"Absurdity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... threshold, and then we crept up; not to the uppermost landing, where the light, when the door was opened, must betray us, but to that immediately below it. There we took our stand in the angle of the stairs and waited, the King, between amusement at the absurdity of our position and anxiety lest we should betray ourselves, going off now and again into stifled laughter, from which he vainly strove to ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... others shoot the chute, and that I came tamely down myself in the car. There is a very charming view from the top, of the sea with its ships, and all the mad gayety of the shore, but of course my main object was to exult in the wild absurdity of those who shot the chute. There was always a lady among the people in the clumsy flat-boat that flew down the long track, and she tried usually to be a pretty girl, who clutched her friends and lovers and shrieked aloud in her flight; but sometimes it was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fool," said Sir Hugh; and Archie could see, by his brother's brow, that Hugh was angry. "You say things that, for folly and absurdity, are beyond belief. If you can't see the peculiarities of Julia's position, I am not going to point them ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... has often been asked but seldom answered satisfactorily. Newspaper editors and correspondents have frequently attempted a practical elucidation of the mystery, by quoting from their own brains the rarest piece of absurdity which they could imagine, and entitling it 'Transcendentalism.' One good hit of this kind may be well enough, by way of satire upon the fogginess of certain writers who deem themselves, and are deemed by the multitude, transcendental par excellence. COLERIDGE however ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... staggered. The argument struck him fully. He at once perceived it, with all its common sense and all its absurdity. And suddenly he burst into a roar of laughter which bent him in two and convulsed his doleful ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... different times. Nowhere is the imagination displayed to a greater extent; and perhaps so ample an exhibition of human invention might gratify 163:27 our vanity, if it were not more than compensated by the humiliating view of so much absurdity, contradiction, and falsehood. To harmonize the contrarieties of med- 163:30 ical doctrines is indeed a task as impracticible as to arrange the fleeting vapors around us, or to reconcile the fixed and repulsive antipathies of nature. Dark and 164:1 perplexed, our devious career resembles ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... and the Merchant Service is to consider that there is in the country a common stock of seamen, on which both can draw. But this theory, like many others equally obvious and tempting, has the disadvantage that it leaves important factors out of account and, if worked out, results in an absurdity. Thus, shortly before war began there were in the country some 420,000 seamen, of whom one-third were in the Navy and two-thirds engaged in merchant ships and fishing vessels. There was no considerable body ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... Seneca than in any other secular writer words of good counsel and comfort. And let this fact not pass, without notice of the light that it sheds on the fact of the unity of literature, and of the absurdity of setting a wide gulf between ancient or classical literature and modern, as if under all dialects the partakers in Graeco-Roman civilisation, whether in Athens, Rome, Paris, Weimar, Edinburgh, London, Dublin, were not the heirs of a great common stock of thought ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... years said: "He told me to say all the words I could think of. He said some foolish things and asked what was foolish [he could not repeat a single absurdity]. I had to put some blocks together. I had to do some problems in arithmetic [he could not repeat a single problem]. He read some fables to me. [Asked about the fables he was able to recall only part of one, that of the fox and the crow.] He showed me the ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... man cannot be omitted, although unlike many others of whom we shall have occasion to speak, he only made it secondary to other pursuits. The love of universal knowledge that filled his mind, would not allow him to neglect one branch of science, of which neither he nor the world could yet see the absurdity. He made ample amends for his time lost in this pursuit by his knowledge in physics and his acquaintance with astronomy. The telescope, burning-glasses, and gunpowder, are discoveries which may well carry his fame to the remotest time, and make the world blind to the one spot of folly—the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... an illustration of Richter, they could not turn sublimity upside down,—a great feat, only possible through sense of the comic, which, in its highest manifestation of humor, pillows pain in the lap of absurdity, throws such rays upon affliction as to make a grin to glimmer through gloom, and, with the fool in "Lear," forces you, like a child, to smile through warmest tears of sympathy. Humor imparts breadth and buoyancy to tolerance, enabling ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... is not imprecating future evils on a past time—an impossibility, an absurdity: he is describing the events then transpiring—the whirlwind, the darkness, the mist, the day that does not come, and the leviathan, the demon, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... though the texts alluded to above make it that of Vaisampayana. It is true in the speech the vocative 'Brahman' occurs, but we may easily take it as a slip of this pen. K. P. Singha makes the correction. The Burdwan translator, without perceiving the absurdity, adheres ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... carrying away of all his princely wealth and state only the sticks which held the gold. On reaching Jutland, he exchanged his present attire for his ancient demeanour, which he had adopted for righteous ends, purposely assuming an aspect of absurdity. Covered with filth, he entered the banquet-room where his own obsequies were being held, and struck all men utterly aghast, rumour having falsely noised abroad his death. At last terror melted into ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... giving a slightly sentimental turn to the conversation. It was not for some time that he saw her drift, so utterly without connection in his mind were Ida and this comfortable matron before him, and when he did, a smile at the exquisite absurdity of the thing barely twitched the corners of his mouth, and ended in a sad, puzzled stare that rather put the other ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... tricks on her—can they, Sue? I wish one o' 'em durn'd deetecters would come around, jest tew see heow she'd pull the wool over 'im. I wudn't ax enny better fun;" and he indulged in a fit of loud cachinnation at the absurdity of supposing that anyone could match in sharpness his ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... itself, and with known facts. Her account was, that Toussaint was carried off from Saint Domingo by the ship in which he was banqueted by Leclerc (the last of a line of two hundred), weighing anchor without his perceiving it, while he was at dinner. The absurdity of this beginning shows how much reliance is to be placed upon the rest of her story. She declared that the Commandant Rubaut had orders from the Government to treat the prisoner well; that his servant remained with him to the last; that he was well supplied with ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... course, I say grandfather's. For indeed, my lady, that is so! Mother has had this model all her life, from when grandfather died, and it could be no one else's mill." The irresistible amusement at the absurdity that spread over Ruth's face, and the undercurrent of laughter in her voice, were secret miseries to Gwen, so explicit were they in their tale of the unconsciousness that allowed them. She was relieved when the speaker's ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... truth, it doesn't bother me much. That a man should go straight in the present is all they ask in Canada, and homeless adventurers with no possessions—the kind of comrades I've generally met—are charitable. As a rule, it wouldn't become them to be fastidious. Anyway, sir, you must see the absurdity of believing that Bertram could have failed in his duty in the way the ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... Jack we'd have to keep away from town or the mine for a while. He wanted to go right back and finish up the fight!" Dade grinned at the absurdity. "I sat down hard on that proposition." Not that phrase, exactly, did he use. One may be pardoned a free translation, since, though he spoke in excellent Spanish, he did not twist his sentences like a native, and he was not averse to making use of certain idioms quite as striking in their ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... to procure the death of her husband, and her own marriage with his brother. To this accusation the Spanish Princess disdainfully replied that "she should have gained so little by the exchange, that the absurdity of the charge must suffice for its refutation;" but her haughty and indignant retort produced no effect upon her judges. She was commanded thenceforward to reside exclusively at the palaces of the Louvre and St. Germain; without the privilege ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... foolishly committed himself to Booth, with perhaps no intention to do a crime, recanted in pen and ink, and was made a national character. Had he recanted by word of mouth he might have saved himself unpleasant dreams. This shows everybody the absurdity of writing what they can so easily say. The best thing Arnold ever wrote was his letter to Booth refusing to engage in murder. Yet this recantation is more in evidence against than then ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... who ever styled themselves soldiers. The impossibility of relief, and the certain prospect of wanting every necessary of life, should your opponents confine their operations to a simple blockade, point out the absurdity of resistance....I am at the head of troops accustomed to success...and so highly incensed at your inhumanity, illiberal abuse, and the ungenerous means employed to prejudice them in the minds of the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... lord, for you condemn yourself. What is absurdity, but to believe Against appearance!—You can't yet, I find, Subdue your passion to your better sense;— And, truth to tell, it does not much displease me. 'Tis fit our indiscretions should be check'd With ...
— The Revenge - A Tragedy • Edward Young
... one I Who will prove it? I! I can't understand how an atheist could know that there is no God and not kill himself on the spot. To recognise that there is no God and not to recognise at the same instant that one is God oneself is an absurdity, else one would certainly kill oneself. If you recognise it you are sovereign, and then you won't kill yourself but will live in the greatest glory. But one, the first, must kill himself, for else who will begin and ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... no doubt, appear fantastic in its absurdity to those who hear it asked for the first time; but those who are at all familiar with the mysterious but undisputed phenomena of hypnotism will realize how naturally this question arises, and how difficult it is to answer it otherwise than in ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... contradicted, we can only reassert. If the old words, "He that made the eye, shall he not see? he that planted the ear, shall he not hear?" do not at once commend themselves to the intellect of any person, we shall never convince that person by any arguments drawn from the absurdity of conceiving the invention of optics by a blind man, or of ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... unknown.[1] But still it is remarkable as an illustration of the uninquiring character of the people, that the allusions of Indian authors to Ceylon, an island of such magnitude, and so close to their own country, are pre-eminent for absurdity and ignorance. Their "Lanka" and its inhabitants are but the distortion of a reality into a myth. ALBYROUNI, the Arabian geographer, writing in the eleventh century, says that the Hindus at that day thought the island ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... Mephistopheles consoles himself with the fact that the devil is old enough to have seen a good many such new generations, with all their absurdities, their up-to-date fads and follies, pass away and give place to other forms of still more up-to-date and self-conceited absurdity. ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... morality is attacked; it is found out that I have a woman for my aide-de-camp. Without pretending to be a Joseph, I know too well how to respect myself, and the laws of public decency, ever to render myself guilty of such an absurdity. I found in the army a woman under the uniform of a volunteer bombardier, who, in fulfilling that duty at the siege of Liege, had received a musket-ball in the leg. She presented herself to the National Convention, desired to continue her military service, and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... infirmities. He died A.D. 1654, in the eighty-third year of his age. His excellence and benevolence of character would afford presumptive evidence of the falsehood of the tradition, if it were not totally exploded by the absurdity of the hypothesis upon which it is grounded. Sir Thomas was succeeded in the baronetcy by his grandson, Robert, who in compliance with his will built an almshouse or hospital for five men and five women. It ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... absurdity, my dear mother. I don't care if I saw it a thousand times. How can it ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... change of symbols. Paganism and Christianity coalesced, and the mongrel production was the papacy; and this new religion, and this alone, made a change in the symbol necessary. Every candid mind must assent to this; and this assent is an admission of the utter absurdity of trying to limit this symbol to the civil power alone. So far from its representing the civil power alone, it is to the ecclesiastical element that ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... who did not perform sacrifice. At the same time he saw the necessity of a total reformation in paganism, if it was to revive as the rival of Christianity; and planned, as Pontifex Maximus, a scheme for effecting it, which involved the concealment of the absurdity of its origin by allegorical interpretation, together with the establishment of a discipline and organisation similar to the Christian, and special attention on the part of the priesthood to morality and to public works of mercy.(228) His bitter contempt for Christianity manifested itself ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... after him without objecting. The heather was tangled and rough, and hid the stones he now and then stumbled against, but it was better to hurry than be left with a long distance to cover in the dark. Indeed, as he caught his feet in the wiry stems and fell into holes, he frankly admitted the absurdity of his adventure, a sense of which amused him now and then. He was in a highly civilized country, there were railways and telegraph lines not far off, and he was lurking like an ancient outlaw among the bogs! It looked as if there must be better ways of meeting his difficulties, but he could ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... and accepted the religion of their country? For as the princes of the world are divided in religion, one country alone would be in the right, and all the rest of the world would have to follow their princes to destruction; "and that which heightens the absurdity, and very ill suits the notion of a deity, men would owe their eternal happiness or their eternal misery to the places of their nativity." This is a principle on which Locke repeatedly insists. If a State is justified in imposing a creed, it follows ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... in the first line of 9 is vicious. I adopt the Bombay reading Satyaratas, qualifying tara. To suppose that Krishna paid such a complement to the Kauravas as is implied by the Bengal reading is an absurdity. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... that the pains of maternity are no curse upon her kind. We know that among the Indians the squaws do not suffer in childbirth. They will step aside from the ranks, even on the march, and return in a short time to them with the newborn child. What an absurdity then, to suppose that only enlightened Christian women are cursed. But one word of fact is worth a volume of philosophy; let me give you some of my own experience. I am the mother of seven children. My girlhood was spent mostly in the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... Kirkpatrick Sharpe was presented by Surtees of Mainsforth with a manuscript of Kirkton's unprinted "History of the Church of Scotland." This he set forth to edite, with the determination not to "let the Whig dogs have the best of it." Every Covenanting scandal and absurdity, such as the old story of Mess David Williamson—"Dainty Davie"—and his remarkable prowess, and presence of mind at Cherrytrees, was raked up, and inserted in notes to Kirkton. Scott was Sharpe's ally in this enterprise. ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... wise assist the enemies of our country. A small body of troops * * may keep them in awe; but if an equal body of the enemy should appear, the balance as to numbers, by the junction of those left, would be against us. I am, however, so well aware of the absurdity of judging with precision in these matters at the distance we are from one another, that prudence obliges me to leave these matters to your judgment, to act ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... are these, when a man of the very lowest birth may indulge in such reveries without the faintest absurdity!" ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... about she explored the whole garden, laughing softly to herself at the absurdity of the performance, for she was growing wetter every minute. She felt of the ground where she could not see it, exulting in the discovery of ranks of tulips, where she had planted their bulbs last ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... his story with an inward laugh as to the absurdity of my ever wishing to cause the death of this harmless boy, whom I hastened to assure of my friendship and even of my protection; begging him, in return, to convey me in his father's ship to my own country. I need hardly say that I took special care not to inform ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... giving away the whole profit on each transaction. Beatrice French, an observant young woman, with a head for figures, had often noted and reflected upon these two egregious illustrations of human absurdity. Her dressmaking enterprise assimilated the features of both, and added novel devices that sprang from her own fruitful brain. The 'Fashion Club,' a wheel within a wheel, was merely the goose-club; strictly a goose-club, for the licensed victualler addresses himself to the ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without forcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of training which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could receive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present training consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and invention high enough, and suppose that they can be taught. Throughout every sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... were evident. One was that it was perfectly impossible to be stiff and stodgy over it, and not laugh out. The other, the obvious absurdity of imputing any sort of motive to the serene frankness and absolute candour of the speaker. Any sort of motive—"of that sort"—said he to himself, without further analysis. He threw himself into the laugh, without attempting ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... her a kind of pre-emptive right to the love and gratitude of our young folks. It requires genius to conceive a purely imaginary work which must of necessity deal with the supernatural, without running into a mere riot of fantastic absurdity; but genius Mrs. Ingelow has, and the story of 'Jack' is as careless and joyous, but as delicate ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... the sincerity of his visitor's manner, touched by the unexpected poetry of his appeal, and yet keenly alive to the absurdity of an incomprehensible blunder somewhere committed, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... and absurdity was seldom penned; but men who could write and act thus were fitting instruments for a man, who made it a point of conscience to commit immoral crimes that he might preserve the succession; who kept his mistress in the same palace with his queen; and only went through the ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Arab lion of the desert, and did speak-out with that great thunder-voice of his, not by words which he thought to be great, but by actions, by feelings, by a history which were great! His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do not believe, like him, that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as always, is a Force of Nature: whatsoever is truly great in him springs-up from ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... nation, or of foreign Powers. He consented to be fettered by a Constitution, as his brother had done; but that any power could legally give to him what he deemed was already his own, was in his eyes an absurdity. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... some of them are cleverer still and make their outspokenness and censure a means of imparting pleasure. As Agis the Argive,[417] when Alexander bestowed great gifts on a buffoon, cried out in envy and displeasure, "What a piece of absurdity!" and on the king turning angrily to him and saying, "What are you talking about?" he replied, "I admit that I am vexed and put out, when I see that all you descendants of Zeus alike take delight in flatterers and jesters, for Hercules had his Cercopes, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... said. 'This is a plot. Luscombe is in it. He has been discussing things with this—this lunatic, and this hatched-up absurdity is the result.' ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... London Cuckolds"[143] was acted this evening before a suitable audience, who were extremely well diverted with that heap of vice and absurdity. The indignation which Eugenio, who is a gentleman of a just taste, has, upon occasion of seeing human nature fall so low in their delights, made him, I thought, expatiate upon the mention of this ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... several formal theistic arguments,[17] but in the opinion of the writer the text of the Metaphysics does not lend itself readily to any such cut and dried arrangement of its argument. Aristotle does, indeed, to avoid the absurdity of an endless regress, argue from the {kinoumena} and the {kinounta} of the physical World to a {proton kinoun} which is a pure {energeia, akineton, aneu hyles}, and hence foreign to all the passivity and contingency of matter;[18] ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... it all reached a culminating point in 1652 when the aristocratic bolshevists of Conde's army routed the victorious king and cardinal at the Faubourg St. Antoine. This was the consummation of tragical absurdity; what might pass muster for political reason had turned inside out; and when Mazarin fled to Sedan he left behind him a France which was morally, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... admitted Dotty. "I own up I was fooled. I never thought of the absurdity of the thing. Did you make up ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... you, with a dark workman, who digs fifty feet under the ground, with a weaver sitting with stiffened joints before the loom, with a savage who emerges from the sea and sometimes reddens it with his blood? Why should one think of things so sad, so ugly? What an absurdity! ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... women thrust her mussy head and ragged, shapeless body in at the door. With a start Norman awoke to the absurdity of his situation—and to the fact that he was placing the girl in a compromising position. He shrugged his shoulders, went in ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... were sitting side by side on two of those white-and-gold thrones, and she summoned an indignation with the absurdity in refusing him. She rose and said that she must go; that she must be going; that it was quite time for her to go; and she would not let him follow her to the elevator, as he made some offer of doing, but left ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... not hard to guess where her thoughts were; they were with that only child who had gone forth in the woods to help the German lad look for the missing horse. Mrs. Carleton smiled as she reflected upon a certain absurdity which marked the whole business, for, look at it as she chose, there was something grotesque in the project of two youths setting out to hunt for a horse that had been wandering for days in a limitless wood. But the smile quickly gave way to the serious expression ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... quote a writer of the school, "has had its uses in the evolutionary process, and seems to constitute the whole of forethought in most animals; but that it should remain any part of the mental equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. I find that the fear clement of forethought is not stimulating to those more civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the natural motives, but is weakening and deterrent. As soon as it becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a positive deterrent, and should be entirely ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... do it. But, you see, I was genuinely fond of Dicky, and yet not the least bit in love with him, and I was able, without his guessing it, to keep the management of the affair in my own hands. So when he woke up, as boys always do, to the absurdity of the idea, there was nothing in his recollections of ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... 'him!'" she commanded. "Think of the original absurdity of being jealous of a rival, and that rival yourself! And remember that 'he' was my sweetheart, and for my own sake, don't abuse him. Why, it was you all the time; and I always felt, even at the worst, that hidden in the ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... was dreadfully ashamed to make you the victim of my blunder," answered Miss Ellison penitently; and a little silence ensued. Then as if she had suddenly been able to alienate the case, and see it apart from herself in its unmanageable absurdity, she broke into a confiding laugh, very like her cousin's, and said, "Why, it's one of the most hopeless things I ever heard of. I don't see what in the world can be done ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... sex is a laughable thing. The tragedies connected with it, the high and thrilling pleasures connected with it, do not obliterate its original absurdity. And Voltaire—this sane sun-born child of the shameless intellect—never permits us for a moment to forget how ridiculous in the last resort all this ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... counts 7, on the basis of an Ace or face counting 2, and any lower card, 1. The believers in this doctrine would, therefore, bid a Club from such a hand as Queen, Knave, X, X, X, without any possibility of another trick; or even from Knave, X, X, X, X, X. The absurdity of this becomes obvious when it is remembered that the only real object in bidding a Club or Diamond is to show strength which will justify the partner in declaring one of the three game-going declarations. Any such holding as that mentioned ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... upon Flanders, they and the Dutch should be divided. That our Embassador had, it is true, an audience; but in the most dishonourable way that could be; for the Princes of the Blood (though invited by our Embassador, which was the greatest absurdity that ever Embassador committed these 400 years) were not there; and so were not said to give place to our King's Embassador. And that our King did openly say, the other day in the Privy Chamber, that he would not be hectored out of his ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... violation of historical truth as a "hideous misrepresentation of the virtuous Eleanor of Castile.... The 'Edward I.' of Peele is a gross tissue of absurdity with some facility of language, but nothing truly good." Nobody but Professor Wendell has ever even intimated that Shakspere ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... by the way, in a letter of counsel from a well-wisher, one reason of my town's absurdity about the chair of Art:[38] I fear it is characteristic of her manners. It was because you did not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man was seen; no flat-roofed huts appeared; no robe, pale blue or white, fluttered among the shadows; no dog blinked in the golden patches of the sun—only the sound of the flute came to us from some hidden place ceaselessly, wild and romantic, full of an odd coquetry, and of an absurdity that ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... his plan, and all his usual shrewdness had been blunted into folly by greediness of lucre on the one side, and potent liquors on the other. The moment that the banker's parting speech had reached his ear, the absurdity of Roger's scheme was evident even to himself, and with a bare "Good day, Master," he hurriedly took his bundle from the counter, and scuttled out as ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... greater piece of absurdity in the world. I thought so when I was a child, and now I know it; and I desire here to brand it as at once a platitude and a falsehood. How ever the idea gained currency that childhood is the happiest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little, and the universe to them is but a mass of little things. It is true, the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former method;—but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favour? I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... wistful. He had kept his eyes on her slim bust and tight-girded waist that sprung suddenly neat and smooth out of the curving skirt-folds, and it had not occurred to him to exclaim even in his own heart: "With your girlishness and your ferocity, your intimidating seriousness and your delicious absurdity, I would give a week's wages just to take hold of you and shake you!" No! The dolt had seen absolutely naught but a conscientious female beginner learning the duties of the post which he himself had baptized as ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... backing, if He chose! Such a rumor would Spread like wildfire. Jesus shows His leadership. He at once calls the crowds about Him, speaks openly of the charge, and refutes it, showing the evident absurdity ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... influence was preternatural or maniacal in my brother's case, they must be equally so in my own. Then I remembered that the voice exerted was to save me from Carwin's attempts. These ideas tended to abate my abhorrence of this man, and to detect the absurdity of ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... to hail, is it?" thought Chris; and then he laughed at the absurdity of the idea, for the ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... that some hundreds of barrels of turpentine had broken loose and were smashing everything below. If any one of them rolled into the furnaces an explosion would follow which would send them all to eternity. That this absurdity was immediately denied by the purser, who asserted with some vehemence that there was not a gallon of turpentine aboard, did not wholly allay the excitement, nor did it stifle the nervous anxiety which had now taken possession of ...
— A List To Starboard - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... men doing sacrifice kiss calves!" The prophet would hardly blame human sacrifices only thus incidentally, more in ridicule than in high moral indignation; he would bring it to prominence the horrible and revolting character of the action much more than its absurdity. Thus ZBXY )DM means most probably, "offerers belonging to the human race." At the same time, even if the expression did mean "sacrificers of men," it would prove nothing regarding regular sacrifices of ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... that it has been a fad with the ladies here to spell out their dates, and, though the fashion is waning, Mrs. Makely is a woman who would remain in such an absurdity among the very last. I will let you make your own conclusions concerning this, for though, as an Altrurian, I cannot respect her, I like her so much, and have so often enjoyed her generous hospitality, that I cannot bring myself to criticise her except by ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... despondency into which her shrewdness, bordering on criticism, had thrown him. He knew perfectly well that she was questioning his judgment and presence of mind, and, the more he thought of it, the more transparent became the absurdity of his action. ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... 'twas such a surprise! and such an excuse as no one could dispute. But the absurdity of the matter followed—all the rest did the same; taking the same privilege, by the example, without the ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... of entailed power is a thing so obvious that one marvels it has escaped the recognition of mankind until yesterday. But stay! Men have always seen its monstrous absurdity—hence the rack. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Almanzor, and thought his Indian Emperor the perfection of tragedy, the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Rochester, the two wittiest noblemen our country has produced, attacked his fame, and turned the rants of his heroes, the jargon of his spirits, and the absurdity of his plots ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... general laugh at my expense, was a puzzler. The absurdity of the story, which I had heard a thousand times, never struck me so forcibly. But I was not to be ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... that was to put as many miles as I could between the scene of my unappreciated labors and myself. This I determined to do the very next day, after handing back this abominable necklace with as little obvious appearance of absurdity ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... no scollard, as they would say in Whitford, you know; but it has often struck me, that if folks would but believe that the Apostles talked not such very bad Greek, and had some slight notion of the received meaning of the words they used, and of the absurdity of using the same term to express nineteen different things, the New Testament would be found to be a much simpler and more severely philosophic book than "Theologians" ("Anthropo-sophists" I call ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... absurdity, and still more to save our painters from inspissating that trickle of fatuity which wells from heads swollen with hot air, critics should set themselves to check this nasty malady. Let them make it clear that to talk of modern English ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... and trust to the saving power of truth and innocence. I could have laughed as I thought of it. I saw myself bringing home the corpse and giving an account of myself, boggling with sheer shame over the absurdity of my wholly unsupported tale, as I brought a charge of mad hatred and fiendish treachery against a man who had never, as far as I knew, had a word to say against me. At every turn the cunning of Manderson had forestalled me. His ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... democracy." Because it supposes that there are "general problems common to all classes," says Lagardelle, democracy refuses to take into account the real difference between men, which is that they are divided into economic classes. Here we see the central principle of Socialism exaggerated to an absurdity. Few Socialists, even the most revolutionary, would deny that there are some problems "common to all classes." Indeed, the existence and importance of such problems is the very reason why "State Socialism," of benefit to the masses, but still more to the interest of the capitalists, is being ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... upon earth are you to find such a man? Who is romantic now?" cried Rosamond. "But I am very glad that you are a little romantic; I am glad that you have in you a touch of human absurdity, else how could you be my sister, or how could I ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... absurdity of two Quaker lads so trapped struck me as it did not Hugh. The man must surely have thought him older than he was, but so did most. I feared that I should not do my friend justice; and then I thought of dear ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... the absurdity of pride when it enters into the heart of a cobbler; tho in reality it is altogether as ridiculous and unreasonable, wherever it takes possession of a human creature. There is no temptation to it from ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... mean to send me one at all, shall be a member of the Episcopal church. There is about that church, what attaches to no other sect, a sort of dignified reserve, that never breaks out in four-day meetings, revivals, or any other similar ebullition of fanaticism and absurdity. ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... it is that a man should put an enemy into his mouth'—that reminded me of Markham, and it got no farther. I even tried poetry. I began one note, in a six-syllable line, 'Oh, do not remember'—but that associated itself with the fifth of November, and became an absurdity. After many attempts, I wrote, 'My dear Agnes. Your letter is like you, and what could I say of it that would be higher praise than that? I will come at four o'clock. Affectionately and sorrowfully, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... last time there were only two other passengers with me in the carriage. None of the ranchmen around use the rail. If they have to go anywhere on the line they drive, and all say it is far cheaper to do so and pay livery for the team than incur such high rates. Is not this an absurdity? The rate is, I believe, six cents a mile, which is just about three times that for the third class in England. A railway should increase and foster travel. It always does so. No; one exception: the D. and R. ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... Miss Vere," replied Ratcliffe, "my character and habits of thinking were so well known to you, that you might have held me exculpated from crediting in such absurdity." ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... dream was at an end: he soon discovered the impossibility of imposing upon others the notions by which he had so long imposed upon himself; which way soever he turned his thoughts, impossibility and absurdity arose in opposition on every side; even credulity and prejudice were at last forced to give way, and he grew ashamed of crediting himself what shame would not suffer ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... moment," remarks a critic, "to realise the image, and the monstrous absurdity of a man's grasping the skies and hanging habitually suspended there, while he contemptuously bids earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have suggested so unnatural a conception." [WESTMINSTER REVIEW, No. cxxxi., p. 27]. It is obvious that if Young had imagined the position ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... altar,—though, no doubt, it was done sullenly, with foreboding of the coming exposure. The whole account of the wild invocations of the priests may suggest some of the characteristics of idolatry, and touch our hearts with pity, as well as with the sense of its absurdity, which animated Elijah's mockery. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... more hateful than pretension. The fable of the "Frog and the Bull" illustrates the absurdity of it. Yet it is of every-day occurrence, and we continually meet with instances of it. Persons in humble class of life will often ape their betters, dressing after them, and absolutely going without ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... is the best yet. First absurdity: the Peace Conference and its nine hundred and ninety-nine branches. Second absurdity: spies. Third: American officers A.W.O.L. Fourth: The seven sisters sworn to slay." He broke out laughing again, his chunky body rolling about ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... friend's mode of avoiding a predestined death—if such an absurdity be supposed—deserves all praise for the facility and simplicity of the contrivance. "Let us," said he, "for argument's sake, grant that I, the Rev. Elder Sprightly, am foreordained to be drowned, in the river, at Smith's Ferry, next Thursday morning, at twenty-two minutes after ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... Spear of State in the other, and a dagger in each lower hand. With his left hand, von Schlichten detached the bayonet from the rifle of one of his followers and went forward, trying not to think of the absurdity of a man of the Sixth Century A.E., the representative of a civilized Chartered Company, dueling to the death with swords with a barbarian king for a throne he had promised to another barbarian, or of what could happen on Uller if he allowed this ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... of the Pagans knew well how to appreciate the art of divination, and often spoke of it to each other, and even in public, with the utmost contempt, and in a manner best adapted to expose its absurdity. The grave censor Cato was of opinion, that one soothsayer could not look at another without laughing. Hannibal was amazed at the simplicity of Prusias, whom he had advised to give battle, upon his being diverted from it by the inspection of the entrails of a victim. "What," ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... hobbyhorse. Under the sunshade it was infuriatingly like a horse on a carousel. That there were three of them together made it look even more foolish. He stared about him, trying to take his mind from his own absurdity. His goggles made the light ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... it," she apologised. "Please forgive me. Do not think that I am irreverent. It is not that at all. But for a moment the absurdity of the thing overcame me. I have met some of them, you know—Mr. Cross of Northumberland, Mr. Evans of ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... newspapers before this time had printed a story of the expedition's collapse. The outer world supposed that Powell and all his men but one had been destroyed, though A. H. Thompson wrote to the Chicago Inter-Ocean, which first published it, showing its absurdity. Mrs. Powell heard the story at her father's home in Detroit and she pronounced it a fabrication, for she had received a letter subsequent to the date given for the destruction of the party. She also had faith in her husband's judgment, caution, ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... cultured race like the Alexandrians it had long seemed an absurdity to try to purchase the favor of the god; by blood-offerings. Many philosophical sects, and especially the Pythagoreans, had forbidden such sacrifices, and had enjoined the bringing of offerings not to purchase good fortune, but only to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... shamefully, yet (if they have the perfection of boldness) they will but slight it over, and make a turn, and no more ado. Certainly to men of great judgment, bold persons are a sport to behold; nay, and to the vulgar also, boldness has somewhat of the ridiculous. For if absurdity be the subject of laughter, doubt you not but great boldness is seldom without some absurdity. Especially it is a sport to see, when a bold fellow is out of countenance; for that puts his face into a most shrunken, and wooden posture; as needs it must; for in bashfulness, the spirits ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... history: it is of our friend Lady Pomfret. Somebody that belonged to the Prince of Wales said, they were going to court; it was objected that they ought to say to Carlton House; that the only court is where the king resides. Lady P., with her paltry air of significant learning and absurdity, said, "Oh, Lord! Is there no court in England but the king's? Sure, there are many more! There is the Court of Chancery, the Court of Exchequer, the Court of King's Bench, &c." Don't you love her? Lord Lincoln does her daughter—Lady Sophia Fermor. He is come over, and met me and ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... such degrading necessity.—All there participate in, and have a share of, Nature's gifts. These, scanty though they be, are open to all. Experience here has proved, and the history of the aborigines of other countries has shown, the absurdity of expecting that any men, "as free as Nature first made man," will condescend to leave their woods, and come under all the restraints imposed by civilisation, purely from choice, unless they can do so on terms of the most perfect equality. Surely it behoves the ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... that Ferguson was trying to escape when shot; nor was there any attempt at a charge of horsemen, made in due form. The battle was purely one of footmen and the attempt to show an effort at a cavalry charge at the end is a simple absurdity.] ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... narrate a whole list of terrible acts he had committed in the East. Before he had been in his new company an hour, he had talked of thefts and even killings with the nonchalance of a man who had served a dozen years in jail. His listeners enjoyed the absurdity of the situation, and allowed him to ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... of my time and nationality, a mere denizen of Christendom, accepting its beliefs, its stale antagonisms, its unreal purposes? That perhaps had been tolerable while I was still an accepted member of the little world into which my lot had fallen, but now that I was thrust out its absurdity glared. For me the alternative was to be a world-man or no man. I had seemed sinking towards the latter: now I faced about and began to make myself what I still seek to make myself to-day, a son of mankind, a conscious part of that ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... do you imagine, now that I am in sound health and mind again, that I don't see the hideous absurdity of these views ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... dying with the slipper of St Francis upon their foot, they would laugh in their turn. But if, when the Indian heard the account of the catholic, and the catholic that of the Indian, each was to reflect, that there was no difference between the absurdity of the slipper and of the tail, but that the veil of prejudice and custom, which covered it in their own case, was withdrawn in the other, they would turn their knowledge to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... speech palliating its sententious absurdity, made Cecilia give up her faint attempt to soften him; and her chair being ready, she ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... a little way with you, and explain which direction I think they would try to take. If they were merely resisters of the gabelle or some kindred absurdity I would try to protect them from capture; but when men murder a person of high degree and likewise burn his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Vane; "the little brute deserved it. Good Heavens! to think that 'a little brute' might have married that angel, and actually broke faith to lose her; it is incredible, the crime is diluted by the absurdity." ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... consider the absurdity of swearing to take for law what another man will declare to be law, and before you hear it! Suppose the judge should be drunk and declare the fugitive slave bill in perfect harmony with the Sermon on the Mount, those noble words ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... children forgot the few words of German the Government sometimes had them taught; while one or two common phrases, 'Morgen,' 'gut,' etc., were retained as extremely good jokes by the boys and girls, occasions of inextinguishable laughter, through the absurdity of their sound and the very ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... officials; public sentiment made no especial demand for it, to say the least, and it was freely prophesied that the order would be followed by a saturnalia of crime and rapes. I am free to confess that even the honest doubters could advance many plausible arguments on the utter absurdity of trying to totally suppress this evil. But now, after a few months' trial, one of the most convincing (if somewhat amusing) tributes to the unqualified success we have met with, in spite of the most diabolical opposition, is the manner in which officials of all degrees ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... expectation that when he has made his fortune with a patent back-action apple-corer, you will marry him." Should he say something to this purport? And in Heaven's name what right had he, Ferris, to say anything at all? The horrible absurdity, the inexorable delicacy of his position ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... assumption afforded him no assistance. Kepler then imagined that as there were five regular geometrical solids, and five planets, the distances of the latter were regulated by the size of the solids described round one another. The discovery afterwards of two additional planets testified to the absurdity of this speculation. A description of these extraordinary researches was published, in 1596, in a work entitled 'Prodromus of Cosmographical Dissertations; containing the cosmographical mystery respecting the admirable proportion of the ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... easy for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity, profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a so-called court of justice in England as a state paper—a bill of indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order that for two hundred years had been the right arm of the Church and the defender ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... answer can hardly be true; for an absurdity appears in the reduction that it would cause in the quantity of our veritable literature, and in the condemnation that it would pass on the tastes of many most intelligent writers and readers. Yet a comparison of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... import of which is, slight chastisement; it is not even whipping, but 'correction' And as if hypocrisy and malignity were on the rack to outwit each other, even that weak word must be still farther diluted; so 'moderate' is added: and, to crown the climax, compounded of absurdity, hypocrisy, and cold-blooded murder, the legal definition of 'moderate correction' is covertly given; which is, any punishment that KILLS the victim. All inflictions are either moderate or immoderate; and the design of this law was manifestly to shield the murderer from conviction, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... difficult for me to believe that I could prize such a one-sided, cold, and abstract state of mind. Beauty came and scattered to the winds all that laborious inward toil, and no regret remains for what has vanished! Self-renunciation is all nonsense and absurdity! That is pride, a refuge from well-merited unhappiness, and salvation from the envy of others' happiness: "Live for others, and do good!"—Why? when in my soul there is only love for myself and the desire to love her ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... highest function. If they were not States, or were States out of the Union, their consent to a change in the fundamental law of the Union would have been nugatory, and Congress in asking it committed a political absurdity. The judiciary has also given the solemn sanction of its authority to the same view of the case. The judges of the Supreme Court have included the Southern States in their circuits, and they are constantly, in banc and elsewhere, exercising jurisdiction ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... from pillar to post, just as if I was seeking information at the War Office. At last they took me—the Colonel himself, three privates with rifles and a mounted orderly with a lance—took me to the General Staff, and there the absurdity ended. But seriously, what is the good of having the very highest and most authoritative passes possible—one from the War Office and one from the head of the Intelligence Department here—if any conscientious colonel can refuse to acknowledge them, and drag a ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... than Fecamp; and if the more enlightened progeny of the present day incline, in the plentitude of their wisdom, to "think their fathers fools" for listening to such tales, let it at least be recollected, that even these tales, with all their absurdity, are most interesting documents of the progress of the human mind; and, above all, let it never be forgotten, that books of this description contain a mass of materials for the elucidation of the manners and customs of the age, which would in vain be ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... could be expected of Beason. His very blank face recalled her to the absurdity of getting out ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... "You know quite well that the very thought of such a thing between you and me is an absurdity. I abhor your politics, I detest your party. You are ambitious, I know. You intend to be Prime Minister, a people's Prime Minister. Well, for my part, I hate the people. I am an aristocrat. As your wife I should be in a perfectly ridiculous position. How foolish! ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... gentlemen, we are not here today to conclude that God set the white man over the black. We are to conclude simply that He set him apart from the black man. The divine right of slavery was an impiety, and, worst of all, an absurdity. The South made that mistake, and bitter has been the price of her folly. Yet the South, having sinned, paid the price of her sinning in all ways exacted of her. She accepted the ruling of the North, and, as a distinguished orator once said, surrendered 'bravely and frankly.' But she ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... religious selfishness. Certainly to myself my own duty seemed clear. They that are whole can heal others; but in my case it was, "Physician, heal thyself." My own soul was my first concern, and it seemed an absurdity to my reason to be converted in partnership. I wished to go to my Lord by myself, and in my own way, or rather His way. I had neither wish, nor, I may say, thought of taking a number with me. But nothing of this could ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... the cobwebs with which those who have a vested interest in Mr. Darwin's reputation as a philosopher still try to fog our outlook. Professor Mivart was, as I have said, among the first to awaken us to Mr. Darwin's denial of design, and to the absurdity involved therein. He well showed how incredible Mr Darwin's system was found to be, as soon as it was fully realised, but there he rather left us. He seemed to say that we must have our descent and our design ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... dignitaries; he had traits even of poetic humor: but in general he seemed deficient in laughter; or indeed in sympathy for concrete human things either on the sunny or on the stormy side. One right peal of concrete laughter at some convicted flesh-and-blood absurdity, one burst of noble indignation at some injustice or depravity, rubbing elbows with us on this solid Earth, how strange would it have been in that Kantean haze-world, and how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... experienced men retreat to under what flimsy pretext did they next undertake to disparage the poor negro race? Had I not seen it in print, and been otherwise informed of the fact, I could not have believed it possible that from any reasonable man any such absurdity could issue. They actually held out this last fear, which, like the others, was fated to be dissipated by the fact. "Wait only," said they, "till the anniversary of the first of August, and then you will see what the negro character ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... accent, 'See such pretty goats!' Then he whistled, WHU! and made them jump. Little did he conceive what Doctor Johnson was. Here now was a common ignorant Highland clown imagining that he could divert, as one does a child, DR SAMUEL JOHNSON! The ludicrousness, absurdity, and extraordinary contrast between what the fellow fancied, and the reality, was truly comick. It grew dusky; and we had a very tedious ride for what was called five miles; but I am sure would measure ten. We had no conversation. I was riding forward to the inn at Glenelg, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... terms. It would be two recognize a right in a Rebel master to employ his Slave in acts of Rebellion and Treason, and the duty of the Slave to aid and abet his master in the commission of the greatest crime known to the Law. No such absurdity can be admitted; and any citizen of the United States, from thee President down, who should, by any overt act, recognize the duty of a Slave to obey a Rebel master in a hostile operation, would himself be giving aid and ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... of their absurdity the words affected Philip curiously. Was it possible that Miss Brokaw had reached Fort Churchill in some other way than by ship? And, if not, was it possible that in this remote corner of the earth there was another woman who resembled her so closely? Philip took a ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... divorce will be sought as not inconsistent with public morality. Looking at the question abstractly, and apart from all religious and social prejudice, it certainly seems the height of cruelty and absurdity to compel parties to keep up the relations of man and wife when one of them feels towards the other either a physical repugnance or a moral dislike. The impediments often raised by our courts in the way of divorce are gross ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... and body may twitch and jerk as if you were being subjected to a series of galvanic shocks. The sitters should keep calm and sympathetic, but they should check any tendency on the part of the medium to undue noise, or violence, or absurdity. You will be aware of what you are doing, but will be unable to fully exercise the will to interfere or try to stop. You will most likely become conscious of an impulse to do something, or to blurt out certain words. If you resist, you will only make the task ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... tendencies of education, opposite characters from the same original dispositions are produced. Cicero, had he been early taught to despise the applause of the multitude, would have turned away like the proud philosopher, who asked his friends what absurdity he had uttered, when he heard the populace loud in acclamations of his speech; and the cynic, whose vanity was seen through the holes in his cloak, might, perhaps, by a slight difference in his education, have been rendered ambitious of ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... but, when two objects are used in the superlative, one must be included in the other. It is wrong to say, The discovery of America was MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANY geographical discovery, for that is saying that the discovery of America was more important than itself—an absurdity. But it would be right to say, The discovery of America was more important THAN ANY OTHER geographical discovery. One should not say, He is the most honest OF HIS fellow-workmen, for he is not one ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... absurdity of which is demonstrated by historical dates, had not been without its partizans in France.—It tended to degrade the reigning family, and to make the people believe that the throne did not of right belong to the descendants of Louis XIV. (a prince surreptitiously intruded) but to the posterity ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... would not have gone to the depot naked, and the crime would not have been committed. It is hard enough for the man who did lend him the money to lose that, without losing his reputation besides. Nothing can exceed the utter absurdity of what has ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... no way of accounting for such discourse in the mouths of men of sense, but by supposing that they secretly entertain a hope that the very act of having made a peace with the Regicides will give a stability to the Regicide system. This will not clear the discourse from the absurdity, but it will account for the conduct, which such reasoning so ill defends. What a roundabout way is this to peace,—to make war for the destruction of regicides, and then to give them peace in order to insure a stability ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... hero, Arthur—is still inaccessible to the student of moderate means; and it is a scandal that this state of things should be allowed to continue.... Those who would raise any objection to these re-editions—as a few have raised them—are asked to consider the absurdity and injustice of debarring a large number of readers from the enjoyment of an old author, because a living editor has once printed his works, when the feeling of the editor himself is well expressed in the words of one of the class, 'You are heartily welcome to all ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... prisoners, therefore, it struck me as an immense absurdity that they should fancy us their enemies; since, whether we intend it so or no, they have a far greater stake on our success than we can possibly have. For ourselves, the balance of advantages between defeat ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various |
