"Absurd" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gains. These increases ranged from $1,000 to $100,000 each, aggregating a loss to the State of many hundreds of thousands of dollars. "The corruption is so enormous," said the World, "as to render absurd any attempt ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... he sent copies of his books to Lord Lorne, and to the Princess a special copy of that absurd manual, The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English, for which he had written an introduction.—[A serious work, in Portugal, though issued by Osgood ('83) as a joke. Clemens in the introduction says: "Its delicious, unconscious ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... certain that he was considered a youth of extraordinary promise by his colleagues, Wilkie, Jackson, and Sir George Beaumont, yet there were not wanting critics who declared that his early picture, 'Dentatus,' was an absurd mass of vulgarity and distortion. Foreign artists who visited his studio urged him to go to Rome, where he was assured that patrons and pupils would flock round him; while, on the other hand, he was described by a native critic (in the Quarterly Review) ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... to this I was most ignorantly and innocently made to hold the candle. This fiscal manoeuvre is well known by the name of the Assumption. Independently of the debts of Congress, the States had, during the war, contracted separate and heavy debts; and Massachusetts particularly, in an absurd attempt, absurdly conducted, on the British post of Penobscot: and the more debt Hamilton could rake up, the more plunder for his mercenaries. This money, whether wisely or foolishly spent, was pretended ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... That's a very absurd story, a rather ridiculous one, but if the surgeon had made the mistake Mr. Beard charged, he would not have made any greater than is made every day at the marriage altar. Young women, I would not silence the love songs in your hopeful hearts, but I would have every betrothed girl demand ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... this letter of Orion's. Did you ever see the grotesquely absurd and the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined together? Mrs. Clemens said "Raise his monthly pension." So I wrote to Perkins to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... shade. What is a garden for? The pleasure of man. I should take much more pleasure in a shady garden. Am I to be sacrificed, broiled, roasted, for the sake of the increased vigor of a few vegetables? The thing is perfectly absurd. If I were rich, I think I would have my garden covered with an awning, so that it would be comfortable to work in it. It might roll up and be removable, as the great awning of the Roman Coliseum was, —not like the Boston one, which ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in dispelling some of the absurd ideas which are now current about Russia, I shall be content. If I win a little comprehension and kindly sympathy for them, I ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... now readily supported by everybody. But that their realization requires compulsion, and compulsion in the form of a dictatorship, is ordinarily not comprehended. And yet, it would be the greatest stupidity and the most absurd opportunism to suppose that the transition from capitalism to Socialism is possible without compulsion and dictatorship. The Marxian theory has long ago criticized beyond misunderstanding this petty bourgeois-democratic ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... in our hearts the rougher merits of the strong arm and the dextrous hand. Every month sees a larger proportion of officers coming from among those whose habits have been the reverse of luxury. It is hard to say which would be more mischievous and absurd: for these to spend their extra pay and rations in an effort to copy the traditional style of an English Guardsman, or to keep on in their old way of life, and pocket large savings that are supposed to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... What an absurd little goose you must be to ask such a thing! Servants are kept for ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... bread,—that cities and countries would honor in him, not Caesar, the lord of the earth, but a poet whose like the world had not produced before. And so he struggled, raged, played, sang, changed his plan, changed his quotations, changed his life and the world into a dream absurd, fantastic, dreadful, into an uproarious hunt composed of unnatural expressions, bad verses, groans, tears, and blood; but meanwhile the cloud in the west was increasing and thickening every day. The measure was exceeded; the insane ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... was a strong man. By his work at the forge he had strengthened his muscles till they were like iron. So was Kit a strong boy, but it would be absurd to represent him as a match for ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.
... of you, Jack," my father cried petulantly. "There is nothing practical about you. Instead of confining your attention to the working out of my noble scheme, you begin raising all sorts of absurd objections. It is a mere matter of detail how our descendants live, so long as they stick to the Djarmas. Now, I want you to go up to the bothy of Fergus McDonald and see about the thatch, and Willie Fullerton has written to say that his milk-cow ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... secretary of an embassy, whom I knew some years after, told me that a paid informer, with two other witnesses, also, doubtless, in the pay of this grand tribunal, had declared that I was guilty of only believing in the devil, as if this absurd belief, if it were possible, did not necessarily connote a belief in God! These three honest fellows testified with an oath that when I lost money at play, on which occasion all the faithful are wont to blaspheme, I was never heard ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... on board, this other Sanchez. I leaned over the edge of my bunk, and looked down on Haley, half resolved to ask if he had ever noticed this lieutenant, but the man was already sound asleep. The suspicion which had crept into my mind was so absurd, so unspeakably silly and impossible, that I laughed at myself, and dismissed the crazy thought. What, that fellow Black Sanchez! Bah, no! He had been at sea, of course; there was no denying that fact, for he knew ships, and spoke the lingo ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... added that a twisted interpretation of the Scriptures was as bad as adding to or taking from them, and that no one doubted that Paul was warning the elders against polygamy. Then I went a bit further, for by this time the absurd character of the questions was ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... angler aboard the steamer had told him about the sportsmanlike rules that obtain at Avalon, it seemed absurd to Colin for any one to try and catch so heavy a fish as the tuna seemed to be, with a rod and line that would be thought ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... you have observed was a pet expression with Rudolph, whenever he wished to intimate that he considered your remarks to be simply absurd. ...
— Tattine • Ruth Ogden
... me they have seen them doing it; and in a natural history book of my childhood there is a picture of a beaver with the end of a three-foot stick in his mouth, sucking the air out. Just as if the beavers didn't know better, even if the absurd thing were possible! The simplest way is to cut the wood early and leave it in the water a while, when it sinks of itself; for green birch and poplar are almost as heavy as water. They soon get waterlogged and go to the bottom. It is almost impossible for lumbermen to drive spool wood ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... great exactness the fineness of the powdered ore customary in practice. They show that having passed through such a sieve is no proof of sufficient powdering, not that all ores powdered and so sifted are unfit for assaying. This last would be an absurd and illogical conclusion. ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... Absurd as appeared the pretensions of the cibolero in regard to Catalina, Roblado had learned enough of late to make him jealous—ay, even to give him real uneasiness. She was a strange creature, Catalina de Cruces—one who had shown proofs of a rare spirit—one not to be bought and sold ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... so completely satisfactory, and so readily and candidly forthcoming, left no room for further doubt that Don Diego should have been false to his parole. And when presently Don Diego had withdrawn again, Captain Blood confessed to Pitt that it was absurd to have suspected him. Whatever his antecedents, he had proved his quality when he announced himself ready to die sooner than enter into any undertaking that could hurt his honour or ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... and agnostic days it may sound a little strange, and perhaps to some seem quite absurd, that the authorities of Harvard in 1791 felt obliged publicly to deny that Gibbon's History was used as a text-book at the University. But with the exception perhaps of Tom Paine, no one in this country had then ventured to assail the literal interpretation of the ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... And he gave a little sympathetic sigh. "To reconcile Northampton and Rome is rather a problem. Mary had better come out here. Even at the worst I have no intention of giving up Rome within six or eight years, and an engagement of that duration would be rather absurd." ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... line of Inca princes, whose exploits, and names even, by no means coincide with Garcilasso's catalogue; a circumstance, however, far from establishing their inaccuracy. But one will have little doubt of the writer's title to this reproach, that reads the absurd legends told in the grave tone of reliance by Montesinos, who shared largely in the credulity and the love of the marvellous which belong to an ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... that, "be that as it might, it was absurd to suppose that I should have given up my position in Chili for anything less in Brazil, and that all that had been offered by the Consul, or desired by me, was simply an equivalent to my Chilian command, with adequate reimbursement of ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... precentor was sure that the dean had been taken in by a clever impostor, which would not have been the case, he asserted, if the matter had been referred to him as it ought to have been. But Morningquest declared that there was no imposition about that voice, and as to antecedents, why, it was absurd to be too particular when everything else ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... better to do in these circumstances than to pour out abuse, occasionally varied by ridicule, on the Unionist leaders, of which Sir Edward Carson came in for the most generous portion. He was by turns everything that was bad, dangerous, and absurd, from Mephistopheles to a madman. "F.C.G." summarised the Balmoral meeting pictorially in a Westminster Gazette cartoon as a costermonger's donkey-cart in which Carson, Londonderry, and Bonar Law, refreshed by "Orangeade," took "an Easter ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... Saul in that house in Damascus and said, 'Receive the Holy Ghost.' An apostle stood by passive and wondering when the Holy Ghost fell on Cornelius and his comrades. In reality apostolic succession is absurd, because there is nothing to succeed to, except what cannot be transmitted, personal knowledge of the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To establish that fact as indubitable history is to lay the foundation of the Christian ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... doctor. "Look out for his knife. Bah! how absurd!" he added the next moment, calming down from ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... many of you indulge in so much smaller talk with men than with women? Because it is expected of you? Only by a few, and they make themselves very absurd by always trying to say nonsensical things to you. Men of this sort appear to have an impression that you are still children amused with a Jack-in-the-box which springs up in a very conceited hobgoblin way. Everybody likes a joke, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... gods—Per hostias dis supplicante. Supplicating or worshiping the gods with sacrifices, and trying to learn their intentions as to the future by inspection of the entrails. "Marius was either a sincere believer in the absurd superstitions and dreams of the soothsayers, or pretended to be so, from a knowledge of the nature of mankind, who are eager to listen to wonders, and are ore willing to be deceived than to be taught." Burnouf. See Plutarch, Life of Marius. He ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... None could think worse of the homes than he did. He spoke in a cross tone; we are all apt to do so, when vexed with ourselves. "What possesses Deerham to show itself so absurd just now? Ghosts! They only affect fear, it ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... it sound absurd? And they all voted for you—every one of them, with the exception ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... subject of free commerce between nations. That any industry, no matter how young might be the nation practicing it, or how peculiar the difficulties of its prosecution, should ever be the subject of home protection, he stamped as a fallacy too absurd to be argued. The journals venturing such an opinion were childish drivelers, putting forth views long since exploded before the whole world. He was still loud in this opinion when his little book of epigrams, The Raven of Zurich and Other ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... thee, O free and independent franchiser; but does not this stupid pewter pot oppress thee? No son of Adam can bid thee come or go, but this absurd pot of heavy-wet can and does, Thou art the thrall, not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetites, and this accursed dish of liquor. And thou pratest of thy 'liberty,' ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... "An absurd story, altogether!" says Olga, throwing up her head, a smile lightening her eyes as they meet Kelly's. At her tone, which is more amused than annoyed, Ronayne lets his hand fall into the water close to hers, and doubtless ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... hesitated. Her first impulse was to scornfully say no, but she quickly realized that would be undignified and absurd; so she said yes, coldly, and let him place his arm about her. The band was playing a particularly sensuous valse, which drove all young people mad that year, and—if the Count had danced well—this man's movements were heaven. Tamara did not speak a word. She ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... third branch of our inquiry, and have to ask whether there be any weekly rhythm of the sexual activity. A priori it might be answered that to expect any such weekly rhythm were absurd, seeing that our week—unlike the lunar month of the year—is a purely artificial and conventional period; while, on the other hand, it might be retorted that the existence of an induced weekly periodicity is quite conceivable, such periodicity being induced by the habitual difference ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... or eighteen, our "young ladies" are sorry specimens of feminality; and palpitators, cosmetics and all the modern paraphernalia are required to make them appear fresh and blooming. Man is equally at fault. A devotee to all the absurd devices of fashion, he practically asserts that "dress makes the man." But physical deformities are of far less importance ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... indignantly that it was my wont to win success, not by routine, but by ability. I added that I would abandon the test altogether unless they would agree not to put off their attendance at my lecture. In truth at this first lecture of mine only a few were present, for it seemed quite absurd to all of them that I, hitherto so inexperienced in discussing the Scriptures, should attempt the thing so hastily. However, this lecture gave such satisfaction to all those who heard it that they spread its praises abroad with notable enthusiasm, and ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... is now almost undone. The absurd liberalism of the day has given every corner of London a theatre, and has degraded the character of the stage in all. By scattering the ability which still exists, it has stripped the great theatres of the very means of representing dramatic excellence; while, by adopting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... more resolutely to public business, he remarked it as an unreasonable and absurd thing that artificers, using vessels and instruments inanimate, should know the name, place, and use of every one of them, and yet the statesman, whose instruments for carrying out public measures ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... marriage, as is the fate of many a beau, and was struck out of the list of visitors. Algernon generally occupied the baronet's disused town-house, a wretched being, dividing his time between horse and card exercise: possessed, it was said, of the absurd notion that a man who has lost his balance by losing his leg may regain it by sticking to the bottle. At least, whenever he and his brother Hippias got together, they never failed to try whether one leg, or two, stood the bottle best. Much of a puritan as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... beauty of its appearance, upon the efficiency of the instrument? The idea that the varnish of a Violin has some influence upon its tone has often been ridiculed, and we can quite understand that it must appear absurd to those who have not viewed the question in all its bearings. Much misconception has arisen from pushing this theory about the varnish either too far or not far enough. What seems sometimes to be implied by enthusiasts is, that the form of ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... He looked so absurd, with his small, angry face, with his outstretched finger, that even the soldier of the convoy, breaking the rule, said to him in an undertone as he led him ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... occurred, as is well known, on June 10, 1903, when, as the result of a military conspiracy, King Alexander, the last of the Obrenovi['c] dynasty, his wife, and her male relatives were murdered. This crime was purely political, and it is absurd to gloss it over or to explain it merely as the result of the family feud between the two dynasties. That came to an end in 1868, when the murder of Kara-George in 1817 by the agency of Milo[)s] Obrenovi['c] was avenged by the lunatic assassination ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... half-dozens, or, at the best, scores. Even of those it provided, but a small proportion was really forced to serve. Mr. Oppenheim tells us of an Act of Parliament (17 Charles I) legalising forcible impressment, which seems to have been passed to satisfy the sailors. If anyone should think this absurd, he may be referred to the remarkable expression of opinion by some of the older seamen of Sunderland and Shields when the Russian war broke out in 1854. The married sailors, they said, naturally waited ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... conviction; the average Philistine, if pressed for the reasons of his dislike, would either become inarticulate, ejaculating "faugh" and "pah" like an old-fashioned Scots Magazine, or else he would give some imaginary and absurd reason, alleging that all "littery men" were poor, that composers never cut their hair, that painters were rarely public-school men, that sculptors couldn't ride straight to hounds to save their lives, but clearly these imbecilities were mere afterthoughts; the average ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... us suppose the case of a pair of tongs that falls upon a man's foot, causing a cruel hurt. Will you claim that the tongs are punishable for that? The question is answered; I see by your faces that you would call such a claim absurd. Now, why is it absurd? It is absurd because, there being no reasoning faculty—that is to say, no faculty of personal command—in a pair of togs, personal responsibility for the acts of the tongs is wholly absent from the tongs; and, therefore, responsibility being absent, punishment cannot ensue. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wrong, or making an outcry against her as if she was—for really, except in the clumsy way of doing it, I can see nothing to blame in her refusal. She is treated as the aggressor. Now all she has done, or could do, was in her own defence, and nothing in the world can be more absurd than pretending that she is the cause of the war. If she beat the allies ever so much, she does not gain one inch of territory, while their real object is to strip her. As for L. N. considering himself aggrieved by her breaking off the negotiation and beginning to defend herself, it can only ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... known anything so absurd." Two bright red spots appeared in her cheeks. "Your attitude is most extraordinary. However, I shall go to the city this morning, Mr. Smart. Pray give me the credit of having ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... thought that, all this time, he was perhaps the dupe of boyish fantasies, was laid to-day. Sometimes he had felt, Why does no one sympathise with my views; why, though they treat them with conventional respect, is it clear that all I have addressed hold them to be absurd? My parents are pious and instructed; they are predisposed to view everything I say, or do, or think, with an even excessive favour. They think me moonstruck. Lord Eskdale is a perfect man of the world; proverbially shrewd, and celebrated for his judgment; he looks upon me as a raw boy, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... good woman of the house took them in and kept them has been briefly mentioned. At first nobody thought they would live a day, such little absurd attempts at humanity did they seem. But the young doctor came and the old doctor came, and the infants were laid in cotton-wool, and the room heated up to keep them warm, and baby-teaspoonfuls of milk given ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in fact conceive it in as much as we do conceive Unity, Being, Truth. The conception is so clear that its inexplicability (admitted) is of no account. Further, since the unity of our thought implies the absolute, and since the existence of things is known only to thought, it appears absurd that the absolute itself should be regarded as non-existent. The Absolute is substance in itself, the ultimate basis and matter of existence. All things are merely manifestations of it, exist in virtue of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... called to the task by some of the most influential organs of public opinion in France;"—she would not certainly affirm what she knew to be false, and the idea that she did receive a bona fide request of the above purport from such individuals, is too absurd to command belief for a moment. Would any one in his senses, who is "desirous of being represented as he is," put in requisition the pencil of an artist by which he would be sure ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... that is in the grave, where she has thrust herself.... But I have nothing to do with that.... I am not to blame! It would even be absurd to think that I am to blame."—Again it flashed into Aratoff's mind that even had she had "anything of that sort" about her, his conduct during the interview would indubitably have disenchanted her. That was ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... very absurd verses which had been publickly recited to an audience for money[711]. JOHNSON. 'I can match this nonsense. There was a poem called Eugenio, which came out some years ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... the ball it has always been toward the goal. Godwin believed that it was well to scan the faults of our fellows closely, in order to see, forsooth, whether they are not their virtues. The belief that mankind should by nature tend to evil, he considered absurd and unscientific, for the strongest instinct in all creation is self-preservation; and that certain men should love darkness rather than light was mainly because governments and religions have warped man's nature through oppression and coercion ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... at Glasgow, and a truly damnable jail, exhibiting the separate system in a most absurd and hideous form. Governor practical and intelligent; very anxious for the associated silent system; and much comforted by ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... where that leaves the Federation! When imitation is carried to the point of identity ..." Federation Councilman Mavig shook his head once more, concluded, "It is utterly absurd, in direct contradiction to everything we have understood to date! You've regarded yourselves as human beings, and believed that your place was among us. And we can ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... management. Of la belle Fanny, all I learned was, that she was a professional actress of very considerable talent, and extremely pretty; that Curzon had fallen desperately in love with her the only night she had appeared on the boards there, and that to avoid his absurd persecution of her, she had determined not to come into town until the morning of the rehearsal, she being at that time on a visit to the house of a country gentleman in the neighbourhood. Here was a new difficulty I had to contend with—to go through my part alone was out of the question to making ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... proved by history, written and unwritten? Is it not proved by the ghastly secrets of individual introspection that men never reveal or admit to others; secrets guarded by a system of conventions so impenetrable and vast that to attempt to personalize it in the sneaking figure of Hypocrisy would be as absurd as to try to enlarge the significance of an ivory chessman by setting it up on a lady's jewel box and naming it Moloch. All men feel how much of them is brute and how much is reason; but it is the unimpartable secret of human society whose betrayal has been rendered impossible by ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... a day when Catholicism is no longer considered by intelligent men to be too evidently absurd to be argued with. Definite reasons are given by those who stand outside our borders for the attitude they maintain; definite accusations are made which must either ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... imitating the hoarse voice of a young cock; which made Oscar's deliverance all the more absurd, because he had just reached the age when the beard sprouts and the voice breaks. "'What a chit for ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... Grecian port, was intrusted to the joint command of Alcibiades, Nicias, and Lam'achus. The expedition captured the city of Cat'ana, which was made the headquarters of the armament; but here Alcibiades was summoned to Athens on the absurd charge of impiety and sacrilege, connected with the mutilation of the statues of the god Her'mes, that had taken place just before he left Athens. He was also charged with having profaned the Eleusinian mysteries by giving ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... Justice, by shewing the terrible Issue of their Contraries. Pieces of this Sort, conducted with Propriety, and carrying Application to ourselves, can scarcely be desireable; But as they are generally conducted, they amount only to giving us an absurd Representation of a Murther committed by some ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... explanation that is probably quite fanciful. Of course, the name has been held to prove the claim of St. Michael's Mount to be the Ictis of the ancients, but the idea that the natives would have carried their tin across to this incommodious little islet for the sake of selling seems absurd, when we consider that they could have sold it much better on the mainland. The description by Diodorus Siculus, often quoted, has a tempting look, but it cannot persuade us that the Mount was Ictis. He says: "They that ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... such absurd things, Genevieve. Why, Charlie Brown—you know he calls us the 'Happy Texagons' now—well, he told me that Tilly'd been bragging so terribly about Texas, and all the fine things there were there, that he asked her this morning real soberly—you know how Charlie ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... to demonetize gold, because the civilized world recognizes it as an invariable standard by which all commodities are measured in value. The supposition is absurd. It would be very much ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... but in the next instant a wave of resentment went through her as if their vaunting were his; as if her pride were his own confessed, colossal vanity; as if the price of his uplift were her belittlement. Never mind, he should pay! Absurd, absurd; but she was harrowingly tired, lonely, idle, grief-burdened, and desolate, and absurdity itself was relief. He should pay, let his paying cost her double. Somehow, in some feminine, minute, pinhole way, she would deflate him, wing ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... startling contrast between the precision of the means of research and the huge variations in the results, which were shown by mathematical law to be absurd, experimental psychology carried on extensive studies, under the illusion that it rested upon a ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... to attempt a description of the motley assemblage. Pick out all the strangest, most ragged, most uncouth figures you ever saw in old pictures, from childhood up to the present day; select from every theatrical representation within the range of your experience the most monstrous and absurd caricatures upon humanity; bring to your aid all the masquerades and burlesque fancy-balls you ever visited, tumble them together in the great bag of your imagination, and pour them out over a vague wilderness of open spaces, dirty streets, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... often find it hard work to rescue an insane prisoner from the clutches of the law. On the other hand, it may be admitted that, as regards some physicians at least, a juster view is sometimes as necessary as it is on the part of the lawyers. When absurd reasons are given in the witness-box for a prisoner's insanity—reasons which would equally establish the madness of many persons in society whom no one regards as insane—it is not surprising that the judges are cautious ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... Hester, "very much like the men, and angels too, in that old edition of the Pilgrim papa thinks so much of. I couldn't for my part, absurd as they were, help feeling a certain pathos in the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Marechal de La Mothe, M. de Brissac, President Bellievre, and myself met that night at M. de Bouillon's house, where a motion was made for the generals of the army to send a deputation likewise to the place of conference; but it was quashed, and indeed nothing would have been more absurd than such a proceeding when we were upon the point of concluding a treaty with Spain; and, considering that we told the envoy that we should never have consented to hold any conference with the Court were we not assured that it was in our power to break it off at pleasure by means ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... "What an absurd report!" said Mrs. Clifford, quite annoyed. "I hope the children are not to be suspected every time their Aunt ...
— Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's • Sophie May
... exclaimed, "how absurd of me not to have thought of it before! But, you see, Mr. Colston always speaks of you by your first name. You ought to hear how he ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... men. He admitted that the papers might be rubbish, and she conceded that nothing was more probable; yet when he offered to settle the point off-hand she caught him by the wrist, acknowledging that, absurd as it was, she was nervous. Finally she put the whole thing on the ground of his just doing her a favour. She asked him to retain the papers, to be silent about them, simply because it would please her. That would ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... breathed that indefinable something which she had just struggled to define: something diametrically different from the ostentatious display of the woman by her side. Theoretically, Cornelia was thankful to escape observation; in reality she felt an absurd pang of loneliness and disappointment, as the carriage bore her out ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the Doctor, "for McClellan's right to cross the Chickahominy would be absurd, for the reason that a Confederate force, supposed to be from Jackson's army, has nearly reached Hanover Court-House—here—in the rear of your right, if you advance; besides, to cross the Chickahominy ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... and did not even shake my head. The circumstances of the encounter were described by Mariano with such graphic power and minuteness that it was impossible not to believe his story. Yet some things in it afterwards struck me as somewhat absurd; that straw hat, for instance, and it also seemed strange that a person of Mula's disposition should have been so much improved in temper by his sojourn in ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... the easy freedom, not to say gusto, with which he depicts, those who succumb to similar temptation. Only by supposing the workings of some subtle influence of this kind is it possible to explain, even in so capricious a humour as Johnson's, the famous and absurd application of the term "barren rascal" to a writer who, dying almost young, after having for many years lived a life of pleasure, and then for four or five one of laborious official duty, has left work anything but small in actual bulk, and fertile ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... sceptical of the seriousness of the situation. She believed in her heart that after a few days of restraint they would resume their former life, and that Wilbur, on reflection, would appreciate that he had been absurd. ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... went; matches flared, illuminating for a second faces without the ghost of an expression and the flat glaze of white shirt-fronts; the hum of many conversations animated with the ardour of feasting sounded to me absurd and infinitely remote. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... not do it at once? Nothing else will make protestations of fairness appear at all genuine. Nothing else will remove the stigma of attempting to drag the hospitals into a support of this crusade against women. * * * How absurd the solemn declaration, "it cannot be assumed by any right-minded person that male patients should be subjected to inspection before a class of females, although this inspection may, without impropriety, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... have been supposed that one or other of these conflicting judgments must have been palpably absurd, that nothing short of gross prejudice or wilful blindness, on one side or the other, could reconcile such contradictory conceptions of a single human being. But it was not so; 'the elements' were 'so mixed' in Mr. Gladstone that his bitterest ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... interested in securing regulation in New York and was an expert on the proposition, to meet with us in that city. We all met as planned. I stated that I desired to take the bill up with them, section by section, paragraph by paragraph, and if anything absurd or impracticable was found, or anything that could not be carried out, attention should be called to it, and we would discuss it and amend it if necessary. We went ahead on this line and were arguing over some proposition, when Mr. Fink got up and remarked: "Let it go; the whole thing is absurd ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... it? I know I was brushing My hair when the notion occurred: I know that I felt myself blushing As I thought, "How supremely absurd! "How they'll hammer on floor and on table As its drollery dawns on them—how They will quote it"—I wish I were able To quote it ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... not so much an imputation on chastity, as a charge of conceited foolishness. An English woman who typifies the begueule may be spotless as snow; but she is presumed to have snow's other quality, and at the same time to be a thoroughly absurd and intolerable creature. Well, here is the point of difference. Fastidiousness of speech is not a direct outcome of Puritanism, as our literature sufficiently proves; it is a refinement of civilization following upon absorption into the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... fat country man with a linen duster and whiskers and baggy umbrella. Patsy Moriarty (Patrici really. Did you ever hear such a name? Mrs. Lippett couldn't have done better) who is tall and thin was Julia's wife in a absurd green bonnet over one ear. Waves of laughter followed them the whole length of the course. Julia played the part extremely well. I never dreamed that a Pendleton could display so much comedy spirit—begging Master Jervie' pardon; I don't consider him a true Pendleton though, any more ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... conflicting opinions about a certain thought, and try to prove the truth or falsity of this definite idea. Since a term—a word, phrase, or other combination of words not a complete sentence—suggests many ideas, but never stands for one particular idea, it is absurd as a subject to be argued. A debatable subject is always a proposition, a statement in which something is affirmed or denied. It would be impossible to uphold or attack the mere term, "government railroad ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... the first lieutenant. I told him what my orders were. This officer was, as I before observed, a man who had no friends, and was therefore entirely dependent on the captain for his promotion, and was afraid to act contrary to his lordship's orders, however absurd. I told him, that whatever might me the captain's orders, I would not ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... talent, the caprice of the public has certainly given me such a temporary superiority over men, of whom, in regard to poetical fancy and feeling, I scarcely thought myself worthy to loose the shoe-latch. On the other hand, it would be absurd affectation in me to deny, that I conceived myself to understand more perfectly than many of my contemporaries, the manner most likely to interest the great mass of mankind. Yet, even with this belief, I must truly and fairly say, that I always considered ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... ago I heard a living thinker of some eminence say that he considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually, he said, it was absurd; and practically, it was an offence, over which he stumbled. It would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they could have kept clear of superstition, and followed on upon the track of ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Elisabeth went on, "if one goes in for a distinguished husband, one must pay the price for the article. It is absurd to shoot big game, and then expect to carry it home in ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... hacienda my wanderings must have seemed absurd, for though I took my gun I never brought anything back. This day game was in abundance, but I did not heed it—only wandered on till I came to a rugged part of the forest far up the mountain-side, and seated ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... Mark Twain. The letters were signed "Snodgrass," and there are but two of them. The second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Roman Church, and devoted his life to teaching the truths which he had received. In both Germany and the Netherlands a class of fanatics had risen, advocating absurd and seditious doctrines, outraging order and decency, and proceeding to violence and insurrection. Menno saw the horrible results to which these movements would inevitably lead, and he strenuously opposed the erroneous ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... anathematize Arius and all who agree with him and share his absurd opinion; also Macedonius and those who, following him, are well styled foes of the Spirit.(334) We confess that our lady, St. Mary, is properly and truly the Theotokos, because she bore, after the flesh, one of the Holy Trinity, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... the world was a Tender Conscience. He protests against the weakness which is content with passing penal laws, but does not see them carried out for fear of wounding these trumpery tender consciences. "Most men's minds or consciences are weak, silly and ignorant things, acted by fond and absurd principles and imposed upon by their vices and their passions." (7.) "However, if the obligation of laws must yield to that of a tender conscience, how impregnably is every man that has a mind to disobey armed against all the commands of his superiors. No authority shall be able to govern him farther ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... too absurd" Oliver felt too much as if he were fighting for life against something invisible to be careful about his words. "I know we quarrelled last night—but it was all my fault, I didn't mean anything—I was going to call her up the first thing this morning ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... his relatives. But money became exceedingly scarce; the Marquis had actually beheld many of his peers reduced to the necessity of earning the despicable but indispensable article after many ludicrous fashions. And the duration of this absurd upsetting of law, order, privilege, and property began to assume unexpected and very ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... amanuensis and general literary assistant to an ex-judge upon so prosaic a task as the history of the Supreme Court of the State. To say that a rose-hued scarf, a laugh, and an alluring speaking voice explain it seems absurd, even when you add to these that which the young man saw during that moment of time when he looked into the face of their owner. Rather would I declare that it was the subtle atmosphere of that which in all his travels he had never really seen before—a home. At all events a new force of ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... use to break their fast." It is described in the Survey as being "under the said Frater, of the same length and breadth." The room could not have been of the "same length and breadth" as the great Parliament Chamber, for not only would such dimensions be absurd for an informal dining-room, but, as we are clearly told, the "Infirmary" was also under the Parliament Chamber, and was approximately one-third the size of the latter.[284] Accordingly I have interpreted the phrase, "of the same length and breadth," to mean that the Parlor was square. ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... most uncertain age appears, Because I never heard, nor could engage A person yet by prayers, or bribes, or tears, To name, define by speech, or write on page, The period meant precisely by that word,— Which surely is exceedingly absurd. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... but an equivocal compliment to a physiological position, that it must stand or fall with the corpuscular philosophy, as modified by the French theory of chemistry. Yet should it happen (and the event is not impossible, nor the supposition altogether absurd,) that more and more decisive facts should present themselves in confirmation of the metamorphosis of elements, the position that life consists in assimilation would either cease to be distinctive, or fall back into the former class as an identical proposition, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... shut herself up and speedily die of grief. He makes such vows as most men would make under such circumstances; he presses her hands ardently to his lips, bedews them with his tears, and moves the whole company to sympathy with his own agitation. The scene is absurd enough, or seems so to us dull people of phlegmatic habit. Yet Diderot, even for us, redeems it by the fine remark: "'Tis the effect of what is good and virtuous to leave a large assembly with only one thought and ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the private thoroughfare of the crown. The scene had been an animated one, and Mr. Ayrton had hoped to derive a good deal of pleasure from describing it to his daughter; but when he had listened to her, and watched her for a few minutes, he came to the conclusion that it would be absurd for him to make an effort to compete with her. What was his wretched little story of Parliamentary squalor compared with these psychological subtleties which had interested his daughter ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... an iron attempt at gravity which was not an unqualified success. Stillman stooped, shaded his eyes with his hand, and gazed down intently at each pair of feet as it passed. Fifty men tramped monotonously by—with no result. Sixty. Seventy. The thing was beginning to look absurd. The guest ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... its later developments it eventually came to deserve. Las Casas, who approved of it, was one of the most excellent of men. Our own Bishop Butler could give no decided opinion against negro slavery as it existed in his time. It is absurd to say that ordinary merchants and ship captains ought to have seen the infamy of a practice which Las Casas advised and Butler could not condemn. The Spanish and Portuguese Governments claimed, as I said, the control of the traffic. The Spanish settlers in the West Indies objected to a restriction ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... this new system is not confined to the depravation of language only; it extends to the sentiments and emotions, and leads to the debasement of all those feelings which poetry is designed to communicate. It is absurd to suppose, that an author should make use of the language of the vulgar, to express the sentiments of the refined. His professed object, in employing that language, is to bring his compositions nearer to the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... you been hiding? The king had some absurd story about your having been killed by a fabulous monster. Bah! don't tell me. I always said you would come back after a little ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... God by the necessity of a sufficient reason to account for the series of things. Each finite thing requires an antecedent or contingent cause. But the supposition of an endless sequence of contingent causes, or finite things, is absurd; the series must have had a beginning, and that beginning cannot have been a contingent cause or finite thing. "The final reason of things must be found in a necessary substance in which the detail of changes exists eminently, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... for twenty years, the absurd Duke, transformed into a mere Porcus by his Circe in that scandalous miraculous manner, has lived; and so he still lives. And his Serene Wife, equally obstinate, is living at Stuttgard, happily out of his sight now. One Son, a weakly man, who had one ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... tradition that history seemed to have innumerable records of it in the hearts and memories of each generation. But as there appears no document or parchment of such criteria as to satisfy all inquiries, historical skepticism has ventured upon the absurd length of calling in question the fact of the treaty. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, with commendable zeal, has bestowed much labor upon the questions connected with the treaty, and the results which have been attained can scarcely fail to satisfy a candid inquirer. ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... small number of municipal officers. It claimed to elect the deputies to the States-general according to the ancient usages. Mirabeau's common sense, as well as his great and puissant genius, revolted against the absurd theories of the privileged: he overwhelmed them with his terrible eloquence, whilst adjuring them to renounce their abuseful and obsolete rights; he scared them by his forceful and striking hideousness. "Generous friends ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the days prior to the American Revolution, occupied a similar position that the monopolists, and wealthy do in politics to-day. They were the aristocrats, and for the common people to clamor for political freedom was absurd. The idea of republicanism was as loathsome to them and watched with as much jealousy as an important labor movement is to-day. The royalists called the men who clamored for civil and religious liberty fanatics, just as the monopolists ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... has rendered the passage according to that interpretation of it to which several of the best expositors incline. Nothing can be so absurd as to suppose that Homer, so correct in his geography, could mean to place a Mediterranean island under ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... let Peter think that, let posterity think that. But he could not cozen himself thus! He had fallen—horribly, vulgarly. How absurd of him to set himself up as a saint, a martyr, an idealist! He could not divide himself into two compartments like that and pretend that only one counted in his character. Who was he to talk of dying for art? No, he was but an everyday ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... not a state of peace. You shut your frontiers to strangers in war time; you may close them to your citizens. A city is legally put in a state of siege during a sedition. We can put the nation in a state of siege in case of external danger co-existent with internal conspiracy. By what absurd abuse of liberty can a state be constrained to tolerate on a foreign soil gatherings of citizens armed against itself, which it would not tolerate in its own land? And if these gatherings should be culpable without, why should the state ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... ungloved hand took firm hold of hers as they stepped out of Miss Bezac's door, and but that the idea was absurd Faith would have thought it was trembling. Once in the carriage, the two side by side on the soft cushions, the orders given to the footman, the coach rolling smoothly down the hill, the stranger turned her eyes full upon Faith; until the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... The minister's lower jaw shot out pugnaciously and his eyes flashed. "Eben, don't be absurd. The two of them are children. This boy is playing away a vacation. To speak of him as a matrimonial possibility is to talk irresponsibly. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck |
