"Irrational" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Refused you! Pah! Pooh! That's nothing! That signifies absolutely nothing! It's meaningless! It's a detail. You get well—do you hear? You go and get well; then try it again! Then you'll see! And if she is an idiot—in the event of her irrational persistence in an incredible and utterly indefensible attitude"—he choked up, then fairly barked at Siward—"take her anyway, sir! Run off with her! Dominate circumstances, sir! take charge of events! ... But you can't do it till you've clapped yourself into ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... minority, would abandon their vain hopes of nationality."[8] It was in this spirit that his successor endeavoured to govern the French section in Canada. Being both rationalist and utilitarian, like others of his school he minimized the strength of an irrational fact like racial pride, and, almost from the first he discounted the force of French opposition, while he let it, consciously or unconsciously, influence his behaviour towards his French subjects. "If it were possible," he wrote in November, 1839, ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... the effects of fear on irrational animals lately occurred in Blickling Park, Norfolk, during the races there: At the very height of sport, a covey of partridges sprang up, and were flying across the ground, when overcome with alarm at the noise and bustle of the scene, they fell lifeless among the crowded ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... as little value. Your mother's wishes, though allowed to be irrational and groundless, are to be gratified by the disappointment of mine, which appear to be just and reasonable; and, since one must be sacrificed, that affection with which you have inspired me and those benefits you confess to owe to me, those sufferings believed by you to have ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... of wider application than mere justice; for we naturally treat men alone according to justice and the laws, while kindness and gratitude, as though from a plenteous spring, often extend even to irrational animals. It is right for a good man to feed horses which have been worn out in his service, and not merely to train dogs when they are young, but to take care of them when they are old. When the Athenian people built the Parthenon, they set free the mules which had done the hardest ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... he fights or he flies, and then wakes to confused memory of just what the author thinks fit to call to his recollection. It is very interesting and edifying, truly, to watch the movements of an irrational puppet! I do beg of you, when you take up the functions of the novelist, not to distribute this species of intoxication amongst your dramatis personae, more largely than is absolutely necessary. Keep them in a rational ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... for either hysteria or neurasthenia, and when the doctor gives medicines for these complaints, it is to remedy organic troubles, or, more often because necessity forces him to pander to the irrational and pernicious habit into which the public have fallen of expecting a bottle of medicine whenever they visit a doctor. Osier, the famous Professor of Medicine at Oxford, truly observed that he was the best doctor who knew the uselessness of medicines. But when public ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... goddesses, necessarily forced man to the creation of a Fate, to which Jupiter himself was subjected, more blind, more crushing, more appalling to the imagination (because while retaining his entire individuality, man was yet forced to submit to its irrational and pitiless decrees) than was even the hopeless fatalism consequent upon the pantheistic absorption of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of life, but, in the courage of their joyousness, feasibly close to all its breathing facts. Men and women refuse any longer to allow their most vital instincts to be branded with obloquy, and the fulness of their lives to be thwarted at the bidding of an impure and irrational fiction of propriety. On every hand we find the right to happiness asserted in deeds as well as words. The essential purity of actions and relations to which a merely technical or superstitious irregularity attaches is being more and more acknowledged, and the fanciful barriers ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... bore, though not without some degree of impatience, yet without any unbecoming or irrational despondency, and applied himself in the intermission of his pains to seek for comfort in the duties ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... my little room I did not mock Mrs. Hutch. I thought about her, thought long and hard, and to a purpose. I decided that she must hear me out once. She must understand about my plans, my future, my good intentions. It was too irrational to go on like this, we living in fear of her, she in distrust of us. If Mrs. Hutch would only trust me, and the tax collectors would trust her, we could ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... for a moment. The silence in his breast was complete. But he felt a suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience when we enter an unlighted strange place—the irrational feeling that something may jump upon us in the dark—the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... very illogical, of course, and very absurd. If we can accept the four words, why not accept all six? If we credit the head of the text, why cavil at the tail? Sometimes the absurdity of such irrational behavior will break upon a man and set him laughing at his own stupidity. Mr. Spurgeon had some such experience. 'Gentlemen,' he said, one Friday afternoon, in an address to his students, 'Gentlemen, there are many passages of Scripture which you will never understand until some trying ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... the Spartan lawgiver, made no law against ingratitude, it is said, because he conceived that no one could be so irrational as to be unthankful for ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... bars. In some it took the form of the sleek stillness of the tiger; others were loud-voiced, restless, biting at their nails. Only to a few was it given to bear triumph soberly, with room for other thoughts; to the most it came as a tumultuous passion, an irrational joy, a dazzling bandage to their eyes, beneath which they saw, with an inner vision, wealth a growing snowball and victory their familiar spirit. Among the adventurers from the Cygnet there was, moreover, an intoxication of feeling ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... types of series than there are finite numbers. There are probably more points in space and more moments in time than there are finite numbers. There are exactly as many fractions as whole numbers, although there are an infinite number of fractions between any two whole numbers. But there are more irrational numbers than there are whole numbers or fractions. There are probably exactly as many points in space as there are irrational numbers, and exactly as many points on a line a millionth of an inch long as in the whole of infinite space. There ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... continual and never-satisfied meditation on human destiny and the dark perplexity of the events of this world, and calculated to call forth the very same meditation in the minds of the spectators. This enigmatical work resembles those irrational equations in which a fraction of unknown magnitude always remains, that will in no way admit of solution. Much has been said, much written, on this piece, and yet no thinking head who anew expresses himself on it, will (in his view of the connexion ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... is the foundation of the fittingness of the Incarnation of the Divine Person, as above stated (Q. 3, A. 8). But as in rational creatures we find the likeness of image, so in irrational creatures we find the image of trace. Therefore the irrational creature was as capable ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... armies confronted one another at Talavera, where a dreadful conflict issued in victory to the British. The British, unsustained by proper support, through the negligence of the English government, and the irrational conduct of the Portuguese, were compelled to fall back. Before doing so, Wellesley accomplished another grand feat—the execution of the lines of Torres Vedras. This defensive position was skilfully selected, and as skilfully fortified. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... wreck the camp in a moment of mad intoxication, he would have made allowances for the cause. Before resorting to extreme measures in defending his charge, he first would have sought to bring them to their senses. Drunken men are men unbalanced, irrational. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... as those which curse the existence of the majority upon this earth, criminals will continue to be produced. And if we concede that these anomalies are directly or indirectly brought about by false and irrational methods of educating the youth of the country, we must also allow that education helps to manufacture criminals and to ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... Miss Zell," said the doctor quietly, "will excuse anything you say, however wild and irrational. I ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... to do now. He felt himself dependent on too many subordinates and too many masters. The near presence of that strange emotional phenomenon called public opinion weighed upon his spirits, and alarmed him by its irrational nature. No doubt that from ignorance he exaggerated to himself its power for good and evil—especially for evil; and the rough east winds of the English spring (which agreed with his wife) augmented his general mistrust of men's motives and of the efficiency of their ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... afternoons and evenings they had the most of their visitors. Then came the suitors, the Kirsten girls with their friends, the pretty young widow, and often the good Kummerfelden, who took great delight in listening to the irrational ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... ludicrous, ridiculous, chimerical, ill-judged, mistaken, senseless, erroneous, inconclusive, monstrous, stupid, false, incorrect, nonsensical, unreasonable, foolish, infatuated, paradoxical, wild. ill-advised, irrational, preposterous, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... the curious, seeing that he appeared to be the more irrational of the two, and far more likely to get into mischief, set off in pursuit. The skipper crossed the road, and began gently to ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... them, with a Poison of Witchcraft that can't be cured. Has there not also been a world of discontent in our Borders? 'Tis no wonder, that the fiery Serpents are so Stinging of us; We have been a most Murmuring Generation. It is not Irrational, to ascribe the late Stupendious growth of Witches among us, partly to the bitter discontents, which Affliction and Poverty has fill'd us with: it is inconceivable, what advantage the Devil gains over men, by discontent. Moreover, the Sin ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... which can be made by man or machinery. The whack of heavy falling bodies, the sudden shivering splinter of chopped logs, the crystal shatter of pounded ice, the crash of a tree hurled to the earth by a hurricane, the irrational, persistent chaos of noise made by switching freight-trains, the explosion of gas, the blasting of stone, and the terrific grinding of rock upon rock which precedes the collapse—all these have been in my touch-experience, and contribute to my idea of Bedlam, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... said suddenly. He had just appreciated as a special aspect of this irrational injustice of fate that these two men were alive and that Kurt was dead. All the crew of the Hohenzollern were shot or burnt or smashed or drowned, and these two lurking in the padded forward cabin ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... That talk four years ago might have been irrational. But now—not on your life.... The world has come to an end.... Oh, Lord, look who's coming! Lane, did you ever in your life see such a ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... end" of the city is extending rapidly toward the West. A brown or dark gray stone, as in Edinburgh, is the principal material used, and gives the city a very substantial appearance. Most of the town, being new, has wide and straight streets; in the older part, they are perverse and irrational, as old concerns are apt obstinately to be. They have an old Cathedral here (now Presbyterian) of which the citizens seem quite proud, I can't perceive why. Architecturally, it seems to me a sad waste of stone and labor. The other churches are also mainly Presbyterian, and, while making less ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... by faith in the son of God, who died on behalf of the sinful human race. Philo, in his poetic fancy, speaks of God associating with the virgin soul and generating therein the Divine offspring of holy wisdom;[363] the Christian creed-makers enunciated the irrational dogma of the immaculate conception of Jesus. So, too, the earliest philosophical exponents of Christianity, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, may have derived many of their detailed ideas from ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... said Paynter, very pale. "I have nothing left against it but a faint, irrational feeling; a feeling that, somehow or other, if poor Vane could stand alive before us at this moment he might tell some other and even more ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... answered George, trying to conceal his annoyance at this sort of petty quibbling. "I mean he is too personal, over-excitable, irrational and very hard ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... than this. The other branch of traditional material, namely that relating to custom, belief, and rite, rests upon a solid basis of historic fact; customs which are strange and irrational to this age are not in consequence to be considered the mere worthless following of practices which owe their origin to accident or freak; beliefs which do not belong to the established religion are not in consequence ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... norm is a rough average estimate. And this common-sense judgment serves practically as a sufficient criterion of truth, at least in relation to such extreme one-sidedness of view as approaches the abnormal, that is to say, one of the two poles of irrational exaltation, or "joy-madness," and abject melancholy, which, appear among the phenomena of ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... of people. It is quite irrational, but I get fond of them. Which is quite a different thing from the admiration and excitement of falling in love. Almost the opposite thing. They cry or they come some mental or physical cropper and hurt themselves, or they do something distressingly little and human and suddenly ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... Jocelyn had not carefully gauged his syringe, and the over-amount of morphia thrown into his system so stimulated him that his words appeared exceedingly irrational to the young man, whose judgment was based on unusual shrewdness and common-sense. He was greatly puzzled by the sudden change in his companion. It was evident that he had not been drinking, for his breath was untainted and his utterance was natural. But his face was flushed, and he seemed possessed ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... those Actions which are common to the rest of the Animals. Thus it was plain to him, that there were three sorts of Actions which he was obliged to, viz. 1. Either those by which he resembled the Irrational Animals. Or, 2. Those by which he resembled the Heavenly Bodies. Or, 3. Those by which he resembled the necessarily self-existent Being: And that he was oblig'd to the first, as having a gross Body, consisting of several Parts, and different ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... a person no better informed than myself to pronounce on systems of government—still less do I affect to have more enlarged notions than the generality of mankind; but I may, without risking those imputations, venture to say, I have no childish or irrational deference for the persons of Kings. I know they are not, by nature, better than other men, and a neglected or vicious education may often render them worse. This does not, however, make me less respect the office. I respect it as the means ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... jungle in the neighbourhood is Central Park, whence an animal would be compelled to take a Subway train to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, and lie in wait for him as he came home in the twilight. But irrational or no, there was the fact. To be quashed into pulp under one of those girder-like front legs, Gordon felt must be abominable. To make matters worse, Gordon has a young son who insists on being taken every Sunday morning to see the animals; and of all attractions in the menagerie, ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... in correspondence with M. Leibnitz, and having instructed him that I was in possession of a method of determining tangents and solving questions involving maxima and minima, a method which included irrational expressions, and having concealed it by transposing the letters, he replied to me that he had discovered a similar method, which he communicated, differing from mine only in the terms and signs, as well as in the generation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... which even reason could not dispel, that whatever secret tragedy or wrong had signalized this house, its perpetration had taken place in this very room. It was a fancy, but it held, and under its compelling if irrational influence, I made a second and still more minute survey of the room to which this conviction had imparted ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... shallow acceptance of mere creeds, because a man's good or evil deeds become a series of actions with inevitable consequences. If you teach him that he can throw off the results of a bad life, and of all it has entailed upon his fellow man, by a brief spell of penitence, or a blind, irrational faith in the sacrifice of a Being he has neglected and ignored during the greater part of that life, you really are only pandering to the selfish and cowardly side ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... And he sees that the three divine Persons are a common effluence in works, in graces, and in glory, in nature and above nature, in all conditions and in all times, in the saints and in men, in heaven and on earth, in all reasonable and irrational creatures, according to each one's merits, needs, and powers of receiving. God is common to all, with all His gifts, the angels are common, the soul is common in all its faculties, in all life, in all the members, ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... got my frail body in his arms, which I realized were twice as strong as my good Marigold's, that I felt the ghastly and irrational revulsion. The only thing to which I can liken it, although it seems ludicrous, is what I imagine to be the instinctive recoil of a woman who feels on her body the touch of antipathetic hands. I know that my malady has made me a bit supersensitive. But my vanity has prided ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... like you about that.—On the contrary! The more I consider our situation calmly, the more irrational it seems to me that we should part ways like any ordinary divorced couple ... that we should give up the beautiful ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... him by the church, and by the unanimous wish of his nobility. In any other situation, or in a milder age, his character might have stood higher than that of the adventurous Coeur de Lion. But in the Crusade, itself an undertaking wholly irrational, sound reason was the quality of all others least estimated, and the chivalric valour which both the age and the enterprise demanded was considered as debased if mingled with the least touch of discretion. So that the merit of Philip, compared with that of his haughty rival, showed ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Chopin's teacher, seem to have been affected a little by this irrational way of looking at music. Schumann, in a complimentary notice of Chopin's nocturnes, expresses his regrets that the composer should confine himself so strictly to the pianoforte, whereas he might have influenced the development of music in all its branches. He adds, however, on second thought, that ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... disturbed you so much? You might surely have given some hint of the cause. It is an additional reason for wishing you here. If I had, before I left New-York, sufficiently reflected on the subject, I would never have consented to this absurd and irrational mode of life. If you will come with Mr. Monroe, I will see you to New-York again; and if you have a particular aversion to the city of Philadelphia, you shall stay a day or two at Dr. Edwards's, ten miles from town, where I can spend the greater ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... to its present form chiefly by Gluck, before whose time it was less irrational than it became later. In the beginning it was music-drama of a pedantic kind; then it served as the opportunity for setting singers to deliver a series of beautiful songs for the delectation of an audience largely seated in the wings; and finally ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... James's and Limehouse, at every hour of the day; as numerous as Welsh parsons, and equally contemptible. How they swarm in all coffeehouses, theatres, public walks, and private assemblies; how they are incessantly employed in cultivating intrigues, and every kind of irrational pleasure; how industrious they seem to mimic the appearance of monkeys, as monkeys are emulous to imitate the gestures of men: And from such observations, I concluded, that to confine the greatest part of those incurables, who are so ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... which it is supposed that he made substances, real beings.——According to Plato, God and matter existed from all eternity. Before the creation of the world, matter had in itself a principle of motion, but without end or laws: it is this principle which Plato calls the irrational soul of the world, because, according to his doctrine, every spontaneous and original principle of motion is called soul. God wished to impress form upon matter, that is to say, 1. To mould matter, and make it into a body; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... replied with imperturbable dignity, but still retaining my hold upon the rail. "When this person so far loses his sense of proportion as to contend with an irrational object, devoid of faculties, let the barb be cast. After that introduction dealing with the four seasons, the twelve gong-strokes of the day are reviewed in a like fashion. These in turn give place to the days of the month, then the moons ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... experimental physiologists—in particular, Marshall Hall in England and Francois Magendie in France; and the joint efforts of these various workers led presently to the abandonment of those severe and often irrational depletive methods—blood-letting and the like—that had previously dominated medical practice. To this end also the "statistical method," introduced by Louis and his followers, largely contributed; and ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... prohibitions bind not. But if death Bind us with after-bands, what profits then Our inward freedom? In the day we eat Of this fair fruit, our doom is, we shall die. How dies the serpent? he hath eaten and lives, And knows, and speaks, and reasons, and discerns, Irrational till then. For us alone Was death invented? or to us denied This intellectual food, for beasts reserved? For beasts it seems: yet that one beast which first Hath tasted envies not, but brings with joy The good befallen him, author unsuspect, Friendly to man, far from ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... clarity exhibited by the old lady on the previous day forbade any notion that this preposterous idea sprang from a mind touched by the infirmities of age, and yet her stipulation was so peculiar, so irrational that I pondered long over my duty in the case. What Mrs. Drainger wanted was, in one sense, absurdly simple—merely the revision of her will, scarcely more than the retyping of that simple document; but I was conscious of a deeper demand; as though, to the support ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... abridgments;—which if they be fortunately so done as to prove delight to any of the young readers, it is hoped that no worse effect will result than to make them wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the Plays at full length (such a wish will be neither peevish nor irrational). When time and leave of judicious friends shall put them into their hands, they will discover in such of them as are here abridged (not to mention almost as many more, which are left untouched) many surprising events and turns of fortune, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... see Ernestine. Every mile which brought him nearer, brought added uncertainty as to what he should say when he reached her. What was there for him to say? The dead leaves of her hopes were all huddled in the hollow. Was he becoming so irrational as to think he could give life to things dead? Was she not right in wishing to cover them up decently and let them be? Was anything to be gained in blowing them about as last summer's leaves were being blown about now by the unsparing, uncaring winds ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... consciousness, that his appearance and conduct while under the influence of liquor, might be such as not only to frighten, but estrange his child's affection from him; and he seemed touched by the thought, for his manner changed, though he was still to a degree irrational. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... behind which each could go her own way without troubling the other. But what are they doing now? They are tearing down this wall, and, under the pretext of making us rational Christians, are making us very irrational philosophers.... We are agreed that our old religious system is false; but I cannot say with you that it is a patchwork of bunglers and half-philosophers. I know nothing in the world in which human acuteness has been more displayed ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... impossible to despise the recommendation of standing well with the best Florentine families, and since Tito began to be thoroughly received into that circle whose views were the unquestioned standard of social value, it seemed irrational not to admit that there was no longer any check to satisfaction in the prospect of such a son-in-law for Bardo, and such a husband for Romola. It was undeniable that Tito's coming had been the dawn of a new life for both father ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Mr. Haim's daughter or any other girl, and to publish or conceal the betrothal as he chose and as she chose. Yes, useless! He felt, inexplicably, a criminal. He felt that he had committed an enormity. It was not a matter of argument; it was a matter of instinct. The old man's frightful and irrational resentment was his condemnation. He could not face ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... entrance porches, the upper parts of the faade, the wooden cupolas over the five domes, and the pointed arches in the narthex, are deviations from Byzantine traditions dating in part from the later Middle Ages Nothing could well be conceived more irrational, from a structural point of view, than the accumulation of columns in the entrance-arches; but the total effect is so picturesque and so rich in color, that its architectural defects are easily overlooked. The external veneering of white ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... Brethren, the Luperci, the Augurs— probably had reference to that three-fold partition. These three elements into which the primitive body of burgesses in Rome was divided have had theories of the most extravagant absurdity engrafted upon them. The irrational opinion that the Roman nation was a mongrel people finds its support in that division, and its advocates have striven by various means to represent the three great Italian races as elements entering into the composition of the primitive Rome, and to transform ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... you it is a knowledge of how often the ridicule and contempt of the world has crushed truth in the embryo or stifled it in the cradle, which makes me so eager to examine and support those opinions which mankind generally condemn as visionary and irrational.' In later times these interests became a bond between W. R. Greg and Miss Martineau. He finally let the subject drop, with the conviction that years of practice had brought it no farther on its way either to scientific rank or to practical ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... code. Ethnology shows us that the Romans and the Hindoos sprang from the same original stock, and there is indeed a striking resemblance between what appear to have been their original customs. Even now, Hindoo jurisprudence has a substratum of forethought and sound judgment, but irrational imitation has engrafted in it an immense apparatus of cruel absurdities. From these corruptions the Romans were protected by their code. It was compiled while the usage was still wholesome, and a hundred years afterwards it might have been too late. The Hindoo law has been ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... he was finally able to exclaim in great wonderment. "Is it possible that you don't see it as clear as day? Don't you see, my son, that all this proves plainly that the reforms of the ministers are irrational?" ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... not like brutes. In a land so wealthy the programme is not impracticable, though severe. As the end to be attained is the welfare of future generations, no good reason could be urged why they should not contribute towards the cost of it—a better debt to leave to posterity than the incubus of an irrational war." ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... object. If knowledge and the object are both but corresponding points in a parallel series, whence comes this correspondence? Why should knowledge illuminate the object. The doctrine of the Vijnana vadins, that it is knowledge alone that shows itself both as knowledge and as its object, is also irrational, for how can knowledge divide itself as subject and object in such a manner that knowledge as object should require the knowledge as subject to illuminate it? If this be the case we might again expect that knowledge as knowledge ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... received benefits from Him (such as the deliverance from slavery in Egypt), and further terrified them with threats if they transgressed His commands, holding out many promises of good if they should observe them; thus treating them as parents treat irrational children. It is, therefore, certain that they knew not the excellence of ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... of the more irrational kinds of animals among each other," said Alice, "for their whole life is well nigh a warfare; but the dog leaves his own race to attach himself to ours; forsakes, for his master, the company, food, and pleasure of his own kind; and surely the fidelity of such a devoted and voluntary ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... may do so. Banish any such irrational thought from your mind. It is not worthy of you. I must go now. I will telegraph to London—to Sir Howard Fellowes—also, I think to the State authorities on forensic medicine. A Government analyst must do his part. Shall I ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... the moment when he looked for the first time into the eyes of Jefferson Craig's newly made wife. For one instant he suffered a pang of jealousy—a queer, irrational feeling. It was as if he had lost his friend, as if this star-eyed creature before him could never find room for him again in her full heart. But he knew better in the next breath, for she lifted her face, ever so little, and with a sense of deep ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... might be arranged without bloodshed, Durnford ordered the white volunteers under his command not to fire, with the result that the rebels fired, killing several of his force and wounding him in the arm. This incident gave rise to an irrational indignation in the colony, and for a while he himself was designated by the ungenerous nickname of 'Don't fire Durnford.' It is alleged, none can know with what amount of truth, that it was the memory of this undeserved ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... before an expression of your own wishes. I was flattered by your so thinking; but, if I may form any judgment from your father's manner, I must suppose that you were mistaken. You will understand that I do not say this as any reproach to you. Quite the contrary. I think your father is irrational; and you may well have failed to anticipate that ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... is irrational. Of course, we are supposing that it is for the public benefit that the woman should be struck. It is the same with an old man. The good of the commonwealth,—and his own,—requires that, beyond a certain age, he shall ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... irrational and dangerous. He was a transcendentalist of the extreme order, and a believer in the perfectability of human nature. His works are full of his principles. The earliest was Queen Mab, in which his profanity and atheism are clearly set forth. It was first privately ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... million pounds' worth of property to set off against his vague colossal liabilities, and from first to last he must have had a controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions. This irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that, paid him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it lies. For he created nothing, he invented nothing, he economised nothing. I cannot claim that a ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... Opinion that a Man may naturally know enough to attack or defend himself, without the Assistance of Art: Man, tho' the only reasonable Creature, finds himself deprived of what irrational Creatures naturally possess; and he requires for his Improvement the Assistance and Practice of others; the grand Art of War, and that of using the Sword, which has been practised thro' so many Ages, still find new Inventions; and it may be said, that as there is no Place, in ...
— The Art of Fencing - The Use of the Small Sword • Monsieur L'Abbat
... . That an irrational custom," went on Professor Haddock, "prevents respectable young ladies from making love, a thing they would enjoy doing, whilst mercenary girls do it too much and without getting any enjoyment out of it. It is indeed deplorable. But M. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... Vengeance. At that critical Conjuncture, there happen'd to be a Dwarf, who was dumb, but not deaf, in the King's Apartment. Nobody regarded him: He was an Eye and Ear-witness of all that pass'd, and yet no more suspected than any irrational Domestic Animal. This little Dwarf had conceiv'd a peculiar Regard for Astarte and Zadig: He heard, with equal Horror and Surprize, the King's Orders to destroy them both. But how to prevent those Orders from being put into Execution, as the Time was ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... on the part of many farmers to regard fertilizers only as stimulants, due to the irrational use of certain materials, but a good commercial fertilizer is a carrier of some or all of the necessary elements that we find in stable manures. They may carry nitrogen, phosphoric acid, or potash,—any one or two ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... neither large, nor handsome, nor ancient, nor remarkable in any point of view. We found in it a monument of the revolution, which I never saw elsewhere, and which I never expected to see at all. The age of reason was a sadly irrational age.—The tablet containing the rights and duties of man, disposed in two columns, like the tables of the Mosaic law, is still suffered to exist in the church, though shorn of all its republican dignity, and degraded into the front of ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... grievance is that, according to actual arrangements, there must be reasons for our wishes, and that on those reasons our wishes must depend. Should we then prefer that there were no such reasons? Would we have our wishes to be independent of reason, and adrift before irrational caprice? Probably we may, on second thoughts, be content to forego an enfranchisement like this; but, if not, we may at least console ourselves for its indefinite postponement, by reflecting that Omnipotence ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... shadow, gracious Hien," remarked Tsin Lung, turning towards the other with courteous deference. "Shall we bring a scene of irrational carnage to an end and agree to regard the incomparable Thang-li's benevolent tongue ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... of view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered almost irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It turns the scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially possible that the key of all social evolution may be found in the dusty casket of some discredited ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... suit—that voice, which in a Siddons or a Braham rouses us, in a siren Catalani charms and captivates us—that the musical expressive human voice should be converted into a rival of the noises of silly geese and irrational venomous snakes? I never shall forget the sounds on my night!" He urges that the venial mistake of the poor author, "who thought to please in the act of filling his pockets, for the sum of his demerits amounts to no more than that," is too severely ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... shameful accounts we read, every week in the Christian year, my lords and gentlemen and honourable boards, the infamous records of small official inhumanity, do not pass by the people as they pass by us. And hence these irrational, blind, and obstinate prejudices, so astonishing to our magnificence, and having no more reason in them—God save the Queen and Confound their politics—no, than smoke ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... develops in us the sense of the beautiful, just what it is in anything that makes us distinguish beauty in it, cannot now be determined. It will be enough for us to know that literature makes a large appeal to a sense of the beautiful in us, a sense not fortuitous and irrational, though varying, but normal and almost universal, dependent upon natural laws of development. Truth is also difficult of definition, but we may understand that when out of experience, as through a process of reasoning, ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... nature. It seeks to satisfy them by using as its "material" the whole variegated and contradictory mass of feelings and reactions to feelings, which the natural human being with his superstitions, his sympathies, his antipathies, his loves and his hates, his surmises, his irrational intuitions, his hopes and fears, is of necessity bound to experience as he ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Provenal troubadours, must have had a touch of this madness, when, after having fallen in love with a lady of Carcassone, named Loba, or the Wolfess, the excess of his passion drove him over the country, howling like a wolf, and demeaning himself more like an irrational beast than a ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... even for an hour upon her own resources, though in situations which scarcely seemed to admit of any occasion for taxing those resources; and often I have felt anger towards myself for what appeared to be an irrational or effeminate timidity, and have struggled with my own mind upon occasions like the present, when I knew that I could not have acknowledged my tremors to a friend without something like shame, and a fear to excite his ridicule. No; if in anything I ran into excess, it was in this very point ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... room to two medium sized young females, gave small opportunities for privacy by night or day, for neither the double washstand, nor the thus far unimagined bathroom, nor even indeed the humble and serviceable screen, had been realized, in these dark ages of which I write. Accordingly, like the irrational ostrich, which defends itself by the simple process of not looking at its pursuers, Emma Jane had kept her Latin letter in her closed hand, in her pocket, or in her open book, flattering herself that no one had noticed her pleased bewilderment ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sinks back into his life's love, which is that of his will; and that love dissipates these truths, and immerses his thought in space, where his lumen, which he calls rational, abides, not knowing that so far as he denies these things, he is irrational. That this is so, may be confirmed by the idea entertained of this truth, that GOD is a MAN. Read with attention, I pray you, what has been said above (n. 11-13) and what follows after, and your understanding will accept it. But when you let your thought down into the natural lumen which derives ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... from her shorthand class and stood wearily by the window, too discouraged even to remove her hat. The shorthand was a failure; the whole course was a failure. She had not the instinct for plodding, for the meticulous attention to detail that those absurd, irrational lines ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... by, or by means of, themselves. Men, for themselves. The perfection of irrational animals is that which is best for them; the perfection of man is that which is absolutely best. There is growth only in plants; but there is irritability, or, a better word, instinctivity, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... guy, Smithy," Rawson reached out and gripped one brown hand. "And we'll do as you say; but first I've got to get a line on things. I'm becoming as irrational as the men. I'm imagining all ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... you obtain no manifestations; but if you go in a mood of faith, which practically means confident expectation, the phenomena follow, and you depart a convert. I use this illustration in no scoffing spirit. The presupposition is not irrational. It amounts, in effect, to saying that you must go some way to meet God before God can or will come to you. This seems a curious coyness; but as God is finite and conditioned, a bit of a character ("a strongly marked and knowable personality," p. 5), there is nothing contradictory ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... red-haired man was six feet from her with his back to her, and a darker red streaking his head. He was struggling to his feet. She had an irrational impulse to stop his rising. She flung the axe at him, missed, saw his face in profile, and he had swerved beyond little Si, and was running through the reeds. She had a transitory vision of Snake standing ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... nearer and nearer; that I was already half surrounded, swept, dragged, coaxed into a vast prison-house where there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, where their worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched. I can neither explain nor justify the storm of irrational emotion that swept me as I stood in that moment, staring down the length of the silent corridor towards the music-room at the far end, I can only repeat that no personal bravery sent me down it, but that the negative ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... doctrine is essentially superficial, and such will be its effects. It has no better measure of right and wrong than that of visible beauty and tangible fitness. Conscience indeed inflicts an acute pang, but that pang, forsooth, is irrational, and to reverence it is an illiberal superstition. But, if we will make light of what is deepest within us, nothing is left but to pay homage to what is more upon the surface. To seem becomes to be; what looks fair will be good, what causes offence will be evil; virtue will be what ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Estate as the House of the People, and not as the House of a privileged class, the Ministry and Parliament of 1831 virtually conceded the principle of Universal Suffrage. In this point of view the ten-pound franchise was an arbitrary, irrational, and impolitic qualification. It had, indeed, the merit of simplicity, and so had the constitutions of Abbe Sieyes. But its immediate ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... turned and defied fate and society. He dwelt upon the admission of base wrong in Col. Selby's dying statement. He drew a vivid, picture of the villain at last overtaken by the vengeance of Heaven. Would the jury say that this retributive justice, inflicted by an outraged, and deluded woman, rendered irrational by the most cruel wrongs, was in the nature of a foul, premeditated murder? "Gentlemen; it is enough for me to look upon the life of this most beautiful and accomplished of her sex, blasted by the heartless villainy of man, without seeing, at the-end of ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... relighted the corncob while Mr. Merrick stared at him in thoughtful silence. As a matter of fact, Uncle John was pleased with the fellow. A whimsical, irrational, unconventional appeal of this sort went straight to his heart, for the queer little man hated the commonplace ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... She spent most of the day shopping for week-end necessities. On an irrational last-minute impulse—perhaps an unconscious surrender to the machine age—she dug in the grocery deep freeze and brought out a ...
— Weak on Square Roots • Russell Burton
... retain his most irrational suspicion against beautiful White Fell was, to Sweyn, evidence of a weak obstinacy of mind that would but thrive upon expostulation and argument. But this evident intention to direct the passions of grief and anguish to a hatred and fear of the fair stranger, such as ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... and I began to reflect upon what had passed. It seemed to me that he was foolish and irrational, altogether unlike himself. He had asked my advice upon a point in which his own judgment would serve him better than mine, and it was contrary to his nature to ask advice at all in such matters. He was evidently ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... weak human idolatry. It was a revelation to me of the depths of despair and wretchedness into which one can sink when unsustained by manly fortitude or Christian principle. It is in such desperate, irrational moods that undisciplined, ill-balanced souls thrust themselves out from the light of God's sunshine and the abundant possibilities of future good. I now look back on that hour with shame, and cannot excuse it even by the fact that I was enfeebled in mind as well as body by disease. We often ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence, again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of the rogueries of a child. See the good-humoured ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... in youthful beauty, fill us Davids with irrational awe; but, the next moment, they are treated like small children by the very first matron they meet; they resign their judgment at once to hers, and bow their wills to her lightest ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... algebra is the algebraic theory at number, which is devised with the view of removing these difficulties. The harmony between arithmetical and geometrical measurement, which was disturbed by the Greek geometers on the discovery of irrational numbers, is restored by an unlimited supply of the causes of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... classify certain of our most essential desires as brutish—hunger and thirst, the urgence of sleep, and especially sexual longing. We know of blind animal rage, of striking, biting, scratching, howling, and snarling, of irrational fears and ignominious flight. We share our senses with the higher animals, have eyes and ears, noses and tongues much like theirs; heart, lungs, and other viscera, and four limbs. They have brains which stand them in good stead, although their ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... to its understanding properly so called, as its measure and criterion. He says: "That therefore to rely upon the understanding, misinformed as it is by depraved affections, as our adequate instructor in matters of religion, is most highly irrational." Nevertheless, "the understanding has a great function in religion and is a medium to the affections, and may ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... seen, in the course of this work, that the writer is as earnest in recommending ladies who belong to the higher class of settlers to cultivate all the mental resources of a superior education, as she is to induce them to discard all irrational and artificial wants and mere useless pursuits. She would willingly direct their attention to the natural history and botany of this new country, in which they will find a never-failing source of amusement and instruction, at once enlightening ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... on again. Besides, there is danger attending the employment of such strong, irritating, or drying preparations. The disease, by their use, is frequently driven to the throat, bronchial tubes, lungs, or brain, and thus a bad matter is made worse. Not less irrational and unsuccessful is the plan of treating the disease with inhalations of "carbolized iodine," and other drags, administered through variously-devised pocket and other inhalers. Such treatment may mask or cover up catarrh for a time; but, by reason of the constitutional nature of the disease, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... certain that had Jane's family seen her then and been told that she was doing this remarkable thing for a woman she had never seen before that day, named Mary O'Shaughnessy, and also for a certain red-haired person of whom it had never heard, it would have considered Jane quite irrational. But it is entirely probable that Jane became really rational that night for the first time in ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... blessings of ignorance. It makes a vast difference in one's mental comfort, I find, whether he accepts the present unquestioningly, with enthusiasm, and reconstructs the historic past as an agreeable duty, or whether he already bears the past, in its various aspects, in his mind, in involuntary but irrational expectation of meeting it, and is forced to accept the present as a painful task! Which of these courses to pursue in the future was the subject of my disappointed meditations, as we drove through the too Europeanized streets, and landed at a hotel ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... dramatic plot in that, "what follows should be the necessary or probable result of the preceding action,"[23] even to the extent that the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities, for by a logical fallacy even an irrational premise in an action may seem probable provided that the conclusion is logical and made to seem real.[24] For instance, the irrational elements in the Odyssey "are presented to the imagination with such vividness ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... whom he was engaged. She was a farmer's daughter, said Skelmersdale, and "very respectable," and no doubt an excellent match for him; but both girl and lover were very young and with just that mutual jealousy, that intolerantly keen edge of criticism, that irrational hunger for a beautiful perfection, that life and wisdom do presently and most mercifully dull. What the precise matter of quarrel was I have no idea. She may have said she liked men in gaiters when he hadn't any gaiters on, or he may have said he liked her better in a different sort ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... which he called a frivolous waste of time; and he had a similar dislike to evening parties; not on account of a puritanic disapproval of dancing, or of young people of different sexes meeting and having opportunities of getting acquainted with each other, but the hours were so irrational, and the conventional dress so unbecoming and dangerous to health, that he had prohibited Jane and Elsie from accepting the invitations that were showered on them when they had given up lessons and were supposed to be ready to come out. If people would meet at six, and break up before twelve, and ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... friend and professional adviser, Mr Rugg, back with him. Mr Rugg had had such ample experience, on the road, of Mr Pancks's being at that present in an irrational state of mind, that he opened his professional mediation by requesting that gentleman to take himself out of the way. Mr Pancks, crushed ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens |
