"Unreason" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... coming in general out of the deeper motives of nations, do not belong to such an extent as is often supposed to the realm of politics. Political causes are often incidental causes and determine the time and place of wars but do not create them. Cramb (66) says that wars persist in spite of their unreason, because there is something transcendental that supports them, and this transcendental purpose is the desire for empire. Powers (75) says that nations fight for tangible things and also for intangible things. The tangible things are existence, commerce, independence, territory; ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... to Richard and his wife, and I often met Mr. Woodcourt there. Richard still suspected my guardian, and refused to see him, and when I said this was so unreasonable, my guardian only said, "What shall we find reasonable in Jarndyce and Jarndyce? Unreason and injustice from beginning to end, if it ever has an end. How should poor Rick, always hovering near it, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... be sealed. And then came the thought that the insensible boy at her feet, escaping for a little while through sleep's primeval sanctity, was part of the robbed world also. Who had lost more than he by his unreason? If her heart did not melt then, ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... the political contests of our country go on without deeply affecting the peace of families. In the cotton States opinion was or had to appear to be at one. In the North the bitterness and unreason of limited groups of anti-slavery people excited the anger of men who saw in their ways and speeches continual sources of irritation, which made all compromise difficult. The strife of parties where now men were earnest as they never were before since ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... not last? Is there any reason, in earth or Heaven, why we two should part? If there is—I will make that reason itself folly, and madness, and unreason. Dear, do not speak of this not lasting. Die, you say? Worse, far worse; as much as eternal death is worse than bodily dying. Last? Does any one know what for ever means, if we do not? Die, we must, in these dying bodies ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... condition already existed in the years of Lincoln's life which we are now observing, although the profound cause of that condition lay wholly in the future, in the years which were still far away. There is a charm in the very unreason and mysticism of such a faith, and mankind will never quite fail to fancy, if not actually to believe, that the life which Lincoln had to live in the future wrought in some inexplicable way upon the life which he was living in the present. The explanation ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Mecca of millions of debased worshipers. It is also true that the pretended exhibitions of the tooth of Buddha can still inspire an ignorant multitude of people to place themselves in adoring procession and to debase themselves with the absurd rites of frenzy and unreason. Nor do I forget the fact that my countrymen are broken up into hundreds of sects, and their language frittered into hundreds of dialects. Yet, as I said, we are full of hope, and there can be no ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... should take Josette, and return with Mata to open the house and make it ready for our reception. It had been the head-quarters of militia, Indians, and stragglers of various descriptions during our absence, and we could easily imagine that a little "misrule and unreason" might have had sway for ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... what was going on in the man's mind. Probably he did not himself rightly know. The discovery that he bore the same name as his employer had once might have set off some unpleasant train of subconscious reflection, accentuating the bitter sense of class distinction and the unreason of it, which he was only too prone to entertain. He did not want any "kindness" from rich people. He worked for them because he must, but he worked in a spirit of armed neutrality at the best, like so many of his kind, and he spat mentally upon Carnegie libraries and all other evidences ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... craftsman. I thought of the broken-tipped sword he'd found behind the hangings; the dirt of the cold room, and his cold eye, wrapped up in his own concerns, scarcely resting on me. Then I remembered the solemn chapel roof and the bronzes about the stately tomb he'd lie in, and—d'ye see?—-the unreason of it all—the mad high humour of it all—took hold on me till I sat me down on a dark stair-head in a passage, and laughed till I could laugh no more. What else ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... gave warning and Charles would ask his employer leave for a "holiday," and stay at home trying by gentle mirth and work to divert the dread visitor of unreason. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... is a capital season, More fit than another, Loose language of silly unreason In courage to smother. Clean speech is too frequently shamed For Cricket to shame it! One word is too often exclaimed For you to ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... suitableness which the theory of fashion implies they should have. But instead of a continual progress towards greater elegance and convenience, which might be expected to occur did people copy the ways of the really best, or follow their own ideas of propriety, we have a reign of mere whim, of unreason, of change for the sake of change, of wanton oscillations from either extreme to the other—a reign of usages without meaning, times without fitness, dress without taste. And thus life a la mode, instead ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... of The Confessional, utter their callous cynicism or their deathbed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the low fierce cry of triumphant malice, the long-drawn shriek of futile rage. There was commonly an element of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, in the hatreds that caught his eye; he had a relish for the gratuitous savagery of the lady in Time's Revenges, who would calmly decree that her lover should be burnt in a slow fire "if that would compass her desire." He seized the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Weller I should ask as Lord of Misrule, and Dr. Johnson as the Abbot of Unreason. I would suggest to Major Dobbin to accompany Mrs. Fry; Alcibiades would bring Homer and Plato in his purple-sailed galley; and I would have Aspasia, Ninon de l'Enclos, and Mrs. Battle, to make up a table of whist with Queen Elizabeth. I shall order a seat ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... frivolities of our domestic art. One may wish to clear them away as so much litter and trash; and this clearance is necessary so that we may purge our vision and see what is beautiful. We are almost rid of the manners of the King's mistress, and most women no longer try to appeal to men by their charming unreason. It is not merely that the appeal fails now; they themselves refuse to make it, out of self-respect. But they still remain irrational in their tastes; or at least they have not learned that all this ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... leave her, till the hour when she could bear the room no more. She had fought with beasts there, and had prevailed. Yet unreason (as she had made herself call it) lifted a bruised head at the last. Papers! Papers, after such a kiss! Oh, the folly of the wise! Caught up she knew not whence, harboured in the mind she knew not how, the bitter words of an old ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... curl of a chimney pot, or the elfin wink of a lonely lamp-post brings home to the startled soul that it is really the City of a Fearful Folk. That the inhabitants are not human in the ordinary sense is quite clear, yet it has only just begun to dawn on me after staying a week in the Town of Unreason with its monstrous landscape and grave, unmeaning customs. Do I seem to be raving? ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of unreason and injustice with what you call my "counsels of despair." I say there may be a future life and there may not be a future life. If there is a future life, a man will deserve it no less, and enjoy it no less, for having been happy here. If there is no future life, he who has been unhappy here ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... primary instincts that make their lair in the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better than cant,—and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... having no instinctive prompting as to what is right and what is wrong, cohabitation, like many other points of the behavior, is left for reason or the will to determine; or, rather, as things now are to unreason; for reason is neither consulted nor enlightened as to what is proper and allowable in the matter. Nature's rule, by instinct, makes it devolve upon the female to determine when the approaches of ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... and religion this curious and very John Bullish unreason is still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the agonizing silence she felt acutely her girlishness, her helplessness, her unreason, confronted by his strong and shrewd masculinity. At the bottom of her soul she knew how wrong she was. But she was ready to do anything to save Sarah Gailey from the distress of one particular humiliation. With the whole of her ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... to know that, even in speculations on 666, there are different degrees of unreason. All the diviners, when they get a colleague or an opponent, at once proceed to reckon him up: but some do it in play and some in earnest. Mr. David Thom found a young gentleman of the name St. Claire busy at the Beast number: he forthwith added the letters in [Greek: st klaire] ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Panky again. He remembered Bridgeford as the town where the Colleges of Unreason had been most rife; he had visited it, but he had forgotten that it was called "The city of the people who are above suspicion." Its Professors were evidently going to muster in great force on Sunday; if two of them had robbed ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... with an avalanche. It was rolling straight toward me, gathering momentum as it came—not one man or a dozen, but a solid wall of human hate and unreason. ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long
... the Crown a protector and an arbiter in all his dealings with his lord. Noble and enlightened in his aims, Joseph, like every other reformer of the eighteenth century, underrated the force which the past exerts over the present; he could see nothing but prejudice and unreason in the attachment to provincial custom or time-honoured opinion; he knew nothing of that moral law which limits the success of revolutions by the conditions which precede them. What was worst united with what was best in resistance to his reforms. The bigots of the University of Louvain, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... baffled his opponent with the brilliancy of his unreason, Kenny enlarged upon the humiliation he must experience when Garry learned the truth. At a familiar climax of self-glorification, in which Kenny claimed he had saved Brian from no end of club-gossip by his timely evasion of the truth, Whitaker lost ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... without insolence as without fear or flutter, of what he is and what others are. A courage to quell the proudest, an honest pity to encourage the humblest. Withal there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot: much vain unreason he hears; lays up without response. He is not there to expect reason and nobleness of others; he is there to give them of his own reason and nobleness. Is he not their servant, as we said, who can suffer from them, and for them; bear ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... three of the most brilliant entertainments of the season fell on the same night, and Madame Mildau, with all the unreason of her sex, desired to attend ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... worse," Elinor said, in her unreason; "the one might be borne, but the other I will not endure. Sympathy, yes! They will all be sorry for me—they will say they knew how it would be. Oh, I know I have not profited as I ought by what ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... I would signify that comradeship at Chigi's villa at Rome in orgies of paint pots and brushes, flesh pots and flagons, feasts of reason and of unreason, wherein we were alike insatiable until the light of our revels went out in the death of ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... was not so beautiful as I wished all my comrades to be, and he was besides very small; but shadows are amiable play-friends, and they did not blame him because he cried when he was teased and did not cry when he was beaten, or because the wild unreason of his sorrow made him find cause for tears in the very fullness of his rare enjoyment. For the first time in my life it seems to me I saw this little boy as he was, squat-bodied, big-headed, thick-lipped, and with a face swept clean of all emotions save ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... feel them, hear them, address them - Halo-bedecked - And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason, Rigid in hate, Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision, ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... before them. The French statesmen insisted on the necessity of the ceremony at Amiens being interpreted as liege homage, involving the obligation of defending the overlord "against all those who can live or die". The English politicians complained of the "injustice and unreason of the King of France, who seeks the disinheritance of their master in Aquitaine". It was only by limiting the demands of both parties to points of detail, that a compromise was arrived at in the convention of the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... yet who, in her months of sanity, was a worthy sister of such a brother. His kindness to her knew no bounds. It was strange that she had premonition of the recurring fits of her disorder; and when the ghost of unreason beckoned, Charles took her by the hand and led her to the appointed home. Charles Lloyd relates, that, at dusk one evening, he met them crossing the field together on their melancholy way toward the asylum, both of them in tears. In the smiles of Charles Lamb, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... brother and sister alike, was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling; madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense. In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you consider well his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of the intellect. I know one who read the essays of Elia with intense delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. She had seen so well through ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... been nameless until his old friend Ben Gaynor had built a summer home there two years ago and had christened the pond among the trees. Lake Gloria! Mark King liked the appellation little enough, telling himself with thorough-going unreason that there was a silly name to fit to perfection a silly girl, but altogether out of place to tie on to an unspoiled Sierra lake. Ben would have done a better job in naming it Lake Vanity. Or Self-Regard. King could think of a score of designations more to the ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... His previous life; growth of his fortune; his noble use of it; sundry original ways of his; his enjoyment of the university in its early days; his mixture of idealism and common sense. First celebration of Founder's Day. His resistance to unreason. Bitter attacks upon him in sundry newspapers and in the Legislature; the investigation; his triumph. His minor characteristics; the motto "True and Firm'' on his house. His last days and hours. His political ideas. His quaint sayings; ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the fighting round the Tower on the Marshes at Mondement. It was the key of the swamp of St. Gond, the French centre. The Tower was held by the French when, by every military rule, they should have given it up. At length they lost it. They won it again, but because of sheer unreason, so far as the evidence shows, for at the moment they regained it Mondement had ceased to be anything but a key to a door which had been burst wide open. Foch, by the books, was beaten. But Foch as we know was fond of quoting Joseph de Maistre: "A battle lost is a battle which one ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... the ground afforded the young man an excellent view. Sweetbriar had arrived at the turn which led to his stable; where rest and oats awaited him; and it evidently seemed to Him the height of injustice and unreason to be asked to go all the way back to Salem again. Mistress Ann, however, knew nothing of these previous experiences of the animal, but imputed his insubordinate behavior entirely to self-will and obstinacy. And thus, as the great globe moves around the sun in a perpetual circle, as the result ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... the coach had left the Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly well, I still felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of my sight longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of unreason I had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours, when Wemmick ran ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... confidence was in each other; with Balder at her side, Gnulemah was fearful of the world no longer. But her visions were all spiritual; even the kisses on her lips were to her a sacred miracle! Love makes children of men and women,—shows them the wisdom of unreason and the value of soap-bubbles. These lovers must meet the world, but the light and freshness of the Golden Age should accompany them. The man held the maiden's hand, and so faced ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... you is madness and folly is perfect sanity with me. After all, Alf, is there not an amount of unreason ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... namely, to state fully and fairly his conclusions, to avoid giving unnecessary offence, and thirdly,] "while feeling assured of the just and reasonable dealing of the respectable part of the Scottish press, I naturally hoped for noisy injustice and unreason from the rest, seeing, as I did, the best security for the dissemination of my views through regions which they might not otherwise reach, in the certainty of a violent attack by ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... have combined in that mighty brain all feminine as well as masculine attributes. The soul in which the feminine does not mingle is ripe for wrong, strife and unreason. "It was mother-love, carried one step further, that enabled the Savior to embrace a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... advantage, that though he may be making himself personally weak and miserable, he is still fixing his thoughts largely on gigantic strength and happiness, on a strength that has no limits, and a happiness that has no end. Doubtless there are other objections which can be urged without unreason against the influence of gods and visions in morality, whether in the cell or street. But this advantage the mystic morality must always have—it is always jollier. A young man may keep himself from vice by continually thinking of disease. He may keep himself from it also ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... woven in with his tissue. Men have always fought for these things,—for their own earth, for their own kind, for their own ideal,—and they will continue to give their blood for them as long as they are men, until wrong and unreason and aggression are effaced from the earth. The pale concept of internationalism, whether a class interest of the worker or an intellectual ideal of total humanity, cannot maintain itself before the passion of patriotism, as this year of fierce ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... themselves into shapes mathematically perfect, or particles of frozen moisture into the symmetrical and beautiful forms of snowflakes, you have nothing to say. You have not even invented a name to conceal your heroic unreason." ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... unruffled: "My dear, I scent unreason. This is a high matter. If the French King compounds with Rome, it means war for Protestant England. Even you must ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... we should consider right and sane to-day. The extraordinary neolithic civilizations of the American continent that flourished before the coming of the Europeans, seem to have got along with concepts that involved pedantries and cruelties and a kind of systematic unreason, which find their closest parallels to-day in the art and writings of certain types of lunatic. There are collections of drawings from English and American asylums extraordinarily parallel in their spirit and quality with the ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... persecution, the broad picture of society. It is no idealised version of the Middle Ages. The ugly, sordid side of mediaeval life is turned outwards; its dirt, discomfort, ignorance, absurdity, brutality, unreason and insecurity are rendered with crass realism. The burgher is more in evidence than the chevalier. Less after the manner of the Waverley novels, and more after that of "Hypatia," "Romola," and "Fathers and Sons," it depicts the intellectual ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... compassionate nature, and had a loving, patient, and noble heart; prudent she was; the skilfulest and thriftiest of financiers; could well keep silence, too, and with a gentle stoicism endure much small unreason.—Life of Schiller. ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... boy. There was a slight echo of rancor in his own voice, still it was patient, with the patience of a man with a woman and her unreason. All his temper of the night before had disappeared. He was quite honest in saying that he wished to do what was right and honorable. He was really much more of a man than he had been the day before. He was conscious of not loving Maria—his budding boy-love ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking voice: "Oh, why didn't you ever tell her? She thought you didn't like her." What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we have told her? His unreason endeared him to me more than all ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... at work in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong. There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and in exhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a soldier—passe encore. But the death of Shelley was not his goal. And the death of the birds is so little characteristic of them ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... friend to the friendless!' With that head, however, he remained old Christopher Casby, proclaimed by common report rich in house property; and with that head, he now sat in his silent parlour. Indeed it would be the height of unreason to expect him to be sitting there without ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... whatever," said the parliamentarian; "and to contend as much would be the apex of unreason. For this diamond belongs, of course, to my ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... a compassionate nature, and had a loving, patient and noble heart; prudent she was; the skilfulest and thriftiest of financiers; could well keep silence, too, and with a gentle stoicism endure much small unreason. Saupe says withal, 'Nobody liked a laugh better, or could laugh more heartily than she, even in her extreme old age.'—Christophine herself makes no complaint, on looking back upon her poor Reinwald, thirty years after all was ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.'s room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if they could suppose that that confounded boy had lived ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... is that they make a writer and his readers believe that he is exercising his reason when he is only moving from trite image to image. If eloquence is reason fused with emotion, writing, or speaking, full of dead metaphors is unreason fused with sham emotion. I add in illustration a further list of dead metaphors lately noticed: 'Branches of the same deadly Upas Tree. Turning a deaf ear to. The flower of our manhood. Taking off the gloves. Written in letters of fire. Stemming the tide. ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... awaited the Senora. Without asking any questions, without taking anything into consideration, perhaps, indeed, because she feared to ask or consider, she had assumed that she would immediately re-enter her own home. With the unreason of a child, she had insisted upon expecting that somehow, or by some not explained efforts, she would find her house precisely as she left it. Little had been said of its occupancy by Fray Ignatius and his brothers; ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... divine unreason of the gods, which lures man as a universal solvent of his sorrow, the great solution to the great enigma! Where was it? Bessie asked when Rob passed her door in the morning on his way to his solitary breakfast without a word of greeting or a kiss, and finally left the house without remembering ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the tidewater region of South Carolina, and certain parts of Virginia were the seats of the soundest political thought of the day. The men who did this sane, wholesome political thinking were quite right in scorning and condemning the crude unreason, often silly, often vicious, which characterized so much of the political thought of their opponents. The strength of these opponents was largely derived from the ignorance and suspicion of the raw country districts, and from the sour jealousy with which ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... fierce unreason should league and lie and defame and smite, We that know thee, how far below thee the hatred burns of the sons of night, We that love thee, behold above thee the witness ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... that first night in Monterey that if she ever made up her mind to marry she thought she would select Adan: he was more tolerable than any one she knew. It is doubtful if he had crossed her mind since; and now, with all a woman's unreason, she conceived a sudden and violent dislike for him because she had treated him too kindly in her thoughts. I liked Adan Menendez; there was something manly and sure about him,—the latter a restful if not a fascinating quality. And I liked his appearance. His clear ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and actions are divided between the sickly sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And I have written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to rid one's self once for all of the canting unreason of "equality and brotherhood," to rise above the coils of material getting, and to make noble and beautiful and free one's own life. Sodom would have been saved had the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and our hope to-day depends ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... jolts and ironical tricks of the hour and the occasion lose their brutish emphasis and sink into humorous perspective. The sense of having some one for whom one's weakest and least effective moments are of interest and for whom one's weariness and unreason are only an additional bond, makes what were otherwise intolerable in our life easy and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... and action struck the chord which, in a man's heart, always responds to the touch of feminine unreason. She dropped into the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands, while Woburn watched ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... gravitation, to generic fatality. Perpetual vacillation between contraries becomes its only mode of progress, because it represents that childish form of prejudice which falls in love and cools, adores, and curses, with the same haste and unreason. A succession of opposing follies gives an impression of change which the people readily identify with improvement, as though Enceladus was more at ease on his left side than on his right, the weight of the volcano remaining the same. The stupidity of Demos is only equaled by its presumption. It ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... out from the isolation of men from the community and the separation of their thoughts from the social principles will be extinguished in blood and unreason; but if the distress first creates the understanding, and if the political understanding of the Germans discovers the roots of social distress, then these incidents would also be felt in Germany as the symptom of ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... applauders could help it! The day was coming when a boiler-deck and pilot-house tradition, heard by many with hearty enjoyment, by many with silent disdain, would be this: that aboard the old Votaress on her first up trip—late spring of '52—cholera on every deck—mutiny hotly smouldering—the unreason of fear and of wrath were beaten in fair fight by the unreason of mirth, and men's, women's, children's lives—no telling how many—were saved, through the cleverness of some play-actors and first the youngest of all the Hayles and then the youngest of all the Courteneys singing a nonsense ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... presents itself to reason as a problem which demands solution no less than the origin of the planets. All the properties and laws of the nebula require to be accounted for. What origin are we to give them? It must be either reason or unreason. We may go back as far as we please, but, at every step and stage of the regress we must find ourselves confronted with the same question, the same alternative—intelligent purpose ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... has gone on we have grown in good-will. We are fighting our battle still, but do not see our victory yet. We are not opposing men and women, but the enemies of men and women—ignorance, prejudice, and injustice. Many people bring into a new movement the whole intensity and unreason of their personal desires and discontents, and the train of progress must carry all this luggage along with it. Woman suffrage means equality in and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of men, and love of order and uprightness, he gave it that high place which it yet holds, and which it must hold; for when the decisions of the Supreme Court are questioned by a State or people, the fabric of our government is but a spider's web through which anarchy and unreason ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... matriculation at Eugene's College of Unreason was in this wise. In 1887, Mr. Ben Ticknor, the Boston publisher, was complaining that he needed some new and promising authors to enlarge his book-list. The New York "Sun" and "Tribune" had been copying Field's rhymes ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... reason." Englishmen might well have difficulty in justifying to their reason their affection for America; for to hear an Englishman speak of American peculiarities and eccentricities, it would often seem that to love such men would be pure unreason. But these criticisms are no true index to the British national feeling for the Americans as a people. Does a brother not love his sister because he says rude things about her little failings? Americans hear the criticisms and, ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... tempest because the small cargo which it has is all in its hold; Timon is like some splendid, but top-heavy, battleship, which turns turtle in the storm through lack of ballast. There is something lionlike and magnificent, despite its unreason, in the way he accepts the inevitable, and later, after the discovery of the gold, spurns away both the chance of wealth and the human jackals whom it attracts. The same lordly scorn persists after him in the ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... Significance, Purpose, Work. Methods of Abolitionists. Southern Opposition. Northern. Anti-abolitionist Riots at the North. Murder of Lovejoy. Outrages against Northern Blacks. Colored Schools Closed. Schism among the Abolitionists. The Liberty Party. Ultra-abolitionists' Unreason. Why Abolitionism Spread. Ambiguity of the Constitution. Seizure of Black Seamen. Grievances on ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... The unreason, brutality, and extravagance of the men; the tyranny of the Union; the growing insolence of the Union officials—Tressady's letters from home after a time spoke of little else. And Tressady's bankbook meanwhile formed a disagreeable comment on the correspondence. ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Feather's impudent little laugh as she had talked of her "vagabond Robin," her "small pariah." He was a boy entranced and exalted by his first passion and because he was a sort of young superman it was not a common one, though it shared all the unreason and impetuous simplicities of the most rudimentary of its kind. He could not think very calmly or logically; both the heaven and the earth in him swept him along as with the rush of the spheres. It was Robin who was foremost ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... liability to moral indignation is one of the plain man's most serious defects. As such, my endeavour is to avoid being staggered and deeply affronted, or even surprised, by human vagaries. There are too many plain people who are always rediscovering human nature—its turpitudes, fatuities, unreason. They live amid human nature as in a chamber of horrors. And yet, after all these years, we surely ought to have grown used to human nature! It may be extremely vile—that is not the point. The point is that it constitutes our environment, from ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... been limited in the range of their ideas, stationary in science, art, and government, and would never have risen above mediocrity. The history of China is an example of the results of restricted intercourse among peoples. Thus the unexpected conclusion emerges, that without unreason and injustice there would ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... which ensues lives are lost from the crowding and crushing. Yet all the time the doors have stood wide open, and through them an orderly exit might have been conducted had reason not given place to unreason. It is the task of those responsible for the children's education to guide them without wild struggling along the paths of well-regulated conduct towards the desired goal, influenced not by the emotions of the moment, but only by reason and a sense ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... to be the very oracles of Heaven. As though God has turned away from the wise, and written His decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... conducted the defence of his friend Lord William Russell, attended his execution, vindicated his memory, and been spitefully deprived by James II. of his lectureship at St. Clement's. Burnet was drawn to the translation of "Utopia" by the same sense of unreason in high places that caused More to write the book. Burnet's is the ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... deal, and do a great deal of harm. And this for a reason that any one at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself. All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times before he got out of bed. The practical politicians might say that this power was a harmless anomaly; that it was ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... knowledge, it is blazing arrogance to sacrifice hard-won standards of credibility to some special purpose. It is nothing but the doctrine that I want what I want when I want it. Its monuments are the Inquisition and the invasion of Belgium. It is the reason given for every act of unreason, the law invoked whenever lawlessness justifies itself. At bottom it is nothing but the anarchical nature of man imperiously hacking its ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... against all superstition," said Sir Richard solemnly; "it brings disorder. For religion we have the clergy, and for justice the lawyers, and for health the doctors. All outside of that partakes of license and unreason." ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... Le Gardeur! It is mad unreason,—I feel that,—but it is no less true. I love you, but I will not marry you." She spoke with more resolution now. The first plunge was over, and with it her fear and trembling as she sat ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... wretches must beat their brains against this hopeless persistency of the orderly outward world, as compared with the storm and tempest, the riot and confusion within—when we remember how many minds must tremble upon the narrow boundary between reason and unreason, mad to-day and sane to-morrow, mad ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... as they had not been long distances that day. There was a vague fear in the young man's mind, although he tried to dispel it by the force of argument. "What has the girl to fear now?" his reason kept dinning in his ears, but, in spite of himself, something else, which seemed to him unreason, made him anxious. When he reached Annie Lipton's home, a fine old house, overhung with a delicate tracery of withered vines, he saw Annie's pretty head at a front window. She opened the door before he had time to ring the bell, and she looked with ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... word of that letter by heart. She had read it while she drove towards the depot, and when she dismissed the carriage it was with a vague idea of flying to Lockhaven, and brushing all this cobweb of unreason away, and claiming her right to take her place at her husband's side. But as she sat in the station, waiting, every sentence of the letter began to burn into her heart, and she slowly realized that she could not go back. The long day passed, and the people, coming and going, ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... A pot that has been boiling furiously doesn't grow cool in a moment, but it ceases almost instantly to boil; and though it may cool slowly, it cools surely. There was not an end of prejudice and unreason the moment the people had disposed of those who were plundering them, but prejudice began to lose its force as soon as men had the opportunity to engage in calm discussion, and to look forward hopefully to the future. In the midst of bayonet and carpet-bag rule, the ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... preserved or restored, and containing those natural and ideal activities which disease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order, cannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and life with continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, and strife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none, perhaps, deserves to be. There is inexperience in not considering that ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... storms—many a Grecian peasant who did homage to Phoebus Apollo when the sun rose or went down—many a savage, his hands smeared all over with human sacrifice—shall sit down with Moses and Jesus in the kingdom of God."[56] To such wild unreason does the mind of man descend when it ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... pure fanatics who spilt their blood that they might have Christ's Kirk and Covenant regulated in their own peculiar way; and he will hold them as mere feather-brains who sacrificed their lands and their lives to an obstinate loyalty to the House of Stuart. Yet it is of such unreason, if unreason it be, that the warp and the woof of the historic annals of Scotland have been spun: it is this defiance of what the utilitarian philosopher calls the rules of common sense, as applied to human ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... of impure assafoetida would mingle with the fumes of the incense; and wicked drinking choruses would rise up along with the holy canticles, in hideous dissonance, reminding one of the old orgies under the reign of the Abbot of Unreason. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... does every intelligent man in Christendom, that the appeal to reason is far preferable to an appeal to war. But, pray, what is to be done where there is no reason to appeal to? Are reasonable men to strip themselves of all armor, and suffer unreason to prevail? ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... decision, wilt thou strike in, when the favoring east wind, the possible, springs up. Mutiny of men thou wilt sternly repress; weakness, despondency, thou wilt cheerily encourage: thou wilt swallow down complaint, unreason, weariness, weakness of others and thyself;—how much wilt thou swallow down? There shall be a depth of silence in thee, deeper than this sea, which is but ten miles deep: a silence unsoundable; known to God only. Thou shalt be a great man. ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... lay the sea, sometimes at full tide, sometimes withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for the same sea. By that road he would travel over a swell of rising ground covered with short, withered grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason. Beyond the ridge, which was crowned with some sort of street-lamp, anything was possible; but up to the lamp it seemed to him that he knew the road as well as he knew the parade-ground. He learned to look forward to the place; for, once there, ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... rationalistic ethics with his semi-sensational theory of knowledge; Newton is far from finding in his mechanical physics a danger for religious beliefs; the deists treat the additions of positive religion rather as superfluous ballast than as hateful unreason; Bolingbroke wishes at least to conceal from the people the illuminating principles which he offers to the higher classes. Such halting where farther progress threatens to become dangerous to moral ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... polished stone weapons of an extinct race, which looked like aerolites, were the children of Ouranos the heaven, and had souls in them. One, by one of those strange transformations in which the logic of unreason indulges, the image of Diana of the Ephesians, which fell down from Jupiter; another was the Ancile, the holy shield which fell from the same place in the days of Numa Pompilius, and was the guardian genius of Rome; and several ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... martyrs, in both of which species, occasionally perhaps combined in the same persons, the Middle Ages abound. The fidelity of Griseldis under the trials imposed upon her by her, in point of fact, brutal husband is the fidelity of a martyr to unreason. The story was afterwards put on the stage in the Elizabethan age; and though even in the play of "Patient Grissil" (by Chettle and others), it is not easy to reconcile the husband's proceedings with the promptings of common sense, yet the playwrights, with the instinct of their craft, contrived ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... not as a rule a judge of good looks; and no doubt 'tis unreason in me to pity her the more for her comeliness. But as a matter of ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... was troubled by a suspicion that the war and the details of its development had discredited in some minds some of the ideas of which he was the professional exponent. He made a brave struggle, however, against this tide of unreason. "God does not make things too easy for us," he explained, "He gives us the opportunities, and if we choose not to use them, that is our fault. A loving father sets up a tremendously high standard for his son, and judges ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... the tendril cried, In beautiful sweet unreason; Till lo! from its prison, glorified, It burst in the glad ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... police-sergeant checked it, but advised the Society to keep on going. The Society withdrew into the brake fighting, as it were, a rear-guard action of oratory up each step. The collapsed harmonium was hauled in last, and with the perfect unreason of crowds, they cheered it loudly, till the chauffeur slipped in his clutch and sped away. Then the crowd broke up, congratulating all concerned except the sexton, who was held to have disgraced his office by having sworn at ladies. We strolled across the green towards Woodhouse, who was talking ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... assassins are hired to commit. This certainly is madness. To be thus used by their bitterest enemies, the police and the State, to serve thus voluntarily the forces of intrigue, of reaction, and of tyranny—surely nothing can be so near to unreason as this. When Bismarck's personal organ declared again and again, "There is nothing left to be done but to provoke the social democrats to commit acts of despair, to draw them out into the open street, and there to shoot them down,"[26] a reasoning opponent would have seen that ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... ever Come? Is endeavour But a vain twining and twisting of cords? Is faith but treason; Reason, unreason, But a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... room, where the atmosphere of womankind still lingered to suggest the dear hands that were gone, and suddenly his eyes leaped to the letters left upon the table. It was Kitty's which he opened first, perhaps because it was nearest; but the torrent of inconsequential words confused him by their unreason and he turned to Lucy's, ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... begin?" We do not want to be paralysed by philosophic doubt for the rest of our mortal lives on the hills. We prefer to be stirred to emotional life by those who are transported by love of beauty to the realms of unreason. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... most rigid veracity. This author was unquestionably a man of the most honourable probity, and not destitute of intellectual ability; but he must serve as an useful example of that wrong-headed nature in some men, which has produced so many "Abbots of Unreason" in society, whom it is in vain to convince by a reciprocation of arguments; who assuming false principles, act rightly according to themselves; a sort of rational lunacy, which, when it discovers itself in politics and religion, and in the more ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... had any—was to outdo nature's cruelest and most wasteful methods, and to prepare for a life of struggle and pain by a worse experience to begin with. About the age of puberty, when body and mind are both sensitive, this pleasant rite took place. Those who survived it, habituated to cruelty and unreason, were thereby fitted to live cruel and unreasonable lives—and ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... through her lustrous, transiently dwelling eyes had not that security. His part, besides the watch over the spring of his hot blood, was to combat a host, insidious among which was unreason calling her Browny, urging him to take his own, to snatch her from a possessor who forfeited by undervaluing her. This was the truth in a better-ordered world: she belonged to the man who could help her to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... such straightforward unreason, are the etherealized, saccharine effusions of the "Glories of Mary," by Alfonso di Liguori! They represent the other pole of Mariolatry—the gentlemanly pole. And under the influence of Mary-worship a new kind of saintly physiognomy was elaborated, as we can see from ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... of execration. The boatswain found himself overwhelmed with reproaches of all sorts. They seemed to take it ill that a lamp was not instantly created for them out of nothing. They would whine after a light to get drowned by—anyhow! And though the unreason of their revilings was patent—since no one could hope to reach the lamp-room, which was forward—he became greatly distressed. He did not think it was decent of them to be nagging at him like ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... his lips. And now those dreadful words are going the round of the newspapers, to be verified here, commented on there, gossiped about everywhere; and I, for my part, am frightened to look at a paper as a child in the dark—as unreasonably, you will say—but what then? what drives us mad is our unreason. I will tell you how it was. First of all, an English acquaintance here told us that she had been hearing a lecture at the College de France, and that the professor, M. Philaret Chasles, in the introduction to a series of lectures on English poetry, had expressed ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... eyes to its defects. Divine providence, though frequently dwelt upon, signified little more for the Stoic than destiny or fate. Harmony with nature was simply a sense of proud self-sufficiency. Stoicism is the glorification of reason, even to the extent of suppressing all emotion. Sin is unreason, and salvation lies in an external control of the passions—in indifference and apathy begotten of the ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... cracked like the laugh of a very old woman, that mounted high and higher, welling from her throat as blood wells from a wound; and rocked herself to and fro and stared into the face of the dead stranger with wide eyes of unreason.... ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... to "Reason and the Laws of Nature." That, at least, the philosophers tried to do. Often they failed. Their conceptions of reason and of the laws of nature being often incorrect, they appealed to unreason and to laws which were not those of nature. "The fixed idea of them all was," says M. de Tocqueville, "to substitute simple and elementary rules, deduced from reason and natural law, for the complicated ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... "Unreason has a potent advocate in you, Miss Liddell," said Errington; smiling a softer smile than usual. "But I want you to understand and appreciate Miss Bradley. She is a fine creature in every sense of the word. As friend, I am sure she would be loyal with ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... the matchless "Lord of Misrule" (also known as the "Abbot of Unreason" and the "Master of Merry Disports"), who, attended by his mock court, king's jester and grotesquely masked revelers, visited the castles of lords and princes to entertain them with strange antics and ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... but surely it is none of God's planting, neither of the Son of God: yet it grows in all lands and in all climes, and sends its hidden suckers far and wide, even (unless we be watchful) into your hearts and mine. And its name is the Tree of Unreason, whose roots are conceit and ignorance, and its juices folly and death. It drops its venom into the finest brains; and makes them call sense, nonsense; and nonsense, sense; fact, fiction; and fiction, fact. It drops its venom into the tenderest hearts, alas! and ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... herself. Like most young women and men, she had been convinced from an early age that she was mysteriously unlike all other created beings, and—again like most young men and women—she could find, in the secrecy of her own heart, plenty of proof of a unique strangeness. But now her unreason became formidable. There she sat with her striking forehead and her quite unimportant nose, in the large austere drawing-room of the Spatts, which was so pervaded by artistic chintz that the slightest movement in it produced a crackle—and wondered why she was so much queerer than other ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... certain opinions concerning his poems, and he weighed every line, not now for cadence and colour, but with a view of determining their ethical tendencies; and this poor torn soul stood trembling on the verge of fearful abyss of unreason ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... indeed. But I know that there are often in men's affairs unexpectedly—even irrationally—illuminating moments when an otherwise insignificant sound, perhaps only some perfectly commonplace gesture, suffices to reveal to us all the unreason, all the fatuous unreason, of our complacency. "Go ahead" are not particularly striking words even when pronounced with a foreign accent; yet they petrified me in the very act of smiling at myself in the glass. And then, refusing to believe my ears, but already boiling with indignation, I ran out ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... cup. I am going on the principle of doing exactly what she tells me to do; thus she may discover the unreason of her conduct. Tu-whit! Yesterday she was displeased with an embroidered muslin jacket, and said she never wanted to see it again. I tore it up; she was displeased. To-night she took a dislike to my dress, and told me not to come near her till morning. Behold me here; I think it probable ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... at her, observe that the man rues them. He accepts himself as a slave: the slave (as I read this passage) to what is true in the idea of woman's purity. The insufferable creature of the smile is (as he says) the "mistaken and obtuse unreason of a she-intelligence"; but somewhere there was right in her demand. If man could but return, unstained! He must go forth, must explore the rays—of all the claims of woman on him this is most insistent; ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... mad, I know—quite mad. Her words had made me so. And when, to ask me that insistent question, she brought her face still nearer, I flung down the reins of my unreason and let it ride amain upon its desperate, reckless course. In short, I too leaned forward, I leaned forward, and I kissed her full upon those scarlet, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... my heart, for though with my reasoning I had accepted the explanation that Zimmern had given for his interest in Marguerite, I had never quite accepted it in my unreasoning heart. And in the depths of me the battle between love and reason and the dark forces of jealous unreason and suspicion had smouldered, to break out afresh ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... all things must have been framed according to a plan or "model" which that mind supplied. Intelligence must be regarded as having a purpose, and as working towards an end, for it is this alone which distinguishes reason from unreason, and mind from mere unintelligent force. The only proper model which could be presented to the Supreme Intelligence is "the eternal and unchangeable model"[646] which his own perfection supplies, "for he is the most excellent of causes."[647] Thus God is not simply the maker ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... arranged everything, so that every traveller could have his own seat. At the Austerlitz station, however, a human avalanche assaulted the train. The doors were broken open, packages and children came in through the windows like projectiles. The people pushed with the unreason of a crowd fleeing before a fire. In the space reserved for eight persons, fourteen installed themselves; the passageways were heaped with mountains of bags and valises that served later travellers for seats. All class distinctions had disappeared. The villagers invaded ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... who rock and bump together, and will suffer in a collision.' But with mulish stubbornness I thought: 'They wished to go to London'; and on I raged, not wildly exhilarated, so far as I can remember, nor lunatic, but feeling the dull glow of a wicked and morose Unreason urge in my bosom, while I stoked all blackened at the fire, or saw the vague mass of dead horse or cow, running trees and fields, and dark homestead and deep-slumbering farm, flit ghostly athwart the murky air, as the half-blind ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... ingratitude to remain critical. Indeed, almost insensibly Ann Veronica became habituated to the peculiar appearance and the peculiar manners of the people "in the van." The shock of their intellectual attitude was over, usage robbed it of the first quaint effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in direct relation to that ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... The child was brimming over with unreason. Yet her eyes were like stars, and in an uncomprehended way the woman felt the charm of her beauty. No, she would never part ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... to his face again, peering at Newman with his small blank eye-holes. There was something almost imbecile in the movement, and Newman hardly knew whether he was taking refuge in a convenient affectation of unreason, or whether he had in fact paid for his dishonor by the loss of his wits. In the latter case, just now, he felt little more tenderly to the foolish old man than in the former. Responsible or not, he was equally an accomplice of his detestably mischievous daughter. Newman was going to ...
— The American • Henry James
... passage on the Norumbia he heard that she had once been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August. He felt obliged to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it proved nothing for or against the ship, and confounded him more by her reason than by all her previous unreason. Reason is what a man is never prepared for in women; perhaps because he finds it so seldom ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... things done by Peter the world knows by heart. The world knows well how he tore his way out of the fetichism of his time; how, despite ignorance and unreason, he dragged his nation after him; how he dowered the nation with things and thoughts that transformed it from a petty Asiatic horde to a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... be working out to advantage. He could not but remember how so very few weeks ago he had been urgent that Richard should spend his summer at Little Beeding and lend a hand in the noble work of defending Stella Ballantyne against ignorance and unreason. But the twinge only lasted a moment. He had made a mistake, as all men occasionally do—yes, even sagacious and thoughtful people like himself. And the mistake was already being repaired. He looked across the meadow that night at the lighted blinds of Stella's windows and anticipated ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... but he had had her pointed out to him, and though he recognized the unreason of such an attitude, he was aware that her great beauty dramatized her suffering, so that his pity ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... English army station he met a very charming widow, with a young step-daughter, who was shortly to return to England. Cecil Trafford admired him with a girl's unreason, and at last committed such an imprudence that the astute step-mother, seeing her opportunity, proposed the only reparation possible,—marriage. Cecil was a bright, pretty, wilful girl, and he liked her, yet he had a strong feeling of ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... talk without feeling that every word is a last word, and full of hurry and therefore of unreason. You desire to see Miss Moran without delay, that ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the sorest ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... some minds insuperable, and to deprive such of the symbols which lead to a final comprehension of the truth is no service to humanity or truth. The suppression of the Roman Catholic religion in Italy, if possible, would be only to leave its place vacant for unreason and anarchy, for the intellectual status of the common people does not admit of a more abstract belief. For that evil influence, however, which a recent writer has designated as Curialism, which to-day has its ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... over the man's limbs. It was the utter, persistent unreason, the maddening blindness of the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... superstitions and abuses of the old should never have leave to take root. So much, we may say, they deliberately intended. No nobles, either lay or cleric, no great landed estates, and no universal ignorance as the seed-plot of vice and unreason; but an elective magistracy and clergy, land for all who would till it, and reading and writing, will ye nill ye, instead. Here at last, it would seem, simple manhood is to have a chance to play his stake against Fortune with honest dice, uncogged by those ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... gentle, and good, and virtuous, and honourable. And yet, as we look more closely into the pages of history, do we not find that fatality distils her poison from the victim's own wavering feebleness, his own trivial duplicity, blindness, unreason, and vanity? And if it be true that some kind of predestination governs every circumstance of life, it appears to be no less true that such predestination exists in our character only; and to modify character must surely ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... unreason of the love-driven male, we say, "Love is blind"; seeing his light-mindedness, we say, "Love has wings"; seeing his evident lack of intelligence and purpose, we make him a mere child; seeing the evil results of his wide license, we euphemistically ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... ability in the way of unreason can never compass fallacies so stupendous as those which you attribute to each other; and if this is all the result of your logic, I will none of it, initialed to possess at least the advantage, that, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... his own comfort and prosperity, as they offer him material for amusement or opportunity for gratifying his vanity. He has no social or political creed, but is always of the opinion which is most convenient for the moment. He is always in the majority, and is the main element of unreason and stupidity in the judgment of a "discerning public." It seems presumptuous in us to dispute Riehl's interpretation of a German word, but we must think that, in literature, the epithet Philister has usually a wider meaning than this—includes his definition and something ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... could have done than vanish when I found out my mistake. It is but a short-sighted policy to wait for the mending of matters that are bound to get worse. The notion that her death was my fault is sheer unreason on the face of it; and I need no exculpation on that score; but I must disclaim the credit of having borne her death like a philosopher. I ought to have done so, but the truth is that I was greatly affected at the moment, and the proof of it is that I and ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... that this neglect of English rested wholly on unreason, or had nothing to say for itself. Teachers and tutors of the old Classical Education (as it was called) could plead ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch |
