"Illogical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by attacking me on the English language. He said it was utterly absurd and illogical, and though he ought to know it, as he had an English wife, he felt he never ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... Huish was thus airing and exercising his bravado, the man at his side was actually engaged in prayer. Prayer, what for? God knows. But out of his inconsistent, illogical, and agitated spirit, a stream of supplication was poured forth, inarticulate as himself, ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of a lack of mental equipoise. We find scattered throughout his works the most brilliant, irrefutable, and logical truths side by side with the most inane, illogical, and stolid crudities. Among other men of genius who showed signs of degeneration we may include Alexander Stevens, Joel Hart, Adams, Train, Breckenridge, Webster, Blaine, Van Buren, Houston, Grant, Hawthorne, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... he had confidence in her, and told himself that he ought to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he felt that he was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... study of biology, and all that sort of thing," said he; "and, although a good deal of a skeptic, and inclined to follow Huxley, I can't bring myself to conceive of life without organism. Such theorizing is, to my mind, on a par with the illogical search for the philosopher's ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... upon them (glass being seldom used for such a purpose), no doubt exists of their great antiquity; and we may consider it a fortunate chance that has preserved one bead with the name of a sovereign of the 18th dynasty. Nor is it necessary to point out how illogical is the inference that, because other kinds of glass have not been found bearing a king's name, they were not made in Egypt, at, or even ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... He was very illogical that afternoon; he threw over the principles of a lifetime, arguing from particulars to generals exactly like a girl. He had objected, always, to the expensive and the aristocratic. He was proud of his pure plebeian blood, as many plebeians are; he gloried in it. He disliked show, with a calm ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... may be quarrelled with as illogical, but the feeling that led to it was beautiful beyond question; and, indeed, all her ideas on that subject ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... and bustle of the bees are gone. O friendly reader, what a loss it was to you, that the writer did not at once sit down and sketch out his essays, Concerning Things Slowly Learnt; and Concerning Growing Old! And two other subjects of even greater value were, Concerning the Practical Effect of Illogical Reasons, and An Estimate of the Practical Influence of False Assertions. How the hive was buzzing when these titles were written down: but now I really hardly remember anything of what I meant to say, and what I remember appears wretched stuff. The effervescence ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... Prussian prove that the Cabinet Order is not the outcome of religious feeling? By describing the Cabinet Order everywhere as an outcome of religious feeling. Is an insight into social movements to be expected from such an illogical mind? Listen to his prattle about the relation of German society to the Labour movement and to ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... field of inductive science, they remain easy victims of metaphysical reasoning. Indeed, since the conditions of civilization throw a protecting influence about us, and make the civilized man less amenable to results of illogical action than was the barbarian, it may almost be questioned whether the average person of to-day is the equal, as a scientific reasoner, of the average man of the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... expected to produce a different political result. I cannot but regard it as a blunder in statesmanship to give suffrage without an educational qualification, and to deem it possible to put ignorance over intelligence. You are not, responsible for the situation, but you are none the less in an illogical position before the law. Now, would you not gain more in a rectification of your position than you would lose in other ways, by making suffrage depend upon an educational qualification? I do not mean gain party-wise, but in political morals and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... him something more than a mathematician. Now, this is exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth. It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... of it, Bland had been left fifty miles farther down the line, to catch his train. Tucson was a perfectly illogical place for him to be in, even for the purpose of carousing. One would certainly expect him to hurry to the city of his desires and take his pleasure there. Johnny decided that Bland must still have an eye ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... were stopped with objections grounded on the impossibility of physical miracles, he would justly protest against the interruption; and were the philosopher, who was determining the motion of the heavenly bodies, to be questioned about their Final or their First Cause, he too would suffer an illogical interruption. The latter asks the cause of volcanoes, and is impatient at being told it is "the divine vengeance;" the former asks the cause of the overthrow of the guilty cities, and is preposterously referred to the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... her treatment of him had so wounded herself that she could not forgive him. All of which is quite illogical and quite feminine. ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... expect, Niklausse? There is nothing so illogical as accidents. They are bound by no rules, and we cannot profit by one, as we might ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... belonged to the Serbo-Croat party, which was, he said, a righteous, though rather a small party, as the island had been gravely handicapped by the support which Austria gave the Serbs. "And now," he added—it seemed a trifle illogical—"the people are all very contented. Believe me," he said. Furthermore, he volunteered the information that the law was being administered in the name of the Entente and the United States. It may show a distinct bias on our part, but I fear we asked him whether the blows from the butt ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... illogical and childish about it. When I had dragged him away from these last sad rites, he gave it as his opinion that any other bishop would have stopped, just for a moment at least, and been friendly and enthusiastic, if ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... importance than mere forms. The evasive talk of the "spirit" of constitutional law, and the administrative anomalies could not be decisive. Many events both in public annals and administrative legislature are very illogical, and very great anomalies. The main fact which the Swedish government had to hold in view, was this, that the responsibility of the Swedish Minister of Foreign affairs, for the joint Foreign policy of the two Kingdoms, ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... knowledge—must be put aside, in cases of this kind. It cannot assist the inquirer. It will lead him, in the most logical progression, to what, in the eyes of artists, would be a most illogical conclusion. Thus: bad drawing, bad proportion, bad perspective, indifference to truthful detail, color which gets its merit from time, and not from the artist—these things constitute the Old Master; conclusion, the Old ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the other assumption—miracle is impossible. That is an illogical begging of the whole question in dispute. It cannot avail to brush aside testimony. You cannot smother facts by theories in that fashion. Again, one would like to know how it comes that our modern men of science, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... great wonder and pride and illogical happiness, was thinking of the days to come, the immediate to-morrows, rich in a tenderness profounder still than that which had linked her before to the companion staring at the stars beside her; she ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... not do. On the most trifling matter his eyes kindled, his fist visited the table, and his voice rolled abroad in changeful thunder. I never saw such a petard of a man; I think the devil was in him. He had two favourite expressions—"it is logical," or illogical, as the case might be; and this other, thrown out with a certain bravado, as a man might unfurl a banner, at the beginning of many a long and sonorous story: "I am a proletarian, you see." Indeed, we saw it very well. God forbid that ever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a Rock ... for Thou art a Rock.' Is that not illogical? No, for notice that little word, 'to me'—be Thou to me what Thou art in Thyself, and hast been to all generations.' That makes all the difference. It is not merely 'Be what Thou art,' although that would be much, but it is 'be it to me,' and let me have all which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... I'm sorry, but you are illogical. You acknowledge that this is a subject about which you know nothing, yet almost in the same breath you criticise and condemn. Men blame women for having no sense of justice, but they are just as bad. They are worse, and with less excuse. ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... sly satire goes deeper, as Judges, under less gross conditions, have often made this illogical appeal to ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... intelligible. And let it be remembered that this is no subject to be smoothed over by nicely adjusted phrases of half-assent and half-censure divided between the parties. The balance must be struck boldly and the result declared plainly. If I have been hasty, presumptuous, ill-informed, illogical; if my array of facts means nothing; if there is no reason for any caution in the view of these facts; let me be told so on such authority that I must believe it, and I will be silent henceforth, recognizing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and property; but the Jacobins, who held that an absolute equality should be maintained by the despotism of the government over the people, interpreted more justly the democratic principles which were common to both parties; and, fortunately for their country, they triumphed over their illogical and irresolute adversaries. "When the revolutionary movement was once established," says De Maistre, "nothing but Jacobinism ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... This transparently illogical position is maintained ostensibly from first to last, much in the same spirit as in the two foregoing passages, written at intervals of thirteen years. But they are to be read by the light of the earlier ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... different ideas, not one of them (save perhaps Miss Asenath, somewhat) understanding in the least this strange and illogical desire to watch the play of the elements out of doors when she could be safe inside a house. It was always their very first move, when a storm was threatened, to ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... deeply rooted in the depths of man's being is this vital need of living a world[42] illogical, irrational, personal or divine, that those who do not believe in God, or believe that they do not believe in Him, believe nevertheless in some little pocket god or even devil of their own, or in an omen, or in a horseshoe picked up by chance on the roadside and carried about with them ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... not how long this lasted—it might have been for hours, as I took no account of time. My mind seemed dazed, incapable of consecutive thought although a thousand illogical conceptions flashed through the brain, each in turn fading away into another, before I was fully aware of its meaning. Occasionally some far-off noise aroused me from lethargy, yet none of these could be identified, except once the mournful cry of ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... disease once fixed on the skin reacts and poisons the blood in turn as it has first been poisoned by the blood, so careless use of language if indulged reacts on the mind to make it permanently and increasingly careless, illogical, ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... to do all we can to limit, to restrain, to fetter the abuse of military power. Bayonets are at best illogical arguments. I am not willing, except as a case of sheerest necessity, ever to permit a military commander to exercise authority over life, liberty, and property. But, sir, it is part of the law of war; you cannot carry in ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... old thing; the same honest, illogical, practical sincerity,' said Owen, in a tone of somewhat superior melancholy; but seeing Phoebe about to resent his words as a disrespectful imputation on their friend, he turned the subject, addressing Phoebe in the manner between teasing and flattering, habitual ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The joyous look on his face was gone now—his hand had fallen to his side. "It gets to be more of a muddle every day—" and then he added, with the illogical reasoning of youth—"all the lawyers that ever lived couldn't paint a picture ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and that is a woman's mind—a young woman's mind. Oh, of course, sometimes they are logical, but let a woman be so once, and she will repent of it to the end of her days. The safety of the world's balance lies in woman's illogical mind. ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... believe in his communism. Those who most resent being looked down upon, are in general the readiest to look down upon others. It is not principle, it is not truth, it is themselves they regard. Of all false divinities, Self is the most illogical. ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... an illogical one, for to doubt of the existence of Christopher Lovelock was one thing, and to doubt of the mode of his death was another; but somehow I ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... through the gate and Kit resumed his walk, struggling with an annoyance he felt was illogical. He knew something about Bell's household and imagined that Janet's life was not smooth. He was sorry for her, and it was, of course, unjust to blame her for her father's deeds. All the same, the favor ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... was in the chair. After the speechifying was over, and the stereotyped, though rather illogical, appeal had been made for voters of the one party to cast the straight ticket, and for those of the other faction to scratch, the colonel rose to ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... the philosophy of the complex vision is bound to recognize, and include in its rational form, much that remains mysterious, arbitrary, indetermined, organic, obstinately illogical. For the illogical is not necessarily the unintelligible, so long as the reason which we use is that same imaginative and clairvoyant reason, which, in its higher measure, sustains the vision of the poets ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... away,—yes, you dog, for you did run away, don't deny it,—well, what with sorrow for the loss of you, and trouble with your mother, for she declared I had driven you from home by not encouraging you to write, and women are most illogical and unreasonable when they once get a fixed idea into their heads,—well, between one and the other of you I had a very bad time. The fact remained that you were gone, never gave us any address, and I got all the blame for it. But the thing that annoyed Mum more than anything ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... work and the finest healthiest children. The children are the forthcoming bearers of the world's burdens and responsibilities. To them belongs the future, and already too many social problems of the present age are due to the unhygienic and illogical mating of the ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... my father, "you reason by synecdoche,—ornamental, but illogical;" and therewith, resolved to hear no more, my father rose ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... do so by throwing them in part upon other and subordinate assemblies. But this, if it be a reason at all, is certainly a most insufficient one. Would any human being, anxious merely to give relief to the House of Commons, adopt so illogical a scheme as one which involves a provincial Parliament in Ireland, and no provincial Parliaments anywhere else; which puts Ireland under two Parliaments, and left the rest of the country under one; which, if Irishmen are to be admitted to the Imperial Parliament, would give Ireland ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... him in charge, in the paltry indignities which he had to endure, and which he could not endure in the patient dignity of silence. The mere refusal to allow to him his title of Emperor, and to insist {13} that he should only be addressed as General Bonaparte, was as illogical as it was ungenerous; for if revolutionary France had not the right to make him an Emperor, she certainly could not have had the right to make him a General. Every movement he made and every movement made by any of his friends on the island was watched ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... lawyer or a doctor should rather be consulted. He himself had never encouraged such confidences. What did he keep curates for? His curates had saved him many a long hour of talk with inconsequent men and illogical women who had come to him with their stories. What were to him the stories of men whose wives were giving them trouble? What were to him the stories of wives who had difficulties with their housemaids or who could not keep their boys from reading ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... endeavored to silver-coat for Northern palates the bitter pill of the Dred Scott decision, by declaring that the people of any State or Territory might withhold that protecting legislation, those "friendly police regulations," without which slavery could not exist. But this was, indeed, a "lame, illogical, evasive answer," which enabled Lincoln to "secure an advantage in the national relations of the contest which ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... observed effect the existence, in time past, of a cause similar to that by which we know it to be produced in all cases in which we have actual experience of its origin. This, for example, is the scope of the inquiries of geology; and they are no more illogical or visionary than judicial inquiries, which also aim at discovering a past event by inference from those of its effects which still subsist. As we can ascertain whether a man was murdered or died a natural death, from the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... fact be more illogical (not to say absurd) than the whole of Mr. Malthus's reasoning applied as an answer (par excellence) to Mr. Godwin's book, or to the theories of other Utopian philosophers. Mr. Godwin was not singular, but was kept in countenance by many authorities, both ancient and modern, in supposing ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... common enough military error of pushing the pursuit to a dangerous extreme, until he found himself upon the margin of a wide but shallow brook, whose rapid waters barred his direct advance against the flying foe that had crossed with illogical ease. But the intrepid victor was not to be baffled; the spirit of the race which had passed the great sea burned unconquerable in that small breast and would not be denied. Finding a place where some bowlders in the bed of the stream lay but a ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... question of time, and that, if promises or threats are addressed to the electoral body with regard to their exercise of the electoral franchise, it is a matter of no importance whether this is done before or at the time of the election. Illogical as he has proved himself, we cannot suppose him to be so utterly destitute of the reasoning faculty as a sincerity in this defence would imply; and we must therefore believe that he knows the charge to be well ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... anomalies of the English Constitution. It is also, I think, a very good example of how highly undesirable those anomalies really are. Most Englishmen say that these anomalies do not matter; they are not ashamed of being illogical; they are proud of being illogical. Lord Macaulay (a very typical Englishman, romantic, prejudiced, poetical), Lord Macaulay said that he would not lift his hand to get rid of an anomaly that was not ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of house-wreckers. The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow, steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of Neo-Georgian aestheticism. Such is the illogical quality of humanity that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard under the seat of current civilisation, saw these changes with regret. He had come up Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows of all the little shops, spent ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... as my story and much more exciting. To begin the foundation of that extension was like setting in motion the siege of a city! It was extravagant—reckless—nevertheless assisted by a neighbor who was clever at any kind of building, I set to work in boyish, illogical enthusiasm. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... expressive of the metamorphosis the funeral pyre is intended to effect, viz. 'transformation of man'; 'transformation of the body'; 'metamorphosis by fire.' Without the clerical sphere it bears no such high-sounding names, being simply called 'incineration of corpses.' A term of illogical composition, and nevertheless very common in the books, is 'fire burial.'" It appears that during the Sung Dynasty cremation was especially common in the provinces of Shan-si, Cheh-kiang, and Kiang-su. During the Mongol Dynasty, the instances of cremation which ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the beginning of his system unnecessarily difficult, to say nothing of his illogical arrangement in the grammar of the art of memory, which he makes the first of his lessons. He analyzes ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... the Ionian Islands, became a British protectorate in virtue of the Treaty of Paris of Nov. 5, 1815, but was given to Greece by the Treaty of London of March 29, 1864. The Ambassadors' Conference decided in the Autumn of last year that it was illogical to allow the chief harbor of Albania to be dominated by the territory of a foreign power, and by the Protocol of Florence, Dec. 19, 1913, it was definitely included in Albania. This decision was ratified by legislative enactment ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... perfect and heroic characters, finer and more affecting scenes. Nor do we seek to use history, as is done in Germany, for the purpose of promoting patriotism and loyalty; we feel that it would be illogical for different persons to draw opposite conclusions from the same science according to their country or party; it would be an invitation to every people to mutilate, if not to alter, history in the direction of its preferences. We understand that the value of every science consists ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... now and again during the year, afternoons or evenings, who have been picked out to be at the top of the nation's talking, by a loose absent-minded and illogical paper-process, cannot expect to control men who have been picked out to be at the top of a nation's buying and selling, by a hard-working, closely fitting, logical process—the men that all the people by everything they do, every ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... good a priori grounds for supposing that the dreams of adults too are full of meaning and are logical; that there is a wish in every dream and that the wish is fulfilled in the dream. The reason dreams appear illogical is due to the fact that if the wish were to be expressed in its logical form it would not square with our everyday habits of thought and action. We should be disinclined to admit even to ourselves that we have such dreams. Immediately upon waking only so much of the dream is ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... inasmuch as the possession of arms, except by special license, was prohibited to Catholics;—though at this time (the American War being then in progress) the feeling of the Irish Protestant was strongly revolutionary, while the Irish Catholic, true to his fatal instinct of illogical veneration, was distinctly loyalist. Otherwise, the bond of a common nationality had overborne sectarian estrangement; and never before or since has Ireland seen a period when the professors of those hostile creeds got drunk together in such ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... by any human supplication? It was that or nothing—the last court of appeal, left open to injured humanity. And so they all prayed, as a lover loves, or a poet writes, from the very inside of their souls, and they rose with that singular, illogical feeling of inward peace and satisfaction ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... equal value. We realize neither the fallacy of many taken singly nor the conflict of all taken together. His points are often cleverly and faithfully put, and our attention is so riveted on this cleverness and faithfulness that we take for granted the rightness of his deductions, slovenly, illogical or false though they may be. What we most remark in his books is how the purely artistic element in his nature—of a very high grade and very true instincts—is dwarfed of full development and stunted of full results by the theorizing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... seems to me more illogical than the argument that this power is acquired by a grant from the Congress, connected with the other argument that Congress have not got the power to do the act themselves; that is to say, that the recipient takes more than the giver possessed; that ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... contradicted his own logic, used but a few minutes before, but she did not attempt to prove it to him; for, in the first place, she felt instinctively that the most difficult thing in the world is to convince an ignorant person that he has been foolish and illogical in his argument. You may prove this to an intelligent mind that is accustomed to reason, and to weigh the merits of questions, but it is a rare thing to find an uncultured brain that can follow you closely enough to be convinced of his ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... he said was very ingenious, and had a great appearance of truth; but still they said it was not truth. They never, however, as far as I could observe, thought proper to grapple with him, to point out anything unfounded in his premises, or illogical in the conclusions which he drew from them; they generally confined themselves to mere assertions, or to minute and unimportant observations by which the real question ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... to take the command of the army, together with Hooker. I almost believe it, because it is nameless, and here all that is illogical ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... feeling that was enveloping him like a mist—a feeling that everything the young Englishman was saying he had heard before. It left him dazed, and made Durwent's voice sound far away. He tried to dismiss it as an illogical prank of the mind, but the thing was relentless. He could not rid himself of the thought that sometime in the past—months, years, perhaps centuries ago—this pitiful scene ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... when a girl cannot work without working herself into her grave, it is her duty not to work, and it is the duty as well as the privilege of her friends to support her. Truth is truth, Willie, and we must not shrink from stating it because a few illogical thinkers are apt to misunderstand it, or because there are a number of mean-spirited wretches who would be too glad to say that they could not work without injuring their health if they could, by so doing, persuade their friends to support them. What! are those ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... although she herself considered her life as practically finished. The past and the present were moulding her into something that only the future could determine. Sometimes April, sometimes July, sometimes witch, sometimes woman; impetuous, intrepid, romantic, tempestuous, illogical,—these were but the elements of which the coming years of experience had yet to shape a character. Young Mrs. Loring had plenty of briars, but she had good roots and in favorable soil would be ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... had lived a hundred years he would never have become a man; he was penetrated with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical; so that I call ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... with tears; she was unhappy, and, as always, this knowledge roused in Maudelain a sort of frenzied pity and a hatred, quite illogical, of all other things existent. She was unhappy, that only he comprehended: and for her to ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... art, ambitious, vain in some respects, full of high spirits, and with a keen sense of humour, and not devoid of originality, he was daily chafed and galled in the depressing atmosphere of his home relations. He felt how illogical was the rigid methodicity, how unreasonable the arbitrary routine, how absurd the restrictions and restraints of his uncle's household regulations; he was eager to be quit of them, to turn his back upon them; he was anxious to find a congenial field for his powers-a field where he could turn ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... the histories of former ages (which they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every instance of oppression and persecution which has been made by that body or in its favour, in order to justify, upon very iniquitous, because very illogical, principles of retaliation, their own persecutions and their own cruelties. After destroying all other genealogies and family distinctions, they invent a sort of pedigree of crimes. It is not very just to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors: ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... you would,' I said: 'for although I confess you are logically right in your conclusions, I know Sir Thomas did not mean anything of the sort. He was only misled by his love of antithesis into a hasty and illogical remark. The whole tone of his book is against such a conclusion. Besides, I do not doubt he was thinking only of good people, for whom he believed all ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... before passing on, that the course which has been adopted towards S. Mark xvi. 9-20, by the latest Editors of the New Testament, is simply illogical. Either they regard these verses as possibly genuine, or else as certainly spurious. If they entertain (as they say they do) a decided opinion that they are not genuine, they ought (if they would ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... and attack, and are not understood by the majority of the classes with which the Army deals. How their omission is reconciled with certain prominent passages and directions laid down in the New Testament I do not know. To me, I confess, this disregard of them seems illogical. ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... about bluffing. The trouble is that bluffing is essentially illogical, and the robot had no rules whatsoever to go by to judge whether Mike was bluffing or not. It finally decided to make its decisions by chance, judging by Mike's past performance at bluffing. When it did, Mike quit bluffing and ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... manner towards his father struck me as an ideal blending of affectionate comradeship with old-fashioned respect.[E] True, this was in Philadelphia, "the City of Homes," and even there it may have been an exceptional case. I am not so illogical as to pit a single observation against (presumably) a wide induction; I merely offer for what it is worth one item ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... of post-nuptial felicity was strong upon Harry just then, but he did not attempt to deny the imputation. He only said, "My pet, I have known him so much the longest!" I wonder, now, how many brides would have admitted that somewhat unsatisfactory and illogical excuse? Fanny Molyneux did; she was the best-natured little woman alive, and wise, too, in her generation, for she never brought matters to a crisis, or measured ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... et Proverbes of Alfred de Musset, or the many agreeable dialogues and monologues of the French domestic stage, than of any work of English or American hands. His softly ironical yet affectionate treatment of feminine ways is especially admirable. In his numerous types of sweetly illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent womanhood he has perpetuated with a nicer art than Dickens what Thackeray calls ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... this whole Winkelberg business. And I said to myself: "The man's a downright fake. If anybody were as pathetic and impossible and useless as this Winkelberg is he would shoot himself. Winkelberg doesn't shoot himself. So he becomes illogical. Unreal." ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... had already recovered his breath, and was about to rush once again into Rodin's arms, the latter stepped back hastily, and held out his arm to keep him off, saying, in allusion to the illogical metaphor employed by Father Caboccini, "First of all, father, one does not embrace a light—and then I am not a light—I am a humble and obscure laborer in ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... democratic; but in most of them it was restricted by custom or local regulation to petty groups of property-holders or taxpayers, to members of the municipal corporations, or even to members of a favored guild. With few exceptions, the borough franchise was illogical, exclusive, ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... instance, therefore, in this connection, does the author of Beowulf use "hilt" to designate the whole sword; consequently, to write "gylden hilt" as one word and capitalize it is both arbitrary and illogical. There is, in fact, nothing in the poem to indicate that the sword ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... Bible, but on what does he build his faith in the Bible? Is it not the testimony of the Holy Spirit? He has this support only through the Bible. Certain liberal theologians, like the orthodox, are extremely illogical in their conclusions concerning the word of God. The former will not accept of verbal inspiration, yet they call the Bible a divine book, which, fortunately, could be no better. Though they laugh at the story of Jonah and the whale, they ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... can't doubt it. Yet that was the mischief. I could find no logical cause for your disturbance. And an illogical world proceeds from confusion to chaos. For want of a little logic my foot and your swing ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... catastrophe of her emotion fused into a white hot, illogical anger against this man who was suffering, and by his suffering ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was a stout, loud-talking woman, whom experience had not softened in her ways of speech or thought or action. She was generally at strife with her husband, but the strife was most illogical. It did not admit of a single legitimate deduction in the mind of a third person. It seemed sometimes as if the pair were possessed of the instincts of those animals which unite for mutual destruction, and as if their purpose were to fulfil their destiny with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... due to human intelligence and products supposed due to Divine Intelligence, a correspondence which is only generic. Illustrations drawn from prodigality in Nature. Further illustrations. Illogical manner in which natural theologians deal with such difficulties. The generic resemblance contemplated is just what we should expect to find, if the doctrine ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... loving mother to throw her child into the Ganges. Nature never prompted men to exterminate each other for a difference of opinion concerning the baptism of infants. These crimes have been produced by religions filled with all that is illogical, cruel and hideous. These religions were produced for the most part by ignorance, tyranny, and hypocrisy. Under the impression that the infinite ruler and creator of the universe had commanded the destruction of heretics and infidels, the church ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... him, and there was something harrowingly pathetic about the combination of little, veinous hands twitching nervously in the folds of the blue gingham, the painstaking frizzes, the pale, screwed little face, and the illogical ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and, perhaps, after that the nuts are passed. They taste so good that you are tempted to take one more about ten times. You fail to chew the nut thoroughly and you crowd it into an already overfilled stomach. Because it happens to be the first thing to come up in case of disaster you jump at the illogical conclusion that your indigestion is due to the nuts. I need not tell you how unscientific is ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... like-minded, set up separate worship according to the Book of Common Prayer. Being called to account before the governor for their schismatic procedure, they took an aggressive tone and declared that the ministers, "were Separatists, and would be Anabaptists." The two brothers were illogical. The ministers had not departed from the Nationalist and anti-Separatist principles enunciated by Higginson from the quarter-deck of the "Talbot." What they had just done was to lay the foundations of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... chattels. The compromise brought forward by Madison consisted in agreeing that five slaves should count in population as three. By this curious device a negro was equivalent to three fifths of a white man. Such a compromise was, of course, illogical, leaving the question whether negroes were chattels or human beings with even a theoretical civil character undecided. But many of the members, who saw the illogic quite plainly, voted for it, being dazzled ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... patriotism, I venture respectfully to hope. But I would not have cared then to set myself right with the populace of my native city, either on that or any other point, though I could have done it with a word. It was natural and illogical to scorn the people for believing in my guilt, whilst I allowed them to believe it. Yet I felt against them a sort of lofty anger, and felt myself affronted to think that anybody could regard me ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... both approved, then there is lifted up the sneer of the world, and again the weakness of woman, the frivolity of humanity, is deplored by those who demand that grief shall co-survive with remembrance. We do not suffer so much as we think we ought to, and yet, foolish and illogical, we call upon our fate in a grand monotony of complaint at the heaviness of our ills. The young man falls in love. His love is not returned. He has believed himself capable of undying and unalterable affection for a maiden. Unselfish, therefore, it must endure, whether ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... candor due to an honorable contemporary.] At this very day, a French and an English economist have reared a Babel of far more elaborate errors on this subject; M. Say, I mean, and Mr. Malthus: both ingenious writers, both eminently illogical,—especially the latter, with whose "confusion worse confounded" on the subject of Value, if reviewed by some unsparing Rhadamanthus of logical justice, I believe that chaos would appear a model of order ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... his right to exercise his art so as to relieve some of this suffering, he was accounted importunate and threatened with a flogging. If he had one regret now it was that he had not been out with Monmouth. That, of course, was illogical; but you can hardly expect logic from a man ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... by Hillyer (Journ. Amer. Chem. Soc., 1903, 524), however, to be quite illogical, for, as he points out, the liberated alkali would be far more likely to recombine with the acid or acid salt from which it has been separated, than to saponify a neutral glyceride, while, further, unsaponifiable greasy matter ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... research in the pregnant statement, "The true knowledge of God begins when we know that things as they are have no truth in them." The testimony of the five physical senses constitutes "things as they are." But—if Jose's reasoning be not illogical—the human mind receives no testimony from these senses, which, at most, can offer but insensate and meaningless vibrations in a pulpy mass called the brain. The true knowledge of God, for which Jose had yearned and striven, begins only when men turn from the mesmeric deception ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... slave-grown cotton of America. If this be so, of what use can it be to make irritating speeches in the House of Lords against a state of things by which we are content to profit? Lord Brougham and Lord Grey are not men of such illogical minds as to be incapable of understanding that it is the demand of the English manufacturers which stimulates the produce of slave-grown American cotton. They are, neither of them, we apprehend, so reckless or so wicked ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... most modern historians of Greece. Estimation in which the later ancient writers have been held. Differences between Mr Mitford and the historians who have preceded him. His love of singularity. His hatred of democracy. And love of the oligarchical form of government. His illogical inferences and false statements. His inconsistency with himself. His deficiencies. Charges of misrepresentation brought ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of bosh could not have been produced unless there were a demand for it. Some people are never tired of abusing the millionaires who have made their fortunes by providing the illiterate nonsense that forms the intellectual food of the vast majority of the public. It is wholly unjustifiable and illogical to blame them. They are not founders of new schools of thought in the field of literature; they are men of business, and do not pretend to be anything worse. As such, it is their vocation to find out what the public want, and to supply it to them. They have no interest in making the million ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... is these, the analogy between the words these and it misleads us; the expression being illogical. ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... now, this being of a meditative and grave character, has been denominated by our academy the 'brown-study color'; and it would clearly have been supererogatory to lay the same tint upon it. No, sir; we avoid repetitions even in our prayers, deeming them to be so many proofs of an illogical and of an ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... can justify its existence as English Christianity, and in no other way. It began its separate career with a series of (doubtless) illogical compromises, in the belief that there is an underlying unity, though not uniformity, in the religion as well as in the character of the English people, which would be strong enough to hold a national Church together. The dissenters from the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... reasoned with him in behalf of all that is precious to Christian faith and hope, trying to show (what I earnestly believe) that, admitting the existence of God, it is illogical to stop short of a belief in ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... morphological resemblance to the structure of a human brain, we are precluded from rationally entertaining any probability that self-conscious volition belongs to the universe. Obviously, this way of presenting the case is so grossly illogical that even the exigencies of popular exposition cannot be held to justify the presentation. For aught that we can know to the contrary, not merely the highly specialized structure of the human brain, but even that of nervous matter in general, may only be one of a thousand ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... which has stuck by me queerly, though all other fond things of the sort were pitched overboard long ago. I suppose one is bound to be illogical on one point, if only to prove to oneself the absolutism of one's logic on all others. Thus do I, otherwise sane and consistent realist, materialist, pessimist, cling to my one dream and ideal—take it out, dandle it, nourish and cherish it, with weakly ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... of my consistency by this time? How often have I changed my mind about Lucilla and Oscar? Reckon it up, from the time when I left Dimchurch. What a picture of perpetual self-contradiction I present—and how improbable it is that I should act in this illogical way! You never alter your mind under the influence of your temper or your circumstances. No: you are, what they call, a consistent character. And I? Oh, I am only a human being—and I feel painfully conscious that I have no business ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... of unfamiliar disturbing feeling ran through Taou Yuen; her mind, it seemed, had become a thing of no importance; all that at one time had so largely ordered her life was superseded by these illogical emotions spreading apparently from her heart. The truth was, she told herself, that—with all her reading and philosophy—she had had little or no experience of actuality: the injury to her hip and quiet life in the gray garden at Canton, her protected ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... neither excuse nor blame her for thus deciding and transacting. Should I censure, a majority of my readers—nearly all of the masculine portion—would pick holes in my unpractical philosophy, scout my reasoning as illogical, brand my conclusions as pernicious—winding up their protest with the sigh of the mazed disciples, when stunned by the great Teacher's deliverance upon the subject of divorce, "If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the psychological organization of material that should obtain both in the curriculum as a whole and in the planning of the individual lessons. We must not think, however, that a psychological order of material necessarily makes it illogical. On the other hand, the arrangement of material that takes into account the child's needs is certain to make it more logical to him than any adult scheme or plan could do. That is most logical to any person which most completely ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... the name of the highest paternal love of God, reject the thought of Christ's sacrificial death, are kicking away the ladder by which they have climbed, and are better than their creeds, and happily illogical. It is the Cross that reveals the love, and it is the Cross as the means of propitiation that pours the light of that blessed conviction ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... splendid prodigality. Ishmael watched and wondered. Was this, then, the blind end of creation—to create again? If life were only valuable for the production of more, then what it created was not valuable either, and the whole thing became an illogical absurdity. There must be some definite value in each life apart from its reproductive powers, or the reproductions were better left in the void. Blind pleasure, like blind working, was not a possible solution to one of his ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of scorched fat make the eyes water. It is not surprising that such a substance, if taken into the stomach, should cause digestive disturbance. Fat in itself is a very valuable food, and the objection to fried foods because they may be fat seems illogical. If they supply burned fat there is a good reason for suspicion. Many housekeepers cook bacon in the oven on a wire broiler over a pan and believe it more wholesome than fried bacon. The reason, of course, is that thus cooked in the oven there is less chance for the bacon becoming ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... much more real than themselves, namely, of the stages of evolution of the human mind. The fact that a certain god-figure, however grotesque and queer, or a certain creed, however childish, cruel, and illogical, held sway for a considerable time over the hearts of men in any corner or continent of the world is good evidence that it represented a real formative urge at the time in the hearts of those good people, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... "It is most illogical of you, Bickley, and indeed wrong," groaned a deep voice from the other side of the cabin door, "to thank a God in Whom you do not believe, and to talk of praying for one of the worst and most inefficient of His servants when you have ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard |
