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More "Unreason" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... correspond to the law of the relative distances of the planets in approach to their central sun, wakes in him that hope of a central Will, which alone can justify one ecstatic throb at any seeming loveliness of the universe. For without the hope of such a centre, delight is unreason—a mockery not such as the skeleton at the Egyptian feast, but such rather as a crowned corpse at a feast of skeletons. Life without the higher glory of the unspeakable, the atmosphere of a God, is not life, is not worth living. He would rather cease to be, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... the right lay the sea, sometimes at full tide, sometimes withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for the same sea. By that road he would travel over a swell of rising ground covered with short, withered grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason. Beyond the ridge, which was crowned with some sort of street-lamp, anything was possible; but up to the lamp it seemed to him that he knew the road as well as he knew the parade-ground. He learned to look forward to the place; for, once there, he was sure ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... thus presents itself to reason as a problem which demands solution no less than the origin of the planets. All the properties and laws of the nebula require to be accounted for. What origin are we to give them? It must be either reason or unreason. We may go back as far as we please, but, at every step and stage of the regress we must find ourselves confronted with the same question, the same alternative—intelligent purpose ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... inapplicable to vessels licensed under the act of Congress to engage in the coasting trade;[842] as was also a Louisiana statute ordering masters and wardens of the port of Orleans to survey the hatches of all vessels arriving there and to enact a fee for so doing.[843] "The unreason and the oppressive character of the act" was held to take it out of the class of local legislation protected by the rule of the Cooley case.[844] Likewise, while control by a State of navigable waters wholly ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... as those of the famous Feliciano de Silva's composition, for their lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found passages like "the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty;" or again, "the high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your greatness deserves." Over conceits of this sort the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... sometimes latent and sometimes flagrant, that would deprive him, too, of his place among these great masters of free and exuberant farce. Diderot, at any rate, must rank in the second class among those who have attempted to tread a measure among the whimsical zigzags of unreason. The sincere sentimentalist makes a ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... so. He tells me that whereas most men make the mistake of putting down womanly unreason to the score of their having too much heart, he puts it down to their having no heart at all, which he says is so mad a state that they are ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... has heard of the matchless "Lord of Misrule" (also known as the "Abbot of Unreason" and the "Master of Merry Disports"), who, attended by his mock court, king's jester and grotesquely masked revelers, visited the castles of lords and princes to entertain them with strange antics and uproarious merriment. His reign lasted until Twelfth Night, during which period he was ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... for the destruction of an unfortunate man; of one who was gentle, and good, and virtuous, and honourable. And yet, as we look more closely into the pages of history, do we not find that fatality distils her poison from the victim's own wavering feebleness, his own trivial duplicity, blindness, unreason, and vanity? And if it be true that some kind of predestination governs every circumstance of life, it appears to be no less true that such predestination exists in our character only; and to modify character must surely be easy to the man of unfettered ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... done by Peter the world knows by heart. The world knows well how he tore his way out of the fetichism of his time; how, despite ignorance and unreason, he dragged his nation after him; how he dowered the nation with things and thoughts that transformed it from a petty Asiatic horde to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... treasures pressed close to them. Stuffy bedrooms lined with hints of Sabbatical horror, strewn with bizarre refuse; musty smelling books out of whose pages fantastic shapes rear themselves against the gaslights, macabre worlds in which unreason rides like a headless D'Artagnan; evenings in the park arguing suddenly with startled strangers on the existence of the philosophers' stone or the astrological causes of influenza—these form a background for the curious men whom the rain has drifted ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... mortification. It was not, said her heart, that the thing itself was so dear to her; it was only that David ought to want immeasurably to do it. She always put great stress upon the visible signs of an invisible bond, and she would be long in getting over her demand for the unreason ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... reason their aims and actions are divided between the sickly sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And I have written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to rid one's self once for all of the canting unreason of "equality and brotherhood," to rise above the coils of material getting, and to make noble and beautiful and free one's own life. Sodom would have been saved had the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... feet of the faithful; odors of impure assafoetida would mingle with the fumes of the incense; and wicked drinking choruses would rise up along with the holy canticles, in hideous dissonance, reminding one of the old orgies under the reign of the Abbot of Unreason. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as prejudice, unless it be jealousy," exclaimed Lady Angleby with delicious unreason. "You would keep ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... in the years of Lincoln's life which we are now observing, although the profound cause of that condition lay wholly in the future, in the years which were still far away. There is a charm in the very unreason and mysticism of such a faith, and mankind will never quite fail to fancy, if not actually to believe, that the life which Lincoln had to live in the future wrought in some inexplicable way upon the life which he was living ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... extension of slavery into the territory acquired from Mexico, and proposed an amendment to the Constitution providing for two presidents, one from the South and one from the North, with a veto over each other's acts. Any absurdity for the sake of slavery! Perhaps disease had something to do with this unreason. He died in April before any ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... unbalanced they were morbid and unbalanced by feeling too much about morality, not by feeling too little. You may say if you like that Robespierre was (in a negative sort of way) mad. But if he was mad he was mad on ethics. He and a company of keen and pugnacious men, intellectually impatient of unreason and wrong, resolved that Europe should not be choked up in every channel by oligarchies and state secrets that already stank. The work was the greatest that was ever given to men to do except that which Christianity did in dragging Europe out of the abyss of barbarism after the Dark Ages. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... she was mysteriously unlike all other created beings, and—again like most young men and women—she could find, in the secrecy of her own heart, plenty of proof of a unique strangeness. But now her unreason became formidable. There she sat with her striking forehead and her quite unimportant nose, in the large austere drawing-room of the Spatts, which was so pervaded by artistic chintz that the slightest movement in it produced a crackle—and ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... in troubled perplexity. "Let Douglas Falloden make some amends to his victim; if he can, and will. Don't be so unkind as to prevent it!" That, he supposed, was what she meant. It seemed to him the mere sentimental unreason of the young girl, who will not believe that there is any irrevocableness in things at all, ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and that it did not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... health, as a harmony continually preserved or restored, and containing those natural and ideal activities which disease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order, cannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and life with continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, and strife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none, perhaps, deserves ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... display could add to them, they nevertheless connived, upon special occasions, at the frolics of the rude vulgar, who, in almost all Catholic countries, enjoyed, or at least assumed, the privilege of making: some Lord of the revels, who, under the name of the Abbot of Unreason, the Boy Bishop, or the President of Fools, occupied the churches, profaned the holy places by a mock imitation of the sacred rites, and sung indecent parodies on hymns of the church. The indifference of the clergy, even ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... of unreason and injustice with what you call my "counsels of despair." I say there may be a future life and there may not be a future life. If there is a future life, a man will deserve it no less, and enjoy it no less, for having been happy here. If there is no future life, ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... Gladstone for several years threw himself with the whole weight of his untiring tenacity and force. He plunged into masses of accounts, mastered the coil of interests and parties, studied legal intricacies, did daily battle with human unreason, and year after year carried on a ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... The child was brimming over with unreason. Yet her eyes were like stars, and in an uncomprehended way the woman felt the charm of her beauty. No, she would never ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... exceptionally personal disqualification is created for the mere purpose of excluding her. When it is added that in the country where this is done a woman now reigns, and that the most glorious ruler whom that country ever had was a woman, the picture of unreason and scarcely disguised injustice is complete. Let us hope that as the work proceeds of pulling down, one after another, the remains of the mouldering fabric of monopoly and tyranny, this one will not be the last to disappear; that the opinion of Bentham, ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... confidence was in each other; with Balder at her side, Gnulemah was fearful of the world no longer. But her visions were all spiritual; even the kisses on her lips were to her a sacred miracle! Love makes children of men and women,—shows them the wisdom of unreason and the value of soap-bubbles. These lovers must meet the world, but the light and freshness of the Golden Age should accompany them. The man held the maiden's hand, and so faced the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the Master who orders all things,—(Reason or Unreason),—and although the social organization prepared by syndicalism might constitute a certain comparative stage in progress for the future, Olivier did not think it worth while for Christophe and himself to scatter the whole of their power of illusion and sacrifice ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... maintain the right of the Many to govern, control, and command the Few. The need of some governing authority in a State can be denied by none but an Anarchist, a gentleman who lives two doors beyond Rousseau on the side of unreason. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... possibility, they say, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind can for an instant tolerate in the world. What is it, they ask, but barefaced crazy unreason, the negation of intelligibility and law? And if the slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent the whole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaos from ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... intellectual struggle which is to some minds insuperable, and to deprive such of the symbols which lead to a final comprehension of the truth is no service to humanity or truth. The suppression of the Roman Catholic religion in Italy, if possible, would be only to leave its place vacant for unreason and anarchy, for the intellectual status of the common people does not admit of a more abstract belief. For that evil influence, however, which a recent writer has designated as Curialism, which to-day ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... flagrant, rousing in its turn the indignation of injury to a pain unendurable. It is strange that the man who most keenly feels the wrong done him, should so often be the most insensible to the wrong he does. So dominant is the unreason of the moment, that the injury he inflicts appears absolute justice, and the injury he suffers absolute injustice. Yet such disputes turn seldom upon the main point at issue between the parties; it may not ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... and religion this curious and very John Bullish unreason is still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws with a certain amount of regret, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... 'Take a salamander,' as if a general should command a private to catch a Tartar. Or, she would casually issue the order, 'Throw in a handful—' of something entirely unattainable. In these, the Housewife's most glaring moments of unreason, Bella would shut her up and knock her on the table, apostrophising her with the compliment, 'O you ARE a stupid old Donkey! Where am I to get ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... He took me by the hand, And fired the sacrifice, and poured the wine, And spoke the words I might not understand. I was unwise in all but the dear chance Which was my fortune, and the blind desire Which led my foolish steps to Love's abode, And youth's sublime unreason'd prescience Which raised an altar and inscribed in fire Its dedication ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... than in his home, where there is a ruler. A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance, carries this mummery to the point of a methodical madness. The whole system is stiff with rigid unreason; like the Royal Court in Lewis Carroll. You would think the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly silent. You would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put it on to go away; therefore he takes off his hat to walk out and puts it on to stop in. Names are forbidden, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... not fail to look at our Yankee portrait of Lafayette. Present my best remembrances to Mrs. Carlyle, whom that stern and blessed solitude has armed and sublimed out of all reach of the littleness and unreason of London. If I thought we could win her to the American shore, I would send her the story of those godly women, the contemporaries of John Knox's daughter, who came out hither to enjoy the worship of God amidst wild men and ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... advised the Society to keep on going. The Society withdrew into the brake fighting, as it were, a rear-guard action of oratory up each step. The collapsed harmonium was hauled in last, and with the perfect unreason of crowds, they cheered it loudly, till the chauffeur slipped in his clutch and sped away. Then the crowd broke up, congratulating all concerned except the sexton, who was held to have disgraced his office by ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... first principles to extremes I do not think Frenchmen comparable to the women of France It would be hard! ay, then we do it forthwith Making too much of it—a trick of the vulgar More argument I cannot bear None but fanatics, cowards, white-eyeballed dogmatists Push indolent unreason to gain the delusion of happiness Reproof of such supererogatory counsel She had no longer anything to resent: she was obliged to weep Slaves of the priests The healthy only are fit to live The world without him would be heavy matter This ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... battle still, but do not see our victory yet. We are not opposing men and women, but the enemies of men and women—ignorance, prejudice, and injustice. Many people bring into a new movement the whole intensity and unreason of their personal desires and discontents, and the train of progress must carry all this luggage along with it. Woman suffrage means equality in and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... unreason of the love-driven male, we say, "Love is blind"; seeing his light-mindedness, we say, "Love has wings"; seeing his evident lack of intelligence and purpose, we make him a mere child; seeing the evil results of his wide license, we euphemistically indicate ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... against all superstition," said Sir Richard solemnly; "it brings disorder. For religion we have the clergy, and for justice the lawyers, and for health the doctors. All outside of that partakes of license and unreason." ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... the end nobody can follow after his own thinking and his own desire. At every turn he is confronted by that which is expected, and obligation follows obligation, and in the long run no champion can be stronger than everybody. So we succumb to this world's terrible unreason, willy-nilly, and Helmas has been made wise, and Ferdinand has been made saintly, and I have been made successful, by that which was expected of us, and by that which none of us had ever any real chance to resist in a world wherein all men ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... and folly is perfect sanity with me. After all, Alf, is there not an amount of unreason ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... with established institutions, people, at any rate not merely egoistic and jealous as the crowd is egoistic and jealous, hide and help one another to mitigate the inflexible austerities of the great unreason. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... was behind the scenes, or perhaps in the orchestra sitting near the conductor, Meroni; but now jealousy sprang up in her. If Claude were with Adelaide Shiffney in that box while she sat alone! If Claude had really known all the time that Adelaide Shiffney was coming and had not told her, Charmian! Unreason, which is the offspring of jealousy, filled her mind. She burned ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... it ever Come? Is endeavour Still a vain twining and twisting of cords? Is faith but treason; Reason, unreason, But a mechanical weaving ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... suppose that this neglect of English rested wholly on unreason, or had nothing to say for itself. Teachers and tutors of the old Classical Education (as it was ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the time. But her sorrow for the world could not be sealed. And then came the thought that the insensible boy at her feet, escaping for a little while through sleep's primeval sanctity, was part of the robbed world also. Who had lost more than he by his unreason? If her heart did not melt ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... his talk, ever ingenious, emphatic and spirited in detail, was much defective in earnestness, at least in clear earnestness, of purport and outcome; but went tumbling as if in mere welters of explosive unreason; a volcano heaving under vague deluges of scoriae, ashes and imponderous pumice-stones, you could not say in what direction, nor well whether in any. Not till after good study did you see the deep molten ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... advanced, viz., that the man she called husband was at that moment in the room with us and that these words were a plea to him—the last appeal of a broken-hearted woman for the support she felt to be her due—how the atmosphere of unreason and mystery clears itself. His suggestion that what was needed there was an alienist, and the pitiful efforts she made to exonerate herself without implicating him in the murderous event, fall naturally ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... the defence of his friend Lord William Russell, attended his execution, vindicated his memory, and been spitefully deprived by James II. of his lectureship at St. Clement's. Burnet was drawn to the translation of "Utopia" by the same sense of unreason in high places that caused More to write the book. Burnet's is the translation given ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... fashionable beauty might be a valuable asset. But to this suggestion Miss Bart opposed a negative which Gerty emphatically supported, while Mrs. Fisher, inwardly unconvinced, but resigned to this latest proof of Lily's unreason, agreed that perhaps in the end it would be more useful that she should learn the trade. To Regina's work-room Lily was therefore committed by her friends, and there Mrs. Fisher left her with a sigh of relief, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... States and Maryland, the tidewater region of South Carolina, and certain parts of Virginia were the seats of the soundest political thought of the day. The men who did this sane, wholesome political thinking were quite right in scorning and condemning the crude unreason, often silly, often vicious, which characterized so much of the political thought of their opponents. The strength of these opponents was largely derived from the ignorance and suspicion of the raw country districts, and from the sour jealousy with ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... compatible with the keenest enjoyment of nature's sights and sounds, fresh air and free sunlight, and compatible with loyalty and high courage. Many men might profitably change their reason for his unreason. Mr. Dick's flightiness is allied to an intense devotion and gratitude to the woman who had rescued him from confinement in an asylum; there lives a world of kindly sentiments in his poor bewildered brains. ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... occasion abnormal spiritual experiences. In religion as in everything else the father was a formalist, and such religious views as he held were those of the Aufklaerung, for which all forms of spiritual emotion were the folly of unreason. Religion was a permanent and sustaining influence in the life of Goethe's mother, but her religion consisted simply in a cheerful acquiescence in the decrees of Providence. Of the soul's trials and sorrows, as they are recorded in the annals of the religious life, her nature was incapable, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... the top of the high cliff out to sea, passing over their heads, and they had the sensation that everything was passing over their heads and out of their control. Paynter felt as if his head had been blown off like a hat. But none of this gale of unreason seemed to stir a hair on the white head of the Squire, whose bearing, though self-important and bordering on a swagger, seemed if anything more comfortable than in the old days. His red face was, however, burnt like a sailor's, and his light ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... [81] The Abbot of Unreason in Scotland, was a similar character to the Lord of Misrule in England. "This pageant potentate," as Stowe calls him, "was annually elected, and his rule extended through the greater part of the holydays conected with the festival days ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... world in which even Toryism was Whiggish. And the Whig as a wit never expressed his political point more clearly than in Pope's line which ran: "The right divine of kings to govern wrong." It will be apparent, when I deal with that period, that I do not palliate the real unreason in divine right as Filmer and some of the pedantic cavaliers construed it. They professed the impossible ideal of "non-resistance" to any national and legitimate power; though I cannot see that even that was so servile and superstitious as the more modern ideal ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... such straightforward unreason, are the etherealized, saccharine effusions of the "Glories of Mary," by Alfonso di Liguori! They represent the other pole of Mariolatry—the gentlemanly pole. And under the influence of Mary-worship a new kind of saintly physiognomy was elaborated, as we can see from contemporary prints ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... 'Mere unreason to think of the performance alone,' said James, setting up his trusty ladder. 'What would ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... board through the lengthening years. For this first year—often the first months of it—marks the transition from love to conjugal affection, or witnesses a rupture which nothing less than omnipotence can ever mend. In the first year a serious readjustment must take place. Unreason, as a basis for the relation, must give way to reason; blind, ignorant, selfish little love must flutter away, so that friendship, clear-eyed and wise, may step in. There will come moments when wills clash ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... her logic of the heart, And wisdom of unreason, Supplying, while he doubts and weighs, The ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... swell in the ground afforded the young man an excellent view. Sweetbriar had arrived at the turn which led to his stable; where rest and oats awaited him; and it evidently seemed to Him the height of injustice and unreason to be asked to go all the way back to Salem again. Mistress Ann, however, knew nothing of these previous experiences of the animal, but imputed his insubordinate behavior entirely to self-will and obstinacy. And thus, as the great globe moves around the sun in a perpetual circle, ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... comic in its disagreeable tone, and so thoroughly due to my state of weakness and unreason, that I laughed silently. ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... o' fire;" but then, he said, "Maggie had the 'Ordinances' and the 'Promises,' and she should hae waited wi' mair patience. Davie was doing weel to himsel' and going to be an honor to her, and to the village, and the country, and the hale Kirk o' Scotland, and it was the heighth o' unreason to mak' him accountable for trouble that ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... sister alike, was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling; madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense. In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you consider well his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of the intellect. I know one who read the essays of Elia with intense delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. She had seen so well through the fun ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... not last? Is there any reason, in earth or Heaven, why we two should part? If there is—I will make that reason itself folly, and madness, and unreason. Dear, do not speak of this not lasting. Die, you say? Worse, far worse; as much as eternal death is worse than bodily dying. Last? Does any one know what for ever means, if we do not? Die, we must, in these dying ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... not as a rule a judge of good looks; and no doubt 'tis unreason in me to pity her the more for her comeliness. But as a matter of ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Blanc end and where do I begin?" We do not want to be paralysed by philosophic doubt for the rest of our mortal lives on the hills. We prefer to be stirred to emotional life by those who are transported by love of beauty to the realms of unreason. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... hopeless persistency of the orderly outward world, as compared with the storm and tempest, the riot and confusion within—when we remember how many minds must tremble upon the narrow boundary between reason and unreason, mad to-day and sane to-morrow, mad ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... love, intrigue, persecution, the broad picture of society. It is no idealised version of the Middle Ages. The ugly, sordid side of mediaeval life is turned outwards; its dirt, discomfort, ignorance, absurdity, brutality, unreason and insecurity are rendered with crass realism. The burgher is more in evidence than the chevalier. Less after the manner of the Waverley novels, and more after that of "Hypatia," "Romola," and "Fathers and Sons," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... address, namely, to state fully and fairly his conclusions, to avoid giving unnecessary offence, and thirdly,] "while feeling assured of the just and reasonable dealing of the respectable part of the Scottish press, I naturally hoped for noisy injustice and unreason from the rest, seeing, as I did, the best security for the dissemination of my views through regions which they might not otherwise reach, in the certainty of a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... speak as all were lost. Things are not thus! Such desperation has unreason in it, And bleeds the hearts that ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... and the private infamy of many who enforced the doctrines of the Church, had produced in earnest men a vigorous antagonism. Tyranny and unreason of low-minded advocates had brought religion itself into question; and profligacy of courtiers, each worshipping the golden calf seen in his mirror, had spread another form of scepticism. The intellectual scepticism, based ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... with heads. Sophia was called upon to prove that she was not a spy signalling to the Prussians. Three quarters of an hour passed before her innocence was established and the staircases cleared of uniforms and dishevelled curiosity. The childish, impossible unreason of the suspicion against her completed in Sophia's mind the ruin of the reputation of the French people as a sensible race. She was extremely caustic the next day to her boarders. Except for this episode, the frequency ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... under the act of Congress to engage in the coasting trade;[842] as was also a Louisiana statute ordering masters and wardens of the port of Orleans to survey the hatches of all vessels arriving there and to enact a fee for so doing.[843] "The unreason and the oppressive character of the act" was held to take it out of the class of local legislation protected by the rule of the Cooley case.[844] Likewise, while control by a State of navigable waters wholly within its borders has been often asserted to be complete in the absence ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... these truths at her, observe that the man rues them. He accepts himself as a slave: the slave (as I read this passage) to what is true in the idea of woman's purity. The insufferable creature of the smile is (as he says) the "mistaken and obtuse unreason of a she-intelligence"; but somewhere there was right in her demand. If man could but return, unstained! He must go forth, must explore the rays—of all the claims of woman on him this is most insistent; but ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... ingratitude to remain critical. Indeed, almost insensibly Ann Veronica became habituated to the peculiar appearance and the peculiar manners of the people "in the van." The shock of their 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 ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Abbot has a right honest unconscious feeling, without insolence as without fear or flutter, of what he is and what others are. A courage to quell the proudest, an honest pity to encourage the humblest. Withal there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot: much vain unreason he hears; lays up without response. He is not there to expect reason and nobleness of others; he is there to give them of his own reason and nobleness. Is he not their servant, as we said, who can suffer from them, and for them; bear the burden their poor spindle-limbs ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... strong, against the organised force of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted Gods. It is the Kingdom of Heaven within us fighting against the brute powers of the world; and it is apt to have those qualities of unreason, of contempt for the counting of costs and the balancing of sacrifices, of recklessness, and even, in the last resort, of ruthlessness, which so often mark the paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children of light. It brings ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... between her words and action struck the chord which, in a man's heart, always responds to the touch of feminine unreason. She dropped into the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands, while Woburn watched the course ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. Or it was like the stunning statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed stars. He was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason itself. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... it not last? Is there any reason, in earth or Heaven, why we two should part? If there is—I will make that reason itself folly, and madness, and unreason. Dear, do not speak of this not lasting. Die, you say? Worse, far worse; as much as eternal death is worse than bodily dying. Last? Does any one know what for ever means, if we do not? Die, we must, in these dying bodies of ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... But with mulish stubbornness I thought: 'They wished to go to London'; and on I raged, not wildly exhilarated, so far as I can remember, nor lunatic, but feeling the dull glow of a wicked and morose Unreason urge in my bosom, while I stoked all blackened at the fire, or saw the vague mass of dead horse or cow, running trees and fields, and dark homestead and deep-slumbering farm, flit ghostly athwart the murky air, as the half-blind ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... not at all. For hours after he reached his room in the hotel he paced it frantically. First cumulative anger, long held in leash, swept him like a forest fire, charring his reason into unreason. He had fought for Conscience and lost her. She had thrown her lot with the narrow minds and cast him adrift. He had placed all his trust in her and she had failed to rise above her heritage. But as the night wore ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... unlike what I had been, or what I have been since. The biographical part of my autobiography might be called the history of a mental civil war, which I fought single-handed on a battlefield that lay within the compass of my skull. An Army of Unreason, composed of the cunning and treacherous thoughts of an unfair foe, attacked my bewildered consciousness with cruel persistency, and would have destroyed me, had not a triumphant Reason finally interposed a superior strategy that saved ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... slavery into the territory acquired from Mexico, and proposed an amendment to the Constitution providing for two presidents, one from the South and one from the North, with a veto over each other's acts. Any absurdity for the sake of slavery! Perhaps disease had something to do with this unreason. He died in April ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... Panky again. He remembered Bridgeford as the town where the Colleges of Unreason had been most rife; he had visited it, but he had forgotten that it was called "The city of the people who are above suspicion." Its Professors were evidently going to muster in great force on Sunday; if two of ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... The unreason, brutality, and extravagance of the men; the tyranny of the Union; the growing insolence of the Union officials—Tressady's letters from home after a time spoke of little else. And Tressady's bankbook ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... struggle which is to some minds insuperable, and to deprive such of the symbols which lead to a final comprehension of the truth is no service to humanity or truth. The suppression of the Roman Catholic religion in Italy, if possible, would be only to leave its place vacant for unreason and anarchy, for the intellectual status of the common people does not admit of a more abstract belief. For that evil influence, however, which a recent writer has designated as Curialism, which to-day has its seat ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... gave warning and Charles would ask his employer leave for a "holiday," and stay at home trying by gentle mirth and work to divert the dread visitor of unreason. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... the superb unreason of women. Beata began to cry as I handed her over to Miss Leslie, who looked daggers at me, and I am quite sure called me, in her own mind, "A ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... work in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong. There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and in exhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a soldier—passe encore. But the death of Shelley was not his goal. And the death of the birds is so little characteristic of them that, as has just been said, no one in ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... grew ever more difficult. She was of a compassionate nature, and had a loving, patient and noble heart; prudent she was; the skilfulest and thriftiest of financiers; could well keep silence, too, and with a gentle stoicism endure much small unreason. Saupe says withal, 'Nobody liked a laugh better, or could laugh more heartily than she, even in her extreme old age.'—Christophine herself makes no complaint, on looking back upon her poor Reinwald, thirty years after all was over. Her final record of it is: "for twenty-nine years we lived contentedly ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... muddle of unreason and injustice with what you call my "counsels of despair." I say there may be a future life and there may not be a future life. If there is a future life, a man will deserve it no less, and enjoy it no less, for having been happy here. If there ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... know, I know," the tendril cried, In beautiful sweet unreason; Till lo! from its prison, glorified, It burst in the ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of The O'Donoghue. On an eminence, the centre of the earth, rises the feldaltar of Saint Barbara. Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns. From the high barbacans of the tower two shafts of light fall on the smokepalled altarstone. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies, naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly. Father Malachi O'Flynn in a lace petticoat and reversed chasuble, his two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mass. The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a plain cassock and mortarboard, his ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... at his heart. Everything at last seemed to be working out to advantage. He could not but remember how so very few weeks ago he had been urgent that Richard should spend his summer at Little Beeding and lend a hand in the noble work of defending Stella Ballantyne against ignorance and unreason. But the twinge only lasted a moment. He had made a mistake, as all men occasionally do—yes, even sagacious and thoughtful people like himself. And the mistake was already being repaired. He looked across the meadow that night at ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... for that I shouldn't have come here to meet you. My gift is the thing that takes you: could there be a better proof than that it's to-night's display of it that has brought you to this unreason? It's indeed a misfortune that you're so sensitive to our poor arts, since they play such tricks with your power to see things as they are. Without my share of them I should be a dull, empty, third-rate woman, and yet that's the fate ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... "Unreason has a potent advocate in you, Miss Liddell," said Errington; smiling a softer smile than usual. "But I want you to understand and appreciate Miss Bradley. She is a fine creature in every sense of the word. As friend, I am sure she would be loyal with a reasonable loyalty, and I flatter myself she ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... bed and board through the lengthening years. For this first year—often the first months of it—marks the transition from love to conjugal affection, or witnesses a rupture which nothing less than omnipotence can ever mend. In the first year a serious readjustment must take place. Unreason, as a basis for the relation, must give way to reason; blind, ignorant, selfish little love must flutter away, so that friendship, clear-eyed and wise, may step in. There will come moments when wills clash and desires do not chime; these must be ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... and Maryland, the tidewater region of South Carolina, and certain parts of Virginia were the seats of the soundest political thought of the day. The men who did this sane, wholesome political thinking were quite right in scorning and condemning the crude unreason, often silly, often vicious, which characterized so much of the political thought of their opponents. The strength of these opponents was largely derived from the ignorance and suspicion of the raw country districts, and from the sour jealousy with ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... religious tyranny over the Protestant minority. How that could be done under a measure so carefully safeguarded as, for instance, the Bill of 1912,[51] they never condescend to tell us. It is part of their policy never to enter into details, but to produce a general atmosphere of distrust and unreason. ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... by the decision of the Supreme Court. Under such circumstances, how the Commander-in-Chief, under Congress, of the forces of the United States could re-create these defunct States, and make it mandatory on Congress to receive their delegates, has always appeared to us one of those mysteries of unreason which require faculties either above or below humanity to accept. In addition to this fundamental objection, there was the further one, that almost all of the delegates were Rebels presidentially pardoned into "loyal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... Mr. Skimpole. "That's the crowning point of unreason in the business! I said to my landlord, 'My good man, you are not aware that my excellent friend Jarndyce will have to pay for those things that you are sweeping off in that indelicate manner. Have you no consideration for HIS ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... to be, and he was besides very small; but shadows are amiable play-friends, and they did not blame him because he cried when he was teased and did not cry when he was beaten, or because the wild unreason of his sorrow made him find cause for tears in the very fullness of his rare enjoyment. For the first time in my life it seems to me I saw this little boy as he was, squat-bodied, big-headed, thick-lipped, and with a face swept clean of all emotions save where his ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Hynes, a total abstainer, and a person of some intelligence, firmly believed that England prevented Ireland from mining for coal, which disability, with the resulting poverty, would disappear with the granting of Home Rule. Everywhere this patent obliqueness and absurd unreason. A fiery Nationalist in white heat of debate shook his fist at an Ulsterman, and said, "When we get the bill, you'll not be allowed to have all the manufactories to yourselves," an extraordinary outburst which requires no comment. This burning patriot looked around and said, with the ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... familiarity of which suited every lip. Merely through enunciating it thus, the throng worked itself into a state of gaiety and became highly good natured. A fever of curiosity urged it forward, that kind of Parisian curiosity which is as violent as an access of positive unreason. Everybody wanted to see Nana. A lady had the flounce of her dress torn off; a man lost ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... God curse me with such a temper? On such moments as this I could feel something within me snapping. It was fury and unreason. How I loved him! And yet we had fought a thousand times over just such provocation. Over his shoulders I could see the still open door that led into the street. A heavy form was looming through the opening; out of the corner of my eye I caught the lines of the form stepping out of the shadows—it ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... mathematics; he refreshed his prosody, he turned over Carrer, he toiled a whole night, and in due time appeared as Tonelli's affectionate friend in all the butchers' and bakers' windows. But it had been too much to ask of him, and for a while he felt the shock of Tonelli's unreason and excess so much that there was a decided ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... the far horizons wave like painted drop-scenes stirred by a breeze; when a hypnotic spell of peace and bright promises is woven over the rangeland—you should see it then, if you would love it with a sweet unreason that will last you through all ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... turn the indignation of injury to a pain unendurable. It is strange that the man who most keenly feels the wrong done him, should so often be the most insensible to the wrong he does. So dominant is the unreason of the moment, that the injury he inflicts appears absolute justice, and the injury he suffers absolute injustice. Yet such disputes turn seldom upon the main point at issue between the parties; it may not even once be mentioned, while some new trifle is fought ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... namely, to state fully and fairly his conclusions, to avoid giving unnecessary offence, and thirdly,] "while feeling assured of the just and reasonable dealing of the respectable part of the Scottish press, I naturally hoped for noisy injustice and unreason from the rest, seeing, as I did, the best security for the dissemination of my views through regions which they might not otherwise reach, in the certainty of a violent ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... know her, but he had had her pointed out to him, and though he recognized the unreason of such an attitude, he was aware that her great beauty dramatized her suffering, so that his pity for ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... their aims and actions are divided between the sickly sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And I have written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to rid one's self once for all of the canting unreason of "equality and brotherhood," to rise above the coils of material getting, and to make noble and beautiful and free one's own life. Sodom would have been saved had the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... likes what she has, but always craves what she has not—that she hates everything useful and prosaic and likes everything which people declare she ought to renounce. She is unreasonable, and he loves her unreason—it bewitches him: she is obstinate, and he loves to feel the strength of her tiny will, as if it were the manifestation of some phenomenal force in her nature. Her scorn for common things, her fastidiousness, her indifference to the little obligations which compel less dainty and spirited creatures,—all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... by Peter the world knows by heart. The world knows well how he tore his way out of the fetichism of his time; how, despite ignorance and unreason, he dragged his nation after him; how he dowered the nation with things and thoughts that transformed it from a petty Asiatic horde to a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... Heaven. (8) As though God had turned away from the wise, and written His decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... any special thing.[8] "Philosophy," Mr. Blood writes to me in a letter, "is past. It was the long endeavor to logicize what we can only realize practically or in immediate experience. I am more and more impressed that Heraclitus insists on the equation of reason and unreason, or chance, as well as of being and not-being, etc. This throws the secret beyond logic, and makes mysticism outclass philosophy. The insight that mystery,—the Mystery, as such is final, is the hymnic word. If you use reason pragmatically, and deny it absolutely, you can't be beaten; ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... about all these things, jerking down notes and throwing them aside in my attempt to give some literary form to the tale of our promotions, the marvel of it all comes to me as if it came for the first time the supreme unreason of it. At the climax of his Boom, my uncle at the most sparing estimate must have possessed in substance and credit about two million pounds'-worth of property to set off against his vague colossal liabilities, and from first to last he must have had a controlling influence ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... is mad unreason,—I feel that,—but it is no less true. I love you, but I will not marry you." She spoke with more resolution now. The first plunge was over, and with it her fear and trembling as she sat ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking voice: "Oh, why didn't you ever tell her? She thought you didn't like her." What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we have told her? His unreason endeared him to me more than all ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... capability for infinite expansion, swell up and bust. But this riot of egoism has as little relation to the Fine Art of Lying in Bed as a movie play has to the fine art of the drama. The true artist may take fair advantage of his nice state of unreason to defy time and space, but he will respect essential verities. He will treat his ego like the child it is; and, taking example from a careful mother, tie a rope to it when he lets it out to play. Thus he will capture a kind ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... the ground afforded the young man an excellent view. Sweetbriar had arrived at the turn which led to his stable; where rest and oats awaited him; and it evidently seemed to Him the height of injustice and unreason to be asked to go all the way back to Salem again. Mistress Ann, however, knew nothing of these previous experiences of the animal, but imputed his insubordinate behavior entirely to self-will and obstinacy. And thus, as the great globe moves around the sun in a perpetual circle, ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... the agonizing silence she felt acutely her girlishness, her helplessness, her unreason, confronted by his strong and shrewd masculinity. At the bottom of her soul she knew how wrong she was. But she was ready to do anything to save Sarah Gailey from the distress of one particular humiliation. With the whole of her volition ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... me! They call up sad memories. I was chased by one in the park at Grantoun when I was a child. A fly had stung it, so it tried to kill me. This struck me as unreason run riot, and ever since then I have wished the Spaniards would go a step farther and make cow-fights the national pastime. I ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... Abbot of Unreason in Scotland, was a similar character to the Lord of Misrule in England. "This pageant potentate," as Stowe calls him, "was annually elected, and his rule extended through the greater part of the holydays conected with the festival days of Christmas." But these "fine and subtle disguisings, ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... gravity, his father's cigar. How the worship of the sacred plant of tobacco has spread through all Europe! I am sure that the persons who cry out against the use of it are guilty of superstition and unreason, and that it would be a proper and easy task for scientific persons to write an encomium upon the weed. In solitude it is the pleasantest companion possible, and in company never de trop. To a ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... discarded all other matters of interest? If everything was due to a reasonless fortuitous concourse of circumstances, reason could not proceed further in the direction to create any philosophy of the unreason. ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... dreams, all made up of unaccountably reasonable incongruities: the sensible look in dreams of what to the waking mind is utterly incoherent, is the most puzzling of things to him who would understand his own unreason. And the wild MR CHENHAFT lovelinesses that fashioned themselves thus in his brain, outwardly lawless, but inwardly so harmonious as to be altogether credible to the dreamer, were not lost in the fluttering limbo of foolish invention, but, in altered shape and less outlandish garments, appeared ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... yet lurked a thoughtful doubt concerning the result. For he knew that, in some shape or other, and that certainly not the true one, the affair would be spread over the country, where now prejudice against the Catholics was strong and dangerous in proportion to the unreason of those who cherished it. Now, also, it was becoming pretty plain that except the king yielded every prerogative, and became the puppet which the mingled pride and apprehension of the Parliament would have him, their differences must ere long be referred to the arbitration of the sword, in which ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... could not make out what was going on in the man's mind. Probably he did not himself rightly know. The discovery that he bore the same name as his employer had once might have set off some unpleasant train of subconscious reflection, accentuating the bitter sense of class distinction and the unreason of it, which he was only too prone to entertain. He did not want any "kindness" from rich people. He worked for them because he must, but he worked in a spirit of armed neutrality at the best, like so many of ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... Street newspapers of ours?" Could any working-man who had such facts put before him fail to realize that Jimmie Higgins had a case, and a most important work in the world to do, in spite of all his unreason and his narrowness? ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... The piteous unreason of the born gamester, who clings so madly to the belief that luck must come to him, and sets on that belief as though a bank were his to lose his gold from, was never more utterly spoken in all its folly, in all its pitiable optimism, than now in ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... debased worshipers. It is also true that the pretended exhibitions of the tooth of Buddha can still inspire an ignorant multitude of people to place themselves in adoring procession and to debase themselves with the absurd rites of frenzy and unreason. Nor do I forget the fact that my countrymen are broken up into hundreds of sects, and their language frittered into hundreds of dialects. Yet, as I said, we are full of hope, and there can be no man so bold as to limit the capabilities of that blood which flows in English ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... quiring angels sing; "Priest of Unreason, and of Discords King!" Great co-Creator, let Thy glory shine: God made all else, the Mule, the ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... muttered; "and I hope his own company will satisfy him until the first fever is past. Do I not know that to be in love is to be possessed? It is in the head—the heart—the blood—it is indeed an uncontrollable fever! I hope, first and foremost, that he will keep away from his mother in his present unreason." ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... have. But instead of a continual progress towards greater elegance and convenience, which might be expected to occur did people copy the ways of the really best, or follow their own ideas of propriety, we have a reign of mere whim, of unreason, of change for the sake of change, of wanton oscillations from either extreme to the other—a reign of usages without meaning, times without fitness, dress without taste. And thus life a la mode, instead ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... behind the scenes, or perhaps in the orchestra sitting near the conductor, Meroni; but now jealousy sprang up in her. If Claude were with Adelaide Shiffney in that box while she sat alone! If Claude had really known all the time that Adelaide Shiffney was coming and had not told her, Charmian! Unreason, which is the offspring of jealousy, filled her ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... on history. A man who loves England for being English will not mind how she arose. But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against all facts for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman) by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest. He may end in utter unreason—because he has a reason. A man who loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870. But a man who loves France for being France will improve the army of 1870. This is exactly what the French have done, and France is a good instance of the working paradox. Nowhere else is patriotism ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... against it, and makes it as possible still as in the first century to speak of the offence of the cross. No doubt the Atonement has sometimes been presented in forms which provoke antagonism, which challenge by an ostentation of unreason, or by a defiance of morality, the reason and conscience of man; but this alone does not explain the resentment which it often encounters. There is such a thing to be found in the world as the man who will have nothing to do with Christ on any terms, ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... Laboratory, or some poor crushed and writhing worm, like the girl of The Confessional, utter their callous cynicism or their deathbed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the low fierce cry of triumphant malice, the long-drawn shriek of futile rage. There was commonly an element of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, in the hatreds that caught his eye; he had a relish for the gratuitous savagery of the lady in Time's Revenges, who would calmly decree that her lover should be burnt ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... must be regarded as "the measure of all things," and all things must have been framed according to a plan or "model" which that mind supplied. Intelligence must be regarded as having a purpose, and as working towards an end, for it is this alone which distinguishes reason from unreason, and mind from mere unintelligent force. The only proper model which could be presented to the Supreme Intelligence is "the eternal and unchangeable model"[646] which his own perfection supplies, "for he is the most excellent of causes."[647] Thus God is not simply the maker ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... any longer without losing caste, without falling ipso facto out of court with men of education. It is enough for a man of letters if he has helped ever so little in the final staking out of the boundaries between reason and unreason!' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wedged into my berth by a wooden bar, or I must have rolled out of it, 'what errand was I then upon, and to what Abyssinian point had public events then marched? No matter as to me. And as to them, if the wonderful popular rage for a plaything (utterly confounding in its inscrutable unreason) I had not then lighted on a poor young savage boy, and a poor old screw of a horse, and hauled the first off by the hair of his princely head to "inspect" the British volunteers, and hauled the second off by the hair of his equine tail to the Crystal ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... talk, ever ingenious, emphatic and spirited in detail, was much defective in earnestness, at least in clear earnestness, of purport and outcome; but went tumbling as if in mere welters of explosive unreason; a volcano heaving under vague deluges of scoriae, ashes and imponderous pumice-stones, you could not say in what direction, nor well whether in any. Not till after good study did you see the deep molten lava-flood, which simmered steadily enough, and showed very well by and by whither ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... were none he liked so well as those of the famous Feliciano de Silva's composition, for their lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found passages like "the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty;" or again, "the high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and there may come a time when suspension means bankruptcy, and when all the kindness and skill of all our friends can be no longer of any avail. Is it not our own fault, and shall we not so educate our girls that they shall not fall into it, since they comprehend its unreason? ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... Melchard's sight, he examined the handkerchief—a lady's, marked with the embroidered initials A.C., and it struck him, once more with a sense of unreason, not only that the beastly dentist had discovered that these letters did not stand for Araminta Bunce, but that he knew the names which they were ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... rules that determine marriage among the lowest of savage tribes. Their complication passes all understanding, all seems a chaos of prejudice, superstition, pride, vanity, and stupidity. And yet we catch a glimpse here and there that there was some reason in most of that unreason; we see how sense dwindled away into nonsense, custom into ceremony, ceremony into farce. Why then should this surface of savage life represent to us the lowest stratum of human life, the very beginnings of civilization, simply because we ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... explanation that Zimmern had given for his interest in Marguerite, I had never quite accepted it in my unreasoning heart. And in the depths of me the battle between love and reason and the dark forces of jealous unreason and suspicion had smouldered, to break out afresh ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... Thus Anatole France touches us most nearly when he describes his childhood. The innocent, wayward, positive, romantic little Pierre Noziere[4] is a human being to a degree to which no other figures in the master's comedy of unreason are. And it is evident that Anatole France himself finds him by far the most attractive of them all. He can almost persuade himself, at moments, that he still is the child he was, as in the exquisite story of how, when he had ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... regarded as so much vacant territory on which to build up his ideal state. He was, in fact, a Revolutionist who happened also to be an emperor. "Reason" and "enlightenment" were his watchwords; opposition to his wise measures he regarded as obscurantist and unreasonable, and unreason, if it proved stubborn, as a vice to be corrected with whips. In this spirit he at once set to work to reconstruct the state, on lines that strangely anticipated the principles of the Constituent Assembly of 1789. He refused to be crowned or to take the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... far as man is wise, it is because his spirit is kindled by union with the universal spirit; but there is a baser, or, as Heraclitus termed it, a moister element also in him, which is the element of unreason, as in a drunken man. And thus the trustworthiness or otherwise of the senses, as the {19} channels of communication with the divine, depends on the dryness or moistness,—or, as we should express it, using, after all, only another metaphor,—on the elevation or baseness ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... and fierce unreason should league and lie and defame and smite, We that know thee, how far below thee the hatred burns of the sons of night, We that love thee, behold above thee the witness written of life ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... preserved or restored, and containing those natural and ideal activities which disease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order, cannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and life with continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, and strife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none, perhaps, deserves to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... whatever may be the Master who orders all things,—(Reason or Unreason),—and although the social organization prepared by syndicalism might constitute a certain comparative stage in progress for the future, Olivier did not think it worth while for Christophe and himself ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... modified the opinions even of conservative men. "It is impossible to conceive of a more humiliating spectacle," said Sherman.[1052] "During the progress of events," wrote Weed, "the President was bereft of judgment and reason, and became the victim of passion and unreason."[1053] But up to this time the party had hoped to avoid a complete break with the Executive. Now, however, the question of passing the Civil Rights Bill over his veto presented itself. Not since the beginning of the government ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... matriculation at Eugene's College of Unreason was in this wise. In 1887, Mr. Ben Ticknor, the Boston publisher, was complaining that he needed some new and promising authors to enlarge his book-list. The New York "Sun" and "Tribune" had been copying ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... him with horror-widened eyes. Dulac hurled his weapon into the bushes and turned upon her furiously, seizing her arm and dragging her to him so that his eyes, glowing with unreason, could ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... the wine, And spoke the words I might not understand. I was unwise in all but the dear chance Which was my fortune, and the blind desire Which led my foolish steps to Love's abode, And youth's sublime unreason'd prescience Which raised an altar and inscribed in fire Its dedication ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... would say, 'Take a salamander,' as if a general should command a private to catch a Tartar. Or, she would casually issue the order, 'Throw in a handful—' of something entirely unattainable. In these, the Housewife's most glaring moments of unreason, Bella would shut her up and knock her on the table, apostrophising her with the compliment, 'O you ARE a stupid old Donkey! Where am I to get it, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... a stealthy way of temporising with the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling; madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense. In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you consider well his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of the intellect. I know one who read the essays of Elia with intense delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. She had seen ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... to Richard and his wife, and I often met Mr. Woodcourt there. Richard still suspected my guardian, and refused to see him, and when I said this was so unreasonable, my guardian only said, "What shall we find reasonable in Jarndyce and Jarndyce? Unreason and injustice from beginning to end, if it ever has an end. How should poor Rick, always hovering near it, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... revolutionary than is the case with the American anarchists, who, on the other hand both in their lives and their opinions, are extreme rebels against sex conventions. It is only another instance of how unreason in one extreme tends to bring about unreason in the other. Our prudishness, hypocrisy and stupid conventionality in all sex matters is responsible for the unbalanced license of ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... lakelet which, so far as he knew, had been nameless until his old friend Ben Gaynor had built a summer home there two years ago and had christened the pond among the trees. Lake Gloria! Mark King liked the appellation little enough, telling himself with thorough-going unreason that there was a silly name to fit to perfection a silly girl, but altogether out of place to tie on to an unspoiled Sierra lake. Ben would have done a better job in naming it Lake Vanity. Or Self-Regard. King could think of a score of designations more to the point. For though he had ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... Significance, Purpose, Work. Methods of Abolitionists. Southern Opposition. Northern. Anti-abolitionist Riots at the North. Murder of Lovejoy. Outrages against Northern Blacks. Colored Schools Closed. Schism among the Abolitionists. The Liberty Party. Ultra-abolitionists' Unreason. Why Abolitionism Spread. Ambiguity of the Constitution. Seizure of Black ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... my name. This means as representing me; and, therefore, as being like me. Our Lord could not commission any one to be received in his name who could not more or less represent him; for there would be untruth and unreason. Moreover, he had just been telling the disciples that they must become like this child; and now, when he tells them to receive such a little child in his name, it must surely imply something in common between them all—something ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... before the coach had left the Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly well, I still felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of my sight longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of unreason I had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Silva's compositions, for their lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found passages like: "The reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted, so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty"; or again: "The high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your greatness deserves." Over conceits of this sort the poor ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... like the laugh of a very old woman, that mounted high and higher, welling from her throat as blood wells from a wound; and rocked herself to and fro and stared into the face of the dead stranger with wide eyes of unreason.... ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... deal worse," Elinor said, in her unreason; "the one might be borne, but the other I will not endure. Sympathy, yes! They will all be sorry for me—they will say they knew how it would be. Oh, I know I have not profited as I ought by what has happened to me. I am unsubdued. ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... "Where does Mont Blanc end and where do I begin?" We do not want to be paralysed by philosophic doubt for the rest of our mortal lives on the hills. We prefer to be stirred to emotional life by those who are transported by love of beauty to the realms of unreason. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Emily, spite of all unreason, such was the family opinion of Fred's propensity to fall in love, that Albinia's first suspicion lighted upon him, but as her eye fell on the pink envelope the handwriting concerned her even ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... still, but do not see our victory yet. We are not opposing men and women, but the enemies of men and women—ignorance, prejudice, and injustice. Many people bring into a new movement the whole intensity and unreason of their personal desires and discontents, and the train of progress must carry all this luggage along with it. Woman suffrage means equality in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... populated with heads. Sophia was called upon to prove that she was not a spy signalling to the Prussians. Three quarters of an hour passed before her innocence was established and the staircases cleared of uniforms and dishevelled curiosity. The childish, impossible unreason of the suspicion against her completed in Sophia's mind the ruin of the reputation of the French people as a sensible race. She was extremely caustic the next day to her boarders. Except for this episode, the frequency ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... all superstition," said Sir Richard solemnly; "it brings disorder. For religion we have the clergy, and for justice the lawyers, and for health the doctors. All outside of that partakes of license and unreason." ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... of despair after a touch at my pulses, and exclamation of 'Oh, Richie, Richie, if only I had my boy up and well!'—assuming that nothing but my tardy recovery stood in the way of our contentment—were examples of downright unreason such as contemplation through the comic glass would have excused; the tragic could not. I knew, nevertheless, that to the rest of the world he was a progressive comedy: and the knowledge made him seem more tragic still. He clearly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... persecution, the broad picture of society. It is no idealised version of the Middle Ages. The ugly, sordid side of mediaeval life is turned outwards; its dirt, discomfort, ignorance, absurdity, brutality, unreason and insecurity are rendered with crass realism. The burgher is more in evidence than the chevalier. Less after the manner of the Waverley novels, and more after that of "Hypatia," "Romola," and "Fathers and Sons," it depicts the intellectual unrest of the time, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... such times reason from the first plays a losing game against unreason. The government, no doubt, interfered; the pious impostors were punished and expelled by the police; every foreign worship not specially sanctioned was forbidden; even the consulting of the comparatively innocent lot-oracle of Praeneste ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the matchless "Lord of Misrule" (also known as the "Abbot of Unreason" and the "Master of Merry Disports"), who, attended by his mock court, king's jester and grotesquely masked revelers, visited the castles of lords and princes to entertain them with strange antics and uproarious merriment. ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... them, feel them, hear them, address them - Halo-bedecked - And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason, Rigid in hate, Smitten by years-long wryness born ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... entirely and at once, excluded every other wish or plan, and to feel was to act with Anthony Clarke, for he was born to emotional experience as the sparks fly upward. He had ever been a creature of unreason, morbidly conscious of self—and naturally, for in him struggled the blood of three races. His father was Scotch, and his mother—Spanish on the spindle side and Irish by way of a most mercurial father—remained an unsolved problem all her ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... good things done by Peter the world knows by heart. The world knows well how he tore his way out of the fetichism of his time,—how, despite ignorance and unreason, he dragged his nation after him,—how he dowered the nation with things and thoughts which transformed it from a petty Asiatic horde to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... think of going on the stage,"' she said, childish yet very feminine unreason combining with atavistic puritanism. "I shouldn't like ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... "That's the crowning point of unreason in the business! I said to my landlord, 'My good man, you are not aware that my excellent friend Jarndyce will have to pay for those things that you are sweeping off in that indelicate manner. Have you no consideration for HIS property?' He ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... frequently dwelt upon, signified little more for the Stoic than destiny or fate. Harmony with nature was simply a sense of proud self-sufficiency. Stoicism is the glorification of reason, even to the extent of suppressing all emotion. Sin is unreason, and salvation lies in an external control of the passions—in indifference and apathy begotten of the subordination of ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... doctor had supposed himself to be an entirely normal man, but he had been sitting only a very short time before he began to become aware of the silent murmurs of these three minds around him. The darkness set his own mind free from clouds of excitement and from mists of unreason. That was the first step. But it did more. It developed in him this marvellous faculty of the hearing of silence, called by some divination. All his senses were rendered amazingly acute. A perfectly ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... instincts that make their lair in the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better than cant,—and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... they might have Christ's Kirk and Covenant regulated in their own peculiar way; and he will hold them as mere feather-brains who sacrificed their lands and their lives to an obstinate loyalty to the House of Stuart. Yet it is of such unreason, if unreason it be, that the warp and the woof of the historic annals of Scotland have been spun: it is this defiance of what the utilitarian philosopher calls the rules of common sense, as applied to human conduct, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... at her for a while, and then said, with the emphasis of a man baffled by utter unreason: "Well, I am damned!" at which breach of good manners she winced. "Hang me if I understand you, Marian," he continued, more mildly. "Of course it's not true. Bad influence is all bosh. But it was a queer thing to say to his face. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... against the strong, against the organised force of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted Gods. It is the Kingdom of Heaven within us fighting against the brute powers of the world; and it is apt to have those qualities of unreason, of contempt for the counting of costs and the balancing of sacrifices, of recklessness, and even, in the last resort, of ruthlessness, which so often mark the paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... intermittent madness, yet who, in her months of sanity, was a worthy sister of such a brother. His kindness to her knew no bounds. It was strange that she had premonition of the recurring fits of her disorder; and when the ghost of unreason beckoned, Charles took her by the hand and led her to the appointed home. Charles Lloyd relates, that, at dusk one evening, he met them crossing the field together on their melancholy way toward the asylum, both of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... three of the most brilliant entertainments of the season fell on the same night, and Madame Mildau, with all the unreason of her sex, desired to attend each ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... mad, I know—quite mad. Her words had made me so. And when, to ask me that insistent question, she brought her face still nearer, I flung down the reins of my unreason and let it ride amain upon its desperate, reckless course. In short, I too leaned forward, I leaned forward, and I kissed her full ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... Donald, cows distress me! They call up sad memories. I was chased by one in the park at Grantoun when I was a child. A fly had stung it, so it tried to kill me. This struck me as unreason run riot, and ever since then I have wished the Spaniards would go a step farther and make cow-fights the national ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... political contests of our country go on without deeply affecting the peace of families. In the cotton States opinion was or had to appear to be at one. In the North the bitterness and unreason of limited groups of anti-slavery people excited the anger of men who saw in their ways and speeches continual sources of irritation, which made all compromise difficult. The strife of parties where now men were earnest as they never were before since revolutionary days was felt most seriously ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... rest was Love's. He took me by the hand, And fired the sacrifice, and poured the wine, And spoke the words I might not understand. I was unwise in all but the dear chance Which was my fortune, and the blind desire Which led my foolish steps to Love's abode, And youth's sublime unreason'd prescience Which raised an altar and inscribed in fire Its dedication To ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... patriot in this world believes his country better than any other country. Now, they cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it follows that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active manifestation—it is fond of shooting—patriotism would be well enough if it were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same feeling that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels us likewise to go ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... deserved it!—Even as thou Before me liest on the naked earth, So lay I once in Colchis at thy feet And craved protection—but thou wouldst not hear! Nay, rather didst thou stretch thine eager hands In blind unreason forth, to lay them swift Upon the golden prize, although I cried, "'Tis Death that thou dost grasp at!"—Take it, then, That prize that thou so stubbornly didst seek, Even Death! I leave thee now, forevermore. 'Tis the last time-for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to occasion abnormal spiritual experiences. In religion as in everything else the father was a formalist, and such religious views as he held were those of the Aufklaerung, for which all forms of spiritual emotion were the folly of unreason. Religion was a permanent and sustaining influence in the life of Goethe's mother, but her religion consisted simply in a cheerful acquiescence in the decrees of Providence. Of the soul's trials and sorrows, as they are recorded in the ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... weight of years was added, Christophine's problem grew ever more difficult. She was of a compassionate nature, and had a loving, patient and noble heart; prudent she was; the skilfulest and thriftiest of financiers; could well keep silence, too, and with a gentle stoicism endure much small unreason. Saupe says withal, 'Nobody liked a laugh better, or could laugh more heartily than she, even in her extreme old age.'—Christophine herself makes no complaint, on looking back upon her poor Reinwald, thirty years after ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... good to know that, even in speculations on 666, there are different degrees of unreason. All the diviners, when they get a colleague or an opponent, at once proceed to reckon him up: but some do it in play and some in earnest. Mr. David Thom found a young gentleman of the name St. Claire busy at the Beast number: ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... from the isolation of men from the community and the separation of their thoughts from the social principles will be extinguished in blood and unreason; but if the distress first creates the understanding, and if the political understanding of the Germans discovers the roots of social distress, then these incidents would also be felt in Germany as the symptom ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... with the brilliancy of his unreason, Kenny enlarged upon the humiliation he must experience when Garry learned the truth. At a familiar climax of self-glorification, in which Kenny claimed he had saved Brian from no end of club-gossip by his timely evasion of the truth, Whitaker lost his ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Carolina, and certain parts of Virginia were the seats of the soundest political thought of the day. The men who did this sane, wholesome political thinking were quite right in scorning and condemning the crude unreason, often silly, often vicious, which characterized so much of the political thought of their opponents. The strength of these opponents was largely derived from the ignorance and suspicion of the raw country districts, and from the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the authority and the will, and was capable, once more, of choosing between depravity and decency. But what had been taken out of his life seemed to leave a dreadful silence in his brain. And, at moments, this silence became dissonant with the clamour of unreason. ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... fair examples of manifest tendencies, which certainly are not on the decline. And if a great and spreading popular cultus, encouraged and urged on beyond all former precedent, is in danger of being developed by its warmest and most confident advocates into something of which unreason is the lightest fault, is there not ground for interfering? Doubtless Roman writers maybe quoted by Dr. Newman, who felt that there was a danger, and we are vaguely told about some checks given to one or two isolated extravagances, which, however, in spite of the checks, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... comfort and prosperity, as they offer him material for amusement or opportunity for gratifying his vanity. He has no social or political creed, but is always of the opinion which is most convenient for the moment. He is always in the majority, and is the main element of unreason and stupidity in the judgment of a "discerning public." It seems presumptuous in us to dispute Riehl's interpretation of a German word, but we must think that, in literature, the epithet Philister has usually a wider meaning than this—includes ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... and gives his extra pay to help out. I know, too, that when a strike threatens, he, who is now in the union because he is convinced he can help best there, is the balance-wheel, and prevents radical unreason and its results. There's trouble brewing there now—about the automatic ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... liked so well as those of the famous Feliciano de Silva's compositions, for their lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found passages like: "The reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted, so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty"; or again: "The high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your greatness deserves." Over ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... strong drink. But he was steady and sure in all his movements and his eyes were deadly cool and reasonable—only it was the reasonableness of insanity, reasonableness based on the wildest premises of unreason. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... they loved him, called him intolerant. I never could look at it that way. He did have the only kind of intolerance which is at all tolerable, and that is the intolerance of intolerance. He always set himself with vigour against that unreason and lack of sympathy which are the essence of intolerance; and yet there was a rock of conviction on many subjects behind which he could not be driven. It was not intolerance: it was with him a reasoned certainty of belief. ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... transient fits of despair after a touch at my pulses, and exclamation of 'Oh, Richie, Richie, if only I had my boy up and well!'—assuming that nothing but my tardy recovery stood in the way of our contentment—were examples of downright unreason such as contemplation through the comic glass would have excused; the tragic could not. I knew, nevertheless, that to the rest of the world he was a progressive comedy: and the knowledge made him seem more tragic still. He clearly could not learn from misfortune; he was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of Unreason in Scotland, was a similar character to the Lord of Misrule in England. "This pageant potentate," as Stowe calls him, "was annually elected, and his rule extended through the greater part of the holydays conected with ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... writes carelessly, sometimes dully but there is the echo of greatness in his work. He is one of the few contemporary men of genius whose books are under-estimated rather than over-estimated. He is an author who has brought back to the world something of the copiousness, fancy, appetite, power, and unreason of the talk that, one imagines, was once to be heard in ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... themselves into shapes mathematically perfect, or particles of frozen moisture into the symmetrical and beautiful forms of snowflakes, you have nothing to say. You have not even invented a name to conceal your heroic unreason." ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... training school shows each new aspirant for the nursing profession that the life is not an easy one, that patience is one of the most necessary characteristics for the nurse. She tells her of the trials, the irritations, the unreason, the tiresomeness of sick people, and still women will come to the school, and forgetting the warnings, they will complain when some exasperating incident occurs. If a nurse, from overwork and the consequent weakening of her nervous energy, has lost her patience, she will be a wise woman if she ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... in my heart, for though with my reasoning I had accepted the explanation that Zimmern had given for his interest in Marguerite, I had never quite accepted it in my unreasoning heart. And in the depths of me the battle between love and reason and the dark forces of jealous unreason and suspicion had smouldered, to break out afresh on ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... voice shared in the laughter, there yet lurked a thoughtful doubt concerning the result. For he knew that, in some shape or other, and that certainly not the true one, the affair would be spread over the country, where now prejudice against the Catholics was strong and dangerous in proportion to the unreason of those who cherished it. Now, also, it was becoming pretty plain that except the king yielded every prerogative, and became the puppet which the mingled pride and apprehension of the Parliament would have him, their differences ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... much to say that, according to the view of the Indians, other animals differ from men only in bodily form and in their various degrees of strength; in spirit they do not differ at all."(2) The Indian's notion of the life of plants and stones is on the same level of unreason, as we moderns reckon reason. He believes in the spirits of rocks and stones, undeterred by the absence of motion in these objects. "Not only many rocks, but also many waterfalls, streams, and indeed material ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... ideal activities which disease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order, cannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and life with continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, and strife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none, perhaps, deserves to be. There is inexperience in not ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... humorous or grotesque in her measure of a gentleman, for he realized that she was strung to a pitch of unreason and unnatural excitement, and that she ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... who came to visit me were some who had received a liberal education at the Colleges of Unreason, and taken the highest degrees in hypothetics, which are their principal study. These gentlemen had now settled down to various employments in the country, as straighteners, managers and cashiers of the Musical Banks, priests of religion, or what ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... illogicalities do matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm. And this for a reason that any one at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself. All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times before he got out of bed. The practical politicians might say that this power was a harmless ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... I, "last season, but 'twere surely wild unreason Such tiny hope to freeze on as was offered by my Star, When she whispered, something sadly: 'I—we feel your going badly!'" "And you let the chance escape you?" rapped the ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... child was brimming over with unreason. Yet her eyes were like stars, and in an uncomprehended way the woman felt the charm of her beauty. No, she ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... as "the measure of all things," and all things must have been framed according to a plan or "model" which that mind supplied. Intelligence must be regarded as having a purpose, and as working towards an end, for it is this alone which distinguishes reason from unreason, and mind from mere unintelligent force. The only proper model which could be presented to the Supreme Intelligence is "the eternal and unchangeable model"[646] which his own perfection supplies, "for he is the most excellent ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... satirists of the world, Butler's saeva indignatio was aroused by the daily conflicts between reason and stupidity, between candor and disingenuousness, with all their mutations of hypocrisy, guile, deceit, and sham. In "Erewhon" it was human unreason, as a clever youth sees it, that he was attacking. We remember vividly the beautiful Erewhonians, who knew disease to be sin, but believed vice to be only disease. We remember the "straighteners" who gave moral medicine to the ethically ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... most young women and men, she had been convinced from an early age that she was mysteriously unlike all other created beings, and—again like most young men and women—she could find, in the secrecy of her own heart, plenty of proof of a unique strangeness. But now her unreason became formidable. There she sat with her striking forehead and her quite unimportant nose, in the large austere drawing-room of the Spatts, which was so pervaded by artistic chintz that the slightest movement in it produced a crackle—and wondered why ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... again. He remembered Bridgeford as the town where the Colleges of Unreason had been most rife; he had visited it, but he had forgotten that it was called "The city of the people who are above suspicion." Its Professors were evidently going to muster in great force on Sunday; if two of them had robbed him, he could forgive them, for the information he had gleaned ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... belong to such an extent as is often supposed to the realm of politics. Political causes are often incidental causes and determine the time and place of wars but do not create them. Cramb (66) says that wars persist in spite of their unreason, because there is something transcendental that supports them, and this transcendental purpose is the desire for empire. Powers (75) says that nations fight for tangible things and also for intangible things. The tangible things are existence, commerce, independence, territory; nations also desire ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... found to be the same, then every thoughtful observer saw that there must be a system in that ancient madness, that there must be some order in that strange mob of gods and heroes, and that it must be the task of comparative mythology to find out, what reason there is in all that mass of unreason. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... imposed upon women in this matter of chastity!" wrote James Hinton forty years ago. "Think of that line: 'A woman who deliberates is lost.' We make danger, making all womanhood hang upon a point like this, and surrounding it with unnatural and preternatural dangers. There is a wanton unreason embodied in the life of woman now; the present 'virtue' is a morbid unhealthy plant. Nature and God never poised the life of a woman upon such a needle's point. The whole modern idea of chastity has in it sensual exaggeration, surely, in part, remaining to us from other times, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... love for Ireland as "dearer than could be justified to reason." Englishmen might well have difficulty in justifying to their reason their affection for America; for to hear an Englishman speak of American peculiarities and eccentricities, it would often seem that to love such men would be pure unreason. But these criticisms are no true index to the British national feeling for the Americans as a people. Does a brother not love his sister because he says rude things about her little failings? Americans hear the criticisms and, their own hearts being alienated from Great Britain, cannot believe ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... then is a capital season, More fit than another, Loose language of silly unreason In courage to smother. Clean speech is too frequently shamed For Cricket to shame it! One word is too often exclaimed For you to ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... for him, this woman, naked now of gear and friends, had been to-night a queen among her own acclaiming people. I think he worshipped where he did not dare to love, as every man cannot but do when starkly fronted by the divine and stupendous unreason of a woman's choice, among so many other men, of him. And yet, I think that Perion recalled what Ayrart de Montors had said of women and their love, so long ago:— "They are more wise than we; and always they make us better by indomitably ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... awaited the Senora. Without asking any questions, without taking anything into consideration, perhaps, indeed, because she feared to ask or consider, she had assumed that she would immediately re-enter her own home. With the unreason of a child, she had insisted upon expecting that somehow, or by some not explained efforts, she would find her house precisely as she left it. Little had been said of its occupancy by Fray Ignatius and his brothers; perhaps she did not quite believe in ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... agree with established institutions, people, at any rate not merely egoistic and jealous as the crowd is egoistic and jealous, hide and help one another to mitigate the inflexible austerities of the great unreason. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... this curious and very John Bullish unreason is still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws with a certain amount of regret, and his general attitude is ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... held to be inapplicable to vessels licensed under the act of Congress to engage in the coasting trade;[842] as was also a Louisiana statute ordering masters and wardens of the port of Orleans to survey the hatches of all vessels arriving there and to enact a fee for so doing.[843] "The unreason and the oppressive character of the act" was held to take it out of the class of local legislation protected by the rule of the Cooley case.[844] Likewise, while control by a State of navigable waters wholly within its borders has been often asserted to be complete in the absence of ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... bonds of priestly dictum. Though one should swear by the altar of God, his oath could be annulled; but if he vowed by the corban gift or by the gold upon the altar,[1136] his obligation was imperative. To what depths of unreason and hopeless depravity had men fallen, how sinfully foolish and how wilfully blind were they, who saw not that the temple was greater than its gold, and the altar than the gift that lay upon it! In the Sermon on the Mount the Lord ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... the sun, so that the far horizons wave like painted drop-scenes stirred by a breeze; when a hypnotic spell of peace and bright promises is woven over the rangeland—you should see it then, if you would love it with a sweet unreason that will last you through all the years ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... the scenes, or perhaps in the orchestra sitting near the conductor, Meroni; but now jealousy sprang up in her. If Claude were with Adelaide Shiffney in that box while she sat alone! If Claude had really known all the time that Adelaide Shiffney was coming and had not told her, Charmian! Unreason, which is the offspring of jealousy, filled her mind. ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... unconscious feeling, without insolence as without fear or flutter, of what he is and what others are. A courage to quell the proudest, an honest pity to encourage the humblest. Withal there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot: much vain unreason he hears; lays up without response. He is not there to expect reason and nobleness of others; he is there to give them of his own reason and nobleness. Is he not their servant, as we said, who can suffer from them, and for them; bear ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... And since you study French history do not fail to look at our Yankee portrait of Lafayette. Present my best remembrances to Mrs. Carlyle, whom that stern and blessed solitude has armed and sublimed out of all reach of the littleness and unreason of London. If I thought we could win her to the American shore, I would send her the story of those godly women, the contemporaries of John Knox's daughter, who came out hither to enjoy the worship of God amidst ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... utter their callous cynicism or their deathbed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the low fierce cry of triumphant malice, the long-drawn shriek of futile rage. There was commonly an element of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, in the hatreds that caught his eye; he had a relish for the gratuitous savagery of the lady in Time's Revenges, who would calmly decree that her lover should be burnt in a slow fire "if that would compass her desire." ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... I think, as an indication of childish unreason, unworthy of any one who faces realities. It is still true that "the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... which the authorities had arranged everything, so that every traveller could have his own seat. At the Austerlitz station, however, a human avalanche assaulted the train. The doors were broken open, packages and children came in through the windows like projectiles. The people pushed with the unreason of a crowd fleeing before a fire. In the space reserved for eight persons, fourteen installed themselves; the passageways were heaped with mountains of bags and valises that served later travellers for seats. All class distinctions had disappeared. The villagers invaded by ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... true love, intrigue, persecution, the broad picture of society. It is no idealised version of the Middle Ages. The ugly, sordid side of mediaeval life is turned outwards; its dirt, discomfort, ignorance, absurdity, brutality, unreason and insecurity are rendered with crass realism. The burgher is more in evidence than the chevalier. Less after the manner of the Waverley novels, and more after that of "Hypatia," "Romola," and "Fathers ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... good faith? She had not known he was acquainted with her plan to leave France; he had discounted a hundred devices to keep it from his knowledge. And now she not only confessed it openly, but invited him to go with her! In the name of unreason—why? She knew, for he had owned, his possessing purpose. He did not for an instant believe Liane Delorme would fly France and leave behind the Montalais jewels. Did she think he did not suspect her of knowing more about them than she had chosen ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... those of late Vedism, Brahmanism, and Hinduism. But how marked is the contrast with the earlier Vedic age! The grotesque fancy, the love of minutiae, in a word, the extravagance of imagination and unreason are here absent, or present only in hymns that contrast vividly with those of the older tone. This older tone is Aryan, the later is Hindu, and it is another proof of what we have already emphasized, that the Hinduizing influence was felt in the later Vedic ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... and tranquil sea, his fancy and passions were plainly shown to be under the control of reason. And this had not escaped the notice of Plato,[285] it seems, who had earlier expressed in form and outline the part that fancy and unreason played in sleep in the soul that was by nature tyrannical, "for it attempts incest," he says, "with its mother, and procures for itself unlawful meats, and gives itself up to the most abandoned desires, such as in daytime the law through shame and fear debars people from." As ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... know that there are often in men's affairs unexpectedly—even irrationally—illuminating moments when an otherwise insignificant sound, perhaps only some perfectly commonplace gesture, suffices to reveal to us all the unreason, all the fatuous unreason, of our complacency. "Go ahead" are not particularly striking words even when pronounced with a foreign accent; yet they petrified me in the very act of smiling at myself in the glass. And then, refusing to believe my ears, but already boiling with indignation, ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... ground afforded the young man an excellent view. Sweetbriar had arrived at the turn which led to his stable; where rest and oats awaited him; and it evidently seemed to Him the height of injustice and unreason to be asked to go all the way back to Salem again. Mistress Ann, however, knew nothing of these previous experiences of the animal, but imputed his insubordinate behavior entirely to self-will and obstinacy. ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... trash; and this clearance is necessary so that we may purge our vision and see what is beautiful. We are almost rid of the manners of the King's mistress, and most women no longer try to appeal to men by their charming unreason. It is not merely that the appeal fails now; they themselves refuse to make it, out of self-respect. But they still remain irrational in their tastes; or at least they have not learned that all this aesthetic irrationality misrepresents them, that it ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... haunting the coach-office in Wood Street, Cheapside, before the coach had left the Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly well, I still felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of my sight longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of unreason I had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours, when Wemmick ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... the rest of the way in silence. But in that silence things grew clearer to him. Why should he take pains to persuade his mother to a consent which she had no right to withhold? His desire was altogether reasonable: why should its fulfilment depend on the unreason of one who had not strength to order her own behaviour? He had to save her, not to please her, gladly as he would have ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... a laughter strange and cracked like the laugh of a very old woman, that mounted high and higher, welling from her throat as blood wells from a wound; and rocked herself to and fro and stared into the face of the dead stranger with wide eyes of unreason.... ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... is the truth; and if you were not a boy, blind with rage and unreason, you would long since have known that such actions as yours, in rousing or trying to rouse the peasants of the Valdedera, must come to the ear of the authorities. Do not mistake. They let you alone as ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... into the room as if her question were the very climax of unreason] What the devil use would they be ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... mockery. Hence the perpetual interruption of the serious and affecting, and sometimes even awful, interest which belongs to the main argument of the piece, by scenes of farcical and extravagant caricature which might be pleasant enough as varieties in that farce of unreason with which he usually entertains us, but which, coming upon the mind in a state of serious emotion, are offensive and disagreeable. The two styles appear two opposite and incompatible moods; and it is impossible ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... far-spreading entanglement Mr. Gladstone for several years threw himself with the whole weight of his untiring tenacity and force. He plunged into masses of accounts, mastered the coil of interests and parties, studied legal intricacies, did daily battle with human unreason, and year after year ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... at the abandoned young man with supreme sympathy and intimate understanding. He was a nice and right-minded young man and she was an utter minx. She was the daughter of unreason and the granddaughter of folly. She needed, emphatically needed, to be shown. But this Englishman, with his harsh and violently antagonizing way of putting things, was clearly not the man for the need. It took a lighter touch—the hand of iron in the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... worldly-minded seek, seem of slight value to him at times. It induced in him many and very varying moods. It carried him back often, even now in the strength of his young manhood, to the fine fancies and exquisite unreason of the fairy world in which those so sadly ill-balanced footsteps of his had first been set. To-day had proved, so far, an unlucky one, prolific of warfare between his clear brain and all too sensitive ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... her, but he had had her pointed out to him, and though he recognized the unreason of such an attitude, he was aware that her great beauty dramatized her suffering, so that his pity for ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.'s room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... infinite expansion, swell up and bust. But this riot of egoism has as little relation to the Fine Art of Lying in Bed as a movie play has to the fine art of the drama. The true artist may take fair advantage of his nice state of unreason to defy time and space, but he will respect essential verities. He will treat his ego like the child it is; and, taking example from a careful mother, tie a rope to it when he lets it out to play. Thus he will capture a kind of immortality; and ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... scarcely avails himself of them even for his foundations or his skeleton framework. His critical faculty, stronger than his gift of adaptation, levels obstructions and marks the earth with ruin. He is more anxious to expose the strange unreason of former writers, the inadequacy of their knowledge, their want of aptitude in induction, than their services in storing material for the use of successors. The result is not to be the sifted and verified wisdom of two centuries, but a ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
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