"Baseless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for a single instant, give a thought to the business aspects of the situation—what it meant to him and his prospects or what he could do about it. Hurt to the soul he stared at the wreck of a friendship. Nothing will more deeply sicken the heart of a naturally loyal man than to discover baseless his faith in some one he has ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... Hamburg. Good news at the Leipsic Fourth of July celebration. Difficulties arising in Germany as the war progressed. The protection of American citizens abroad; prostitution of American citizenship; examples; strengthening of the rules against pretended Americans; baseless praise of Great Britain at the expense of the United States. Duty of the embassy toward American students; admission of women to the German universities. Efforts of various compatriots to reach the Emperor; psychological curiosities. Changes in Berlin since my former official residence; disappearance ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... and design. This enormous error, which is protean in form, has naturally induced the counter error of a too great insistence on the consciousness and elaboration of Shakespere's art. The most elaborate theories of this art have been framed—theories involving the construction of perhaps as much baseless fabric as anything else connected with the subject, which is saying a great deal. It appears to me in the highest degree improbable that Shakespere had before him consciously more than three purposes; but these three I think that he constantly ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... worship in temples made with hands, neither in the mountains of Samaria, nor in the temples of Jerusalem, or Rome, or London. 'The cloud-capt towers-the gorgeous palaces-the solemn temples-yea, the great globe itself, shall dissolve, and, like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wreck behind.' Or in language far more solemn and striking, because they are the unerring words of truth, 'The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and the works that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... mourned she her civilities When time unlocked the truth, that she had choked Her indignation at his former slights And slanderous sayings for a baseless hope, And wrought no tittle for her country's gain. I marvel why you mourn a frustrate tie With one whose wiles could wring ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... The French court approved the plan, though not without distrust; for some enemy of the governor told Ponchartrain that under pretence of negotiations he and Dudley were carrying on trading speculations,—which is certainly a baseless slander.[85] Vaudreuil on his part had strongly suspected Dudley's emissary, Vetch, of illicit trade during his visit to Quebec; and perhaps there was ground for the suspicion. It is certain that Vetch, who had visited the St. Lawrence before, lost no opportunity of studying the river, and looked ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... time; him he ordered to proclaim silence, and then to give out this proclamation of the generals: "Whoever will give any information as to who let an ass into the camp shall receive a talent of silver in reward." On hearing this proclamation the soldiers made up their minds that their fear was baseless, and their generals safe and sound. At break of day Clearchus gave the order to the Hellenes to get under arms in line of battle, and take up exactly the same position as they held on ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... Helsingfors, I overheard a conversation between the Governor-General and his son, which revealed to me a staggering truth that I had never suspected. It was Oberg himself who had denounced my mother to the Minister of the Interior, and had made those cruel, baseless charges against her! Then I discerned the reason. She being exiled, her fortune, as well as that of my father, came to me. The reason they were scheming for Michael to marry me was in order to obtain control of my money. I saw at once how helpless I was in the hands of that unscrupulous ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... for him the whole course of his future life. He had been aware, once or twice before, of such a premonition, and, as with most men, half of him had rejected and half of him received the warning. To-day, however, there were reasons enough for thinking this no mere baseless superstition. With Maggie, with his father, with his sister, with his own life the decision had got to be taken, and it was with an abrupt determination that he would end, at all costs, the fears and uncertainties ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... his stewardship to God.—From our connextion here, there will probably be some interest in each other in that day; and I cannot bear the thought of your being able to say when the scheme of Universalism shall all vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision, and all the hopes built upon it will be like the spider's web and like the giving up of the ghost, that you should be able to say, I never warned you of this issue, nor admonished you ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... of crops, which was always urged as an objection to raising fruits or truck on open grounds, has proved to be a baseless fear. Where any of the gardeners are allowed to camp or put up shacks on the patches, theft does not occur and various superintendents repeat that "the few and trivial cases of stealing from vacant lot plots or school gardens ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... me better, nothing would afford my country greater pleasure and satisfaction, than to see this marriage consummated. It would nail that baseless lie which has ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... weeks later, he heard the Tschaikowski "Pathetique" and later the "Unfinished" symphony, by Schubert, and a Beethoven symphony, attracted by each in turn, he realized that his prejudice against the whole question of symphonic music had been both wrongly conceived and baseless. ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... know that we are going to live together. There is no more baseless theory on God's earth than that we are going to take eight millions of men and send them out of this country, because they want to learn something, because they want to live like men and be men and citizens, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... inconceivable to the inhabitant of the plains, manifested among the hills in the course of one day. The mere power of familiarity with the clouds, of walking with them and above them, alters and renders clear our whole conception of the baseless architecture of the sky; and for the beauty of it, there is more in a single wreath of early cloud, pacing its way up an avenue of pines, or pausing among the points of their fringes, than in all the white heaps that fill the arched sky of the plains from one ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... charging the queer people who called themselves Conscientious Objectors with cowardice, but the charge seemed a baseless one to Henry. He did not believe that he could endure the odium and obloquy which some of the Conscientious Objectors had borne. There was courage in the man who said, "I will fight for my country!" but that courage might be less than that of ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... concealment for the express purpose of deceiving, is recognized as clearly in warfare as in peaceful civil life; and the writer on Christian ethics who appeals to the approved practices of warfare in support of the "lie of necessity" can have only the plea of ignorance as an excuse for his baseless argument. ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... so loudly before or since—and stepped out into the cool air. The fresh breeze that smote my cheeks as I sat down outside to put on my boots brought me back to the everyday world—a world that seemed to make the events of the night unreal and baseless, so that I had, with boyish elasticity of temper, almost forgotten all fear as I began to descend the ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... going to shut herself up, and write some long letters in connection with that business. After she had got into her own room, she was never sensible of how time was passing—never conscious of any feeling within her, except a baseless, helpless hope that the French police might yet be proved to have made some terrible mistake—until she heard a violent shower of rain come on a little after sunset. The noise of the rain, and the freshness it brought ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... phenomena—that is, to changes perceptible by the senses. Psychology, based, as it is, upon self-observation and self-reflection, is a "mere illusion; and logic and ethics, so far as they are built upon it as their foundation, are altogether baseless." Spiritual entities, forces, causes, efficient or final, are unknown and unknowable; all inquiry regarding them must be inhibited, "for Theology is inevitable if we permit the inquiry into ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... essential condition, as already pointed out, of all the projected invasions was the receipt of assistance from sympathisers in the enemy's country. Hoche himself expected this even in Tate's case; but experience proved the expectation to be baseless. When the prisoners taken with Tate were being conducted to their place of confinement, the difficulty was to protect them, 'car la population furieuse contre les Francais voulait les lyncher.' Captain Desbriere dwells at some length on the mutinies ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... But how baseless this idea is found to be, when we come to see how easily and successfully the Phoenician people traversed northern, western and eastern oceans, and brought home the products of the whole world to enrich themselves and the peoples among whom Providence had fixed their destinies! And how strangely ...
— Prehistoric Structures of Central America - Who Erected Them? • Martin Ingham Townsend
... influence in Europe seems the most baseless thing in the world; a sort of convention invented by diplomatists for some dark purpose of their own, one would suspect, if the lack of grasp upon the realities of any given situation were not the main characteristic of the management of international relations. A glance back at the last hundred ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... her dealings, deference to others, and refined personal habits,—and lest these should not suffice to convince grammatical fair ones that her feelings can at all resemble theirs, I will add that she was slightly proud and exacting, and as constant in her affection towards a baseless opinion as towards ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... And I would have set aside the verdict if the jury had found the defendant guilty. I do not know the lady who was so wantonly charged with this crime, and I do not know of any case in the annals of criminal jurisprudence which, from the evidence submitted in the case, had so baseless a foundation for so grave ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... accompanied by squawking inquiries which were never answered, uproarious laughter, back patting, brazen and baseless charges that each was growing fat, and Sanders watched ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... saw how thoughtless, unprepared, and baseless were all the objections we had made, and how greatly the echo of the present was heard in them, the voice of which, in the province of culture, the old man would fain not have heard. Our objections, however, were not purely intellectual ones: our reasons for protesting against the ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Mayo and Benson to this country were productive of very good results. The exchange of information which took place was most beneficial, as was the experience which the admirals gained of modern naval warfare. Moreover, the utterly baseless suggestion which had, unfortunately, found expression in some organs of the Press of the United States that we were not giving the fullest information to the Navy Department ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... questions of unprofitable curiosity; whilst, on the other hand, without a knowledge of the ground on which value depends, or without some approximation to it, Political Economy could not exist at all, except as a heap of baseless opinions. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... last chapter of the last book was done, it occurred to me to wonder whether I might ever be able to afford to get for a week or two where the thermometer went below ninety degrees in summer. But this was a wild and baseless dream, whose irrationality I quickly recognized. For such books as those into which I had been coining a year of my young strength and heart, I received the sum of one hundred dollars apiece. The "Gypsy" publisher was more munificent. He offered one hundred ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... of our fears turned out to be baseless. For instance, one day Johnny Boatman, a little boy not quite four years old, was lost. His mother was almost crazed, for word went out that the Indians had stolen him. A day later the lad was found under a tree, asleep. He ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... and ye, fair realms of Nature's history, whose pictures we tormented all grown persons to illustrate with more knowledge, still more,—how we bless the chance that gave to us your great realities, which life has daily helped us, helps us still, to interpret, instead of thin and baseless fictions that would all this time have hampered us, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... done the people of Kentucky, because of their conduct during the retreat. Baseless charges of their cowardice and treachery had been bandied about in the mouths of the unreflecting; the many had been made to suffer for the baseness of the few; and the shield of the state had been tarnished because of an inaction ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... books of evil, one more word before I blow away your baseless nightmares for ever. Not even faintly could you understand how little I care whether you can convict me or no. The things you call disgrace and horrible hanging are to me no more than an ogre in a child's toy-book to ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... hour, a change of name for me belongs to the policy of Must and Shall; namely the policy of Necessity, against which let no dog bark,—though I have known dogs howl at it! William Waife is no more: he is dead; he is buried; and even Juliet Araminta is the baseless fabric of a vision." ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be found in its proper place. It is the sole personal utterance in prose, and almost the only biographical fact of importance that we have for the first thirty years of Dryden's life. Upon it, an entirely baseless romance has been built of disappointed love and parental unkindness. There is absolutely no evidence that Dryden ever seriously pretended to his cousin's hand, or that he was rejected, or that this rejection was due to his ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... How baseless this expectation was, was seen from the event. For the Swiss being routed after a protracted combat, the troops of the Pope and Spain, so far from venturing to attack the conqueror, prepared for flight; nor ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... ingratitude of the people, and of telling us that under a democratic government neither men nor measures can remain for an hour unchanged. The witness alike of the present and of the past is an answer to baseless theories like these. The spirit which made democratic Athens year by year bestow her highest offices on the patrician Perikles and the reactionary Phokion, still lives in the democracies of Switzerland. The ministers of kings, whether despotic ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... well as from the point of view of manners, the Lectures on Translating Homer are open to not a few criticisms. In the first place, the assumptions are enormous, and, in some cases at least, demonstrably baseless. One of Mr Arnold's strongest points, for instance, not merely against Mr Newman but against Homeric translators generally, is concerned with the renderings of the Homeric compound adjectives, especially the stock ones—koruthaiolos, merops, and the rest. The originals, he is ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... through my mediation, she has become a favorite. I have married, and according to the general opinion reformed. Yet I suspect my reformation, like most others of the kind, will prove instable as "the baseless fabric of a vision," unless I banish myself entirely from her society. But that I can never do; for she is still lovely in my eyes, and I cannot control ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... succeeded in ruining a party, at least he succeeded in discrediting some pestilent opinions. This he did, not so much by a brisk display of intellectual handiness, as by showing that a pompous superstructure was baseless. He makes us feel a position to be absurd, instead of merely thinking certain things ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... foremost nation of the world. They had seen the mythological conceptions of their ancestral country dwindle into fables; the wonders with which the old poets adorned the Mediterranean had been discovered to be baseless illusions. From Olympus its divinities had disappeared; indeed, Olympus itself had proved to be a phantom of the imagination. Hades had lost its terrors; no place could ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... Morgan and by Maine, that this abhorrence was the result of experience; the marriages of closely related persons were found to be injurious to offspring and were therefore avoided. This theory, however, is baseless because the marriages of closely related persons are not injurious to the offspring. Consanguineous marriages, so closely as they can be investigated on a large scale,—that is to say, marriages between cousins,—as Huth was the first to show, develop ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the vase, looking at it critically. I had a feeling of being watched, one of those sensations which psychologists tell us are utterly baseless and unfounded. I was glad I had not said anything about it when he tapped the vase with his cane, then stuck it down the long narrow neck, working it around as well as he could. The neck was so long and narrow, however, that his stick could not ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... If therefore we were to fall upon them suddenly and in the night, I have hopes, with the help of the well-wishers that we may have left inside the town, that we shall become masters of the place. Let us not shrink from the risk, but let us remember that this is just the occasion for one of the baseless panics common in war: and that to be able to guard against these in one's own case, and to detect the moment when an attack will find an enemy at this disadvantage, is what makes a ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... that there is no such state of things, and that the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy. No evidence for it can be alleged beyond the familiar fact that during the present life we know Soul only in its association with Body, and therefore cannot ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... primal source, immortal all along its bright pathway, immortal as it flows onward to eternity, immortal in its return to the bosom of God. It is no postulate, no corollary, no mere hypothetical judgment; no "undiscovered correlative of motion," no "baseless fabric of a vision"—but the one grand comprehensive Datum on which all the objective, as well as subjective, data of the universe rest. It is the same "spirit that moved upon the face of the depths," in that majestic Dawn of ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... so precious to Hilda. Here Lord Chetwynde of course drifted away, and she could not hope to see him except at certain stated intervals. Now more than ever she began to lose hope. The hopes that she had once formed seemed now to be baseless. And why, she asked herself bitterly—why was it so impossible for him to love her? Would not any other man have loved ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by these incongruous additions, filled me with indignation and a kind of anger. In view of the errand I had come upon to Aros, the feeling was baseless and unjust; but it burned high, at the first ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heard of no more. Here, also, are countless vows and prayers for unattainable objects, lovers' sighs and tears, time spent in gaming, dressing, and doing nothing, the leisure of the dull and the intentions of the lazy, baseless projects, intrigues, and plots; these and such like things fill ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... very difficult to convince a Hanoverian court of law that the visitorship of an Oxford college ought to be transferred from the Jacobite university to the Crown; and so it came to pass that the Court of King's Bench solemnly ratified as a fact what historical criticism pronounces to be a baseless fable. The case in favour of William of Durham as the founder is so clear, that the antiquaries are ready to burst with righteous indignation, and one almost enjoys the intensity of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... her. Should she end in the convent of Crowland? And suspecting, fearing, imagining all sorts of baseless phantoms, she hardened her heart into ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... proper persons of the different kinds of mental and manual labor will be effected in fact by the anthropological variations in temperament and character, and there will be no need to resort to monkish regulations (another baseless objection ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... science, they have wasted the lamp of life, forgetful of the midnight hour, or when, lost in poetic dreams, fancy has peopled the scene, and the soul has been disturbed, till it shook the constitution by the passions that meditation had raised, whose objects, the baseless fabric of a vision, faded before the exhausted eye, they must have ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... long since the two have met. An ailing, obstinate, dull boy, they say, with no more wit than can be put in him with a spoon. If it were not that weak natures often turn vicious that they may be thought strong I would say the King's fear of a plot was baseless." ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... severely tried. All action has of necessity ceased, the body is at rest, the mind has now full time for thought. Numberless acts of the past life rise up to the recollection, many a deed, and thought, and word, which must bring either pain or fear; principles undergo a test which the wrong and baseless cannot bear. Death looks terribly near. What can stand a man in good stead on an occasion like this? One thing, and one thing alone—sound Bible religion; a firm faith in Him who took our nature upon Him, and died for our sins, and rose again, that ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... (for, if that were the reason, then the Christian fiends should be incongruous with the angels, which they are not,)—but as the unreal opposed to the real. In all the hands of other poets, we feel that Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, Diana, are not merely impure conceptions, but that they are baseless conceptions, phantoms of air, nonentities; and there is much the same objection, in point of just taste, to the combination of such fabulous beings in the same groups with glorified saints and angels, as there is to the combination, by a painter or a sculptor, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... mysterious death, was the immediate cause of my grandfather's recall. How much, or how little of this story—or other dark stories of the same kind—is true, whether my grandfather was a consummate scoundrel, or the victim of a baseless slander,—whether he left India a rich man or a poor man, is known to no mortal except Lady Maulevrier, and compared with her the Theban ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... them a scheme of philosophical opinions. But unfortunately the philosophic system of both was so far from supporting their own views and the cravings of their own enthusiasm, that, as in some points it was baseless, incoherent, or unintelligible, so in others it tended to moral results, from which, if they had foreseen them, they would have been themselves the first to shrink as contradictory to the very purposes in which their system had originated. Hence, in maintaining their own system they both ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... much out of my way to study the subject,—which was one requiring study. I found, or thought that I found, that the conduct of the gentleman in his office had been indiscreet; but that charges made against himself affecting his honour were baseless. This I said, emphasising much more strongly than was necessary the opinion which I had formed of his indiscretion,—as will so often be the case when a man has a pen in his hand. It is like a club or sledge-hammer,—in ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... violence or injustice could never wrest from him. Affection is always credulous, and fortunately for her happiness she gave no belief to the high charges which were publicly alleged against him; but placed the most undoubting trust in his assurance, that they were the baseless calumnies of an enemy. Even the many dark shades in his character, which could not escape her discernment, she was ever ready to palliate; and her bland influence often restrained the violence of his ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... in time a trodden clod, shall I be yet warm in life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable sages and holy flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of another world beyond death; or are they all alike, baseless visions, and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a flattering idea, then, is a world to come! Would to God I as firmly believed it, as I ardently wish it! There ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it. The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished before barbarian hordes like the baseless fabric of a dream. To think that we can solve a problem of this depth and magnitude by any mere external means—as so many good and earnest women seem to imagine—by any multiplication of Rescue Societies, Preventive Institutions, and other benevolent ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Argob, a region of the kingdom of Og, is a matter of much difficulty. It has been equated on philological grounds to the Lej[a]. But these arguments have been shown to be shaky if not baseless, and the identification is now generally abandoned. The confidence with which the great cities of Og were identified with the extensive remains of ancient sites in the Lej[a] and Hauran has also been shown to be without justification. All the so-called "giant cities of Bashan" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... continue to write about some of the American hero-gods as if they had been chiefs of tribes at some undetermined epoch, and the effort to trace the migrations and affiliations of nations by similarities in such stories is of almost daily occurrence. How baseless and misleading all such arguments must be, it is one of my objects ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... shall I define Thy shapeless, baseless, placeless emptiness? Nor form, nor colour, sound, nor size is thine, Nor words nor fingers can thy voice express; But though we cannot thee to aught compare, A thousand things to thee may likened be, And though thou ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... this unknown sea all this insubstantial pageant had faded like the baseless fabric of the vision that it was and left not a ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... service in the same department. For besides verifying approximately Struve's parallax of half a second of arc for 61 Cygni, he refuted, in 1811, by a sweeping search for (so-called) "large" parallaxes, certain baseless conjectures of comparative nearness to the earth, in the case of red and temporary stars.[1580] Of 450 objects thus cursorily examined, only one star of the seventh magnitude, numbered 1,618 in Groombridge's Circumpolar Catalogue, gave signs of measurable vicinity. Similarly, a reconnaissance among ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... came back with tidings which seemed scarcely less terrible than the baseless fear. I had angrily commanded her to leave me because she had urged me to revoke the command to turn back. Now, deadly pale, she announced that Mark Antony had left his galley, followed me in a little five-oared boat, and come on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... light shows now in the east and at length the full moon rises, not blood-coloured as in our climates but straightway very luminous, and surrounded by an aureole of a kind of mist, caused by the eternal dust of the sands. And when we return to the baseless kiosk—lulled always by the Nubian song of the boatmen—a great disc is already illuminating everything with a gentle splendour. As our little boat winds in and out, we see the great ruddy disc ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... aggression, and the Irish Parliament would give aid to a foreign enemy (pp. 176-7). Federalism would aggravate or increase instead of diminishing the actual Irish disloyalty to the Crown (pp. 179-80); the Irish expectations of material prosperity from Home Rule are baseless or grossly exaggerated (p. 182); the probability is, it would produce increased poverty and hardship; there would be frequent quarrels between the two countries over questions of nullification, secession, and federal taxation (p. 184); neither side would acquiesce ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... the citizens,' replied the Prefect, inclining with civility to Publius, 'the Christians have reached at no time fifty thousand. As for the conjecture touching the number of those who secretly embrace this injurious superstition, I hold it utterly baseless. It may serve a dying cause to repeat such statements, but they ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... doubt, ere this you have received from Valmai's own lips, for I know that to-morrow she will see you, having received her sister's letter in the morning; and the veil will be lifted, and all your sorrow will disperse like the baseless fabric of a dream. You will see already how Gwladys, dreading your influence upon the sister whom she thought you had deceived and deserted, was tempted, by your mistaking her for Valmai, to impersonate ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... more shrewd Italian or Spanish diplomatists at the Vatican—advised, perhaps, by their English bishops and dukes—may hope to affect the issue rather in the Unionist than in the Home Rule direction? Such suspicions may be entirely baseless, but it will be impossible to disregard them entirely during the events of the ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... the Jew is only the religious caricature of the baseless morality and of right generally, of the merely formal ceremonies which pervade the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... that was the sheriff's luck, it appeared, not the county's. Morrill treated him most affably. As they were nearing Medora, in fact, he informed his prisoner that he would appear before the justice of the peace, explain that he had discovered that the charge was baseless, and ask for a dismissal of the case without a hearing on the ground that a ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... light outside of us. If he in any way confused the conclusions of his logic (which is often extremely inconsequent and mistaken) with the perceptions of his divinely illuminated soul, our belief might prove baseless.' (Soul, pp. 226. 227.) These are his ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... daring flight, we would insinuate, darkly, sorrowfully, that perhaps the great man's morals ... but no! We were persuaded that rumour accused him falsely. The story that he had been seen dancing at Bullier's with the notorious Duchesse de Z—— was a baseless fabrication. Unprincipled? Oh, we were nothing if not unprincipled. And our pleasure was so exquisite, and it worried our victim so. 'I suppose you think it's funny, don't you?' he used to ask, with a feint of superior ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... the individual be under his own care, if it be his first care, if duty begin from the point of accountableness to our conscience and, through that, to God and human nature; if without such primary sense of duty, all secondary care of teacher, of friend, or parent, must be baseless and fruitless; if, lastly, the motions of the soul transcend in worth those of the animal functions, nay, give to them their sole value; then truly are there such powers; and the image of the dying taper may be recalled and contemplated, though with no sadness in the nerves, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... say that, after reading till one is tired the strange fancies of the squarers of the circle, the inventors of perpetual motion, and the rest of the moonstruck dreamers, most persons will confess to themselves that they have had notions as wild, conceptions as extravagant, theories as baseless, as the least rational of ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... highest degree. We must ask in what directions especially may woman, most profitably for herself or for others, seek to express herself apart from motherhood. It will appear, if our leading principle be valid, that it affords us a sure guide in the welter of controversy and baseless assertion of every kind, in which this vastly important question ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... upon the same terms. Had the French Government retraced its steps, improved the condition of its soldiers, and mitigated the punishment for desertion during the long war, Frederick's army would have fallen to pieces 'like the baseless fabric ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... obtrudes— 'never to be again'. So wrapt was he in the emotions evoked, he had no time to think of what tones called them up, and now all is past and gone. His magic palace, unlike that of Solomon, has 'melted into air, into thin air', and, 'like the baseless fabric of a vision', only the memory of it is left. . . . And, depressed by this saddest of human experiences, . . .he turns away impatient from the promise of more and better, to demand from God the same— the very same. Browning with magnificent assurance answers, 'yes, you shall ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... rushed into and over Lois's mind with such a sweep and confusion, that she hardly knew what she was thinking or feeling. All her positions were knocked away; all her assumptions were found baseless; her defences had been erected against nothing; her fears and her hopes were alike come to nought. That is, bien entendu, her old fears and her old hopes; and amid the ruins of the latter new ones were starting, in equally bewildering confusion. Like little green heads ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... amongst the masses of the people". There are principally two reasons for the proposed reform, first that Sweden and Norway have a different Tariff-System, secondly, the frequent rivalry between Swedish and Norwegian trade articles of export. The first reason is baseless, as the different Tariff-Systems are of importance chiefly for the imports, and not for the exports[12:1]; the second reason loses its chief point by the fact that consuls are not commercial agents, that it is not their business ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... programme of his funeral, and asked that on that occasion Mozart's Requiem should be performed.] Also the story about Chopin's wish to be buried beside Bellini is, according to the latter authority, a baseless invention. This is also the place to dispose of the question: What was done with Chopin's MSS.? The reader may know that the composer is said to have caused all his MSS. to be burnt. Now, this is not true. From Franchomme I learned that what actually took ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... in Glaston, replied by wire in that tumult of emotion which each new lure was potent to excite, despite the quicksands of baseless hope that had whelmed its many precursors. Still, she expected only another instance of deliberate and brazen fraud, or crafty and sleek imposture, or, worse still, honest mistake. The little suit-case, packed with all that the child might need, which had journeyed ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... a rare delicacy in Calcutta. Rajendra, who had been promising himself a veritable feast on reaching Kashmir, was disappointed to find there no large vineyards. Now and then I chaffed him jocosely over his baseless anticipation. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... time. "My dear Mr. Ware," he said, as they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been brought them, "of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless and empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... in according to Gallatin the honor of this field day. It was left to John C. Hamilton, half a century later, to charge a want of courage upon Gallatin,—a baseless charge.[3] Not Malesherbes, the noble advocate defending the accused monarch before the angry French convention, with the certainty of the guillotine as the reward of his generosity, is more worthy of admiration than Gallatin boldly pleading the cause of order within rifle range ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... say: Formerly, when the nation was disunited and disturbed, there was no one who could give unity to it. The princes therefore stood up together; constant references were made to antiquity to the injury of the present state; baseless statements were dressed up to confound what was real, and men made a boast of their own peculiar learning to condemn what their rulers appointed. And now, when Your Majesty has consolidated the empire, and, ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... games, and regulating their play accordingly, as they do at Baden-Baden and Hombourg. I suppose that now and then these scientific calculators must be told that their whole theory of chances is the most baseless delusion, but they certainly do not believe it; and at any rate this curious pseudo-science of winning by skill at games of pure chance will last ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... How baseless is the mightiest earthly pride, The diamond is but charcoal purified, The lordliest pearl that decks a monarch's breast Is but ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... strangely revived it by convincing him that his family deserved and needed all his strength. She was right, and for their sake, if not for his own, this passion, which could bear no fruit, must be cut off, uprooted, shown to be as visionary and baseless as she had maintained. The best way of achieving this was not to run away from her, but to face her, and having steeped himself in her qualities, to convince his reason that they were, as she assured him, not those that he imagined. She was a practical ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... terror. They had charged him with sinning, on the strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered with a deliberate denial of it. Losing now all mastery over themselves, they pour out a torrent of mere extravagant invective and baseless falsehoods, which in the calmer outset they would have blushed to think of. They know no evil of Job, but they do not hesitate now to convert conjecture into certainty, and specify in detail the particular crimes which he ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... Tribune, "and gloomy fantasy, that man's fate is pre-ordained—irrevocable—unchangeable, from the moment of his birth! Yet, were the dream not baseless, fain would I know which of yon stately lights is my natal star,—which images—which reflects—my career in life, and the memory I shall leave in death." As this thought crossed him, and his gaze was still fixed above, he saw, as if made suddenly more distinct than the stars around it, that rapid ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... ought to be, we have only to learn whether it is truly poetical. It is a popular fallacy to suppose that poetical things are necessarily fanciful, or imaginative, or sentimental in other words, that poetry resides in that which is both baseless and valueless. In the popular thought, poetry is shut out of the realm of truth and reality. The reason, I suppose, is, that poetry demands more of truth and harmony and beauty than is commonly found in the actualities of ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... who, in himself and his external circumstances, shall be equally and totally false: his fortune resting on baseless credit,— his patriotism assumed,—his domestic affections, his honor and honesty, all a sham. His own misery in the midst of it,—it making the whole universe, heaven and earth alike, all ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that the whole process went on in the little space that remained of the open square. Like other fairy works, however, it all proved evanescent. Not only carriage and ponies, but castle itself, soon vanished away, 'like the baseless fabric of a vision.' On the death of the Marquis in 1809, the castle was pulled down. Few probably remember its existence; and any one who might visit the place now would wonder how it ever could have ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... of everything, this expectation of being cured cheered him, but then a new fear entered. His servant might have failed to find the physician. Again he grew faint, passing instantly from the most unreasoning hopes to the most baseless fears, exaggerating the chances of a sudden recovery and his apprehensions of danger. The hours passed and the moment came when, in utter despair and convinced that the physician would not arrive, he angrily told himself that he certainly would have been saved, had he acted sooner. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... they were composed of water they could not cause a flood on the earth; the report that some strange, misty object is visible in the starry heavens is based on a misapprehension; and finally, the so-called calculations of the author of this inexcusable hoax are baseless and ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... merely wished to prove to you that your aversion for me was entirely unfounded. You have proved to me that your love for Adolphus, in the abstract, is as baseless and unsubstantial. I am not sorry under the circumstances that it should have been murdered, for it was a poor exotic. Let us not attempt to analyse the mysterious nature of that passion which is too precious a plant to tear up by the roots in order to discover the ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... Spirit may be more complex than that of electricity, because, as expressed in us, it is the law of conscious individuality; but it is none the less a purely natural law, and follows the universal rule, and therefore we may dismiss from our minds, as a baseless figment, the fear of any Divine power treasuring up anger against us on account of bygones, if we are sincerely seeking to do what is right now. The new causes which we put in motion now will produce their proper effect as surely ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... regarding dreams. They admit the dream state to be ideal—constantly use such expressions as "A dream of loveliness," "Happier than I could even dream," "Surpasses my fondest dreams," and yet on the other hand they call its experience "but the baseless vision of a dream." What do they mean by "baseless"? Certainly it is not lack of vividness or emotional intensity. It is probably the lack of duration in the happy experiences, and of the possibility of remembering them, and, still ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... which to simmer his troubles was urgent within him and Emilia's, though it lacked experience, was a woman's regarding love. And moreover, she did not weep, but practically suggested his favourable chances, which it was a sad satisfaction to him to prove baseless, and to knock utterly over. The grief in which the soul of a human creature is persistently seeking (since it cannot be thrown off) to clothe itself comfortably, finds in tears an irritating expression of sympathy. Hints of a brighter future are its nourishment. Such embryos ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
