"Rational" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... washing day; The decadents decay; the pedants pall; And H. G. Wells has found that children play, And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall; Rationalists are growing rational— And through thick woods one finds a stream astray, So secret that the very sky seems small— I think I will not hang ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... heroes and their glorious atchievements, in which Lord Nelson and his transcendent actions must for ever stand pre-eminently conspicuous, would far surpass, in genuine grandeur, perhaps, and certainly in rational and philosophical contemplation, the loftiest and most stupendous pillar or pyramid ever raised by human art and industry, for little other purpose than to attract the gaze of profitless admiration, with the vain attempt of mocking the ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... for I was just going to say that the Church of Rome has done more to retard rational and spiritual progress than any other. I don't believe in the voice of man barring the way to inquiry. God made man, and, as far as I have ever been able to learn, He made them all on one pattern. The offices and dignities they give themselves won't make them one whit greater ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... subject seemed so painful to her, that I was forced to give it up. You can understand my position. Ever since, I have been waiting for an opportunity to take her quietly and straighten out the whole matter for her in a calm and rational way. For her part she has evidently regarded the subject as happily closed. Why under heaven should I press it upon her—merely to gain the academic satisfaction of convincing her that the Post acted on information superior and judgment ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... little share, too, in bringing him to the above conclusion. He was a bit of a schemer—liked to play puppets. At present, his niece and friend were the largest and finest puppets he had on hand; the day he should bring them to a mutual, rational understanding, the puppet-strings would fall from his hands and the puppets turn independent agents. He represented to Talboys that Lucy was young and very innocent in some respects; that marriage did not seem to run in her head as in most girls'; that a precipitate avowal might startle ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... degrading when widely believed in; and they must disbelieve that such people have the right to know, and that it is their duty to know, wonder- workers by their fruits, and to test miracle-mongers by the tests of probability, analogy, and common sense. They must disbelieve all rational explanations of thoroughly proved experiences (only) which appear supernatural, derived from the average experience and study of the visible world. They must disbelieve the speciality of the Master and the Disciples, and that it is a monstrosity to test ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... dry up to your utmost the fountains of his feelings, the springs of his thought; you may yoke him to your labour, as an ox which liveth only to work, and worketh only to live; you may put him under any process which, without destroying his value as a slave, will debase and crush him as a rational being; you may do this, and the idea that he was born to be free will survive it all. It is allied to his hope of immortality; it is the ethereal part of his nature, which oppression cannot reach; it is a torch lit up in his soul by ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... man as Ringfield, and as soon as the buggy had been tied up under a grove of maples, he was led about by the energetic queen of the feast, whose attire, weird enough while driving, had now culminated in a highly rational although unusual aspect. Everything upon her partook of an unpleasing and surely unnecessary brevity; thus her figure was too short for her breadth, and her skirts too short for her figure; her jacket was too ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... that the additional officers raise a body of five thousand men to an equality with six thousand, is not the pay of four thousand men apparently thrown away? And do not the officers receive a reward which their service cannot deserve? Would it not be far more rational to raise seven thousand, by which our army would be stronger by a seventh part, and as the pay of three thousand would be saved, the publick would be richer by almost ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... might have kept his black-browed grandsires on better terms with him than he admits to be possible. However little they might have appreciated the artist, they would have approved of the man. The play of Hawthorne's intellect was light and capricious, but the man himself was firm and rational. The imagination was profane, but the temper ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... ground at no cheap rate, whereon Hannibal himself encamped his own regiment. Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success and victory. For as in a body when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous, not only to vital, but to rational faculties, and those in the acutest and the pertest operations of wit and subtlety, it argues in what good plight and condition the body is; so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightly up, as that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but to spare, and to ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... theme: I have still one word on this subject for rational players. Even they use the soft pedal too much and too often, and at unsuitable places; for instance, in the midst of a piece, without any preparatory pause; in melodies which require to be lightly executed; or in rapid ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... bedroom mere emotional belief in Miss Tancred had risen to rational conviction. The first aspect of the guest-chamber had inspired him with a joyous credulity. It wooed him with its large and welcoming light, its four walls were golden white and warm, and in all its details he ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... depends upon the stock of practical wisdom in the heads, for two fools, you know, Louis, will hardly form one rational plan." ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... entreated.[33] And yet who but myself defined completely the prerogative for these same new gods? But on these matters I say nothing, for I should speak to you already acquainted with these things. But for the misfortunes that existed among mortals, hear how I made them, that aforetime lived as infants, rational and possessed of intellect.[34] And I will tell you, having no complaint against mankind, as detailing the kindness of the boons which I bestowed upon them: they who at first seeing saw in vain, hearing they heard not. But, like to the forms of dreams, for a long time they ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... it is the Xanthe Desert. Whatever else he might unwittingly be, S. Nuwell Eli considered himself a practical, rational man, and it was across the bumpy sands of the Xanthe Desert that he guided his groundcar westward with that somewhat cautious proficiency that mistrusts its own mastery of the machine. Maya Cara Nome, his colleague in this mission ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... Turkish question; steady-going old Barham, confessing nobody but the Jackdaw of Rheims, and fearless alike of Ritualism, Darwinism, or disestablishment; iridescent clearness of Thomas Hood—the wildest, deepest infinity of marvelously jestful men; manly and rational Sydney, inevitable, infallible, inoffensively wise of wit;[3]—they are gone their way, and ours is far diverse; and they and all the less-known, yet pleasantly and brightly endowed spirits of that time, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... impossible to disguise the fact that in the psychology of our own day the emphasis is transferred from the mind's purely rational function, where Plato and Aristotle, and what one may call the whole classic tradition in philosophy had placed it, to the so long neglected practical side. The theory of evolution is mainly responsible for this. Man, we now have reason to believe, has been evolved from infra-human ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... of Heemskirk. She was afraid of him because of his personal appearance: because of his eyes and his eyebrows, and his mouth and his nose and his limbs. Nothing could be more rational. And she thought him an evil man, because, to her eyes, he looked evil. No ground for an opinion could be sounder. In the dimness of the room, with only a nightlight burning at the head of Freya's bed, the camerista crept out of her corner to crouch at ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... responded soothingly, "I shouldn't hunt for a rational reason for their act. They have merely hastened the step we were going to ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... rational, practical formula for computing the quantity of cement required for a given mixture will now be given, based upon ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... new experience for Molly. It was the upheaval of an utterly uncultivated side of her nature. She was astonished to find that she had religious instincts, and that, instead of feeling that these instincts were foolish and irrational—a lower part of her nature,—they now seemed quite curiously rational and established in possession of her faculties. Her mind seemed more satisfied than it had ever been before. She did not know in what she believed, but she felt a different view of life in which men seemed less utterly mean, and women less ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... connexion between intellectual refinement and social regeneration. The cultivation of the arts and sciences in the reign of Augustus may have been beneficial to a few, by diverting them from the pursuit of vulgar pleasures, and opening up to them sources of more rational enjoyment; but it is a most humiliating fact that, during the brightest period in the history of Roman literature, vice in every form was fast gaining ground among almost all classes of the population. The Greeks, though occupying a higher position as to mental accomplishments, were still ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... convinced that these feelings are general among great multitudes of the more thoughtful and intelligent adherents of Christianity. Religion rests with them upon a certain intellectual acquiescence, or upon the equipoise of rational probabilities, or on the compromise of intellectual hesitations. Their tastes are gratified by the normal forms of worship, and their sentiments are softly stirred and stimulated. But when the voice of the orator ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... have thought them wanting in self-control—I went down and must needs throw myself into the melee, like a romantic fool! Did I do any good? They would have gone away without me I dare say.' But this was over-leaping the rational conclusion,—as in an instant her well-poised judgment felt. 'No, perhaps they would not. I did some good. But what possessed me to defend that man as if he were a helpless child! Ah!' said she, clenching her ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... will—instantly!" said Porthos, who went to execute the orders, casting all the while looks behind him, to see if the bishop of Vannes were not deceived; and if, on recovering more rational ideas, he would not recall him. The alarm was sounded, trumpets brayed, drums rolled; the great bronze bell swung in horror from its lofty belfry. The dikes and moles were quickly filled with the curious and soldiers; matches sparkled in the ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... under the eastern cliff, and the warren, and the dairy-farm inland, and the slope of the ground where the sea used to come, and fields where the people grew potatoes gratis, and all the eastern village, where the tenants paid their rents whenever they found it rational. ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... loathe them I hate old age It changes you so I could be in love with her cruelty, if only I had her near me I look on the back of life I want no more, except to be taught to work I married a cook She expects a big appetite I'm for a rational Deity If the world is hostile we are not to blame it Ignorance roaring behind a mask of sarcasm Increase of dissatisfaction with the more she got Lawyers hold the keys of the great world Learn—principally ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... may be presumed to indicate with certainty nothing more than that the business is again afloat, and that no scheme is finally determined on. Thus the Company is left without any fixed data upon which they can make a rational disposition of their affairs. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... London Times, while driving in the suburb, narrowly escaped being bitten. But no cattle were hit; that was the pity of it. We could have forgiven the Boers much had they only killed the oxen, and provided us with something rational to eat, in spite of the Colonel ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... occasional use of the drug to insatiable craving is the rational course of the cocaine fiend. From thence to the insane asylum and the grave is ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... or three hundred pounds left, after I had paid my share of the vessel, and this I employed in purchasing a venture on my own account, and providing nautical instruments, &c. I also fitted myself out, for you see, William, although Sanders had persuaded me to be rational, I was still puffed up with pride at the idea of being captain of my own ship; it was too great a rise for one who had just before been a lad in the mizen-top of a man-of-war. I dressed myself very smart - wore white shirts, and rings on my fingers. Indeed, as captain and part owner ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... strengthen the French legion by the addition of some thousands of trained soldiers, now broke entirely from the Spanish connection, and dismissed his Ministers who refused to acquiesce in this change of policy. Meanwhile the Eastern Powers and all rational partisans of absolutism besought Don Carlos to give those assurances which would satisfy the wavering mass among his opponents, and place him on the throne without the sacrifice of any right that was worth preserving. It seemed as if ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... if Spain should offer to Cuba genuine autonomy—a measure of home rule which, while preserving the sovereignty of Spain, would satisfy all rational requirements of her Spanish subjects—there should be no just reason why the pacification of the island might not be effected on that basis. Such a result would appear to be in the true interest of all concerned. It would at once stop the conflict which is ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... "There is something else now that must be done well—and that is, to die," and he cheered up again. And however strange it may seem, beginning with the second morning in the fortress, he commenced devoting himself to gymnastics according to the unusually rational system of a certain German named Mueller, which absorbed his interest. He undressed himself completely and, to the alarm and astonishment of the guard who watched him, he carefully went through all ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... in the press day by day, and the numerous accounts of competent and trustworthy observers, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Protopopov deliberately sought to precipitate a revolution. Mad as this hypothesis seems to be, it is nevertheless the only one which affords a rational explanation of the policy of the government. No sooner was Golitizin made Premier than it was announced that the opening of the Duma would be postponed till the end of January, in order that the Cabinet might be reorganized. Later it was announced that the Duma opening would ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... to know this, and therefore converse with us on the footing of rational creatures, without either fearing or expecting to find ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... adjourned to the garden for coffee and cigars. Seated under the wide-spreading trees, in the balmy air of this summer evening, we had songs and recitations of Scandinavian poetry, anecdotes, and humorous dissertations till nearly midnight. I do not remember that I ever participated in a more rational or delightful entertainment. After a farewell glee to our host we marched down to the wharf, where the boat was in waiting, and embarked for Stockholm. I can only add that I was charmed with the refinement and intelligence ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... of the time and immediately connected with the events, and whose intelligence and integrity have in no small degree contributed to the character and prosperity of the country in which we live? Is it rational to assume that the claimants who now present themselves for indemnity by the United States represent debts which would have been admitted and paid by France but for the intervention of the United States? And is it possible to escape from the effect of the voluminous evidence ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... Miss Cornelia me, Anne, dearie. ANYBODY would have thought the same. If the Montreal doctors can make a rational creature out of Dick ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... poor and unknown as I then was, I had pretty nearly as high an idea of myself and of my works, as I have at this moment, when the public has decided in their favour. It ever was my opinion, that the mistakes and blunders both in a rational and religious point of view, of which we see thousands daily guilty, are owing to their ignorance of themselves. To know myself, had been all along my constant study. I weighed myself alone; I balanced myself with others; I watched every means of information to see how ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Billy Magee, "fleeing from the great glitter known as Broadway to do a little rational thinking in the solitudes. It's getting late, and I suggest that we start for Baldpate ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... means employed to obtain confessions, amounting sometimes to positive torture; the total disregard of retractions made voluntarily, and even at the hazard of life—all these circumstances had impressed the attention of the more rational part of the community; and, in this crisis of danger and alarm, the meeting of the General Court was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... allowed to say. I can write in some solemn quarterly an elaborate article explaining that God is the devil; I can write in some cultured weekly an aesthetic fancy describing how I should like to eat boiled baby. The thing I must not write is rational criticism of the men and institutions ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... marchin' fr'm th' pay-car to their peaceful saloons, their wives are takin' in washin' again, th' price iv wheat is goin' up an' down, creditors are beginnin' to sue debtors; an' thus all th' wurruld is merry with th' on'y rational enjoyments iv life. ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... Menangkabau to the father of the present sultan of Moco-moco, and apparently written about fifty years ago, was communicated to me by Mr. Alexander Dalrymple, and though it is in part a repetition I esteem it too curious to hesitate about inserting it. The style is much more rational than that of the foregoing. "Praised be Almighty God! Sultan Gagar Alum the great and noble King, whose extensive power reacheth unto the limits of the wide ocean; unto whom God grants whatever he desires, and over whom no evil spirit, nor even Satan himself has any influence; ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... information as to the associations of Robin Hood with this fishing-village. The stories of his shooting an arrow to determine where he should make his headquarters sound improbable, although his keeping one or two small ships in the bay ready for making his escape if suddenly attacked seems a rational precaution, and if only there were a little more evidence outside the local traditions to go upon, it would be pleasant to let the imagination play upon the wild life led by the outlawed Earl of Huntingdon in this then ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... theoretical discussions respecting the various kinds of crime and punishment, while hardly any account is taken of the persons who commit the crime and require the punishment. Yet this is the most important point of all; the other is trivial in comparison with it. If crime is to be dealt with in a rational manner and not on mere a priori grounds, our minds must be enlightened on such questions as the following: What is the Criminal? What are the chief causes which have made him such? How are these causes to be got rid of or neutralised? ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... and the strength of the Snark went glimmering, Charmian and I pinned our faith more and more to the Snark's wonderful bow. There was nothing else left to pin to. It was all inconceivable and monstrous, we knew, but that bow, at least, was rational. And then, one evening, we started ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... and each piece will develop into an entire organism. In fact the realisation of the idea of an individual gradually becomes more and more difficult, and the continuity of existence, even among the highest animals, gradually forces itself upon us. I believe that as we become more rational, as we realise more fully the conditions of existence, this consideration is likely to have important ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... lost my uncle, a gentleman in Derbyshire, who had well provided my education; but, having a family of his own, could not be expected to leave me much. And he left me even less than could, from his own point of view, have been rational. It is true that he had seven children; but still a man of,L15,000 a year might have done, without injustice—or, I might say, with better justice—something more than to leave his nephew a sum which, after much pushing about ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... without rational excuse who revenges herself for her husband's suspicion by her own shame. It is as though a man should thrust his sword through his own body, because unable to slay his foe, or should bite his own fingers because he cannot scratch him. She would have done better had she spoken to ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Sheldon carried himself like a crazy one. The old doctor bustled about, and said he would search the world over to bring her back. Kate cried, and the children loudly bewailed the loss of their dear governess. Mrs. Prague seemed the only calm and rational one in the household; she declared herself glad to get rid of the baggage, and considered her flight proof ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... to the most marked modifications of form in the lapse of short periods of time, both p 12 by the improvement in the instruments used, and by the consequent expansion of the field of view opened to rational observation, and that those scientific works which have, to use a common expression, become 'antiquated' by the acquisition of new funds of knowledge, are thus continually being consigned to oblivion as unreadable. However discouraging such a prospect ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... with a strong veto message on March 2, 1897. He could not concur in so radical a departure from the traditional liberal policy of the Government; and he believed the literacy test so artificial that it was more rational "to admit a hundred thousand immigrants who, though unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and opportunity to work, than to admit one of those unruly agitators and enemies of governmental control who can not only read and write, but delights in arousing by inflammatory ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... life, and I know not from whence the light is to spring which would cheer this gloomy picture. Without this, man would be in a grade of blessedness beneath the brutes that perish. It would be better to be anything than rational without the religion of Jesus Christ and the intelligence of the Bible. The Scriptures inform us that these things have a cause, that they come from God's dealings with his creatures, that the unseen hand which permits these trials is benevolent and wise. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... wretch as that. In all this he was most unjust to both of them. He was specially unjust to poor Larry, who was by no means a wretch. His costume was not that to which Morton had been accustomed in Germany, nor would it have passed without notice in Bond Street. But it was rational and clean. When he came to the bridge to meet his sweetheart he had on a dark-green shooting coat, a billicock hat, brown breeches, and gaiters nearly up to his knees. I don't know that a young man in the country could wear more suitable attire. And he was a well-made man, just ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... one another, and was assured that they were actually engaged in the solemn game of death, and this at such a distance from their own homes, he would wonder at the causes of these movements, and the reason of this destruction, and, not knowing that they possessed rational faculties, he would probably consider them as animals, destined by nature ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... name and ap- pellation, one faith and necessary body of principles common to us both; and therefore I am not scrupulous to converse and live with them, to enter their churches in defect of ours, and either pray with them or for them. I could never perceive any rational consequences from those many texts which prohibit the children of Israel to pollute themselves with the temples of the heathens; we being all Christians, and not divided by such de- tested impieties as might profane our prayers, or the place wherein we make them; or that a resolved ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... command of the sea,' with the result that in the middle of the tenth century their empire was far more secure from its enemies than under the first successors of Heraclius. Not only was the fall of the empire, by a rational reliance on sea-power, postponed for centuries, but also much that had been lost was regained. 'At the close of the tenth century the emperors of Constantinople possessed the best and greatest part' of Southern Italy, part of Sicily, the whole of what is now called the Balkan Peninsula, ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... straight to a bottle which stood on a window sill, and took a long drink from it, and then passed it to Patching, who mutely did the same, and, in turn, handed it to the idiot, who pulled at it with great gusto, in the manner of a rational person. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... their origin. There are, in truth, no economic motives as such. The motives of economic life are the same as those of the life of art, of vanity and ostentation, of war and crime, of sex. Economic life is merely the life in which instinct gratification is alleged to take on a rational pecuniary habit form. Man is not less a father, with a father's parental instinct, just because he passes down the street from his home to his office. His business raid into his rival's market ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... equally an obligation on his part to provide means for their adequate support in event of his death. The duty is so obvious, the means of performing it are so simple, and are now so easily placed within the reach of all men,—the arrangement is so eminently practical, rational, benevolent, and just,—it is, moreover, so calculated to increase every wise and prudent man's sense of self-respect, and to encourage him in the performance of all proper social duties,—that we cannot conceive of any possible objection that can be urged against it; and it ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... that causes, equal to each other, produce equal effects; hence to arrive at a rational conclusion as to what must we do to be saved from Eastern Imperialism or its equal, Western greed, supported by law, let us look at the United States ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... rational dog, since you are come,' said Sir Guy; and Bustle, resuming the deportment of a spirited and well-bred spaniel, no longer crouched and curled himself into the shape of a comma, but bounded, wagged his tail, thrust his nose into his master's hand and then ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... successful, even under the most favorable circumstances, and with the very best lecturers; and it is to be observed, that they grow less successful with the increasing intelligence of the people. In this fact is to be found an entirely rational and competent explanation of their failure. The schools have done so much toward popularizing science, and the circulating-library has rendered so familiar the prominent facts of history, that men and women do not go to the lecture to learn, and, as far as any appreciably ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... the word "ner" ([Hebrew: nun-resh; Transliteration: ner])—candle or light, embodied, of course, in the word Menorah ([Hebrew: mem-nun-vav-resh-hey; Transliteration: menorah])—is used metaphorically in many significant senses. God is a light—enlightening, comforting and honoring his people. The rational understanding and conscience are lights which search, inform, direct and judge us. A profession of faith is called a lamp, which renders men shining and useful and instructors of others. The last two interpretations certainly cast an appropriate reflection ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... the shamans may sometimes use rational means. There is in existence around Norogachic for instance, a kind of sweating-bath, made by placing in a hole in the ground, just large enough for a man to sit in, several hot stones, pouring water on them, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... because the burghers rudely and vehemently declared that under their ancient charter they were free from any Imperial dues or taxes whatsoever, nor could the noble marquis's arguments move them to a more rational view. Still, he argued for a week, and during that time his wife, the lovely Isabella, dazzled the women of the town with her costumes and the men with her ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... young man shut his book, modestly opened his eyes, looked at the dervish, and answered him: "All the actions of my life have not been rational; I have given reason for the abuse which is now made of power in ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... a man has not done his duty by himself as a rational creature unless he has formed an idea of what is going on, as one complicated process, until he has formed an idea sufficiently definite for him to make it the basis of a further idea, which is his own relationship to that process. He must ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... coincide accidentally with the readings of the First Folio; but his text is deformed by many palpable errors. His practical experience as a playwright induced him, however, to prefix for the first time a list of dramatis personae to each play, to divide and number acts and scenes on rational principles, and to mark the entrances and exits of the characters. Spelling, punctuation, and ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... substance, inclosing nests of beryl, topaz, and sapphire, and veined with gold. But it cannot be determined how far, or in what localities, these changes are yet arrested; in the plurality of instances they are evidently yet in progress. It appears rational to suppose that as each rock approaches to its perfect type the change becomes slower; its perfection being continually neared, but never reached; its change being liable also to interruption or reversal by new geological phenomena. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of Greece, the knights-errant in search of the supreme good, in the same plight with the chivalry of Spain after Cervantes, the science of mind, and particularly mental pathology, has made some steps forward on crutches furnished by the medical profession. The treatment of insanity is on a more rational and efficient footing. The statistician collects, and invites the moral philosopher to collate, the records of crime. The naturalist studies the life of the lower animals, and gives the coup de grace to the uncompromising distinction drawn ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... impossible for any man to retain his self-respect if he were driven to take his glass of beer under the rules by which regimental canteens were governed. I believed, too, that the more the status of the rank and file could be raised, and the greater the efforts made to provide them with rational recreation and occupation in their leisure hours, the less there would be of drunkenness, and consequently of crime, the less immorality and the greater the number of efficient soldiers in the army. Funds having ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... who went from down Plymouth way, and who is making a fortune; and besides, I have got tired of the old place somehow, lately. I have nothing to keep me here now, and there will be a change, and a new life there. In short," said he, in despair of giving a rational reason, "I have ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... religions; that has maintained at all times the territorial constitution of England as the only basis and security for local government, and which nevertheless once laid on the table of the House of Commons a commercial tariff negociated at Utrecht, which is the most rational that was ever devised by statesmen; a party that has prevented the Church from being the salaried agent of the state, and has supported through many struggles the parochial polity of the country which secures to every labourer ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... be found to rescue it from chains and misery; but such means are not put in our power. Other countries neglect us. Whilst they reprobate the violations which a neighboring nation is alleged to have committed against rational liberty, they behold, not only with apathy but with approbation, the ravages which are now desolating Poland. Posterity must avenge it. We have done. We accede in silence, for the reasons above mentioned, to the treaty laid before ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... but have no power over the substance of original justice. The other foundation of law, which is utility, must be understood, not of partial or limited, but of general and public utility, connected in the same manner with, and derived directly from, our rational nature: for any other utility may be the utility of a robber, but cannot be that of a citizen,—the interest of the domestic enemy, and not that of a member of the commonwealth. This present equality can never be the foundation of statutes which create an artificial difference ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... her face, and stuffed her fingers in her ears to shut out the rhythm from her mind. She lay still for a long time, and her mind resumed at a more tolerable pace. She found herself talking to Capes in an undertone of rational admission. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... that I have better information touching on what sustenance I need than any outsider ever can hope to have unless he breaks into me surgically. I claim that a series of rational experiments should tell any rational human how much he needs to eat and what he needs to eat in order to reduce his bulk and yet keep his powers and his bodily vigor unimpaired. I am not speaking now, understand me, of those unfortunates ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... hand-in-hand with an insane Callistion. Now our ways parted. She desired only to be avenged on you, and very crudely. That did not accord with my plan. I fell to bargaining. I purchased with—O rarity of rarities!—a little rational advice and much gold as well. Thus in due season I betrayed Callistion. Well, who ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... Clara. 'I hope Charley will help you to a little rational interest in your own affairs. I am quite bewildered to think that an author, not to say a young man, the sole remnant of an ancient family, however humble, shouldn't even know whether he had any papers in ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... importance as most of those to whom he had been presented in the course of the evening. The Duke had considerable tact with women, and soon perceived that the common topics of a hack flirtation would not do in the present case. He was therefore mild and modest, rather piquant, somewhat rational, and apparently perfectly unaffected. Her Ladyship's reserve wore away. She refused to dance, but conversed with more animation. The Duke did not leave her side. The women began to stare, the men ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... to be. I am a man, and a lover, despite the books. As for De Casseres—if ever I get back to New York, equipped as I now am, I shall confute him with the same ease that he has confuted all the schools. Love is the final word. To the rational man it alone gives the super-rational sanction for living. Like Bergson in his overhanging heaven of intuition, or like one who has bathed in Pentecostal fire and seen the New Jerusalem, so I have trod the materialistic dictums of science underfoot, scaled the ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... Stationers, half understood, should so endear men to each other was a sentiment into which she could not enter. It was better, after all, to be a woman, she said to herself, and sit soberly at home and sew the rational sampler, and let the world wag on as it would and the cutthroats work their wild will on each other. The least suggestion that brought the thought of the French to their minds was received with eyes alight, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... classical antiquity regarding storms, thunder, and lightning Development of a sacred science of meteorology by the fathers of the Church Theories of Cosmas Indicopleustes Of Isidore Of Seville Of Bede Of Rabanus Maurus Rational views of Honorius of Autun Orthodox theories of John of San Geminiano Attempt of Albert the Great to reconcile the speculations of Aristotle with the theological views The monkish encyclopedists Theories regarding the rainbow and the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... whole, easy and comfortable about you. As long as you are as active and enterprising as you are now, you will be happy, for I believe that the grand secret of happiness consists in having a good pursuit, which can be followed with some success. To ensure this success, the pursuit must be rational; and I assure you, that so far from shaking my head at your hopes of doing 'grand things,' I think your hopes are very rational, provided that by 'grand things,' you and I mean the same. I suppose you mean no more than that, ...
— Principle and Practice - The Orphan Family • Harriet Martineau
... those days, as bad as our roads near the Imperial City, and it would have been dangerous perhaps to attempt the journey in a vehicle of any kind. In riding to town on a pony, then, he was acting like a rational man. But let us read ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... study, we owe primarily to Jews." Another historian, also a Christian, closes a review of Jewish national traits with the words: "Looking back over the course of history, we find that in the gloom, bareness, and intellectual sloth of the middle ages, Jews maintained a rational system of agriculture, and built up international commerce, upon which rests ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... out of my power to determine, or even to conjecture on any rational grounds, which, of a certain three-score of archbishops of Rouen, the figure represents; but, if I were to choose between Maurice, the fifty-fourth archbishop, who died in 1235, and William, of Durefort, the sixty-first, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... had recorded a mere delusion, the doctor told her, of the little dazed brain in the moment preceding unconsciousness; but for all that rational view, they awed ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... carrying forward and consummating the glorious task which Wallace and Bruce had but begun. He saw that unless our reformers had come after our heroes, planting schools, founding colleges, and, above all, imparting to their countrymen a scriptural and rational faith, in vain had Bruce unsheathed his sword,—in vain had Wallace laid down his life. Wallace and Bruce had created an independent country; Knox and Melville had created an independent people. They were the creators ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... to enjoy it immediately, and will tolerate no deception practiced on their expectations. In this violent state, fired by boundless expectations, all their whims appear reasonable and all their opinions rational. They are no longer able to find faults with or control themselves. In their brain, overflowing with emotions and enthusiasm, there is no room but for one intense, absorbing, fixed idea. Each is confident and over-confident in his own opinion; all become ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... close the void of misery. Yes, my friend, save the pang of sympathy, I am happy. These are my halcyon days. Let us taste them together. We shall mutually heighten their relish. Let us rescue some moments of rational enjoyment from the wreck of impetuous time. Friendship shall smooth the rugged path of science, and ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... exist because we require them, which we know because we employ them, these are the type of all great works of art. And from the selfsame craving which insists that these should be shapely as well as handy, pleasant to the eye as well as rational; through the selfsame processes of seeing and remembering and altering their shapes—according to the same aesthetic laws of line and curve, of surface and projection, of spring and restraint, of clearness and compensation; and for the same organic reasons ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... pattern of the rooms just described on the Quai Malaquais; to be able to ask a party of friends to dine at the Rocher de Cancale without a previous consultation with your trousers' pocket; never to be pulled up in any rational project by the words, 'And the money?' and finally, to be able to renew at pleasure the pink rosettes that adorn the ears of three thoroughbreds and the lining of ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... made things beautiful; He has made things happy; whatever misery there is in the world there is no denying that. Misery is the exception; happiness is the rule. No rational man ever heard a bird sing without feeling that the bird was happy, and that if God made that bird He made it to be happy, and He takes pleasure in its happiness, though no human ear should ever hear its song, no human heart should ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... consultations. Somewhat to his surprise, Mr. Carlisle found that his quondam fair mistress was good for much more than a plaything. With the quick wit of a woman she joined a patience of investigation, an independent strength of judgment, a clearness of rational vision, that fairly met him and obliged him to be the best man he could in the business. He could not get her into a sophistical maze; she found her way through immediately; he could not puzzle her, for what she did not understand one day she had studied ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... natural world the intelligent wisdom that pervades all things, will wonder that he discovers a revelation of perfect love in Jesus Christ. "We walk by faith, not by sight," said Paul. So says every Christian; and it is of all things the most rational. Faith in something higher and greater than we can see, faith in something above this narrow scene, faith in something beyond this present life, faith in realities that are not of time or sense; from all that we have now considered we claim such faith to be most rational, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... that the extension of frequent leave, and consequent opportunity, has abolished the frenzied inclination to make the most—not the best—of a rare chance; has renewed men from within. Personally, I believe the last. Together with the gradual rise of tone throughout society, rational liberty among seamen has resulted in rational indulgence. "Better England free ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... while conceiving no improbability of "interventions of Creative mind in Nature," if by such is meant the bringing to pass of new and fitting events at fitting times, we leave it for profounder minds to establish, if they can, a rational distinction in kind between his working in Nature carrying on operations, and ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... forthwith cut the matter short by declaring that, on principle, he refused to disclose what had passed in private conversation; a sentiment which was actually cheered by the Committee. One sentence of common sense brought the absurd embroilment to a rational conclusion. Mr. Hill saw his mistake; begged that no further evidence might be taken; and, at the next sitting of the House, withdrew his charge in unqualified terms of self-abasement and remorse. Lord Althorp readily admitted that he had acted "imprudently as a man, and still more ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... is a result of an interruption of the solar current is rational to suppose. It is indisputable that the interruptions which produce these manifestations have an important bearing upon terrestrial phenomena. Winds, storms, vegetation, healthfulness, are manifestly influenced, and in a measure controlled by ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... speak, in all its tenderness and beauty, in its own sweet native dialect, all its poetic wildness, its mad verities, its sober impossibilities, even at the moment in which he asks in statesmanship for the rational motive, undrenched in humours and affections—for the motive of the weal that is common, and not for the motive of that which ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the rest of the world remaining at peace. The doctrine that the rights of nations remaining quietly in the exercise of moral and social duties, are to give way to the convenience of those who prefer plundering and murdering one another, is a monstrous doctrine; and ought to yield to the more rational law, that 'the wrong which two nations endeavor to inflict on each other, must not infringe on the rights or conveniences of those remaining at peace.' And what is contraband, by the law of nature? Either every thing which may aid or comfort an enemy, or nothing. Either all commerce ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... rightly used, rational enjoyment, power, fame,—these are all worthy objects of ambition; but they are not the highest objects, and you may acquire them all without achieving true success. But if, whatever you seek, you put good will into all your actions, you are sure of the best success ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... which requires to be made explicit. How does Christ in His death prove His love for us? Obviously, only in one way: by bearing responsibilities which must otherwise have fallen upon us. There must be, as Dr. Denney rightly argues, some rational relation between our necessities and what Christ has done before we can speak of His act as a proof of His love. If, to borrow the same writer's illustration, a man lose his own life in saving me from drowning, ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... and extended themselves on a wooden frame, whose several parts had glued themselves together to form a cavity with regular apertures? Should we maintain that the bow formed without art should be pushed by the wind to touch every string so variously, and with such nice justness? What rational man could seriously entertain a doubt whether a human hand touched such an instrument with so much harmony? Would he not cry out, "It is a masterly hand that plays upon it?" Let us proceed ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... conversation with Dr. Witherspoon, the then president of the college, on the subject. The result of that conversation in some measure tranquillized young Burr. The Rev. Dr. assured him that it was not true and rational religion, but fanaticism, that was ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... it sets down amid mists and storms. I neither regret nor fear the approach of death if it is coming. I would compound for a little pain instead of this heartless muddiness of mind which renders me incapable of anything rational. The expense of my journey will be something considerable, which I can provide against by borrowing L500 from Mr. Gibson. To Mr. Cadell I owe already, with the cancels on these apoplectic books, about L200, and must run it up ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... wondering what was become of their comrades and of the boat, would certainly come on shore in their other boat to look for them, and that then, perhaps, they might come armed, and be too strong for us; this he allowed to be rational. Upon this, I told him the first thing we had to do was to stave the boat, which lay upon the beach, so that they might not carry her off; and taking everything out of her, leave her so far useless as ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... understood French and Italian, and had all the polish and liberal feeling of a highly instructed man. In Bouquet's pamphlet on "The Present State of the Fine Arts in England," published in 1755, he is described as "an able painter, who, acknowledging no other guide than nature, brought a rational taste of resemblance with him from ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... for the country market. I tell you, I know that we can do just what we please in the way of 'rational amusement,' as our clergyman calls it, and your people can't, and I advise you to come over to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... chastity, which bound him never to marry. For not only was the single life considered more holy than the married, but the monastic organization would, of course, have been impossible unless the monks remained single. Aside from these restrictions, the monks were commanded to live rational and natural lives and not to abuse their bodies or sacrifice their physical vigor by undue fasting in the supposed interest of their souls. These sensible provisions were directed against the excesses of asceticism, of which there had been many ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... from the dignity of his nature, and makes that being which was rational, merely vegetative; his life consists only in the mere increase and decay of a body, which, with relation to the rest of the world, might as well have been uninformed, as the ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... am I ashamed to rank myself among the professed admirers of this lovely fair one. I am in no danger, however, of becoming an enthusiastic devotee. No; I mean I act upon just and rational principles. Expecting soon to settle in an eligible situation, if such a companion as I am persuaded she will make me may fall to my lot, I shall deem myself as happy as this state of imperfection will admit. She is now resident at General Richman's. The general and his lady are her particular ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... with argument. It is an alarming feature of this discussion, that it has reversed, very generally, the traditional positions of the sexes: the women have had all the logic; and the most intelligent men, when they have attempted the other side, have limited themselves to satire and gossip. What rational woman can be really convinced by the nonsense which is talked in ordinary society around her,—as, that it is right to admit girls to common schools, and equally right to exclude them from colleges; that it is proper for a ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... said that the business of philosophy is to answer three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? and For what may I hope? But it is pretty plain that these three resolve themselves, in the long run, into the first. For rational expectation and moral action are alike based upon beliefs; and a belief is void of justification, unless its subject-matter lies within the boundaries of possible knowledge, and unless its evidence satisfies the conditions which experience imposes as ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... the examination and introduction of Nissen's "Rational Home Gymnastics" is cordially invited. Specimen pages ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 11, March 17, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various |
