a new difficulty I had to contend with—to go through my part alone was out of the question to making ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... proved by history, written and unwritten? Is it not proved by the ghastly secrets of individual introspection that men never reveal or admit to others; secrets guarded by a system of conventions so impenetrable and vast that to attempt to personalize it in the sneaking figure of Hypocrisy would be as absurd as to try to enlarge the significance of an ivory chessman by setting it up on a lady's jewel box and naming it Moloch. All men feel how much of them is brute and how much is reason; but it is the unimpartable secret of human society whose betrayal has been rendered impossible by ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... a day when Catholicism is no longer considered by intelligent men to be too evidently absurd to be argued with. Definite reasons are given by those who stand outside our borders for the attitude they maintain; definite accusations are made which must either ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... imitating the hoarse voice of a young cock; which made Oscar's deliverance all the more absurd, because he had just reached the age when the beard sprouts and the voice breaks. "'What a chit for ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... Grecian port, was intrusted to the joint command of Alcibiades, Nicias, and Lam'achus. The expedition captured the city of Cat'ana, which was made the headquarters of the armament; but here Alcibiades was summoned to Athens on the absurd charge of impiety and sacrilege, connected with the mutilation of the statues of the god Her'mes, that had taken place just before he left Athens. He was also charged with having profaned the Eleusinian mysteries by giving ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... Justice, by shewing the terrible Issue of their Contraries. Pieces of this Sort, conducted with Propriety, and carrying Application to ourselves, can scarcely be desireable; But as they are generally conducted, they amount only to giving us an absurd Representation of a Murther committed by some ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... explanation that is probably quite fanciful. Of course, the name has been held to prove the claim of St. Michael's Mount to be the Ictis of the ancients, but the idea that the natives would have carried their tin across to this incommodious little islet for the sake of selling seems absurd, when we consider that they could have sold it much better on the mainland. The description by Diodorus Siculus, often quoted, has a tempting look, but it cannot persuade us that the Mount was Ictis. He says: "They that ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... such absurd things, Genevieve. Why, Charlie Brown—you know he calls us the 'Happy Texagons' now—well, he told me that Tilly'd been bragging so terribly about Texas, and all the fine things there were there, that he asked her this morning real soberly—you know how Charlie ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... to demonetize gold, because the civilized world recognizes it as an invariable standard by which all commodities are measured in value. The supposition is absurd. It would be very much ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... but in the next instant a wave of resentment went through her as if their vaunting were his; as if her pride were his own confessed, colossal vanity; as if the price of his uplift were her belittlement. Never mind, he should pay! Absurd, absurd; but she was harrowingly tired, lonely, idle, grief-burdened, and desolate, and absurdity itself was relief. He should pay, let his paying cost her double. Somehow, in some feminine, minute, pinhole way, she would deflate him, wing ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... startling contrast between the precision of the means of research and the huge variations in the results, which were shown by mathematical law to be absurd, experimental psychology carried on extensive studies, under the illusion that it rested upon a ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... to attempt a description of the motley assemblage. Pick out all the strangest, most ragged, most uncouth figures you ever saw in old pictures, from childhood up to the present day; select from every theatrical representation within the range of your experience the most monstrous and absurd caricatures upon humanity; bring to your aid all the masquerades and burlesque fancy-balls you ever visited, tumble them together in the great bag of your imagination, and pour them out over a vague wilderness of open spaces, dirty streets, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... often find it hard work to rescue an insane prisoner from the clutches of the law. On the other hand, it may be admitted that, as regards some physicians at least, a juster view is sometimes as necessary as it is on the part of the lawyers. When absurd reasons are given in the witness-box for a prisoner's insanity—reasons which would equally establish the madness of many persons in society whom no one regards as insane—it is not surprising that the judges are cautious ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... Hester, "very much like the men, and angels too, in that old edition of the Pilgrim papa thinks so much of. I couldn't for my part, absurd as they were, help feeling a certain pathos in the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Marechal de La Mothe, M. de Brissac, President Bellievre, and myself met that night at M. de Bouillon's house, where a motion was made for the generals of the army to send a deputation likewise to the place of conference; but it was quashed, and indeed nothing would have been more absurd than such a proceeding when we were upon the point of concluding a treaty with Spain; and, considering that we told the envoy that we should never have consented to hold any conference with the Court were we not assured that it was in our power to break it off at pleasure by means ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... "What an absurd report!" said Mrs. Clifford, quite annoyed. "I hope the children are not to be suspected every time their Aunt ...
— Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's • Sophie May
... exclaimed, "how absurd of me not to have thought of it before! But, you see, Mr. Colston always speaks of you by your first name. You ought to hear how he ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... men. He admitted that the papers might be rubbish, and she conceded that nothing was more probable; yet when he offered to settle the point off-hand she caught him by the wrist, acknowledging that, absurd as it was, she was nervous. Finally she put the whole thing on the ground of his just doing her a favour. She asked him to retain the papers, to be silent about them, simply because it would please her. That would ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... breathed that indefinable something which she had just struggled to define: something diametrically different from the ostentatious display of the woman by her side. Theoretically, Cornelia was thankful to escape observation; in reality she felt an absurd pang of loneliness and disappointment, as the carriage bore her out ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the Doctor, "for McClellan's right to cross the Chickahominy would be absurd, for the reason that a Confederate force, supposed to be from Jackson's army, has nearly reached Hanover Court-House—here—in the rear of your right, if you advance; besides, to cross the Chickahominy ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... and did not even shake my head. The circumstances of the encounter were described by Mariano with such graphic power and minuteness that it was impossible not to believe his story. Yet some things in it afterwards struck me as somewhat absurd; that straw hat, for instance, and it also seemed strange that a person of Mula's disposition should have been so much improved in temper by his sojourn in ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... the easy freedom, not to say gusto, with which he depicts, those who succumb to similar temptation. Only by supposing the workings of some subtle influence of this kind is it possible to explain, even in so capricious a humour as Johnson's, the famous and absurd application of the term "barren rascal" to a writer who, dying almost young, after having for many years lived a life of pleasure, and then for four or five one of laborious official duty, has left work anything but small in actual bulk, and fertile ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... sceptical of the seriousness of the situation. She believed in her heart that after a few days of restraint they would resume their former life, and that Wilbur, on reflection, would appreciate that he had been absurd. ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... went; matches flared, illuminating for a second faces without the ghost of an expression and the flat glaze of white shirt-fronts; the hum of many conversations animated with the ardour of feasting sounded to me absurd and infinitely remote. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... not do it at once? Nothing else will make protestations of fairness appear at all genuine. Nothing else will remove the stigma of attempting to drag the hospitals into a support of this crusade against women. * * * How absurd the solemn declaration, "it cannot be assumed by any right-minded person that male patients should be subjected to inspection before a class of females, although this inspection may, without impropriety, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... have been supposed that one or other of these conflicting judgments must have been palpably absurd, that nothing short of gross prejudice or wilful blindness, on one side or the other, could reconcile such contradictory conceptions of a single human being. But it was not so; 'the elements' were 'so mixed' in Mr. Gladstone that his bitterest ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... interested in securing regulation in New York and was an expert on the proposition, to meet with us in that city. We all met as planned. I stated that I desired to take the bill up with them, section by section, paragraph by paragraph, and if anything absurd or impracticable was found, or anything that could not be carried out, attention should be called to it, and we would discuss it and amend it if necessary. We went ahead on this line and were arguing over some proposition, when Mr. Fink got up and remarked: "Let it go; the whole thing is absurd ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... it? I know I was brushing My hair when the notion occurred: I know that I felt myself blushing As I thought, "How supremely absurd! "How they'll hammer on floor and on table As its drollery dawns on them—how They will quote it"—I wish I were able To quote it ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... not so much an imputation on chastity, as a charge of conceited foolishness. An English woman who typifies the begueule may be spotless as snow; but she is presumed to have snow's other quality, and at the same time to be a thoroughly absurd and intolerable creature. Well, here is the point of difference. Fastidiousness of speech is not a direct outcome of Puritanism, as our literature sufficiently proves; it is a refinement of civilization following upon absorption into the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... fat country man with a linen duster and whiskers and baggy umbrella. Patsy Moriarty (Patrici really. Did you ever hear such a name? Mrs. Lippett couldn't have done better) who is tall and thin was Julia's wife in a absurd green bonnet over one ear. Waves of laughter followed them the whole length of the course. Julia played the part extremely well. I never dreamed that a Pendleton could display so much comedy spirit—begging Master Jervie' pardon; I don't consider him a true Pendleton though, any more ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... conflicting opinions about a certain thought, and try to prove the truth or falsity of this definite idea. Since a term—a word, phrase, or other combination of words not a complete sentence—suggests many ideas, but never stands for one particular idea, it is absurd as a subject to be argued. A debatable subject is always a proposition, a statement in which something is affirmed or denied. It would be impossible to uphold or attack the mere term, "government railroad ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... the first lieutenant. I told him what my orders were. This officer was, as I before observed, a man who had no friends, and was therefore entirely dependent on the captain for his promotion, and was afraid to act contrary to his lordship's orders, however absurd. I told him, that whatever might me the captain's orders, I would not ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... talent, the caprice of the public has certainly given me such a temporary superiority over men, of whom, in regard to poetical fancy and feeling, I scarcely thought myself worthy to loose the shoe-latch. On the other hand, it would be absurd affectation in me to deny, that I conceived myself to understand more perfectly than many of my contemporaries, the manner most likely to interest the great mass of mankind. Yet, even with this belief, I must truly and fairly say, that I always considered ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... ago I heard a living thinker of some eminence say that he considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually, he said, it was absurd; and practically, it was an offence, over which he stumbled. It would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they could have kept clear of superstition, and followed on upon the track of ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Elisabeth went on, "if one goes in for a distinguished husband, one must pay the price for the article. It is absurd to shoot big game, and then expect to carry it home in ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... hacienda my wanderings must have seemed absurd, for though I took my gun I never brought anything back. This day game was in abundance, but I did not heed it—only wandered on till I came to a rugged part of the forest far up the mountain-side, and seated ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... Mark Twain. The letters were signed "Snodgrass," and there are but two of them. The second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Roman Church, and devoted his life to teaching the truths which he had received. In both Germany and the Netherlands a class of fanatics had risen, advocating absurd and seditious doctrines, outraging order and decency, and proceeding to violence and insurrection. Menno saw the horrible results to which these movements would inevitably lead, and he strenuously opposed the erroneous ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... anathematize Arius and all who agree with him and share his absurd opinion; also Macedonius and those who, following him, are well styled foes of the Spirit.(334) We confess that our lady, St. Mary, is properly and truly the Theotokos, because she bore, after the flesh, one of the Holy Trinity, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... the world was a Tender Conscience. He protests against the weakness which is content with passing penal laws, but does not see them carried out for fear of wounding these trumpery tender consciences. "Most men's minds or consciences are weak, silly and ignorant things, acted by fond and absurd principles and imposed upon by their vices and their passions." (7.) "However, if the obligation of laws must yield to that of a tender conscience, how impregnably is every man that has a mind to disobey armed against all the commands of his superiors. No authority shall be able to govern him farther ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... too absurd" Oliver felt too much as if he were fighting for life against something invisible to be careful about his words. "I know we quarrelled last night—but it was all my fault, I didn't mean anything—I was going to call her up the first thing this morning ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... his relatives. But money became exceedingly scarce; the Marquis had actually beheld many of his peers reduced to the necessity of earning the despicable but indispensable article after many ludicrous fashions. And the duration of this absurd upsetting of law, order, privilege, and property began to assume unexpected and very ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... amanuensis and general literary assistant to an ex-judge upon so prosaic a task as the history of the Supreme Court of the State. To say that a rose-hued scarf, a laugh, and an alluring speaking voice explain it seems absurd, even when you add to these that which the young man saw during that moment of time when he looked into the face of their owner. Rather would I declare that it was the subtle atmosphere of that which in all his travels he had never really seen before—a home. At all events a new force of ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... use to break their fast." It is described in the Survey as being "under the said Frater, of the same length and breadth." The room could not have been of the "same length and breadth" as the great Parliament Chamber, for not only would such dimensions be absurd for an informal dining-room, but, as we are clearly told, the "Infirmary" was also under the Parliament Chamber, and was approximately one-third the size of the latter.[284] Accordingly I have interpreted the phrase, "of the same length and breadth," to mean that the Parlor was square. ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... most uncertain age appears, Because I never heard, nor could engage A person yet by prayers, or bribes, or tears, To name, define by speech, or write on page, The period meant precisely by that word,— Which surely is exceedingly absurd. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... but an equivocal compliment to a physiological position, that it must stand or fall with the corpuscular philosophy, as modified by the French theory of chemistry. Yet should it happen (and the event is not impossible, nor the supposition altogether absurd,) that more and more decisive facts should present themselves in confirmation of the metamorphosis of elements, the position that life consists in assimilation would either cease to be distinctive, or fall back into the former class as an identical proposition, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... shut herself up and speedily die of grief. He makes such vows as most men would make under such circumstances; he presses her hands ardently to his lips, bedews them with his tears, and moves the whole company to sympathy with his own agitation. The scene is absurd enough, or seems so to us dull people of phlegmatic habit. Yet Diderot, even for us, redeems it by the fine remark: "'Tis the effect of what is good and virtuous to leave a large assembly with only one thought and ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the private thoroughfare of the crown. The scene had been an animated one, and Mr. Ayrton had hoped to derive a good deal of pleasure from describing it to his daughter; but when he had listened to her, and watched her for a few minutes, he came to the conclusion that it would be absurd for him to make an effort to compete with her. What was his wretched little story of Parliamentary squalor compared with these psychological subtleties which had interested his daughter ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... an iron attempt at gravity which was not an unqualified success. Stillman stooped, shaded his eyes with his hand, and gazed down intently at each pair of feet as it passed. Fifty men tramped monotonously by—with no result. Sixty. Seventy. The thing was beginning to look absurd. The guest ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... its later developments it eventually came to deserve. Las Casas, who approved of it, was one of the most excellent of men. Our own Bishop Butler could give no decided opinion against negro slavery as it existed in his time. It is absurd to say that ordinary merchants and ship captains ought to have seen the infamy of a practice which Las Casas advised and Butler could not condemn. The Spanish and Portuguese Governments claimed, as I said, the control of the traffic. The Spanish settlers in the West Indies objected to a restriction ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... this new system is not confined to the depravation of language only; it extends to the sentiments and emotions, and leads to the debasement of all those feelings which poetry is designed to communicate. It is absurd to suppose, that an author should make use of the language of the vulgar, to express the sentiments of the refined. His professed object, in employing that language, is to bring his compositions nearer to the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... you been hiding? The king had some absurd story about your having been killed by a fabulous monster. Bah! don't tell me. I always said you would come back after a little ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... God by the necessity of a sufficient reason to account for the series of things. Each finite thing requires an antecedent or contingent cause. But the supposition of an endless sequence of contingent causes, or finite things, is absurd; the series must have had a beginning, and that beginning cannot have been a contingent cause or finite thing. "The final reason of things must be found in a necessary substance in which the detail of changes exists eminently, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... for twenty years, the absurd Duke, transformed into a mere Porcus by his Circe in that scandalous miraculous manner, has lived; and so he still lives. And his Serene Wife, equally obstinate, is living at Stuttgard, happily out of his sight now. One Son, a weakly man, who had one ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... tradition that history seemed to have innumerable records of it in the hearts and memories of each generation. But as there appears no document or parchment of such criteria as to satisfy all inquiries, historical skepticism has ventured upon the absurd length of calling in question the fact of the treaty. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, with commendable zeal, has bestowed much labor upon the questions connected with the treaty, and the results which have been attained can scarcely fail to satisfy a candid inquirer. ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... small number of municipal officers. It claimed to elect the deputies to the States-general according to the ancient usages. Mirabeau's common sense, as well as his great and puissant genius, revolted against the absurd theories of the privileged: he overwhelmed them with his terrible eloquence, whilst adjuring them to renounce their abuseful and obsolete rights; he scared them by his forceful and striking hideousness. "Generous friends ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the days prior to the American Revolution, occupied a similar position that the monopolists, and wealthy do in politics to-day. They were the aristocrats, and for the common people to clamor for political freedom was absurd. The idea of republicanism was as loathsome to them and watched with as much jealousy as an important labor movement is to-day. The royalists called the men who clamored for civil and religious liberty fanatics, just as the monopolists ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... has rendered the passage according to that interpretation of it to which several of the best expositors incline. Nothing can be so absurd as to suppose that Homer, so correct in his geography, could mean to place a Mediterranean island under ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... let Peter think that, let posterity think that. But he could not cozen himself thus! He had fallen—horribly, vulgarly. How absurd of him to set himself up as a saint, a martyr, an idealist! He could not divide himself into two compartments like that and pretend that only one counted in his character. Who was he to talk of dying for art? No, he was but an everyday ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... not a state of peace. You shut your frontiers to strangers in war time; you may close them to your citizens. A city is legally put in a state of siege during a sedition. We can put the nation in a state of siege in case of external danger co-existent with internal conspiracy. By what absurd abuse of liberty can a state be constrained to tolerate on a foreign soil gatherings of citizens armed against itself, which it would not tolerate in its own land? And if these gatherings should be culpable without, why should the state ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... ungloved hand took firm hold of hers as they stepped out of Miss Bezac's door, and but that the idea was absurd Faith would have thought it was trembling. Once in the carriage, the two side by side on the soft cushions, the orders given to the footman, the coach rolling smoothly down the hill, the stranger turned her eyes full upon Faith; until the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... The minister's lower jaw shot out pugnaciously and his eyes flashed. "Eben, don't be absurd. The two of them are children. This boy is playing away a vacation. To speak of him as a matrimonial possibility is to talk irresponsibly. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... be too absurd, certainly. You have heard the proverb— Hold in contempt the innocent words of those Who from their infancy have known no guile:— But trust the treacherous counsels of the man Who makes a very science ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... through the trees. She was quite close. He almost ran. No, it could not be his mother. This was a girl, lithe, tall, swift stepping. His mother had been rather short and stout. Could this girl be his sister Alice? The swift supposition was absurd, because Alice was only about ten, and this girl was grown. She had a grace of motion that struck Pan. He hurried around some trees to intercept her, losing sight of her ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... I had every reason to be proud of the four young men who will control the destinies of the family when I am under the sod. Proud not only of my two dear sons, but of my two dear sons-in-law, who, though one is slight and short, and the other impressive-looking and tall, and though both hold absurd political notions with which I have not the slightest sympathy, have so completely won my heart by their devotion to their wives and generally exemplary behavior, that I cannot choose between them. I was in a jovial mood ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... rationality, of what is known by demonstration. Beyond these limits is the irrational, which, whether it be called the super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational, is all the same thing. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the impossible of the certum est, quia impossibile est. And this absurd can only base itself ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their confused and absurd behavior, and then by their constantly following the swarms of dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the streets, accompanied by musicians playing on bagpipes, and by innumerable spectators attracted by curiosity, to which were added anxious parents and relations, who ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... oh, uncle! I really cannot read it out—it is too absurd! Is there no way, I wonder, of stopping these reporters from giving their auction-book schedule of one's height, figure, complexion, and all that? Here, Bee—you read it, my dear," said Claudia, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... sin. Her denial of the one personal God—"all is infinite mind, and its infinite manifestations,"— is but a swing of the pendulum from the godless and graceless system of the materialistic philosophy propounded by Darwin and Haeckel and is as absurd and unscriptural (although opposite) as the ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... has "et ce est mout scue chouse"; Pauthier's Text, "mais il est moult cele" The latter seems absurd. I have no doubt that scue is correct, and is an Italianism, saputo having sometimes the sense of prudent or judicious. Thus P. della Valle (II. 26), speaking of Shah Abbas: "Ma noti V.S. i tiri di questo re, saputo insieme e bizzarro," ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... now developed rapidly. The absurd thing happened: Harry Sterling began to take a serious view of his attachment to Mrs. Mortimer. The one thing more absurd, that she should take a serious view of it, had not happened yet, and, indeed, would never happen; ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... preaching from a cathedral pulpit, that chanting should be abandoned in cathedral services. By such an assertion he would have overshot his mark and rendered himself absurd, to the delight of his hearers. He could, however, and did, allude with heavy denunciations to the practice of intoning in parish churches, although the practice was all but unknown in the diocese; and from thence he came round to the undue preponderance ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... portrayal of the old-time Southern colonel, with his absurd grandiloquence, his eccentric garb, his quaint idioms and phrases, his motheaten pride of family, and his really kind heart, fastidious sense of honor, and lovable simplicity, is the best delineation of a character role on the boards to-day. The coat worn by Colonel Calhoun ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... is pretty, and there is something taking in her name. Old people, and very precise people, call her Margaret Boyne. But you do not: it is only plain Madge; it sounds like her, very rapid and mischievous. It would be the most absurd thing in the world for you to like her, for she teases you in innumerable ways: she laughs at your big shoes, (such a sweet little foot as she has!) and she pins strips of paper on your coat-collar; and ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... James!" cried Mortimer, turning a deep and apoplectic red, "if I love him! Hold! I and Dick Dudley, my best friend, who loves the duke, not as much as I (we fought once because he made this absurd claim)—I and Dudley, I tell you, asked each other just now if we should have the strength to again see our James without ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... "she was called to the task by some of the most influential organs of public opinion in France;"—she would not certainly affirm what she knew to be false, and the idea that she did receive a bona fide request of the above purport from such individuals, is too absurd to command belief for a moment. Would any one in his senses, who is "desirous of being represented as he is," put in requisition the pencil of an artist by which he would be ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... happens to a child," continued Harald, excitedly, "then directly to charge those belonging to it with a wilful murder! Can one imagine anything more shameful or more absurd. No, such snakes, at least, shall not hiss about the unhappy lady. And to crush them shall be ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... can scarcely be termed absurd, and yet it is unquestionably groundless. The mysterious 'understanding' of servants, and their wide knowledge of each other's experiences, may be explained upon a perfectly simple and rational theory, and I think we may venture to reject ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Where the latter method is in use, it is noticeable that pupils adopt a uniform tone and measured rhythm, both of which are undesirable. Moreover, especially with young pupils, there is a danger that absurd blunders made by individuals may pass unnoticed, because the teacher has not the opportunity of detecting them. When the passage has been memorized, it should be repeated daily for a time and then repeated at longer intervals, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... round trot. Colonel Philibert, impatient to reach Beaumanoir, spurred on for a while, hardly noticing the absurd figure of his guide, whose legs stuck out like a pair of compasses beneath his tattered gown, his shaking head threatening dislodgment to hat and wig, while his elbows churned at every jolt, making play with the shuffling gait of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... danger of a flareup because Halloway always bore himself with entire politeness yet with a courtesy which did not escape a sort of indulgent patronage; as though the serious thought of rivalry was absurd. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... down upon Rachel Henderson. When she woke in the morning it was to cleared skies both in her own mind and in the physical world. The nightmare through which she had passed seemed to her now unreal, even a little absurd. Her nerves were quieted by sleep, and she saw plainly what she had to do. That "old, unhappy, far-off thing" lurking in the innermost depth of memory had nothing more to do with her. She would look ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... answered. "Didn't you see me rolling over on the ground laughing at it? Why, Zoega, I never saw any thing so absurd as that in my life; any decent Geyser would have given at least an hour's notice. This miserable little wretch went off half cocked. I was just laughing to think how sick we made ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Mountains; it beyond them appears again here and there and everywhere, within and without the regions of rain. There is nothing like a border of The Desert. The "Grand Desert" and "Petite Desert" of the French, are equally incorrect and absurd. All is Sahara, or waste, uncultivated lands, and oases scattered thick within them, as spots on the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... them before they did meet? That was the question, and upon its answer it depended whether or no they had another three minutes to live. To think of mercy at the hands of these bloodthirsty brutes, after they had just killed one of their number before their eyes, was absurd. It was true he had been shot in self-defence; but what count would savages take of that, or of the fact that they were but harmless travellers? White people were not very popular with the Matabele just then, as they knew well; also, their murder in this remote place, with not ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... well-to-do professional men, of minor officials, clerks, shopkeepers, our roads leading through the workaday world. Yet quite half our time was taken up in studies utterly useless to us. How I hated them, these youth-tormenting Shades. Homer! how I wished the fishermen had asked him that absurd riddle earlier. Horace! why could not that shipwreck have succeeded: it would have in the case of any one ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... as the world is moral. Shakespeare is all good, Rabelais is all good, Montaigne is all good, not because all the thoughts, the words, the manifestations are so, but because at the core, and permeating all, is an ethic intention—a love which, through mysterious, indirect, subtle, seemingly absurd, often terrible and repulsive, means, seeks to uplift, and never to degrade. It is the spirit in which authorship is pursued, as Augustus Schlegel has said, that makes it either an infamy or a virtue; and the spirit ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... of Red Mick and his prosecution became at once a matter of no moment. How absurd his worry and vexation now seemed. On the other hand, what new complications might arise? All these years the Gordons had lived on the assumption that Mr. Grant would provide for them, without having any promise or agreement from him; and, owing to the old man's violent ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... an example which I quote because it is so absurd. The rooms I live in were owned by a prim old woman who for more than twenty years was my landlady. She and I were great friends, indeed she tended me like a mother, and when I was so ill nursed me as perhaps few mothers would have ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... COURT! The definition is absurd!" said General Hyde, with both scorn and temper. "A court pre-supposes both royalty ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... not in the least eccentric. The child, who is born in the actual presence (result of the usual farcical opening) of a corporal and four fusiliers, is put out to nurse at Saint-Germain in the way they did then, brought home and put out to school, but, in consequence of his mother's absurd spoiling, allowed to learn absolutely nothing, and (though he is not exactly a bad fellow) to get into very bad company. With two of the choicest specimens of this he runs away (having, again by his mother's folly, been trusted with a round sum in gold) at the age ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... consternation. Miss Trinder followed, silent and indomitable, at the heel of the hunt, and the released puppy, who had also harked in, could be heard throwing his tongue in the dusky shrubbery ahead of us. It was all exasperatingly absurd, as things seem to have a habit of being in Ireland. I never felt more like a fool in my life, and the bitterest part of it was that it was all I could do to keep ahead of Bridgie. As for the filly, ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... that the truth or correctness of names can only be ascertained by an appeal to etymology. The truth of names is to be found in the analysis of their elements. But why does he admit etymologies which are absurd, based on Heracleitean fancies, fourfold interpretations of words, impossible unions and separations of syllables ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... that his suspicion was unworthy and absurd. His was no simple choice between his friend's shameful cowardice, and this girl's criminal falsehood. No, Dal was crazy-drunk at the time, and himself cried out in his misery that the worst that they said of him was probably true. And even supposing that this girl was no ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... against loss; but we think there is nothing irrational in the popular belief in the existence of such an understanding, and that nothing has occurred since the middle of June that renders that belief absurd. The contrary belief makes a fool of Napoleon III.,—a character which not even the Emperor's enemies have attributed to him since he became a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... feet. "I am going to make what will seem an absurd request," he said tensely. "I am going to ask you all—the women, I mean—to take your places at the bridge tables. And then—" he paused for an instant, his blue eyes hard: "I want to see the death hand played exactly as it was played while Nita ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... time that an end be put to such absurd and dangerous antics, not abroad only, but at home. In the new order of things now dawning upon Ireland, there can no longer be room for them; and the very name of Orangeman must disappear forever from the vocabulary ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... had been conscious of innumerable lives being lived round him, and loves loved, and he outside, unable to know, to grasp, to gather them; and all the time the sands of his hourglass running out! A most absurd and unreasonable feeling for a man with everything he wanted, with work that he loved, quite enough money, and a wife so good as Sylvia—a feeling that no Englishman of forty-six, in excellent health, ought for a moment to have been troubled with. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... linen-draper at the Key in Cheapside; where there was a company of fine ladies, and we were very civilly treated, and had a very good place to see the pageants, which were many, and I believe good, for such kind of things, but in themselves but poor and absurd. ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... question. It is offering a great deal both on her part and her husband's to take charge of these two, but it would never do. She is almost a child herself,—a bride and beauty under twenty,—excessively admired, very likely to have her head turned. No, it would be too absurd. All her kindness, amiability, desire to make Marian her friend and companion, would only serve ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... that my presence is desired, or that fear of me, the foreigner, has ceased. On the contrary, it signifies that I am more greatly to be feared. The European is not wanted in China, no matter how absurd it may seem to the student of international politics, who sits and devours all the newspaper copy—good, bad and indifferent—which filters through regarding China becoming the El Dorado of the Westerner. He is wanted for no other reason than that of teaching the Chinese to foreignize ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... are mad, absolutely mad," declared the Captain. "I can't understand it. I'm still in my bed when I'm aroused by an insolent loafer who calls himself a walking delegate and tells me his union won't load me until I pay some absurd sum." ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... Miss Houston, whose given name was Agnes, "Frances and I happened to read that remarkable tale that was printed in one of the papers this morning, about a marriage between Rod Duncan and Beatrice. We thought it so absurd: We couldn't resist the temptation to come over to see you, for a few minutes this very evening, and ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... "It is only your absurd infatuation for Phrida Shand that prevents you," she said. "Ah!" she sighed. "How grossly ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... Decorations, as its only Design is to gratify the Senses, and keep up an indolent Attention in the Audience. Common Sense however requires that there should be nothing in the Scenes and Machines which may appear Childish and Absurd. How would the Wits of King Charles's time have laughed to have seen Nicolini exposed to a Tempest in Robes of Ermin, and sailing in an open Boat upon a Sea of Paste-Board? What a Field of Raillery would they have been let into, had they been entertain'd with painted Dragons ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... determination. Nevertheless, finding the enemy so eager and having reflected more maturely, he saw no reason for accepting the chivalrous cartel. As commanderin-chief—for Mayenne willingly conceded the supremacy which it would have been absurd in him to dispute—he accordingly replied that it was his custom to refuse a combat when a refusal seemed advantageous to himself, and to offer battle whenever it suited his purposes to fight. When that ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... for her loss. Then came jealousy of AEnone, who had apparently been able to console him so early. And mingled with all this, there began to press upon her a startling thought—one which she at first contemned as unlikely and absurd—but which, though continually driven away, so obstinately returned and commended itself to her attention with newer plausibility, that at last she began to give bitter and anxious heed to it. What if this constant communication between AEnone and Cleotos were to result in a mutual ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ancestors; they may have possessed some species of protection from the rain on which they prided themselves as much as we do on our Umbrellas, and regarded the new-fangled invention (as they no doubt termed it) as something exceedingly absurd, coxcombical, and unnecessary; while we, who are in possession of so many life-comforts of which those of the good old times were supremely ignorant—among these we give the Umbrella brevet rank—can afford ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... a poetical work is, ceteris paribus, the measure of its merit, seems undoubtedly, when we thus state it, a proposition sufficiently absurd—yet we are indebted for it to the Quarterly Reviews. Surely there can be nothing in mere size, abstractly considered—there can be nothing in mere bulk, so far as a volume is concerned, which has so continuously elicited admiration ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "Absurd, but serious," he quietly returned. "Doris, I came to-night to ask you. It wouldn't keep any longer. One moment, please. Two things happened yesterday. My father won the big law suit that has been our nightmare for years; and I got a move-up in the office. Never was more shocked in all my ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... [17] In those days the guns that were pointed by the Church against the Dissenters were shotted. The law was a cesspool of iniquity and cruelty. Adam Smith was a new prophet whom few regarded, and commerce was hampered by idiotic impediments, and ruined by still more absurd help, on the ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... a feeling that it was the last time he should ever see him, and his face was gray with suffering as he faced his son for the last time. Harold became not merely unresponsive, he grew harsher of voice each moment. His father's tremulous and repeated words seemed to him foolish and absurd—and also inconsiderate. After he was gone he ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... with figures at the bottom of each page, and told that every month the junior had to add those stereotyped columns. Like all bank beginners, Nelson did not use his brains. Juniors are taught (1) to obey, (2) to work, (3) to ask no foolish questions. No matter how absurd a task appears, perform it without a kick. The happy-go-lucky boys take a chance and ask questions rather than do what seems to be unnecessary work; but Evan was the conscientious kind, the kind that obeys unquestioningly ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... that DA is equal to DB (unless, of course, you've bisected that chord all wrong), and DG is common, and GA is equal to GB—at least according to your absurd theory about G it is, since they must be both radii. Radii indeed! Look at them. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... rule of abstract rights. Under some circumstances it might be requisite to confine the legislative power to a single individual; under others to the hands of a few; and under others to commit it to the whole community. It would be absurd to maintain, on the ground of the natural equality of men, that a horde of ignorant and vicious savages, should be organized as a pure democracy, if experience taught that such a form of government was destructive to themselves and others. These different ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... fortune wrought him woe; 235 But he was ever talking in such sort As you do—far more sadly—he seemed hurt, Even as a man with his peculiar wrong, To hear but of the oppression of the strong, Or those absurd deceits (I think with you 240 In some respects, you know) which carry through The excellent impostors of this earth When they outface detection—he had worth, Poor fellow! but a humorist in his way'— 'Alas, what drove him mad?' 'I cannot say: 245 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... "It is absurd to call me clever," she said. "I have little learning and no accomplishments. I cannot even get on with the crochet work Denah showed me, and I do not know how ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... natural; every day she began to gain a greater command over her tender emotions, and indeed life, practical life, makes possible and comprehensible much which poetical logic and the imagination label—absurd. ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... very good men were against it read literally part of it would be ridiculous and you may take your seats if you please gentlemen of the jury I shall be occupied some time in my charge and I do not care to keep you standing and some of it would be absurd and some of it reads very well." And ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... in its parts. After sketching one day several heads of birds it became a vital matter of interest to me to know the use of the bony process on the head of the hornbill; but on asking a great physiologist, I found that it appeared to him an absurd question, and ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... that might apparently have been written with an eye to the conditions that attended their publication. Which, unless one credits our romancers with much further sight than is commonly supposed to be their portion, is absurd. The thing is a coincidence; and of this there is no more striking example than the story that ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK has prepared for the world this autumn. She calls it The Encounter (ARNOLD), and it is all about the struggle between "the Nietzschean attitude of mind in Germany," as exemplified ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... even murdering, on the other. "Mr. Errol said once," rejoined Miss Carmichael, "that there are two opposite natures, an old man and a new, in all human beings, as well as in those who are converted, and that no contradiction of the kind is too absurd for human nature." "Mistah Ehhol is quite right, my deah Miss Mahjohie, as all expehience attests. Bret Hahte has shewn it from a Califohnian standpoint. I have seen it in times of wanah and of peace, bad ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... sure the private business hours of the Debating Society were some of his happiest moments. His magnificent assumption of wrath on the most absurd grounds; his vast intensity over trivialities; his love for the heat and play of debate, would have made a stranger believe he lived for ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... fine, does not suit anybody, not even yourself. His majesty wished to speak to you, you refused him an interview; why, now that you are face to face, that you are here by a force independent of your will, why do you confine yourself to rigors which I consider useless and absurd? Speak! what the devil! speak, if only ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... old man, with a great white beard, appeared respectable and well-to-do in his black velvet cap and pelisse; his eyes were very bright, and his cheeks hectic with resentment at the annoyance he was undergoing; but that he could help out of the difficulty appeared absurd. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... dishonourable character—a man who preys upon society, and makes easily-deceived people his dupes, Sir; his absurd, his foolish, his wretched dupes, Sir,' said ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... undoubtedly the person referred to in the writing on the potsherd and in his father's letter, in proof of which he advanced Billali's allusions to her age and power. I was by this time too overwhelmed with the whole course of events that I had not even the heart left to dispute a proposition so absurd, so I suggested that we should try to go out and get a bath, of which we ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Parliament had ever taken notice so seldom of any libellous matter published, or of any breach of privilege committed against him. He might also add, that no person had ever been more the object of the most indiscriminate, and he might say the most absurd and the most unfounded abuse. Nevertheless, in all such cases he had adopted a neutral course, and had left the truth to come out in the natural lapse of events. There was, however, one species of breach of privilege which he had never been disposed to pass unnoticed. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... absurd, however, to attribute the defeat of the suffrage amendment wholly to the liquor dealers, or to the densely ignorant, or to the foreigners. In the wealthiest and most aristocratic wards of San Francisco and Oakland, where there ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... best," the other went on easily, "but it is rather absurd to talk about one's best when you know so little of what ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... on it. He says: 'Some glacialists have ventured to explain the transportation of boulders even in the situation of those now referred to, by imagining that they were transported on ice floes,' etc. He treats this view, and the scratching of rocks by icebergs, as almost absurd...he has finally stirred me up so, that (without you would answer him) I think I will send a paper in opposition to the same Journal. I can thus introduce some old remarks of mine, and some new, and will insist on your capital observations in N. America. It is a bore to stop one's work, but he ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Hagan. So I went on to Holland with that quick-change artist, and watched him come on board the steamer at Parkeston Quay, dressed as a rather German-looking commercial traveller, eager for war commissions upon smuggled goods. This sounds absurd, but his get-up seemed somehow to suggest the idea. Then I went below. Dawson always kept away from me whenever Hagan might ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... firing back at them. It brought one great leader—Stonewall Jackson—into fame. Above all, it profoundly affected the popular points of view, both North and South. In the South there was undue elation, followed by the absurd belief that one Southerner could beat two Northerners any day and that the North would now back down en masse, as its army had from the Henry Hill. A dangerous slackening of military preparation was ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... well-established fact, that oftentimes the most scientific museum admitted as genuine fragments of the human osteology what in fact belonged to the gigantic brutes of our earth in her earliest stages of development. This mistake would go some way in accounting for the absurd disposition in all generations to view themselves as abridged editions of their forefathers. Added to which, as a separate cause of error, there can be little doubt, that intermingled with the human race there has at most periods of the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... equal pay for equal work in their evidence before the Royal Commission on the Civil Service, and it is gratifying that, in spite of the determined policy of the department to adhere as far as possible to the absurd segregation of the sexes, the two organised bodies of Men and Women Clerks ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... know. I must be truthful with myself—with you. I do know. But it seems so strange, so almost inexplicable, and even rather absurd." ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... of time to Virginia; and yet three months afterward the defeated commander had advanced upon and forced back his victorious adversary. That such should be the result of the year's campaigning seemed absurd to the North. A clamorous appeal was made to the authorities to order another advance; and this general sentiment is said to have been shared by General Meade, who had declared himself bitterly disappointed at missing a battle with Lee in October. A stronger ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... dress. With his thin legs and thin arms he made a grotesque figure, a sinister Don Quixote, and Walker began to make coarse jokes about him. They were acknowledged with little smothered laughs. Mackintosh struggled with his shirt. He knew he looked absurd, but he hated being laughed at. He stood silent ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... drawn. One said that the brightness of the dawn—a fact easily explained by the diurnal motion of the globe—showed him that his soul was immortal. He asserted further that he had, at an earlier period of his life, trailed bright clouds behind him. This was absurd. ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... impatient; An understanding simple and unschool'd: For what we know must be, and is as common As any the most vulgar thing to sense, Why should we, in our peevish opposition, Take it to heart? Fie! 't is a fault to heaven, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd; whose common theme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, From the first corse, till he that died to-day, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... he wrote, "A Letter containing some Reflections on His Majesty's Declaration for Liberty of Conscience," to warn the Nonconformists of the great mistake into which some were falling. "Was ever anything," he asked afterwards, "more absurd than this conduct of King James and his party, in wheedling the Dissenters; giving them liberty of conscience by his own arbitrary dispensing authority, and his expecting they should be content with their religious liberty ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... Sommerton? Why, what could make you think such a thing? What an absurd idea! You cannot imagine how kind she was to me ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... and good, unless, indeed, it is a matter of principle with them that our social customs are a fetich. But there are innumerable instances where there are obstacles to unions which to overcome would involve hardships and suffering to others, or where absurd laws prevent marriage, and where two persons loving each other, prefer to pay the price of social ostracism to separation. Such as these lose nothing by Society's disapproval, but Society does lose something by persecuting ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... arm around him. "I want to go! I know it sounds crazy, and absurd, and desperate; but I'm sure it isn't! I want you to let me ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... by this system, we were giving the general government full and absolute power to regulate commerce, under which general power it would have a right to restrain, or totally prohibit, the slave trade: it must, therefore, appear to the world absurd and disgraceful to the last degree, that we should except from the exercise of that power, the only branch of commerce which is unjustifiable in its nature, and contrary to the rights of mankind. That, on the contrary, we ought rather to prohibit expressly in our Constitution, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Hayden-Bond's, we'll say, at seven or eight o'clock. It's after midnight now. How long would it take them to find out that between eight and midnight you had not only never been near your mother, but could not prove an alibi of any sort? If you told the truth it would sound absurd. No one in their sober senses would ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... for 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 ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... terror and compulsion as she did. But she declared that he had never loved her, and was always wanting her to be like ces Anglaises fades, and as to her child, he so tormented her about it, and the ways of his absurd mother and sisters, and so expected her to sacrifice her art and her prospects to the little wretch, that she was ready to strangle it! "Maternal love, bah! she was not going to be like a bird or a beast," she said, with a strange wild glance in her eyes that made Lance shudder, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was at once too absurd and too grave to be permitted to continue. "Sockless" Jerry Simpson now counseled the Populists to let the decision go to the courts. The judges, to be sure, were Republican; but Simpson, ever resourceful, argued that if they decided against the Populists, the house and senate could ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... generations, and showed by his protruding ribs the general leanness of the land. He moved in an eccentric amble, and when put upon his speed was generally run backward. To this old negro's horse was harnessed a very shaky and absurd wagon, which rattled like approaching dissolution, and each part of it ran without any connection or correspondence with any other part. It had no tail-board, and its shafts were sharp as famine; and into this mimicry of a vehicle the murderer was to be sent ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... Here, all day long, he jolted on the bare boards, distressed by heat and continually reawakened from uneasy slumbers. By the half return ticket in his purse, he was entitled to make the journey on the easy cushions and with the ample space of the first-class; but alas! in his absurd attire, he durst not, for decency, commingle with his equals; and this small annoyance, coming last in such a series of disasters, cut him ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... try my patience a little now and then. Surely it's better that I should save you from making these ridiculous mistakes. Once or twice this week I've heard most absurd remarks of yours repeated. Please remember that it isn't only yourself you—stultify. Politics may be a joke for you; for me it is a serious pursuit. I mustn't have people associating my name with all kinds of nonsensical chatter. I have ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... being absurd," she declared, "and I don't want to be and I don't want you to be. Of course, you can't look at things just as I do. You belong to a very large world. You spend your life destroying obstacles. All my people, you know," she went on, "look upon me as terribly emancipated. ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... slept in hammocks—the favourite resting arrangement of the Brazilian—to my mind the most uncomfortable and absurd fashion of resting, especially in tropical regions. First of all, it is almost an impossibility to assume a perfectly horizontal position for your entire body, except—if you are an expert—diagonally; then there is always a certain amount of swing and ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... little houses under their blue roofs, the little shop-fronts hung with blue, and the smiling little people in their blue costumes. The illusion is only broken by the occasional passing of a tall foreigner, and by divers shop-signs bearing announcements in absurd attempts at English. Nevertheless such discords only serve to emphasise reality; they never materially lessen the fascination of the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the raft, picking his way from balk to balk, skipping aside now and again as the water rose between them under his weight and overflowed his shoes. To Myra, unaccustomed to be prayed for aloud and by name, the whole performance was absurd and embarrassing. She blushed hotly under the eyes of the other men, and glanced at Clem, expecting him to ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... howled, swayed, rocked back and forth in their chairs, repeating the word "mortifying" over and over to each other—each repetition seeming to make it only more brilliantly absurd. ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Guebre population, taken towards the end of this century, gives an absurd figure. We find no vestige of them anywhere except in Yezd, and in the neighbourhood of Teheran, in Kaschan, Shiraz and Bushire. In 1854, according to the information furnished to the Persian Amelioration Society ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... Glycas, and Manasses, the origin of the Aconoclcasts is imprinted to the caliph Yezid and two Jews, who promised the empire to Leo; and the reproaches of these hostile sectaries are turned into an absurd conspiracy for restoring the purity of the Christian worship, (see Spanheim, Hist. Imag. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... never thought of such a thing," said Vera; "but suppose I did, of course it's an absurd idea, but ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... heart in a grip of ice. Of course it was almost silly to suspect that the cripple could have been forgotten in all the excitement; but anything is liable to happen at a fire, where most people lose their heads, and do things they would call absurd at ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... out the little volume, and presented it humbly with a trembling hand to M. Didot. I told him that I had written these verses, and wished to have them published,—not indeed to bring me fame (I had not that absurd delusion), but in the hope of attracting the notice and good-will of influential literary men; that my poverty would not permit of my going to the expense of printing; and, therefore, I came to submit my work to him, and request him to publish it, should ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... book I prize next to the Bible; Man of the World; Sterne, especially his Sentimental Journey; Macpherson's Ossian, etc.;—these are the glorious models after which I endeavour to form my conduct, and 'tis incongruous—'tis absurd to suppose that the man whose mind glows with sentiments lighted up at their sacred flame—the man whose heart distends with benevolence to all the human race—he "who can soar above this little scene of things"—can he descend to mind the paltry concerns about which the terrae-filial ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... unscrupulous creditors, to say that all debt obligations are obliterated in the United States, and now we commence anew, each possessing all he has at the time free from incumbrance? These propositions are too absurd to be entertained for a moment by thinking or honest people. Yet every delay in preparation for final resumption partakes of this dishonesty, and is only less in degree as the hope is held out that a convenient season will at last arrive for the good work ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... so as to round out the Department of Kansas. To them it was absurd that Fort Smith should be within their jurisdiction and its environs within Steele and Thayer's. The upshot of the quarrel was, the reorganization of the frontier departments on the seventeenth of April which gave Fort Smith and ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... and went out in a kind of trance—it was so unreasonable, so utterly absurd. Why should Indians be watching to shoot down Wunpost when he had always been friendly with them all? And for that matter, why should anyone desire to kill him—that certainly could never lead them to his mine. The men who had come to the ranch were ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... saddle. Let us welcome even ghosts when they rise. Away with our stares and grimaces. The New Zealander's tattooing is not a prodigy; nor the Chinaman's ways an enigma. No custom is strange; no creed is absurd; no foe, but who will in the end prove a friend. In heaven, at last, our good, old, white-haired father Adam will greet all alike, and sociality forever prevail. Christian shall join hands between Gentile and Jew; grim Dante ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... injected into the little body are poisonous. They are the result of degenerative changes—diseases—in the bodies of rabbits, horses, cows and other animals. Nature's law is that health must be deserved or earned. Health means cleanliness, so it really is absurd to force into the body these products of animal decay. Statistics can be given, showing how beneficial these agents are, but they are misleading. In the days of public and official belief in witchcraft it was not difficult to prove ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... soul without a body, but that most dreadful of all existences infesting that haunted wood—a body without a soul! In its blank stare was neither love, nor pity, nor intelligence—nothing to which to address an appeal for mercy. "An appeal will not lie," he thought, with an absurd reversion to professional slang, making the situation more horrible, as the fire of a cigar might light ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... decisively. "Besides, it is a profession that is out of date now. Men don't go wilily to work in these days; but if they did, the notion of poor George, who could not keep a secret or tell a lie with easy grace if it were to save his life—the notion of making him a diplomatist is very absurd. No doubt statesmen are better without original ideas—their business is to pick out the practical ideas of other men and work them well—but George wants ability, poor fellow! They ought to have put him into the Church: he reads well, he could have read other ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... How many productions whose milk-and-water merits, or unintelligible stupidity, have been considered as novelties, have by that means gained the admiration of Criticism and the praise of Fashion, until a more absurd novelty pushed them from their preferments and caused them to be as suddenly forgotten! The vulgar, tasteless jargon of "Dr. Syntax," with all the above-mentioned excellencies to excite public notice from the butterflies of fashion, soon found what it sought, though some of the plates or illustrations ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... sought this mission to the South, but had accepted it thinking that I might do the country some service. I pointed out to him that the charge that I had reported to the newspapers instead of to the President was simply absurd; that I had written to the President a series of elaborate reports; and, though I had, indeed, written a few letters to a newspaper, that it was well understood by the Secretary of War that I would do this when he made the arrangements for my journey. The compensation set out for me, I ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... have to put out the sage to please the fool, and so on. We'll keep it up, once the precedent is established, until finally it will become a class club entirely—a Plumbers' Club, for instance—and how absurd that would be in Hades! No, gentlemen, it can't be done. The poets must ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... a man absurd in what they understand, they may conclude the same of him in what they ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... usually refer to its superior power of explaining reality. And if it be objected that therefore no morally educative agency would remain if religion were discarded, the answer is simple. A system of moral idealism founded on science—it is absurd to call it science—does exist, and might at any time be enlarged to the proportions of a national or international educative agency. As yet it is left to individual cultivation or crystallised in a few tiny associations, such as ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... English readers have perhaps been satiated with writings about Art. But rather more than 100 years ago there had been comparatively little of it and hardly anything, if anything at all, of this quality. And it may not be absurd to draw attention to the differences between these descriptions and those in ornate prose that we have had since from Mr. Ruskin and others. Most of the latter are essentially prose though often very beautiful prose: Shelley's, though pure prose in form, are as it were scenarios ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... "that the other boy would not leave his sister and his father." He roused himself suddenly. "Perhaps I do Ken injustice. I want to meet the gallant commander of the Flying Dutchman. It seems absurd that such close neighbors have not yet met. Bring him—and Felicia, when you come again. We'll drink to the success of the Sturgis Water Line. And don't dare to tell me, next time, that you never heard of the scale of A flat major, ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... superstitious," replied Krantz; "and yet I must say that, to me, the appearance was not like a reality. No vessel could carry such sail in the gale; but yet, there are madmen afloat who will sometimes attempt the most absurd things. If it was a vessel, she must have gone down, for when it cleared up she was not to be seen. I am not very credulous, and nothing but the occurrence of the consequences which you anticipate will make me believe that there ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Nazareth, and staid but a little while. The people said, "This the Son of God! Why, his father is nothing but a carpenter. We know the family. We see them every day. Are not his brothers named so and so, and his sisters so and so, and is not his mother the person they call Mary? This is absurd." He did not curse his home, but he shook its dust from his feet ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and this with so great alacrity, as you could hardly put on the like, in case our metropolis had called you to her assistance against barbarians. And if I had perceived that your army was composed of men like unto those who invited them, I had not deemed your attempt so absurd; for nothing does so much cement the minds of men together as the alliance there is between their manners. But now for these men who have invited you, if you were to examine them one by one, every one of them would be found to have deserved ten thousand deaths; for the very rascality and offscouring ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... only fooling, dearie; it's all going to be lovely, and I'm going into that conservatory just as valiantly as the Rough Riders charged up old San Juan! Only, Marmee, don't ask me to wear white—that would be too absurd! Frankly, I'm susceptible to color. You've heard about the little boy who whistled in the dark to keep his courage up?" Mrs. Warren smiled through her tears. "Well, I'm going to wear my red—red is cheerful, and not too innocent, and—and courageous—I mean," Nancy explained, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... now wanders over the battlefield of Castillon can hardly realize how his country grieved at the defeat of Talbot far away here amidst the southern vines. To-day it seems so absurd, so contrary to the policy of common-sense, that England, then so thinly populated, should have striven so hard and so long in order to be a Continental power; when now, with her dense population, half subsisting ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... more absurd than usual over this incident. It pretends that he swam with one hand, and carried his Commentaries, holding them above water, with the other. As if a general would take his MSS. with ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... through his mind with importunate distinctness, but he dismissed it as absurd and unworthy of himself. A king would be more likely to offer to share his throne with a beggar than this girl would be to invite him to enjoy the sweet follies of love-making with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... also been the absurd suggestion that the impediment was Swift's knowledge that both he and Stella were the illegitimate children of Sir William Temple—a theory which is ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... reasonably imagined. To suppose, as has been put forward, that birds are endowed with a migratory instinct for the express purpose of keeping down their numbers, in order, that is, that they may perish in crossing the sea, is really too absurd for serious consideration. If that were the end in view, it would be most easily obtained by keeping them at home, where snow would speedily starve them. On the contrary, it will appear to any one who walks about ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... vindictiveness against woman suffrage and the astounding amount of misinformation there is everywhere here in the East concerning its practical operation. I have been equally amazed and indignant at the many brazen assertions I have seen in the papers and heard that are perfectly absurd and without the slightest foundation in fact, and I have had many heated discussions on the subject during the past three years. When I hear men and women who have never spent a week and most of them not an hour in an equal suffrage State attempt to discuss the subject ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... we can make a hearty Meal of a Piece of roast Beef for all that. Is it possible, Sir, that your Country-men should act so absurdly, as to pay an Ox the Tribute of divine Worship, said the Indian? Absurd as you think it, said the other, the Ox has been the principal Object of Adoration all over Egypt, for these hundred and thirty five thousand Years, and the most abandon'd Egyptian has never been as yet so impious as to gain-say it. Ay, Sir, an hundred ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... well mounted, some ill, but all flying along as best they might, the subaltern as good as the general, jostling and pushing, spurring and driving, with every thought thrown to the winds save that they should have the blood of this absurd fox! Truly, they are an extraordinary people, ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... love you?" repeated the divinity student. "Come now, that's absurd! No woman is annoyed by an offer. I swear I love you reverently. I can put you at the head of this society—the wife of a clergyman. Busy tongues shall be stilled at your coming and going, and the shadow of this late tragedy ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... Portuguese authors, as I have read nearly all that are to be found in print of Mr. Southey's authorities, and some that he does not mention; but Mr. Southey had been so faithful as well as judicious in the use he has made of his authors, that it would have been absurd, if not impertinent, to have neglected his guidance. From the time of the King's arrival in Brazil, or rather of his leaving Lisbon, I am answerable for all I have stated: it is little, but I hope ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... nothing to be done," said Dahl to him; "but don't be ashamed of your pain; groan, it will ease you." "No," he replied, interruptedly; "no,... it is of no ... use to ... groan;... my wife ... will ... hear;... 'tis absurd ... that such a trifle ... should ... master me,... I will not."—I left him at five o'clock in the morning, and returned in a couple of hours. Having observed, that the night had been tolerably quiet, I went home with an impression almost of hope; but on my return I found ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... "How absurd!" exclaimed the officials with whom I talked. "We holding King Nicholas a prisoner? The idea is preposterous. So far as France is concerned, he can return ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... conferences was an agreement between England and France to effect the exchange of Sardinia and Sicily just mentioned, recompensing Spain by giving her Parma and Tuscany in northern Italy, and stipulating that the emperor should renounce forever his absurd but irritating claim to the Spanish crown. This arrangement was to be enforced by arms, if necessary. The emperor at first refused consent; but the increasing greatness of Alberoni's preparations at last decided him to accept so advantageous an offer, and the accession of ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... aboard the steamer had told him about the sportsmanlike rules that obtain at Avalon, it seemed absurd to Colin for any one to try and catch so heavy a fish as the tuna seemed to be, with a rod and line that would be thought light ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... to Marois Bay, none of us dreamed that he was a man with a hidden sorrow in his life. There was something about the man which made the idea absurd, or would have made it absurd if he himself had not been the authority for the story. He looked so thoroughly pleased with life and with himself. He was one of those men whom you instinctively label in your mind as 'strong'. He was so healthy, so fit, and had ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the population. There is yet but one considerable building completed, a most surprising thing to be seen in this wild Region. It is of stone and built as if to last forever. It is large as a Courthouse of one of your usual Towns, and might seem absurd in this country did it not suggest a former civilization instead of one yet to come. It is full large enough for any Town of several thousand people. This is the property of the Co. that is building the Ry. It is said that ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... say to these results? If true, what a wonderful antiquity is here unfolded for the human race, and what a wonderful lapse of time is included in what is known as the Paleolithic Age! How strikingly does it impress upon our minds the slow development of man! Is such an antiquity for man in itself absurd? We know no reason for such a conclusion. Our most eminent scholars nowhere set a limit to the time of man's first appearance. It is true, many of them do not think the evidence strong enough to affirm such an antiquity, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... whole the three girls got along excellently, but if there was any hint at disturbance it generally arose from Lilias, whose pride would be up in arms at the most absurd trifles. She was annoyed that Carmel was asked to give away the prizes at the village sports, and showed her dissatisfaction so plainly that her sweet-tempered cousin, rather than have any fuss, solved the situation by asking Cousin Clare to perform the ceremony instead, considerably ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... succeeding days, artillery disappeared and the emblems of peace and commerce took its place—cats, hacks, sausages, tugs, fire engines, pianos, guitars, rocks, gardens, flower-pots, landscapes—whatever was wanted, he flung it in; and the more out of place and absurd the required object was, the more joy he got out of fabricating it. The pirates were delighted, the customers applauded, the sex began to flock in, great was the prosperity of the firm. Tracy was obliged to confess to himself that there was something ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... defense, those who knew that they were the cause of dissatisfaction spread the report that a race war was in progress and that the Katipuneros were planning the massacre of all of the white race. It was a sufficiently absurd statement, but it was made even more ridiculous by its "proof," for this was the discovery of an apron with a severed head, a hand holding it by the hair and another grasping the dagger which had done the bloody work. This emblem, handed down from ancient days as an object lesson of faithfulness ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... Quite a cultured town. There is a theatre, a museum, a town garden with a band, a good hotel.... No hideous fences, no absurd shop-signs, and no waste places with warming placards. There is a tavern called "Taganrog"; sugar costs twenty-four kopecks a pound, pine kernels six ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... all a big man's tenderness and sweetness, and everyone liked him. Susan and he quarreled with and criticized each other, William imitating her little affectations of speech and manner, Susan reviling his transparent and absurd ambitions, but they had been good friends for years. Young Oliver's mother had been Mrs. Lancaster's housekeeper for the most prosperous period in the history of the house, and if Susan naturally felt that the son of a working housekeeper was seriously handicapped in a social sense, ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... from the imperfect seed, by discovering and separating the seed of metals, and bringing that seed under the conditions which alone are suitable for its growth. Metals must have seed, the alchemists said, for it would be absurd to suppose they have none. "What prerogative have vegetables above metals," exclaims one of them, "that God should give seed to the one and withhold it from the other? Are not metals as much in His sight ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... was absurd for a mere boy just out of college, with scarcely a cent to his name—and not a whole name to call his own—to think of attempting to attack the great problem of the people single-handed; but still he felt he was called to do it, ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... vast woods, that infinite summer sky—they were giving her a new and far from practical point of view—especially upon the petty trickeries and posturings of the ludicrously self-important human specks that crawl about upon the earth and hastily begin to act queer and absurd as soon as they come in sight of each other. She found herself rapidly developing that latent "sentimentality" which her grandmother had so often rebuked and warned her against —which Lucia had insisted was her real ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... was cruelly assassinated. An officer in the Russian army, named Mirovitch, conceived an absurd plan of liberating Ivan from his captivity, restoring him to the throne, and consigning Catharine II. to the dungeon the prince had so long inhabited. Mirovitch had command of the garrison at Schlusselburg, where Ivan was imprisoned. Taking advantage of the absence of the empress, ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... frequently made to herself and Arthur. The excitement of finding a sister in Miggie, had in a measure overturned Nina's reason again, and for many days after the disclosure she was more than usually wild, talking at random of the most absurd things, but never for a moment losing sight of the fact that Edith was her sister. This seemed to be the one single clear point from which her confused ideas radiated, and the love she bore her sister ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... to the method which is irrational—regardless of reason, and therefore leading to conclusions erroneous and absurd. Rationalism is opposed to ultraism, to vehement, officious and extreme measures—while it would seek more excellent ways, it holds fast ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... or Giotto, these are just the kind of persons likely to be there: as much as the angel is likely to be there also, though you will be told nowadays that Giotto was absurd for putting him into the sky, of which an apothecary can always produce the similar blue, in a bottle. And now that you have had Shakespeare, and sundry other men of head and heart, following the track of ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... nothing but a mutual suspicion and espionage; if only there was anything to spy out and to hide! It is pure trifles with which they worry themselves, and I find these diplomatists with their airs of confidence and their petty fussiness much more absurd than the member of the Second Chamber in his conscious dignity. Unless some external events take place, and we clever men of the Diet can neither direct nor foresee them, I know already what we shall bring about in one or two or three years, ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... the boy's first wild infatuation—as mad, unreasoning, absurd, yet intense as was ever that of Arthur Pendennis for the lovely Fotheringay. Margaret Garrison had never seen or known the like of it. She had fascinated others for a time, had kindled love, passion and temporary devotion, but this—this was worship, and it was something so sweet to ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... is absurd," she replied dreamily, "and I am not so silly as to believe it. But I don't think I should ever be able to take any pleasure in that kitchen if it were built out of that lumber. Besides, I think the kitchen would look better and last longer if ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... desperadoes were planning to attack the command, the very next morning while crossing the Judith Mountains, with a hope, of course, of getting the animals. He also told Faye that one of them would be in camp that evening to ask permission to go with him to Maginnis. Faye said the whole story was absurd, particularly the attack, as those horse thieves would never dare attack government troops. Besides, he had over fifty good men with him, and probably there were only ten or twelve horse thieves. So not much attention was paid to what ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... He was, as he said, willing to aid her; but the idea of the principal personage of the house of Sands & Co. walking through the streets of the great city with such an ill-dressed young lady was absurd, and not to be tolerated. Master Sneed reflected. It is undoubtedly true that "where there is a will there is ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... these performances with open mouth. Secretly the fat boy aspired to imitate Davy in some of his antics; though Giraffe always scoffed loudly at the absurd idea of a heavy weight like Bumpus trying to play the part of ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... "How perfectly absurd of me, Mr. Addison!" she said. "You will certainly think I am more than eccentric to sit here fulfilling the part of a ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... causes most of us to drop the poem after a single canto; its affected antique spelling; its use of fone (foes), dan (master), teene (trouble), swink (labor), and of many more obsolete words; its frequent torturing of the king's English to make a rime; its utter lack of humor, appearing in such absurd lines as, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of this ballad is found in Arndt's Murchen, Berlin, 1816. The ballad appeared first in St. Nicholas, whose young readers were advised, while smiling at the absurd superstition, to remember that bad companionship and evil habits, desires, and passions are more to be dreaded now than the Elves and Trolls who frightened ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... whom the shadow of suspicion could by any possibility fall were Lapierre and Jonathan Perry. Well, so far as the latter was concerned the idea was too absurd for serious consideration. To begin with, Jonathan was seventy-six years of age, feeble and almost decrepid. Then, he was a man of excellent character, and, notwithstanding his humble station in life, was ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... the result that it now resembles the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, and can no longer be re-arranged on the original Varronian plan. The difficulty is increased by the etymologies and explanations which they offer of the divine names, which, as a rule, are even more absurd than the divinities themselves.[338] ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... portion of aconitine to his prescriptions. The drug was a deadly one, he said, and the toxic dose was still to be determined. He could not push it in the case of a relative who trusted himself to his care. I tried to shake him in what I regarded as his absurd squeamishness—but in vain. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... of manoeuvring a balloon in a wind, and poising it in the manner suggested, is, of course, preposterous; and when one considers the attempt to aim bombs from a moving balloon high in air the case becomes yet more absurd. Any such missile would partake of the motion of the balloon itself, and it would be impossible to tell where it would strike ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... founded their families, when those ancestors would have disclaimed them as puny nonentities. Their ideas were wholly provided for them, precisely as were their clothes and every artistic thing that gave them "background." They would have made as absurd a failure of trying to evolve the one as the other. Yet they posed—and were widely accepted—as the superiors of those who made their clothes and furniture and of those who made their ideas. And she had thought Dory partly insincere, partly ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... article of food; but in this, as in all other similar instances, they are very unwilling to confess their ignorance of a thing, and rather than do so will often invent a tradition. Hence many intelligent persons have raised most absurd theories and have committed ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... don't mean that at all, and you know it! But for a great, tall fellow like you to be so unreasonably jealous of a little ten-year-old does seem absurd. I love Doodles, of course; everybody does. But, David, you ought to know that's all there is ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... so kind as to interest yourself so warmly in my favour, I cannot resist the temptation of writing you a few lines. Till these two days, I was convinced the Congress would unanimously have rescinded the absurd, shameful sentence of the court-martial; but, within these two days, I am taught to think that equity is to be put out of the question, and the decision of the affair to be put entirely on the strength of party; and, for my own part, I do not ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... the way of such an attempt comes the prompt objection that the Articles were actually drawn up against "Popery," and therefore it was transcendently absurd and dishonest to suppose that Popery, in any shape,—patristic belief, Tridentine dogma, or popular corruption authoritatively sanctioned,—would be able to take refuge under their text. This premiss I denied. Not ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Requests.—Holborn.—A case of rather a curious nature, and which was characterised rather by the absurd credulity of the parties than by its novelty, came before the Commissioners on Thursday last. A man of the name of O'Regan attended the Court, to show cause against a summons which had been issued, calling upon him to pay a debt of eighteen ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... such "history" ought to be self evident. Imagine, if you can, a brigade of infantry following Sheridan on his wild ride of "twenty miles" and then rushing to attack an army which, according to the tradition of which I have spoken, had just whipped four army corps. Of course, the statement is an absurd one. No brigade came from Winchester. No brigade could have come from Winchester; and had such a thing been possible, it would have constituted but a ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... outworn "van to van," ship to ship, dogma; but Rodney is said to have expressed himself in more emphatic terms subsequently, as follows: "During all the commands Lord Rodney has been entrusted with, he made it a rule to bring his whole force against a part of the enemy's, and never was so absurd as to bring ship against ship, when the enemy gave him an opportunity of acting otherwise." Though not distinctly so stated, it would seem that his first movement on the present occasion had failed because of the long distance between the fleets permitting the enemy to succor ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... could not believe that this laboriously written record could have been compiled for his sole benefit; and this one entry which he had lit upon by mere chance was only one of hundreds of stupid, absurd entries, most of which meant nothing at all, and which seemed more like the symptoms of a disease than the healthy productions of a ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... in the mind of man, to keep up society. And it is certain, that earnest desire has been the cause of the greatest events; and this ought to instruct us that the world stands in need of a great many instincts, which, examined according to the ideas of our reason, are ridiculous and absurd. For there is nothing so opposite to reason as to torment ourselves in this life, that we may be praised after we are dead, since neither philosophy, nor experience, nor faith, nor any thing whatsover, makes it appear, that the praises given us after death can do ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... Brissot de Warville took exception, and supplied his own picture by writing in 1791, "You have often heard me blame M. Chastellux for putting too much sprightliness in the character he has drawn of this general. To give pretensions to the portrait of a man who has none is truly absurd. The General's goodness appears in his looks. They have nothing of that brilliancy which his officers found in them when he was at the head of his army; but in conversation they become animated. He has no characteristic ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... after he came here from abroad. I have seen the little creature run furiously at the great animal when gnawing a bone, who instantly turned himself submissively over on his back, with all his legs in the air, whilst Raith, seizing the bone, would make the most absurd and unavailing attempts to bestride the enormous head of his subdued companion, with the most ludicrous affectation of the terrible growling, that might bespeak the loftiest description of dog-indignation. ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... three of the best hours of a morning; the difficulty of early rising he finds to consist less in rising early than in satisfying himself that the practice is wholesome; his mind is torn for a whole forenoon in an absurd contest with himself, whether he ought to indulge a strong wish to exercise his horse before dinner. Every page of his diary is a register of the symptoms of this unhappy disease. When the Revolution came, he was absolutely forced, by the iron necessity of the case, after certain perturbations, ...
— Burke • John Morley
... constraint seemed to have vanished, and she let it be seen that she had sincere pleasure in renewing the acquaintance. King himself began to realize how large a place the girl's image had occupied in his mind. He was not in love—that would be absurd on such short acquaintance—but a thought dropped into the mind ripens without consciousness, and he found that he had anticipated seeing Irene again with decided interest. He remembered exactly how she looked at Fortress Monroe, especially ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... well. We have two cracker jacks as guides—John Goff, my old guide on the mountain lion hunt, and Jake Borah, who has somewhat the Seth Bullock type of face. We have about thirty dogs, including one absurd little terrier about half Jack's size, named Skip. Skip trots all day long with the hounds, excepting when he can persuade Mr. Stewart, or Dr. Lambert, or me to take him up for a ride, for which he is always begging. He is most affectionate and intelligent, but when ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... that swell the big man's heart to bursting find rather absurd expression in his savage objurgation of the innocent brown charger. But Captain Bingo, when he stoops over the camp-bed where lies Beauvayse, kisses him solemnly and clumsily upon the forehead, and then goes heavily striding out of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... at hers. But certainly she was not going to quit England, not going to quit home at all, while her husband remained there, and while Mrs. Peacocke was an inmate of the school. It was not that she was jealous. The idea was absurd. But she knew very well what Mrs. Stantiloup ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... by Cardinal Paleotti. These were an Ecclesiastical History, a treatise on the Hebrew Commonwealth, and an edition of Sulpicius Severus. The MSS. were returned to him, accused of unsound doctrine, and scrawled over with such remarks as 'false,' 'absurd.'[125] ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... but the young professor had forgotten the heat and the grime of the workshop. He was wholly absorbed in the making of a nondescript machine, a sort of crude harmonica with a clock-spring reed, a magnet, and a wire. It was a most absurd toy in appearance. It was unlike any other thing that had ever been made in any country. The young professor had been toiling over it for three years and it had constantly baffled him, until, on this hot afternoon in June, 1875, he heard an almost inaudible sound—a faint TWANG—come ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... This was an absurd, ridiculous threat, for in the first place Pista, if he had really attempted to execute it, would have stifled and roasted himself before the mansion received the slightest injury, and besides, as examination afterwards proved, he had neither matches nor tinder with him; but ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... was his father's voice that he now heard, lofty and bitter reason which, though it had fled, at present came back in all sovereignty. As he had done already after Lourdes, he protested against the glorification of the absurd and the downfall of common sense. Reason alone enabled him to walk erect and firm among the remnants of the old beliefs, even amidst the obscurities and failures of Science. Ah! Reason, it was through her alone that he suffered, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... commissions. I entered into a treaty with a house in Hamburg, which I authorised, in spite of the Berlin decree, to bring cloth and leather from England. Thus I procured these articles in a sure and cheap way. Our troops might have perished of cold had the Continental system and the absurd mass of inexecutable decrees relative ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... same infatuation existed among the people there as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their confused and absurd behavior, and then by their constantly following the swarms of dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the streets, accompanied by musicians playing on bagpipes, and by innumerable spectators ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... blanket, the half of a shelter tent, and one wooden tent pole in two sections. The rifle could be used as a tent pole—so say men I talk with on the subject. On this expedition overcoats are a superfluity, and it is absurd that troops should be sent to the tropics in summer wearing exactly the same uniform they would be using throughout the winter on the frontiers of Canada. This war will, no doubt, produce a change after English models. At present the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... 'An Autobiography' at one stage of its inception, although he wished to repudiate the autobiographical nature of his story at another. Dr. Knapp in his anxiety to prove that Borrow wrote his own memoirs in Lavengro and Romany Rye tells us that he had no creative faculty—an absurd proposition. But I think we may accept the contest between Ben Brain and Thomas Borrow, and what a revelation of heredity that impressive death-bed scene may be counted. Borrow on one occasion in later life declared that his favourite hooks were the Bible and the Newgate ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... to rather an important matter. Rent. It is up to you to say how much you want; but let me give you one word of warning. Don't be absurd. You aren't dealing now with one of those profiteers who remained (with honour) in his own country. And you can have our flat in exchange, if you like—well, it isn't ours really, it's the landlord's, but we will introduce ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... represents, and it has in return enjoyed a degree of national favor never granted to any other. The object of Cervantes in writing it was, as he himself declares, "to render abhorred of men the false and absurd stories contained in books of chivalry." The fanaticism for these romances was so great in Spain during the sixteenth century, and they were deemed so noxious, that the burning of all copies extant in the country ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... so that you can say you've been, but it's very simple. It's absurd to call it a maze. You keep on taking the first turning to the right. We'll just walk round for ten minutes, and then go and get ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... particularly his "Elegies;" Thomson; "Man of Feeling"—a book I prize next to the Bible; "Man of the World;" Sterne, especially his "Sentimental Journey;" Macpherson's "Ossian," &c.; these are the glorious models after which I endeavour to form my conduct, and 'tis incongruous, 'tis absurd to suppose that the man whose mind glows with sentiments lighted up at their sacred flame—the man whose heart distends with benevolence to all the human race—he "who can soar above this little scene of things"—can he descend to mind the paltry concerns about which ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... this dark age is enough to make one feel as if among children. Want and ignorance and wars interminable had impoverished the mind of man and starved his moral nature. The scanty, slashed, ridiculous garments of the nobles and the wealthy betray an absurd poverty of taste and weakness of intellect.[49] One of the most striking characteristics of these small minds is their triviality; they are incapable of attention; they retain nothing. No one who reads the writings of the period ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... frame from a cabinet, and, with an absurd assumption of devotion, dropped a kiss on it before she gave it to Gladys. Gladys sat up, and, holding the photograph up between the light, looked at it earnestly. It was the portrait of a man in hunting dress, standing by his horse, and certainly no fault could be found with his ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... space toward the enemy ship, Emmett felt overcome with an absurd sensation of freedom. Completely surrounded by billions of motionless, pin-point stars and securely hidden by the vast blackness of space, the aliens and the problem of survival seemed ...
— No Hiding Place • Richard R. Smith
... width of all the glacial markings he discovers. On the U.S. Government maps the stream flowing through Glen Alpine basin is marked as Eau Claire Creek. To the proprietors of Glen Alpine, and the visitors, the French name is absurd and out of place. No Frenchman has ever resided here, and if it was desired to call it Clear Water Creek, why not use good, understandable, common-sense English. At the request of those most intimately concerned, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... two gods we got the chiffre, and the rebus is still to seek. In the case of Quetzalcoatl or CUKULCAN, the rebus was the means of getting the name; and if the names of this divinity had not been equivalent in the two tongues, our results would have led us to the (almost absurd) conclusion that a god of certain attributes was called by his Aztec name in ...
— Studies in Central American Picture-Writing • Edward S. Holden
... W. Hewer away home. I not sorry for it much did go to White Hall, and got my Lord Bellasses to get me into the playhouse; and there, after all staying above an hour for the players, the King and all waiting, which was absurd, saw "Henry the Fifth" well done by the Duke's people, and in most excellent habits, all new vests, being put on but this night. But I sat so high and far off, that I missed most of the words, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the Duke of Hereward! What on earth could a gentleman have to say to a charge as absurd as it was infamous, thus made upon him by a disreputable person in ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... as the writings of Moses. All the efforts between Moses and David are without regular form—a mass of rearranged tradition, both fabulous and corrupt; long after the times of David the pages of writers regarded authentic, are loaded with absurd and ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... respect? What is your influence upon young men? Do you not think it would be better for you to exercise a little self-denial! People wondered why George Briggs, Governor of Massachusetts, wore a cravat but no collar. "Oh," they said, "it is an absurd eccentricity." This was the history of the cravat without any collar: For many years before he had been talking with an inebriate, trying to persuade him to give up the habit of drinking and he said to the inebriate, "Your habit is entirely unnecessary." "Ah!" replied the inebriate, ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... cooler heads among the revolutionists, especially those who were living abroad in personal safety, had come to understand that the Socialist ideal could not be attained by popular insurrection, terrorism, or conspiracies, and consequently that further activity on the old lines was absurd. Those of them who did not abandon the enterprise in despair reverted to the idea that Autocratic Power, impregnable against frontal attacks, might be destroyed by prolonged siege operations. This change of tactics is reflected in the revolutionary ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... knowledge, what acuteness of scientific criticism, can touch this, if any one possessed of knowledge, or acuteness, could be absurd enough to make the attempt? Will the progress of research prove that justice is worthless and mercy hateful; will it ever soften the bitter contrast between our actions and our aspirations; or show us the bounds of the universe and bid us say, Go to, now we comprehend the infinite? ...
— The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature - Essay #4 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... gibbering idiocy. There are ten little boys whom you wish to provide with ten top-hats; and you find there are only eight top-hats. To a simple mind it would seem not impossible to make two more hats; to find out whose business it is to make hats, and induce him to make hats; to agitate against an absurd delay in delivering hats; to punish anybody who has promised hats and failed to provide hats. The modern mind is that which says that if we only cut off the heads of two of the little boys, they will not want hats; and then the hats will exactly go round. The suggestion that heads ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... only paper that put the news in half a column of ordinary type, took a judicial attitude, called upon the city authorities to tear down the posters, and hinted that "this absurd person, Cosmo Versal, who disgraces a once honored name with his childish attempt to create a sensation that may cause untold harm among the ignorant masses," had laid himself ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... lacked the necessary conviction. After all I was the average citizen, with the average incredulity of the far-fetched, the melodramatic, the absurd. To connect the head waiter's panic at my departure with the episode in my room, to declare that the floor clerks had been called from their posts for a set purpose, and the halls deliberately cleared ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... supporter of John Sherman's policy at any period of its crucial test. We did not believe that his gigantic experiment could be brought to a successful conclusion. The absurd currency theories which were from time to time set up in antagonism to his policy never impressed us; our disbelief was based upon our fear that the commercial and industrial wreckage, consequent upon an increase of forty per cent. in the purchasing ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... why we shouldn't participate," said another bush. "Here we are, covered with fruit, and it's all just as free as ever it was. That's absurd, after a big war. The duty of a war is to make things ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... it is no mistake," exclaimed the general, impatiently. "Look at the inscription, 'The Reward of Fidelity!' To whom should that apply but to you? Put the money in your pocket, Walter, and let us have no more absurd doubts ...
— Harper's Young People, December 30, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... makes superstition less to be wondered at, particularly amongst the vulgar; and when two facts, naturally unconnected, have been accidentally coincident, it is not singular that this coincidence should have been observed and registered, and that omens of the most absurd kind should be trusted in. In the west of England, half a century ago, a particular hollow noise on the sea-coast was referred to a spirit or goblin, called Bucca, and was supposed to foretell a shipwreck. The philosopher knows that sound travels much faster than currents in the ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... how they can, of course," said Theodora. "It is absurd to try and make any one else happy in one's own way, but oh, I hope I shall not have to pass the time like that, ever! I don't think I could ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... Wren. "Don't be silly like Turkey Proudfoot. He's making himself miserable because the Peacock has a tail that sticks up higher than his. How absurd," she cried, "to be proud like Turkey Proudfoot, just because your tail happens to stick up in the air. Why, yours and mine stick up. But we don't go around boasting about them. And if somebody else has ...
— The Tale of Turkey Proudfoot - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... cat as he spoke, which process he performed by passing his hand deliberately from her head, along her back, to the very tip of her tail, which he retained each time in his grasp for a moment, ere he recommenced operations), "I highly disapprove of the absurd practice, so common with young men of the present day, of expressing their ideas in that low and incomprehensible dialect, termed 'slang,' which, in my opinion, has neither wit nor refinement to redeem its vulgarity, and ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... appear whimsical, but which is still not without reason. He said that in his first campaigns the enemy was so well provided that when his troops were in want of supplies he had only to fall upon the rear of the enemy to procure every thing in abundance. This is a remark upon which it would be absurd to found a system, but which perhaps explains the success of many a rash enterprise, and proves how much actual ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... man. Great writer though Plato was, what he did not know of biology was eminently worth knowing, and his teaching regarding womanhood and the conditions of motherhood in the ideal city is more fantastically and ludicrously absurd than anything that can be quoted, I verily believe, from any writer of equal eminence. If, indeed, the teaching of Plato were correct, there would be no purpose in this book. If a girl is practically a boy, we are right in bringing up our girls to be boys. If a woman ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... portrait of the glaciere. The way to reach it? Go by diligence to Charvonnaz—exactly what I had determined upon—and walk up to Aviernoz, where his good friend the maire would make me see his beautiful glaciere, through the means of a letter which he went to write. It was absurd to see this hot little man sign himself 'Dugravel, glacier,' that being the style of his profession, naturally recalling the contradictory conduct of the ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... his chance, he was beside himself with joy. As to his being scared, the idea was manifestly absurd. He was as pleased with the prospect as it was possible for a man to be, and hardly able to contain himself for impatience to be off. I almost envied him his exuberant delight, for a sense of responsibility began to weigh upon me with ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... guilt of Adam and Eve to their descendants. This is the famous doctrine of imputation, which is now rejected by all the leading schools of modern Orthodoxy. That we can be guilty of Adam's sin, either by imputation or in any other way, seems too absurd and immoral a ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... funeral pyre. This opinion had its defenders and its detractors. Some said that there were too many such personages, and the price of wood would be enormously increased by such a custom; moreover, it would be absurd to see our ancestors in their urns in the procession at Longchamps. And if the urns were valuable, they were likely some day to be sold at auction, full of respectable ashes, or seized by creditors,—a race of men ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... moonlight, "I must protest against your belief that I could have been an effective candidate! I have roamed about the State, and I have made some very good friends here and there among the hill farmers, like Mr. Jenney. Mr. Redbrook is one of these. But it would have been absurd of me even to think of a candidacy founded on personal friendships. I assure you," he added, smiling, "there was no self denial in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and those of his more fortunate mates. The experiences of his first day at school were branded into his soul; and although he made friends by his bright face and kind and honest nature, scarcely a day passed during his six years of village schooling without his absurd name flying out at him from some unsuspected ambush and ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... technical knowledge of some sort, as in "Abt Vogler," where only a trained musician can fully understand the terminology. Many even of the minor poems belong to realms of thought and experience so remote that only by distinct effort do we transport ourselves thither. It would, for instance, be absurd to call "Two in the Campagna" difficult in form or phrasing, yet it narrates an experience intelligible only to those who have loved deeply but have found in the very heart of that love a baffling sense of inevitable ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... not going to be accepted by the McKelveys made Babbitt feel guilty and a little absurd. But he went more regularly to the Elks; at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon he was oratorical regarding the wickedness of strikes; and again he saw ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... great cruelties were practised to compel uniformity. To that absurd shrine many thousand invaluable lives were sacrificed. Blessed be God, that happier days have dawned upon us. Antichrist can no longer put the Christian to a cruel death. It very rarely sends one to prison for refusing obedience to human laws that interfere with religious ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... artistic temperament was all very well, but there were limits. It was absurd that obscure authors should behave in this way. Prosser! Who on earth was Prosser? Had anyone ever heard of him? No! Yet here he was going about the country clipping small boys over the ear-hole, and flinging loaves ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... and won the highest praise from thousands of grateful women. It many cases, it is well to accompany its use with alterative treatment, for which the "Golden Medical Discovery" will be found especially effective. It is an absurd practice to arrest the discharge with astringent injections alone. The weak and lax walls of the vagina, as well as the other tissues of the system, require strength, and this can be gained only by the use of general and special ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... scarcely answerable," nervously interposed Claire. "You see, you don't and the man who does—though it's all absurd, since we none of us here are the least in ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... means light-bearer. It was at first thought to be the source of all power, to heal all diseases, and to turn the common minerals into gold. Although we have long ago learned that these ideas are absurd, yet we have also learned that its real value to man is far greater than was even dreamed ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... every English tourist would be wise to avoid the place, I acknowledged that there was the genuine ring of truth in his declaration. When he appealed to me, as a dispassionate observer, to say whether I did not consider the conduct of the authorities arbitrary, unjust, and absurd, I was forced to admit that I did consider that conduct absolutely indefensible. Lastly, when he announced that he intended never to say another word in praise of Ostend, I confessed that I had come in my own mind to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... any one at this day to affirm that the two things which that Congress deliberately framed, and carried to maturity at the same time, are absolutely inconsistent with each other? And does not such affirmation become impudently absurd when coupled with the other affirmation, from the same mouth, that those who did the two things, alleged to be inconsistent, understood whether they really were inconsistent better than we—better than he who affirms that they ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... the only exception, that I can think of, of an accurate describer of species, at least in the Invertebrate Kingdom, who has disbelieved in permanent species, but he in his absurd though clever work has done the subject harm." ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... a hot rage, shapeless and wordless, but smouldering like a fire within me. The cool, green lane, deep between hedge-rows, the banks of which were gemmed with primroses, had no effect upon me just then. Tardif marry Olivia! That was an absurd, preposterous notion indeed. It required all my knowledge of the influence of dress on the average human mind, to convince myself that Olivia, in her coarse green serge dress, had impressed the people of Sark with the notion that she ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... pheasants at the start. Of these 16 were shot dead, 1 was wounded in the wing, and 7 got away. The reader may have concluded that the answer is, therefore, that "seven remained." But as they flew away it is clearly absurd to say that they "remained." Had they done so they would certainly have been killed. Must we then conclude that the 17 that were shot remained, because the others flew away? No; because the question was not ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... sir, your everlasting contradictions end by being rather absurd! You have hardly finished building up one laborious theory before you start knocking it down again. ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... it probably is the most serious, the most earnest, the least devoted to amusement, the least flippant, the least jocose,—and yet it has the face to show itself month after month to the world, with so absurd a misnomer! It is, as all who know the laws of modern literature are aware, a very serious thing to change the name of a periodical. By doing so you begin an altogether new enterprise. Therefore should the name be well chosen;—whereas this was very ill chosen, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... a noisy, lively, sociable Duck, who has in spring some pleasing notes, so mellow and musical that he may almost be said to sing; but he is not choice or dainty in his food, and the flesh is too rank for House People to eat. He has many absurd names besides ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... clinging to Him tenaciously, loyally, as no other under the sun. Oh, if martyrdom, patience, and faith in despite of trial, can confer a patent of nobility, then this people is noble beyond many another.—It would have been absurd and petty, if, as people accuse me, I had been ashamed of being a Jew. Yet it were equally ludicrous for me to call myself a Jew.—As I instinctively hold up to unending scorn whatever is evil, timeworn, absurd, false, and ludicrous, so my nature leads me to appreciate the sublime, to admire what ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... of papers, I have only one request to make of the reader, which is this: that, however absurd or incredible my statements may appear, he will take them ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... jabbering for amusement instead of putting their own hands into the dough. So our armies were beaten and we couldn't defend, our frontiers. THE MAN was no longer there. I say "the man" because that's what they called him; but it was absurd to say that he was merely a man, when he had a star of his own with all its belongings. It was the rest of us who were merely men. At the battle of Aboukir, with a single division and with a loss ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... word of objection or the least appearance of embarrassment, and delivered an original monologue supposed to be spoken by a freshman newly arrived and airing her impressions of the college. It hit everybody with its absurd humor, which no one enjoyed better, apparently, than the ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... would earn his daily bread,—that cities and countries would honor in him, not Caesar, the lord of the earth, but a poet whose like the world had not produced before. And so he struggled, raged, played, sang, changed his plan, changed his quotations, changed his life and the world into a dream absurd, fantastic, dreadful, into an uproarious hunt composed of unnatural expressions, bad verses, groans, tears, and blood; but meanwhile the cloud in the west was increasing and thickening every day. The measure was exceeded; the insane comedy was ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... baudy amusements. Where I fail to have done so, I have left description blank, rather than attempt to make a story coherent by inserting what was merely probable. I could not now account for my course of action, nor why I did this, or said that, my conduct seems strange, foolish, absurd, very frequently, that of some women, equally so, but I can but ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... know, you absurd prince, that when you played the Czardas the other night I seemed to see a vision of a Hungarian prairie, covered with fighting centaurs and satyrs! I longed to be a vivandiere among all those fauns. You were there—in the music, I mean—and you ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... captain had taken a great deal of trouble to come down several miles from the village, probably hiring Prince to put him alongside the yacht. Yet he could not help thinking that the slight uneasiness which disturbed him was very absurd. He had permitted himself to hope that the owner of the Skylark would not claim her, or, at least, would not claim her till he had the use of her for a season, the longer the better; but he felt that he had no right to hope any such thing. The yacht was a beautiful craft, and it was in the very height ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... feelings were dormant. Every emotion seemed to have been eradicated. He felt no regrets, no fears, no pain or discomfort. Even when he thought of the girl, it was as of an inhabitant of one of those remote stars at which he gazed. He remembered the absurd antics of his companion and laughed softly, yet without a feeling of mirth. Soon the daily army of milk wagons made of the city a roaring drum to which they marched. Vallance fell asleep on his ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... case, why Theology should require no specific teaching, for there is nothing to mistake about; why it is powerless against scientific anticipations, for it merely is one of them; why it is simply absurd in its denunciations of heresy, for heresy does not lie in the region of fact and experiment. I understand, in that case, how it is that the religious sense is but a "sentiment," and its exercise a "gratifying treat," for it is like the sense of the beautiful or the sublime. I ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... rare union of fineness and placidness. The table stood spread in the usual place, warmth and comfort filled every corner of the room, and Pleda began to feel as if she had been in an uncomfortable dream, which was very absurd, but from which she was very ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... the invincibility of the British Army. He had read somewhere that the German forces amounted in all to the equivalent of over three hundred divisions; he had been reliably told that the British forces in France amounted to three divisions and some cavalry. It was most absurd; but his mysticism survived the absurdity, so richly was it nourished by news from the strange, inartistic colonies, where architecture was not understood. Revelation came to George that the British Empire, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... Prussia's cavalry! And this little island of pipe-smoking, country-side philosophers and pampered, sport-loving youth—this was the country, heart of a crumbling empire, that had ordered the gray torrent of Germany to alter its course and flow back to its own confines. It was absurd. It was grotesque. It was a sporting thing to do, but would it mean the collapse of the sprawling, disjointed British Empire, linked together by a flimsy tradition ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... I paused; my imagination was reconstructing the scene of the railway carriage, and I felt a reflex of the hesitation shown by the rubicund man when he had asked the same question. "Can he ... can he talk?" It seemed so absurd a question to ask, yet it was essentially a natural question ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... The sight was most absurd. Five pretty girls, each dressed in the Glenwood blue and white, and each with a bundle of ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... statute is contrary to natural right, absolute justice, or sound morality does not authorize them to refuse it effect." The court of Washington in Fishing Co. v. George, 28 Wash. 200, held that "a statute cannot be ignored by the courts because leading in its application to absurd, incongruous, or mischievous results." A few cases may also be cited showing how relentlessly this disclaimer is applied. The court of New York in Kittinger v. Buffalo Traction Co., 160 N. Y. 377, held that the courts had no power to inquire into the ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... the countries over which Charles reigns are contributed by my provinces. Torrents of ducats inundate your treasury, and yet—yet—it's enough to drive one mad!—in spite of this and the lamentable parsimony with which the Emperor deprives himself of both great and small pleasures—it is simply absurd!—the story is always: The finances are at the lowest ebb—save and save again. To protect the plumes in his new cap from being injured by the rain, the sovereign of half the world ordered an old hat to be brought, and waited in the shower until ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... up her draperies when she came. She would not have come at all but for the fact that she had once or twice been asked if the child was growing pretty, and it would have seemed absurd to admit that she never saw her ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... It may seem absurd to include Barnacles among plants; but in the time of Shakespeare the Barnacle tree was firmly believed in, and Gerard gives a plate of "the Goose tree, Barnacle tree, or the tree bearing Geese," ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... travelled? The brute-force method is to simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is clearly very stupid in that it considers even obviously absurd routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San Francisco and New York, in that order). For very small N it works well, but it rapidly becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N 15, there are already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to consider, and for N 1000 ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... inclined to share her opinion, after watching Bony perform. The pig walked up and down before them in the absurd costume, twirling the parasol and bowing to each in turn as ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... believe that they are injured persons instead of transgressors, which is, in our opinion, wrong, and has a bad tendency." Is not the writer here a little muddled? or would he hold up these reformers as so absurd a set as to think of reforming men by making them believe they are good already and really sinned against? Indeed, would not the labors of such men of straw be bad? True, the writer pretends to found his objections to ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... gravely, "and they have led you admirably in this case. But in face of three facts, the failure of the detective, the declaration of Mr. Dillon, and your failure to recognize your husband after five years, it would be absurd to persist in the belief that this young man is your husband. Moreover there are intrinsic difficulties, which would tell even if you had made out a good case for the theory. No Endicott would take up intimate connection with the ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... me, kindly, and as he spoke all my views changed. It suddenly seemed that I had been absurd to refuse the orders sent me. They seemed right and reasonable and even more lenient than would have been justified.... I left The Leader in a state in which I could not possibly fail to do anything he wished. From that moment I obeyed ...
— The Leader • William Fitzgerald Jenkins (AKA Murray Leinster)
... attendants, most of whom carried hawks on their "fists" as a present to Charles. The strangeness of this sight caused the mob to jeer, upon which the diarist characteristically remarks, "but lord! to see the absurd nature of Englishmen that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at every thing that looks strange." Later on he makes a note of having seen the ambassador's retinue at York House engaged in a manner that does not speak well ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... find some words of soothing and encouragement to say to the child, such as she had heard Melissa Davis use; but she could not. They were not a part of her life's vocabulary. Several times she had essayed to speak, but the sentences that formed in her mind seemed so absurd and awkward that ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Bengal would studiously conceal their faces, no trouble whatever of the kind is taken here. They are possibly Mahrattas, which will account for their carelessness; but I could wish that, with superior freedom from absurd restraint, they had preserved greater ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... point which I might argue without fear of defeat, namely, the cabman's statement that I gave him this bad piece of money. Suppose every cabman who took me a shilling fare were to drive away and return presently with a bad coin and an assertion that I had given it to him! This would be absurd and mischievous; an encouragement of vice amongst men who already are subject to temptations. Being homo, I think if I were a cabman myself, I might sometimes stretch a furlong or two in my calculation of distance. But don't come TWICE, my man, and tell me I ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ground could you procure such a thing to be done?—a vagrant, is he? What! he a vagrant, a wanderer, who refuses to budge? It is because he will not be a vagrant, then, that you seek to count him as a vagrant. That is too absurd. No visible means of support: there I have him. Wrong again: for indubitably he does support himself, and that is the only unanswerable proof that any man can show of his possessing the means so to do. No more, then. Since he will not quit me, I must quit him. I ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... London, I went to St. James's Church last Sunday, and there opposite me sat my beauty of the Wells. Her behavior during the whole service was so pert, languishing, and absurd; she flirted her fan, and ogled and eyed me in a manner so indecent, that I was obliged to shut my eyes, so as actually not to see her, and whenever I opened them beheld hers (and very bright they are) still staring at me. I fell in with her afterwards at ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... Caroline's arrival at Friendly Bay we should have to understand Aunt Caroline, and that, as Euclid says, is absurd. Therefore we shall have to take the arrival for granted. The only light which she herself ever shed upon the matter was a statement that she "had a feeling." And feelings, to Aunt Caroline, were the only reliable things in a strictly unreliable world. To follow a feeling across ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... reason in the world why the allegorical and the real should not go together, provided, of course, they don't grossly conflict and become absurd. What the artist is always working for is the effect of beauty. If a picture is beautiful, no matter how the beauty is achieved, it deserves recognition as a work of art. In these murals Du Mond has tried to reach as closely as he could to nature without ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... how should his sister be avenged? There is nothing more difficult for a man than the redressing of injuries done to a woman who is very near to him and very dear to him. The whole theory of Christian meekness and forgiveness becomes broken to pieces and falls to the ground, almost as an absurd theory, even at the idea of such wrong. What man ever forgave an insult to his wife or an injury to his sister, because he had taught himself that to forgive trespasses is a religious duty? Without an argument, without a moment's ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... COTTON—whom, notwithstanding all that the sage must have disapproved in his life, he honoured with the title of son. Nothing like this, however has the biographer of Burns accomplished; and, with his means of information, copious as in some respects they were, it would have been absurd to attempt it. The only motive, therefore, which could authorize the writing and publishing matter so ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... diversions was killing his people. Such slaughter as the kaiser has effected consists in twenty-five thousand head of game. The career of Caligula is horrible, yet in the horrible is sometimes the sublime. The career of the kaiser has been theatrical, and in the theatrical is always the absurd. The single parallel between the two lies in the fact that all young emperors stand on a peak so lofty that, do they look below, vertigo rises, while from above delirium comes. There is nothing astonishing in that. It would be astonishing were it otherwise. What does astonish is the equilibrium ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, an inimitable satire on the feebleness of our jury system and the absurd pretence of "temporary insanity," must wait for that encyclopaedia. And her "Miss Molony on the Chinese Question" is known and admired by every one, including the Prince of Wales, who was fairly convulsed by its fun, when ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... It deals with the absurd, the ridiculous, not with the physically impossible. Though not in itself probable, all its actions proceed just as though the basis on which it is worked out ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... that's enough. Of course she's all right. Don't let's get absurd. I can't understand it, ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... reading finished, when questions put to the ministers from all parts of the hall instantly threw the deliberations of the assembly into confusion. All the deputies, who had risen, addressed to them at once questions as absurd as they were arrogant, and were astonished, indignant, that they did not satisfy ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... English. Their most sweeping denunciations of the iniquity of the opium traffic elicited a murmur of approval from the most influential among the foreigners. No European stood up to say that their allegations as to the evil of using opium were baseless and absurd. What is more, no one thought it. Had the Chinese made sufficient use of this identity of views, and shown a desire to facilitate trade in the so-called innocent and legitimate articles, there is little doubt that the opium traffic would have been reduced to very small dimensions, because ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... aware of that, Dona Luisa, and glad to say my orders enable me to comply with your wishes, and that you remain here till Don Ignacio returns. I'm enjoined to see to your safe keeping—a very absurd requirement, but one which often falls to the lot of the soldier as ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... the Blessed Virgin. The Greeks have an oratory opposite to the Holy Sepulchre, in which they have set up a globe, representing, as they are pleased to imagine, the centre of the earth; thus transferring from Delphi to Jerusalem the absurd notions of the pagan priests of antiquity relative to the figure of the habitable world. After this he enters a dark narrow staircase, which, by about twenty steps, carries him to Mount Calvary. "This," exclaims Dr. ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... still in the saddle, too. It was hard for Skipper to stand there and see those mincing cobs go by, their pad-housings all a-glitter, crests on their blinders, jingling their pole-chains and switching their absurd little stubs of tails. But it was still more tantalizing to watch the saddle-horses canter past in the soft bridle path on the other side of the roadway. But then, when you are on the force you must ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... excited the ragged Condottieri who followed the fated footsteps of the "gray-eyed man of Destiny," in the wild hope of plunder and power,—nor with the vague reverie in which fanatical theorists construct impossible Utopias on the absurd framework of Icarias or Phalansteries. His clear, bold, and thoroughly executive mind planned a magnificent scheme of commercial enterprise, which, having its centre of operations at Guaymas, should ramify through the golden wastes that stretch in silence and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... know, or did not understand. You could blunder along with such a companion to your heart's content. Such had been his belief until now, with a dozen words, Ted saw his father shatter the illusion. No, of course Mr. Laurie would never come to the shack. It had been absurd to think it for a moment. And even if he did, it would only be as a lofty and unapproachable spectator. Mr. Fernald's words were a subtly designed flattery intended to put him in good humor because he ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... House of Levi," of which I give a reproduction opposite page 176. Veronese is not a great favourite of mine; but there is a blandness and aristocratic ease and mastery here that are irresistible. As an illustration of scripture it is of course absurd; but in Venice (whose Doges, as we have seen, had so little humour that they could commission pictures in which they were represented on intimate terms with the Holy Family) one is accustomed to that. As a fine massive arrangement ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... serve, a kind friend in West 22d St., Mrs. Hanford Smith, gave us the use of her parlors for our meeting. A more gloomy committee has been seldom seen. "Have you a room for a library?" was asked. "No." "Any money?" "No." "Any books?" "No." "Absurd! How do you expect to start such a work?" "On faith." Next a vote was taken whether to organize or not. It was decided to organize. Mr. Edward Chichester was elected president, Mr. Edward Vanderbiit secretary, and Mr. E. P. Pitcher to the very responsible position of ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... He was all attention in an instant. The alley door closed softly. He sprang to the corner of the brick store. The next moment two men brushed by him, and one seemed to have something under his arm. It must be that box! So they were going to remove the treasure. Why call Tom now? It would be absurd—the men would get away with the box and never be found again. No, he would stick to their wake and follow them; he would trust to the darkness for security from discovery. So communing with himself, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... by filling up the gaps of missing syllables with pauses or prolongations of the voice in reading. In rapid, abrupt, and passionate dialogue this is possible, but in passages of continuously level speech it is barbarously absurd. I do not believe that any of our old dramatists has knowingly left us a single imperfect verse. Seeing in what a haphazard way and in how mutilated a form their plays have mostly reached us, we should attribute such faults ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... a moment to my excellent academician friend, M. Dupaty, whose acquaintance I had made in the most absurd fashion. In the palmy days of the warlike enthusiasm of the Citizen Guard the worthy Dupaty was a captain in the 1st battalion of the 2nd Legion, commanded by Commandant Talabot. One evening, when he was on ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... intellectual attitude was over, usage robbed it of the first quaint effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in direct relation to that rightness, absurd. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... that, on the morning when the princess had walked through the streets before making holiday on the river Gilguerillo had seen her from his window, and had straightway fallen in love with her. Of course he felt quite hopeless. It was absurd to imagine that the apothecary's nephew could ever marry the king's daughter; so he did his best to forget her, and study harder than before, till the royal proclamation suddenly filled him with hope. When he was free he no longer spent the precious moments poring ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... frequented its parlour merely to touch the hand of the great heavyweight of other days, however much he was faded and all his glories past. Then would Uncle Mo give a sketch of his celebrated scrap with Bob Brettle, which ended in neither coming to Time, simultaneously. Mo would complain of an absurd newspaper report of the fight, which said the Umpires stopped the fight. "No such a thing!" said Uncle Mo. "I stopped Bob and he stopped me, fair and square. And there we was, come to grass, and stopping there." Perhaps the old boy was dreaming ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... braided man had completed this strange tale Dorothy nearly laughed, because it was all so absurd; but the Wizard tapped his forehead significantly, to indicate that he thought the poor man was crazy. So they politely bade him good day, and went back to the outer ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... Wollaston stole a furtive glance at Miss Slome, which was an absurd parody on a glance of a man under similar circumstances, and Miss Slome, who had had experience in ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... young and strong and vigorous, full of physical and intellectual life, would soon cease to be; could not believe that those twelve commonplace unimaginative-looking men who sat in the box could condemn him to die. It was so absurd, so foolish. Then he remembered his little passage of arms with the judge, and he wondered what Mary Bolitho would say. He did not realise her presence at the time, but now it all came back to him. His words had been polite enough, and yet his ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... physical beauty far too much, as most painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd vanity. Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill conscience, and at that moment kills himself. Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of life. He finds that those who reject the battle are more deeply wounded than ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... such direct assertions as these of Luther's, which would with the vast majority of Christians have raised it into an article of faith, are to be found in either Testament. That the 'Ob' and 'Oboth' of Moses are no authorities for this absurd superstition, has been unanswerably shewn by ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in the yellow peril, though not, of course, in its absurd form of a military nightmare. The pressure of population is the irresistible force of history. It depends, of course, upon parenthood, and more especially upon motherhood and therefore upon womanhood. At present the motherhood of the yellow races is sober. If it remains so, and ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... club?" What was he getting out of rebellion? Misery and shame—the shame of being treated as an offensive small boy by a ragamuffin like Ida Putiak! And yet—Always he came back to "And yet." Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... reading aloud to his nephew, who, mildly bored by King Philip's war, was mildly amused by the spectacle the baronet presented, and surprised to see that their fellow-travellers thought it an excellent joke. A loud "Haw! haw!" and many convulsive titters testified their appreciation of the absurd contrast between Sir Robert's highly-respectable head, his grave, absorbed air, and the remarkable way in which he was finished off below the ears; but he read on and on, in his round, agreeable voice, unconscious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... get dogged,—to shows signs of very bad nature. Knowing this was most unprofitable to him I yielded indulgence. To be good-natured in cases of Emergency is a most valuable trait; and to whip a man for being ill-tempered, when nothing can be made at it, is most absurd. ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... 'Expatiating his offence' in a lunatic asylum. But their name is legion. How many a man, perhaps, 'father of a family, member of the church, and doing a snug business,' hears every day or two 'positively and without joking or exaggeration, the most perfectly absurd and ridiculous thing, he ever heard in all ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... at the gate had attracted the tormentors, and Ambrose found his uncle leaning against the wall alone. He looked thin and wan, the light was gone out of his black eyes, and his countenance was in sad contrast to his gay and absurd attire. He scarcely cheered up when his nephew spoke to him, though he was glad to hear of Perronel. He said he knew not when he should see her again, for he had been unable to secure his suit of ordinary garments, so that even if the King came to London, or if he could elude the other ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... enables the wood to ripen perfectly. It has never received winter protection thus far, either in this region or in Michigan, where it is largely raised, but it may be found necessary to shield it somewhat in some localities. It is both absurd and dishonest to claim perfection for a fruit, and the Cuthbert, especially as it grows older and loses something of its pristine vigor, will, probably, like all other varieties, develop faults and weaknesses. We cannot too much deprecate the arrogant spirit often manifested in ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... Keith, in his usual pompous fashion. "Do put down that absurd tray and let people help themselves. Listen to me for a moment. How do you like this place? I am not asking out of vulgar curiosity; I am anxious to know the impressions of a person of your age and antecedents. You might collect them for me, will ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the tremulous voice of the minister had begun the service, and there was so much weeping that the preacher could say but little. Poor Mrs. Plausaby was nearly heart-broken. Nothing could have been more pathetic than her absurd mingling for two days of the sincerest grief and an anxious questioning about her mourning-dress. She would ask Isa's opinion concerning her veil, and then sit down and cry piteously the next minute. And now she was hopeless and utterly disconsolate at the loss of her little Katy, but wondering ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... that swallowed up the solid and charming house and the comfortable family existence, as she glanced at that face at once strange and familiar to her. 'Is it all right?' she kept thinking. 'Is John all that he seems? I wonder whether he has ever committed murder.' Yes, even this absurd thought, which she knew to ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... be the essential distinction between buyers and sellers, the one class being necessarily in some degree dependent on the other. When he proposes to fix prices 'which would allow a moderate gain,' and to regulate trade in several minute particulars, we must remember that this is by no means so absurd in a city consisting of 5040 citizens, in which almost every one would know and become known to everybody else, as in our own vast population. Among ourselves we are very far from allowing every man to charge what he pleases. Of many things the prices are ...
— Laws • Plato
... preferred to a first class with solitude. You know that he came into his uncle's money a little time ago, and after a first delirious outbreak, he has now relapsed into that dead heavy state of despair which is caused by having everything which one can wish for. How absurd are the ambitions of life when I think that I, who am fairly happy and as keen as a razor edge, should be struggling for that which I can see has brought neither profit nor happiness to him! And yet, if I can read my own nature, it is not the accumulation of money which is my real aim, ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... objection to a burial rate into their ears. Recollect, our two great weapons—like those of all good old anti-reformers—are cant and clamor. Keep up the same cry against the Bill perseveringly, no matter how thoroughly it may be refuted or proved absurd. Literally, make the greatest noise in opposition to it that you are able, especially at public meetings. There, recollect a groan is a groan, and a hiss a hiss, even though proceeding from a goose. On all such occasions do your utmost to create a disturbance, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... adore the husband who gave me his hand when I was poor and unfortunate. Every step you take adds to the glory of the name I bear. Yet this is the moment which has been selected for persuading you that I no longer love you! Surely nothing can be more wicked and absurd than the conduct of those who are about you, and are jealous of your ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... himself into the belief that he was an ill-used martyr, Alice a most unreasonable woman, and Tabitha a wicked fury. Having no principles himself, that any one else should have them was both unnecessary and absurd in his eyes. He simply could not imagine the possibility of a woman caring so much for the precepts or the glory of God, that she was ready for their sakes to ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... your brave fellows have been the means of preserving us both from a very terrible fate; and, as I have said, you shall not find me ungrateful. I am not going to give my unconditional consent to Inez's marriage with you—not yet at least, that would be rather too absurd. You are both—and you, especially, Leo—far too young to seriously contemplate marriage for some years to come; moreover, you are at present merely a midshipman; you still have your way to make in the noble profession you have chosen to follow. I have not the slightest ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... highest intellectual powers, and proving by their lives and their deaths that they are ready to make every sacrifice for the sake of religion, should suffer themselves to be imposed upon in so momentous a subject, should willingly accept as true a series of absurd fabrications, whose falsehood they might detect by the exercise of any ordinary acuteness, and should risk their reputation with the world by professing to believe these fictions. If we are sincere in our faith, it is impossible to suppose us so willing ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... Mr Frewen say that, and wondered what he meant. For it did seem absurd that he should come slowly up to me till his eyes were looking close into mine, and then gradually shrink away again till he was right off on the other side of the ship, and then over the bulwarks and away at sea, ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... may be gradually increased; this is necessary after the second month, when three parts of milk to one of water may be allowed. But there must be no change in the kind of diet if the health of the child is good, and its appearance perceptibly improving. Nothing is more absurd than the notion, that in early life children require a variety of food; only one kind of food is prepared by nature, and it is impossible to transgress this law without ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... Gallienne admits that in some respects "such a book as Whitman's Leaves of Grass is more helpful than The New Testament—for it includes more." Why then all this chatter about Christ? Can we ever be united on a question of personality? Is it not absurd, and worse than absurd, to thrust this object of contention into the arena where the forces of light should be fighting, like one man, the strong and disciplined ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... two thousand years had time to invent and improve everything; and a play could have had its natural length then. It would not have been necessary to crowd the whole history of Macbeth, from his youth to his old age, into an absurd epitome of three hours. One cannot trace a touch of real human nature in any actor's delineation of that very interesting Scotchman, because the actor always comes on the stage as if he were the same age when he murdered Duncan, and when, in his sear and ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... go the documents will certainly be published; and you can see the absurd and ridiculous position in which that will place us in the eyes of the public. Well, at this very moment, you ask for the release of Arsene Lupin, a release which would be illegal, uncalled for, and inexcusable. I am obliged, therefore, to refuse ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... a daughter insisted on marrying! Here he was, ubiquitous as Satan! And—bless his soul again! there was the minx, Jenny! looking as if the place was her own! The silly tears in her eyes too!—It was all too absurd! He had just been dreaming of his dead wife, and clearly that was it! he was not ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... went from Margaret's cheek for an instant. The statement was too horrible and sudden not to startle her, but it was also too absurd to have more than an instant's effect. Her quick recovery of herself reassured Mr. Slocum. Would she meet Mr. Taggett's specific charges with the like fortitude? Mr. Slocum himself had been prostrated by them; he prayed to Heaven that Margaret might have more strength ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... threaten. There's her point of view to be considered: silly, crazy; but one sees it. We are not sure that she struck a blow at Craye or Creckholt. I wonder she never wrote. She was frightened, when she came to manage her property, of signing her name to anything. Absurd, that sending of Jarniman! However, it's her move; we make a corresponding disposition ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... authority to impose—that Texas should not annex herself to any other power—but this could not detract in any degree from the recognition which Mexico then made of her actual independence. Upon this plain statement of facts, it is absurd for Mexico to allege as a pretext for commencing hostilities against the United States that Texas is still a part of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk
... "et ce est mout scue chouse"; Pauthier's Text, "mais il est moult cele" The latter seems absurd. I have no doubt that scue is correct, and is an Italianism, saputo having sometimes the sense of prudent or judicious. Thus P. della Valle (II. 26), speaking of Shah Abbas: "Ma noti V.S. i tiri di questo re, saputo insieme e bizzarro," "acute ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... sat musing, The Art World still in his hand, Warburton could hear his friend's voice ring out that audacious vow. He could remember, too, the odd little pang with which he heard it, a half spasm of altogether absurd jealousy. Of course the feeling did not last. There was no recurrence of it when he heard that Franks had again seen Miss Elvan before she left Ashtead; nor when he learnt that the artist had been spending a day or two at ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... within the limits of probability that she had been bold enough to join the party in the smoking-room? The bare idea was absurd. ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... be absurd," and he looked over his spectacle tops, as if he had found the remark in his paper, "for parents to oppose the marriages their children choose to make, and I beg you to understand that I may oppose, not resist Ben. You ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... some of the police regulations are, others are very absurd. If a person is wounded or otherwise injured, no one may go near him; for, if the wounded man should die, the person who went to help him would be carried off to prison, and certainly be tried for the murder. An acquaintance told ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... the Reformation the English nation had been distracted with religious disputes, and divided into contending parties. One part of the people adhered to the old superstitious system of the Romish church, and strictly observed all the absurd tenets and practices of that establishment. Another party, of which the church of England was composed, seceded several steps from popery, but maintained the hierarchy in its full power and authority. The third sect were Puritans, who had imbibed such high notions of civil ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... relates to this passage of that famous impostor, and bears some affinity to the subject we are now upon. A sultan of Egypt, who was an infidel, used to laugh at this circumstance in Mahomet's life, as what was altogether impossible and absurd: but conversing one day with a great doctor in the law, who had the gift of working miracles, the doctor told him he would quickly convince him of the truth of this passage in the history of Mahomet, if he would consent to do what he should desire of him. Upon this the sultan was ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... testament, should offer his assertion as sufficient evidence of the validity of the will. And, even were not such a circular, or rather rotatory, argument, that the infallibility of the Bible is testified by the infallible Church, whose infallibility is testified by the infallible Bible, too absurd for serious consideration, it remains permissible to ask, Where and when the Church, during the period of its infallibility, as limited by Anglican dogmatic necessities, has officially decreed the "actual historical truth of all records" in the Old Testament? Was Augustine heretical ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... is also because it haunts and exasperates me, because I have long since condemned it.... As I have often said to you, one cannot imagine anything more preposterous than Paris, our great Paris, crowned and dominated by this temple raised to the glorification of the absurd. Is it not outrageous that common sense should receive such a smack after so many centuries of science, that Rome should claim the right of triumphing in this insolent fashion, on our loftiest height in the full sunlight? The priests want Paris to repent and do penitence for its liberative ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... authority, are hard to be effected, and not seldom generations come and go without effecting them. The republics of Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Harrington, as the communities of Robert Owen and M. Cabet, remain Utopias, not solely because intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but chiefly because they are innovations, have no support in experience, and require for their realization the modes of thought, habits, manners, character, life, which only their introduction and realization can supply. So to be able to execute the design of passing ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... and that men have often appeared after their death. This I think very remarkable. He was so pressed with the matter of fact which he could not have the confidence to deny, that he was forced to account for it by one of the most absurd unphilosophical notions that was ever started. He tells us, That the surfaces of all bodies are perpetually flying off from their respective bodies, one after another; and that these surfaces or thin cases, that included each other whilst they were joined in the body like the coats of an ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... smiling, and putting his hand on his father's shoulder with indulgent patronage] Really, my dear father, it is impossible to be angry with you. You don't know how absurd all this sounds to ME. You are very properly proud of having been industrious enough to make money; and it is greatly to your credit that you have made so much of it. But it has kept you in circles where you are valued for your money and deferred to ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... well-built savages, whose belief in clothing went as far as a little apron; and one of them had his hair carefully twisted, and tied up into an absurd-looking pigtail, which stood straight up from the back ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... comparison with the natives of the country; or, in other words, he considered the American as an animal inferior to the parent stock, and viewed all his notions of military service, in particular, as undigested and absurd. A more impracticable subject, therefore, could not well have offered for the purpose of Mabel, and yet she felt obliged to lose no time in putting ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... only—which would be intelligible enough—but Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite as well. Why? Mr. Ablewhite's explanation is, that they acted on blind suspicion, after seeing him accidentally speaking to Mr. Luker. Absurd! Half-a-dozen other people spoke to Mr. Luker that morning. Why were they not followed home too, and decoyed into the trap? No! no! The plain inference is, that Mr. Ablewhite had his private interest in the 'valuable' ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... replied her brother; "you say that Lina is absurd so as to say that Benito is absurd to ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... dream of, and desired no communion of feeling with that madman who had left Caermaen some few hours before. He felt he had made a fool of himself, he was ashamed to think of the fatuity of which he had been guilty, such boiling hatred was not only wicked, but absurd. A man could do no good who put himself into a position of such violent antagonism against his fellow-creatures; so Lucian rebuked his heart, saying that he was old enough to know better. But he remembered that he had sweeter things to dream of; there was a secret ecstasy that he treasured ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... great authority. One of their maxims was: "It is a worse offence to teach things contrary to the ordinances of the scribes than to teach things contrary to the written law." Naturally their attempt to anticipate by definite regulations each individual problem led them to absurd extremes and in time obscured the real intent of the older laws, but the spirit which actuated it was progressive. They also did not hesitate to accept the growing popular belief in angels and spirits. Like the earlier prophets, they recognized the presence of Jehovah directing ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the most resolute composure of countenance, and, except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner in ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... come that right feeling which we naturally call a good understanding. The common blood, and still more the common language, are fatal instruments of misapprehension. Let them give up trying to understand us, still more thinking that they do, and acting in various absurd ways as the necessary consequence, for they will never arrive at that devoutly-to-be-wished consummation till they learn to look at us as we are and not as they suppose us to be. Dear old long-estranged ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... Symbolism rather than realism was the controlling element of archaic decoration. Thus, while objects of beauty, like flowers and leaves, were rarely depicted, and human forms are most absurd caricatures, most careful attention was given to minute details of symbolism, or idealized animals unknown ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... spoke of, though less openly absurd than this one, is really quite as false. It consists of a vague idea that, for some reason or other, happiness can never be distributed in an equal measure to all, unless it be not only equal in degree but also the same in kind; and that the one kind that can be thus ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... without its illustrations in history, to "decorate with legend" the early history of great men. In reply, it may be enough here to say that legends analogous to the pagan legends of the births of heroes, false and absurd legends, did gather round the infancy of Jesus Christ. The Apocryphal Gospels are full of such legends. They tell us how the idols of Egypt fell down before Him; how His swaddling-clothes worked miracles; and how He made clay birds and turned boys into kids, and worked ...
— The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord - A paper read (in substance) before the confraternity of the Holy - Trinity at Cambridge • B. W. Randolph
... may, and (as a matter of fact) does abound in false Churches, just as it abounds in false deities; but, this is rendered possible only because they are false. Two or more true Churches involve a contradiction in terms. Such a condition of things is as intrinsically absurd, and as unthinkable, as two or more true Gods—as well talk of two or more multiplication tables! No! There can be but "One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism". If several Churches all teach the true doctrine ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... in 1859, Proudhon was pardoned two years later by a special act. He did not wish to take advantage of this favor, and seemed resolved to remain in Belgium until the 2d of June, 1863, the time when he was to acquire the privilege of prescription, when an absurd and ridiculous riot, excited in Brussels by an article published by him on federation and unity in Italy, induced him to hasten his return to France. Stones were thrown against the house in which he lived, in the Faubourg d'Ixelles. After having placed his wife and daughters in safety among ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... death! Sissy waiting for him at Ashendale, and no money to pay for a railway-ticket! It would have been absurd if it had not been horrible. What had he to sell or pawn? By the time he could go to Bellevue street and return would not the shops be shut? It was a quarter to nine already. He did not even know where any pawnbroker lived, nor what he could take to him, and the time was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... (taking his sword). They shall. You've wronged me, Ulric, More with your unkind thoughts than sword: I would The last were in my bosom rather than The first in yours. I could have borne yon noble's 300 Absurd insinuations—ignorance And dull suspicion are a part of his Entail will last him longer than his lands— But I may fit him yet:—you have vanquished me. I was the fool of passion to conceive That I could cope with you, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... to his feet, very much astonished; his cheek tingling, his self-love stung to the quick. But he was too experienced in such affairs to indulge any tragical emotions on the occasion. He stared at her for a minute, with an expression of absurd bewilderment. There was no very graceful exit from the undignified predicament to which he had, like a simpleton, reduced himself. Recovering his self-possession, however, he broke into a cold ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... seventy years old!" replied Mrs. Polly, drawing up her neck as far as its limited length would permit. "And now you can understand why I laughed, sir; for it did look a little absurd to hear a bird of your tender years speaking of a history. Think what mine must be, and what I must have come through and ...
— The Cockatoo's Story • Mrs. George Cupples
... all the governments of the world are approvingly ordained of God, and that the powers that be in the United States, in Russia, in Turkey, are in accordance with his will, is no less absurd than impious. It makes the impartial Author of our existence unequal and tyrannical. It cannot be affirmed that the powers that be in any nation are actuated by the spirit or guided by the example of Christ in the treatment of ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... time was consumed in arguing with them. But the sect of the anti-vaccinators had arisen, and was to some extent organized. Caricatures, lampoons, scurrilities, vulgarities and misrepresentations, the mean, were scattered on all sides. Nothing was too absurd to be stated or believed—that vaccinated persons had their faces grow like oxen, that they coughed like cows, bellowed like bulls and became hairy on the body. One omniscient objector declared that, "vaccination was ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... corner of the table was separated from the rest of the party as by a cloud which intercepted the absurd remarks, the hoarse laughter, the boasting. Frantz and Desiree talked together in undertones, hearing naught of what was said around them. Things that happened in their childhood, anecdotes of the neighborhood, a whole ill-defined past which ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... go to school any more! Why, Keith, what an absurd idea! Of course you've got to go ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... know it. Jeff's case is ancient history. We can't do anything practical about it, so what we want is to agitate—agitate—until he leaves his absurd plaything—carrots, is it, or summer squash?—and gets into business in a civilised way. The man's a genius, if only his mind wakes up. Let him think we're going to spread the necklace story far and wide, let him see Esther about to be hauled before ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... mocassined feet rest on prairie grass or frozen snow-drift; but this picture of the black-coated Metis playing the part of Europe's great soldier in the garb of a priest and the shoes of a savage looked simply absurd. At length M. Riel appeared to think he had enough of the interview, for stopping in front of ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... impatiently. "I never heard of anything so utterly absurd. Why, in the name of common-sense, should he object to showing me the way out of his old cave? One would think that ordinary humanity—But boys are such heartless young beggars that there's no such thing as appealing to their sympathies. ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... Kennion, I've known her less than a fortnight! It's bad enough for a man to fall in love in that absurd length of time, but I wouldn't ask a girl to marry me on two weeks' acquaintance. It would simply ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... best," I murmured. "The June sunshine and the lightning have thrown considerable light on my future. I said to Emily Warren, 'What could I have done without you in this emergency?' With still greater emphasis I feel like asking, What would life be without you? It seems absurd that one person should become essential to the life of another in a few brief hours. And yet, why absurd? Is it not rather in accord with the deepest and truest philosophy of life? Is the indissoluble union of two lives ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... years after his death they still prayed before the tomb of the saint. A miraculous vision was propagated by fanaticism or fraud: and the Christian hero appeared on a milk-white steed, brandishing his lance against the Pagans of Bulgaria: "An absurd fable," says the Catholic historian, "since Copronymus is chained with the daemons in the abyss ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... of fictitious superiority. Your Lordship will not question the grand principle on which this inquiry set out; I look upon it, then, as my duty to try the propriety of these distinctions by that criterion, and think it will be no difficult task to prove that these separations among mankind are absurd, impolitic, and immoral. Considering hereditary nobility as a reward for services rendered to the State—and it is to my charity that you owe the permission of taking up the question on this ground—what services can a man render to the State adequate to such a compensation that ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... at once stopped the supplies he considered himself entitled to expect. A claim of I do not know how many millions was at once made on the Egyptian Government. A commissioner was sent out, who it appears took a very different view of the question, as he declared the "Comte's" pretensions absurd and unreasonable. The Comte soon afterwards, with his wife, returned to Nice, leaving at Kassala the remnant of his European army; the few who had not succumbed to fever or ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
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