"Irony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the incarnation, an expansion of the Nicene formula with reference to perversions of the faith by various heretics, and in conclusion a statement of Pelagius's own opinions regarding free will, grace, and sin. It is due to the irony of history that it should have been found among the works of both Jerome and Augustine, long passed current as a composition of Augustine, Sermo CCXXXVI, and should have been actually quoted by the Sorbonne, in 1521, in its articles against Luther. ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... without its compensations for a new writer. The 'equal popularity' of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair is referred to. 'A very remarkable book,' the reviewer continues; 'we have no remembrance of another containing such undoubted power with such horrid taste.' There is droll irony, when Charlotte Bronte's strong conservative sentiments and church environment ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... with Dr. Sitgreaves, that no species of knowledge was to be despised; and, consequently, he was an empiric in everything but his profession. At first, indignation at the irony of his comrade kept him silent; but, suddenly changing his purpose, he answered the applicant with ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... governor-general and dependent, Mr. Hilary Vane, he had married a wife who had upset all his calculations. The lady discovered Mr. Flint's balance in the bank, and had proceeded to use it for her own glorification, and the irony of it all was that he could defend it from everybody else. Mrs. Flint spent, and Mr. Flint paid the bills; for the first ten years protestingly, and after that he gave it up and let ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... place in him. The irritability approaching to violence, which had attended every speech and infused itself into every movement since he came into the room, had left him. He spoke quietly, and with a touch of irony in his tone. He seemed more the man, but not a whit more prepossessing, and, if anything, less calculated to inspire confidence. The district attorney showed that he was baffled, and Dr. Perry moved uneasily in his ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... la Haye looked angry at the rather caustic irony with which I had sprinkled the dialogue; but he was still more vexed when, taking some gold out of my pocket, I returned to him the sum he had lent me in Vienna. A man never argues well except when his purse is well filled; then his spirits are pitched in a high ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... risk enough in the former course,—which his duty made imperative. He hardly dared to think of the past day's slaughter, which—there was no doubt now—had been due to the previous work of the spy, and how his brigade had been selected—by the irony of Fate—to suffer for and yet retrieve it. If she had had a hand in this wicked plot, ought he to spare her? Or was his destiny and hers to ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... fundamentally with Jolyon's liberty—the one thing on which his jaw was also absolutely rigid, a considerable jaw, under that short grizzling beard. Nor was there ever any necessity for real heart-to-heart encounters. One could break away into irony—as indeed he often had to. But the real trouble with June was that she had never appealed to his aesthetic sense, though she might well have, with her red-gold hair and her viking-coloured eyes, and that touch of the Berserker in her spirit. It ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... fun of it. As he well knew, they all feared and hated him for his trick of irony; but at least half a dozen of them desired his custom, for in St. Hospital (where nothing escaped notice) Brother Copas's fastidious extravagance in body-linen and his punctuality in discharging small debts were matters of common knowledge. Moreover, in their present mood each ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... long experience at times in sweeping and profound generalisations, which covered the whole field of Oriental thought and action, and at others in pithy epigrammatic sayings in which the racy humour, sometimes tinged with a shade of cynical irony, never obscured the deep feeling of sympathy he entertained for everything that was worthy ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with something of her own writing. The child has a full and gay sense of the sweetest kinds of irony. There was no need for her to write, she and her mother being both at home, but the words must have seemed to her worthy of a pen:—"My dear mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of that article, if it is worthy to be called a article, which I doubt. Such a unletterary article. I cannot ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... irony were perceptible in his voice. His wife did not utter a syllable. She remained so quiet that it might have been thought she did not even hear him, but for the convulsive movement of her lips, and of the fingers ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... resenting Howard's good-humoured irony and putting on a supercilious look that brought out more strongly the insignificance of his face. "Journalism is not a career. It is either a school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... perhaps, her present owner and possessor, Mr. Abner Nott. For by the irony of circumstances, Mr. Nott was a Far Western farmer who had never seen a ship before, nor a larger stream of water than a tributary of the Missouri River. In a spirit, half of fascination, half of speculation, he had bought her at the time of her abandonment, and had since mortgaged his ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... master dramatist of the new movement, while he does not reproduce the average Irishman, is just as natively Irish in his extravagance and irony as the old folk-tale of the "Two Hags"; Lady Gregory in her farces is in a similar way representative of the riot of West-Country imagination; and Mr. Yeats, if further removed from the Irishmen of to-day, is very like, in many ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... isthmus, where on one side was a steep descent to the shore of the little bay, and on the other the live rock hewn away to wall, shining and sparkling with crystals of a clear irony brown, they next clambered up a rude ascent of solid rock, and so reached what had been the centre of the seaward portion of the castle. Here they came suddenly upon a small hole at their feet, going right down. Florimel knelt, and peeping in, saw the remains of a small spiral ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... enjoyment, dabbling in art, patronizing music and the composers, seemingly with no prevision that the musicians whom they attached to their train, and who in the cases of Mozart and Haydn were at times treated but little better than lackeys, were destined by the irony of fate to occupy places in the temple of fame, ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... been the climax of his empty successes. It had been Boston's first oratorio of the season, and the wreath had been an unusually ponderous one. It had met him promptly at the end of his first number, and it had impressed him as a curious bit of irony, following as it did upon the closing phrases of Spe modo Vivitur. Were his crowns to be only the thornless, characterless ones that went with his profession? He bowed low, nevertheless, before the storm of applause, set up his trophy against the steadiest of the music ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... statesmen, as Critias and Critobulus; some were politicians, in the worst sense of that word, as Glaucon; and some were young men of fashion, as Euthydemus and Alcibiades. These were all alike delighted with his inimitable irony, his versatility of genius, his charming modes of conversation, his adroitness of reply; and they were compelled to confess the wisdom and justness of his opinions, and to admire the purity and goodness of his life. The magic power ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... lowest Oolite lies is the Northampton Sands, an irony stratum of red ferruginous sand and sandstone, the upper portion of it also being called the Lower Estuarine deposit. It is from this stratum so many springs arise in various parts of the county, as ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... and still. Had I, by some strange irony, been led to this spot that I might witness the death of my foe? Was this the end of that long ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... unsatisfactory son," Bohemian and dilettante, frankly at odds with the Sinclair tradition—now standing, more or less, in that father's shoes; his heart centred on the old place and on the boy for whom he held it in trust; and the irony of it twisted his lips into a rueful smile. By his own over-concentration on Roy, and his secret dread of the Indian obsession, he could gauge what his own father must have suffered in an aggravated form, blind as he was to any point of view save his own. And there was Roy—like ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the irony of fate, this one Indian became the model warrior of the tribe. As the confusion and uproar grew in intensity, one after another joined the dancing circle, until it seemed that every brave in the camp was leaping around the fire. Blue-eyed Indians, Bois-Brules, ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... beauty is not less, though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's most profound sayings and most magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths of his villains and his clowns. To genius, pain is purgation; ugliness, beauty in disturbance. It injects the acid of irony into success, and distils the attar of felicity from failure. It teaches that the blows of fate are aimed, not at us, but at our fetters; that death is swallowed up in victory, that the Hound of Heaven is none other than the ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Vinsauf was the author of a well-known mediaeval treatise on composition in various poetical styles of which he gave examples. Chaucer's irony is therefore directed against some grandiose and affected lines on the death of Richard I., intended to illustrate the pathetic style, in which Friday is addressed as "O Veneris lachrymosa dies" ("O ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... that behind those grave eyes was a world of laughter, that beneath the solemn words was a gentle irony, and yet for the while he could not distinguish how much of tragedy there ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... Bienfilatre, l'Affichage celeste, la Machine a gloire, and le Plus beau diner du monde, betrayed a singularly inventive and keenly bantering mind. The whole order of contemporary and utilitarian ideas, the whole commercialized baseness of the age were glorified in stories whose poignant irony transported Des Esseintes. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... he wants to. Are you tired of sitting in prison? Go. Are you tired of going? Sit. They robbed you? Keep still. They beat you? Bear it. They have killed you? Stay dead. That's certain. And I'll carry off Savka; I'll carry him off!" His curt, barking phrases, full of good-natured irony, perplexed the mother. But his last words aroused ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... suggestion which I knew was ironically directed against myself, I did not care. So long as I was to be with my companions and of them, irony did not matter. I caught the twinkle in his eye and laughed. He was as joyous as Narcisse. The gladness of the July morning danced in his veins. He pulled the violin and bow out of the old baize bag and fiddled as we walked. It must have been an ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... readers who have no sense of humor and irony, the essay 'Of Love' unquestionably gives countenance to the theory that Francis Bacon was cold and passionless in all that concerned woman. Of the many strange constructions put upon this essay, not the least amusing and perverse is that which would ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... have been driven, by the long suppression of free thought and belief, added to the miseries brought about by the old regime, to take refuge in unrealities, and this has resulted in a kind of deformity of the national soul. It was a strange irony that even the aristocracy should end by falling victim to its own environment. Exploited by miracle-mongers, thrown off its balance by paroxysms of so-called mysticism, it disappeared from view in a welter of practices and beliefs ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... at the end of June one might have fancied a crisis had been reached. Curiously enough, by the irony of coincidence, the Reuters of that day contained the news that it had been stated in Parliament that, in the interests of the public, no statement would be made about the state of ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... acquiesced the banker. "In fact, I like the idea of staying here much better. It is more private, you know." He grinned significantly, but the woman's smile of faint derision changed merely to irony, which held steadily, making ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... I have never had the pleasure of meeting you before, sir," said the great railroad swallower and amateur Philanthropist with a tinge of railroad irony. ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... delay the enemy till European diplomacy, however slow of movement, could come to its aid, and ultimately to dispose the victor to accept terms consistent with its continued existence. It was an existence, of course, of sufferance, but one which grew better assured the longer it lasted. By an irony of the Osmanli position, the worse the empire was administered, the stronger became its international guarantee. No better example can be cited than the effect of its financial follies. When national bankruptcy, long contemplated by its Government, supervened at last, the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald, enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships they have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestra announces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, her sufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospect of his return. He will find her, she says, as he left her, a faithful watcher of the home, her loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... to the man and outrage upon the laws of God, the common Parent of all mankind. There are those in this country—men too of large influence, however small their wit, who, aping miserably the masterly irony of Junius, speak of the black man as the "ward of the nation"—a sort of pauper, dependent upon the charity of a generous and humane people for sustenance, and even tolerance to dwell among them, to enjoy the blessing of a civilization ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... for the supremacy of the world. For England herself the event which accompanied it, the sudden withdrawal of William Pitt from office which took place in the very month of the treaty, was hardly less significant. To men of our day the later position of William Pitt seems one of almost tragic irony. An economist heaping up millions of debt, a Peace Minister dragged into the costliest of wars, he is the very type of the baffled statesman; and the passionate loyalty with which England clung to him through the revolutionary struggle is one of the least intelligible passages of ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... which he understood were to form the matter of discussion; but he skilfully affected to regard them as having originated with the imperialists, and not with the French king. In a long paper of instructions, in which earnestness and irony were strangely blended, he directed the ambassador to treat his good brother as if he were still exclusively devoted to the interests of England; and to urge upon him, on the ground of this fresh delay, that the interview should not take place ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... Twelve gunners were also hit, and the only field gun taken. The retiring Boers were swiftly followed up by Thorneycroft's column, however, and the gun was retaken, together with twenty of Kritzinger's men. It must be confessed that there seems some irony in the fact that, within five days of the British ruling by which the Boers were no longer a military force, these non-belligerents had inflicted a loss of nearly six hundred men killed, wounded, or taken. Two small commandos, that of ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his first wild Californian dream, his English visit, the revelation of Gray Eagle, the final collapse of his old beliefs, were whirling through his brain to the music of this clear young voice. And by some cruel irony of circumstance it seemed now to even mock his later dreams of expiation as it also called back his unhappy experience ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Asiatic appearance. His eyes were slightly narrowed, his black hair curled lightly over an extremely broad forehead. He spoke little and often in brusque phrase. For this reason he was frequently misunderstood, as the irony and sarcasm with which he sometimes spoke did not tend to make friends. But this attitude was only turned toward those who did not comprehend him and his ideals, or who endeavored to falsify what he believed ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... greatly exalted by his poll, and referred freely on market days to his "plumpers," but as time went on the irony of the situation ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... turned on him. "You think you are sure of me, don't you?" she cried. And in her tone at once were defiance and irony. ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... times," said Tibble, in the tone of irony that was hard to understand. "He owneth the dean as a ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... children to come unto Me.' You are one of those who have come back again," replied the Baron with a touch of irony. ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... fond of telling funny stories in private conversation, they disappeared more and more from his public discourse. He would still now and then point his argument with expressions of inimitable quaintness, and flash out rays of kindly humor and witty irony; but his general tone was serious, and rose sometimes to genuine solemnity. His masterly skill in dialectical thrust and parry, his wealth of knowledge, his power of reasoning and elevation of sentiment, disclosed in language ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... to invade. invasor m. invader. inventar to invent. invierno winter. invitar to invite. ir to go; vr. to go away, depart; ir (with present part.), to go on —ing. iris m. rainbow. ironia irony. ironico ironic. irrealizable unrealizable. irritar to irritate. isla island. islamita m. Mohammedan. Italia Italy. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... explains men's pride in ships. "Ships are all right," as my middle-aged, respectable quartermaster said with much conviction and some irony; but they are not exactly what men make them. They have their own nature; they can of themselves minister to our self-esteem by the demand their qualities make upon our skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance. Which is the more flattering ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of things before you," he said in his softest tones, just touched with irony. "The fact of our engagement has been published. Our marriage is looked for by a host of friends and acquaintances, and even by the mere readers of the newspapers. All but at the last moment, on a caprice, an impulse you do not pretend to justify to one's intelligence, you declare it is all ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... mind of the Empress with explanations," but he did not mend his infidelity. At Oto's request he built a residence for her at Chinu in the neighbouring province of Kawachi, and thereafter the compilers of the Chronicles, with fine irony, confine their record of three consecutive years' events to a repetition of the single phrase, "the Emperor made a ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... was a lady of quite mature appearance, the remark was not without its little irony. The other man blew his horn by way of grace, at which Liza called out ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... effect, nay, even from its cumbrous and comical shape, stands alone among the instruments of noise. And if it be true, as I have heard it said, that drums are covered with asses' skin, what a picturesque irony is there in that! As if this long- suffering animal's hide had not been sufficiently belaboured during life, now by Lyonnese costermongers, now by presumptuous Hebrew prophets, it must be stripped from his poor hinder quarters after death, ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... exercised that right with the most cruel vigor, and he fulfilled that duty with the fiercest heroism, and to make matters worse, the mysterious irony of fate had caused him to be born with the name of Lebeau, while an ingenious godfather, the unconscious accomplice of the pranks of destiny, had given him the Christian name ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... draws up a paper of counsels and rules for his own conduct—"Custumae aptae ad Individuum"—which might supply an outline for an essay on the arts of behaviour proper for a rising official, a sequel to the biting irony of the essays on Cunning and Wisdom ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... blowed an' puffy-like. Soon's I can talk good, I will. Young folks is allers got to be impatient. There's my darter, Matildy Jane, she ain't none too patient, you know—leastways, not onless it's with you, Jim,"—here a wink of the eye at Jim made evident the playful irony of the exception, for Jim was Matilda's bete noir, and a chronic warfare waged between the two,—"an' she says to me this mornin', says she, 'Pa,' says she,—an' ye might think I hadn't never learned her the Ten Comman'ments, leastways the one about ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... "Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom," a cosmopolitan swindler and adventurer. The book is Smollett's "Barry Lyndon," yet as his hero does not tell his own story, but is perpetually held up as a "dreadful example," there is none of Thackeray's irony, none of his subtlety. "Here is a really bad man, a foreigner too," Smollett seems to say, "do not be misled, oh maidens, by the wiles of such a Count! Impetuous youth, play not with him at billiards, basset, or ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... with anyone doing it in such a dreary place. Of all God-forsaken dustbins of Nature, I think the most heart-breaking are places like that bandstand, that were meant to be festive and are forlorn. I can fancy a morbid man feeling he must kill his rival in the solitude and irony of such a scene. I remember once taking a tramp in your glorious Surrey hills, thinking of nothing but gorse and skylarks, when I came out on a vast circle of land, and over me lifted a vast, voiceless structure, tier above tier of ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... task of cutting his mutton into very small pieces Mr Cupples replied: 'The most curious feature of it, in my judgement, was the irony of the situation. We both held the clue to that mad hatred of Manderson's which Marlowe found so mysterious. We knew of his jealous obsession; which knowledge we withheld, as was very proper, if only in consideration ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... however, who did most of the talking; Olive only inserted from time to time an inquiry, a protest, a correction, an ejaculation tinged with irony. None of these things checked or diverted her hostess; Olive saw more and more that she wished to please her, to win her over, to smooth matters down, to place them in a new and original light. She was very clever and (little by little Olive said to herself) absolutely ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... imaginary, imaginative impending, approaching imperious, imperial imply, infer in, into inability, disability ingenious, ingenuous intelligent, intellectual insinuation, innuendo instinct, intuition involve, implicate irony, sarcasm irretrievable, irreparable ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... woman replied, with bitter irony in her tones, "I have come with my little girl to thank you for the present we received last night;—a ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... grimly given to be understood that the despatch is an ultimatum, and a last chance is being offered for the recreant ally to fulfil her pledge. To make it more plain, the document goes on with a kind of bilious irony: "The two German war-ships now in Samoa are here for the protection of German property alone; and when the Olga shall have arrived" [she arrived on the morrow] "the German war-ships will continue to do against ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little family conference—where they should send their wives and children. And one of these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the German barbarian, said quite naively and with no sense of irony or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German "savage" had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute power in ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the blended truth, irony, and wit with which Heloise dissuaded Abelard from open marriage. He compromised the affair, and contented himself with a secret marriage. "After a night spent in prayer," said he, "in one of the churches of Paris, on the following morning we received the nuptial blessing in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... River, this last vestige of his fortune which remained to him by pure chance. He had bought it as an investment for surplus funds. He had never even seen it. He would have smiled, if his face had been capable of smiling, at the irony of his owning ten million feet of Douglas fir and red cedar—material to build a thousand cottages—he who no longer owned a roof to shelter his head, whose cash resources were only a few ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... chief with biting irony, "my friend? You—the ringleader of those who despise my laws. You are my worst enemy. You pray for pity? No! for you I have no pity. It is my duty to have pity on my people over whom God placed me, and I am going to show them pity to-day; and that is my duty to ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... do no wrong," said MacGregor with gentle irony, "and neither can the law. Remember that, Philip, as long as you are in the service. The law may break up homes, ruin states, set itself a Nemesis on innocent men's heels—but it can do no wrong. It is ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... and 6 dilate with keen irony on the fate of the first half of Israel's sin—the calf. It was thought a god, but its worshippers shall be in a fright for it. 'Calves,' says Hosea, though there was but one at Beth-el; and he uses the feminine, as some think, depreciatingly. 'Beth-aven' or the 'house of vanity,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Laterensis that, even though the people might have judged badly in selecting Plancius, it was not the less his duty to accept the judgment of the people.[42] Say that the people ought not to have done so; but it should have been sufficient for him that they had done so. Then he laughs with a beautiful irony at the pretensions of the accuser. "Let us suppose that it was so," he says.[43] "Let no one whose family has not soared above praetorian honors contest any place with one of consular family. Let no mere knight stand ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... going to blow up?" he inquired, with a tinge of irony. "Well, it isn't." He turned to me. "Here's where we shall stay for a while. You and the men are to cut a number of these pine trees for a house. Better pick out the little ones, about three or four inches through: they're easier handled. I'll be ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... conclusively proved itself to be the most potent of all known artificial agents in the promotion of vegetable growth, should be found in a district utterly lacking the slightest traces of vegetation of any kind. Lest such a statement should seem to savour of irony, we hasten to explain that the singular barrenness of this part of the country is largely due to the character of its climate, the deposits occurring in the midst of sandy deserts,[205] ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... very kindly man, father," I answered, in a tone of irony. "I see that perfectly. But do not let this matter cause you needless anxiety; for there is one very clear argument which must reassure both of us. If a veritable religious impulse urges Brother John the Trappist to make a public reparation, it will be easy to make him understand ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... lie thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with fine irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery. Passionately ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... sake," said Merryon, with grim irony. "The regimental morals are somewhat easily offended, and an outsider like myself can't be ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... sources. The 'Anti-Jacobin' shows Mr. Canning's power in his youthful exuberance. When I knew him it had been sobered, perhaps saddened, by the political contrarities and other incidents of more advanced life, but had lost none of its refinement of irony. Less obvious than the common wit of the world, it excited thought and refined it—one of the highest characteristics of ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... say is not shared by the large majority of Chinese. Persons who have committed political offenses in their own country find protection not only in America but in all countries in Europe, Japan, and other civilized lands. It is an irony of fate that since the establishment of the Chinese Republic, Manchu and other officials under the old regime, now find secure asylums in Hongkong, Japan, and Tsingtao, while hundreds of ex-Manchu officials have fled to the foreign settlements ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... convinced that those characteristics are not the essential characteristics. I am convinced that there is another Montaigne who has nothing in common with the Montaigne of convention and tradition. I am convinced that the scepticism, the Conservatism, the irony, the moderation, the affectation of humility, frivolity, pedantry, and innocent candour, are only a mask and disguise which Montaigne has put on to conceal his identity, that they are only so many tricks ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Irony about this View Is, I fear, more true than new, Still the crowd's a great 'un; Heads and bodies hide from me Pictures that I wish to see; Smooth, fair maids ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... sun shine on the head of the crucified, if a bird lift up its joyous song in presence of a broken heart, it seems to us cruel. But beautiful is the unconscious irony of nature in comparison with that which exists in human circumstances. We have here an example of this before us. See these sparkling false diamonds, this red gauze finery, these ruins of theatrical ornament. ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... less brilliant than his gifted, short-lived younger brothers, Edward and Charles. He had an undistinguished career at Harvard, where he was graduated in 1821, ranking thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Lovers of irony like to remember that he was the seventh choice of his classmates for the position of class poet. After some desultory teaching to help his brothers, he passed irregularly through the Divinity School, his studies often interrupted by serious ill-health. "If they had ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... to observe the close interweaving, the subtle irony and contrasts, the perfect harmony of the details. We must review them quite briefly. To illustrate the first, Pedringano's letter is not the 'wonderful discovery' that usually saves lost situations in weak novels: it has been referred to by him ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... Gullion, who drunk Acheron dry in his passage over it, and grounded Charon's boat, but floated it again, by as liberal a stream of urine. It concludes with the following sarcastical, yet wholesome irony. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... physiognomist could at that moment have detected in the corner of Roblado's eye a very odd expression—a mingling of irony with a strong desire to laugh. In fact, the gallant captain could hardly keep from bursting out in the faces of his admirers, and was only restrained from doing so by the desire of keeping the joke bottled up till he could enjoy it in the company of the Comandante—to ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... a vein of misanthropic irony in most of what Anthony Thurston said, but the other man had the same blood ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... other, and shows the want of thoroughness and depth in Mrs. Jameson's intellect. She has taste, feeling and knowledge, but she cannot think out a subject thoroughly, and is unconsciously tainted and hampered by conventionalities. Her advice to the governesses reads like a piece of irony, but we believe it was not meant as such. Advise them to be burnt at the stake at once, rather than submit to this slow process of petrifaction. She is as bad as the Reports of the "Society for the relief of distressed and dilapidated Governesses." We have no more patience. We must go to ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Carpen: It were indeed a most stupendous mind Which, as the argonaut with mining pan Doth sift pure gold from ever present dross, Can Truth unmesh from Error's well spread net. Conditions intricate with taunting smile Of Fate's stern irony, have faced us here; But now the seething problem must be solved And vague uncertainty be swept aside. Shall the mestizos, as the ruling class, Be firm entrenched by our assisting hand, Or must we in the well marked path still tread And longer bear our burden which will bring No gratitude to ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... replied quickly, sure that her voice must betray the irony she felt. As if she cared, indeed, whether he ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... Sir, at being taxed with insincerity for my encomiums on Scotland. They were given in a manner a little too serious to admit of irony, and (as partialities cannot be supposed entirely ceased) with too much risk of disapprobation in this part of the world, not to flow from my heart. My friends have long known my opinion on this point, and it is too much formed on fact for me ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... not begin with thy irony-stop! I know all your organ tones, from the tenor of your kindness to the bourdon of your displeasure. Do you think I am not glad to have you here safe and sound? Do you think I have not been miserable about you since I knew of your sickness? Monsieur de Malfort will tell you whether I have ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... mother said to her a dozen times a day? Now be a good little girl and have a good time. How could you be a good little girl and have a good time at the same time? The irony of it, when anybody with a grain of sense would know that the two do not go hand in hand! If she had stayed home that afternoon, she would have been good, but she would not have had a good time. As it was, she had had a good time, but she had not been good. ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... world yet takes note of it, and that is his patience. If interrupted in a speech, he gave way and never answered sharply, nor used his position to the other's discomfiture. In his speeches there was no challenge, no vituperation, no irony, no arraignment. He assumed that everybody was honest, everybody just, and that all men were doing what they thought was best for themselves and others. His enemies were not rogues—simply good men who were temporarily in error. He impeached no man's motives; but ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... grand and simple irony in this not easily surpassed. Some very evident proofs had been given in England, that to deny the King's spiritual supremacy was "wilfully to be dead," although neither the King nor the Parliament had vouchsafed to inform the victims in what part of the Gospel the keys of the kingdom ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... was understood and appreciated. The poor fellow of twenty-seven had the innocence of a lad of sixteen. Another man, one of those distrustful, surly artists, would have noticed the diabolical look on Elie's face and seen the twitching of the hairs of his beard, the irony of his moustache, and the movement of his shoulders which betrayed the satisfaction of Walter Scott's Jew in ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... of irony which Nina had thrown into her voice when she spoke of what was due to her lover even though he was a Jew was not lost upon her father. "Of course you would take his part against a ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... this now as he looked on; and not without a sense of irony, he said under his breath, "Almost thou persuadest me ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... lurking irony in this speech; yet the softened accents of his father, in some measure, disarmed the youth of the bitterness he would have flung into his observation,—"That no man on earth, his parent excepted, should have dared to insinuate ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day. [To VOITSKI] I read irony in your eye; you do not take what I am saying seriously, and—and—after all, it may very well be nonsense. But when I pass peasant-forests that I have preserved from the axe, or hear the rustling of the young plantations set out with ...
— Uncle Vanya • Anton Checkov
... whole time I was with them, I never heard them indulge in a joke, or other levity, and the practice of it is apt to give offence: they are so accustomed to take what is said in its literal meaning, that irony was always considered a falsehood, in spite of explanation. They could not see the propriety of uttering what was not strictly true, for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... on the main point at issue, that of their violent death, are worded with marvellous dignity, coupled with a sad touch of irony. That engraved on the urn of Pompeius ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... lost caste by the way in which he made so many respectable Sabines fathers-in-law against their will, or that the wise Odysseus was a perfectly admirable gentleman in our sense of the word? Even in the sixteenth century, in the then most civilized country of the world, the grave irony with which Macchiavelli commends the frightful treacheries of Caesar Borgia would have had no point, if he had not taken it for granted that almost all who read his treatise would suppose him to be in earnest. In the same way dregs is explained simply as the sediment left after ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Saturday just previous, and his purse contained only four thalers. There was only one prospect left, and he went to a rich money lender, and in response to his request for relief in money difficulties, was met with this reply of irony and sarcasm from one who loved to indulge his enmity to the Christian faith. "You in money difficulties, or any difficulties, Mr. Loest! I cannot believe it; it is altogether impossible! you are at all times and in all places ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... though they persecuted certain Royalist poets of far inferior note. On the accession of Charles the Second he celebrated the event by a most singular piece called the Lamentation of Oliver's men, in which he assails the Roundheads with the most bitter irony. He was loyal to James the Second, till that monarch attempted to overthrow the Church of England, when Huw, much to his credit, turned against him, and wrote songs in the interest of the glorious Prince of Orange. He died in the reign of good Queen Anne. In his youth his ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... servants, and the 'Powers' of the hospital—all were sorry; yet they could not understand to the point of quite forgiving their vagaries. The twain were outcast, wandering each in a dumb world of his own, each in the endless circle of one or two hopeless notions. It was irony—or the French system—which had ordered the Breton Roche to get well in a place whence he could see nothing flatter than a mountain, smell no sea, eat no fish. And God knows what had sent Gray there. His story was too vaguely understood, for his stumbling ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... "The diamond does not know its own value," he said, and there was an inexpressible charm, and a touch of something like irony ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... conjure with, so he capitulated with a willingness that savored somewhat of suspended animation (so fearful was he that he might do something to disturb the dream before it came true). That was two years ago. With exquisite irony, Lady Bazelhurst decided to have a country-place in America. Her agents discovered a glorious section of woodland in the Adirondacks, teeming with trout streams, game haunts, unparalleled scenery; her ladyship instructed them to buy without ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... tribune was an earthquake. The tribune of France spoke, and every sentient being on this earth betook itself to reflection; the words sped into the obscurity, through space, at hazard, no matter where,—"It is only the wind, it is only a little noise," said the barren minds that live upon irony; but the next day, or three months, or a year later, something fell on the surface of the earth, or something rose. What had been the cause of that? The noise that had vanished, the wind that had passed away. This noise, this wind, was "the Word." A sacred force! ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... bedclothes against her mouth to prevent the sound of it penetrating the partition wall and reaching John Niel's ears, for his room was next to hers. Even in the midst of her suffering the thought of the irony of the thing forced itself into her mind. There, separated from her only by a few inches of lath and plaster and some four or five feet of space, was the man for whom she mourned thus, and yet he was as ignorant of it as though he were thousands of miles away. Sometimes at such acute ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... strange irony of Fate that we found ourselves reunited for a summer's outing, in a ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... paltry joke upon a grave and sensible though unsuspecting individual, he felt quite delighted at the feat; and took the person thus imposed upon into the number of his favorites. It was upon this principle among others that Norton, who pretended never to see through his flimsy irony, contrived to keep in his favor, and to shape him according to his wishes, whilst he made the weak-minded young man believe that everything he did and every step he took was the result of his own deliberate opinion, whereas in fact he was only ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... wise man, of which the Sophists, as he describes them in the Republic, are the imitators rather than the authors, being themselves carried away by the great tide of public opinion. Socrates approaches his antagonist warily from a distance, with a sort of irony which touches with a light hand both his personal vices (probably in allusion to some scandal of the day) and his servility to the populace. At the same time, he is in most profound earnest, as Chaerephon remarks. ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... "I beg to say that if I did give him any physic, the dose would be much to his advantage; but, however, my opinion is, that this invitation to breakfast is, after all, a mere piece of irony; and that, when we get to Walmesley Lodge, we shall not see anything of him; on the contrary, we shall probably find it's ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... any presents in one hut, the inmates of the next would not fail to tell us of it, accompanying their remarks with some satirical observation, too unequivocally expressed to be mistaken, and generally by some stroke of irony directed against the favoured person. If any individual with whom we had been intimate happened to be implicated in a theft, the circumstance became a subject of satisfaction too manifest to be repressed, and we were told of it with ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... The only irony allowed to poverty is to drive Justice and Benevolence to unjust denials. When a poor wretch has convicted Society of falsehood, he throws himself more eagerly on the mercy ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... shrink; she rather pressed forward and bent near, to acquaint herself perfectly with what was done; and once or twice asked a question as to the reason or the use of something. Dr. Harrison glanced up at her the first time—it might have been with incipient impatience—or irony,—but if either, it disappeared. He answered her questions straightforward and sensibly, giving her, and with admirable precision, exactly the information she desired, and even more than absolutely that. For everything else, the work went on in silence. When the doctor however was standing ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... while the dumb understand the whole show the person who's describing it quite accurately to them often knows nothing about it. Paradox, irony, blasted eternal cussedness of life! Did you ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... assures us that he laboured over The Nabob for eight months, mainly in his bed-room, sometimes working eighteen consecutive hours, often waking from restless sleep with a sentence on his lips. Yet, such is the irony of literary history, the novel is loosely enough put together to have been written, one might suppose, in bursts of inspiration or else more or less methodically—almost with the intention, as Mr. James has noted, of including every striking phase of Parisian life. For ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... it is a peculiar irony of fate that the very originator of the new trend in Greek thought was charged with and sentenced for impiety. We have already mentioned the singular prelude to the indictment afforded by the comedy of Aristophanes. We have also remarked upon the futility of looking therein for any actual ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... with careless irony. In reality the trial that was hanging over him worried him extremely. Olga Mihalovna remembered how on his return from the unfortunate session he had tried to conceal from his household how troubled he was, and how dissatisfied with himself. As an intelligent man ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... no doubt shrugged his shoulders, for in a tone of crushing irony and scorn, he exclaimed: "Noble ladies! whom do you call noble ladies, pray? The brainless fools who only think of displaying themselves and making themselves notorious?—the senseless idiots who pique themselves on surpassing ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... character shall appear dreadful, and even hateful, but not contemptible. But where a character of less note, a Shadwell or a Settle, crossed his path, the satirist did not lay himself under these restraints, but wrote in the language of bitter irony and immeasurable contempt: even then, however, we are less called on to admire the wit of the author, than the force and energy of his poetical philippic. These are the verses which are made by indignation, and, no more than theatrical scenes of ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... devoured them. They told of three determined attacks on the town on the third day after I had left, all successfully repulsed, and of a bombardment on the following Monday. The latter had been somewhat of a farce, and had done no damage, except to one or two buildings which, by an irony of fate, included the Dutch church and hotel and the convent. The shells were of such poor quality that they were incapable of any explosive force whatever.[26] After nine hours' bombardment, although some narrow escapes were recorded, the only casualties were one chicken ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... to have a brother!" observed Bertram with irony. "Well!—and what news, sweet Hugh, of ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... instinct as shows itself in our love of certain kinds of fiction. We know that some of the happy endings in the plays and in the novels are often far-fetched; but we like to have the happy endings, or the "poetic justice" endings, or the "irony of fate" endings, just the same. When the child makes up his endings to fit his sense of justice or beauty, we must not condemn him, as we are often tempted to do, by calling his fabrication a "lie," for that ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... she must have read them over many times, and dwelt upon them, there was an under-current of ridicule running through her tones and action—for she had personified the river-god—and when she was done, she criticised them with merciless irony. ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... most glad, honored Master Scientist," he said in the flowery Oriental fashion that he affected in his irony, "to welcome you here. For me it is a memorable occasion. Your presence graces my home, and, however unworthily, distinguishes me, rewarding as it does aspirations which I have long held. I am humbly confident that great achievements will result ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... more powerful horror, but it would have lacked the ethical beauty which Hawthorne gave it and which makes it significant beyond a mere feat of verbal legerdemain. And the subtile simplicity of "The Great Stone Face" is as far from Poe as the pathetic irony of "The Ambitious Guest." In all his most daring fantasies Hawthorne is natural, and, though he may project his vision far beyond the boundaries of fact, nowhere does he violate the laws of nature. He had at all times a wholesome simplicity, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... of the headquarters behind Verdun he found many old friends and companions. They greeted him with cheerful irony. ...
— The Broken Soldier and the Maid of France • Henry Van Dyke
... had left her eyes cold as she surveyed the scene. There was no sign of the expressed delight with which she had followed Nan at her first inspection of her new home. The recollection of it had even left her. Only a certain sense of the irony of it all occupied her. That, and a painful wonder as to when the dread under which she labored would materialize into the shattering of every hope ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... "No irony," said Robert, who, nevertheless, was pleased. "It merely proves that Areskoui had forgiven me, while he had not forgiven you two. But don't you notice ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in irony. She laughed, and broke away. She was free. As she sat on the top of the tram in the sunlight, she looked round her with tremendous delight. She had left something which had meant much to her. She ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... does, and it is commonly supposed to be no heavy fault in him or any other writer for the common public. Man cannot live by analysis alone, nor nourish himself on the secret delights of irony. And if Macaulay had only reflected the more generous of the prejudices of mankind, it would have been well enough. Burke, for instance, was a writer who revered the prejudices of a modern society as deeply as Macaulay did; he believed society to be founded on prejudices and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... said that to me I should have laughed—you don't suspect the irony in it" Hilda said. "Pray who is to ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... in Bantry Bay with the ships of Hoche's unlucky expedition; he landed with Humbert in Donegal, and saw the Race of Castlebar; he had some marvellous experiences in the West Indies, and everywhere the devotion of women facilitated his hairbreadth escapes. There need be no irony in repeating that avowed fiction can have no chance at all in competition ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Gabler.' Dennery might envy the ingenuity with which Consul Bernick is tempted to insist on the fatal order that seems for a season to be the death-sentence of his own son; and Sardou would appreciate the irony of Nora's frantic dance at the very moment when she was tortured by deadly fear. But these theatric devices, in Dennery's hands or in Sardou's, would have existed for their own sake solely; but in Ibsen's, ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... irony of the whole of that, finishing with the grim innuendo of the last stanza but one, is at once truly masterly ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... worn-out instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go—"for the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated—and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to be a late and "literary" presentation of the stately society it describes, rank it much higher as such. Its author was a bitter enough satirist if he wrote, as he most probably did, the famous Quinze Joyes de Mariage, one of the most unmitigated pieces of unsweetened irony—next to A Tale of a Tub and Jonathan Wild—to be found in literature; but not couched in narrative form. The same quality appears of course in the still more famous farce of Pathelin, which few good judges deny very stoutly to him, though there ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity, is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... to view her and amuse itself with her antics. For the first time she saw that smile which was not on any particular face, but which, nevertheless, hovered over all faces and seemed to fill the theater; it was a smile of indulgent and unconscious irony, a smile of crushing superiority that is seen on the faces of older people when they watch the playing of ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... of the power of that God whom he was blaspheming; but Job cuts short his harangue, and ends it for him in a spirit of loftiness which Bildad could not have approached; and then proudly and calmly rebukes them all, no longer in scorn and irony, but in high tranquil self-possession. "God forbid that I should justify you," he says; "till I die I will not remove my integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go. My heart shall not reproach me so long as ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... cultivated through study and social intercourse, such as we find in France and England. His conversation indicated the tact of circumstances, like that of the hunter in pursuit of his prey. His spirit seemed a cold, keen sword-blade, which freezes while it wounds. I felt a profound irony in his mind, which nothing great or beautiful could escape, not even his own fame, for he despised the nation whose suffrages he sought... "—"With him, everything was means or aims; spontaneity, whether for good or ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... I was told that I was doing a rash thing, a dangerous thing—that before your twenty-fifth birthday the bad blood would out; that you would, in short, have shot a man. And the prophecy has come true. By an irony of chance it has happened on the very last day. And by another irony you picked your victim from among the ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... powerful aids furnished by the pen to the solution of the burning question of their time. Lord Murray called the Plymley letters "after Pascal's letters the most instructive piece of wisdom in the form of irony ever written." Worldly wealth came later; but in wit, wisdom, and kindly helpful cheerfulness, from youth to age, ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... praising the writers of his own age, ventured to disparage some of the great authors of the ancient classics. Boileau lashed himself into a fury of opposition and hurled strident insults against the heretic. Racine, more adroit, pretended to think that the poem was a piece of ingenious irony. Most men of letters hastened to participate in the battle. No doubt Perrault's position was untenable, but he conducted his defence with perfect temper and much wit; and Boileau made himself not a little absurd by his violence and his obvious longing to display the extent ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... traveller, he had, at thirty years of age, seen all that was to be seen, he had visited India and Japan, drunk camel's milk under the tents of the Kirgheez, and eaten dates with the Kabyles, and narrated with a sort of appetizing irony, love adventures which might have seemed romantic brag, if it were not that he lessened their improbability by his raillery. He was a kind of belated Byron, who might have been cured of his romantic tastes by the ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... of eight books, the first of which, in irony of some histories which had previously been published, gives a description of the world and a history of its creation, and in brief, the story of Noah and the discovery of America, and a dissertation on the origin of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... at last. It is an irony of Fate. There are a hundred thousand of them there, the best blood of Russia, and the most charming and delightful people in Europe in themselves, though now almost entirely destitute of means. A large Russian army without ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... very ill of, when they keep such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards—no Antony, no royal Dane, no ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... you and me; and your fate for all time, your future weal or woe is rather a costly shuttlecock to be tossed to and fro in a game of words. I do not come to bandy phrases, and in view of your imminent peril, I cannot quite understand your irony." ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... this last decidedly hackneyed, not to say silly remark, Andrea laughed frankly as if to forestall the lady's smile, whether of incredulity or irony. But Elena remained perfectly serious. Was she listening, or was she thinking of something else? Did she accept that kind of speech, or was she, by her gravity, amusing herself at his expense? Did she ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... objectors the irony and the oratory of a Chalmers was directed with what was held to be overwhelming effect. If the telescope had shewn us wonderful things, there was another instrument, he said, which had been given to us {20} about the same time. If by the telescope we had ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... and how little we remembered her as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare must have desired, to have been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should live... and now we have no real interest in her.... The irony of it is that if he had cared more for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have read it after ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... to laugh and Guillaume realised all the good-natured irony of his laugh. While admiring him as a great savant, he had hitherto suffered at seeing him lead such a bourgeois life, accepting whatever appointments and honours were offered him, a Republican under ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... By the irony of fate, Aunt Eliza, of all people, turned out to be the Dea ex machina: which thing fell out in this wise. It was that lady's obnoxious practice to issue forth, of a Sunday afternoon, on a visit of state to such farmers ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... short of sudden death, and even then he'd feel himself ill used. Stay at home because I felt faint? It would be as much as my place is worth," said Bertie with a smile of which Judith could not understand the fine irony. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... porphyry, garnet, and such like. Sometimes he had a day in the woods, and there, too, the boy's attention was excited by the peculiar geological curiosities which came in his way. While searching among the rocks on the beach, he was sometimes asked, in irony, by the farm-servants who came to load their carts with sea-weed, whether he "was gettin' siller in the stanes," but was so unlucky as never to be able to answer in the affirmative. When of a suitable age he was apprenticed ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... much as a Michael Angelo, hewing, with heat and haste, at one of his terrible pieces of statuary. He characterizes the miser severely; he lashes the proud wicked man whom he sees pompously hearsed into Hell; with stern irony he pursues the beauty from her looking-glass ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.] |
