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More "Absurd" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Burke had begun his duties, an incident occurred which illustrates the character of the two men. The old duke of Newcastle, probably desiring a post for some nominee of his own, conveyed to the ear of the new minister various absurd rumours prejudicial to Burke,—that he was an Irish papist, that his real name was O'Bourke, that he had been a Jesuit, that he was an emissary from St Omer's. Lord Rockingham repeated these tales to Burke, who of course denied them with indignation. His chief declared ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Stillman stooped, shaded his eyes with his hand, and gazed down intently at each pair of feet as it passed. Fifty men tramped monotonously by—with no result. Sixty. Seventy. The thing was beginning to look absurd. The guest remarked, with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... trained body of men, who had every spiritual and worldly motive to accept the prohibition, and were, moreover, brought up to regard asceticism as the best ideal in life,[453]—we may realize how absurd it is to attempt to gain the same end by mere casual prohibitions issued to untrained people with no motives to obey such prohibitions, and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... With its taking there came to him a premonition that the things that he had suspected—the things that he had heard—the things that to him were as unbelievable, as utterly absurd, and ridiculous, and impossible, as might be the vainest imaginings of the vainest, ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... the Work of a Mind at ease; but the Men of true Taste can easily distinguish the Exertion of a Mind which overflows with tender Sentiments, and the Labour of one which is only describing Distress. In Performances of this kind, the most absurd of all things is to be witty; every Sentiment must grow out of the Occasion, and be suitable to the Circumstances of the Character. Where this Rule is transgressed, the humble Servant, in all the fine things he says, is but shewing his Mistress how well he can dress, instead ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... "Absurd," Hugh said to himself, with the distrust of all sudden springs of pure emotion which those who have misused them rarely escape. And then another remembrance, which only a sleeping-draught had kept at bay, darted upon him like a panther on ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... impression on my mind. I was sorry to leave my friends even for two or three weeks, but it was too hot! Nora was pale and Reggie's noble appetite gave signs of flagging. Besides—as I had said to Ottilia—it would be too absurd to have come so far and not see ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... his feet. "I am going to make what will seem an absurd request," he said tensely. "I am going to ask you all—the women, I mean—to take your places at the bridge tables. And then—" he paused for an instant, his blue eyes hard: "I want to see the death hand played ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... blinn, skate, pollack, spider-crabs, and conger eels, we used to catch; the fights with the conger in the dark or by the light of matches or of an old lantern that blew out when it was most wanted; the absurd way the crew turned up their noses at my nice tomato sandwiches and gobbled down stringy corned beef; their quiet slumber round the stern seats and my solitary watch amidships over all the lines, and at the sea-fire trailing ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... unflagging courage they disputed his advance, although they were so few. Once more it was the "Thin Red Line" against the heavy column: hundreds against thousands, a task which for any other troops would have been both hopeless and absurd. ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... true,—according to the light in which he saw her position. Had there been nothing between them two but a mutual desire to be married, the reason given by her for changing it all would be absurd. As he had continued to speak, slowly adding on one argument to another, with a certain amount of true eloquence, she felt that unless she could go back to John Gordon she must yield. But it was very hard for her to go back to John Gordon. In the first place, she ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... entities dwell in the body. In the rest he expounds the nature of Sattwa which the commentator takes to mean buddhi or knowledge. He begins with the statement that Sattwasya asrayah nasti. This does not mean that the knowledge has no refuge, for that would be absurd, but it means that the asraya of the knowledge, i.e., that in which the knowledge dwells, viz., the body, does not exist, the true doctrine being that the body has no real existence but that it exists like to its image in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... impose needless labor alike on the officer to be paid and the census office. To say that the square root of an area multiplied by the square root of the number of horses indicates the number of miles travelled in taking a census is as absurd as to say that the square root of the yards of cloth in a suit multiplied by the square root of the number of stitches taken to make the suit will give the length of the thread used. In its practical working in 1860 the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Reynolds, protested against such a desecration of tradition; even the King questioned him, and West replied that the painter should be bound by truth as well as the historian, and to represent a group of English soldiers in the year 1758 as dressed in classic costume was absurd. After the picture was completed, Reynolds was the first to declare that West had won, and that his picture would occasion a revolution in art—as, indeed, ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... baptize in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, by aspersion or immersion, not only a bird or a quadruped, but also an inanimate object, a statue, a table, a chair, etc. That animal would be Christian, that idol, that table would be Christian! It is absurd!" ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... some of the customs of the Dahcotahs, which, however absurd they may appear to us, are held in sacred reverence by them. There are some animals, birds and fishes, that an Indian venerates; and the creature thus sacred, he dare neither kill nor eat. The selection is usually a bear, buffalo, deer, otter, eagle, hawk or snake. One will not eat the ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... really his tree! [TOMPSON brings in a large basket containing seven small stockings and six small boys' socks—very small stockings and very small socks. They are made of bright and different colors and are stuffed into absurd, bulgy shapes.] There's a name on each one. ...
— The Climbers - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... consider yourself insulted, if you like. I shall not give you satisfaction, because there is neither rhyme nor reason nor satisfaction to be found in the whole business. What an absurd fool he is, to ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... grown up, as papa always says, and really I don't care a continental for that young man. I like him quite well as a friend—he has always been very polite and kind to me since that time when he came so near cutting my fingers off with his skates—but it is absurd to think he wants to be anything more than a friend; besides papa doesn't want me to think about beaux for years to come, and I ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... of the karma upon millions of butterflies? Or does there linger in the innumerable little ganglion minds a memory of long-lost Atlantis, so compelling to masculine Catopsilias that the supreme effort of their lives is an attempt to envisage it? "Absurd fancies, all," says our conscious entomological sense, and we agree and sweep them aside. And then quite as readily, more reasonable scientific theories fall asunder, and we are left at last alone with the butterflies, a vast ignorance, and a great unfulfilled ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... courses to be pursued which divide public opinion, the Opposition is almost bound by its position to enforce the merits of the course opposed to that adopted by the Government. In theory nothing could seem more absurd than a system of government in which, as it has been said, the ablest men in Parliament are divided into two classes, one side being charged with the duty of carrying on the government and the other with that of obstructing and opposing them in their task, and in which, ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... not so philosophical or so cool. She never could withstand the flit of a warbler wing; she would follow for half a day the absurd but enchanting little trill; and she regularly went mad (so to speak) at every migration, over the hundred or two, more or less, varieties that made this wood a resting-place on their way. Now, I could ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... round trot. Colonel Philibert, impatient to reach Beaumanoir, spurred on for a while, hardly noticing the absurd figure of his guide, whose legs stuck out like a pair of compasses beneath his tattered gown, his shaking head threatening dislodgment to hat and wig, while his elbows churned at every jolt, making play with the shuffling gait of his spavined and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... as yet concerning them, and the most rude or absurd ideas are entertained in our country of their objects and nature. As in modern Greece, every ruin is now a Paleo-castro or old castle for the vulgar peasant or herdsman, thus all our ruins of the West are Indian forts for the settlers of the Western states; ...
— The Ancient Monuments of North and South America, 2nd ed. • C. S. Rafinesque
... and must be correct. If without an intelligence it was not, and could not be by evolution, for creation by evolution could not, and can not be; because that which is not in a thing can not be evolved out of it, unless you can get more out of a thing than there is in it; which is absurd. So evolution is a negation of the doctrine of a creation. And the doctrine that there is nothing but matter, and that matter is eternal, is a denial of creation by intelligence or otherwise. The infidel says, life began to be; for there was a time when there was no ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... prejudices, it will be impossible to lift the veil, and I have no intention of affording even the slightest preliminary peep behind the scenes of that dramatic affair. The wheels of God grind slowly, and they ground exceeding small almost before the absurd exultation of Nationalist relief over the Pigott episode had abated. It is almost time to treat the whole affair from the historical point of view, and then the idol of Home Rule will be pulverised. However, that is another story in which I ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... made to Southampton, and the Christchurch road taken through Totton to Lyndhurst. The station for the latter town is over two miles away on the Southampton road, where the railway makes a wide detour to Beaulieu Road and Brockenhurst. The absurd title given to Lyndhurst by local guide-books, "Capital of the New Forest," is uncalled for. Certainly it is nearly the centre of the district and is within convenient distance of some of the most beautiful woodlands, but nothing could be a greater contrast to the surroundings ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... American seamen who had been impressed on board British ships. Whenever James says that an American ship had a large proportion of British sailors aboard, the explanation is that a large number of the crew were Americans who had been impressed on British ships. It would be no more absurd to claim Trafalgar as an American victory because there was a certain number of Americans in Nelson's fleet, than it is to assert that the Americans were victorious in 1812, because there were a few renegade British on board ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the whole assembly, of all present and past French legislatures, as if, indeed, bribe-taking on the part of a representative of the people was altogether too monstrous an idea, a crime that surpassed possibility to such an extent that the mere notion of it was absurd. And thereupon applause rang out; the Chamber, delivered from its fears, thrilled ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Then we struck into the woods along what California called a "camina reale,"—a good road,—and Portland a "fair track." It wound in and out among fire-blackened stumps, under pine trees, along the corners of log-fences, through hollows which must be hopeless marsh in winter, and up absurd gradients. But nowhere throughout its length did I see any evidence of road-making. There was a track,—you couldn't well get off it,—and it was all you could do to stay on it. The dust lay a foot thick in the blind ruts, and under ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... that he was certain of that. A feeling of helplessness fastened on him, together with the incongruous speculation about the propriety of a cable to William Grove. The absurd idea occurred to him that Savina had two husbands; each with the right, if he desired, to be at a side of her bed, each holding one of her limp hands. He dismissed the elaborated thought in a rage at the triviality of his mind. ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a bill, let him say so. I for one shall not blame him. There is no reason he should give me anything. But situated as I have been at Oxford, it would have been almost absurd in ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... being meted out to him. As he slowly approached Miss Cronin he endeavoured resolutely to bear himself like a man who had not proposed that day for Miss Van Tuyn's hand. But preposterously, Miss Cronin's absurd misconception seemed to have power over his conscience, and that again over his appearance and gait. He was fully aware, as he went forward to convey Miss Van Tuyn's message, that he made a very poor show of it. In fact, he was just then living up to Dick's description of him ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... preaches, An owl has a toe That can't turn out so! I've made the white owl my study for years, And to see such a job almost moves me to tears! Mister Brown, I'm amazed You should be so gone crazed As to put up a bird In that posture absurd! To look at that owl really brings on a dizziness; The man who stuffed him don't half know his business!" And the ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... sides, remained forever. Logically stated, this means that man's goal is the world; this world meaning earth carried to a state higher and with elimination of its evils is the state they call heaven. This theory, on the face of it, is absurd and puerile because it cannot be. There cannot be good without evil, or evil without good. To live in a world where there is all good and no evil, is what Sanskrit logicians call a 'dream in ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... have got on as well as any two people of opposite sex ever can do. There has never been an angry word between us. But one day the impulse—or whatever you like to call it—took possession of me that I must live alone—quite alone and all to myself. Call it an absurd idea, an impossible fancy; call it hysteria—which perhaps it is—I must get right away from everybody and everything. It is a blow to Richard, but I hope he will soon get over it. In the long run his factory will make up ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... had your substantial reward long ago but for the very absurd opinion that by some fixed, mysterious law of nature the labor done by women is worth less than precisely similar work done by men. You should persist in your just claim, if only to establish the principle that the value of work should be estimated according ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... absurd to wait where they were in order to learn every move of their enemies, for that would have been a voluntary abandonment of the advantage secured at the cost of so much labor and danger. Captain Dawson insisted that the pursuit should be pressed without any thought of ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... "That's the worst of it. I know that the whole affair seems quite absurd, but I must admit that I can't fix suspicion upon anyone ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... this absurd attempt at poetry: it led him to music, and in its intense earnestness he first learned to appreciate the seriousness of art, which until then had appeared to him of such small importance in contrast with his other studies, that he regarded "Don Juan" for instance as silly, ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... adventure, as absurd as any, in its way. Have I ever told you that our post-office is ten miles off, with an atrocious road between us and it? I know you will throw down this letter and feel rather disgusted with me ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... until one of their own doctors coming along had a look at the corpse, and promptly verified my statements. That calmed them considerably, and they looked at the thing in cooler blood, and soon saw that it was really absurd to put the blame of the man's death on the shoulders of the Lancers, though they stoutly maintained that our cavalry were at times guilty of such monstrous conduct. I have often heard them solemnly swear never to give ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... with smiling eyes at Levin, and even made a faint gesture of irony to him; but Levin did not think the landowner's words absurd, he understood them better than he did Sviazhsky. A great deal more of what the gentleman with the gray whiskers said to show in what way Russia was ruined by the emancipation struck him indeed as very true, new to him, and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... her lip. She had made her assertion in so categorical a form that to withhold her authority now meant to appear absurd, and she had not wished to betray the confidence of Marian Holbury. So she fell back on the alternative of ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... dogma; but Rodney is said to have expressed himself in more emphatic terms subsequently, as follows: "During all the commands Lord Rodney has been entrusted with, he made it a rule to bring his whole force against a part of the enemy's, and never was so absurd as to bring ship against ship, when the enemy gave him an opportunity of acting otherwise." Though not distinctly so stated, it would seem that his first movement on the present occasion had failed because of the long distance between ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... kick myself," Hall muttered as soon as Dr. Syx was out of earshot. "If my absurd wish to outdo others had not blinded me, I should have known that he would see us going up this side of the peak, particularly with the balloon to give us away. However, what's done can't be undone. He may not really suspect the truth, and if ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... coquettish eyeglass which she wore on a ribbon round her pretty neck, as if she had never seen him before, motioned to him in a queenly way as she raised her dainty foot, giving him a severe look, or what tried to be such but was in truth an absurd failure. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of another man's servants is absurd, and reminds one of the 'plate, glass, and linen' that used to be charged for at the posting-house on the Dover road with every threepenny-worth of brandy-and-water, I have been asked 6d. for an orange (when oranges were cheap) ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... the other hand, have little use for absolutely accurate time, except in connection with matters of transportation, but will refuse to adopt a standard which would materially alter their accustomed habits of thought and of language in every-day life. That this position is absurd may be argued, and, perhaps, admitted, but it is a fact, and ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... Plinter, werry sorry—What! de black cooksmate and all?—But misfortune can't be help. Stop till I put up my needle, and I will take a turn wid you." Here he drew himself up with a great deal of absurd gravity. "Proper dat British hofficer in distress should assist one anoder—We shall consult togeder.—How can ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the distance travelled? The brute-force method is to simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is clearly very stupid in that it considers even obviously absurd routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San Francisco and New York, in that order). For very small N it works well, but it rapidly becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N 15, there are already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to consider, and for N 1000 ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... elaborate note of apology, palpitant with sincerity. It embarrassed her; for in a cooler, quieter moment it appeared to her, absurd that she should have taken his action so seriously, so dramatically. She felt sure that the significance of the whole occurrence had lain in her own self-consciousness. If she ignored his note it would give undue importance to a trivial ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... He looked at the smiling face of John Jennings and the tearful eyes of Mrs. Jennings, who had returned with Lyman. But his heart hardened again as he caught sight of Lime looking in at him. His absurd pride would not let him relent. Lime ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... "Somewhat absurd, I will admit," said Mr. Dapper, bowing. "One reverend doctor was not sufficient," he continued, "to look after the education of the prince, and so my Lord Bishop Hayter of Norwich was associated with Doctor Ayscough. Then the Old Harry ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... Italian, and pondered. A sudden idea flashed upon his brain. For the first instant it struck him as too absurd ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... Protestant, which within their own territories had exercised unquestioned a right of reformation, and the abuse which the Estates of Styria made of their religious liberties, would serve as a justification of this violent procedure. Under the shelter of an absurd positive law, those of equity and prudence might, it was thought, be safely despised. In the execution of these unrighteous designs, Ferdinand did, it must be owned, display no common courage and perseverance. Without tumult, and we may add, without cruelty, he suppressed ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... much the serious manner in which this unit of shear in steel is written in specifications and building codes for reinforced concrete work (it does not mean anything in specifications for steelwork, because it is ignored), but it is apparent when designers soberly use these absurd units, and ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... say, as used to be said, that psychology is purely an introspective science, making use of no other sort of observation, is absurd in the face ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... had floundered despondently with endless chains, oars, paddles, duck's feet, so now Thomas and Brown in their efforts to make the railroad effective wandered in a maze of difficulties testing out such absurd and impossible ideas as cars propelled by sails and cars operated by horse treadmills. By May, 1830, however, cars on rails, running by "brigades" and drawn by horses, were in operation in America. It was only in this year that in England locomotives were used ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... "How absurd and childish he is! But he is true and able. And how glad you should be that you are able to make true friends, without an effort. Yesterday I met neighbour Fairley, and another little old Elder who keeps his chin in his collar and his eyes on the sky. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... lured into society,—he went a willing victim, with no affectation of martyrdom. The few who met him in Edinburgh drawing-rooms found him prodigal of tongue, somewhat puzzling with his wholesale enthusiasms, absurd flights of fancy, theories he had to propound, and ever ready to change like a chameleon to tone with his surroundings. The spritish, fantastic youth impressed those he encountered, even when he was one of the unfledged ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... figures of the little group of girls she led. But she, the central figure, stood out among all the rest. Fanny Brandeis, the artist, and Fanny Brandeis, the salesman, combined shrewdly to omit no telling detail. The wrong kind of feet in the wrong kind of shoes; the absurd hat; the shabby skirt—every bit of grotesquerie was there, serving to emphasize the glory of the face. Fanny Brandeis' face, as the figure grew, line by line, was a ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... use. When Mr Hope dropped in at the Greys', at two o'clock, he found the family dining. It was a fancy of Mrs Grey's to dine early on what she considered busy days. An early dinner was, with her, a specific for the despatch of business. On this day, the arrangement was rather absurd; for the great evil of the time was, that everything was done, except what could not be transacted till the evening; and the hours were actually hanging heavy on the hands of some members of the family. Morris ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... Cavendish was a great mathematician, electrician, astronomer, meteorologist, and as a chemist he was equally learned and original. He lived at a time when science was to a large extent but blank empiricism; even the philosophy of combustion was based on erroneous and absurd hypotheses, and the speculation of experimenters were wild and fantastic. He was the first to submit these speculations to crucial tests, to careful and accurate experiment; and the results which were given to ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... itself is the growth of ages; and Christian doctrine and Christian creeds have been the evolution of a still longer period. The dogmas of the churches are most manifold and conflicting. Is it not rather immodest and absurd for each church to claim infallibility for its present creed, and that wisdom died when the book of Revelation closed the Bible, or the Council of Trent or the Westminster Assembly adjourned its sitting? It seems to me that the churches ought, instead, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... subsistence. The only pursuit which his present circumstances would allow him to adopt was that which, he was inclined to believe, was likewise the most eligible. Without doubt his experience was slender, and it seemed absurd to pronounce concerning that of which he had no direct knowledge; but so it was, he could not outroot from his mind the persuasion that to plough, to sow, and to reap, were employments most befitting ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... the time of day expressed by the rising of the judges; in [Greek: D] of the Iliad, l. 86, by the dining of the woodman. When we recollect that the ancients had not the inventions that we have whereby to measure their time, we shall cease to consider the circumlocution as absurd or ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... 29. In the afternoon meet the Methodist preacher at Israel Methodist church. But I am sorry to say that instead of going into a discussion with me on baptism and other ordinances of God's house he suffered himself to run into an absurd abuse of us, as if we might be doing much harm by our close adherence to the teachings and examples of Christ and his apostles. I can pray the Lord to have mercy upon him, and to open his eyes; for I was led to believe, from what he said, that he ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... auld acquaintance had gone by, and none forgot, Bobby went up to the lodge to sit for an hour with Mistress Jeanie. There he was called "croodlin' doo"—which was altogether absurd—by the fond old woman. As neat of plumage, and as busy and talkative about small domestic matters as the robin, Bobby loved to watch the wifie stirring savory messes over the fire, watering her posies, cleaning the fluttering skylark's cage, or just sitting by the hearth ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... greatly. Sunday morning wore away, and still he did not reappear. But about three o'clock a ferocious and prolonged hooting outside drove us to the window, to see Poirot alighting from a car, accompanied by Japp and Summerhaye. The little man was transformed. He radiated an absurd complacency. He bowed with exaggerated ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... off to bed, thankful for once that he had been considered unworthy a second glance from those luminous brown eyes. His satisfaction, however, was short-lived. A moment later the young lady appeared at the far end of the ward, carrying an absurd little basket adorned with a large pink bow, from which ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... an interesting drill. Pestiferous little man disturbed nature, and it all seemed so absurd out there on those quiet gray hills. It made me feel, as I slowed down and gazed at the vastness of things, like a superior sort of bug. In the middle distance several hundred troops are of no more proportion than an old cow bawling through the hills after her wolf-eaten calf. If my mental ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... war. He had collected together a force of seven hundred of British regulars and militia and six hundred auxiliary Indians. And he very coolly determined upon obtaining the surrender of His Excellency, General Hull, and his whole force. Knowing from his absurd proclamation, how much in dread he stood of the Indians, General Brocke intimated that if an attack were made, the Indians would be beyond his control; that if Detroit were instantly surrendered, he would enter into conditions such as would satisfy the most scrupulous sense ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... of the advocates of the ointment, he says, "Lastly, it will cure a beast as well as a man, which I like best of all the rest, because it subjecteth the matter to an easy trial." It is worth remembering, that more than two hundred years ago, when an absurd and fantastic remedy was asserted to possess wonderful power, and when sensible persons ascribed its pretended influence to imagination, it was boldly answered that the cure took place when the wounded party did not know of the application made to the weapon, and even when a brute ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... convey the satire of his reply. The absurdity of placing Horace in the court of a Norman king is the result. But Dekker's play is not without its palpable hits at the arrogance, the literary pride, and self-righteousness of Jonson-Horace, whose "ningle" or pal, the absurd Asinius Bubo, has recently been shown to figure forth, in all likelihood, Jonson's friend, the poet Drayton. Slight and hastily adapted as is "Satiromastix," especially in a comparison with the better wrought and ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... of mind is quite safe. Mr. Pond is right, of course...." And then, thinking that this cool distance was rather absurd under the circumstances, she added in a friendlier way: "But why aren't you the Director here, instead of Mr. Pond? I should think you would be, since it's ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the spirit of modesty. There are those who are inclined to sneer at the Trinitarian; those to whom the doctrine appears merely a contradiction—a puzzle—an entangled, labyrinthine enigma, in which there is no meaning whatever. But let all such remember, that though the doctrine may appear to them absurd, because they have not the proper conception of it, some of the profoundest thinkers, and some of the holiest spirits among mankind, have believed in this doctrine—have clung to it as a matter of life or death. Let ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... shut herself up and speedily die of grief. He makes such vows as most men would make under such circumstances; he presses her hands ardently to his lips, bedews them with his tears, and moves the whole company to sympathy with his own agitation. The scene is absurd enough, or seems so to us dull people of phlegmatic habit. Yet Diderot, even for us, redeems it by the fine remark: "'Tis the effect of what is good and virtuous to leave a large assembly with only one thought and one soul. How all respect one another, love one another in such moments! For instance, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the history of the war in this country and its social and political effects might have been something much finer, much cleaner and more noble if only the weapons of finance had been more boldly and wisely used. It is not a good thing to indulge in high-falutin' on this subject. It is absurd to suppose that the war suddenly turned us all into plaster saints at the beginning, and that we might have continued so to the end if the State had dealt with our money in a proper way. But without setting up any such idealistic arguments as these, looking ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... of the case, to minimize the rebellious language, the violent acts of the colonists, and to make England responsible for the war because a body of troops were sent to seize cannon and military stores intended to be used against them are so absurd, as well as so untrue, that it is astonishing how wide a ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... cries of various encouragement and consternation. Miss Trinder followed, silent and indomitable, at the heel of the hunt, and the released puppy, who had also harked in, could be heard throwing his tongue in the dusky shrubbery ahead of us. It was all exasperatingly absurd, as things seem to have a habit of being in Ireland. I never felt more like a fool in my life, and the bitterest part of it was that it was all I could do to keep ahead of Bridgie. As for the filly, she waited till we got near her, and then she jumped a five-foot coped wall into the road, ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the floor in a pet at the idea of being asked to play such a childish game; but though he tried hard to enjoy his favourite book, and not to listen to their mirth, when Lizzie purposely made such absurd mistakes, he was compelled at last to join in the laughter, and then in the game itself. Afterwards they played a game at bagatelle, but it took all their patience to stand Herbert's whims and tricks. He did not interfere with Lizzie, for she was on his side, but when Caroline and Charles were going ...
— Carry's Rose - or, the Magic of Kindness. A Tale for the Young • Mrs. George Cupples
... to absurd lengths in their skepticism, some of them even saying that they asserted nothing, not even that they asserted nothing. They ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... another thing which he tells me—vexed, if amused a little by the absurdity of it. I mean that absurd affair of the 'Autography'—now isn't it absurd? And for neither you nor George to have the chivalry of tearing out that letter of mine, which was absurd too in its way, and which, knowing less of the world than I know now, I wrote as if writing ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... many of them so vague and unintelligible, that it has been a work of much difficulty to weave them into one continuous narrative, and to shape them into a plot sufficiently interesting for our purpose. The name and character of "Noman" are still the subject of many an absurd and marvellous story among the country ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... obtain. If the perception of rhythm in a series of impressions were dependent on intellectual analysis and discrimination, the existence of such temporal limits as are actually found would be inconceivable and absurd. So long as the perception of the uniformity or proportion of time-relations were possible, together with the discrimination of the regular recurrence in the series of points of accentuation, the perception ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... hunting that nobody at home could get a word out of him. Four days a week he hunted, and very good sport he had; and the other two he went to the bench and the board of guardians, and very good justice he did; and, when he got home in time, he dined at five; for he hated this absurd new fashion of dining at eight in the hunting season, which forces a man to make interest with the footman for cold beef and beer as soon as he comes in, and so spoil his appetite, and then sleep in an arm-chair in his bedroom, all stiff and tired, for two or three ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... long-armed, stooping and altogether incongruous. His entrance was greeted by a general but pretty friendly neighing. He was made to sit down at the table, was helped to vodka and sausage. He, for his part, sent a tramp he knew after beer, and, glass in hand, delivered three absurd speeches: one about the self-determination of Ukraine; another about the goodness of Little Russian sausage, in connection with the beauty and domesticity of the women of Little Russia; and the third, for some reason, about trade ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... as to the beauty of nature and the beauty of geometry, like the others analogous of the historically beautiful and of human beauty, seem less absurd in the Aesthetic of the sympathetic, which means, at bottom, by the words "aesthetic beauty" the representation of what is pleasing. But the pretension to determine scientifically what are the sympathetic contents, and what are the irremediably antipathetic, is ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... "This is absurd!" she exclaimed. "You imagine these grievances, Mary Louise, and I cannot permit you to attack the school and your fellow boarders in so reckless a manner. You shall not stir one step from this school! I forbid you, positively, ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... 4: Since Christ said at the very outset of the preaching of the Gospel: "The kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt. 4:17), it is most absurd to say that the Gospel of Christ is not the Gospel of the kingdom. But the preaching of the Gospel of Christ may be understood in two ways. First, as denoting the spreading abroad of the knowledge of Christ: and thus the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... as though there could be no to-morrow, and she would never meet him again in this world. This meeting had had a peculiar significance—the flouncy, painted dress, the plans she had made to meet him for once as a woman. Shivering, and in absurd anguish she ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... chimney, or sputters out for want of feeding. And then—and then it is Chloe, in the dark, stark awake, and Strephon snoring unheeding; or vice versa, 'tis poor Strephon that has married a heartless jilt, and awoke out of that absurd vision of conjugal felicity, which was to last for ever, and is over like any other dream. One and other has made his bed, and so must lie in it, until that final day when life ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... case, and not by the rule of abstract rights. Under some circumstances it might be requisite to confine the legislative power to a single individual; under others to the hands of a few; and under others to commit it to the whole community. It would be absurd to maintain, on the ground of the natural equality of men, that a horde of ignorant and vicious savages, should be organized as a pure democracy, if experience taught that such a form of government was destructive to themselves and others. ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... she has: and yet she lives on from day to day, wearying herself with little Claude, and stitching away, as though she cared for nothing beyond. Wouldn't she enjoy being rich, and sending things to her family! Why, the delight she had over that common grey plaid that she sent to her aunt was quite absurd—and quite touching too. It cost her two months' wages at the very least, but she did not seem to think of that. The only thing that marred her happiness at all that day was the want of a few pence that would have ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... the loss of character resulting from the public persistence in an opinion privately abandoned, not only by considering carefully every change in their own conclusions, but by a delay, which often seems cowardly and absurd, in the public expression of their thoughts upon all questions except those which are ripe for immediate action. The written or reported word remains, and becomes part of that entity outside himself which the stateman is always building ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... it is wonderful that he preserved his power for eighteen years. He must have had great tact and ability to have reigned so long amid the factions which divided France, and which made a throne surrounded with republican institutions at that time absurd and impossible. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... number of wax tapers, were exposed to the adoration of the soldiers. While each of these was, according to custom, giving proofs of his devotion by an endless repetition of crossings and genuflections, the priests were addressing them with fanatical exhortations, which would appear barbarous and absurd to ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... enough at the present time to refer to petroleum as an indispensable commodity. At the beginning of the Civil War, however, any such description would have been absurd. Though petroleum was not unknown, millions of American households were still burning candles, whale oil, and other illuminants. Not until 1859 did our ancestors realize that, concealed in the rocky of western Pennsylvania, lay ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... I observe any instance of folly, any queer habit, any absurd illusion, straightway to look for something of the same type in myself, feeling sure that amid all differences there will be a certain correspondence; just as there is more or less correspondence in the natural history even of continents widely apart, and of islands in opposite zones. No doubt ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... put that absurd French de before his name; and why were my father and he not good friends; and is he married; and has he ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... antiquity, Carneades, was accustomed to take copious doses of white hellebore, a great aperient, as a preparation to refute the dogmas of the stoics. "The thing that gives me the highest spirits (it seems absurd, but true) is a dose of salts; but one can't take them like champagne," said Lord Byron. Dryden's practice was neither whimsical nor peculiar to the poet; he was of a full habit, and, no doubt, had often found by experience the beneficial effects without being aware ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the palatability of many foods when cooked with them. It is surely as unfair to decry the mushroom on account of its low nutritive value, as it is wrong to attribute to it qualities which are nothing short of absurd in view of its composition. In some respects its place as a food is not unlike that of the oyster, celery, berries, and other delicacies. Worked out on the basis of nutritive value alone they would all ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... obscures the dangers against which Militarism is an insurance. Now Militarism is not in itself a desirable thing, and the developments and accidents of it upon the Continent of Europe are often not only irksome and absurd but also irreconcilable with the existence of a healthy feeling of self-respect in the non-military sections of the community, who are taught to regard themselves as an inferior caste; but with all its shortcomings it promotes ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... a tint of embarrassment came into her cheeks: "It may seem absurd to you; it seems so to me, at times—what I am going to say to ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... Galissonniere, Admiral of France, who fought the well-known action off Mahon, in the month of June, 1756, with Admiral Byng, who, in consequence of his conduct on that occasion, was brought to a court martial and shot. The French writers make the following absurd remark, as to the cause of his fate: "Les Anglais, furieux d'avoir ete vaincus par un Amiral Francois, firent fusiller l'Amiral Byng". It is now well known that he was sacrificed ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... a more productive element for men to work in than the land? No, that was absurd: the land, in the nature ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... distinctions. The abuses of dominion made the appropriate title of kings odious; the title of a magistrate, who had the care of the public granaries of corn, at length was applied to a wretched flatterer for a dinner; and absurd philosophers occasioned a mere denomination to become a by-name. To employ such terms in their primitive sense would now confuse all ideas; yet there is an affectation of erudition which has frequently revived terms sanctioned by antiquity. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Could my voice have weight in deciding on the names to be given to these new children of the sun, I would call them by the names of their respective discoverers, Piazzi, Gibers and Harding, instead of the senseless and absurd appellations of Ceres, Pallas and Juno. The former method would at least assist us in preserving the history of science; the latter will only tend farther to confuse a very ancient mythology which ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... ever have imagined that a chit of a thing like you, Dorothy Glenn, would have the impudence to put in your oar, or that you ever thought of lovers, or marrying, and you only sixteen a day or so ago?" cried one. "It's absurd!" ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... in this absurd interpretation; but from this moment it became evident that Spain would sooner or later be obliged to render a strict account of the warlike intentions which she had suddenly evinced in 1806; this, without justifying the events of ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... out of his book. This being done, he commanded one of the damsels to gird on his sword, which she did with much grace and cleverness. And it was with difficulty that they all kept from laughing during this absurd ceremony, but what they had already seen of Don Quixote's fury made them careful not to annoy him even ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... in my life, saw anything at once so ridiculous, and so unpleasant, as this sight—ridiculous in the absurd incidents inseparable from it; and unpleasant in its senseless and unmeaning degradation. There are two steps to begin with, and then a rather broad landing. The more rigid climbers went along this landing ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... smile he put his lips to the spot where she had drunk and drained the last drop. "That's enough for me!" he said, and they laughed self-consciously. His homage seemed to say that thus through life he would be content with what she left him to drink,—absurd fancy, but at this moment altogether delightful.... Later she rested, pillowing her head on his shoulder, covered by his coat, while the trap jolted on through the woods between high hills. Now and ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... whom he was introduced was Mrs. Dillingham, the lady who stood nearest to him—so near that the hand flourish seemed absurd even to him, and half died in the impulse to make it. Mrs. Dillingham, in her black and her magnificent diamonds, went down almost upon the floor in the demonstration of her admiring and reverential courtesy, and pronounced the ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... in her orbit she is a good deal nearer to the sun at one time than another. Would you be surprised to hear that she is nearer in our winter and further away in our summer? Yet that is the case. And for the first moment it seems absurd; for what then makes the summer hotter than the winter? That is due to an altogether different cause; it depends on the position of the earth's axis. If that axis were quite straight up and down in reference ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... were popping everywhere. The club house was dressed in bright-colored bunting from veranda rail to ridge pole. Ladies strolled about beneath their parasols with correctly dressed yachtsmen, asking all sorts of absurd questions about the various boats that lay ready to take part in the various events. It was the day of the Hampton Yacht ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... collapse, and have to be sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude for results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is so apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who should do the same work ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... remains absurd: for the second clause but repeats the first without adding one jot. For if you care not at all whether you win or lose, you must be entirely indifferent to the results of the game. So why not say 'I was careless if I won or lost,' and have done ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... what his retort is, but you take my point. It is manifestly absurd to drag the psychological element into this cold-blooded mathematical pursuit. After all that England has done and come through in the last few years, is a man in baggy knickerbockers, with tufts on the ends of his garters, going to be daunted and foiled just because a man in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... gigantic plagiarism from the past. Why plagiarize with toil the toils of the past, when all that is good in them lives, necessarily and of its own tendency, in the winged and growing spirit of man? The stream flows in a channel, and is colored by all the ores of its banks, but it would be absurd for it to attempt to take the channel up and carry it along with itself out into the sea. Why should the tinted water of life attempt to carry along with it not only the tint, but also the bank, ages back, from which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Browne no inexorably severe guide to truth; he will not too sternly reject the amusing because it happens to be slightly improbable, or doubt an authority because he sometimes sanctions a mass of absurd fables.' So he more or less believed in the griffin, the phoenix, and the dragon: he knew that the elephant had no joints, and was caught by cutting down the tree against which he leant in sleep; that the pelican pierced its breast for the good of its young; that ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... Mississippi Company. John Law, already a wealthy and prosperous banker, proposed to increase the paper currency, and supersede the use of gold and silver. His offer was accepted, and his bank became a royal one, its bills going at once into circulation. Now, as the most absurd delusions existed as to the wealth of Louisiana, and the most boundless faith was placed in Law's financiering; and as only Law's bills could purchase shares in the Company which was to make everybody's fortune,—gold and silver flowed to his bank. The shares of the Company continued to rise in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... as Madonna. She had refused to touch the Bambino—sometimes petulantly, sometimes in silent scorn. The tiny figure lay always on the studio floor, dusty and disarranged. The artist picked it up. It was an absurd little wooden face in the lace cap. He straightened the velvet mantle and smoothed the crumpled dress. He stepped to the model-stand and placed the tiny figure in the draped chair. It rested stiffly ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... and Washington to consult with his friends about the great war, to urge active participation in it by the United States, and to offer to the proper authorities, his services as a military expert and commander, his daughter protested vigorously. It was absurd, she declared, for him, at his age, to think of doing anything of the kind; utterly preposterous and absurd. But he would not listen to her. His mind was made up, and she was entirely unable to divert ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... cousins, the manufacturers, or remaining idly in the cafes. He looked with interest on the human current passing through the Ramblas in which were mingled the natives of the country and the picturesque and absurd medley brought ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... first place, the supposed origin of sin in heaven seems to me so absurd as to be utterly unthinkable. This idea of war in heaven, rebellion against God, smacks too much of the Old World traditions, of the mythologies of Greece and Rome and of other peoples. Jupiter could dethrone his father, the god Saturn, because Saturn was not almighty and all-wise. These ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... accustomed grooves. A lady does not willingly get out of her bedroom-window with nothing on but her nightgown; but when her house is on fire she is very thankful for an opportunity of doing so. It is not long since the "habeas corpus" was suspended in parts of Ireland, and absurd arrests were made almost daily when that suspension first took effect. It was grievous that there should be necessity for such a step; and it is very grievous now that such necessity should be felt in the Northern States. But ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... evening my name was entered as an honorary member of the Maryland Club. It would be absurd to compare this institution with the palaces of our own metropolis; but, in all respects, it may fairly rank with the best class of yacht clubs. You find there, besides the ordinary writing and reading accommodation, a pleasant lounge ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... he was set upon the absurd notion he had conceived that the lady had gone westward, and I felt it my duty to warn the Earl not ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... incorrect; but her simple statement is at least supported by minute and feasible details, and, unless rebutted by positive facts, will certainly command credence from impartial minds more readily than his angry accusation, which has something absurd and improbable in its very front. Moreover, is it not absurd to term the assertion of her natural rights by a slave,—even supposing her to have been kindly dealt with by her "owners," and treated in every respect the reverse of what Mary affirms to have ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... something, I dare say, very whimsical about it, probably very absurd, judged at least by the canons of fashion, and old Cousin Monica Knollys, in whose eye the London fashions were always fresh, was palpably struck by it as if it had been some enormity against anatomy, for she certainly laughed very heartily; indeed, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... and children would be hurriedly hidden, as if from fear. These taunts were at first disregarded. But there came a time when living children were brought to the mission for sale as food; whereupon the mission made formal complaint in the yamen, and the Fu at once issued a proclamation checking the absurd tales about the foreigners, and ordering the citizens, under many pains and penalties, to treat the foreigners with respect. There has been no trouble since, and, as we walked through the crowded ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... well, beforehand you design, At vast expense, for me to build a shrine? Friends, 'tis absurd! to no such outlay go; Leave to the great the pomp and pride of woe. Take what for marble or for brass would pay— For a dead beggar garb by far too gay— And buy life-stirring wine on my behalf: The money for my tomb right gayly let ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... instructed to prepare certain text-books by Cardinal Paleotti. These were an Ecclesiastical History, a treatise on the Hebrew Commonwealth, and an edition of Sulpicius Severus. The MSS. were returned to him, accused of unsound doctrine, and scrawled over with such remarks as 'false,' 'absurd.'[125] ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... manners than Pompeo Stromboli. Van Torp might have been on his very best behaviour that morning, or at any of her previous chance meetings with him; sooner or later she would have felt that same absurd and unreasoning fear of him, and would have found it very hard not to turn and make her escape. His face was so stony and his eyes were so aggressive; he was always like something dreadful that was ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... course of his life, and that any one who listens to him through politeness would prefer toothache or ear-ache to his conversation? Does he consider the great uneasiness which ensues, when the company has discovered a man to be an extremely absurd person, at the same time that it is absolutely impossible to convey by words or manner the most distant suspicion of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... its change, which now seemed to have settled into permanency. Of course it was only the ridiculous fashion of the world he once knew, but he could not free himself of the fancy that Priscilla was more her real self in the shabby trappings than she had ever been in the absurd costumes of the In-Place. ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... with mutterings of sympathy mingled with astonishment, but out of earshot of Ahmed, all said the merchant must have been mad to draw up so absurd a testament. Ahmed himself could hardly realize the great blow that had befallen him. He consulted with his father's friend and the rabbi, but, although they re-read the document many times, they could find no fault or ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... into the sphere of the so-called higher professions, as for instance, the higher departments of instruction and of the civil service, the medical or legal careers, and the pursuit of the natural sciences. The most laughable and absurd objections are fetched up, and are defended with the air of "learning." Gentlemen, who pass for learned, appeal, in this as in so many other things, to science in order to defend the most absurd and untenable propositions. Their chief trump card is that woman is inferior to man in mental powers ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... out of this difficulty is to go in for separation between internal and external—subject and object—when we find this convenient, and unity between the same when we find unity convenient. This is illogical, but extremes are alone logical, and they are always absurd, the mean is alone practicable and it is always illogical. It is faith and not logic which is the supreme arbiter. They say all roads lead to Rome, and all philosophies that I have ever seen lead ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... out in all that storm on your Caesar," he went on, changing the subject quickly from the man whom he knew bore him an absurd animosity. "A pretty great horse, Caesar. He's looking none the worse for fetching that whisky either. Guess the boys'll be getting over their drunk by now. And it's probably done 'em a heap of good. You did right to encourage ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, against the day of wrath which they see approaching. The idea that Confederate States notes are improving in value, when every commodity, even wood and coal, daily increases in price, is very absurd! ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... their blood atingle. And in a very few moments there was, seeming absurd and impossible, a repetition of the vision which had so startled them: a black form at the head of the cliffs, the field of star-strewn sky back of it limning it into vivid distinctness—the ebon bulk of a steer moving straight out from the top of the precipice, ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... too, chuckled at his own wit, but turned suddenly grave the next moment, and moralized. He pronounced it desirable, for the interests of mankind, that a great and rising singer should not love out of the business; outsiders were wrong-headed and absurd, and did not understand the true artist. However, having discoursed for some time in this strain, he began to fear it might be unpalatable to her; so he stopped abruptly, and said, "But there—what is done is done. We must make the best of it; and you mustn't think I meant to run him down. He loves ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... drifting in silence before the gale, the thought suddenly occurred to Leo, "How strange it is that I, who am a Christian—in name at least—should feel as if it were absurd to pray for God's help at such a time as this! Surely He who made me and these Eskimos is capable of guarding us? The very least we can do is to ask Him ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... garden, on a seat which, at the distance, appeared to be covered with silk or satin, and through the railing looked upon the assembly before him, who formed a semicircle in front of him. Nothing could be more absurd and grotesque than the figures who formed this court. Large stomachs and large heads are indispensable for those who serve the court of Bornou, and those who unfortunately possess not the former by nature, make up the deficiency with wadding. A little to our left, ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... Behind one of them sits a wounded, and hatless, and handcuffed captive, his pockets bulging with money. Nobody suspects anything, no one calls the attention of a magistrate to this extraordinary demarche! It is too absurd! ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... man who, by the absurd law of hereditary descent, was the destined heir to the throne of more than twenty millions of people. The king was anxious to obtain for his son a bride whose alliance would strengthen him against his enemies. With that policy alone influencing him, he applied for the hand of ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... the dancing plague, or St. Vitus' dance,[60] in the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their confused and absurd behavior, and then by their constantly following the swarms of dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the streets, accompanied by musicians playing on bagpipes, and by innumerable spectators attracted by curiosity, to which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... environments of Torbali are in a most wretched condition; to escape sprained ankles it is necessary to walk with a great deal of caution, and the idea of bicycling through them is simply absurd. Nevertheless the populace turns out in high glee, and their expectations run riot as I relieve the kahvay-jee of his faithful vigil and bring forth my wheel. They want me to bin in their stuffy little bazaar, crowded with people and donkeys; mere alley-ways with scarcely a twenty yard stretch ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... following sentence is from Newman: from the point of view of an ardent churchman, it may be a climax; but from the point of view of the general reader who considers the whole greater than any of its parts, in spite of all the sense preceding the final phrase, that is absurd and disappointing nonsense. ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... traditions and superstitions of the Hungarian Gypsies with regard to people suffering from dementia set me thinking; and at last I came to the conclusion that if I really believed Winifred to have taken shelter among the Romanies, it would be absurd not to follow up a band like these Hungarians. Accordingly I changed my course, and followed them up. On coming upon them in a famous English camping-place I found the Lovells and the Boswells. Rhona, dressed in gorgeous attire, evidently purchased at some second-hand ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... which was the only paper that put the news in half a column of ordinary type, took a judicial attitude, called upon the city authorities to tear down the posters, and hinted that "this absurd person, Cosmo Versal, who disgraces a once honored name with his childish attempt to create a sensation that may cause untold harm among the ignorant masses," had laid himself open to ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... to guide a man through these streights.'[362] So much in fact Bentham might learn from Hume; and to defend upon any other ground the congeries of traditional arrangements which passed for the British Constitution was obviously absurd. It was in this warfare against the shifting and ambiguous doctrines of Blackstone that Bentham first showed the superiority of his own method: for, as between the two, Bentham's position is at least ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... coffer under his cot, and Kim shut away Mahbub's pistol, the oilskin packet of letters, and the locked books and diaries, with a groan of relief. For some absurd reason their weight on his shoulders was nothing to their weight on his poor mind. His neck ached under ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... lock-step like a gang of convicts. He had indulged in forty- cent opera, leaning over the iron railing of the top row of the Academy of Music, and had finished the evening at Pfaff's, drinking beer and munching hardtack and pickles, and had laughed and sung in a dozen other equally absurd escapades. And yet it was as plain as daylight to Fred that Oliver's heart was no longer centred in the ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... doubtless would like to see them," said the minister; at this time a man of about thirty years of age. He was a rather comely and intelligent looking man, and Master Raymond wondered that one who appeared so intellectual, should be the victim of such absurd hallucinations. ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... have to be faced. What was certain was that this was the time for Belarab to open the great gate and let his men go out, display his power, sweep through the further end of the Settlement, destroy Tengga's defences, do away once for all with the absurd rivalry of that intriguing amateur boat-builder. Lingard turned eagerly toward Belarab but saw the Chief busy looking across the lagoon through a long glass resting on the shoulder of a stooping slave. He was motionless like a carving. Suddenly he let go the long glass which some ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... makes such vows as most men would make under such circumstances; he presses her hands ardently to his lips, bedews them with his tears, and moves the whole company to sympathy with his own agitation. The scene is absurd enough, or seems so to us dull people of phlegmatic habit. Yet Diderot, even for us, redeems it by the fine remark: "'Tis the effect of what is good and virtuous to leave a large assembly with only one thought and one soul. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... thousand years in the attempt to impose the prohibition of marriage on its priesthood,—an educated and trained body of men, who had every spiritual and worldly motive to accept the prohibition, and were, moreover, brought up to regard asceticism as the best ideal in life,[453]—we may realize how absurd it is to attempt to gain the same end by mere casual prohibitions issued to untrained people with no motives to obey such prohibitions, and no ideals ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... destroyed another industry nearly as remote from the proper subject of inquiry as either of these. These gentlemen concluded that shipbuilding was becoming extinct, because the Confederate cruisers had destroyed many of our ships—a reason ridiculously absurd, in view of the corollary that the very destruction of those vessels should have stimulated reproduction. Since that abortive attempt to steal bounties from the Treasury for the benefit of a favored class of mechanics, Government, occupied with matters deemed of greater importance, has ...
— Free Ships: The Restoration of the American Carrying Trade • John Codman
... reproduction opposite page 176. Veronese is not a great favourite of mine; but there is a blandness and aristocratic ease and mastery here that are irresistible. As an illustration of scripture it is of course absurd; but in Venice (whose Doges, as we have seen, had so little humour that they could commission pictures in which they were represented on intimate terms with the Holy Family) one is accustomed to that. As a fine massive arrangement of men, ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... horse-yacht. If necessary it could be sworn to before a notary public. But I am perfectly sure that you might read this page through without skipping a word, and if you had never seen the creature with your own eyes, you would have no idea how absurd it looks and ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... or St. Vitus' dance,[60] in the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their confused and absurd behavior, and then by their constantly following the swarms of dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the streets, accompanied by musicians playing on bagpipes, and by innumerable spectators attracted by curiosity, to which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... in any walk in life. But in polite society, fashionable society, these things occur. Oftener in New York than in Boston, and oftener in London and Paris than in New York. Indeed, we may sneer, as we often do, at the primitive customs of the lowly, and at their absurd phrase of "keeping company." It makes a delightful jest. But beneath it is a greater regard for the rights of a man or woman in love than one is apt to find higher in the ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... said, smiling, and extending her hand to the earl: "You are right. It would be a crime to suspect her; and I am a fool. Forgive me, Seymour, forgive my absurd and childish anger; and I promise you in return to betray our secret to no one, not ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... and sought his passage. The minister but for curiosity and the dread of seeming absurd would have stopped his ears and refused to listen. He was a man of not merely dry or stale, but of deadly doctrines. He would have a man love Christ for protecting him from God, not for leading him to God in whom alone is bliss, out of whom all is darkness and misery. He ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... try upon him the effect of kindness and mild persuasion. He had one very annoying habit, and that was he would very seldom give a satisfactory answer if suddenly asked a direct question, and often his reply would be very absurd, sometimes bordering on downright impudence. The master noticed one afternoon, after calling the boys from their play at recess, that Ned had not entered the school-room with the others. Stepping to the door, ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... don't know," says she. "You see, although she knows perfectly well I've heard all about it, Auntie makes a deep mystery of everything connected with this cruise. It's that absurd Captain Killam who puts her ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... author continues, 'the passage 'originally formed part of the text, it is absurd to affirm that it is any proof of the use or existence of the first Gospel.' 'Absurd' is under the circumstances a rather strong word to use; but, granting that it would have been even 'absurd' to allege this passage, if ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... enough. Who, that is himself at all above the condition of an oyster, will undertake to say, deliberately and upon reflection, that it is not? So long as we have that one fact in our possession, it is absurd, it is simply disgraceful, to complain of any deficiency in this person's biography. There is enough of it and to spare. With that fact in our possession, we ought to have been able to dispense long ago with some, at least, of those details that we have of it. The only fault to be found with the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the silent house; the overalls still showed their pristine folds, the shirt was of good quality and well-cut. The ends of a narrow red-silk four-in-hand swung free. He was clean-shaven save for an absurd little mustache so fair as to be almost indistinguishable. His blond hair was brushed back unparted from his forehead. Another swift survey of the slight figure disclosed a pair of patent-leather pumps. His socks, revealed at the ankles, were scarlet. Dan was unfamiliar with the menage of such ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... puckered her brows and pursed up her mouth as she thought, while he looked on and decided that her expression was most adorable. "'It don't do to be hasty.' Change 'don't' to 'do not,' and it reads, 'It do not do to be hasty,' which is perfectly absurd." ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... too, a foreigner is often asked to perform absurd, laughable, or impossible cures. One man wants to be made clever, another to be made fat, another to be cured of insanity, another of tobacco, another of whisky, another of hunger, another of tea; another wants to be made strong, so as to conquer in gymnastic exercises; most men ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... she replied, smiling in return; "but it becomes very monotonous. It is the same old round, you know, only that just now it bows a little lower than formerly, while it mingles condolences and congratulations in the most absurd manner. One hears, 'Such a dreadful affair! so shocking, don't you know!' and 'Such delightful fortune! I quite envy you, my dear!' all in the same breath. I am only awaiting what society will say when the real facts ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... by Jove!" he exclaimed in a beautiful English accent, and then started laughing as only absurd ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... the East India Declaratory Act, and there was a great muster of the forces of Fox, Lord North, Lord Lansdowne, and of the refractory directors, with every appearance that some great exertion was to be made. Erskine made the most absurd speech imaginable: and after having spoke for near three hours, he was taken ill, and obliged to leave the bar. Rous was then heard; and when he had finished, Erskine (who had dined in the coffee-room with the Prince of Wales, and been well primed with ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... pair at the time, and they told me absurd and various tales about dark figures wandering along the corridors and bending over them in bed at night, whispering; but their chief trouble was a continuous ringing of bells about ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... "All very absurd, you will agree, and you may get some inkling as to my state of mind while I walked over those same dark hills. I seemed a part of that darkness. I looked up to the stars. They were merely like the pages of a book. I ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... This absurd story evidently belongs to the same class with the Seven cities formerly mentioned, and the El Dorado and Welsh colony, which will both occur in the sequel of this work. Though not exactly connected in point of time with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... all whipped blocks," he went on, his absurd smile still persisting. "You're a cracker jack, you're a smart aleck. You've done to me what the fire did to the furnishing shack. You've dealt me one in the spaghetti joint. Oh, I gotta hand it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... mean it, dear; it's only for fun; and it would be so absurd if we should leave Francesca over here as the presiding genius of an ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... swarming at the window of the telegraph-office, and sending home cablegrams to announce their safe arrival; March could not forbear cabling to his son, though he felt it absurd. There was a great deal of talking, but no laughing, except among the Americans, and the girls behind the bar who tried to understand, what they wanted, and then served them with what they chose for them. Otherwise the Germans, though voluble, were unsmiling, and here on the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... responsibility toward my father's property," said Coryston, calmly. "And I intend to settle down upon it, and try and drum a few sound ideas into the minds of our farmers and laborers. Owing to my absurd title I can't stand for our parliamentary division—but I shall look out for somebody who suits me, and run him. You'll find me a nuisance, mother, I'm afraid. But you've done your best for your principles. Don't quarrel with me ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... much out of sorts and footsore. Then an iron-grey colt, called Diaway, having been very poor and miserable when first purchased, but he was a splendid horse. Then came the sideways-going old crab, Terrible Billy. He was always getting into the most absurd predicaments—poor old creature; got down our throats at last!—falling into holes, and up and down slopes, going at them sideways, without the slightest confidence in himself, or apparent fear of consequences; but the old thing always did his work well enough. Blackie next, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... husband, Carrol," she went on rapidly. "I knew you didn't understand it. I ought to have written you about it. I thought I would come and tell you before you did anything absurd. We were married as soon as he heard that his wife ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... this to the excited burghers, but they only sneered at me for my trouble, until one of their own doctors coming along had a look at the corpse, and promptly verified my statements. That calmed them considerably, and they looked at the thing in cooler blood, and soon saw that it was really absurd to put the blame of the man's death on the shoulders of the Lancers, though they stoutly maintained that our cavalry were at times guilty of such monstrous conduct. I have often heard them solemnly swear never to give a Lancer a chance to surrender ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... temporal, and the Representatives freely chosen by the constituent bodies of the realm were met together, there was the essence of a Parliament. Such a Parliament was now in being; and what could be more absurd than to dissolve it at a conjuncture when every hour was precious, when numerous important subjects required immediate legislation, and when dangers, only to be averted by the combined efforts of King, Lords, and Commons, menaced the State? A Jacobite indeed might consistently refuse to recognise ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you under an absurd pretext, on an irregularity in the registry of death, let us say—no matter, I will maintain my child is not dead. As I have the greatest interest in having it believed that she still lives, although lost, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... quite clearly, Austria was backed by Germany. Why this change in German policy? So far as the Kaiser himself is concerned, there can be little doubt that a main cause was the horror he felt at the assassination of the Archduke. The absurd system of autocracy gives to the emotional reactions of an individual a preposterous weight in determining world-policy; and the almost insane feeling of the Kaiser about the sanctity of crowned heads was no doubt a main reason why Germany backed Austria in sending her ultimatum ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... preposterous the very idea is! I do not boast or brag, but it is common knowledge that my father was the richest man in the city, in this entire part of the country, in fact. The thought of such a thing is absurd. Who could have attempted to perpetrate such a senseless hoax, a ridiculous insult to your intelligence ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... was proud of himself in the costume of a groom, partly because he was timid, he desired to get away, to go back to the stables. He walked up to the mirrors as if about to challenge them, peering in. He knew he would look absurd, and then knew, with shame, that he looked splendidly better than most of the gentlemen that Freda Buckler knew. He hated himself. A man who had grown out of the city's ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... there was relief in her laugh. "How absurd you are, Bobby!" she said, kindly. "But you are wrong. My husband is here—I ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... in the world. I'm too absurd to be so upset"—Mr. Longdon smiled through his tears—"but if you had known Lady Julia you'd understand. It's SHE again, as I first knew her, to the life; and not only in feature, in stature, in colour, in movement, but in every bodily mark and sign, ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... long standing. Why, we have always been like cousins—like brother and sister, I may say. He is my brother's most intimate associate and often fancies that he is entitled to the same privileges as the family. Oh, I know it is absurd, uncalled for, to tell you this; undignified even," she was almost weeping, "but it makes so much difference to me what you think of—of me." Her voice had grown very low and agitated. The misery had ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... that they take the "Great Dutch Conspiracy" at all seriously. Some people maintain that, though perhaps the Boer farmers themselves were not in it, yet their leaders were. But the farmers form the vast majority of the Boers. They are an independent and stiff-necked type; and it is as absurd to suppose that their leaders could pledge them to such vast and visionary schemes as it is to suppose that such schemes could have the slightest interest for them. As a matter of fact, what has given old Kruger his long ascendency is the way in which he ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... compromised by the imputations put forth against his principal, declared publicly that the military court which had condemned the Herr von Thalermacher, after hearing only his accuser, was a one-sided and absurd tribunal, and that it was not competent ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... did chide himself over his absurd stupidity. He should have known her better than to have entertained, for even a passing moment, a thought of her inconstancy, and that he should have so misjudged her,—her whom he himself would have selected from among ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... had expressed a wish to leave this useless piece of ordnance behind him; but, to his surprise, the Highland chiefs interposed to solicit that it might accompany their march, pleading the prejudices of their followers, who, little accustomed to artillery, attached a degree of absurd importance to this field-piece, and expected it would contribute essentially to a victory which they could only owe to their own muskets and broadswords. Two or three French artillerymen were therefore appointed to the management of this military engine, which was ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... his mind with importunate distinctness, but he dismissed it as absurd and unworthy of himself. A king would be more likely to offer to share his throne with a beggar than this girl would be to invite him to enjoy the sweet follies of love-making with her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... could make you think such a thing? What an absurd idea! You cannot imagine how kind she was to ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... Ivan was cruelly assassinated. An officer in the Russian army, named Mirovitch, conceived an absurd plan of liberating Ivan from his captivity, restoring him to the throne, and consigning Catharine II. to the dungeon the prince had so long inhabited. Mirovitch had command of the garrison at Schlusselburg, where Ivan was ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... against degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear to become sullied in my own sight—and that is a thing not without its use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends, and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's ashes, and to those of her absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And I keep grateful memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well to be able to look ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... it.—"'Tis really not bad; And yet, it is far from complete, I must add. The feathers, for, instance, how short! 'Tis absurd!" So he set to work straightway to ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... Bob in hurt tones, Mrs. Garland being all the while on tenter-hooks lest Anne should persist in her absurd refusal. ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... the fifteenth year of the reign of Amaziah, Jeroboam the son of Joash reigned over Israel in Samaria forty years. This king was guilty of contumely against God, [18] and became very wicked in worshipping of idols, and in many undertakings that were absurd and foreign. He was also the cause of ten thousand misfortunes to the people of Israel. Now one Jonah, a prophet, foretold to him that he should make war with the Syrians, and conquer their army, and enlarge the bounds of his kingdom on the northern parts to the city Hamath, and ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... government sets up a manufactory of nobles, it is as absurd as if she undertook to manufacture wise men. Her nobles ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... young people's infatuation for each other going to last? If it is to be brief and evanescent, it would be absurd for me to take a black eye. But if it is to be stable and enduring, I should be ashamed to stand in the way of it. Knowing something of Lucy's history, how long do you think her fancy for ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... had to make speeches, but instead of making a speech Bowers brought in a wonderful Christmas tree, made of split bamboos and a ski stick, with feathers tied to the end of each branch; candles, sweets, preserved fruits, and the most absurd toys of which Bill was the owner. Titus got three things which pleased him immensely, a sponge, a whistle, and a pop-gun which went off when he pressed in the butt. For the rest of the evening he went round ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... riddle. He found himself dragged into society and courted, wondered at and envied very much as if he were one of those foreign barbers who flit over here now and then with a self-conferred title of nobility and marry some rich fool's absurd daughter. Sometimes at a dinner party or a reception he would find himself the centre of interest, and feel unutterably uncomfortable in the discovery. Being obliged to say something, he would mine his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... stock; but we should be careful not to overdo the thing. If we must have gaily-decked ponderous bulls and cows at our fat cattle exhibitions, let us condemn to speedy immolation those unhappy victims to a most absurd fashion; but in the name of common sense let us leave the perpetuation of the species to individuals in a normal state, whose muscles are not replaced by fat, whose hearts are not hypertrophied, and whose lungs are capable of effectively ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... feeble as it was, displeased the first consul; not that it was any obstacle to his designs, but it kept up the habit of thinking in the nation, which he wished to stifle entirely. He put into the journals among other things, an absurd argument against the opposition. Nothing is so simple or so proper, was it there said, as an opposition in England, because the king is the enemy of the people; but in a country, where the executive government is itself named by the people, it is ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... doubtless, enacted to the jingling of morris-dancers and other profanities. These fooleries put the king into such good humour, that he was more witty in his speech than ordinary. Some of these sayings have been recorded, and amongst the rest, that well-known quibble which has been the origin of an absurd mistake, still current through the county, respecting the sirloin. The occasion, as far as we have been able to gather, was thus. Whilst he sat at meat, casting his eyes upon a noble surloin at the lower end of the table, he cried out, 'Bring hither that surloin, sirrah, for ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... belonging to him as "company," there were no more quarrels between Mike and Pierre about the leadership. J.M. could not seem to find his old formal personality for weeks after Mike's baseball had knocked it out of him, and in the meantime he submitted, meekly at first and later with an absurd readiness, to being an Indian chieftain, and the head of the fire department, and the principal of a big public school, and the colonel of a regiment, and the owner of a cotton factory, and the leader of Arctic expeditions, and all the other characters which the fertile ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... stupid pride and churlishness; and should be sick of the advantage of birth or ancestry, if this was the natural fruit of it. "For a man," said her ladyship, "to come to his nephew's house, and to suffer the mistress of it to be closetted up (as he thinks), in order to humour his absurd and brutal insolence, and to behave as he has done, is such a ridicule upon the pride of descent, that I shall ever think of it.—O Mrs. B.," said she, "what advantages have you over every one that sees you; ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... given for this month is to be prepared for either heavy rain or sharp frost, so that extreme variations of temperature may inflict the least possible injury in the garden. Let the work be ordered with reference to the weather, that there may be no 'poaching' on wet ground, or absurd conflict with frost. Accept every opportunity of wheeling out manure; and as long as the ground can be dug without waste of labour, proceed to open trenches, make drains, and mend walks, because this is the period for improving, ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... is disfigured by pedantically heavy punctuation. He carried to absurd excess the methods which his Master adopted in the 1625 edition of his Essays. It has not been thought necessary to retain ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... It is absurd to suppose that, while actually engaging the enemy, Captain Ferris would haul down his colours, to hoist them as a signal of distress, when he had other ensigns to hoist, and when there was a signal in the ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... both salt- and fresh-water products. The food of any region is characteristic of that region, and to travel along the Old Coast Road and not partake of one of the delicious fish dinners, is as absurd as it would be to omit rice from a menu in China or roast beef from ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... for my own part that I cannot claim the distinction—will bear me out that the condition of a man's mind during the painful period of waiting for news as to his wife's progress is apt to depart from the normal and make room for imaginings that in saner moments he must dismiss as absurd. There has been a great deal of discussion and not a little criticism on the part of the public as to the committee's wisdom in purchasing this picture, and I am confident you will all agree with me that we could be ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... Yet we cannot argue without thinking; nor can we either think or argue to any purpose without freedom. Therefore free-thinking, so far from being a disgrace, is a virtue, a most commendable quality. How absurd, and how cruel it is in the professors of divinity, to address the understanding of men on the subject of their belief, and to upbraid those very men who shall exercise their understanding in attending ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... inspected the promising fruit trees, and were enthusiastic over the roses. Then they wandered over to the Mall and discussed the impending changes in Boston, and said, as people nearly always do, that it would be ruined by improvements. It was sacrilegious to take away Beacon Hill. It was absurd to think of filling in the flats! Who would want to live on made ground? And where were all the people to come from to build houses on these wonderful streets? ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... signs with designs that served as the trade-mark of their products. In the show windows the packages of tobacco were heaped up like so many bricks, and monstrous unsmokable cigars, wrapped in tinfoil as if they were sausages, glitteringly displayed their absurd size; through the doors of the Hebrew shops, free of any decoration, could be seen the shelves laden with rolls of silk and velvet, or the rich silk laces hanging from the ceiling. The Hindu bazaars overflowed into the street with their exotic, polychrome ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... all other such expedients are vain and absurd. A piece of calm water always contains a picture in itself, an exquisite reflection of the objects above it. If you give the time necessary to draw these reflections, disturbing them here and there as you ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... their own business best. We were forced to accept this decision, though we could not imagine why it was that they should thus insist on trying but one at a time. The only reason that I can yet conjecture for this proceeding is, that it would have looked too absurd to arraign twenty-one, or even twelve men, all in a body, and from ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... and a woman came out, mounted their horses and rode away. We were then told to go on home with the horses. I afterwards learned that the whole trouble originated in the fact that the lady who had ridden away was a divorced woman. To present-day readers, this may appear absurd, prudish, but not so to the men and women of that day. This is not repeated here to "point a moral," but merely to "adorn a ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... those who knew Don Quixote, he said aloud, "The fact is, my good fellow, that I am tired collecting such a number of opinions, for I find that there is not one of whom I ask what I desire to know, who does not tell me that it is absurd to say that this is the pack-saddle of an ass, and not the caparison of a horse, nay, of a thoroughbred horse; so you must submit, for, in spite of you and your ass, this is a caparison and no pack-saddle, and you have stated and ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... came from the courtyard; the commandant rushed out, and missed seeing the pallor that covered Madame du Gua's face as he spoke. Hulot saw at once that the sound came from a postilion harnessing his horses to the coach, and he cast aside his suspicions, all the more because it seemed absurd to suppose that the Chouans would risk themselves in Alencon. He returned to the ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... style of life, and he must be true to it. If he enacts the part of a costermonger, he must swear and talk slang, and commit crimes, if need be, or anything suiting the character he assumes; or else the thing would be absurd, and the gentleman and costermonger would be ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... man, "DONOGHUE rides him; our leading jockey, you know." I had forgotten to look at the jockeys' names. How absurd! Of course ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... of their school-days; and these young folks took the idea that their grandfathers had been taught their letters by a Centaur, half man and half horse. Little children, not quite understanding what is said to them, often get such absurd notions into their heads, ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... catching rheumatism himself, but he risked the life of that boy by encouraging him to do such a foolish action. It was a hair-brained business altogether, sir; and I am glad you had the wisdom, Fred, to keep out of it. The idea of two lives being risked to save that of a wretched cur is too absurd; if you had offered the girl who owned it five shillings to buy another it would have ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... was physically incapable of climbing the tower, that any wounded German of whom the church was full could have seen him doing it, had the absurd charge been true. He reminded them that he had spent his whole time in nursing their men. No use! He is struck, hustled, spat upon, and dragged off to the Mairie. There he passed the night sitting on a hamper, and in the morning some one remembers ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Amelie's. When he was there he lost all self-control, and would whole-heartedly indulge his fantastic humor: he was not afraid of paradox: and he took a malicious delight in pushing his companions to the extreme consequences of their absurd and wild principles. They never knew whether he was speaking in jest or in earnest: for he always grew warm as he talked, and always in the end lost sight of the paradoxical point of view with which he had begun. The artist in him was carried away by the intoxication of the ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... transaction. This my Lady Huntingdon persuaded him to drop, and he took leave of his children the day before. He wrote two letters in the preceding week to Lord Cornwallis on some of these requests - they were cool and rational, and concluded with desiring him not to mind the absurd requests of his (Lord Ferrers's) family in his behalf. On the last morning he dressed himself in his wedding clothes, and said, he thought this, at least, as good an occasion of putting them on as that for which they were first made. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... But that absurd idea—of Santa Claus in the trenches—came into my head several times, and I wondered whether the Germans would fire a whizz-bang at him or give a burst of machine-gun fire if they caught the glint of ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... that lay upon this Coast I must observe, for the benefit of those who may come after me, that I do not believe the one 1/2 of them are laid down in my Chart; for it would be Absurd to suppose that we Could see or find them all. And the same thing may in some Measure be said of the Islands, especially between the Latitude of 20 and 22 degrees, where we saw Islands out at Sea as far as we could distinguish ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... disappointed! Did I expect this twenty years ago? Yes, we ought to save more. But we don't, so there you are! I'm bound to worry! I know I should be better if I didn't smoke so much. I know there's absolutely no sense at all in taking liqueurs. Absurd to be ruffled with her when she's in one of her moods. I don't have enough exercise. Can't be regular, somehow. Not the slightest use hoping that things will be different, because I know they won't. Queer world! Never really what you may call happy, you know. Now, if ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... there anything absurd in his aspiring in those her circumstances to win her. He was a man of good breeding, and more than agreeable manners—with a large topographical experience, and a social experience far from restricted, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... of the Holy Spirit, many passages of Scripture become meaningless and absurd. For example, we read in 1 Cor. ii. 10, "But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God." This passage sets before us the Holy Spirit, not merely as an illumination whereby we are enabled to grasp the deep things ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... un-careful face. A face it was that always had a rare union of fineness and placidness. The table stood spread in the usual place, warmth and comfort filled every corner of the room, and Fleda began to feel as if she had been in an uncomfortable dream, which was very absurd, but from which she was very glad ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... vivid picture—scenery, date, Greenwich time, and all to give an air of artistic verisimilitude—of the signing of the Peace armistice. The armistice had not been signed at the time, was not signed for some days after. But it would have been absurd to have waited, since "our special correspondent" had seen it all in advance, right down to the embrace of the Turkish delegate and the Bulgarian delegate, and knew that some of the conditions were that the Turkish commissariat was to feed the Bulgarian troops at Chatalja and the Bulgarian ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... I omit to mention, what I trust may be considered as a change belonging to religious feeling—viz., that conversation is now conducted without that accompaniment of those absurd and unmeaning oaths which were once considered an essential embellishment of polite discourse. I distinctly recollect an elderly gentleman, when describing the opinion of a refined and polished female ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... kingdoms for France. He therefore regarded now with little sympathy the aspirations after republican organisation which he had himself originally stimulated among the northern Italians. He knew, however, that the Directory had, by absurd and extravagant demands, provoked the Pope to break off the treaty of Bologna, and to raise his army to the number of 40,000,—that Naples had every disposition to back his Holiness with 30,000 soldiers, provided any reverse should befall the French ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... suburban street. She had been brought up an Independent. After my father's death she became a Baptist, from conscientious scruples. She considered the Baptists, as I do, as the only sect who thoroughly embody the Calvinistic doctrines. She held it, as I do, an absurd and impious thing for those who believe mankind to be children of the devil till they have been consciously "converted," to baptise unconscious infants and give them the sign of God's mercy on the mere chance of that mercy being ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... is evident that this idea is only the ancient hypothesis turned about. The ancients accused the individual man; Rousseau accuses the collective man: at bottom, it is always the same proposition, an absurd proposition. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... sixteen, wedded the Dauphin Francis, who was a year her junior. The prince was a wretched, whimpering little creature, with a cankered body and a blighted soul. Marriage with such a husband seemed absurd. It never was a marriage in reality. The sickly child would cry all night, for he suffered from abscesses in his ears, and his manhood had been prematurely taken from him. Nevertheless, within a twelvemonth ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... is not mainly concerned with the attainment of pleasure; it is rather concerned, in all its deeper and more authoritative maxims, with the prevention of suffering. There is something artificial in the deliberate pursuit of pleasure; there is something absurd in the obligation to enjoy oneself. We feel no duty in that direction; we take to enjoyment naturally enough after the work of life is done, and the freedom and spontaneity of our pleasures is what is most ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... to let you know that he has no sympathy with Stanly in his absurd wickedness, closing the schools, nor again in his other act of turning our camp into a hunting ground for Slaves. He repudiates both—positively. The latter point has occupied much of his thought; ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... cold. It may be any one of a dozen things has caused the death of this child. And do you not see that in every case it has nothing whatever to do with the mother's moral goodness or spiritual cultivation? It is absurd to think that the mother, in this case, is being punished for something that she is entirely unconscious of having been guilty of. Do you not see that there is no logical connection between an inherited ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... though she had heard not a word of the lovers' quarrel, as she put a pin in the back of the ruffled collar which Sallie had come to reclaim. A quarrel it had evidently been, and as evidently the lady was mollified, for she said, "Don't be absurd, Jim!" and Jim laughed and responded, "All right, Sallie, you're an angel! But come, we must hurry, or the curtain'll be up,"—and away went the dashing ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... be ignominiously punished as a traitor and a public slanderer. His opponent's minute and temperate narrative of facts appears to have made no impression on him. He is content magisterially to pronounce it absurd and incredible, and inconsistent with itself as well as with probability. He appears in his ire to forget that the king of Scots and his subjects were better able to judge of its truthfulness than he, a foreigner, could be; and that after saying all he could for the bishops ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... be perpetually renewed to the end of time ("to survive the fall of empires," as Miss Lamb says), in order to distinguish the site of every great man's grave, Lamb speaks of the project in these terms: "Godwin has written a pretty absurd book about Sepulchres. He was affronted because I told him that it was better than Hervey, but not so good as Sir Thomas Browne." Sufficient intimacy, however, had arisen between them to induce Lamb to write a facetious epilogue to ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... were erroneous and impracticable; yet he seemed to pride himself upon his absurd economical theories. He seemed to have no fixed views of government; he was neither monarchist, aristocrat, nor republican: his opinions seemed to be incompatible with all organised government, except a popular despotism, such as the French empire exemplified. Hatred to England, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... in the newspapers? To me at any rate they are not things in newspapers; they are pain and failure, they are torment, they are blood and dust and misery. They haunt me day and night. Even if it is utterly absurd I will still do my utmost. It IS absurd. I'm a madman and you and my mother are sensible people.... And I will go my way.... I don't care for the absurdity. I don't care ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... p. 774. Letter of the Earl of Dartmouth, Sept. 10, 1774. A sufficient answer, by the way, to the absurd charge that Dunmore brought on the war in consequence of some mysterious plan of the Home Government to embroil the Americans with the savages. It is not at all improbable that the Crown advisers were ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... said, "I have an absurd prejudice against paying twice for the same thing; I inherit it from a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... masqued like others: for, in troth, not so To incorporate them, could be nothing else, Than like a state ungovern'd, without laws; Or body made of nothing but diseases: The one, through impotency, poor and wretched; The other, for the anarchy, absurd. ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... The crest was a small emblem worn on top of a knight's helmet. A tower with a lily stuck in it would have been unwieldy and absurd. ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... the tone of the assurances in them that the writer was innocent. He knew that trick; every prisoner invariably protested the same thing. But these protestations were unusually strong. They were of such strength that they actually produced in his own hardened and experienced mind a passing doubt, absurd of course, and not for one moment to be considered, whether the Stralsund authorities might not have blundered. It was a dangerous notion to put into people's heads, that the Stralsund authorities, of whom he was one, could blunder. Blunders meant a reproof from headquarters ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... "How very absurd!" said Zenobia; "a mere nickname. As if there could be any opinion but that of the Sovereign and ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... wholly unknown there not many years ago, was first introduced by strangers, and has since met with several variations at their hands. The idea of a criminal flying from Mohra to Mansfeld, which was only a few miles off, and was equally subject to the Elector of Saxony, is absurd, and in this case is strangely inconsistent with the honourable position soon attained, as we shall see, by Hans Luther himself at Mansfeld. Moreover, the very fact that Witzel's spiteful remark was long known to Luther's enemies, coupled ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... literature. The only new development it takes, consists in the exaggeration of the heroic element, of which there was enough already in many an Elizabethan novel; it consists, in fact, in the magnifying of a defect. The imitation of France only resulted in absurd productions which were so successful and filled the literary stage so entirely that they left no space for other kinds of romances. In vain did a few intelligent persons, such as the authors of "The Adventures of Covent Garden" and of "Zelinda," attempt to bring about a ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... torch shews the figure to be emblematic, if it had been designed to represent a real person in the act of dying there had been no necessity for the expiring torch, as the dying figure alone would have been sufficiently intelligible;—it would have been as absurd as to have put an inverted torch into the hand of a real person at the time of his expiring. Besides if this figure had represented a real dying person would not the other figures, or one of them at least, have stretched out a hand to support her, to have eased her fall among loose ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... is the only exception, that I can think of, of an accurate describer of species, at least in the Invertebrate Kingdom, who has disbelieved in permanent species, but he in his absurd though clever work has done the subject harm." ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... abatement—and the elder one declared that we were evidently going to be such a sociable group that it was too bad to have to stay at home. She asked Mrs. Nettlepoint if there were any one else in our party, and when our hostess mentioned her son—there was a chance of his embarking but (wasn't it absurd?) he hadn't decided yet—she returned with extraordinary candour: "Oh dear, I do hope he'll go: that would be ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... is not to be passed without mention. It is among the most aged survivals of pre-revolutionary days. Neither its architecture not its age, however, is its chief warrant for our notice. The absurd number of windows in this battered old structure is what strikes the passer-by. The church was erected by subscription, and these closely set large windows are due to Henry Sherburne, one of the wealthiest citizens of the period, who agreed to pay for whatever glass was used. If the building could ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... was attended with ceremonies of the most absurd description, which were continued till the time of the revolution. They are detailed at length in the Histoire de Dieppe I. p. 68; and a brief account has lately been given of them in English, in Turner's Tour ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... into my head: "I neither love nor esteem sadness, although the world has invested it, at a given price, with the honor of its particular favor. They dress up in it wisdom, virtue, conscience. Stupid and absurd adornment." ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... Uniformity, which is said to be enacted by the "Queen's Highness," with the assent of the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, is a testimony, at once unanswerable and unprecedented. We have dwelt with the more anxiety on this part of Dr Arnold's work, as it furnishes a complete answer to the absurd opinions concerning the English Church, which it has been of late the object of a few bigots, unconsciously acting as the tools of artful and ambitious men, to propagate, and which would lead, by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... on "what the other fellow thinks," which is the main secret in his published writings. If the view of him as a "sentimentalist" (which nobody, unless it is taken offensively, need refuse to accept) is strengthened by them, that absurd other view, which strangely prevailed so long, of his "cynicism" is utterly destroyed. We see the variety of his interests; the keenness of his sensations; the strange and kaleidoscopic rapidity of the changes ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... Kotzebue (q.v.), Alexander approved of Castlereagh's protest against Metternich's policy of "the governments contracting an alliance against the peoples,'' as formulated in the Carlsbad decrees, 1819, and deprecated any intervention of Europe to support "a league of which the sole object is the absurd pretensions of absolute power.''10 He still declared his belief in "free institutions, though not in such as age forced from feebleness, nor contracts ordered by popular leaders from their sovereigns, nor constitutions ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... agnostic days it may sound a little strange, and perhaps to some seem quite absurd, that the authorities of Harvard in 1791 felt obliged publicly to deny that Gibbon's History was used as a text-book at the University. But with the exception perhaps of Tom Paine, no one in this country had then ventured to assail the literal interpretation ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... "It is absurd," admitted Jane, "but Maudie, all students are not scientifically inclined as you are. What about the ghost? Who is he and ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... was my motive. A demand upon an American citizen to found a British air fleet is extravagant—in a sense, absurd. But I was anxious to offer Mr. Oppner one more opportunity of distributing some of the vast sum which he has locked up for his ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... companion of her childhood, and who probably would have married her had not the general come in the way! Here was, no doubt, the real enemy, while they had all been thinking of Colonel Keith. A man only now expecting his company! It would sound more absurd. Yet Rachel was not wont to think how things would sound! And this fresh intense dislike provoked her. Was it the unsuitability of the young widow remarrying? "Surely, surely, it must not be that womanhood in its contemptible side is still so strong ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stood motionless there for fully a minute. It seemed absurd, preposterous, the conviction that was being forced home upon him—that there were no rooms on the right-hand side of the corridor at all! But that was not like the Tocsin, accurate always in the most minute details. The room must be still farther ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... construction, though, from the character of the parties, we should think collusion was, in the highest degree, improbable; and the experiments, although not conclusive, were very curious, and some of them not easy of explanation. In the third case, transparent and absurd as the experiments seemed to us, and as the account of them will probably appear to our readers, the doctor, from his position and practice, must have been seriously injured by his mesmeric experiments; and therefore there is fair reason to believe, that he was not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... confused, she followed him to an inconspicuous table in a corner of the dining room. Then the dreamlike unreality and beauty of their hours together began again. Cherry felt adjusted, untrammelled, at ease; she felt that all the uncomfortable sensations of the past two hours were absurd, forgotten. ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... 'I have lived in this house for thirty years at least, and, as for your father and mother—why, if you are really Urashima Taro, they have been dead three hundred years; and that is absurd. Do you want me to ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... calling a number of rude fellows the innkeeper took his revenge upon the crazy knight by the mistreatment of Sancho Panza who was tossed in a blanket until the company could toss him no more for weariness and the laughter that his absurd plight awoke in them. ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... the Romany patteran?" she broke off to ask. "I've always thought of it as patter, or patois, the Gypsy patois, and somehow it strikes me as absurd to follow a language over the world—a sort ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... alluding to the print of Hogarth, where a black boy follows his mistress with a teakettle in his hand.... In stature Garrick was short.... A fact which conveys a high notion of his powers is, that he was able to act out the absurd stage-costume of those days. He represented Coriolanus in the attire of Cheapside. I remember hearing from Sir G. Beaumont, that while he was venting, as Lear, the violent paroxysms of his rage in the awful tempest scene, his wig ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... perfect plague. Your philosopher is a complete novice in the life comme il faut.... I like very well to see a child babble and stammer; there is even a grace about it when it becomes his age. But to see a man continue the prattle of the child, is absurd. Just so with your philosophy." The consequence of this prevalent spirit of universal skepticism was a general laxity of morals. The Aleibiades, of the "Symposium," is the ideal representative of the young aristocracy of Athens. Such was the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... he was Tommy, and at first even to think of leaving Elspeth was absurd. Yet it would be pleasant to leave Aaron, who disliked him so much. To disappear without a word would be a fine revenge, for the people would say that Aaron must have ill-treated him, and while they searched the pools of the burn for his ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... with its vast grounds and its deserted quadrangles torn up by the savage conflict, became to us curiously oppressive—almost ghostlike in the bright sunshine. It seemed absurd to imagine that forty or fifty rifle-armed sailors, a band of priests and many thousands of converts had been ringed in here by fire and smoke for weeks, and had lost dozens and hundreds at a time through mine explosions. It seemed, also, equally ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... would happen to you," he growled, "and I wanted to stop you. I never saw a person climb in such an utterly absurd way." ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... in chorus, while one of the party played on a cow's horn, and the trees were well rapped with the sticks which they carried. This ceremony is thought to have been a relic of some heathen sacrifice, and it is quite absurd enough ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... he was his close friend, cicerone, and companion. Allowing for the Aretine biographer's well-known inaccuracies in matters of detail and for his royal disregard of chronological order—faults for which it is manifestly absurd to blame him over-severely—it would be unwise lightly to disregard or overrule his testimony with regard to matters which he may have learned from the lips of Titian himself ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... do," the poor lady exclaimed. "How absurd of you, Harold, to ask such a question! I met him at a party when Joan and I were in London at the beginning of this week." She caught again at her fleeting courage. "So I invited him, and he's coming this afternoon. I shall send the motor ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... she was so beautiful in person and alluring in manner, that even that head-dress, and the accompanying costume with which she was deformed, could not eclipse her charms for those who had become at all accustomed to the absurd disguise which she assumed. But it was the woman that was beautiful, not the costume; and the woman was so beautiful, in spite of the costume, that she was able to light up even its forbidding features with the reflection of her own loveliness. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... denounces this attitude in the presence of a young girl who loves him and is loved by him, but who belongs to the category of women under discussion. When he learns her history, he struggles vainly to resist the feelings of distrust and jealousy which he had declared absurd a little while earlier. And the two are forced at last to walk their different ways. Unfortunately the dialogue is heavy and stilted. The play is a tract rather than a piece of art, and the tirades of Fedor are equally unconvincing when he speaks for or against ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... Wisconsin, her home, she had bought a copy of Science and Health. When she reached M——, she met a minister from the North, whom the M. D.'s had sent there because of consumption,—they had given him two months to live. She gave him Science and Health, and while doing so, felt it was all absurd. The minister read it, and was healed immediately. Was not this a beautiful demonstration of the power of Truth, and good evidence that Science and Health ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... supernatural power of emitting more ideas and bringing to the surface more recollections than, under any ordinary use of her faculties, she could put forth in the course of a whole day. The poignant tale of her monologue may be abridged into a few absurd sentences, as contradictory and bare of ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... deserted mansion. The scent of the orange blossoms was not so insistent as it had been on the previous evening. The land appeared normal; it exhibited none of the disturbing influence of which he had been first conscious. Last night's mood seemed absurd. ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and his reputation, perhaps; yes, and come to England and marry this American, and break poor Hetty's heart—would her father wish that? Let us spare further arguments, and not be so rude as to hint that Mr. Lambert was in the right in calling a fond wife by the name of that absurd splay-footed bird, annually sacrificed at the Feast of ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... labor conditions and demands I shall always be glad to make. The thing I am trying to bring home to you is that the men have gotten an absurd impression that you are in sympathy with them.... Young men sometimes come home from college with unsound notions. Possibly you have picked up some socialistic nonsense. You will have to rid yourself of it. Our family has always arrayed itself squarely against such indefensible ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... space, he impales like a butterfly the human type, mostly in a moment of folly or wickedness.... The least definition of surrounding would blunt his (the artist's) keenness, and make his vehemence absurd." ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... the last of what—of what it pleases him to call our Line. It is all most foolish, most absurd. But I cannot tell you here. Since chance has brought you our way again, and as you may take up your residence in the neighbourhood—have you decided yet?—I feel I must make some explanation of how you find us, my brother and myself. Can you row? ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... staid and serious, was quite transformed by his joy and pride in her, and would not have seen a thousand blunders on her part. The consensus of opinion, among his friends, was that Carey was "really a little absurd, don't you know?" and that Mrs. Carey was "quite deliciously odd," and that Duncan was "too wonderful—poor, ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... feat the while;—March into Mahren, on to Vienna if he chose; laying all flat. Infallible," say the Schmettau people. "He had the fire of head to contrive it all; but worn down and grown old, he could not execute his great thoughts." Which is obviously absurd, Friedrich's object not being to lay Austria flat, or drive animosities to the sanguinary point, and kindle all Europe into war; but merely to extract, with the minimum of violence, something like justice from Austria on this Bavarian matter. For which end, he may justly consider ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... silly, stupid, fatuous, fungus-grown, doddering, drivelling dolts anywhere, past or future, I alone am far and away ahead of the whole lot of 'em in silliness and absurd behaviour! Damnation! I'm ashamed! The idea of my being made a fool of twice at my time of life ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... Shakespear, Goethe, Ibsen, and Tolstoy, not to mention our own contemporary playwrights, is as much in place in Mr Redford's office as a pickpocket is in Bow Street. Further, it is not true that the Censorship, though it certainly suppresses Ibsen and Tolstoy, and would suppress Shakespear but for the absurd rule that a play once licensed is always licensed (so that Wycherly is permitted and Shelley prohibited), also suppresses unscrupulous playwrights. I challenge Mr Redford to mention any extremity of sexual misconduct which any manager in his senses would risk presenting on the London stage that ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... shout 'eggs' at him, to remind him that he was an enthusiast on the subject and had a collection to which he ought to seize this excellent opportunity of adding. The only question was, where to go. The surrounding country was a Paradise for the naturalist who had no absurd scruples on the subject of trespassing. To the west, in the direction of Stapleton, the woods and hedges were thick with nests. But then, so they were to the east along the Badgwick road. He wavered, but a recollection that there was water in the Badgwick direction, and that he might with luck beard ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... ourselves,' although condemning the expression as absurd. Intemperance, improvidence, timidity are morally wrong. Still, as in other cases, a man is not truly virtuous on such points, till he loves them for their own sake, and even performs them without an effort. These prudential ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... etc. The specialties of the Florentine character are popularly supposed to be embodied in "Stenterello," who comes on the Florentine stage, in pieces written for the purpose, every Carnival, to the never-failing delight of the populace. Stenterello is an absurd figure with a curling pigtail, large cocked hat, and habiliments meant to represent those of a Tuscan citizen of some hundred years or so ago. He is a sort of shrewd fool, doing the most absurd things, lying through thick ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... The glowing eyes kept scanning the wall where the weapons hung, and as though without purpose other than to get a pipe from the rack on the wall, Ingolby moved to where he could be prepared for any rush. It seemed absurd that there should be such a possibility; but the world was full ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... disturbing. They seemed not so much intent as meditative, and not so much watchful as interested. When the sergeant and his guest moved past them, the unrhythmic waverings of the small yellow lights seemed to change hopefully, as if the machines anticipated being put to use. Which, of course, was absurd. Mahon machines do not anticipate anything. They probably do not remember anything, though patterns of operation are certainly retained in very great variety. The fact is that a Mahon unit is simply a device to let a machine stand idle without losing the ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... it his plain duty to explain to Scott that the road ahead of him was likely to be an open one and easy. If he kept on as he had begun, in time he might be head of a department on his own account. Absurd for a fellow with a mind like his to be spending his time over rhetoric and the classics! Science was his line, pure science; ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... bring ourselves to act accordingly. But the subject must admit of diversity of colouring; it must receive a colour on that side. In the House of Commons there are members enough who will not vote what is grossly unjust or absurd. No, Sir, there must always be right enough, or appearance of right, to keep wrong in countenance.' BOSWELL. 'There is surely always a majority in parliament who have places, or who want to have them, and ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... like snow shoes, bearing them up on the wind-packed surface. Their tufted ears stood straight up, alert for any unwonted sound. Their absurd stub tails, not four inches long, and looking as if they had been bitten off, twitched with eagerness. Their big round eyes, of a pale greenish yellow, and with the pupils narrowed to upright, threadlike black slits by the blinding glare, ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... an hour, and then I was convicted and sentenced to execution, with an intimation from the judge that it would be perfectly absurd of me to dream, for one moment, of a remission of ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... from the Free States are being driven out and murdered for pretended complicity in a plot the evidence for the existence of which has been obtained by means without a parallel since the trial of the Salem witches, and the stories about which are as absurd and contradictory as the confessions of Goodwife Corey. Kansas was saved, it is true; but it was the experience of Kansas that disgusted the South with Mr. Douglas's panacea of ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... favourite dog, and constantly longs to marry a peasant girl; a third talks love to the moon, sends kisses to the stars, and wishes to press the heavenly orbs to his bosom! For a time the public would read nothing but absurd productions of this sort, and Karamzin, the great literary authority of the time, expressly declared that the true function of Art was "to disseminate agreeable impressions in the region of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... was kept at a distance, prevented from studying the real character of the woman. I required to put her into play. And I ask you whether any more innocent way of doing so could be found than talking to a woman, and letting her talk, about an absurd fancy she had for a couple of ancestors of hers of the time of Charles I., and a poet whom they had murdered?—particularly as I studiously respected the prejudices of my host, and refrained from mentioning the matter, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... knew old Barclay, as she called him, well enough—that is, not at all, and had never shown him any cordiality, anything, indeed, better than condescension. To treat him like a gentleman, even when he sat at her own table, she would have counted absurd. He had never been to the castle since the day after her husband's funeral, when she received him with such emphasized superiority that he felt he could not go again without running the risk either ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... example which I quote because it is so absurd. The rooms I live in were owned by a prim old woman who for more than twenty years was my landlady. She and I were great friends, indeed she tended me like a mother, and when I was so ill nursed me as perhaps few mothers would have ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... and roebucks were killed. The space in which these poor animals had to run was inclosed by netting, in order that the monarchs might shoot them at pleasure, without disturbing themselves while seated in the windows of the pavilion. I have never seen anything more absurd than hunts of this sort, which, nevertheless, give those who engage in them a reputation as fine shots. What skill is there in killing an animal which the gamekeepers, so to speak, take by the ears and place ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... that it was quite absurd that it should be so, but this statement gave him a sense of great elation, a delightful thrill of relief. There was every reason why the girl should not confide in a complete stranger—even to deceive him was quite within her rights; but, though Sam appreciated this, he ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... or the answer to Boswell's fears that if he were in Parliament he would be unhappy if things went wrong, "That's cant, sir. . . . Public affairs vex no man." "Have they not vexed yourself a little, sir? Have you not been vexed at all by the turbulence of this reign and by that absurd vote of the House of Commons, 'That the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished'?" "Sir, I have never slept an hour less, nor eat an ounce less meat. I would have knocked the factious ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... doubt partly due to his inability to reconcile himself to Johnson's table manners. It can hardly be denied that he was unnaturally sensitive to surface impressions. He was a great observer of manners, but not a great portrayer of character. He knew men in their absurd actions rather than in their motives—even their absurd motives. He never admits us into the springs of action in his portraits as Saint-Simon does. He was too studied a believer in the puppetry of men and women to make them ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... inconclusive, as the numbering of the inhabitants of a great city can furnish no proper test; and the account of births at Bantam, which states the number of girls to be ten to one boy, is not only manifestly absurd, but positively false. I can take upon me to assert that the proportion of the sexes throughout Sumatra does not sensibly differ from that ascertained in Europe; nor could I ever learn from the inhabitants of the many eastern islands whom I have conversed with that they were conscious ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... and the same infatuation existed among the people there as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their confused and absurd behavior, and then by their constantly following the swarms of dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the streets, accompanied by musicians playing on bagpipes, and by innumerable spectators attracted by curiosity, to which were added anxious parents and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... one old judge was rather spry— Oh yes, he was! You'd not have thought him half so spry, But oh, he was! He said, "Why really, on my word! Disqualify that shocking bird!— Absurd!" ...
— Mouser Cats' Story • Amy Prentice
... various commodities, their dealings with us were fair and upright, though latterly they were by no means backward nor inexpert in driving a bargain. The absurd and childish exchanges which they at first made with our people induced them subsequently to complain that the Kabloonas had stolen their things, though the profit had eventually been a hundred-fold in their favour. Many such complaints were made, when the only ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... that I can never get an answer when I ring? Here have I been ringing for the last half-hour. I have rung twenty times." (This is a falsehood. You have rung only six times, and the "half-hour" is an absurd exaggeration; but you feel the mere truth would not be adequate to the occasion.) "I think it disgraceful," you continue, "and I shall complain to the Company. What is the use of my having a telephone if I can't get any answer when I ring? Here I pay a large sum for having this thing, and ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... Denis, who are stopping over to Deephaven for the summer." Kate and I turned as we heard this introduction; we were standing close by, and I am proud to say that I never saw Kate treat any one more politely than she did that absurd, pitiful creature with the gilt crown and many bracelets. It was not that she said much, but there was such an exquisite courtesy in her manner, and an apparent unconsciousness of there being anything in the least surprising or uncommon about ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... called Daemoniaques, that is, possessed by the Devill, such as we call Madmen or Lunatiques; or such as had the Falling Sicknesse; or that spoke any thing, which they for want of understanding, thought absurd: As also of an Unclean person in a notorious degree, they used to say he had an Unclean Spirit; of a Dumbe man, that he had a Dumbe Devill; and of John Baptist (Math. 11. 18.) for the singularity of his fasting, that he had a Devill; and of our Saviour, because he said, hee that keepeth his sayings ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... exactly say, preaching from a cathedral pulpit, that chanting should be abandoned in cathedral services. By such an assertion he would have overshot his mark and rendered himself absurd, to the delight of his hearers. He could, however, and did, allude with heavy denunciations to the practice of intoning in parish churches, although the practice was all but unknown in the diocese; and from thence he came round to the undue preponderance ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the laughing stock of Europe, if its defence is to depend upon an apocryphal Army of the Loire, marines from the Navy, peasants from the provinces, and the National Guards of the wealthy quarters. To talk of the heroic attitude of Paris, when the Parisians have not been under fire, is simply absurd. As long as the outer forts hold out, it is no more dangerous to "man the ramparts" than to mount guard at the Tuileries. I saw to-day a company of mounted National Guards exercising. Their uniforms were exquisitely clean, but I asked myself of what earthly use they were. Their commander ordered ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... firm in this decision,—however absurd or obscure their conclusions,—and Jackson, after his first flash of indignation, felt a certain relief in their departure. But strangely enough, while he had hesitated about keeping the property when they ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... was horrible. But he shook it off at last and called himself a fool for his pains. He had never harboured thought of murder in his life. He had detested Tom, but he had never gone the length of wishing him dead. The whole idea was absurd. ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... which seems an arbitrary net, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without these rules, since without them it ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... his wife, "I know no more about the little thing than you do. Some neighbor's child, I suppose. Our Violet and Peony," she added, laughing at herself for repeating so absurd a story, "insist that she is nothing but a snow-image, which they have been busy about in the garden, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a book on so large a matter, finished hastily enough amid the necessities of an enormous national crisis, it would be absurd to pretend to have achieved proportion; but I will confess to some attempt to correct a disproportion. We talk of historical perspective, but I rather fancy there is too much perspective in history; for perspective makes a giant a pigmy ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... unfair to blame them for missing marriage certificates. True, his father had never committed a theft, but there was no necessity for a man to steal if he had an income of six thousand crowns and could please himself. The act would be absurd or abnormal in ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... mind, not without its illustrations in history, to "decorate with legend" the early history of great men. In reply, it may be enough here to say that legends analogous to the pagan legends of the births of heroes, false and absurd legends, did gather round the infancy of Jesus Christ. The Apocryphal Gospels are full of such legends. They tell us how the idols of Egypt fell down before Him; how His swaddling-clothes worked miracles; and how He made clay birds and turned boys ...
— The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord - A paper read (in substance) before the confraternity of the Holy - Trinity at Cambridge • B. W. Randolph
... which her words caused me made me look quite absurd in my own eyes, and with the sudden consciousness that I had been making a fool of myself, pondering over such shadowy improbabilities, as they seemed to me now, I turned sharply and impatiently from the spot where I had been ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... superstitious protest, my wife put a penny on one eye and half-a-crown on the other. Mary seemed to regard this as a desecration, or at best as unlucky. Then they bound up the jaw of that body with one of my handkerchiefs. I thought I had never seen anything more wantonly absurd. Their trouble in straightening the arms—the legs were quite straight—infuriated me. I wanted to weep in my tragic vexation. It seemed as though tears would ease me. But I could ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... way bore a resemblance to fire—for the woman, after getting over her first terror of the dancing flames, kept pointing to them and then to her wounds in a most suggestive way. This, however, as Grom rather scornfully pointed out, was too absurd. There was nothing that could be in the least like fire itself; and the wounds of the fugitives had no likeness whatever to the corrosive bites of the flame. A-ya took the correction submissively, but held her own thought; and when a day or two later, events proved her to have been right, she discreetly ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... agent to farm. She was tired of the long highly-coloured descriptions of Canadian scenery and the tales of Vincent's adventures, and she had got into the way of skipping his vain repetitions of all the absurd things he had said to her on the night of his departure; but the postscript stirred strange feelings in her breast. His mother was married a second time, but to Audrey's certain knowledge Vincent had no little half-sisters; ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... candied tongue lick absurd pomp, And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee Where thrift may follow fawning. 1930 SHAKS.: Hamlet, Act ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... lines. Here he has trusted to the ground as it looked from his side of the field, when, in reality, it presented few difficulties from yours. Some experience in the world has led me to believe that if a salesman has come to the opinion, even in the most absurd manner, that he can sell a certain man goods, he can do it, almost beyond the chance of a doubt. I once knew a successful solicitor who seemed to do all his work at his desk. He would sit in the ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... come it will be hard to bear," said he; "and yet I am an idiot, for what have I to do with the opinion of people I do not know?" but much as he might repeat that his alarms were absurd, he could not get over them, or free himself from the fear ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... repeated Maria inquiringly. "Why, how absurd! And, after all, what is the matter with the girl?" Dropping the curtain, she came over to the fire, and sat listening attentively while Miss Saidie told, in spasmodic jerks and pauses, the foolish story ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... honour's appearance and custom. Allow that it would be a pity to suffer pride to stand in the way of the talents with which Providence has blest me; to scorn the little delicacies of art, which I execute so well, would, in my opinion, be as absurd as for an epic poet to disdain the composition of a perfect epigram, or a consummate musician, the ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... boating on fine rivers in the sunlight, or walking about in the dawn, to the music of Creation, evolving the philosophy of revolutions and building beautiful worlds. You get no hint of this from the absurd propagandist play, yet this is what the heart of man craves. When he does not get it, he cannot explain what he wants; but he knows what he does not want, and he goes away and keeps his distance. The play has missed fire, and the playwright and his hero are ridiculous. Let ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... universal republic founded on the principles enunciated in the Lord's Prayer! Thrones, armies, navies, frontiers, national barriers, all to be abolished! So simple! So easy! So childlike! But alas, so absurd! So entirely oblivious of the great principles of political economy and international law, and of impulses and instincts profoundly sculptured in the heart ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... vagueness and indefiniteness with which this story abounds is not, therefore, that impressive obscurity which springs from the mysterious; it is, on the contrary, the obscurity of the unintelligible and absurd. In all of Cooper's novels, it is a fault that the characters are often represented as acting without sufficient motive. In the story of adventure this can be pardoned, or at least overlooked; for freak plays ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... God require Naaman to dip seven times in Jordan? Why did Jesus put his hands the second time upon the blind man of Bethsaida before he saw clearly? Why does God redeem a soul by two works of grace? These questions are equally absurd. But you say, God does the thing most reasonable. That he does, and redemption by two works of grace is the very most reasonable and natural way to restore the soul to its normal condition. Man was holy in his nature in creation. By sin he ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... apology like what we should now call a gentleman, without first subjecting himself to the fire of his wrongfully accused antagonist. So the Duke and the Earl went out with their seconds and met at Wimbledon. The victor of Waterloo was not destined to kill or be killed in this absurd contest. When the parties to the duel were placed on the ground and the word was given. Lord Winchilsea reserved his fire, the bullet from the Duke's pistol passed him without doing any harm, and Lord Winchilsea then discharged his ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... A petition to Parliament against the railway was not brought to me, as it was well known that I would not sign it; but some little girls undertook my case; and the effect of their parroting of Mr. Wordsworth, about "ourselves" and "the common people" who intrude upon us, was as sad as it was absurd. The whole matter ended rather remarkably. When all were gone but Mrs. Wordsworth, and she was blind, a friend who was as a daughter to her remarked, one summer day, that there were some boys on the Mount in the garden. "Ah!" ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... far off. I should like to. I should like to try quite a new life-mode. This is finished in me—and yet perhaps it is absurd to go further. I'm rather sick of seekers. I hate ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... to make so loud a report," said I, smiling; "but I protest against your doctrine. Why, according to that, an author is accountable for all the opinions of his dramatis personae, however absurd ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... of indulgences contains such insipid, antiquated, and absurd crimes, that it is impossible to turn it to much account. It was composed in stupid and barbarous times; and it is now highly necessary to make a new tariff of sin, for which Rome herself can furnish the ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... charged with one offence or two similar offences; one boy is from the upperworld, the other from below the line. The same magistrate fines the two boys an equal amount; the one boy pays, or his friends pay; but the other goes of a certainty to prison. Is it not absurd! rather, is ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... not. What an absurd little goose you must be to ask such a thing! Servants are kept ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... the crown by his descent from Thomas of Woodstock has been already adverted to;—it seems never to have awakened the slightest jealousy in the mind of Elizabeth; but the absurd vaunts of some of his followers, commented upon by the malicious ingenuity of his enemies, had sufficed to excite sinister suspicions in the bosom of the king of Scots. For the purpose of counteracting these, lord ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... not to be found in our modern general maps, though certainly infinitely better for all the uses of geography than the absurd appellations so much in use ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... to cure Jack. I administered one dose of medicine and he at once began to fill out and get strong and chesty in a manner almost absurd, whereon there was much twitting of our Kate who, in her old way, rated me soundly in public and crept up to me in private, and kissed me and wept gladly in ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... have been the case. What misfortune was to be apprehended in consequent of this event we could not learn; but he spoke of it in a kind of agony, and was evidently labouring under the influence of some powerful though absurd superstition respecting it. Towards night he suffered a dreadful bleeding at the nose, followed by much sickness at the stomach, which, together with the phanton of Arnalooa, that still haunted his imagination, combined to make him extremely unwell for some hours. The ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... the power of Congress, or, in other words, of the national legislature, shall extend to certain enumerated cases. This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd, as well as useless, if a general authority ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... smile crept into Agatha's eyes. The mere idea that the sunny-tempered, brilliant young man to whom she had given her heart could have changed or degenerated in any way seemed absurd to her. Winifred, ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... who has carried the use of the microscope into researches so wide and so profound. M. Martout had desiccated and resuscitated thousands of little worms, rotifers and tardigrades; he held that life is nothing but organization in action, and that the idea of reviving a desiccated man has nothing absurd about it. He gave himself up to long meditations when Professor Hirtz sent from Berlin the following document, the original of which is filed among the manuscripts of ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... Erastian, Socinian, Sabellian, Eutychian, Nestorian, Monothelite, &c., not to mention Protestant, whose fate is yet uncertain, will be convinced of the truth of this observation. It is thus a system becomes absurd in the end, merely from its being reasonable and philosophical ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... of Talleyrand—how, giving his autograph to a lady, he wrote it at the top left-hand corner of the sheet, so that she could write above or before it, neither an order for money nor a promise of marriage: yielding to an absurd impulse, he did the same. The baronet burst into loud laughter, which, however, ceased abruptly: he had not gained ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... now that Jim was thoroughly wonderful—nor that she, the county superintendent, was quite as thoroughly a little fool. She to be put in authority over him! It was too absurd for laughter. Fortunately, she hadn't hindered him much—but who was to be thanked for that? Was it owing to any wisdom of hers? Well, she had decided in his favor, in those first proceedings to revoke his certificate. Perhaps ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... Again the roads and paths leading away over the green hills were dark with lines of pedestrians; but a number of those whose homes lay nearest to Hundwyl lingered to drink and gossip out the day. A group of herdsmen, over whose brown faces the high stove-pipe hat looked doubly absurd, gathered in a ring, and while one of them yodelled the Ranz des Vaches of Appenzell, the others made an accompaniment with their voices, imitating the sound of cow-bells. They were lusty, jolly fellows, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... correctly?" said I; "or are you only playing off some new freak upon me? Answer me frankly one question, and I shall be better able to comprehend the meaning of your mysterious menace. Are you—but I know it is absurd, I feel that the question is very ridiculous, only that your reply to it will, perhaps, set us both right—do you love Astraea? I really can not conceive any thing short of some such ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... may stumble upon it, who do not know, till they meet it, that there is any view of Jesus Christ but that which is presented in the widely circulated issues of the Tract Society and similar institutions. Our attention has already been called to one very absurd and unjust attack upon it, in a Philadelphia paper, intended to catch the prejudices of such persons. But the views by which we found this attack accompanied, in the same journal, led us to suspect that some political prejudice against the author's anti-slavery had more to do with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... is reached by a miniature railway leading from St. Helier's to the fishing village of Gorey. By this time the young people were all well accustomed to the absurd little narrow gauge tramways with their leisurely trains. But if the train into St. Helier's crawled, the one to Gorey snailed, to quote Roger. Time was ample to note the pretty stuccoed houses, pink, cream or brown, with gardens and climbing vines that even in December made them spots of ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... an old rail fence and replacing it with wire. Archie's task was the rather more disagreeable one of trundling gravel in a wheelbarrow and distributing it in holes staked for his guidance in the road that ran from the highway gate to the barn. The holes were small; it seemed to Archie absurd to spend time filling such small cavities; and a wheelbarrow filled with gravel is heavy. The foreman explained the job and departed, reappearing from time to time for the pleasure of criticizing Archie's work. When Archie suggested that there would be an economy of time ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... how discipline gets into a man's bones, the pride, the indignant pride of obedience! At that hour I swore that I should myself be the governor of that Company one day,—the boast of loud-hearted youth. I had angry visions, I dreamed absurd dreams, but I did not think of disobeying. It was an unheard-of journey at such a time, but I swore that I would do it, that it should go into the records of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... signet—Oh! you mean that with the three monstrous legs, which I supposed was devised as the most preposterous device, to represent our most absurd Majesty of Man.—The signet—I have not seen it since I gave it to Gibbon, my monkey, to play with.—He did whine for it most piteously—I hope he has not gemmed the green breast of ocean with ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... gathered in the Netherlands, resolved to invade England and demand the crown. He believed that a large part of the nation would look upon him as representing the cause of Protestantism, and would therefore rally to his support. He landed at Lyme on the coast of Dorsetshire (1685), and there issued an absurd proclamation declaring James to be a usurper, tyrant, and murderer, who had set the great fire of London (S474), cut the throat of Essex (S480), and poisoned ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... duty well done. They are the logical recompense for effort and sacrifice. Individual happiness is not the chief object of existence in this life. To work efficiently is the supreme obligation. It is naturally to desire happiness and to labor for it; but it is absurd to be annoyed and angry because we do not find it. Happiness through marriage is never attained except by never-ending ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... of his name and influence, was in the eyes of the French nobility, who considered it a dishonourable thing to concern oneself with art or industry, nothing more than a rich merchant, with whom it would be absurd to stand upon any very strict ceremony. So Charles VIII received him on horseback, and addressing him with a haughty air, as a master might address a servant, demanded whence came this pride of his that made him dispute his entrance into Tuscany. ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... adhere to their religion. ADDISON'S Goddess has prevailed over the fathers and the canons; and men not only make a difference in the price regulated by the difference in the mode of payment; but it would be absurd to expect them to do otherwise. They must not only charge something for the want of the use of the money; but they must charge something additional for the risk of its loss, which may frequently arise, and most frequently does arise, from ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... of those absurd wrangles as to whether or not Aunt Harriet would go to Jennie's in the rather remote contingency of Uncle James' becoming twenty years younger and ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... His feet were like flat-irons turned the wrong way, and his legs seemed to be slipped into the middle of them, like the handles of two queer-shaped hoes. His intense, magnificent importance, and the bombastic way he swaggered about the deck, were so perfectly absurd, that we three youngsters should probably have never had any feeling towards him but that of contempt, if it had not been that we were now quite enough of seamen to appreciate the skill with which he took us safely on our dangerous and intricate passage into harbour. How we ever got through ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... takes us to Gatwick and Sandown—(or rather the train takes us—another absurd expression)—the last day of the latter Meeting being devoted to "Jumping Races," which is the contemptuous way some people speak of the winter branch of our National Sport!—forgetting that it demands the two most desirable qualities in a horse, speed and endurance—whereas the modern flat-racing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... Kentuckians, is absurd. The Kentucky vanity is as irritable, although not as radical, as the Virginian, and sees a slight in every thing short of a caress. He appointed some fifteen general officers from Kentucky, and he permitted the Kentucky loafers to secure their ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... felt himself deeply compromised by the imputations put forth against his principal, declared publicly that the military court which had condemned the Herr von Thalermacher, after hearing only his accuser, was a one-sided and absurd tribunal, and that it was not competent to give ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... humor is rather more enjoyable to the British taste than wit, though there is, indeed, no lack of the latter. But the people delight most in absurd situations that appeal to the risibilities without any injury to the feelings of others. For example, Dickens relates an anecdote concerning two men, who were about to be hanged at a public execution. When they were already on the scaffold in preparation for the supreme ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... and cannot be there really, because the brain is the sole seat of consciousness; and, further, because evidence, as strong as that in favour of the sensation being in the finger, can be brought forward in support of propositions which are manifestly absurd. ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of soap. I have known of cases where parents claimed that their children were not fond of such things. Believe them not. I liked pie, but not pudding; the rich, heavy fruit-cake of weddings, good, honest gingerbread, the brisk, crispy heat of the brittle ginger-snap, but not "plain cake,"—absurd viand! It is of the essence of cake not to be plain. As well say, acid sweetness. Nor did I like the hereditary election-cake of my ancient State and city. Fat pork I could not swallow; nor onions nor cabbage,—gross, indelicate vegetables! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... the question," Tommy agreed with emphasis. "To begin with, it means waiting, which is absurd; and in the second place I object to any attempt to travel first-class. It's silly and snobbish, to put the kindest construction on it. If I've got to join this excursion I'm willing to go where they like to put me, and if necessary I'll ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... the doctrine of a personal Devil, is not to endorse the grossly absurd caricatures conjured up by morbid imaginations, and popular theology,—a being with bat's wings, horns, hoofs, and a dart-pointed tail. Yet upon such pictorial fables he doubtless looks with complacency; as they are calculated still further to destroy faith in his existence, and enable him the ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... mighty few of them are pure by the time they're through college, by the time they're through High School, perhaps! It's all queer, for that involves girls and women, too, thousands of them! And how absurd it would be to bring such a charge as this against a man, ten years after it happened, when he was ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... Jethro said, "that your forebodings will not be verified. I cannot believe that an absurd suspicion can draw away the hearts of the people from one whom they have so respected ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... buildings made of stone, grotesque and hideous; a pseudo-Gothic chapel with a tower of surpassing loveliness; and four laboratories of the purest factory design. But despite the conglomerate and sometimes absurd architecture—a Doric temple neighbored a Byzantine mosque—the campus was beautiful. Lawns, often terraced, stretched everywhere, and the great elms lent a dignity to Sanford College that no architect, however stupid, could ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... am not ordinary in anything, my dear sir," laughed Aristide, in his large boastfulness. "If I were, do you think I would have agreed to your absurd proposal? Voyons, I only wanted to show you that in dealing cards I am your equal. Now, the letters——" The Count threw a small packet on the table. "You will permit me? I do not wish to read them. I verify only. Good," said he. "And ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... questioner. "Since you have set the example of expressing opinions without regard to considerations of common courtesy," he said, shortly, "I may say that your theory, if it can be called one, is manifestly absurd." ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... a moment. It would sound very absurd to the captain for him to say that there was a passenger on the ship whom he desired very much not to meet, and yet, after all, that was what made the thought of the voyage so ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... corral; "it extends from my corral to Fair Plains. That is claimed by the sisters' title, and, as things appear to be going, if a division of the land is made it will be theirs. It's bad enough to have this best grazing land lying just on the flanks of the corral held by these rascals at an absurd prohibitory price, but I am afraid that it may be made to mean something even worse. According to the old surveys, these terraces on different levels were the natural divisions of the property,—one heir or his tenant ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... our "young ladies" are sorry specimens of feminality; and palpitators, cosmetics and all the modern paraphernalia are required to make them appear fresh and blooming. Man is equally at fault. A devotee to all the absurd devices of fashion, he practically asserts that "dress makes the man." But physical deformities are of far less importance than ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... puppyism. After the American has got done bragging about his independence, and his "free and equal" prerogatives, he begins to see how these things run into impertinence and forwardness; and the Englishman, in visiting us, escapes from his social bonds and prejudices, to see for a moment how absurd ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... this appears to me absurd, wrong, foolish, And quite repugnant to my scheme of life, Yet, if you're so much ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... magistrates often interfered to protect the Jews from massacre; but they absolutely and persistently refused to trouble themselves with any attempt to understand their doctrines or enter into their disputes. The tradition that Gallio sent some of St. Paul's writings to his brother Seneca is utterly absurd; and indeed at this time (A.D. 54), St. Paul had written nothing except the two Epistles to the Thessalonians. (See Conybeare and Howson, St. Paul, vol. i. Ch. xii.; Aubertin, Seneque et ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... the performance of a play through thick glass or with closed ears has much the same absurd effect that is produced by also stopping the ears while at a ball and watching the apparently objectless capering of the dancers, without the aid of musical accompaniment. Diderot, in his Lettre sur les sourds muets, ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... Absurd—isn't it?—that one should have to cloak one's interest in a stranger's soul under such a convention as the offer of a paper. Why couldn't I have said to him straight out, "Look here, what's the ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... there in a bright patch of moonlight looking up into his face, seeing every line of it in the rich flood of light from the full moon, wondering dully if she had lost her sense of the real and the unreal. It seemed to her so rankly absurd, so utterly preposterous that he should seek to pretend with her. For, now that she had seen the limping gait of his big sorrel, was she more than certain that this was the man whom she had seen following her in the afternoon. And as she noted again the sinewy ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... OBSERVATION 1. The following absurd phrases so common in the sacred desk and elsewhere, should be carefully avoided by all who regard common sense:—"Sing the two first and three last verses." Just as if there could be more than ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... sermon-paper than sacrifice the interest of your hearers. But it is a silly thing for a man in a prayer-meeting or pulpit to stop merely because a certain number of minutes have expired while the interest is deepening—absurd as a hunter on the track of a roebuck, and within two minutes of bringing down its antlers, stopping because his wife said that at six o'clock precisely he must be home to supper. Keep on hunting till your ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... which that of the European always possesses. This peculiarity must be attributed to the absence of pigment cells which, when present, always present a more or less dark color. The theory that climate alone is capable of producing all these diversities is simply absurd. The Esquimaux, who live in Greenland and the arctic regions of America, are remarkable for the darkness of their complexion. Humboldt remarks that the American tribes of the tropical regions have no darker skin than the mountaineers of the temperate ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... absolutely silly," said Imogen, with her eyes full of tears. "What extraordinary things fevers are! I declare, I am as bad as any child. It is absurd, but the mere idea of having to give you up makes me quite cold ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... apprehend what it is, yet you see what kind of thing it is, or if you do not quite see that, yet you certainly see how great it is. What, then? Shall we imagine that there is a kind of measure in the soul, into which, as into a vessel, all that we remember is poured? That indeed is absurd; for how shall we form any idea of the bottom, or of the shape or fashion of such a soul as that? And, again, how are we to conceive how much it is able to contain? Shall we imagine the soul to receive ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... It IS so absurd to be an engaged orphan and it IS so absurd to have the girls and the servants scuttling about after one, like mice in the wainscot; and it IS so absurd to be ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... into the error of supposing that all eyes and ears are fixed upon them, to observe how awkwardly or how gracefully they move, and how well or how ill they converse. This is the result of a mental egotism combined with love of admiration, and usually produces awkward diffidence or absurd affectation. Too often the first weakness is overcome, or covered up, most unwisely, by exchanging bashfulness for impertinent boldness; while the vanity and self-consciousness of the second very rarely result in manners or Conversation either sensible ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... walked across the room and looked out into the Duchesse's rose garden. Really, Markham's importance in her scheme of things was getting to be intolerable. It infuriated her that this obsession was warping her judgment to the point of imagining impossibilities. Hermia and Markham? The idea was absurd. And yet somehow it persisted. She turned on her heel and paced the floor of the room rapidly two or three times. She paused for a moment at her dressing-table and then with a quick air of ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... diligently, for even he, had he not been blinded by zeal, might have seen that it was something too ornate to appeal to a rather practical young lady of twenty-five. It was much too ornate, that is certain; and it alone would have made him absurd had not fate joined forces against him and at precisely this point prompted Harry, who was for once impatient with his progress, to try to reproduce the larger music coursing through his soul. This ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... mongrel makeshift man[oe]uvre. Any absurd attempt to substitute a bad contrivance for what the custom of the sea ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... "An absurd idea!" cried M'Nicholl. "But probably Kepler never knew the real dimensions of these craters. Barbican knows the trouble and time required to dig a well in Stony Hill only nine hundred feet deep. To dig out a single lunar crater would take hundreds ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... Pugh could no longer be mistaken. The conviction of his intentions grew upon his sister, first from a mere absurd notion, banished from her mind with derision, then from a misgiving angrily silenced, to a fixed expectation, confirmed by the evident opinion of all around her, and calling for decision and self-command on her ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and she fifteen— Ah, me! how fair I thought her. She treated with disdainful mien The homage that I brought her, And, in a patronizing way, Would of my shy advances say: "It's really quite absurd, you see; He's very ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... devil, death, and the seven deadly sins, are impersonated in the procession. They are clad in the most absurd costumes, and make hideous contortions, beating and abusing each other in their supposed vexation at having to join in the Creator's praises. The people hoot and hiss them, the lower classes sing songs in derision of them, and play them all manner of tricks, and the whole scene is one of incredible ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... know the thought is treason, We feel the dream absurd; A claim rebuked of reason, That withers at a word: For never shone the season That bore ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... cartridges, with all its absurd embellishments, ran up the Ganges and Jumna to Benares, Allahabad, Agra, Delhi, and the great cantonment at Meerut; while another current of lies ran back again from Meerut to Barrackpur. It was noised abroad ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... the stress of other occupations. But it was your getting the money from her at the Kaims for Nanny that I was to speak of. Absurd though it seems, I think some dotard must have seen you and her at the Kaims, and ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... occasion, M. de Lauzun complained bitterly of me; he invented the most absurd tales about me, even saying that he had struck me in my own apartments, after taunting me to my face with ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... cannot very well get on without the word, and we certainly cannot avoid its connotation. No man in his senses can deny that there is such a thing as the "art of literature," though it may seem absurd to talk about it. No one, however healthy in his tastes, would refuse to distinguish the statement "This is a very good book"—which may mean only that it is instructive, or useful for certain purposes—from ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... Miss Griffin laughed and stood looking coyly up into Mr. Holmes's face. But at last, feeling absurd, Miss Griffin shifted ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... could only express myself like you! But I have an infernally absurd jargon—half the language of men of the world and of letters, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... seen that sodden, puffy, but good-humored face; everybody had felt the fiery exhalations of that enormous red beard, which always seemed to be kept in a state of moist, unkempt luxuriance by liquor; everybody knew the absurd dignity of manner and attempted precision of statement with which he was wont to disguise his frequent excesses. Very few, however, knew, or cared to know, the pathetic weariness and chilling horror that sometimes looked out ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... of such an attempt comes the prompt objection that the Articles were actually drawn up against "Popery," and therefore it was transcendently absurd and dishonest to suppose that Popery, in any shape,—patristic belief, Tridentine dogma, or popular corruption authoritatively sanctioned,—would be able to take refuge under their text. This premiss I denied. Not any religious doctrine at ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... What absurd impulse fired his blood at this sudden familiarity, Dan did not know; but, quite spontaneously, as though all his life he had been in the habit of paying such gallantries to charming ladies, he kissed ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... religion proves the first, by intimating the necessity of a providence guiding and governing the world, from the consequence of the wisdom, justice, prescience, and goodness of the Almighty Creator: for otherwise it would be absurd to think, that God should create a world, without any care or providence over it, in guiding the operations of nature, so as to preserve the order of ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... lingers in the old leaves of the manuscript. And the reader who comprehends this may also comprehend the tender affection for the Ivy expressed in the old Christmas carols which I have quoted, and which, without such comprehension, seem absurd enough; while with it, they appear truly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... could not help laughing at this absurd reflection. But a cry from their merry companion stopped them; he was bending over Satellite's ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... Mayor—I," Grabot answered eagerly, tapping himself on the breast in the most absurd manner. "Don't you know ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... possible point in the situation, and she was doing it. She did not like Mrs. Cristie's attention to Mr. Tippengray, because it gave him pleasure, and she did not wish that other women should give him pleasure; but she was not jealous, for that would have been absurd in ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... against something incredible, unbelievable. Beings from an atomic universe, from a world buried within the atom; beings attacking his own earth with uncanny methods of destruction. Oh, it was impossible, absurd, but he must look at them, ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... much now, that the range of hope is sadly limited! A thousand dark ways of what seemed blissful possibility are now closed to us, because there the light now shines, and shows naught but despair. Yet why should the thing be absurd? Can any one tell why this organism we call man should not go on working forever? Why should it not, since its law is change and renewal, go on changing and renewing forever? Why should it get tired? Why should its law work more ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... the parish, if you dared to indulge the right of every honest heart? Would you dare to look upon her as a human being, of the same order of creation as yourself, who might one day be your wife, if you were true and honest, and helped to break down the absurd distinctions built up by vile tyranny between you? In a word, are you a man—as every man is on the Continent—or only an English ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... the real connection between the use of certain drugs or herbs and an excitation or depression of the activities of the nervous system? He does observe consequences, but he is quite ignorant of causes. Even to-day their full consequences are unknown; and it is absurd to expect that savage humanity should have been better informed. And even when a more rational theory exists, the practice persists under various forms. This is a principle that receives vivid illustration from the history ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... girls had hoped, the boys were wildly curious about the mysterious letters "M.K." They made a great many absurd guesses, and Carl finally nicknamed it the "Club of Many Kinks," which he thought sounded like girls. But they ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... things appear of a nature, either so monstrous as to shock humanity, or so absurd as to excite derision; yet they have some redeeming qualities which must elicit commendation. And while we view with satisfaction those bright spots, shining more brilliantly from the gloom which surrounds them, their want of learning and the absence of every opportunity for refinement, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... fail to be read almost at once by the lettered; and he was translated pretty early, though not perhaps to any great extent. It was in England, moreover, that by far his greatest follower appeared, and appeared very shortly. For it would be absurd in the most bigoted admirer of Thackeray to deny that the author of Vanity Fair, who was in Paris and narrowly watching French literature and French life at the very time of Balzac's most exuberant flourishing and education, owed something to the author of Le ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... you invent are altogether too improbable—because you think me more of a fool than I am in thinking that I am going to credit such absurd inventions. I preferred your first method; at least you had two witnesses to speak for you—two witnesses who were not worth very much, it's true, but witnesses all the same. You've made a change; well, you are within your rights. Let us stick to ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... something would happen to you," he growled, "and I wanted to stop you. I never saw a person climb in such an utterly absurd way." ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... his sister had expected. He smiled faintly at the absurd appearance of the Venus in her mackintosh, but he was evidently depressed. He looked mournfully at ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... sympathetic sigh. "To reconcile Northampton and Rome is rather a problem. Mary had better come out here. Even at the worst I have no intention of giving up Rome within six or eight years, and an engagement of that duration would be rather absurd." ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... staring at the boy who had spoken. Even in the dim light their intense interest was plainly manifest. Zeke was doing his utmost by absurd motions to impress upon the mind of John the fact that he must ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... stood the chances of escape by sea? Could he stow himself on board a grab or gallivat, and try to swim ashore when near some friendly port? He put the suggestion from him as absurd. Supposing he succeeded in stowing himself on an outgoing vessel, how could he know when he was near a friendly port without risking almost certain discovery? Besides, except in such rare cases as the visit of an interloper like ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... life had suddenly come upon him, of the life of the brain, or of the spirit, or of both, which he had been living, if not with content at least with ardor—a stronger thing than content. He felt unmanly, absurd. All sense of personal dignity and masculine self-satisfaction had fled from him. He was furious with himself for being so sensitive. Why should he care, even for half an hour, what Mrs. Shiffney thought of ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... would become all of a sudden more acute or more learned, if the present civil incapacities were removed? Do you fear for your tithes, or your doctrines, or your person, or the English Constitution? Every fear, taken separately, is so glaringly absurd, that no man has the folly or the boldness to state it. Every one conceals his ignorance, or his baseness, in a stupid general panic, which, when called on, he is utterly incapable of explaining. Whatever you think of the ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... irradiating from some sort of centrally-situated spiritual power-house. As we look up into the starry heavens we cannot imagine the Activity as residing in the empty space between the stars or between the stars and the Earth on which we stand. It seems absurd to picture its dwelling-place there. Equally absurd does it seem to regard the Activity as emanating from some spiritual sun situated far beyond the confines of the stars, and from there emitting spiritual ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... left arm; and no sooner had they all tasted his gift than they fell upon their knees to worship him, vowing that the distributor of such delight must be more than man. If this avowal be considered absurd and extraordinary in this present age of philosophy, we must not forget to make due allowance for the palates of individuals who, having been so long accustomed merely to horse-chestnuts and acorns, suddenly, for the first time in their lives, ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... both from a very terrible fate; and, as I have said, you shall not find me ungrateful. I am not going to give my unconditional consent to Inez's marriage with you—not yet at least, that would be rather too absurd. You are both—and you, especially, Leo—far too young to seriously contemplate marriage for some years to come; moreover, you are at present merely a midshipman; you still have your way to make in the noble profession you have chosen to follow. I have not the slightest doubt ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... all their paces, and horsemen were careering about with that dexterity and grace for which the Arickaras are noted. As soon as a horse was purchased, his tail was cropped, a sure mode of distinguishing him from the horses of the tribe; for the Indians disdain to practice this absurd, barbarous, and indecent mutilation, invented by some mean and vulgar mind, insensible to the merit and perfections of the animal. On the contrary, the Indian horses are suffered to remain in every respect the superb and beautiful animals ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... powerful. They had been so ground down into poverty and wretchedness, that they felt the fiercest envy, the most brutal rage, towards all the wealthy and noble, believing them born to be unboundedly happy, and to make everybody below them as miserable as they pleased. Never, perhaps, were the absurd notions of the privileges of royalty held in such exaggeration as by the common people of France at this time; and never, perhaps, was a more intense hatred shown among men than by those who abolished this royalty. The story of the young ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... are very sorry; it only makes the matter worse, when I have so much upon my mind. It's absurd, gentlemen. I wonder at you. Just because you see a few dolphins and albicores swimming below the ship's counter you must want to begin playing with the grains. There, be off, both of you. What would be the good of the fish ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... my efforts seem to amuse Ned immensely," laughed Zoe. "It's too absurd that he will persist in looking upon me still as a mere child. Just think of it! when I've been married more than a year; yes, ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... in the Iliad and Odyssey. Naucrates even points out the source in the library at Memphis in a temple of Vulcan, which according to him the blind bard completely pillaged. Undoubtedly there were good poets before Homer; how absurd to conceive that an elaborate poem could be the first! We have indeed accounts of anterior poets, and apparently of epics, before Homer; AElian notices Syagrus, who composed a poem on the Siege of Troy; and Suidas the poem of Corinnus, from which it is said Homer greatly borrowed. Why did Plato ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... impossible it won over poor Sonia Turgeinov—she who had thrown her cap over the windmills. There would be excitement, fascination in playing such a thrilling part in real life. Were you ever hungry, Prince?" She broke off. "What an absurd question! What is more to the point, tell me it was all well done—the device, or excuse, of substituting another motor-car for her own, the mad flight far into the night, down the coast where save for that mishap—But I met all difficulties, ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... ordain'd the dust to tread, Or hand, to toil, aspired to be the head 260 What if the head, the eye, or ear repined To serve mere engines to the ruling mind? Just as absurd for any part to claim To be another, in this general frame; Just as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains, The great directing ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... you mean that with the three monstrous legs, which I supposed was devised as the most preposterous device, to represent our most absurd Majesty of Man.—The signet—I have not seen it since I gave it to Gibbon, my monkey, to play with.—He did whine for it most piteously—I hope he has not gemmed the green breast of ocean with my ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... He was somewhat irritated at Jean for taking the thing so seriously, for being so obstinate. On such a morning it was absurd. At least it would do no harm to make an effort to reach the island. If it proved impossible they could give it up. "All right, Jean," he said, "I'll take it back. You are only timid, that's all. ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... or etchings, to the doctor's clever caricatures and grotesque outlines, and the contributions were equally miscellaneous. There were descriptions of scenery, fragmentary notes of history and science, records more or less veracious or absurd of personal adventures, and conversations, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had been silly and absurd, but he knew also that he was so moved as to have hardly any control over himself. In the few words that he had now said to Madame Faragon he had, as he felt, told the story of his own disappointment; and yet ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... recognition she prescribed a condition which she had no power or authority to impose—that Texas should not annex herself to any other power—but this could not detract in any degree from the recognition which Mexico then made of her actual independence. Upon this plain statement of facts, it is absurd for Mexico to allege as a pretext for commencing hostilities against the United States that Texas is still a ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk
... on my new Scallop, and is very fine. To church, and there saw the first time Mr. Mills in a surplice; but it seemed absurd for him to pull it over his ears in the reading-pew, after he had done, before all the church, to go up to the pulpitt, to preach without it. Home and dined, and Mr. Sympson, my joyner that do my diningroom, and my brother Tom with me to a delicate fat pig. Tom takes his disappointment ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... law, His providence as my will, His fellowship as my joy. And the root and beginning of all such following is in coming to Him, conscious of mine own darkness, and trustful in His great light. We must rely on a Guide before we accept His directions; and it is absurd to pretend that we trust Him, if we do not go as He bids us. So 'Follow thou Me' is, in a very real sense, the sum ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... himself. "Why did I follow her? I was so happy at the mere sight of her! She looked at me; was not that immense? She had the air of loving me. Was not that everything? I wished to have, what? There was nothing after that. I have been absurd. It is my own fault," etc., etc. Courfeyrac, to whom he confided nothing,—it was his nature,—but who made some little guess at everything,—that was his nature,—had begun by congratulating him on being in love, though he was amazed at it; ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... No brindle-thatched guy in buckskin can interfere without sleepin' in smoke. Understand?" The long, sallow man nervously stroked his hair, which was flattened down on his forehead in a semicircle in the absurd fashion of ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... the guise in which his sorrow came to him, the sense that the angel of his life had been snatched away and given to a rude man of earth and iron, who could neither need nor appreciate her ministrations,—this was the very perversity of fate that makes human existence appear too absurd and contradictory to be the scene of one other hope or one other fear. There was nothing left for Owen Warland but to sit down like a ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... La Tour in safety to his fort, a large majority resolutely declined committing any act of aggression, or joining in an attack which might be considered beyond the limits of their treaty. Excessively provoked at what he termed their absurd scruples, La Tour sent his lieutenant to request a few of the leading men to meet aboard his vessel, hoping to prevail with them to relinquish their ill-timed doubts. He walked the quarter-deck with impatient steps, while waiting ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... How absurd is the impression bequeathed by Slavery in regard to these Southern blacks, that they are sluggish and inefficient in labor! Last night, after a hard day's work, (our guns and the remainder of our tents being ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... I think any such absurd thing? I think, if you choose, that he wouldn't be worth the ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... great temples. Caligula worked at Coptos, and the Antonines enriched Esneh and Philae. The gangs of workmen employed in their names were still competent to cut thousands of bas-reliefs according to the rules of the olden time. Their work was feeble, ungraceful, absurd, inspired solely by routine; yet it was founded on antique tradition—tradition enfeebled and degenerate, but still alive. The troubles which convulsed the third century of our era, the incursions of barbarians, the progress ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... suggestion Loki could scarcely keep from laughing, for the idea of sending the beautiful Freya, the joy and delight of Asgard, to be the wife of this ill-favoured Frost Giant was too absurd ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... Romans as most effeminate. Unlike the Greeks, who strove for a harmonious bodily development, the Romans exercised for usefulness in war. Cicero exclaims, with reference to Greek gymnasial training: "What an absurd system of training youth is exhibited in their gymnasia! What a frivolous preparation for the labors and ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... from external possessions, but from wisdom, which consists in the knowledge and practice of virtue; that the cultivation of virtuous manners is necessarily attended with pleasure as well as profit; that the honest man alone is happy; and that it is absurd to attempt to separate things which are in nature so closely united as virtue and ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... warm and impatient when no answer came to the knocking. He said such play-acting was absurd. Why did not the man come out courageously and deny that he was a priest? He would have a far better excuse for letting ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... more than a year before, and had been acquainted with his proceedings from month to month—almost from week to week—during the entire interval. The charge of being an evil-minded and seditious person was too absurd to be seriously entertained for a moment by any one who knew Mr. Gourlay as intimately as Dickson had done for more than eight years.[10] As for his not having taken the oath of allegiance, it had ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... 'No, indeed—what an absurd child you are!' said Ethelberta. 'I knew him once, and he is interesting; a few little things like that make ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... things are very absurd; For a bobolink, or a yellow bird, Comes of its own accord, and sits On every knitting-needle that knits, And pipes and sings, As the ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... detest an Adjective. It is the father of lies, the author of affectation and the progenitor of all exaggeration. They should be remitted to limbo with all the other crudities of youth. I have listened to the point of exasperation, through an evening, to the absurd use of adjectives by young girls of education and with some claims to good taste. Somehow it sometimes comes to me, that this use of adjectives is the besetting sin of the female conversationalists of this day. Some young fellows unsex themselves so far as to follow ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... upon him the effect of kindness and mild persuasion. He had one very annoying habit, and that was he would very seldom give a satisfactory answer if suddenly asked a direct question, and often his reply would be very absurd, sometimes bordering on downright impudence. The master noticed one afternoon, after calling the boys from their play at recess, that Ned had not entered the school-room with the others. Stepping to the door, he found him seated very composedly in the yard, ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... are not one of those absurd people I have heard of, who cut down their apple-trees for fear the apples ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... alluding to a ridiculous and absurd way of some mathematicians in calculating the gradual decay of moral evidence by mathematical proportions; according to which calculation, in about fifty years it will be no longer probable that Julius Caesar was in Gaul, or ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... took it in very different fashions. Colonel Boyce suffered in the more respectable part of his soul. Sunderland merely fumed and felt venomous. For it is certain (if absurd) that Colonel Boyce had a sincere reverence for Marlborough. He much desired (one of his few simple human emotions) that Marlborough should think well of him. If he had tacked Marlborough's name to a dirty business about which Marlborough ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... such a companion to your heart's content. Such had been his belief until now, with a dozen words, Ted saw his father shatter the illusion. No, of course Mr. Laurie would never come to the shack. It had been absurd to think it for a moment. And even if he did, it would only be as a lofty and unapproachable spectator. Mr. Fernald's words were a subtly designed flattery intended to put him in good humor because he wanted something ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... too sad at parting. But you know I am not much over fifteen yet, though I too feel older—oh, so much older than girls in England, who are at school till long past that age. You know I like you, Dick, very, very much. It would be absurd to say more than that to each other now. We part just on these terms, Dick. We know we both like each other very much. Well, yes, I will say 'love' if you like, Dick; but we cannot tell the least in the world what we shall do five years hence. So ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... "it's those absurd children." Then, opening the gate, she called: "John! Dorry! come out and show yourselves." But nobody replied, and no one could be seen. The nosegay lay on the path, however, and picking it up, Katy ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... capturing Paris at the beginning of the struggle, with the comparatively insignificant forces which the prince could bring to the undertaking, as the most chimerical that could be entertained. Was it less absurd now, when, if the Protestant army had received large accessions, the walls of Paris could certainly be held by the citizens for a few days, until an army of fully equal size, under experienced leaders, could ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... Indians raised in concert their cries of lamentation over the corpse, and among them Shaw clearly distinguished those strange sounds resembling the word "Halleluyah," which together with some other accidental coincidences has given rise to the absurd theory that the Indians are descended from the ten lost tribes ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... sound the depths of his character and know the treasures of excellence hidden beneath its surface. Besides, he was dogged for years by certain malignant scribblers, who took a pleasure in misrepresenting all his actions, and holding him up in an absurd and disparaging point of view. In what this hostility originated I do not know, but it must have given much annoyance to his sensitive mind, and may have affected his popularity. I know not to what else to attribute ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Natalie sees not how the tendrils of "first love" have filled the girl's heart. The young soldier-artist rules that gentle bosom. Love finds its ways of commune. Marriage seems impossible for years. Isabel must mount her "golden throne" before suitors can come to woo. A sculptor! The idea is absurd. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... out by Castlereagh in the Treaty of Chaumont nine years later. Pitt also assented to the Czar's proposal that the final settlement should be guaranteed by international agreements forming a basis for the new European polity, a suggestion in which lies the germ of the Holy Alliance. It would be absurd to hold Pitt responsible for the strange and unforeseen developments of the years 1815-25. But it is to be regretted that fear of Napoleon should have obliterated his earlier aim of forming a defensive league of the weaker States. His cure for the evils of French domination ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... dents[Fr], extract sunbeams from cucumbers, set the Thames on fire, milk a he-goat into a sieve, catch a weasel asleep, rompre l'anguille au genou[Fr], be in two places at once. Adj. impossible; not possible &c. 470; absurd, contrary to reason; unlikely; unreasonable &c. 477; incredible &c. 485; beyond the bounds of reason, beyond the bounds of possibility, beyond the realm of possibility; from which reason recoils; visionary; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... walking to Keppel Street with the young lady, of the purport of the letter and of the invitation given to Daniel Thwaite. The Serjeant at once declared that the girl must have her own way,—and the Solicitor-General, who also heard of it, expressed himself very strongly. It was absurd to oppose her. She was her own mistress. She had shown herself competent to manage her own affairs. The Countess must be made to understand that she had better yield at once with what best grace she could. Then it ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... go back a little before relating the adventure of Father d'Aigrigny, whose cry of distress made so deep an impression upon Morok just at the moment of Jacques Rennepont's death. We have said that the most absurd and alarming reports were circulating in Paris; not only did people talk of poison given to the sick or thrown into the public fountains, but it was also said that wretches had been surprised in the act of putting arsenic into the pots which are usually kept all ready on the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... a thing was absurd, and, of course, wasn't true; Much perplexed, we all wondered what we ought for to do, Though we heard with delight they were on the girl's track, And we wept in our joy when we ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... reign of Richard II., shoes were of such absurd length as to require to be supported by being tied to the knees with chains, sometimes of gold and silver. In 1463 the English parliament took the matter in hand and passed an act forbidding shoes with spikes more than two inches in length being ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... came. One of the letters, of course! The owner of the diamond had sent it this way, perhaps to be set, and had sent instructions under another cover. An absurd, even a reckless thing to do, but ——! And Mr. Latham attacked the heap of letters neatly stacked up in front of him. There were thirty-six of them, but not one even remotely hinted at diamonds. In order to be perfectly sure, Mr. Latham went through ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... drive to our county town to make some little purchases. Owen, and Morgan, and I were all hard at work, during her absence, on the stories that still remained to be completed. Owen desponded about ever getting done; Morgan grumbled at what he called the absurd difficulty of writing nonsense. I worked on smoothly and contentedly, stimulated by the success of the ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... Bulbul's I never saw. Tom lisps atrociously, and uttered the passage, "You athk me if I thuffer," in the most absurd way. Miss Clapperclaw says he acted pretty well, and that I only joke about him because I am envious, and wanted to act ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fertile fancy," she went on, "and your absurd way of taking a joke only encourages me! Suppose you could transform this sour old wife of yours, who has insulted me, into the sweetest young creature that ever lived by only holding up your ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... uterus is often divided into two long segments which afford room for the development of a number of young at once. Some ancient writers make most absurd statements with regard to the fecundity of females. One declares that the simultaneous birth of seven or eight infants by the same mother was an ordinary occurrence with Egyptian women! Other statements ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... fancy everything I have in that way is pretty safe. No, Clarke, I have really come to consult you about a rather curious matter that has been brought under my notice of late. I am afraid you will think it all rather absurd when I tell my tale. I sometimes think so myself, and that's just what I made up my mind to come to you, as I know ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... organization of the human family into Debating Clubs, County Societies, State Unions, etc., etc., with a view of inducing all children to take hold of the handles of their knives and forks, instead of the metal. Children have bad habits in that way. The movement, of course, was absurd; but we all did our best to forward, not it, but him. It came time for the annual county-meeting on this subject to be held at Naguadavick. Isaacs came round, good fellow! to arrange for it—got the townhall, got the Governor to preside ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... that it was something which in some way bore a resemblance to fire—for the woman, after getting over her first terror of the dancing flames, kept pointing to them and then to her wounds in a most suggestive way. This, however, as Grom rather scornfully pointed out, was too absurd. There was nothing that could be in the least like fire itself; and the wounds of the fugitives had no likeness whatever to the corrosive bites of the flame. A-ya took the correction submissively, but held her own thought; and when a day ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... but a shroud!" I cried in great wrath—and then stopped short, and burst out laughing. "What an absurd and gruesome conversation," I said, holding out my hand. "Good-bye, Frau Inspector, I am sure you ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... quite so imperial in her port, not quite so incisive in her speech, not quite so judicial in her opinions, but with two or three more joints in her frame, and two or three soft inflections in her voice, which for some absurd reason or other drew him to her side and so bewitched him that he told her half his secrets and looked into her eyes all that he could not tell, in less time than it would have takes him to discuss the champion paper of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... other; he always frowns, and I always smile. Theoretically I am annoyed and indignant; but at the critical moment the comical side of the situation sweeps over me, and out flashes the smile before I can force it back. It is so absurd to see a big grown man sulking like a child! Quite a good thing he does not intend to marry. His wife would ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... see about that," said Uncle John. "I will admit, in advance, that a daily paper in such a place is absurd. None of us quite understood that when we established the Tribune. My nieces thought a daily the only satisfactory sort of newspaper, because they were used to such, but it did not take long to convince me—and perhaps them—that in spite of all ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... of defence against possible attacks from wild animals. When viewed from a respectable distance these articles invest the ultra-gentle Bengali with a suggestion of being on the war-path, a delusion that is really absurd in connection ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... again, ever take a natural pleasure in life if she lost him, was unimaginable to her at the instant. She loved him, she had loved him from the first moment she saw him, she would never, though she lived a million years, love any one else. It was as absurd to think that she could love again as that a flower could bloom afresh when its petals were withered. No, without George there was only loveless old age—there was only the future of Miss Amelia before her. And she clung to this idea with a horror ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... some minutes musing, and then exclaimed, "I will move heaven and earth to break off this absurd match." ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... which could not but be unwelcome to Columbus. A decree was issued making it lawful for all native-born Spaniards to make voyages of discovery, and to settle in Espanola itself if they liked. This was an infringement of the original privileges granted to the Admiral—privileges which were really absurd, and which can only have been granted in complete disbelief that anything much would come of his discovery. It took Columbus two years to get this order modified, and in the meantime a great many Spanish ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... Britling's brain and marked its multiple strands, its inconsistencies, its irrational transitions. It was but a specimen. Nearly every brain of the select few that counted in this cardinal determination of the world's destinies, had its streak of personal motive, its absurd and petty impulses and deflections. One man decided to say this because if he said that he would contradict something he had said and printed four or five days ago; another took a certain line because so he saw his best opportunity of putting a rival into ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... suppose you attach some value to probabilities? Do you, as a sensible man, believe for one moment that Hyde, placed in the position he is, would be such a fool, such a suicidal fool, as to tell you about that particular shed if he'd really hidden those things there? The mere idea is absurd—ridiculous!" ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... extensive and so complicated that it would be absurd to attempt to reduce it to a few rules. The only one which can be given has just been alluded to, and is, that either the political objective points should be selected according to the principles of strategy, ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... and supplied his own picture by writing in 1791, "You have often heard me blame M. Chastellux for putting too much sprightliness in the character he has drawn of this general. To give pretensions to the portrait of a man who has none is truly absurd. The General's goodness appears in his looks. They have nothing of that brilliancy which his officers found in them when he was at the head of his army; but in conversation they become animated. He has no characteristic traits in his figure, and this has rendered it always so difficult ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... There is no harm in it, as long as the charmer does not sit up for a public benefactor. If I were a man, a clever man like yourself, who had seen the world, who was not to be charmed and encouraged, but to be convinced and refuted, would you be equally amiable? It will perhaps seem absurd to you, and it will certainly seem egotistical, but I consider myself sociable, for all that I have only a couple of friends,—my father and the principal of the school. That is, I mingle with women without any second thought. Not that I wish you to do so: on the contrary, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... the way, were always perfect without being formal or absurd. They seemed to have an instinct for absolute good breeding. Yet they were all the time what Whitman called "natural and nonchalant persons." Neither my wife, nor her staff, nor I ever made any ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... rob you, an orphan, as any brigand might do? I felt greatly depressed, dearest. That is to say, persuaded that I should never do any good with my life, and that I was inferior even to the sole of my own boot, I took it into my head that it was absurd for me to aspire at all— rather, that I ought to account myself a disgrace and an abomination. Once a man has lost his self-respect, and has decided to abjure his better qualities and human dignity, he falls headlong, and cannot ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... undesirable; where the canons of dramatic art become inoperative; where, contrary to what KArting says, we are not asked to believe that "everything is happening in a perfectly natural manner"; where the poet may stick at nothing provided the laugh be forthcoming; where all the apparently absurd conventions of palliatae cease to be absurd, vanish into thin air and become unamenable to literary criticism, inasmuch as they are all only part of the laugh-compelling scheme. This is the solvent that we propose. To establish ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... had lost his practice, because his whimsically changing his religion had made people distrustful of him, I maintained that this was unreasonable, as religion is unconnected with medical skill. JOHNSON. 'Sir, it is not unreasonable; for when people see a man absurd in what they understand, they may conclude the same of him in what they do not understand. If a physician were to take to eating of horse-flesh, nobody would employ him; though one may eat horse-flesh, and be a very skilful physician. If a man ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... time—I am to be leaning from the window gazing at Orion as you too—so we agreed—will be gazing. Each will know the other has his thoughts, and we will say 'good-night.' How utterly foolish! How contemptibly absurd, common!—and how mystically delightful! You and I with Orion for the apex of eye's sight and our thoughts flying from heart ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... All day he tramped the streets. He listened to street-fakirs, peered into shop-windows, threw himself upon the grass of the public squares and stared up at the blue sky. He had very little personal consciousness; he seemed to have lost track of himself. He had an absurd feeling that he had come away from somewhere and left behind a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... considers this property? A right line can be comprehended alone; but this definition is unintelligible without a comparison with other lines, which we conceive to be more extended. In common life it is established as a maxim, that the straightest way is always the shortest; which would be as absurd as to say, the shortest way is always the shortest, if our idea of a right line was not different from that of the shortest way betwixt ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... produce of the mines throws extra payment into the hands of the mine laborers, they squander their money with the most absurd extravagance, and they are excellent customers to the European dealers in dress and other articles of luxury. Prompted by a ludicrous spirit of imitation, the Indian, in his fits of drunkenness, will purchase costly things which he can have no possible use for, and which he becomes weary of, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... enough to leave the answer to that one to the Infant. For had not the Infant alone seen the only reasonable answer to the puzzle of the mysterious man? And Danny had learned that it takes a real man and a real mind to track truth to her hiding place and accept the absurd improbabilities ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... expense, difficulty, and loss of time, by reason of the many turf-pits scattered irregularly through the bog, wherein great numbers of cattle are yearly drowned. And it hath been, I confess, to me a matter of the greatest vexation, as well as wonder, to think how any landlord could be so absurd as to suffer such havoc ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... of discomfort by setting the world right, by waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects that integral part of the world where lies his business, his first business—namely, his own character and conduct. Were it possible—an absurd supposition—that the world should thus be righted from the outside, it would yet be impossible for the man who had contributed to the work, remaining what he was, ever to enjoy the perfection of the result; ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... of the strong arm and the dextrous hand. Every month sees a larger proportion of officers coming from among those whose habits have been the reverse of luxury. It is hard to say which would be more mischievous and absurd: for these to spend their extra pay and rations in an effort to copy the traditional style of an English Guardsman, or to keep on in their old way of life, and pocket large savings that are supposed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... any man can tell any tidings of a spruce, neat, apish, nimble, fine, foolish, absurd, humorous, conceited, fantastic gallant, with hollow eyes, sharp look, swart complexion, meagre face, wearing as many toys in his apparel as fooleries in his looks and gesture, let him come forth and certify me thereof, and he shall have for ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... said Denys, with great dignity and ceremony, indeed so great as to verge on the absurd, "you are turned off. If on a slight acquaintance I might advise, I'd say, since you are a servant no more, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... would write Elaine the truth and bid her good-by. He could not in honour continue to visit this home where resided the woman he loved—with a jealous daughter. Why jealous? What a puzzle, and what an absurd one! He helped Elaine to a seat on the wall and sat near her. For several minutes neither spoke. They were again facing the pool, which looked in the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... argument can occur only when men have conflicting opinions about a certain thought, and try to prove the truth or falsity of this definite idea. Since a term—a word, phrase, or other combination of words not a complete sentence—suggests many ideas, but never stands for one particular idea, it is absurd as a subject to be argued. A debatable subject is always a proposition, a statement in which something is affirmed or denied. It would be impossible to uphold or attack the mere term, "government railroad supervision," for this expression ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... Mrs. Fitzgerald at once communicated with Lady Burton's dying wishes to the person in whose charge the papers were, and requested that they should not be published. But with a disregard alike for the wishes of the dead and the feelings of the living, the person rushed some of these absurd "communications" into print within a few weeks of Lady Burton's death, and despite all remonstrance was later proceeding to publish others, when stopped by a threat of legal ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... window of my room I saw the doctor get astride his mule. He was girt with a big sword, but he still wore his long, absurd and shabby gown and his loose, ill-fitting shoes, so that it was very likely that the stirrup-leathers would engage his thoughts ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... father's death? I know who murdered him in spite of secrecy," she screamed," it was Mr. Palsey, that false villain below," "Helen cried Cyril," "how could it be Mr. Palsey, why I should know it if it was he, dont be absurd dear, get into bed again do you know you are very ill, and to go out would ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... very lively reading, much more so than that dreary love-making between Pyrocles and Philoclea, or between any other pair of the many exceedingly tiresome folk in Sidney's Arcadia. Grant that it is deliciously absurd. It is not to be supposed that a clever eighteen-year-old girl, replying to a declaration of love, will talk in the language of a trained nurse, and say: 'Green sores are to be dressed roughly lest they fester, ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... wisdom tells us to follow their evolution. After the morning's waiting, we want the noon-day splendour and rapture. As you never had that rapture, you have not yet known love: and, at your age, is not that an absurd and miserable ignorance? Is it not right to wish for love and even to force its coming? Those who go on waiting for it in meek resignation appear to me so guilty!... Life has always seemed to me to be divided into two parts: the search for love; and love. As long as we are not in ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... attempted to emphasise the idea of ultimate union by calling the statutory bodies "Councils" instead of "Parliaments," and by setting up a single Senate to control them both. But they did not meet with acceptance. Captain ELLIOTT thought the first as absurd as the idea that you could make two dogs agree by chaining them together, and Mr. LONG dismissed the second with the remark (which shows how rapidly his political education has advanced since the Parliament Act) that he was in great doubt as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... latter risks, so the practice arose of insuring against seizure. At one time, at any rate, in the French ports were to be found brokers who would insure the evasion of a cargo of goods for a premium of fifteen per cent. At the safe distance of a century and a half, the absurd prohibition and its incompetent administration are equally comic. At the time, however, there was nothing comic in the contempt for law and order thus engendered, in the feeling of outrage on the part ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... opening-up of the country by internal reform and not by external pressure has as yet hardly commenced in immense areas of the Empire far removed from the imperial city of Peking. And the mere fact that the Chinese propose such an absurd program as that which plans the building of all their railways without the aid of foreign capital is sufficient to react in an unwholesome ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... day he always seems only a yard from her, as they examine the red walls pitted by bullets, and wander round the Museum. He has a party of friends with him—Eleanor can hear them chaffing the guide, and ridiculing everything. Their absurd remarks amuse her, from time to time she laughs for ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... the Colonel invariably got his humorous effects by a good-natured but sometimes sharp ridicule, the process of which was to exaggerate the argument or travesty the cause he was attacking until it became absurd. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... into exclamations that it was impossible that a boy of fourteen could entertain so absurd an idea, and the tutor evidently thought it a fresh proof of depravity that he should thus have tried to ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is usually said that he converted the entire seven rooms into his theatre, but that seems highly unlikely. The northern section was 46 x 26 feet, the southern section 110 x 22—absurd dimensions for an auditorium. Moreover, that Farrant originally planned to use only the northern section is indicated by his request to be allowed to "pull down one partition and so make two rooms—one." The portion not used for the playhouse he rented; in 1580, we ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... sadness and a voice that showed emotion; "I will not answer you. Let us leave our extinct passions in their tombs, in peace. Why unbury all those charming follies which have had their day?" "Come," says Grimm to Duclos, "do not let us grow sentimental; that would be too absurd. Mademoiselle de Camargo," said he, playing with the dogs at the same time, "which was the epoch of short petticoats? for that is one of the points ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Pompeius was asked what he would do, if Caesar should resist the requirements of the Senate, he answered,—"What if my son should raise his stick against me?"—meaning to imply, that, in his opinion, resistance from Caesar was something too absurd to be thought of. Yet Caesar did resist, and triumphed; and, judging from their after-lives, we should say that the Young Pompeys would have had small hesitation in raising their sticks against their august governor, had he proved too disobedient. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... his chair, quietly digesting this bit of information. Medicine and writing. What did she write? Love stories? Fairy tales? Romances? He had read several of these. Mostly they were absurd and impossible. Love stories, he thought, would be easy for her. For—he said, mentally estimating her—a woman ought to know more about love than a man. And as for anything being impossible in a love ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... lord duke do but write a letter (like the Chinese behind their mud-walls, he was always bold enough when well secured under the protection of the post, and was more absurd in ink even than in action) to the King of Spain, offering him his services as a volunteer against 'Gib.' Whether his Most Catholic Majesty thought him a traitor, a madman, or a devoted partisan of his own, does not appear, for without waiting for an ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... that the character lo should be changed to si, and that we should read Si-lan, our Ceylon. Both Ma and the Sung-shi say that 2500 li south-east of Chu-lien was 'Si-lan-ch'i-kuo with which it was at war. Of course the distance mentioned is absurd, but all figures connected with Chu-lien in ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... still in his mind. As if either he or I could escape doing what we are fated to do—supposing we really are fated—by putting a few hundred or a few thousand miles between Armadale and ourselves! What strange absurdity and inconsistency! And yet how I like him for being absurd and inconsistent; for don't I see plainly that I am at the bottom of it all? Who leads this clever man astray in spite of himself? Who makes him too blind to see the contradiction in his own conduct, which he would see plainly in the conduct ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... life," continued Mills. "She had plenty of it, and it had a quality. My cousin and Henry Allegre had a lot to say to each other and so I was free to talk to her. At the second visit we were like old friends, which was absurd considering that all the chances were that we would never meet again in this world or in the next. I am not meddling with theology but it seems to me that in the Elysian fields she'll have her place in a ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... "The story is absurd," said Mr. Spalding. "In the first place, Anson is not trying to get the franchise. No one has made overtures to me with that end in view. I have set no price on the franchise, because I had not the slightest intention of letting ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... a great empire was revising its destinies. Now and then one saw a canvasser on a doorstep. For the most part people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe. At times one felt a little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... system, if we mistake not, is the genealogy of organized forms; when we can trace the latter, we establish the former. Considering how much naturalists differ in their views as to what is a natural classification, it is not strange that a genealogy of animals or plants seems absurd to many. To another generation of naturalists it must, perhaps, be left to decide whether to attempt the one is more unphilosophical ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... course. How absurd you are!' said her husband, laughing, as he finished the letter and came back ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... attempt; but in the first passage there is a direct injunction to a possible act: "Fly with false aim, move the still-piecing air." To say "wound the still-piecing air" would be to direct to be done, in one passage, that which the other passage declares to be absurd ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 182, April 23, 1853 • Various
... but worse,—it is pure waste of fuel, and results in direct and irreparable harm. Realizing fully that sleep is meant for rest, that the only gain is rest, and that new power for use comes as a consequence,—how absurd it seems that we do not abandon ourselves completely to gaining all that Nature ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... islands of evergreen. Then, turning to go on, he cast a glance at the house and stopped with a word of surprise. There was a light. Somebody had broken in (an incredible happening here) and was beguiled by loneliness and silence into an absurd security. He turned into the path and went softly up to the front door, lifted the latch and was stepping in when some one came. It was Nan. She was in the hall, a pile of blankets in her arms. Seeing him, she did not start, only laughed a little, ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... St. Paul's history, we may discern and insist upon the suitableness of his character, before his conversion, for that display of free grace which was made in him. Not that he could merit such a great mercy—the idea is absurd as well as wicked; but that such a one as he was before God's grace, naturally grew by the aid of it into what he was afterwards ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... Anthony was kneeling upon Mr. Morgan, who was lying face downwards upon the drawing-hearth and dealing as fluently as a sheep-skin rug would permit with Anthony's birth, life, death and future existence. As for Patch, his services no longer required, he was rolling upon the sofa in an absurd endeavour to remove the burrs ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... thing of all was concealed from his view. The inevitable day had dawned for the genuinely Greek type of city. It was brilliant but it was a source of eternal divisions in a world which had to be unified to be of any service. Its absurd factions and petty leagues were really a hindrance to political stability. Further, the essential vices of democracy cried aloud for a stern master, and found him. Treason, bribery, appeals to an unqualified voting class, theft of rich men's ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... See the account of this legend in the note in M. B., pp. 235, 236, different, but not less absurd. The first part of Fa-hien's narrative will have sent the thoughts of some of my readers to the exposure of the infant Moses, as related in Exodus. ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
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