"Illogical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes; they are at grips with the essentials of a problem before men have finished debating its mere externals. They are the supreme realists of the race. Apparently illogical, they are the possessors of a rare and subtle super-logic. Apparently whimsical, they hang to the truth with a tenacity which carries them through every phase of its incessant, jellylike shifting of form. Apparently unobservant and easily deceived, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... sentimental Jacklondon idea, that no wild animal should be made to work on the stage or in the show-ring, as illogical and absurd. Human beings who sanely work are much happier per capita than those who do nothing but loaf and grouch. I have worked, horse-hard, throughout all the adult years of my life; and it has been good for me. I know that it is no more wrong or wicked for a ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... court, not have a leg to stand on. judge hastily, shoot from the hip, jump to conclusions (misjudgment) 481. Adj. intuitive, instinctive, impulsive; independent of reason, anterior to reason; gratuitous, hazarded; unconnected. unreasonable, illogical, false, unsound, invalid; unwarranted, not following; inconsequent, inconsequential; inconsistent; absonous|, absonant[obs3]; unscientific; untenable, inconclusive, incorrect; fallacious, fallible; groundless, unproved; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... personage were to meet me now? To imagine Him—as has been too often done—as doing deeds, speaking words, and even worse, entertaining motives, which are not written in the four Gospels, is as unfair morally, as it is illogical critically. It creates a phantom, a fictitious character, and calls that Christ. It makes each writer, each thinker—or rather dreamer—however shallow his heart and stupid his brain—and all our hearts are but too shallow, and all ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the illogical feeling of the lamented critic, difficulties arise. We have grown very velvet-tongued in these days. There was no nonsense about our predecessors; if the leading lady was plain, they said so, whilst if one of us were to suggest that the ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... rooted in the depths of man's being is this vital need of living a world[42] illogical, irrational, personal or divine, that those who do not believe in God, or believe that they do not believe in Him, believe nevertheless in some little pocket god or even devil of their own, or in an omen, or in a horseshoe ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... vitally spurious about this whole Winkelberg business. And I said to myself: "The man's a downright fake. If anybody were as pathetic and impossible and useless as this Winkelberg is he would shoot himself. Winkelberg doesn't shoot himself. So he becomes illogical. Unreal." ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... explanations. But when they insist on an alternative to their respective theories, I suggest Puck as at least equally credible with Satan, Shakespeare, or the parrot-cry of imposture. It is the very extravagance of illogical temper to call on me to furnish an explanation because I say 'we know far too little of the thing itself to guess at its causes;' but of the current guesses, imposture seems inconsistent with the evidence, and 'spiritual agency' with the ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... is governed by logic. Truth as well as Providence is always on the side of the strongest battalions. An illogical opinion only requires rope enough ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... be only a representative of value, but its absence operates marvellously like the want of the value itself, and the primitive people of those days, and especially that class to which the schoolmaster belonged, had a habit, however illogical, of considering it a desirable commodity, ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... we can only do so by throwing them in part upon other and subordinate assemblies. But this, if it be a reason at all, is certainly a most insufficient one. Would any human being, anxious merely to give relief to the House of Commons, adopt so illogical a scheme as one which involves a provincial Parliament in Ireland, and no provincial Parliaments anywhere else; which puts Ireland under two Parliaments, and left the rest of the country under one; which, if Irishmen are to be admitted to the Imperial ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... and supposed incapable of performing duties for which they were mentally well suited. But those militant days are past. Animal strength and brute force are no longer needed in the councils of the nation; and the time has arrived when women should cease to be oppressed by the disparaging, illogical deductions of former generations, and when their assistance ought to be invoked in the great work ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... military error of pushing the pursuit to a dangerous extreme, until he found himself upon the margin of a wide but shallow brook, whose rapid waters barred his direct advance against the flying foe that had crossed with illogical ease. But the intrepid victor was not to be baffled; the spirit of the race which had passed the great sea burned unconquerable in that small breast and would not be denied. Finding a place where some ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... recovering their child's body, they returned South. Though don't think," said pretty Ruth suddenly regarding Mr. Dilke's attentive face while she laughed, "that I received the story from Mrs. Buckley in any such direct fashion. Such people are not only illogical and irrelevant, they are secretive,—if ever you have to do with them as my work leads me to, you'll understand what I mean. But to continue with Mrs. Buckley. In order to convince her that neither Rosy nor the child, despite her evidence, were ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... lifted up the sneer of the world, and again the weakness of woman, the frivolity of humanity, is deplored by those who demand that grief shall co-survive with remembrance. We do not suffer so much as we think we ought to, and yet, foolish and illogical, we call upon our fate in a grand monotony of complaint at the heaviness of our ills. The young man falls in love. His love is not returned. He has believed himself capable of undying and unalterable affection ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... drummer-boys hated both lads on account of their illogical conduct. Jakin might be pounding Lew, or Lew might be rubbing Jakin's head in the dirt, but any attempt at aggression on the part of an outsider was met by the combined forces of Lew and Jakin; and the consequences were painful. The boys were the Ishmaels of the corps, but ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... for that reason have found 'Tristan und Isolde' less satisfying as a work of art than 'Parsifal' or 'Die Meistersinger,' in which the chorus takes its proper place. It is scarcely necessary to point out that, opera being in the first instance founded upon pure convention, there is nothing more illogical in the judicious employment of the chorus than in the substitution of song for speech, which is ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... labored under an essential immaturity: it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred years he would never have become a man; he was penetrated with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical; so that I call him the ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... of the Ionian Islands, became a British protectorate in virtue of the Treaty of Paris of Nov. 5, 1815, but was given to Greece by the Treaty of London of March 29, 1864. The Ambassadors' Conference decided in the Autumn of last year that it was illogical to allow the chief harbor of Albania to be dominated by the territory of a foreign power, and by the Protocol of Florence, Dec. 19, 1913, it was definitely included in Albania. This decision was ratified by legislative enactment in Greece, to ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... he said was very ingenious, and had a great appearance of truth; but still they said it was not truth. They never, however, as far as I could observe, thought proper to grapple with him, to point out anything unfounded in his premises, or illogical in the conclusions which he drew from them; they generally confined themselves to mere assertions, or to minute and unimportant observations by which the real question ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... by the adverse side, accepting without doubt the possibility—and, indeed, the actual existence—of the phenomenon. Thus the liberals, or pseudo-liberals, in that important controversy were placed in an illogical position. For (as their opponents might triumphantly argue) if the devil's power and possession could be manifested in one way, why not by any other method. Nor was it for them to determine the appointed methods of his schemes, as permitted by Providence, ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... State into contempt, was fined heavily, and made to remove the offending inscription. My French friends hotly contested the legality of this decision. They declared that it was straining the sense of the particular Article of the Code to make it applicable in such a case, and that it was illogical to apply the law of Lese-majeste to the Head of a Republican State. The President pertinently added that no evidence as to the quality of food supplied in the restaurant had been taken. If bad, it might unquestionably reflect injuriously on the Head of the State; if good, on the other ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... (1), the prospects of Imperial Federation do not affect the Irish issue. It is no doubt illogical and sometimes highly inconvenient that the British Cabinet and Parliament, representing British and Irish electors only, should decide matters which deeply concern the whole Empire, including the self-governing Colonies, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... watered shop before breakfast, greeted him in a new tone, and with startling deference asked him what he thought she had better do in regard to the addressing of a certain parcel. Edwin considered this odd; he considered it illogical; and one consequence of Miss Ingamells's quite sincere attitude was that he despised Miss Ingamells for a moral weakling. He knew that he himself was a moral weakling, but he was sure that he could never bend, never crouch, to such a posture as Miss Ingamells's; that she was obviously sincere ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... expense. It does cost something, I'll admit. All good things do. The necessary expense, however, is often overestimated. But let us see if we are not, even in hesitating at the expense, whatever it may be, wholly illogical. The city assumes the duty of educating the young, but if many of the young are not in a condition to receive that education, should we not logically see that the hindrances are removed? We enact compulsory attendance laws; ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... are in all their manifestations anti-Christian. The world is not so simple a place. But we cannot go on applying one set of principles to our private lives and another set of principles to our politics and industry. Man is not so illogical a creature as that. There is bound to be, finally, either a levelling up or a levelling down towards a single uniform standard. No proverb is more dangerous than "Charity begins at home." When it begins in the place most congenial ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... pantomimes had with the Globe Theatre: but the Church of England had retained in her Catechism the old Roman word 'pomps,' as one of the things which were to be renounced; and as 'pomps' confessedly meant at first those very spectacles of the heathen circus and theatre, Prynne could not be very illogical in believing that, as it had been retained, it was retained to testify against something, and probably against the thing in England most like the 'pomps' of heathen Rome. Meanwhile, let Churchmen decide whether of the two was the better Churchman—Prynne, who tried to make the ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... robot did know about bluffing. The trouble is that bluffing is essentially illogical, and the robot had no rules whatsoever to go by to judge whether Mike was bluffing or not. It finally decided to make its decisions by chance, judging by Mike's past performance at bluffing. When it did, Mike quit bluffing ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... intelligence, of design, of providence; a something which cannot be addressed by veneration or worship; whose sole effects are subjective, that is, upon the worshipper, not upon the worshipped. Nothing also can be more illogical than the awe and respect claimed by Mr. Herbert Spencer for a being of which the very essence is that nothing can be known of it. And, as the idea grows, the several modes and forms of the UNKNOWABLE, the Hormuzd ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... anything modern in Villeneuve-Loubet, the moonlight would hide it or gloss it over; if there was anything ancient, the moonlight would enable us to see it as we wanted to see it. I pity the limited souls who do not believe in moonshine, and use the word contemptuously. One is illogical who contends that moonshine gives a false idea of things; for he is testing the moonshine impression by sunshine. It would be as illogical to say that sunshine gives a false idea of things on the ground that moonshine is the standard. If sunshine is reality, so is moonshine. The ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... like the loneliness of the grave, fell round Cuckoo. Like Judas, she could have gone out and hanged herself, but for one thing, the love in her heart that seemed so useless. In her muddled, illogical way, and to stifle gnawing thoughts of the betrayed Jessie, she dwelt upon this love of hers for Julian. What had it ever brought her? What had it brought him? To her it had given many sorrows, humiliations. ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... interesting!—As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who first had the really admirable daring to describe them as machina; the whole of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did: what we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his inheritance from some higher order of beings, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... attacks the symptom itself, contenting itself with teaching the patient that his trouble is psychic in origin; that it is based on exaggerated suggestibility and uncontrolled emotionalism; that it is made out of false ideas about the body, illogical conclusions, and unhealthy feeling-tones; and that it may be cured by a kind of moral hygiene, which breaks up these old habits and replaces them with new and better ones. It tries to inculcate the cheerful attitude of mind; to give the patient the conviction of ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... were never grave at all. Now let us seriously consult about this unhappy affair. Ah, duelling, duelling! how wicked, childish, illogical, despotic, bloody, and at the same time ludicrous it is! Come, you have lost your key, you say—we cannot go to your lodgings: let us find a room in the 'Raleigh,' and arrange this most unhappy ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... believed, and when the time came that you ran away,—yes, you dog, for you did run away, don't deny it,—well, what with sorrow for the loss of you, and trouble with your mother, for she declared I had driven you from home by not encouraging you to write, and women are most illogical and unreasonable when they once get a fixed idea into their heads,—well, between one and the other of you I had a very bad time. The fact remained that you were gone, never gave us any address, and I got all the blame for it. ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... Mr. Newman has at last joined the Church of Rome?[116] If it is true, it will do much to prove to the most illogical minds the real character of the late movement. It will prove what the point of sight is, as by the drawing of a straight line. Miss Mitford told me that he had lately sent a message to a R. Catholic convert from the English ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... torture had come to have the zest of an exhilarating sport. The cries of pain, the distortions of agony under the stones, or the lobster, or suspension, the noting of the curious changes of flesh colour and expression under these punishments, the ready assent to absurdly illogical questions, all this not only amused, but interested Shu[u]zen. The naivete and obstinacy of the fisherman was just of the kind to furnish the best material. The fellow was sturdy of frame, and under skilled hands readily submitted to this dalliance ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... aft without rejoinder. "Invalid's pessimism," was my private comment. And yet the sick man was whole for the time being; the virile spirit was once more master of the recreant members; and it was with illogical relief that I found those I sought standing ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... comments the pamphlets of Captain Maconochie, not only because they illustrate the hasty and illogical reasonings, the utter forgetfulness of elementary principles, into which such reformers are apt to lapse; but also for the still better reason, that they contain a suggestion of real value; a contribution towards an efficient prison-discipline, which merits ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... Musset, or the many agreeable dialogues and monologues of the French domestic stage, than of any work of English or American hands. His softly ironical yet affectionate treatment of feminine ways is especially admirable. In his numerous types of sweetly illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent womanhood he has perpetuated with a nicer art than Dickens what Thackeray calls "that great discovery," ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... remember how we saw our profiles in a glass, and you said, 'I'm sure those are somebody else'? Illogical female!" ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... in the magnificent style; but authors unacquainted with Grammar and Logic are not likely to place such figures well and wisely. Indeed, common idioms, though both grammatically and rhetorically justifiable, both correct and effective, often seem illogical. 'To fall asleep,' for example, is a perfect English phrase; yet if we examine severally the words it consists of, it may seem strange that their combination should mean anything ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... little harm of the kind he meant that she suffered from an illogical disappointment. The young people got through the meal with no talk that seemed inductive; Burnamy left the table first, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement; she kept on chatting with March till his ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the Father, and making way for coming again. Prayer does react in good upon the praying soul, irrespective of answer. But to pray for the sake of the prayer, and without regard to there being no one to hear, would to me indicate a nature not merely illogical but morally false, did I not suspect a vague undetected apprehension of a Something diffused through the All of existence, and some ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... Then I was rewarded by a sight seldom accorded to humans. It was worth all the fatigue, cold, and bruises, for that appallingly illogical cloud cap took a new vagary. It split and lifted a little, and there, not three hundred yards away, in the twilight of that cold wet cloud, on that mountain in the sky, were two bull elk in deadly combat. Their far branching horns were locked together, ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... bonbon and give the board a twirl; "ving-cinq," she would say; the ball flew round and fell into a number; it might be ten, or twenty, or twenty- five, it did not much matter; she looked to see what it was, but right or wrong, never failed to eat the bonbon—an illogical result, which contrasted quaintly with the intense seriousness with which she made her stakes. Sometimes she would place two or three sugar-plums on one number, always naming it aloud—"trente-et-un," ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... the admiration expressed by Sir Edward for the new American system which is so clearly based on central control it is rather illogical that he should be so strongly in favour of independence on this side of the water. His opinion is that "the policy of the Joint Stock banks ought to be to make themselves independent of the Bank of England by maintaining ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... of justification, with which he wearied me throughout the remainder of the passage. No doubt in the past he had taken pleasure to paint himself unnecessarily black, and made a vaunt of his wickedness, bearing it for a coat-of-arms. Nor was he so illogical as to abate one item of his old confessions. "But now that I know you are a human being," he would say, "I can take the trouble to explain myself. For I assure you I am human too, and have my virtues like my neighbours." I say, he wearied ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not solve the question which he asked. But if he had solved it, if the explanation which he has given us were as satisfactory as it is illogical, we should know no better than before who has a right to exact payment for the use of the soil, of this wealth which is not man's handiwork. Who is entitled to the rent of the land? The producer of the land, without doubt. Who made the land? ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... "reasonable women," with the uncommon quality which is called "common sense," but it is the woman of caprice, the sweet, illogical despot of a thousand moods, who is most often and most tenderly loved. Man is by nature a discoverer. It is not beauty which holds him, but rather mystery and charm. To see the one woman through all the changing moods—to discern Portia through Carmen's witchery—is the ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... her eyes denied the mirth that her lips affirmed, and Appleton had such a sudden, illogical desire to meddle with her career, to help or hinder it, to have a hand in it at any rate, that he could ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... should be the order of our writing.) Goes he muzzled, or aperto ore? Are his intellects sound, or does he wander a little in his conversation? You cannot be too careful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illogical snarl he makes, to St. Luke's with him! All the dogs here are going mad, if you believe the overseers; but I protest they seem to me very rational and collected. But nothing is so deceitful as mad people to those who are ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... out of this difficulty is to go in for separation between internal and external—subject and object—when we find this convenient, and unity between the same when we find unity convenient. This is illogical, but extremes are alone logical, and they are always absurd, the mean is alone practicable and it is always illogical. It is faith and not logic which is the supreme arbiter. They say all roads lead to Rome, and all philosophies that I have ever seen lead ultimately either to some ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... letter. He had said that he was coming over to Lonesome Cove and he had not come—why should he, on her account? Between them all was over—why should he? The question was absurd in her mind, and yet the fact that she had expected him, that she so WANTED him, was so illogical and incongruous and vividly true that it raised her to a sitting posture on the log, and she ran her fingers over her forehead and down her dazed face until her chin was in the hollow of her hand, and her startled eyes were fixed unwaveringly ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... that he had no sympathy with the American colonies in their struggle against British oppression. When, in 1775, the Congress published their Resolutions and Address, he answered them in a prejudiced and illogical paper entitled Taxation no Tyranny. Notwithstanding its want of argument, it had the weight of his name and of a large party; but history has construed it by the animus of the writer, who had not long before declared of the colonists that they were "a race of convicts, and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... There was an odd, illogical delight in the way Pederson said it—and something almost frightening the way Mandleco just stood there in cold silence, gazing at the tele-columnist with ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... but was generally respected as an honest man. He was most marked for practical sagacity and love of constitutional liberty. The phrase, "a monarchical government surrounded with republican institutions," is ascribed to him,—an illogical expression, which called out the sneers of Carlyle, whose sympathies were with strong governments and with the men who can rule, and who therefore, as ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... had been proportionately healthier than they were at present. As for religion, I had never had the least faith in Providence rewarding the pitiable by giving them a future life of bliss. The theory seemed to me illogical, for the more pitiable in this life appeared to me the thick-skinned and successful, and these, as we know, in the saying about the camel and the needle's eye, our religion consigns wholesale to hell. Success, power, wealth, those aims ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... of these tribes, who venerate and almost deify the animals which they habitually hunt, kill, and eat, is not so flagrant as at first sight it appears to us: the people have reasons, and some very practical reasons, for acting as they do. For the savage is by no means so illogical and unpractical as to superficial observers he is apt to seem; he has thought deeply on the questions which immediately concern him, he reasons about them, and though his conclusions often diverge very widely from ours, we ought not to deny him ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... children. The children are the forthcoming bearers of the world's burdens and responsibilities. To them belongs the future, and already too many social problems of the present age are due to the unhygienic and illogical mating of the human ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... he spoke she had no means of knowing; probably, at most, two or three minutes. But to the woman gazing out blindly through the cobweb-covered window into the night, it might well have been hours. For some illogical reason, which she could not have explained to herself, she had the feeling that the victory in the coming struggle would lie with the one who kept silent the longer. To break the nerve-wrecking spell would ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... minds,"[27]—and that this has happened, not only to the convulsionists, but (by the confession of many of the ancient fathers[28]) also to the greatest saints. But he protests against the conclusion, as illogical, that the convulsionists never speak by the spirit of God, because they do ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... of false assumptions, of invalid reasoning, of foregone conclusions, of pride and prejudice and passion. One would say that the result of your profound researches was only to make you more intensely illogical than you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... redeem; and that, hence, the Treasury "idly holds money uselessly subtracted from the channels of trade," a situation from which monetary derangement and business distress would naturally ensue. He strongly urged that the "present tariff laws, the vicious, inequitable and illogical source of unnecessary taxation, ought to be at once revised and amended." Cleveland gave a detailed analysis of the injurious effects which the existing tariff had upon trade and industry, and went on ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... loving mother to throw her child into the Ganges. Nature never prompted men to exterminate each other for a difference of opinion concerning the baptism of infants. These crimes have been produced by religions filled with all that is illogical, cruel and hideous. These religions were produced for the most part by ignorance, tyranny, and hypocrisy. Under the impression that the infinite ruler and creator of the universe had commanded the destruction of heretics and infidels, the church ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... to be talking so. Once before she had tasted the sweetness and the bitterness of crime. She did not stop to think about right or wrong. If she had done so her ethics would have been strangely illogical. It was enough that, short as their acquaintance had been, she felt unconsciously that there was something latent in the spirit of this ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... designed for that purpose. That is what follows from the fact that it is cold; and not that a child who needs fresh air should remain at home," he would add with extreme logic, as if punishing someone for those secret illogical ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... he thought, the more illogical the entire episode appeared. How on earth had he ever come to enter a stranger's cab and drive with a stranger half a mile before either discovered the situation? And what blind luck had sent the cab to the destination he also was bound for—and not ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... cause whatsoever can be assigned for them; while if anyone shall argue against their being miraculous and supernatural on the ground of their being so common, I can only answer, that of all absurd and illogical arguments, this is the most so. For what has the number of times which the miracle occurs to do with the question, save to increase the wonder? Which is more strange, that an inexplicable and unfathomable thing should occur once and for all, or that it should ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... have known, for she stood very still, with head lowered and downcast eyes. As for Sayre, what common sense he possessed had gone. The thrilling unreality of it all—the exquisite irrational, illogical intoxication of the moment—her beauty—the mystery of her—and of the still, sunlit woods, had made of them both, and the forest world around them, an enchanted dream which he was living, every breath a rapture, every heart-beat ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... lowest myths. Why, or how, did a silly buffoon, or a confessed 'bogle' arrive at being regarded as a patron of such morality as had been evolved? An hypothesis of the processes involved must be indicated. It is not enough to reply, in general, that the rudimentary human mind is illogical and confused. That is granted; but there must have been a method in its madness. What that method was (from my point of view) I have shown, and it must be as easy for opponents to set forth what, from their point of view, the ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... of Latin may have been illogical, but on one occasion it helped to avert a European war. The late Count Benckendorff, the last Russian Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, a singularly fascinating man, was protocolist to the ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... quite fair to either of us," I protested, turning away to push in a hair-pin so that he wouldn't see the tremble that I could feel in my lower lip. For an unreasonable and illogical and absurdly big wave of compassion for my poor old Dinky-Dunk was welling up through my tired body, threatening to leave me and all my make-believe dignity as wobbly as a street-procession Queen of Sheba on her circus-float. I was hearing, I knew, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... an honorable contemporary.] At this very day, a French and an English economist have reared a Babel of far more elaborate errors on this subject; M. Say, I mean, and Mr. Malthus: both ingenious writers, both eminently illogical,—especially the latter, with whose "confusion worse confounded" on the subject of Value, if reviewed by some unsparing Rhadamanthus of logical justice, I believe that chaos would appear a model of order and light. Yet the very want of logic, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... sliding down from a third-story balcony on a tin waterspout. In the light of later years Escosura felt that in this boyish prank the child was father of the man. The boy who preferred waterspouts to stairways, later in life always scorned the beaten path, and "the illogical road, no matter how venturesome and hazardous it was, attracted him to it by virtue of that sort of fascinating charm which the abyss exercises over certain eminently nervous temperaments." The belief that Espronceda ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... had practical experience of the scientific stove. I want the old-fashioned, unsanitary, wasteful, illogical, open fireplace. I want the heat to go up the chimney, instead of stopping in the room and giving me a headache, and making everything go round. When I come in out of the snow I want to see a fire—something that says to me with a cheerful ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... whose fault it was. It wasn't HIS place to find out, and who'd mind what he said, if he did find out? He only know'd that it wasn't put right by them what undertook that line of business, and that it didn't come right of itself. And, in brief, his illogical opinion was, that if you couldn't do nothing for him, you had better take nothing from him for doing of it; so far as he could make out, that was about what it come to. Thus, in a prolix, gently-growling, foolish way, did Plornish turn the tangled skein of his estate about and about, like a blind ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... that the bird will likewise take them from his hand and eat them—an observation that I made on my child exactly as Sigismund did on his—it is not right to call such an act "stupid"; the act shows ignorance—i. e., inexperience—but it is not illogical. The child would be properly called stupid only in case he did not learn the difference between the animals fed. When, on the other hand, the child of two and a half years, entirely of his own accord, holds a watch first to his left ear, then to his right, listens both ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... that will clear the air and bring peace and quiet to the earth again—when the town, sea and sky will be calm and beneficent. But it is only an illusion, preserved by the untiring hope of man and his imperishable and illogical desire ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... head, because politics isn't his place. There are priest-inventors; but somehow we forget the priest in the inventor, and feel that the latter title makes him a little less worthy of the former—rather illogical, is it not? The Abbot Mendel was a scientist, but it is only now that he is coming into his own; and how many know him only as Mendel, forgetting his priestly office? Liszt was a cleric, but few called him Abbe. A priest as a priest can be nothing else. In fact, it ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... no technical class-name; they are merely extreme examples of the ambiguity common to most words, which grows up naturally from divergence of meaning. True homophones are separate words which have, or have acquired, an illogical fortuitous identity.] ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... of the synod of 1646-1648 and in their strenuous efforts to check the increase of religious discontent due to the narrow definition of church membership—efforts which eventually resulted in that "illogical compromise," the Half-Way Covenant. They recommended the driving out of "Quakers, Ranters, and other Herritics of that nature," and urged that the true Gospel might be spread among the Indians. They upheld the work of the Society for the Promoting ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... was declared by the Resurrection to be the Son of God with power; or Jesus Christ has not risen from the dead—and what then? Then He was either deceiver or deceived, and in either case has no right to my reverence and my love. We may be thankful that men are illogical, and that many who reject the Resurrection retain reverence, genuine and deep, for Jesus Christ. But whether they have any right to do so is another matter. I confess for myself that, if I did not believe that Jesus Christ ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... conclusion was extremely illogical, as was demonstrated a few days later, when one of the other "alternatives" was adopted with success. This successful movement was essentially the same as that which had been previously made to dislodge the enemy from Dalton, and that by which ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... inhabitants of what was formerly Piedmont, but beyond these limits it is rarely seen. Why so? Either it is good or not good. If not good, how has it prevailed over so large an area? If good, why does it not extend its empire? The Reformation is another case in point: granted that Protestantism is illogical, how is it that so few within a given area can perceive it to be so? The same question arises in respect of the distribution of many plants and animals; the reason of the limits which some of them cannot pass, being, indeed, ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... them, intending to go out, would press on the ledge, and the sash would fall on his hand with what result we know. The others would then either break the glass and so escape; or pass through the house; or remain prisoners. That immoderate surprise was therefore absurdly illogical, after seeing the burglar-track in the snow. But how, above all, do you account for Lord Pharanx's silence during and after the burglars' visit—if there was a visit? He was, you must remember, alive all that time; they did not kill him; certainly they did not shoot him, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... in the eyes of the world at large, a sovereign body. Time soon showed that the continued exercise of such powers was not compatible with the absence of the power to tax the people. In truth the situation of the Continental Congress was an illogical situation. In the effort of throwing off the sovereignty of Great Britain, the people of these states were constructing a federal union faster than they realized. Their theory of the situation did not keep pace with the facts, and their first attempt to embody their ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... conduct of our Government in this matter had been more chivalrous. It is true that we had only on two occasions acknowledged the imperial title, namely during the negotiations of 1806 and 1814; and to recognize it after his public outlawry would have been rather illogical, besides feeding the Bonapartists with hopes which, in the interests of France, it was well absolutely to close. Ministers might also urge that he himself had offered to live in England as a private individual, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... as easy as making the egg stand on end—when you know how. It is perfectly true that, after hearing Dr. Sexton's exposition—rather than expose—it is quite easy for any one to frustrate the designs of these clever conjurors, if he wishes to do so. I am not sure that the expose is wise. Illogical people will not see the force of Dr. Sexton's argument, and will possibly think it "proves too much." If so much can be done by sleight of hand and ingenious machinery, they will argue, perhaps, that the Davenports and other mediums are only cleverer conjurors still, or have better ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... shelf with Sprenger, Remigius, Delrio, and De Lancre, and deserves insertion only in a list which has yet to be made out, and which if accurately compiled would be a literary curiosity, of the singularly illogical books of singularly able reasoners. What was left unaccomplished by the centurions of literature came ultimately from the strangest of all possible quarters; from the study of an humble pupil of the transmuter of metals and prince of mountebanks ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... to come absolutely pure and immaculate into the world: being in his power, could any earnest worshipper of the Virgin doubt for a moment that for one so favoured it would not be done? Such was the reasoning of our forefathers; and the premises granted, who shall call it illogical ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... a mongrel one, a cross between desire not to interfere with State taxation and desire at the same time not utterly to crush out interstate commerce. It is a practical, but rather illogical, device to prevent duplication of tax burdens on vehicles in transit. It is established in our decisions and has been found more or less workable with more or less arbitrary formulae of apportionment. Nothing either in theory or in ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... present, there must also always have been a tendency in that which has prevailed to conquer. We may say that, in the process of evolution, man becomes aware of differences to which at first he gave but little attention; and, so far as he becomes conscious of them, he sets aside what is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, because he is satisfied it is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... Halleck is to take the command of the army, together with Hooker. I almost believe it, because it is nameless, and here all that is illogical ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... and larger part of this speech to the silent wood, for the two policemen had vanished almost as quickly as they came. It is very possible, of course, that they were fairies. In that case the somewhat illogical character of their view of crime, law, and personal responsibility would find a bright and elfish explanation; perhaps if I had lingered in the glade till moonrise I might have seen rings of tiny policemen dancing on the sward; or running ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... of a reconciliation between Sylvia and Jermain. The girl was deeply under the impression made by the philosophy of the older woman; she did not for the moment dream of denying its truth; but she stood granite in a perfectly illogical denial of its implications in her own case. She did not consciously revolt against the suggestion that she renew her relations to Jerry Fiske, because with a united action of all her faculties she refused utterly to consider it for ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... of two natures, and we often confuse a wise suspension of judgment with the weakness of hesitation. To profess an opinion for which we have no sufficient reason is clearly illogical, but when it is necessary to act we must do so on the best evidence available, however slight that may be. Herein lies the importance of common sense, the instincts of a General, the sagacity of a Statesman. Pyrrho, the recognized representative of doubt, was often wise in suspending ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... live, a wisdom the Englishmen called experience and the Germans practical reason, spirit, or will. The intellectual sciences could be allowed to spin themselves out in abstracted liberty while man practised his illogical and inspired ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... than a Neapolitan. One can be cosmopolitan without losing one's patriotism, I venture respectfully to hope. But I would not have cared then to set myself right with the populace of my native city, either on that or any other point, though I could have done it with a word. It was natural and illogical to scorn the people for believing in my guilt, whilst I allowed them to believe it. Yet I felt against them a sort of lofty anger, and felt myself affronted to think that anybody could regard me as being even likely to commit a murder. Ratuzzi was kind throughout, even when he believed me guilty; ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... he ought to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he felt that he was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the high mantel-shelf and her head against her hand, Celia stood looking down on the vacant hearth. There was something of weariness in the attitude. What a delicate bit of porcelain she seemed! Allan had a sudden, illogical vision of a fire of blazing logs, and himself and Celia sitting ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... "An illogical and foolish way to collect debts, that!" grumbled the manager, tugging at the rope. "If they kill us, how can we ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... felt. If we expect a treasury of knowledge in history how we are deceived! All attempts of philosophy to reconcile what the moral world demands with what the real world gives is belied by experience, and nature seems as illogical in history as she is logical ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... our own immediate day is weak and weary, because it is no longer young; yet it possesses one noble attribute—it has an acute and almost universal sympathy, which does indeed often degenerate into a false and illogical sentiment, yet serves to redeem an age of egotism. We have escaped both the gem-like hardness of the Pagan, and the narrowing selfishness of the Christian and the Israelite. We are sick for the woe of creation, and we wonder why such woe is ours, and why it is entailed on the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... not do. On the most trifling matter his eyes kindled, his fist visited the table, and his voice rolled abroad in changeful thunder. I never saw such a petard of a man; I think the devil was in him. He had two favourite expressions—"it is logical," or illogical, as the case might be; and this other, thrown out with a certain bravado, as a man might unfurl a banner, at the beginning of many a long and sonorous story: "I am a proletarian, you see." Indeed, we saw it very well. God forbid ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whole evening with him, and made him more comfortable than he had been since his cold began. Westover now talked seriously and frankly with him, but no longer so harshly, and in his relenting he felt a return of his old illogical liking for him. He fancied in Durgin's kindness to himself an indirect regret, and a desire to atone for what he had done, and he said: "The effect is in you—the worst effect. I don't think either of the young Lyndes very exemplary ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... common use, but slightly illogical: He began, "Our Father which art in heaven." [The period should follow the quotation mark, since there is no period in ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... struggle for existence. Humanity as a whole will then be able to do its share towards the conquest of the complex forces of nature, and there will be brought about an intellectual and spiritual quickening that will make our civilization of to-day seem as crude, as selfish and illogical as that of the dark ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... strange how like a knife thrust that word of hers—hopeless—went through him. Perfectly illogical, of course; she was not speaking of his life and hers but of that ridiculous drawing-room piano. Somehow the mere glow she had brought into the room with her, the afterglow of an experience he had no share in producing, had become painful to him; made him feel old. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of have with an intransitive verb is irreducible to the idea of possession: indeed, it is illogical. In I have waited, we cannot make the idea expressed by the word waited the object of the verb have or possess. The expression has become a part of language by means of the extension of a false analogy. It is an instance of an ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... matter cannot overturn any truth, because, if erroneous, it will necessarily sink into oblivion; if real, it will tend only to instruct and to enlighten the world. Wise are ye in your generation, O ye sages of Gaur, yet withal wondrous illogical." And ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... his innermost thoughts, knowing her father, he felt and meant. It is a point I cannot and would not pursue, and, thank Heaven, it does not matter now; yet, with fuller knowledge of the facts, and, I trust, a mellower judgement, I often return to the same debate, and, by I know not what illogical bypaths, always arrive at the same conclusion, that I liked the man and ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... the reasons for disbelief are utterly illogical. For instance, one view is this: "I never want to come back to this earth after I once leave it." The fact is, that there could be no return to today's recognized conditions of life. If one were to return to this planet and become ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... the Englishman who accepts it. Gladstone who declines a peerage is anomalous, not Tennyson who takes it. As part of the English system, as a true believer in the oligarchically administered monarchy, Gladstone was illogical, and Tennyson was logical. ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... Federal Convention of 1787 the idea of state coercion required little discussion; for the members were soon convinced that it involved an impracticable, illogical, and unjust principle. The prevailing view was voiced by Oliver Ellsworth before the Connecticut ratifying convention: "We see how necessary for Union is a coercive principle. No man pretends to the contrary.... The ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... theme, she finally narrowed down to the point of Darrow's intervention. "My grandson, Mr. Darrow, calls me illogical and uncharitable because my feelings toward Miss Viner have changed since I've heard this news. Well! You've known her, it appears, for some years: Anna tells me you used to see her when she was a companion, ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... his friend belonged to the Serbo-Croat party, which was, he said, a righteous, though rather a small party, as the island had been gravely handicapped by the support which Austria gave the Serbs. "And now," he added—it seemed a trifle illogical—"the people are all very contented. Believe me," he said. Furthermore, he volunteered the information that the law was being administered in the name of the Entente and the United States. It may show a distinct bias on our part, but I fear we asked him whether the blows from the butt end of muskets ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... artist of the pair, knew that Tolstoy was on the wrong path with his crack-brained religious and social notions; knew that in his becoming the writer of illogical tracts and pamphlets, Russia was losing a great artist. What would he have said if he had lived to read the sad recantation and artistic suicide of Tolstoy: "I consign my own artistic productions to the category of bad art, except the story, God Sees the Truth, which seeks ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... led to a convulsion in Europe; and the Convention which, in the first illusions of victory, promised brotherhood to populations striking for freedom, was impolitic, but was not illogical. In truth the Jacobins only transplanted for the use of oppressed Europeans a precedent created by the Monarchy in favour of Americans who were not oppressed. Nobody imagined that the new system of international relations could be carried into effect without ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... was on its way to me vi this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the mean time he had eaten ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the correct thing," said Joyce rather scared. "Mother says, 'husbands and wives are one,' and 'to the pure, all things are pure'—whatever that has to do with it—so it would be illogical in the face of that to object to such a trifle as sharing a room. 'One has to tune one's mind to accept whatever comes, and to follow in the footsteps of one's ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... so-called Prussian prove that the Cabinet Order is not the outcome of religious feeling? By describing the Cabinet Order everywhere as an outcome of religious feeling. Is an insight into social movements to be expected from such an illogical mind? Listen to his prattle about the relation of German society to the Labour movement ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... and a word of crooning comfort from her soft voice. This yearning was mingled with a doubt lest perhaps he had been transgressing the Place's Law, in some new way; and lest he might have let himself in for a scolding. The Law was still so queer and so illogical! ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... this profoundly illogical reasoner—Society. Government levies a conscription on the young intelligence of the kingdom at the age of seventeen or eighteen, a conscription of precocious power. Great ability is prematurely exhausted by excessive brain work before it is sent up to be submitted to a process of selection. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... He is serious with the most trifling subjects, and he trifles with the most serious. "He broods eternally over his own thought," but who can tell what his thought may be for the nonce? He is of all writers the most vagrant, surprising, and, to many minds, illogical. His sequences are not the sequences of other men. His writings are as full of transformations as a pantomime or a fairy tale. His arid wastes lead up to glittering palaces, his banqueting-halls end in a ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... "I wish you wouldn't say such things. Besides seeming to imply a sort of distrust of my love for you, they are illogical; and you know there is nothing I hate like ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... upstairs in her bedroom, pondering on her mother's preposterous notion of collecting the rents herself. Alone, she would invent conversations with her mother, silencing the foolish woman with unanswerable sarcastic phrases that utterly destroyed her illogical arguments. She would repeat these phrases, repeat even entire conversations, with pleasure; and, dwelling also with pleasure upon her grievances against her mother, would gradually arrive at a state of dull-glowing resentment. She could, if she chose, easily free ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... to declare that the subject should be begun at precisely this or that point in the college course. These differences, to be sure, are in many cases the result of accidental factors in the college curriculum, and often have been determined by illogical departmental rivalries within the faculty rather than by wise and disinterested educators studying the merits of the case. But in large part these differences are the expression of different purposes and practical ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... writer of these pages does not himself "seem to see it." Nevertheless, I look upon the illusion with a respect almost bordering upon fear, although not quite in that spirit of veneration which moves illogical savages to fall down and worship the stranger lunatic whom chance has led to their odorous residences. Dwelling one summer on the New Jersey shore, I used to loiter, day after day, upon a deserted wharf, at the end of which ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various |
