"Irrational" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... continues as he formerly was. The man in brown, who so unseasonably interrupted his pleasantry, is an officer of justice, and has probably taken him before a magistrate, to answer some one of his numerous creditors. You must know," added he, "that the people of the moon, however irrational themselves, are very prompt in perceiving the absurdities of others: and this lively wit, who, as you see, wants neither parts nor address, acts as strangely as the wretch he has been ridiculing. He inherited a large estate, which brought ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... the town and no serious opposition was made to the British entry. The most effective resistance came from a single schoolmaster, who, in a moment of irrational frenzy or of patriotic exaltation, shot down three of the invaders before he met his own death. Some rolling stock, one small gun, and something under a hundred prisoners were the trophies of the capture, but the Boer ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the curious, seeing that he appeared to be the more irrational of the two, and far more likely to get into mischief, set off in pursuit. The skipper crossed the road, and began gently to ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... ghost even as a joke?" inquired Katherine. The utterance of the word ghost, together with the probability that there was a neighborhood story behind it, forced upon her imagination an irrational explanation of the strange occurrences of the ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... mind, to be its most uniform characteristic. So long as the only mythology that was studied was the mythology of Indo-European peoples, it was assumed, without question, that the myths could not really be, or originally have been, irrational and absurd: they must conceal, under their seeming absurdity and outwardly irrational appearance, some truth. They must have had, originally, some esoteric meaning. They must have conveyed—allegorically, indeed—some profound truths, known or revealed to sages of old, which it ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... week wore on, miracles happened; for every night one of the Gorgons turned into the beautiful girl she used to be before the Goddess of Reason, infuriated with the Irrational God who bestows on girls their quite unreasonable loveliness, had made her what she was. And night by night the Wanderer rubbed his eyes and wondered if he had been dreaming; for the guardians of the tower no longer hissed, but sighed at love, and instead of claws for the destructions ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... been told that she was doing this remarkable thing for a woman she had never seen before that day, named Mary O'Shaughnessy, and also for a certain red-haired person of whom it had never heard, it would have considered Jane quite irrational. But it is entirely probable that Jane became really rational that night for the first time in her spoiled ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of their student days long past descended upon the friends. Frederick was still in a state of excitement and irrational recklessness. He pinned his faith to the moment, ready to stake his yesterday and his morrow upon it. The twilight of the room brought back memories of youthfully blissful times. He had found his old ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... real life fantastically transformed; but there is no magic or anything else super-natural, and the most fascinating quality in the drama is the skill with which the transformation is made in accordance with the irrational logic of dreams. Accompanied by the weird music of Gyrowetz and exquisitely staged, this is the most popular of Grillparzer's plays in Vienna. But it is by no means merely theatrical. There is profound truth in the theory upon which it is constructed: a dream is the awakening of the soul; dreams ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... that if certain religious legislators had forbidden various aliments, it was for hygienic motives. Even Renan believed that dread of trichinosis and leprosy had caused the Hebrews to forbid the use of pork. To show the irrational nature of this explanation, it will be enough to point out that in the whole of the Bible there is not a single instance of an epidemic or a malady attributed to the eating of unclean meats; the idea of hygiene ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... entire dominion over every exercise of power committed into its hands! And yet I have lived to see prudence and conformity to circumstances wholly set at nought in our late controversies, and treated as if they were the most contemptible and irrational of all things. I have heard it an hundred times very gravely alleged, that, in order to keep power in wind, it was necessary, by preference, to exert it in those very points in which it was most likely to be resisted and the least likely to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... for a moment. The silence in his breast was complete. But he felt a suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience when we enter an unlighted strange place—the irrational feeling that something may jump upon us in the dark—the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... ideas and on the other with bodily states and conduct. Whoever runs amuck in his emotions runs amuck in his whole being. The nervous invalid with his exhausted and sensitive body, his upset mind and irrational conduct is a living illustration of the central place of the emotions in the ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... people. It is quite irrational, but I get fond of them. Which is quite a different thing from the admiration and excitement of falling in love. Almost the opposite thing. They cry or they come some mental or physical cropper and hurt themselves, or they do something distressingly ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... knowledge. He is deeply happy only when in harmony with his work and environments. The backwoodsman, early settler, pioneer plainsman, mountain man were all like some infuriated beast of Promethean capabilities tearing at its own vitals. Driven by an irrational energy, they seemed intent on destroying not only the growth of the soil but the power of the soil to reproduce. Davy Crockett, the great bear killer, was "wrathy to kill a bear," and as respects bears and other wild ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... serious ones, not to the wives alone, but to their husbands as well. There is hardly a physician who has no cause to complain of this frequently criminal diffidence on the part of women, and their objection to state their complaint freely. All this is easy to understand; irrational, however, is the posture of the men, and of several physicians among them, who will not admit the justice and necessity of the study of medicine, in particular, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... is a deceitful thing," as the Scotch translator of KING DAVID has it, and I entirely agree with him. I rather wish to be protected from a horse, than expect any succour from a creature so large, muscular and irrational. Far from being "courageous," as his friends say, the horse (I am not speaking of the war-horse) is afraid of almost everything, that is why I am afraid of him. He is a most nervous animal, and I am a nervous rider. He is afraid of a bicycle or a wheel-barrow, ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... this house, Mahomet Tughlak, was a very remarkable character. Possessed of extraordinary accomplishments, learned, temperate, and brave, he plunged upon wholly irrational and inpracticable schemes of conquest which were disastrous in themselves and also from the methods to which the monarch was driven to procure the means for his wild attempts. One portion after another of the vast empire broke into revolt and at the end of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... of it, merely a result, almost accidental. And he was astounded and disgusted that he, with his professed love of architecture and his intermittent study of it, had not perceived this obvious truth for himself. He never again looked at a house in the old irrational way. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... made the detective melancholy; but he had not yet begun to reflect on how the passing of a dearly loved husband would change the life of Mrs. Pendean. He suddenly felt himself thrust out of the situation forever, yet resented his own conviction as irrational. ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... not impracticable, though severe. As the end to be attained is the welfare of future generations, no good reason could be urged why they should not contribute towards the cost of it—a better debt to leave to posterity than the incubus of an irrational war." ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... and beastly minded men desire more, either to lay by them to look upon, or else to waste and spoil it upon their lusts, while other Bretheren live in straits for the want of the use thereof. But the Laws and Faithful Officers of a Free Commonwealth do regulate the irrational conduct of such men. ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... Musick was performed at Stationers' hall; and he wrote afterwards six cantatas, which were set to musick by the greatest master of that time, and seem intended to oppose or exclude the Italian opera, an exotick and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... wholly unstructural use of columns in the entrance porches, the upper parts of the faade, the wooden cupolas over the five domes, and the pointed arches in the narthex, are deviations from Byzantine traditions dating in part from the later Middle Ages Nothing could well be conceived more irrational, from a structural point of view, than the accumulation of columns in the entrance-arches; but the total effect is so picturesque and so rich in color, that its architectural defects are easily overlooked. The external veneering of white and colored marble occurs rarely in the East, but became ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... Further, likeness is the foundation of the fittingness of the Incarnation of the Divine Person, as above stated (Q. 3, A. 8). But as in rational creatures we find the likeness of image, so in irrational creatures we find the image of trace. Therefore the irrational creature was as capable of assumption ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... by thinking of it in a rational way, referring it to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and consequences, and thus ciphering out its date by connecting it with theirs. The artificial memory-systems, recommending, as they do, such irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the first landmarks in a system, or for such purely detached facts as enjoy no rational connection with the rest of our ideas. Thus the student of physics may remember ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... voice, a word misinterpreted, or something equally slight, the product very possibly of shyness, or inability for right expression on a sudden call. And there is all that goes by the name of antipathy, the nameless and quite irrational repulsions which we permit ourselves to cherish, for which we have no better excuse than that they are instinctive. With all these forces against us how can we love our neighbour as ourselves? It is something if we do not detest him; if we tolerate him it should be ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a 'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical, 'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth of the spirit; ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... stone, and I believe that I am acquainted with all the fiendish noises which can be made by man or machinery. The whack of heavy falling bodies, the sudden shivering splinter of chopped logs, the crystal shatter of pounded ice, the crash of a tree hurled to the earth by a hurricane, the irrational, persistent chaos of noise made by switching freight-trains, the explosion of gas, the blasting of stone, and the terrific grinding of rock upon rock which precedes the collapse—all these have been in my touch-experience, and contribute to my idea of Bedlam, of a battle, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... wished to be sensible, and admitted in principle the right of 'private judgment' or rationalism so far as consistent with Protestantism. The effect had been that in substance it had become Utilitarian and empirical; while it had yet insisted upon holding on to the essentially irrational element. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... God help me, how am I to look for loyalty to others? The most dull, the most imbecile, at a certain moment turn round, at a certain point will hear no further argument, but stand unflinching by their own dumb, irrational sense of right. It is not only by steel or fire, but through contempt and blame, that the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear soul. Be glad if you are not tried by such extremities. But although all the world ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I had convinced myself, experimentally, that human existence, human nature, was a bottomless pit and an uncommonly filthy one at that. Reaction was inevitable. Then I understood why men have invented gods, subscribed to irrational systems of theology, hailed and accredited transparently ridiculous miracles. Such lies are necessary to certain stages of development simply for the preservation of sanity, just as, at another stage, sanity, for its own preservation, is necessarily driven to declare their falsehood. And ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... them unrelated in any particular respect, that 'respect' connects them; and so on. In short you fall into hopeless contradiction. You must stay either at one extreme or the other.[8] 'Partly this and partly that,' partly rational, for instance, and partly irrational, is no admissible description of the world. If rationality be in it at all, it must be in it throughout; if irrationality be in it anywhere, that also must pervade it throughout. It must be wholly rational or wholly ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... the nativities of his sons; and what is remarkable, his prediction relating to his son Charles, was accomplished. The incident being of so late a date, one might hope that it would have been cleared up; but, if it be a fact, it must be allowed that it forms a rational exultation for its irrational adepts. Astrologers were frequently, as may easily be understood, put to their wit's end when their predictions did not come to pass. Great winds were foretold, by one of the craft, about the year 1586. No unusual storms, however, happened. Bodin, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... was of a murderous force, ten thousand bolts of irrational lightning raging around the country, striking a ...
— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley
... theory, he was bound to handle it with the same calmness which he would have expected to find in a pathological treatise by a physician. Who would write of the sweating sickness with indignation, or describe zymotic diseases with resentment? Condorcet's pertinacious anger against theology is just as irrational as this would be, from the scientific point of view which he pretends to have assumed. Theology, in fact, was partly avenged of her assailants, for she had in the struggle contrived to infect them with the bitter contagion of her ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... following conclusions,—first, that having once fully admitted the existence of an infinite yet self-conscious Creator, we are not allowed to ground the irrationality of any other article of faith on arguments which would equally prove 'that' to be irrational, which we had allowed to be 'real'. Secondly, that whatever is deducible from the admission of a 'self-comprehending' and 'creative' spirit, may be legitimately used in proof of the 'possibility' of any further ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... aphorism that all the rational is real and all the real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe, like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a hole and enclosing it ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... those which curse the existence of the majority upon this earth, criminals will continue to be produced. And if we concede that these anomalies are directly or indirectly brought about by false and irrational methods of educating the youth of the country, we must also allow that education helps to manufacture ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... guilty of such injustice and inhumanity, that he could take pride in works which not even money had made his own, and live with undiminished splendor, when his credit itself began to fail, seemed to her incongruities so irrational, that hitherto ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... society and government? Man is a gregarious animal—a social being. He may exist in solitude, but he cannot enjoy life: he cannot perfect his nature. Those who have watched and studied closely the habits of those irrational animals, who live in communities, as the ant, the bee, and the beaver, have observed not only a settled system and subordination, but the existence of some wonderful faculty, like articulate speech, by which communication ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... respondent's counsel assured the Court that his client 'had resolved to spend his fortune, if necessary, in resisting the claim of the Rev. Dr. O'Fay.' Lord Justice Blackburne pronounced this to be a very irrational determination, although he had to decide that the claim could not be sustained ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... the bed Lord Linchmere was breathing peacefully. I envied him his quiet sleep, and again and again my own eyelids drooped, but every time my sense of duty came to my help, and I sat up, rubbing my eyes and pinching myself with a determination to see my irrational watch ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... exaltation, and considered it an indication of my graceless state, that I was so insensible to the "spirit," which was another term for the frenzy, I found it impossible to provoke it. It is a curious subject, this usurpation of the reasoning faculties by the irrational, which is permitted when religion becomes emotional, either in the revolutionary condition of the revivalist or that of the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... good, for expensive foods having little nutriment and then, for lack of savings, to go badly underfed when work is slack and wages are small. There is for each class of circumstances a golden mean of saving. The saving habit may develop to irrational excess and become miserliness, but this happens rarely compared with the many cases where men in the period of their largest earnings spend up to the limit on a gay life and make no provision for any of the mischances of life—business reverses, loss ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... that seemed to her the first irrational flaw in something exquisitely reasonable, and ran down the dark stairs. She attended imaginatively to the sound of his footsteps; as on her first excited night in country lodgings the summer before she had sat up in bed listening to horse's hooves beating through ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... 19% in 2004, largely because of higher international oil and gas prices. Overall prospects in the near future are discouraging because of widespread internal poverty, the burden of foreign debt, the government's irrational use of oil and gas revenues, and its unwillingness to adopt market-oriented reforms. Turkmenistan's economic statistics are state secrets, and GDP and other figures are subject to wide margins of error. In particular, the rate of ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the principle, so far as the same hath been directly avowed, of the said proceedings at the Mogul's court, was as altogether irrational, and the pretended object as impracticable, as the means taken in pursuit of it were fraudulent and dishonorable, namely, the restoration of the Mogul in some degree to the dignity of his situation, and to his free agency in the conduct of his affairs. For the said Hastings, at the very time ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... itself is wearisome, but its existence proves that it must be quieted, and it can be so quieted only by a rational solution, for every irrational decision, being from its nature self-contradictory, has for its chief mission to destroy itself. As long as it continues, we may be sure that the true solution has not been attained, and for our hope we may remember ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... increased action at the outset of a fever, but this does not indicate increased strength; on the contrary, it indicates the action of an irritant to the heart that will soon weaken it. It is, therefore, irrational further to depress the heart by the use of such drugs as aconite. It is better to strengthen it and to favor the elimination of the substance that is irritating it. The increased blood pressure throughout the body may be diminished by lessening the quantity of blood. This is obtained ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... lips, her eyebrows, her neck, her hands, her feet, her disposition and her future husband were each in turn enthusiastically toasted by other guests in bumpers of French wine. He adds that these compliments were "so moist and numerous that they became more and more indistinct, noisy and irrational" and that before they ended "Nearly every one stood up singing his own favorite song. There is a stage of emotion which can only be expressed in noises. That stage had been reached. They put me in mind ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... disappointment, he casts his life away in the first adventure that offers. Moreover, in consonance with his main design, Tennyson seeks, so far as may be, to discard whatever in Malory is merely accidental or irrational; whatever is stuff of romance rather than of epic or drama—whose theatre is the human will. To such elements of the wonderful as he is obliged to retain he gives, where possible, an allegorical or spiritual significance. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... is to open to all the opportunity for steady and productive employment, to remove from all the handicap of arbitrary or irrational exclusion, to offer to all the facilities for education and health and welfare, to make society the servant of the individual and the individual the source of progress, and thus to realize for all the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy
... ordinance of nature, nor to re-enact the will of God. I would put in no Wilmot proviso for the mere purpose of a taunt or a reproach. I would put into it no evidence of the votes of superior power, exercised for no purpose but to wound the pride, whether a just and a rational pride, or an irrational pride, of the citizens of the southern States. I have no such object, no such purpose. They would think it a taunt, an indignity; they would think it to be an act taking away from them what they regard as a proper equality of privilege. Whether they expect to realize any benefit from ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... been malignant. That does not, of course, mean that it has been irrational; quite the contrary. One fully admits that Prussia, being what she is, has every cause to hate the Cross, and every motive to vent the agonized fury of a lost soul upon things sacred ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... wit's end, forming plan after plan for the evangelisation of Erewhon, when by one of those special interpositions which should be a sufficient answer to the sceptic, and make even the most confirmed rationalist irrational, my eye was directed to the following paragraph in the Times newspaper, of one of the ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... Irrational as it was, she could not bear to see them destroyed. In her distracted mind there was a sort of crazy hope that he would at last give them to her to burn; she might even perhaps have brought ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... Vengeance has no consideration for the true well-being of the offender. It confounds the person with the deed in wholesale condemnation. It renders evil for evil; it provokes still further retaliation; and erects a single fault into the occasion of a lasting feud. It is irrational, brutal, and inhuman; it is ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... gloomy turn, and I have a thousand ways of amusing myself. Indeed of late I have been terribly frightened lest I must give them all up; my fears have gone to extravagance; do not wonder; my life is not quite irrational, and I trembled to think that I was growing fit only to consort with dowagers. What an exchange, books and drawings, and every thing of that sort, for cards! In short, for ten weeks I have had such pains in my eyes with the least application, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Earle were influenced by their observation that even in those suffering from mania much of their behavior could not be described as irrational. If you will allow me I will quote a sentence of ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... dramatist. He would say that if Shakespeare is to be played to the masses there should be some preliminary training of them. At least they might be broken in gently. To present Hamlet as successor to the pantomime and not long after some of the simple melodramas acted at this theatre seems rather irrational. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... say (without disrespect to a few precursors) that the modern study of natural science began, and in the same period we have a series of famous thinkers who were guided by a disinterested love of truth. Of the most acute minds some reached the conclusion that the Christian scheme of the world is irrational, and according to their temperament some rejected it, whilst others, like the great Frenchman Pascal, fell back upon an unreasoning act of faith. Bacon, ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... nightmare dream. As in a dream, the balancing weights of reasoning and morality began to melt before the heat of that which burned within; as in a dream, the uncurbed inner motives began to strive furiously. Then a sudden fierce anger, quite like the savage irrational anger of an ugly dream, flamed up quickly and fiercely. He opened his lips as though to vent his rage, but for an instant his tottering reason regained a momentary poise. Checking himself with an effort ten thousand times greater than that he would have used in his former ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... day of danger and deliverance, and thus armed, lest Doeg should try to bar his flight, he hurries from the pursuit which he knew that the Edomite's malignant tongue would soon bring after him. The tragical end of the unsuspecting priest's kindness brings out the furious irrational suspicion and cruelty of Saul. He rages at his servants as leagued with David in words which have a most dreary sound of utter loneliness sighing through all their fierce folly: "All of you have conspired against me; there is none of you that is sorry for me" (1 Sam. xxii. 8.) Doeg is ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... upon which one party was denounced unreasonably and the other was lauded unreasonably. No party has ever deserved quite the abuse that each party has got in turn, and nobody has ever deserved the praise that both parties have got in turn. The old political meeting was a wholly irrational performance; it was got together for the purpose of saying things that were chiefly not so and that were known by those who heard them not to be so, and were simply to be taken as a tonic ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... which spread the insane spirit of violence at a rapid rate, affecting many during the course of the day, who in the early part of the morning had not partaken of its influence. To no other principle than this can we attribute the wanton and irrational outrages of many of the people. Every one acquainted with such awful visitations must know that their terrific realities cause them, by wild influences that run through the whole masses, to forget all the decencies and restraints of ordinary life, until fear and shame, and becoming respect ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... though undemanded qualifications. He went to study in Paris with the determination that when he provincial home again he would settle in some provincial town as a general practitioner, and resist the irrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge in the interest of his own scientific pursuits, as well as of the general advance: he would keep away from the range of London intrigues, jealousies, and social truckling, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... from the south of Scotland, who boarded with two elderly ladies of the place, and attended the subscription school; and the acknowledged leader of the band, who, belonging to the permanent irreducible staff of the establishment, was never off duty. We used to be very happy, and not altogether irrational, in these little skeleton parties. My new friend was a gentle, tasteful boy, fond of poetry, and a writer of soft, simple verses in the old-fashioned pastoral vein, which he never showed to any one save myself; and we learned to love ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... not read to you this morning," said Oisille, "that those who thought themselves wiser than other men, since by the sole light of reason they had come to recognise a God, creator of all things, were made more ignorant and irrational not only than other men, but than the very brutes, and this because they did not ascribe the glory to Him to whom it was due, but thought that they had gained the knowledge they possessed by their own endeavours? For having erred in their minds by ascribing to themselves that which pertains ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... of things was Force; his pet doctrine, the ultimate healthy healing that follows the surgery of Revolution. But to me he was the gentlest creature imaginable; and I was very fond of him, in spite of his—as I then thought—strange ideas. Strange ideas! Ha! Many of 'em luckily don't sound quite so irrational today! ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... flowers; singing, chatting, laughter, and amusements, perpetually succeed each other. It must be allowed, that reckoning all these advantages, no hesitation was necessary in the choice; in fact, I was so content with mine, that I never once repented it; nor do I even now, when, free from the irrational motives that influenced me at that time, I weigh in the scale of reason every action of ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... temporal powers; the function of the spiritual power being concerned with education, and that of the temporal with action, in the wide senses of those terms. The defects of this dual system were due to the irrational theology. But the theory of papal infallibility was a great step in intellectual and social progress, by providing a final jurisdiction, without which society would have been troubled incessantly by contests arising ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... thing. It is useful to know something of the manners of different nations, that we may be enabled to form a more correct judgment regarding our own, and be prevented from thinking that everything contrary to our customs is ridiculous and irrational, a conclusion usually come to by those whose experience has been limited to their own country. On the other hand, when too much time is occupied in traveling, we become strangers to our native country; and the over curious in the customs of the past are generally ignorant of those of the present. ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... town for the day, we had wine in one another's rooms after hall in the evening, and behaved like young fools, and threw oranges wildly at one another's heads, and generally enjoyed ourselves. It was all very silly and irrational, no doubt, but it was life, it was reality; while the pretended earnestness of those pallid Somerville girls is all ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... correcting the erroneous reference of the Translator, I can find no such case alluded to in the chapter. But Caelius Aurelianus mentions two modes of treatment employed by Asclepiades, into both of which the use of wine entered, as being "in the highest degree irrational and dangerous." [Caelius Aurel. De Morb. Acut. et Chron. lib. I. cap. xv. not xvi. Amsterdam. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... unspoiled conscience of man as man democracy will ever be the most self-evident of truths. It is the complexity of our civilization that blinds us to its self-evidence, teaching us to acquiesce in irrational privilege as inevitable, and at last to see nothing strange in being ruled by a class, whether of nobles or of mere parliamentarians. But the man who looks at the world with the terrible eyes of his first innocence can never see an unequal law as anything but an iniquity, or government divorced ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... quit school." W.F. Book tabulated the reasons why pupils leave high school,[36] as given by 1,051 pupils. He found that discouragement, loss of interest, and disappointment affect more pupils than all the other causes combined. Likewise Bronner notes[37] that the 'irrational' sameness of school procedure for all pupils often leads to "serious loss of interest in school work, discouragement, truancy, and disciplinary problems." Still it may be that the worst consequences of multiplied failures ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... "Prussian." Another word about this opinion of his. The more cultivated and general the political understanding of a people is, all the more does the proletariat—at least at the beginning of the movement—dissipate its energies in irrational, useless, and brutally suppressed revolts. Because it thinks along political lines, it perceives the cause of all evils in the wills of men, and all remedies to lie in force and the overthrow of a particular form of the State. In proof whereof we cite the first outbreak of the French ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... institutions, and the disaffection bred in this void of the Irish people's heart, seem to us irrational and even insane, in the absence of any more substantial grievance, we ought to ask ourselves what would become of our own patriotism if we had no national institutions, no objects of national loyalty and reverence, even though we might be pretty ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... always been, far more so in temperament, indeed, than her husband; but although she left home on that journey a frail and heartsick woman, she returned a different creature altogether, blurred and confused in mind, with clouded memory and irrational fancies. ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... passions, the same ambition, reign in almost every breast; a constant desire to supplant, and a continual fear of being supplanted, keep the minds of those who have any views at all in a state of unremitted tumult and envy; and those who have no aim in their actions are too irrational to have a notion of social comforts. The love, as well as the pleasures, of society, is founded in reason, and cannot exist in those minds which are filled with irrational pursuits. Such indeed might claim a place in the society of birds and beasts, though few would deserve to be admitted amongst ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... be such an unreasonable child," he remonstrated, feebly. "I do not love you with the wild, irrational passion of former years; but I have the tenderest regard for you, and my heart warms at the sight of your sweet face, and I shall do all in my power to make you as happy as any man can make ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... to make the playing of his part any the easier. It filled him in fact with a continual fear of giving himself away by doing something he had done before. It was really a most irrational fear; but there it was. Under the circumstances his sustained babble and ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... advantages of old age, if we contemplate it in another point of view; if we consider it as delivering us from the tyranny of lust and ambition; from the angry and contentious passions; from every inordinate and irrational desire; in a word, as teaching us to retire within ourselves, and look for happiness in our own bosoms. If to these moral benefits naturally resulting from length of days be added that sweet food of the mind which is gathered in the fields of science, I know not any ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... although that way can still be opened whenever the will's resistance ceases (see above, n. 424). That man is able to understand truths and be rational whenever he so wishes has been made clear to me by much experience. Evil spirits that have become irrational in the world by rejecting the Divine and the truths of the church, and confirming themselves against them, have frequently been turned by Divine power towards those who were in the light of truth, and they then comprehended all things as the angels did, and acknowledged them ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... create, but he could not weigh coolly and impartially what was created. His whole make forbade it. He was impatient, passionate, reckless, furious in his likes and dislikes. His fervid enthusiasm for one author dictated a splendid tribute to a friend; while an irrational prejudice against another called out a terrific diatribe against a foe. In either case, there might be "thoughts that breathe and words that burn"; still, there was but little of true criticism. The matchless papers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... of this. If there is any thing irrational or inconsistent, any thing false or ridiculous, in this view of the subject, it should be remembered that it has been long taught, not only in common schools, but in our academies and colleges, as serious, practical ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them, with many other wild, impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, "that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational, which some philosophers have not ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... the country," instead of claiming the government of their own country, and they are expected to feel grateful for "boons," for concessions. Britain is to say what she will give. The whole thing is wrong, topsy-turvy, irrational. Thank God that India's eyes are opening; that myriads of her people realise that they are men, with a man's right to freedom in his own country, a man's right to manage his own affairs. India is no longer on her knees for boons; she is on ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... reason controls imagination, and under the other aspect the imagination formulates the reason; it is meant to free the idea, on the one hand, from that suggestion of abstraction implied by the reason, and to disembarrass it, on the other, of any connection with the irrational fancy; for the world of art so conceived is necessarily both concrete, correspondent to the realities of experience, and truthful, subject to the laws of the universe; it cannot contain the impossible, it cannot amalgamate ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... regimental officer; still, it is slight in comparison with the risk run by a franc tireur, employed in harassing an enemy, and in cutting his communications—especially when capture means death. Those who remained behind were encouraged partly by this thought, but still more by the really irrational one that, as the boys had gone away and come back safe, once, they ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... with your consent and my aunt's, Miss Hood should return just as if nothing had happened, and continue to teach the twins till next summer, when I should have done with Oxford. There appears to me to be nothing irrational or unseemly in such a plan. If she were our cook or housemaid, there might be reasonable objections. As it is, it would hardly involve a change even in your tone to her, seeing that you are in the habit of treating ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... animals and plants were succeeded, without the intermediation of any obvious lapse of time, by other assemblages of organic beings of a different character. Everywhere they found evidence that the earth's crust had undergone changes of such magnitude as to render it seemingly irrational to suppose that they could have been produced by any process now in existence. If we add to the above the prevalent belief of the time as to the comparative brevity of the period which had elapsed since the birth of the globe, we can readily understand the general acceptance ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... moment when he looked for the first time into the eyes of Jefferson Craig's newly made wife. For one instant he suffered a pang of jealousy—a queer, irrational feeling. It was as if he had lost his friend, as if this star-eyed creature before him could never find room for him again in her full heart. But he knew better in the next breath, for she lifted her face, ever so little, and with a sense of deep relief he gave her the brotherly ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... an irrational way of losing her possessions. While yet on her way to the London railway station she had lost her tam-o'-shanter. So perforce, she travelled in a large picture-hat which, although pretty and becoming, was hardly suitable headgear for channel-crossing ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... exhaustion, yet he could not sleep, though the deep silence warned him that day was not far off. What if—but he would not let the thought shape itself in his mind. He had witnessed the judge's skill with the pistol, and he had even a certain irrational faith in that gentleman's destiny. He prayed God that Fentress might die quickly and decently with the judge's bullet through his brain. Over and over in savage supplication he muttered his prayer that ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... executive, and the judicial as well as the legislative authority, was now the child of the people, but to the two former the people behaved like stepmothers. The legislature was still discriminated by excessive partiality." This preference, historic but irrational, led up naturally to a single chamber. The people of America and their delegates in Congress were of opinion that a single Assembly was every way adequate to the management of their federal concerns, and when the Senate was invented, Franklin strongly objected. "As to the two chambers," ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... heart sunk within him to hear a poor untaught creature desire to be taught to know God, and he such a wicked wretch, that he could not say one word to her about God, but what the reproach of his own carriage would make most irrational to her to believe; nay, that already she had told him that she could not believe in God, because he, that was so ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... whereby the community is in danger of losing the well-knit organization of a common life; second, the tendency to reduce variety in national civilization, to assimilate all to a common type and thus to discourage individuality, and produce a "remorseless mechanism—vast, irrational;" third, the evils arising from the fact that waves of emotion, the passion of the mob, tend in our day to sweep across ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... Roman supper; but it ought to be recollected that those suppers were at three o'clock in the afternoon, and should be a subject of contempt, instead of imitation, in Grosvenor Square. Women, 180however, are not quite so irrational as men, in London, for they generally sit down to a substantial lunch about three or four; if men would do the same, the meal at eight might be relieved of many of its weighty dishes, and conversation ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Bluewater; it is irrational to suppose that they who have loved each other so well in this state of being, are to be for ever separated ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... questions would be fair, and draw forth solid conclusions, were the woman supposed at the time to be under the direction of a calm and unembarrassed mind; but the moment we reflect that her mind was violently agitated with a conflict of passions and terror, an irrational conduct may appear ...
— On the uncertainty of the signs of murder in the case of bastard children • William Hunter
... by the harsh regret of his warlike past, of that one long, intoxicating clash of arms, unique in the magnitude of its glory and disaster—the marvellous work and the special possession of his own generation. He felt an irrational tenderness towards his old adversary and appreciated emotionally the murderous absurdity their encounter had introduced into his life. It was like an additional pinch of spice in a hot dish. He remembered the flavour with sudden melancholy. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... national spirit of Japan centres about the divinity of the Emperor. And precisely therein lies their present problem. For one may say, I think, with confidence that this attitude cannot endure, and is already disappearing. Western thought is an irresistible solvent of all irrational and instinctive ideas. Men cannot be engineers and pathologists and at the same time believe that a man is a god. They cannot be historians and at the same time believe that their first Emperor came down from heaven. Above ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... horrible knowingness and pointing his finger—an accusing finger. It had been the most exasperating, humiliating, and shameful incident in the bishop's career. It was the afternoon for his fortnightly address to the Shop-girls' Church Association, and he had been seized with a panic fear, entirely irrational and unjustifiable, that he would not be able to deliver the address. The fear had arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then as now had come the thought, "If only I could smoke!" And he had smoked. It seemed better to break a vow than fail the Association. ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... reaction. Society, capricious in its indignation as it had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and petted darling. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry. He was persecuted with an irrational fury. Much has been written about those unhappy domestic occurrences which decided the fate of his life. Yet nothing is, nothing ever was, positively known to the public, but this, that he ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... terror with which I anticipated the hour of one, and the disclosure of the unknown undertaking to which I had bound myself, was irrational and morbid. But, honestly, I doubt it; my tendency has always been that of many other weak characters, to act impetuously, and afterwards to reproach myself for consequences which I have, perhaps, in reality, had little ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... of an ultra-fashionable mother and a worldly father, in whose eyes sins against the beau monde were the most irrational and unpardonable. ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the dust hole quite as readily, as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice had not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... in any way, shape or form responsible for such outrages. I find that the ultra-Socialistic members of the unions in Butte denounced these men for coming here, in a manner as violent—and I may say as irrational—as the denunciation [by the capitalistic writer] in the article you sent me. Doubtless the gentleman of whom you speak as your general manager is an admirable man. I, of course, was not alluding to him; but I most emphatically was alluding to men who write such articles ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... opinions and public prejudice. I assure you it is a knowledge of how often the ridicule and contempt of the world has crushed truth in the embryo or stifled it in the cradle, which makes me so eager to examine and support those opinions which mankind generally condemn as visionary and irrational.' In later times these interests became a bond between W. R. Greg and Miss Martineau. He finally let the subject drop, with the conviction that years of practice had brought it no farther on its way either to scientific rank or to practical fruitfulness. The time ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... suffrage to depend, as in a good state of things it would, on personal conditions. Where it depends, as in this and most other countries, on conditions of property, the contradiction is even more flagrant. There something more than ordinarily irrational in the fact that when a woman can give all the guarantees required from a male elector, independent circumstances, the position of a householder and head of a family, payment of taxes, or whatever may be the conditions imposed, ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... because of its predominant reliance on "beauty" as way of communicating idealized concepts. Also, since the music intimately reflects the cravings and thought-processes of the natural human mind, which in numerous ways is emotionally and intellectually irrational, the music may itself ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... afraid of where that emotion might lead him. He recognized the astonishing power of passion. It troubled him, stirred up an amazing conflict at times between his reason and his impulses. He fell back always upon the conclusion that love was an irrational thing anyway, that it should not be permitted to upset a man's logical plan of existence. But he was never very sure that this conclusion would ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... good, forbids us to be wise? Such prohibitions bind not. But, if death Bind us with after-bands, what profits then Our inward freedom? In the day we eat Of this fair fruit, our doom is, we shall die! How dies the Serpent? he hath eaten and lives, And knows, and speaks, and reasons, and discerns, Irrational till then. For us alone Was death invented? or to us denied This intellectual food, for beasts reserved? For beasts it seems: yet that one beast which first Hath tasted envies not, but brings with joy The good befallen him, author unsuspect, Friendly to man, far from deceit or guile. ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... reminiscence that I find it hard to treat of its beauties methodically. I find myself wandering up and down, hither and thither, in so irresponsible a fashion that I marvel you have not abandoned me as the most irrational ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... thing—love. It caused the trouble. It was more terrible than frost or famine. Women were all very well, in themselves good to look upon and likable; but along came this thing called love, and they were seared to the bone by it, made so irrational that one could never guess ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... and towels. Freehold Villas symbolized the final triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of the prudent and industrious artisan. It corresponded with a Building Society Secretary's dream of paradise. And indeed it was a very real achievement. Nevertheless Hilda's irrational contempt would not admit this. She saw in Freehold Villas nothing but narrowness (what long narrow strips of gardens, and what narrow homes all flattened together!), and uniformity, and brickiness, and polished brassiness, and righteousness, and an ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... by the statute of the Twelve Tables in cases of mischief done through wantonness, passion, or ferocity, by irrational animals; it being by an enactment of that statute provided, that if the owner of such an animal is ready to surrender it as compensation for the damage, he shall thereby be released from all liability. Examples of the application of this enactment may ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... must that man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the lamb in the meadow, or any other irrational creature is endowed; who should ascribe it, in short, to blank ignorance in the child; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... unsuccessful use of stonework and effectively explodes the pet notion of the indiscriminate that everything which is old is therefore good. The promiscuous use of rough, long, quarried stones, square blocks and narrow strips on end results in an utterly irrational effect, a ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... are irrational things, cannot glorify God, although they may be done to the glory of God, if faith be present. But at present we are inquiring, not into the quality of the works done, but into him who does them, who glorifies God, and brings forth good works. This is faith of heart, the head and ...
— Concerning Christian Liberty - With Letter Of Martin Luther To Pope Leo X. • Martin Luther
... now in almost lunatic confusion—forms being locked; galleys being lifted in; editors, compositors, boys, rushing to and fro in a fury of activity. Again the phenomenon of the news-room, the individual faces calm but their tense expressions and their swift motions making an impression of almost irrational excitement. ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... from his boyhood, that it was clearly apparent of what manner he was destined to be. For he was as a burning lamp in extraordinary charity, so as to show not only the warmth of a pious heart and devotion in relieving the necessity of men, but also an unwearied sympathy for the needs of irrational animals. And because such a lamp should not be hidden under a bushel, so from his boyhood he began to sparkle with ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... Graham found himself in the lift, was altogether barely five minutes. As yet the haze of his vast interval of sleep hung about him, as yet the initial strangeness of his being alive at all in this remote age touched everything with wonder, with a sense of the irrational, with something of the quality of a realistic dream. He was still detached, an astonished spectator, still but half involved in life. What he had seen, and especially the last crowded tumult, framed in the setting ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... the sensibility of the woman. . . . Alas for him! He, too, might have discovered what Byron did; for were not his errors avenged upon him within, more terribly even than without? His cries are like the wails of a child, inarticulate, peevish, irrational; and yet his pain fills his whole being, blackens the very face of nature to him: but he will not confess himself in the wrong. Once only, if we recollect rightly, the truth flashes across him for a moment, and the clouds ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... "you comprehend something which is very bad and irrational. They are precisely such excitements as these that we have to thank for there being so many miserable men, and so many drunkards in Sweden, that one can scarcely venture to go out in the streets ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... a Poison of Witchcraft that can't be cured. Has there not also been a world of discontent in our Borders? 'Tis no wonder, that the fiery Serpents are so Stinging of us; We have been a most Murmuring Generation. It is not Irrational, to ascribe the late Stupendious growth of Witches among us, partly to the bitter discontents, which Affliction and Poverty has fill'd us with: it is inconceivable, what advantage the Devil gains over men, by discontent. Moreover, the Sin of Unbelief may ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... and professional adviser, Mr Rugg, back with him. Mr Rugg had had such ample experience, on the road, of Mr Pancks's being at that present in an irrational state of mind, that he opened his professional mediation by requesting that gentleman to take himself out of the way. Mr Pancks, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... practical rule of policy strong enough to counteract the benefits of extended patronage enjoyed during wars by corrupt ministers; to allay the puerile love of glory cherished by weak princes; or to subdue the demoniacal passions and irrational prejudices artfully excited by rulers, and too often cherished by ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... without my forty winks, and now if you put on that killingly tragic face, I'll scream with laughter, I know I shall. Oh, dear, oh, dear, you must learn once for all never to mind a single thing Tony says; she's the oddest, most irrational creature—a genius of course—her pictures are simply monstrosities, which is a ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... happened to be Ephraim Gundry's. I was quite surprised, and told him so; and he said that he also was surprised at meeting me in this way. Remembering how long I had been here, I thought this most irrational, but checked myself from saying so, because he looked so poorly. And more than that, I asked him kindly how he was this evening, and smoothed my dress to please his eye, and offered him a chair of rock. But he took no notice of ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... which they too, as well as that of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties none the less exist; the fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational, if our conscience did not forbid us to listen to it. The objections, with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with William de Blyenburg; and it will be seen from this with how little justice the denial of evil as a positive thing can be called equivalent to denying it ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... seem a cross, Such as derides thy passions' best relief, And scorns the succours of thy easy grief; Yet lest thy ignorance betray thy name Of man and pious, read and mourn; the shame Of an exemption from just sense doth show Irrational, beyond excess of woe. 10 Since reason, then, can privilege a tear, Manhood, uncensured, pay that tribute here Upon this noble urn. Here, here remains Dust far more precious than in India's veins; Within those ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... therefore, upon the whole, that since the vulgar, in nations which have embraced the doctrine of theism, still build it upon irrational and superstitious grounds, they are never led into that opinion by any process of argument, but by a certain train of thinking, more suitable to their ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley |
