"Unreasoning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... marriage, justifying myself by the tragedies and unhappiness of scores of my friends, I who have made for myself a place in the world's work with an assured comfortable income, have suddenly thrown all my theories to the winds and given myself in marriage in as impetuous, unreasoning fashion ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... Liberalism that on the very day on which the proclamation was issued the censorship of the Press was restored. But the King had not miscalculated his power over the Spanish people. The same storm of wild, unreasoning loyalty which had followed Ferdinand's reappearance in Spain followed the overthrow of the Constitution. The mass of the Spaniards were ignorant of the very meaning of political liberty: they adored the King ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... unguessable circumstances: the tormenting mystery of it all had preyed insistently upon her mind. Since then Sonia Danidoff had never taken a bath without thinking of Fantomas; and every year when the anniversary of his aggression came round she suffered cruelly: she was seized with wild, unreasoning fears at the idea that she might see this terrifying bandit appear before her again, and that this time he ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... of panic rose within him. He knew the sickening bodily revolt of blind unreasoning terror—the terror of the lost, the terror of certain untimely death, but mostly ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... distant world as well as those of this solar system. Third, only by superior force can I make either your race or the Osnomians listen to reason sufficiently to unite against a common foe. You have been reared in unreasoning hatred for so many generations that your minds are warped. For that reason I have assumed control of this entire system, and shall give you your choice between co-operating with us or being rendered incapable of molesting ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... the ground, winking and blinking through bleared eyes, tried to remember if he had ever seen that marble-faced avenger before. Lucy, peering fearfully through the front window behind locked doors, hardly knew which to dread the more, her passionate unreasoning father, or this new and strange edition ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... or conduct can possibly be known. And when this peculiar conformation and expression is coupled with delicacy of health, and obvious suffering, the attractive influence becomes irresistible. Let us thank God that such is the case. Blind, unreasoning affection is a grand foundation on which to build a mighty superstructure of good offices, kindly acts, and tender feelings, mingled, it may be, with loving forbearance, and occasional suffering, which shall be good to ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... place. On these objections the following remarks may be made. The supposition of impiety arises from an entire misconception of what is implied by an aboriginal creation of insects. The experimentalist could never be considered as the author of the existence of these creatures, except by the most unreasoning ignorance. The utmost that can be claimed for, or imputed to him is that he arranged the natural conditions under which the true creative energy—that of the Divine Author of all things—was pleased to work in that instance. On the hypothesis here brought forward, the acarus ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... that firm faith, almost as simple and unreasoning as that of the child, and which it sometimes seemed, God had specially sent this good man to teach her—her, who had hitherto had so little cause to trust or to reverence any body—Christian rested as completely and contentedly as ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... schooner lying in the bay took fire, and had to be set adrift. An immense crowd gathered on the wharves; and I saw many curious manifestations of grief,—such grief, perhaps, as an infant feels for the misfortune of a toy it imagines to possess feeling, but not the less sincere because unreasoning. As the flames climbed the rigging, and the masts fell, the crowd moaned as though looking upon some human tragedy; and everywhere one could hear such strange cries of pity as, "Pauv' malhr!" (poor unfortunate), "pauv' ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... down below startled and bewildered by mysterious words from everyone, watched his blue garments vanishing upwards, and like a man driven by irresistible necessity, muttered incoherent excuses to my amazed companions, and in a blind, unreasoning, unconquerable impulse rushed after him. But I wish I had not. There were several ladies, who, all more or less en deshabille, scampered around with their bundles of gear—sewing, babies' clothes, tin pots, hair ornaments, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... preceded it. One could see that in the Liberal ranks there had succeeded to the fierce fighting spirit of the previous days a certain lassitude and disappointment. What their faces told in the House their lips more freely uttered in the lobbies. For a time, indeed, there was a feeling of almost unreasoning despair, and that full, frank, unsparing criticism to which every Government is subject from its friends when the winds blow and the waves are high. It was said that the Government had committed the mistake of making too many targets at ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... to me in this provincial atmosphere. But I beguiled myself. In fact, it still weighs on me, it still holds me wrapped in the mild gloom of its crypt; but I can now reason about it, I can scrutinize its details, I try to talk to it of art, and in these inquiries I have lost the unreasoning sense of its environment, the silent ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... and schemes had suddenly received their death-blow; but there was nothing worse than that; he himself (as he imagined) had been dealt no desperate wound. For one thing, flattered and petted as this young man had been, he was neither unreasoning nor vain; that a woman should have refused to marry him did not seem to him a monstrous thing; she was surely within her right in saying no; while, on the other hand, he was neither going to die of chagrin nor yet to plan a melodramatic revenge. But the truth was that he had never been passionately ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... Tears—unreasoning, woman tears—stood in Kate's eyes at the tender solicitude of his tone. Very submissively she picked up the pitcher and the glasses and went into the cabin. The professor sighed when she was gone, kneaded the pillows ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... much in love with the old Squire, old as he was, as with the young one; but that was only an idle village sneer. The young Squire and his wife loved each other devotedly, and their only child, Hetty, with an unreasoning and unreasonable affection which would have been the ruin of her, if she had been any thing else but what she was, "the old Squire over again." As it was, the only effect of this overweening affection, on their part, was to produce ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... dumb unreasoning passion to forget, as a man works his hand to the bone night after night, week after week, month after month, to file through the bars of his prison. She found at last that forgetfulness came not of prayer and fasting; ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... all the way from the hotel straight to the little cavern. But now that he had found her again, there seemed to be plenty of time for everything, and he stood quite silent looking down at her. He was glad he had found her there, glad, in a curious, unreasoning way, for the quiet of the late afternoon, for the faint fragrance of the Mariposa lilies blooming just beyond the ledge. Yet he let her know nothing of this in ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... this mere unreasoning or good-natured impulse, since Bob could scarcely have pressed his suit in my presence, while I should certainly have done my best to retard it; still, it was rather a relief to me to see him shake his head with some ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... Italian's Christian name so easily struck unreasoning regret into the heart of Mark. It gave him an excuse for ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... said,—but I was constrained. My heart was palpitating in my bosom; I could hear it beat. I was trembling so that I could scarcely stand. I was overwhelmed by a fresh flood of terror. I stared in front of me with eyes in which, had it been light, would have been seen the frenzy of unreasoning fear. My ears were strained so that I listened with an acuteness ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... and Maggie Whaley fled from the immediate vicinity of Adam Ward's estate, they were beside themselves with fear—blind, unreasoning, instinctive fear. ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... a regular orbit. They come here feeling that this is somehow a land of liberty, and with very dim and confused notions of what liberty is. They are for the most part the raw, untrained Irish peasantry, and the wonder is, that, with all the unreasoning heats and prejudices of the Celtic blood, all the necessary ignorance and rawness, there should be the measure of comfort and success there is in our domestic arrangements. But, so long as things are so, there will be constant changes and interruptions in every domestic establishment, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... of grown-up people; but we may depend upon it the young folks don't agree with us. Our griefs, modified and restrained by reason, experience, and self-respect, keep the proprieties, and, if possible, avoid a scene; but the sorrow of childhood, unreasoning and all- absorbing, is a complete abandonment to the passion. The doll's nose is broken, and the world breaks up with it; the marble rolls out of sight, and the solid globe ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... because as herd members the cry of fear sets us all racing for safety. This is the grimmest danger from fires in public places or the presence of a coward in a military unit. Panic occurs with its blind unreasoning flight, and the result is disastrous. I emphasize again that emotions are poorly adapted to the welfare of the individual. Business panics are in large measure the result of the contagiousness of fear; timidity spreads like wildfire, distrust and suspicion ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... God's Word clothed in Syllables of Unsurpassable Sweetness—He that holdeth the Pleiades in His Right Hand—Blissful Forecasts—Shall God weigh out Arcturus to Stop the Unreasoning Clamor of the Fool who Hath Said in His Heart there Is ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... mystery with which they develop their plots, and for the absorbing, if often over-sensational, nature of their incidents; but whilst Mr. Collins excites and fascinates our attention by an intense power of realism which carries us with unreasoning haste from cover to cover of his works, Le Fanu is an idealist, full of high imagination, and an artist who devotes deep attention to the most delicate detail in his portraiture of men and women, and his descriptions of the outdoor and indoor ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the yacht for more than an hour, and nothing, for him, had come of it but the birth of an unreasoning hate. To the unconscious demand of these people's presence, of their ignorance, of their faces, of their voices, of their eyes, he had nothing to give but a resentment that had in it a germ of reckless violence. He could tell them nothing because he had not the means. Their coming ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... though it was after twelve o'clock, Ariadne had not been told to come to luncheon. When the little girl came running at her mother's call, her vivid face flushed with happy play, Lydia knew a throb of that exquisite, unreasoning parent's joy, lying too near the very springs of life for any sickness of the spirit to affect it. Like everything else, however, the touch of the child's tight-clinging arms about her neck brought her back to her preoccupation. Ariadne must ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... and inexplicable that the suggestion of the girl's probable fate should have affected Billy Byrne as it did. He did not stop to reason about it at all—he simply knew that he felt a mad and unreasoning rage against the creatures that had borne the girl away. Outwardly Billy showed no indication of the turmoil that raged ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... express rates, and if you will call at this office we shall be pleased to reveal the reason for our failure, hitherto, to grant the relief desired. It is extremely warm in Washington at the present time, but if anything could add to the disagreeableness of life in the city it is the unreasoning insistence on the part of the traffic bureaus of the country that express rates shall be ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... unreasoning recoil, his mind was decided to adminster the flogging. Would it not be a mercy to Little Lizay for him to do this rather than that other hand, energized by hate, revenge ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... David rattled on, describing, with a gusto which never failed, one of Purcell's book-selling enormities after another. It was evident that he despised his master with a passionate contempt. It was evident also that Purcell had shown a mean and unreasoning jealousy of his assistant. The English tradesman inherits a domineering tradition towards his subordinates, and in Purcell's case, as we know, the instincts of an egotistical piety had reinforced those of the employer. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not far to seek. The white missionaries from Europe and America succumb under the fatal malaria, or are deterred by the unreasoning and deadly hostility of the natives. The missionaries are a foreign people, with different color, features and habits. They are known to the natives as coming from nations that have plundered and enslaved them. They come as a superior race, unable to meet the natives on the basis ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... part taken by the individual, and it is thus that he becomes a distributing centre of the Divine energy, neither on the one hand trying to lead it like a blind force, nor on the other being himself under a blind unreasoning impulsion from it. He receives guidance because he seeks guidance; and he both seeks and receives according to a Law which he is able to recognize; so that he no more sacrifices his liberty or dwarfs his powers, than does an engineer who submits to the generic laws of electricity, in order to apply ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... confusion, Rag, lying almost beneath his comrades' feet, got himself kicked. He leaped to his feet, dazed, roaring like a bull, and, stupid lout that he was, took unreasoning vengeance upon the first object which caught his eye. ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... snorted. He had the unreasoning contempt for college men so often found in the old-time ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... groups—the Cain and Abel and the David and Goliath—the modern professor might be justified in criticising with considerable severity his draughtsmanship and many salient points in his design. The effect produced is tremendous of its kind. The power suggested is, however, brutal, unreasoning, not nobly dominating force; and this not alone in the Cain and Abel, where such an impression is rightly conveyed, but also in the other pieces. It is as if Titian, in striving to go beyond anything that had hitherto been done of the ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... passions of human nature. "Our country, right or wrong," may be very bad morality, but it is a tremendous force to reckon with. One is wise overmuch who thinks that interest can restrain or statesmen control; wise unto folly who ignores that disinterested emotion, even unreasoning, may be just the one factor which diplomacy cannot master. I was in Rome when our late troubles with Spain came on, and dined with a number of the diplomatic body. "Oh yes," said to me one of these illuminati, "it is all very ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... once, Servigny, by a few words, the brutality of which she felt without understanding them, awakened in her a sudden disquietude, unreasoning at first, but which grew into a tormenting apprehension. She had fled home, had escaped like a wounded animal, wounded in fact most deeply by those words which she ceaselessly repeated to get all their sense and bearing: "You know very well that there can be no question of marriage between ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... strong hostility to foreigners as such. It would not be difficult to make out a case for the view that intercourse with the white races is proving a misfortune to China, but apparently this view is not taken by anyone in China except where unreasoning conservative prejudice outweighs all other considerations. The Chinese have a very strong instinct for trade, and a considerable intellectual curiosity, to both of which we appeal. Only a bare minimum of common decency is required to secure their ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... or of ill-temper,—you could not use any of these forces, if you would, you poor little chick! I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred,—that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt. Thoughtless, instinctive, unreasoning love and self-sacrifice, such as many women long to bestow on husband and children, soil and lower the very objects of their love. You may grow saintly by self-sacrifice; but do your husband and children ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... many laws of inferior generality. The generalising propensity which, instinctive or not, is one of the most powerful principles of our nature, does not indeed wait for the period when such a generalisation becomes strictly legitimate. The mere unreasoning propensity to expect what has been often experienced, doubtless led men to believe that every thing had a cause, before they could have conclusive evidence of that truth. But even this cannot be supposed to have happened until many cases of causation, or, in other words, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... punishment. It had always been that way in his two-year-old days; first, the general hustle—small legs and arms working with concentric swing; then the impatient admonishment of fierce-jabbing spurs; and finally the welt-raising cut of a vicious, unreasoning whip. It was not a pleasurable prospect; and at the first shake-up, Lauzanne pictured it coming. All thoughts of overtaking the horses in front fled from his mind; it was the dreaded punishment that interested him most; figuratively, ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... see," was Monsieur Paul's comment on the conversation, as we were taking our after-dinner stroll in the garden—"as you see, that sort of person is the bad element in our country—the dangerous element—unreasoning, revengeful, and ignorant. It is such men as he who still uphold hatreds and keep the flame alive. It is better to have no talent at all for politics—to be harmless like me, for instance, whose worst vice is to buy ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... where they might disappear from view. She turned to look across the valley, and the man was directly opposite. He must have ridden hard to get there so soon. Oh, horror! He was waving his hands and calling. She could distinctly hear a cry! It chilled her senses, and brought a frantic, unreasoning fear. Somehow she felt he was connected with the one from whom she fled. Some emissary of his sent out to foil her in her attempt ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... muscle quivering with tension in readiness for instant action when the need for action should appear. Moses, on the other hand, turning round from the sight with glaring eyes, resumed paddling with unreasoning ferocity, and gave vent at once to his feelings and his opinion in the sharp ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... were all such fine men that I must have grown up thinking that every man was very like them, but one day I came in direct contact with the Jap that Donald is trying to beat, and the thing I saw in his face put fear into my heart and it has been there ever since. I have almost an unreasoning fear of that Jap, not because he has said anything or done anything. It's just instinctive. I may be wholly wrong in having come to you and in taking up your time, but there are two things I wanted to tell you. I could have told Donald, but if I did and his mind went off at a tangent thinking ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... appendage of a gentleman rider, used for tethering his horse on lonely plains, and always made the object of the most lavish expenditure of decoration and artistic skill. But he was as suddenly filled with a blind, unreasoning sense of repulsion and fury, and lifted his eyes to the man as he approached. What the stranger saw in Clarence's blazing eyes no one but himself knew, for his own became fixed and staring; his sallow cheeks grew lanker and livid; his careless, jaunty bearing stiffened into rigidity, and swerving ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... less severe on land than on sea. The same wild enfranchisement of the elements had taken place around the abandoned child. The weak and innocent become their sport in the expenditure of the unreasoning rage of their blind forces. Shadows discern not, and things inanimate have not the clemency they ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... protection, and I will gladly watch their progress, record their prowess, and will have great pleasure in writing their obituary notice. The people, as a whole, are enemies to England. They are filled with a blind, unreasoning, implacable resentment for injuries they have never received, their dislike engendered and sustained by lying priests and selfish agitators, who are hastening to achieve their ends, alarmed at the prospect of popular enlightenment, which would for ever hurl ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... defiantly and with shame those streets through which he had once led the perfect father in festal parade, to receive the applause of a respectful populace. Now he went forth awkwardly, doggedly, keen for signs that others saw what he did, and quick to burn with bitter, unreasoning resentment, when he detected that they did so. Once his father rallied him upon his "grumpiness"; then he grew sullen—though trying to smile—thinking with mortification of his grandfather. He understood the ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... been wise, would have desisted, but he was filled with a blind, unreasoning rage, and advanced again to the attack. But he was no match for the stout sailor. He fared this time no better than before, but again was stretched at the ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... at her with the first stab of doubt he had felt. "She is Spanish in her marrow," he thought,—"the steadfast unreasoning child of traditions. I could not well be at greater disadvantage. But ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... spectre, presently reappearing, "that these interruptions (only fresh illustrations of our malady) have not frightened your dog into a fit. I have known very valuable and attached dogs expire of mere unreasoning terror ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... unreasonable repugnance to trying the experiment. It would materialize it too much." The same repugnance may be traced in the tendency to avoid, so far as possible, the use of the hands. It is quite common to find this instinctive unreasoning repugnance among women, a healthy repugnance, not founded on any moral ground. In men the same repugnance exists, more often combined with, or replaced by, a very strong moral and aesthetic objection to such practices. But the presence ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... shall not deter me from practising as I have always done.' And one afternoon I had sat down to the piano full of determination to practise without fear of him, without self-consciousness. But before my hands had touched the keys shame took me, unreasoning, terror-struck shame, and I knew in an instant that while he lived I should never more play the piano. He laughed lightly when I told him, and I called myself silly. Yet now, as I sat in the garden, I saw how right I had been. And I wondered that I should ever have had ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... Saunders. And Susan went, with a sense of escape and relief, up the long passageway, and into the cool, friendly darkness of the streets. She had an unreasoning fear that they might follow her, somehow bring her back, and walked a swift block or two, rather than wait for the car ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... is given to poets to project themselves into futurity, and declare the verdict of posterity. But the occasion was ill-chosen, and he spoke with all a poet's imprudence. In another company he aroused the martial fury of an unreasoning captain by proposing the toast, 'May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause.' A very humanitarian toast, one would think, but regarded as seditious by the fire-eating captain, who had not the sense ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... in itself a very melancholy one, but there are other circumstances which greatly heighten the effect. In a very ignorant or a very wretched population it is natural that there should be much vague, unreasoning discontent; but the Irish people are at present neither wretched nor ignorant. Their economical condition before the famine was, indeed, such that it might well have made reasonable men despair. With the land divided into almost microscopic ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... in themselves, who yet are anxious to pose as heroes in their domestic circle, should remember that the smallest modicum of common-sense on the part of the worshipper will inevitably mar a happiness, the very existence of which depends entirely on a blind unreasoning devotion. In middle life the absence of reason begins perhaps to be felt; but why in youth take thought ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... does seclude them in this fashion—supposing they really exist—who can blame him? No woman is safe on Nepenthe with persons like Muhlen about. From chance meetings in the street, from stray conversations overheard, he had been led to take an unreasoning dislike to this foreigner, whose attitude towards the gentle sex struck him as that of a cur. Muhlen, if the yacht were his, would flaunt these ladies about the streets. The American, in keeping them ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... its closest intimates. There was something like an emanation of evil from her eyes and from the face of the other, who, exactly behind her and overtopping her by half a head, kept his eyelids lowered in a sinister fashion—which in the poor girl, reached, stirred, set free that faculty of unreasoning explosive terror lying locked up at the bottom of all human hearts and of the hearts of animals as well. With suddenly enlarged pupils and a movement as instinctive almost as the bounding of a startled fawn, she jumped up and found herself in the middle of the big room, exclaiming at those amazing ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... there!" he heard the master-player shout, and there was something in the fierce, high voice that turned his whole heart sick. What right had they to stop him? This was not the Stratford road; he was certain of that now. But "Stop him—stop him there!" he heard the master-player call, and a wild, unreasoning fright came over him. He dug his heels into the palfrey's heaving sides and urged him up the hill through the cloud of dust that came rolling down behind the horsemen. The hindmost riders had plunged into those before, and the whole array was struggling, ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... returned to my French novel. But not even Dumas himself could keep my attention to the story. What else I was thinking of I cannot say. Why I was out of spirits I am unable to explain. I wished myself back in England: I took a blind, unreasoning ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins
... invective—for volumes may be spoken—in the banging of a door. The moment was inauspicious for the entrance of Harriet Penny. At best, Chloe merely endured the little spinster, with her whining, hysterical outbursts, and abject, unreasoning fear of God, man, the devil, and everything else. "Oh, my dear, I am so glad!" piped the little woman, rushing to the girl's side: "we need never ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... many years ago, for instance, that men feared a sudden catastrophe from the possible collision of a comet with our earth. The unreasoning terror with which the ancients were wont to regard these mysterious visitants to our skies had, indeed, been replaced by an apprehension of quite another kind. For instance, as we have seen, the announcement in 1832 that Biela's Comet, then visible, would cut ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... the motive of what has come to be the only satisfying harmony in dramatic art. It takes the place, in our modern world, of the Necessity of the Greeks; and is not less impressive because it arises from the impulse and unreasoning wilfulness of man rather than from the implacable insistency of God. It is with perfect justice, both moral and artistic, that the fatal crisis, though mediately the result of accident, of error, is shown to be the consequence and the punishment of wrong. A tragedy resulting from the ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... it illustrated them well. He had never been in love with Mrs. Quest; to begin with she had shown herself too much in love with him to necessitate any display of emotion on his part. Her violent and unreasoning passion wearied and alarmed him, he never knew what she would do next and was kept in a continual condition of anxiety and irritation as to what the morrow might bring forth. Too sure of her unaltering attachment to have any pretext for jealousy, he found it exceedingly irksome to ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... the oars became more distinct. Her unreasoning fear increased. With the mystical attention of the great and hidden mind was now blent a crude human attention. She began to feel really terrified, and, seizing her oars, she pulled frantically towards the middle ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... this that John received another brief dispatch. "At home: come and see us." He had indeed got a short letter or two in the interval, saying almost nothing—a brief report of Elinor's health, and of the baby, against whom he had taken an unreasoning disgust and repugnance. "Little beast!" he said to himself, passing over that part of the bulletin: for the letters were scarcely more than bulletins, without a word about the circumstances which surrounded her. A shooting lodge in Ross-shire in the middle of the winter! What a place for a delicate ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... impressions of individual identity. Each man recognizes his neighbor, yet there are few instances in which any one is prepared to give a reason for his recognition. The editor of L'Etoile had no right to be offended at M. Beauvais' unreasoning belief. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that were turned toward her, and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that she did not feel at all. He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon her ostracism, or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... at least he was never far from her side. There were always the delight of unexpected moments unseen, whispered words in the crowd, the sense of complete understanding, broken now and again by poignant attacks of unreasoning jealousy, not only on her part but his; quite worth the reconciliation at the lattice, while Elena Castro, gentle duena, pitched her voice high and amused her husband so well he sought ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... abundance upon itself, while the head was torn and lacerated with following, contrary to nature, a guide that was deaf and blind. And such we see to have been the lot of many, who, submitting to be guided by the inclinations of an uninformed and unreasoning multitude, could neither stop, nor recover themselves out of ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Providential solution of the question is offered in the employment of the negro as a soldier! There cannot surely be any well-founded objection to it. Such opposition as the plan has encountered seems to spring from the same unreasoning prejudice that keeps the black man out of all decent industries in our free North. It is that very prejudice which this plan will overcome. For the first thing to be done is to raise the negro from his degradation; and to do this we must obviously begin with teaching him a proper self-respect. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... no one upon whom I can rely but myself," she went on with the extraordinary energy she was able to summon at will, "and I am convinced that self-sacrifice—at least, indiscriminate, unreasoning self-sacrifice—is worse than useless, and to teach it is criminal ignorance. None of the so-called Christian virtues appeals to me: I hate humility. You haven't it. The only happiness I can see in the world lies in self-expression, and I certainly ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... times, it is to his ancestor who was a serf, and even, in the earliest times, a slave, that the peasant owes the foundation of his independence, namely, his capability of a settled existence—nay, his unreasoning persistency, which has its important function in the development ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Maud's cabinet. There were my own letters, carefully tied up with a ribbon; letters from her mother and father; from the children when we were away from them. I began to read, and was seized with a sharp, unreasoning pain, surprised by sudden tears. I seemed dumbly to resent this, and I put them all away again. Why should I disturb myself to no purpose? "There shall be no more sorrow nor crying, for the former things are passed away"—so runs the old verse, and I had ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... from Dante, with a superadded psychical quality peculiar to its author, there were many, even amongst the friendliest in sympathy, who heard of the completed sequence with a sense of doubt. Such is the silent and unreasoning and all but irrevocable edict of all popular criticism against continuations of works which have in fragmentary form once made conquest of the popular imagination. Moreover, Rossetti's first volume achieved a success so signal and unexpected as to subject this second and maturer book to the ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... outside the house she ran down the road in fury and agitation. It was strange, the unreasoning rage and violence Hermione roused in her, by her very presence. Ursula knew she gave herself away to the other woman, she knew she looked ill-bred, uncouth, exaggerated. But she did not care. She only ran up the road, lest she should ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... John was of a different, nobler, stronger nature. But the mother's instinct leapt to defend her son, and cried also that John was a man, and Peter but a boy in love, ready to sacrifice the whole world to her he worshipped. His father would never have done that. Lady Mary was even capable of an unreasoning pride in Peter's power of loving; though it was not her—alas! it never had been her—for whom her boy was willing ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... of the sea, at ebb-tide, with a solid in his hand, which he partially immerses: he remains steadfast and unmoved, and we all know that he must be drowned. The multitudes who daily perish in this manner to attest a philosophical truth, and whose bodies the unreasoning wave casts sullenly upon our thankless shores, have a truer claim to be called the martyrs of science than a Galileo or a Kepler. To use Kossuth's eloquent phrase, they are the unnamed ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... eyes took in at one confused glance. The thing that gave him unreasoning terror was the hundred-foot-high metal monster before him. It defied description. It was unlike any color known on Earth, a blinding color sinister with power and evil. Its shape was equally ambiguous—it rippled like quicksilver, now compact, now spread out ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... as could resist the world, the flesh and the devil were accounted, and not unfrequently were in reality, ignorant crazy fanatics, half-pitied and half-despised. Between these two extremes of worldly indulgence and of unreasoning severity of life, Hildebrand ever pursued a middle course, for whilst on the one hand he eschewed the vanities of life around him, on the other he never sank into the self-effacement of a hermit. His acknowledged purity and zeal soon won for him from the laity a respect ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... themselves to her mind with a comprehensiveness and simplicity which would have been impossible to Mr. Ward. But at this time he knew nothing of the mental processes that were leading her out of the calm, unreasoning content of childhood into a mist of doubt, which, as she looked into the future, seemed to darken into night. He was struggling with his conscience, and asking himself if he had any right to ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... can judge His own hereafter, and allot its new career and home. Could man sell himself to the fiend, man could prejudge himself, and arrogate the disposal of eternity! But these creatures, modifications as they are of matter, and some with more than the malignanty of man, may well seem, to fear and unreasoning superstition, the representatives of fiends. And from the darkest and mightiest of them I have accepted a boon,—the secret that startled Death from those so dear to me. Can I not trust that enough of power yet remains to me to baffle or to daunt the Phantom, if it seek to pervert the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the boy with sudden childish rage: "My mother dead! and sent a grace by thee,— Thou liest, woman! Take thy false words back!" And still impetuous and unreasoning, Fighting the facts of life in rebel mood (A child of sudden temper, guileless heart), He seized her, struggling with a furious might To make her unsay what her lips had told. Perhaps he might have harmed her in his ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel
... had left the field he had heard only too clearly how the Kennedy eleven, in the unreasoning passion of conflict, had expressed itself. At present, through the open window, the sounds of violent words were borne up to him from below. He approached and looked down upon ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... in the progress of China, and Japan in the adoption of Western science and educational methods have from time to time been noticed in these columns. To the popular mind the names of the two countries are synonymous with rigid, unreasoning conservatism and with rapid change, respectively. The grave, dignified Chinese, who maintains his own dress and habits even when isolated among strangers, and whose motto appears to be, Stare super mas antiquas, is popularly believed to be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... of us in the dungeon,—John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... apparent ground for its appearance because of any new or startling exhibitions of antipathia against us noticeable at the present time. No argument was needed to prove that there has been an unreasonable and unreasoning prejudice against negroes as a class, a long-existing antipathy, seemingly, ineradicable, sometimes dying out it would appear, and then bursting forth afresh from no apparent cause. If Mr. Parton means to assert that such prejudice is ineradicable, or is increasing, or is even rapidly passing ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... effort to introduce his statue with the same successful pertinacity as had repelled the efforts of Antiochus Epiphanes in the days of the Maccabees. The episode ended disastrously, for the spirit of nationalism and unreasoning hate to the government of Rome roused a rebellion which inevitably led to the fall of Jerusalem and the violent destruction of Jewish national life. Henceforward the official Jewish religion remained a foreign element in the life of ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... You don't think I am going to run after the man? I am disgusted with Hugh. His duplicity and, worse still, his obstinate, foolish, unreasoning behaviour, have annoyed me more than anything I ever remember. But there, my dear child, it is nothing to do with you. I have quite altered my opinion of Hugh Alston. You were right and I was wrong. Tom Arundel will make you a better husband, and you ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... they were whispering together. They saw that something was wrong. "Do you thus promise?" repeated the minister, after a pause. "Nod, if you can't speak," murmured the bridegroom. His words were the hiss of a serpent in her ears. Her will resisted no longer; her soul was wholly possessed by unreasoning terror of the man and horror of the marriage. "No! no! no!" she screamed in piercing tones, and snatching her hand from the bridegroom, she threw herself upon the breast of the astonished minister, sobbing wildly as she clung to him, "Save me, save me! Take me away! I can't ...
— At Pinney's Ranch - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... judgments on the spur of the moment are not always right, but they are apt to be pretty conclusive. Irregular, jerky nods are signs of irritability, of rash or very impulsive decisions, and often of unreasoning prejudice. The nod made directly forward signifies frankness, dignity, and straight thinking. The tilting of the head a little to one side suggests a habit of indirectness ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... intermission. "The preachers became frantic in their exhortations; men, women, and children, falling as if in catalepsy, were laid out in rows. Shouts, incoherent singing, sometimes barking as of an unreasoning beast, rent the air. Convulsive leaps and dancing were common; so, too, 'jerking,' stakes being driven into the ground to jerk by, the subjects of the fit grasping them as they writhed and grimaced in their contortions. The world, indeed, seemed ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... sprang to Iola's eyes, and she said to herself, "I am not despondent of the future of my people; there is too much elasticity in their spirits, too much hope in their hearts, to be crushed out by unreasoning malice." ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... not know why he stays in Holland, and I wish he would go home," continued Mrs. Vansittart. "It is unreasoning, I know, and foolish, but I am convinced that he is running into danger." She stopped suddenly, and laid her hand upon Dorothy's; for she had caught many foreign ways and gestures. "Listen," she said, in a lower tone. "It is useless for you ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman |
