"Unreal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so," he said caressing her, "but I begin to fear that the sounds we have heard with so much relief and pleasure, were as unreal as ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... moment, the night these terrible eyes looked into mine. The feeling did not last, but I have never forgotten it, and never shall. It was as if a veil were lifted for an instant, and I was standing outside of my life and looking back at it; and it seemed so poor and worthless and unreal—I ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... to the spot, gazing at him with a sort of fascination. As he emerged into the light there was something almost familiar in his features, and yet something horribly incongruous and unreal. His eyes glowed like living fire; his soft, low tones reminded me of nothing so much as the purring of a tiger; while the smile that played about his lips was more terrible than anything I had ever seen on human face. ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... predication about a character into a single unqualified proposition so fatally inadequate. If it is indispensable that we should be for ever describing, naming, classifying, at least it is well, in speaking of such a nature as his, to enlarge the vocabulary beyond the pedantic formulas of unreal ethics, and to be as sure as we know how to make ourselves, that each of the sympathies and faculties which together compose our power of spiritual observation, is in a condition of free and patient energy. Any less ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... next to Bob; rode until he met the next man, and then retraced his steps till he faced Bob again; rode until the world seemed unreal and far away, with nothing left but the night and the riding back and forth on his beat, and the rain that oozed through his clothes and trickled uncomfortably down inside his collar. He lost all count of time, and was startled when at ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... make a certain distinction. His best service, I should say, was not so much in showing us the past as it was when it was present; but in showing us the past as it is really still present. His knights and crusaders and feudal nobles are after all unreal, and the best critics felt even in his own day that his greatest triumphs were in describing the Scottish peasantry of his time. Dandie Dinmont and Jeanie Deans and their like are better than many Front de Boeufs and Robin Hoods. It is in dealing with his own contemporaries that ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... asserting that virtue is not a thing to be taught, why are we making it unreal? For if teaching produces it, the deprivation of teaching prevents it. And yet, as Plato says, a discord and false note on the lyre makes not brother go to war with brother, nor sets friends at variance, nor makes states hostile ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... running as rapidly as we could over the rubbish which covered the ground and taking advantage of every piece of cover. A few stray shots pecked at us, but in this quarter, so strange that it appeared unreal, the enemy gave hardly a sign of life. Behind us, on our left, a tremendous fusillade was in progress, and the cracking of the rifles came back to us in one high-pitched roar. But the intervening trees and the ruins did not allow us to see or understand what was the cause. We had ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... marks just as striking an advance upon Bjornson's early plays as the first of Ibsen's "social dramas" did upon his. Unreal stage conventions have disappeared, the characterisation is convincing, and the dialogue, if more prolix than Ibsen's (as is throughout the case with Bjornson), is always interesting and individual. The emotional theme of the play, the love of an older woman for her adopted daughter's ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... who has followed me so far will admit that this is Shakespeare's most usual and most ingenuous attitude towards life; "I do not esteem worldly possessions," he says; "life itself is too transient, too unreal to be dearly held." Gratiano's reflection, too, is Shakespeare's, and puts ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... hence error of thought becomes fable instead of fact. Science demonstrates the reality of Truth and the unreality of the error. A self-evident proposition, in the Science of Mind-healing, is that disease is unreal; and the efficacy of my system, beyond other systems of medicine, vouches for the validity of that statement. Sin and disease are not scientific, because they embody not the idea of divine Principle, and are not ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... Castruccio Castrucciani) they are such exquisite dissemblers, that their affection of simplicity has temporarily the effect of simplicity itself. This power of successful assumption is, fortunately, confined to very few, and the pretenders to unreal virtues and the utterer of assumed sentiments are only ill-paid labourers, working hard to reap ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... think many of their allegations utterly erroneous, and their reasonings wholly unsound. I very deeply regret indeed that my colleague and co-worker has, with somewhat of suddenness, and without any interchange of ideas with myself, adopted as facts matters which seem to me to be as unreal as it is possible for any fiction to be. My regret is greater as I know Mrs. Besant's devotion to any course she believes to be true. I know that she will always be earnest in the advocacy of any views she undertakes to defend, and ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... child's imagination. True imagination is the ability to visualize mentally the realities of life, not what is unreal—for which it is so often mistaken. Hence in this book the child is helped to visualize the animals in their actual haunts, and to see each incident ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle - Book One • Prince Sarath Ghosh
... seated side by side in the car and the train began slowly to pull out, her presence there seemed even more unreal than ever. But soon he gave himself up comfortably to the illusion. She was within arm's length of him and they were steaming through the green country. That was enough for him to know at present. She looked very trim as compared ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... knew that my heart thrilled strangely at the mention of the word Home; that unbidden tears started to my eyes at the thought that perhaps—only perhaps—in that as yet unknown place there might be someone who would love me just a little. "Father—Mother." I spoke the words, but they sounded unreal to me, and as if uttered by another. I spoke them again, holding out my arms and crying aloud. All my heart seemed to go out in the cry, but only the hollow winds answered me as they piped mournfully through the yellowing leaves, a throng ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... first the events of that fearful night seemed all like a dream, and mingled themselves with the strange spectres which haunted me in delirium; but afterwards the real separated itself from the unreal, and I knew that my father and all his friends, my Danish uncles amongst them, had perished with the whole household assembled there that fatal day. I also remembered, but faintly, how I came here. Did not you ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... it does you harm?" In her eagerness to persuade him, her words came pell-mell. "If writing makes you live in such an unreal world, it must do you harm. I see now what Mr. Cathro meant, long ago, when ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... identity are there in the poem? Does this turning of the plot on mistaken identity make it seem unreal? Show in each case where the identity is exposed and where hints have been given beforehand of the ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... rewarded; a faint, far-off rustling came to him; somehow it gave him the impression of hesitation, non-assurance, timidity; he was speculating upon the queerness of this impression when there came a faint, momentary glow from the hall—mysterious, phosphorescent, unreal; and then it vanished. Both young men were huddled upon the sofa, which was placed facing the open door. A huge Spanish screen was drawn before them; but the black leather was cracked in places; and through these they had a clear ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... the wind that had seized upon them and was dragging them at headlong speed athwart the arch of heaven. The air, too, was full of spindrift, to perhaps double the height of the felucca's mast, and that too was luminous with a faint, green, misty light that imparted a weird, unreal aspect to everything it shone upon; an effect which was further heightened by the unearthly screaming ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... uninspired. We prove his Divine Legation by the intrinsic and transcendent merits of the Poem which he wrote. Imagination originates nothing absolutely new. It merely imitates and combines. It is regarded as the creative faculty of man; but its material is already furnished. The portrait of an unreal Adam is as conceivable as a child without a father, or an effect ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... me, and stood looking down into the fire. I was trying to answer her question, to realize how it would be between us, how, having lived in the real, we must now dwell in the unreal with one another. I was wondering how I could meet her and not show that I loved her, how I could love her and yet be true to my idol, the conception that governed me. Suddenly she spoke, without turning or lifting ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... and brush in relation to the picture in the painter's brain. The mere intellect can never find out that which owes its being to the heart supreme. The relation of the intellect to that which is born of the heart is an unreal except it be a humble one. The idea of God, I repeat, is the flower. He thought it; invented its means; sent it, a gift of himself, to the eyes and hearts of his children. When we see how they are loved by the ignorant and degraded, we may ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... hills and forest; nothing reminded her of despairing hunger, of the disbelief that had stolen upon her in the possibility of eking out much longer a life that was too hard to sustain. What if her errand seemed fantastic, unreal, since this new world also was like some illusion of a dream? The great stillness appeared to be friendly—the bent tops of snow-laden trees surely bowed a welcome to her—the shining sun and the pure ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... still greater truth it may be said that Language is his master. Words seem to dominate him. Alliteration tyrannises over him. Mere sound often becomes his lord. He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes unreal. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... regiment as it passed. The spectacle was magnificent, but except among the soldiers themselves a sense of sadness and disappointment passed over the whole assembly. The speech of the Emperor showed that he was still the despot at heart: the applause was forced: all was felt to be ridiculous, all unreal. [234] ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... confess that that sight swept away any remnant of doubt I may have had in the reality of the unreal—if I may use such a term. Peter Magnus was sitting in that chair. There could be, to my mind, no question ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... least sufficiently clear and distinct for all practical purposes. And to my mind, all discussion about Good is for this reason rather factitious and unreal. I don't mean to say, of course, that it isn't amusing, among ourselves, to pass an hour or two in this kind of talk; but I should think it very unfortunate if the habit of it were to spread among the mass of ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... material evidence, and the sight of the terrace, of whose existence he had had no suspicion, proved that the djinn was really a human being, who for some unknown motive had wandered across it, and was by no means so unreal as he had supposed. The idea of crime and theft occurred to him. He was about to follow the person who fled, when he saw on the terrace, before his window, an object which he immediately picked up, and examined by the light of his lamp. It was a veil of white lace, at that time the ordinary ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... are as unreal as they are repulsive, but they are diabolically clever. Seneca's rhetoric is, however, as we have already seen, capable of rising to higher things, and even where he does not succeed, as in the passages quoted above from the Phaedra and Troades,[199] in introducing a genuine ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Office. The National Volunteers were to become the objects of derision and contempt, which would extend to himself. By keeping the Volunteers out of active participation in war service, it could be proved that Redmond did not speak for Ireland or represent Ireland; that the Irish were raising unreal objections so as to keep an excuse for avoiding danger. It was urged on him that he should press for the extension of the Territorial Act to Ireland and endeavour to bring his ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... moment, passing downstairs. The half-deserted dining-room, the fateful hour—Chauvelin on the watch!—then, precise to the moment, the entrance of a man, he, the Scarlet Pimpernel, the mysterious leader, who to Marguerite had become almost unreal, so strange, so weird was ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... Her form, too, unsubstantial, unreal, an illusion only, though comeliest of illusions? She had given him alms! Was the merit of the giver illusive also,—illusive like the grace of the supple fingers that gave? Assuredly there were mysteries in the Abhidharma impenetrable, incomprehensible!... It was a golden coin, stamped with the ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... beyond. He and Tige had wandered farther from home that day than ever before, though wanderers they had always been, the woods holding a deep interest for Steve. He loved to hide in the densest solitudes, lie still with his dog and dream, fantastic, unreal dreams. Now a definite, tangible vision had come to him out of the solitude of a hazy November day in the mountains of Kentucky. He had lain for two hours or more in the stillness when suddenly Tige lifted his head and gave a sharp bark, then came the sound of voices, ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... all are equal. It is an unreal world, true, but to many it is the happiest. In it there are no distinctions. The woman who is old and wrinkled and gray, who has known nothing but hard work and sorrow in this world, in the land of dreams ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... battlefields, where men lived in ditches and "pill-boxes," muddy, miserable in all things but spirit, as to a place where the pageantry of war still maintained its old and dead tradition. It was like one of those pageants which used to be played in England before the war—picturesque, romantic, utterly unreal. It was as though men were playing at war here, while others sixty miles away were fighting and dying, in mud ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... to say that Mr. Stewart would be glad if he would look in before leaving the house, and so he went up-stairs and knocked at old David's door. He moved like a man in a dream, and the things about him seemed to be curiously unreal and rather far away, as they seem sometimes in ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... out. The great extent of the convent grounds had left this poor garden scarce breathing-space for its humble blooms; with the low paling fence that separated it from the adjoining house-yards it looked like a toy-garden or the background of a puppet-show, and in its way it was as quaintly unreal to the young girl ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... faint and unreal. "Do you know," continued he, striking on a new idea, "the padre don't like the guero family. That's evident from the hints he let drop to-night. We may get this fellow out of the way without much scandal, if the Church will ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... the common realities of existence. Not only is the subject-matter of the greater part of his poetry remote and dubious; his very characters themselves seem to be infected by their creator's delight in the mysterious, the strange, and the unreal. They have no healthy activity; or, if they have, they invariably lose it in the second act; in the end, they are all hypochondriac philosophers, puzzling over eternity and dissecting the attributes of Death. The central ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... waiting for the cue to the joke. She was serious. It was all so unreal, so ridiculous—and yet back there on the floor of the room down the corridor lay Jim Marcum. This mad, sad, heart-rending, adventure must have driven him to insanity. He rubbed his brow, looked out of the window, heard the unromantic honk-honk of a piratical night-owl taxicab on the street ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... for the happy and well-to-do to talk scornfully of poetic sentimentality. Those to whom a natural outlet for their affection is denied know better. They instinctively turn to books which are the farthest removed from commonplace and are in a sense unreal. Not to the prosperous man, a dweller in beautiful scenery, well married to an intelligent wife, is Byron precious, but to the poor wretch, say some City clerk, with an aspiration beyond his desk, who has two rooms in Camberwell and who before he knew what ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... the great bear stepped out of the bushes and trod across the pine needles with such swift and silent footsteps that its bulk seemed unreal. It was very cautious, continually halting to peer around; and once it stood up on its hind legs and looked long down the valley towards the red west. As it reached the carcass I put a bullet between its shoulders. ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... descriptive material in books on Mystical Religion are far from being universal ladders. Like creeds, or like religious institutions, they powerfully assist certain minds to find the way home, but they seem unreal and artificial to many other persons, and they must be considered only as symbolisms which speak to the condition of a ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the international border, lay before them. On the opposite side a motor launch skirted the shore looking unreal against the dark, impenetrable wooded background. In the middle distance a canoe with two figures in it rose and fell lazily in the ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... of the Golden Age. Oh, those lovely days when we went gipsying along the roads of Provence and Picardy and Touraine! I cannot write of them now, for in to-day's shock of battle they have already become unreal and dreamlike. I touch them and the bloom vanishes. But sometimes when I do not try to write, and only lean back and close my eyes, I can catch again a little of their breath and sweetness; I can see the purpling vineyards and the poppied fields; I can drift once more with Elizabeth and our ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... have the touch of his hand. This emphasizes his reality. One of the greatest dangers of the day, it seems to me, is the fact that we are so inclined to make him unreal. It also indicates his nearness. He can fill us so that his life may come throbbing into our very being, and this is the secret of victory in the time of temptation. We must be empty to be filled, but no man can empty himself. Two ways may be presented for the emptying ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... only to themselves, but to their disciples, to see if it would be so very dreadfully painful; with what conclusions the reader may judge.... Still, I could not keep up the excitement. Why should I? The fear of pain is not the fear of sin, that I know of; and, indeed, the thing was unreal altogether in my case, and my heart, my common sense, rebelled against it again and again; till at last I got a terrible whipping for taking my little sister's part, and saying that if she was to die,—so gentle, and obedient, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... pursuit; and many had been the scenes which he would willingly have identified with that mentioned in the ancient, time-yellowed record which he bore about with him. It is to be observed that, undertaken at first half as the amusement, the unreal object, of a grown man's play-day, it had become more and more real to him with every step of the way that he followed it up; along those green English lanes it seemed as if everything would bring him close to the mansion that he sought; every morning he went on with renewed ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... keynote of the old melancholy Indian music; the bass, whose undertone accompanies, with a kind of monotonous solemnity, all the treble variations in the minor key. The world is unreal, a delusion and a snare; sense is deception, happiness a dream; nothing has true being, is absolute, but virtue, the sole reality; that which most emphatically IS,[4] attainable only through knowledge, the great illuminator, ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... and the new life opening before her, seemed for a long time strange and unreal to Lilias. She used to wake in the morning with the burden of her cottage-cares upon her, till the sight of her pleasant room, and the sunshine coming in through the clustering roses, chased her anxious thoughts ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... straw in a loft until the middle of the night, and then rode forward again when all the town was asleep. Among the many wild changes observable on familiar things which made this wild ride unreal, not the least was the seeming rarity of sleep. After long and lonely spurring over dreary roads, they would come to a cluster of poor cottages, not steeped in darkness, but all glittering with lights, and would find the people, in a ghostly manner in the dead of the night, circling hand in hand ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... unreal than seemed at first than between the contending parties: almost every advantage lay against the royal cause. The king's revenue had been seized from the beginning by the parliament, who issued out to him from time to time small sums for his present subsistence; and as soon ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... to see that the real Michael was speaking. When people were being unreal, when they were pompous or adopting attitudes, she could attend to nothing but their absurdity, which engrossed her altogether. But she never laughed at real things; real things were not funny, but ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... The unreal creatures that hovered near withdrew to the far side of the room. The walls beyond them were of metal, white and gleaming; there were doorways. In another wall were portholes—round windows of thick glass that framed circles of absolute night. It was dark out beyond them with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... sides of the ravine towering up stern and gloomy on either hand: and high above all against the sky, the grey stone cross at which he was to meet Marie. He saw it all as if he were there, and the ground beneath him, as he tramped on, seemed unreal. Twilight was already falling over the rocks and the grey sea: there were no lights in the village, except such as shone here and there in a cottage window: the distant roar of the sea was heard, as it dashed over a long ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... around Winter Quarters began to come into view, part of the basin of the boat harbour appeared, and lo! there were human figures! They almost seemed unreal—I was in a dream—but after a brief moment one of them saw me and waved an arm, I replied, there was a commotion and they all ran towards the Hut. Then they were lost, for the crest of the first steep ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... interminable as it appeared, flowered at moments into rapt contemplations—that for instance of the painted portrait, large as life, of the celebrity of the hour, then "dancing" at the Broadway Theatre, Lola Montes, Countess of Lansfeldt, of a dazzling and unreal beauty and in a riding-habit lavishly open at ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... as she touched the ground, she was so surrounded that I could only see the top of her hat; for hundreds and hundreds of little children suddenly appeared, like a great flock of birds,—rosy, happy, pretty children; but all looked unreal, and among them I saw some who looked like little people I had ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... other subtleties of thought transplanted hither not without advantage, the distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination, made much also of the cognate distinction between Wit and Humour, between that unreal and transitory mirth, which is as the crackling of thorns under the pot, and the laughter which blends with tears and even with the sublimities of the imagination, and which, in its most exquisite motives, is one with pity—the ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... that this Taoist priest, Chang, had, it is true, in past days, stood as a substitute for the Duke of the Jung Kuo mansion, but that the former Emperor had, with his own lips, conferred upon him the appellation of the 'Immortal being of the Great Unreal,' that he held at present the seal of 'Taoist Superior,' that the reigning Emperor had raised him to the rank of the 'Pure man,' that the princes, now-a-days, dukes, and high officials styled him the "Supernatural being," and he did not therefore venture to treat him ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... him, and as he read the poems he caught himself puzzling as to what he had had in mind when he wrote them. His audacities of phrase struck him as grotesque, his felicities of expression were monstrosities, and everything was absurd, unreal, and impossible. He would have burned the "Sea Lyrics" on the spot, had his will been strong enough to set them aflame. There was the engine-room, but the exertion of carrying them to the furnace was not worth while. All his exertion was used in washing other persons' clothes. He did not have ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... added strength and wisdom, and a loss in her as of gentleness outgrown and timidity overcome, dazzled him for a moment—caused a revulsion in him which he half recognized as the beginning of a dangerous passion. His former love for her suddenly appeared boyish and unreal to him; and this ruin of a once cherished illusion cost him a pang. Meanwhile, there she was, holding out her hand and smiling with a cool confidence in the success of her advance that would have been impossible to ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... outside the door. For a long time after washing he stood on the porch, looking out over the big basin at this new and strange world. Endless it seemed, lying before him in its solemn silence; a world of peace, of eternal sunlight, smiling skies, and infinite distance. It seemed unreal to him. Did this same planet hold the busy cities to which he had been accustomed? The stuffy room, with its smell of damp ink, its litter of papers—his room in the newspaper offices, filled with desks and the clatter of typewriters? Through whose ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... tho' first, In years unseason'd, I attun'd the lay To idle Passion and unreal Woe? Yet serious Truth her empire o'er my song Hath now asserted; Falsehood's evil brood, Vice and deceitful Pleasure, she at once Excluded, and my Fancy's careless toil ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... results, not objects. I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept them—I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in their various development, these being mostly approved by the masses, although they may be unreal, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... went down. England was growing lonely. A great barge laden with straw came out of the dusk, and was gone without a sound, its ghostly sail drawing in a wind that the wherry sat too low to feel. Nick held his breath as the barge went by: it was unreal, fantastical. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... a Sunday night—the fourth Sunday after Easter—that the supreme crisis of the bishop's life began. He had had a feeling all day of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his ministrations unreal, his ceremonies absurd and undignified. In the night he became bleakly and painfully awake. His mind occupied itself at first chiefly with the tortuousness and weakness of his own character. Every day he perceived that the difficulty ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... by M. Reinaud from the written descriptions of the Arabic geographer. This illustrates the extremely unreal and untrue conception of the earth among Moslem students, especially those who followed the theories of Ptolomy—e.g., in the extension to Africa eastward, so as practically or actually to join China, making the Indian Ocean ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... you, except because I know that it is so. We come to strange conclusions out yonder, where only death seems to be true and all the rest a dream. What we call the real and the unreal ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... dying away in the distance. The girl was not crying, although one of her hands was held across her eyes, and her bosom rose and fell tumultuously to labored breathing. She stood silent, motionless, the strange radiance causing her to appear unreal, some divinely moulded statue, an artist's dream carven in colored stone. Suddenly she sprang backward from out that revealing tongue of light and crouched low at the angle of the house, not unlike some affrighted wild ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... stillness came the sound of exquisite music; clear, thrilling notes, unreal—fairylike! Almost hesitatingly Mrs. Lee turned as though she expected to see a fairy sprite in gauzy robes approaching her from the shadows of the house! She rose and crept toward the window. No sprite ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott
... appear to you, Miss Barton, more distorted and unreal than a dream? I know it does to me. The spectacle we have just witnessed was a part of the ages that believed in the godhead of Christ and the divine right of Kings; but it seems to me strange that such barbarities should ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... becomes more important than even the securing of material possessions, for the imperial form is the very reality and existence of the nation. It is at bottom merely the assertion that its own mores are supreme and entitled to be universal. To admit that this is not so would be to become to some extent unreal, and to lose something essential to a sense of personality. Therefore, there can be thus far no intimate relations among nations. They must present to one another symbolic representations of themselves. It is their flag, the symbol of their place in ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... and the whole type of picture was changed. For the first time out-of-door values were studied as things in themselves interesting and important. The result on landscape pictures was that pictures painted in the studio seemed unreal and insincere, and that men looked and studied less for the making of pictures, and more for what ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... girl. Bob often said it was not easy to fool Betty. She had just as strong an imagination as any other girl of her age and loved to weave fancies in her own mind when it was otherwise idle. But she knew her dreams were dreams, and her imaginings unreal. ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... or so before dawn—that mysterious, unreal and solemn period of the night or morning—Captain Bluenose came on deck minus his coat and shoes, in order to have a look at "how things were getting on,"—as if the general operations of nature had been committed to his charge, and he ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... must say it—unlawful? See, now, I am struck with the change in her since I beheld her last. The modesty which charmed me in Penelope Devereux seems vanished. Even now I hear her laugh, hollow and unreal, as she coquettes and lays herself out for the admiring notice of the gentlemen who are watching her movements. Yes, Philip, nothing but harm can come of persisting in this ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... in the reception-room, that he recoiled in dismay from the girlish figure that turned timidly from the window to meet him with a face thickly veiled. He was vexed, too; here, he knew from the mystery put on, was one of those cases of feminine trouble, real or unreal, which he most disliked to ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... concerning the bequest of property with a serious sense of their sacredness whether he felt it or not. They seemed to be an essential part of the crazy structure of society that must not be questioned, least of all by a probate judge! If men had devised these unreal rules and absurd regulations, probably there was some divine necessity for them beyond his human insight. Judge Orcutt never got farther than this point in his speculations. With a sigh he dropped the Clark case, and the next morning sent for the two women ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... establishing the canon of ignorance, that the highest knowledge is to know that nothing is; that there is neither being nor not-being, nor yet the becoming. After this wholesale iconoclasm the only possible object in life for the sage is the negative one of avoiding pain, which though as unreal as anything else, interferes with his meditations on its unreality. To this negative end the only aid he can expect is from other sages who have gone farther in self-cultivation. Self, therefore, is the first, the collective body of sages is the second, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... across the pallor of the pavement and cobbled roadway, to be swallowed up in a black split—knife narrow, as it seemed—between the blank house fronts opposite. And once, as they turned into the open space of the Grand Place—unreal and stark with its spidery framework of stalls, set up ready for to-morrow's market, under the budding plane trees—they encountered a tired gendarme making his round, picturesque of aspect in kepi and flowing cloak. His footsteps brisked up, as he met and treated ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... at description as hopelessly impossible; but when you called him Dick Sunshine it fitted him like a glove. That is the immense advantage that nicknames possess over real names. Of all real things, real names are the most unreal. There is no life in them. They stand for nothing; they express nothing; they reveal nothing. They bear no kind of relationship to the unfortunate individuals who are sentenced to wear them, like meaningless badges, for the term of ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... flew into a silent rage at him, though scorning to discuss with him a matter I felt him incapable of understanding, and the character of Cousin Horace went into the story. He was for the first day or two, a very poor cheap element, quite unreal, unrealized, a mere man of straw to be knocked over by the personages of the tale. Then I took myself to task, told myself that I was spoiling a story merely to revenge myself on a man I cared nothing about, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... resuscitation, as Jesus did on the road to Emmaus. Another theory that has had its day is that of unconscious deception on the part of those who claimed to have seen the resurrected Christ, such persons having been victims of subjective but unreal visions conjured up by their own excited and imaginative condition. The independence and marked individuality of the several recorded appearings of the Lord disprove the vision theory. Such subjective visual ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... followers to do the same. Up at the end of the trestle the light from the boss's shack twinkled through the gloom. Close beside them the gurgle of the waters was soft and soothing, and the colour-touched clouds above the setting sun cast an unreal glow over the edges of the river bank. Koppy moved his eyes about uncomfortably on the day's good-night. The mumblings of Werner brought him ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... more she could do. She stood still, listening. The rattle of pistol fire three floors below continued in fits and starts, but the sound of it was oddly unreal, resembling more stammering explosions of a string of firecrackers than snaps ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... cost, victorious. These religious experiences, vividly described in his 'Grace Abounding,' traceable in the course of his chief Pilgrim, and frequently referred to in his discourses, have been too literally interpreted by some, and too much explained away as unreal by others; but present no special difficulty to those who will but consider Bunyan's ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... but with apparently increasing impatience on his part, and certainly decreasing interest on mine; so that at last I think he was willing to have me go. But in the morning he seemed reluctant, and pleaded with me to stay a few days longer with him. I alleged engagements, more or less unreal, for I was never on such terms with Alderling that I felt I need make any special sacrifice to him. He gave way, suspiciously, rather, and when I came down from my room after having put the last touches to my packing, I found ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... life. Even the benighted savage thus sees in his visions the fading forms of landscapes, which are, perhaps, connected with some of his most pleasant recollections; and what other conclusion can be possibly extract from those unreal pictures than that they are the foreshadowings of another land beyond that in which his lot is cast? At intervals he is visited in his dreams by the resemblances of those whom he has loved or hated while they were alive; and these manifestations are to him incontrovertible proofs ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... shrink from ordinary dangers. His motives were certainly pure, and his subsequent exertions to rally his men and bring them to face the foe, were as great as could have been made by any one; but disheartened by the fear of unreal danger, and in the trepidation of a flight, deemed to be absolutely necessary for their safety, they could not be readily brought to bear the brunt of battle. The efforts of a few cool and collected individuals, drove back the pursuers, and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... streets after days given over to sorrow and death; we are bewildered that the world should be going on as usual and unable to determine which is real, the inner pang or the outward seeming. In time all huge London came to seem unreal save the poverty in its East End. During the following two years on the continent, while I was irresistibly drawn to the poorer quarters of each city, nothing among the beggars of South Italy nor among the salt miners of Austria ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... exquisitely reared castle of his dreams. Since the evening before his imagination had been thrilling to the tune of some spirited music, flowing presumably from these airy towers, and as he went on over the wet sunlight on the sidewalk, he was still keeping step to the exalted if unreal measures. Never in his life; not even in his wildest literary ecstasies, had he felt so assured of the beauty, of the bountifulness, of his coming years—so filled with a swelling thankfulness for the mere ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... Chinese sages Meng-tse (360 B.C.) and Tschu-tsche (1200 A.D.) an object of philosophical speculation. The doctrine of Lao-tse, the younger contemporary of Kong-tse, which lays down as the basis of the world, that is of the unreal or non-existent, a supreme principle, Tao, or Being, corresponds with the Brahma doctrine of the Indians, among whom he lived for a long time; but this doctrine never became popular ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... hours of twilight or by a cloudy moonlight, the city pitched amid the drifting aerial heights seems built itself of air and cloud, evanescent and unreal. ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... that she had seen. Once or twice she thought, "Perhaps in a few days more, Maurice will be passing over this very line; he will be disappointed when he reaches home and finds that we are gone;" but all her meditations were dreamy and unreal—her mind acted mechanically. A kind of moral catalepsy benumbed her. Afterwards when she remembered this time, she wondered at herself; she could not comprehend the absence of sensation with which she had left the dear home and all the familiar ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... sunshine, the memory of their ride through the gorge; the awakening at the shepherd's hut; something in his look then, something in his accents later, when he spoke her name while she professed to sleep—seemed, perhaps, unreal, dream-like. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... born of the scientific spirit, which rendered the public dissatisfied with fanciful pictures of past ages and with the impossibilities of wild romance. Realism, as the word indicates, adheres to reality. Discarding what is idealistic or unreal in characters and situations, it aims at being true to life. All the great novelists of this period—Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot—were in the best sense of the ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... spiritual atmosphere was saturated with cant—cant moral, cant political, cant religious; an affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch the conduct, and flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal speech. The truest thinkers were those who, like Lucretius, spoke frankly out their real convictions, declared that Providence was a dream, and that man and the world he lived in were material phenomena, generated by natural forces out of ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... and began the descent into the canon. John raised his cap, and the caballeros responded with a flourish of sombreros. It would be some moments before they could meet, and John was glad to stare at the brilliant picture they made. Life suddenly seemed unreal, unmodern to him. He forgot his olive-trees, and recalled the tales the priests had told him of the pleasures and magnificence of the Californian ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... the darkness, and the dark forms, outlined in their glimmering beams, seemed like beings of an unreal world; the bearers of the body, with their unconscious burden, appeared like a mournful procession of medieval times, when in the solemn hours of the night the bodies of the dead were borne ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... immured in zenanas and harems, but who freely mingle in social life, and adorn all they touch;' and such, without controversy, are the women of Japan. Above all, 'give us a reverent and a religious people, who yet are conscious that the religion of their fathers is unsatisfying and unreal, and who are therefore ready to welcome the Christ of God;' and such are ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... achievement. And here again we must reassert the significance of Lyly's appeal to women. "That noble faculty," as Macaulay expresses it, "whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future in the distant and in the unreal," is rarely found in the opposite sex. They delight in novelty, their minds are of a practical cast, and their interests almost invariably lie in the present. The names of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Mrs Humphry Ward are sufficient to show how entirely successful ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... argument drawn from the supposed damnation of the heathen is unreal. We may stir up a quasi enthusiasm; we may be moved for the time; but we are not by any means moved to the level of the fate which we deplore. If we really believed it, as so many profess, we would spend our last dollar, and make all but superhuman efforts, ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... life seems more or less tragic, as both fear that the supreme quality of their marriage is vanishing. The more a couple have been lifted up by their romantic attachment for each other, the more they can be hurt when the wearing out of its unreal element drops them to earth again. The ones who are stouthearted enough to count their own hurt a small matter, if they can still help the partner to have something to look forward to beyond the present difficulties, are matured by this part of their marriage ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... was a profoundly religious country. There was ignorance, there was superstition, there was bigotry; but there was faith—a faith that itself worked true miracles, even while it believed in unreal ones. At this time, also, one of those devotional movements began among the clergy in France, which from time to time occur in national churches, without it being possible for the historian to assign any adequate human cause for their immediate date or extension. Numberless friars and priests ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... unreal, as she looked back upon it. The situation was certainly romantic, but the words had been poor beyond her imagination, and the actors had halted in their parts, as ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... not the speculations, mystical or scientific, which make In Memoriam, in more than name, a book of consolation: even in hours of the sharpest distress, when its technical beauties and wonderful pictures seem shadowy and unreal, like the yellow sunshine and the woods of that autumn day when a man learned that his friend was dead. No, it was not the speculations and arguments that consoled or encouraged us. We did not listen to Tennyson as to Mr Frederic Harrison's glorified Anglican clergyman. We could not murmur, like ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... by, the absentees returned, and matters fell so completely into their old train again that the occurrences 309 of the last eight months seemed like the unreal creations of some fevered dream, and there were times when I could scarcely bring myself ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... the mender of his things; and in their place had left an appalling monument of bills. The only people he had permitted himself to owe money to were the gruesome committee that brought him his grief; the doctor, the druggist, the casket-maker, the sexton, and the dealer in the unreal estate who sold the tiny lots in the sad ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... a mist presently to be shot with silver and sapphire-blue, dissolved by slow enchantment until there lay revealed the plain and the shimmering ocean with its distant islands trembling in the haze. At sunset my eyes sought the mountains, mountains unreal, like glorified scenery of grand opera, with violet shadows in the wooded canon clefts, and crags of pink tourmaline and ruby against the skies. All day long in the tempered heat flowers blazed around me, insects hummed, lizards darted in and out of the terrace wall, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... all have been but a dream? Had the cottage, the fisherman and his wife been as unreal as the figures that had followed him in the haunted forest? No, that he would not believe, for even yet in the distance he could hear the faint echo of the fisherman's voice as he called out pitifully, 'Undine! Undine!' Now in his search the ...
— Undine • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... storks, cows, camels, monkeys and the various fabulous monsters of the Hindu mythology, are scattered in apparent confusion about the temple courtyard, producing an effect as bizarre as it is bewildering. It is so unreal, so incredibly fantastic, that I felt that I was looking at the papier-mache setting for a motion picture spectacle, such as Griffith used to produce, and that the director and the cameraman would appear shortly and ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... purpose. Yet whilst the writer never clearly reveals to us who he himself is, it is equally manifest that his own convictions constitute the matrix in which the discourses and events are imbedded, and that there is nothing in this matrix to render that which it contains unreal or untrustworthy. ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... or out of respect to the governmental impotence, or to the even more sinister and evil political peculiarities, of people who, though they dwell afar off, yet, against the wish of the actual dwellers on the Isthmus, assert an unreal supremacy over the territory. The possession of a territory fraught with such peculiar capacities as the Isthmus in question carries with it obligations to mankind. The course of events has shown that this canal can not be built by private enterprise, or by any other nation ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... advancing.... It may have been her distorted fancy, but down the long perspective, that figure looked more mincing, more waspish, more unreal than ever. And she was conscious of that swift rising of dislike, of antagonism ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... have before their eyes, is indescribable. Yoga is the best means for attaining to it. It is not easy to explain it (to thee). Those that are learned live, reflecting on the scriptures from desire of finding what is unreal. They are, however, often led away to this and to that in the belief that the object of their search exists in this and that. Having mastered, however, the Vedas, the Aranyakas, and the other scriptures, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... possibilities of deliverance are sought after in such a disposition of mind, and are, by imagination, easily changed into probabilities and realities, because just that is wanting which proves them to be improbable and unreal, viz., the consciousness of a living, omnipotent God. Thus men free themselves from fear, and with it, from the troublesome obligation of escaping from it in another and a legitimate way, viz., by true conversion. Now, it is this levity which the prophet opposes. He shows that whatever ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... instant felt a little dizzy, as though he were on a high building. All this fabric on which he moved suddenly seemed to him unreal, like a vast cobweb in suspension through a void. It was a brief sensation, and little defined in his childish mind, so it soon passed, but it constituted while it lasted a definite subjective experience ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... intuition are all in conflict within him. The emotional and intuitional faculties overfunctioning distort his common understanding. His idea centers are not able to distinguish between the real and the unreal in thoughts. He becomes possessed and obsessed by ideas born of emotion and intuition that have no foundation in fact, and as time goes on, he loses complete control of ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... as unreal to Leopold's eyes as a painted picture; the walls of Pompeian red; the gold candelabra; the polished floor, spread with the glimmering fur of Polar bears; and in the center a flower-decked table lit with pink-shaded lights, and sparkling with gold and crystal; ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... day will detect an abundance of remarkable talent—-that is, of intellectual agility, apprehensiveness, wit, fancy, and power of expression which is nevertheless impotent to rescue "clever writing" from neglect or contempt. It is unreal splendour; for the most part mere intellectual fireworks. In Life, as in Literature, our admiration for mere cleverness has a touch of contempt in it, and is very unlike the respect paid to character. And justly so. No talent ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... 1440 and 1445 with elephants' tusks, gold, and negro slaves. The Gold Coast was already reached; the fabled dangers of equatorial waters—serpent rocks, whirlpools, liquid sun's rays and boiling rivers—were soon proved unreal; and before 1480 the coast well beyond the Congo ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... pinched herself to know that she was still a living-breathing girl; all seemed as unreal as though she had slipped away into a ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... undergoes a forced and temporary revival. So it was with the Mask. In 1633, the Puritan hatred to the theatre had blazed out in Prynne's Histriomastix, and as a natural consequence, the loyal and cavalier portion of society threw itself into dramatic amusements of every kind. It was an unreal revival of the Mask, stimulated by political passion, in the wane of genuine taste for the fantastic and semi-barbarous pageant, in which the former age had delighted. What the imagination of the spectators was no longer equal to, was to be supplied by costliness of ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... Here and there the shadow of a tent loomed up, or a more solid bulk spoke of roughly built shacks of logs and canvas. Faint laughter and, once or twice, the sound of loud quarreling was heard. It all seemed weirdly unreal and remote as though they rode through an alien, fourth dimensional world with which they had no connection. The snow crunched softly under ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... can prove against any other document. I will, if possible, make my meaning plain by yet another example. Let us suppose some Walter Scott had compiled some purely fictitious history, professedly laid in the Middle Ages (and surely even miraculous occurrences cannot be more unreal than these products of sheer imagination); and suppose some critic had engaged to prove it fiction from internal evidence supplied by contradictions and discrepancies, and so on, would you not think it strange if he were to enforce that argument by saying, 'And besides all this, what is ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Fleming's hallucination A resumed identity Hazen's brigade A baby tramp The night-doings at "Deadman's" A story that is untrue Beyond the wall A psychological shipwreck The middle toe of the right foot John Mortonson's funeral The realm of the unreal John Bartine's watch A story by a physician The damned thing Haita the shepherd An inhabitant of Carcosa ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... offensive thing. In all great affections there is one peculiarity; if one loves a person, one gets to the point of changing that person to an idol inside oneself, and from that moment it seems that the person divides into the unreal idol, which is like a false picture of the adored one, and the living being, who resembles ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... still sifting down through the leaves and lying upon the green earth in bright patches. The robins were singing, and many strange birds, whose calls she did not know, but who piped gently, musically, so in harmony with the soft landscape that their notes seemed a part of it. It was all unreal, this quiet, sunlit world, where the birds were free as the air which bore their songs, while the brave Captain—she ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... scattered, was quite large for South Africa, of the yellow-wood species, and interspersed wherever the ground was dry with huge euphorbias, of which the tall finger-like growths and sad grey colouring looked unreal and ghostlike in the waning light. Following the advice given to us, we rode in single file along the narrow path, fearing lest otherwise we should tumble into some bog hole, until we came to higher land covered with the scattered ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... performance in any of her other works. Josiah Carp, the Melbourne merchant in In Her Earliest Youth, and Sir Matthew Bogg, another of the same class, in the short story Monsieur Caloche, are shown only in a satirical and repulsive light, which necessarily makes them appear somewhat unreal. ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... Muni, upon which the fundamental elements of Buddhism, the eternity of matter, the principles of things, and the final extinction, are supposed to be planned. 'It seems not impossible,' he continues, 'that Sakya Muni is an unreal being, and that all that is related of him is as much a fiction, as is that of his preceding migrations, and the miracles that attended his birth, his life, and his departure.' This is going far beyond Niebuhr, far even beyond Strauss. If an allegorical name had been invented for ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... moon and the magic of the moon. Slowly she mounted upwards, peeping down at me through whispering leaves, checkering the shadows with silver, and turning the brook into a path of silver for the feet of fairies. Yes, indeed, the very air seemed fraught with a magic whereby the unreal became the real and things ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... giving us sterner and yet more loving, more human, and more divine thoughts about ourselves, and our business here, and the fate of those who are gone, and awakening us out of the luxurious, frivolous, and unreal dream (full nevertheless of hard judgments) in which we have been living so long, to trust in a living Father who is really and practically governing this world and all worlds, and who ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... the echo of these lines still in his ear, when he described imagination as 'that noble faculty whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and in the unreal.' Essays, ed. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... so romantic and so devout? Surrounded as they were with illusions, false lights, and false shadows,—breathing an atmosphere of miracle,—compassed about with angels and devils,—urged with stimulants most powerful, though unreal,—their minds drugged, as it were, to preternatural excitement,— it is very difficult to judge of them. High merit, without doubt, there was in some of their number; but one may beg to be spared the attempt to measure or define it. To estimate a virtue ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... sight, Unheard of him; till suddenly aware Of its cold music, shivering in the light, He raised himself, and with far-ranging stare Looked all about him: and with dazed eyes wide Saw, still as in a numb, unreal dream, Black figures scouring a far hill-side, With now and then a sunlit rifle's gleam; And knew the hunt was hot upon his track: Yet hardly seemed to mind, somehow, just then ... But kept on wondering why they looked ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... I have described in Brussels were reproduced in Antwerp. There was a slightly closer supervision over the comings and goings of the inhabitants, but there was the same unreal atmosphere of contentment and real appearance of plenty. Though a good number of officers were in evidence, the military arm of Germany was not sufficiently displayed to produce any intimidation. ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... contrary to the nature of reality; it is that which harmonises everything except discord, which loves everything except hatred, verifies everything except falsehood, and beautifies everything except ugliness. Thus that which falls outside the notion of God, proves on examination to be not merely unreal, but unreality as such. But the relation of evil to the Absolute is not a religious problem. To our experience, evil exists as a positive force not subject to the law of God, though constantly overruled and made an instrument of good. On this subject we must say more later. Here I need ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... They are better, and worse, than himself. They have stronger wills, more definite purposes, but less genial and less versatile natures. But it remains true, that when he tried to represent a character totally different from himself, the result is either unreal or uninteresting. Marino Faliero, begun April, finished July, 1820, and prefixed by a humorous dedication to Goethe—which was, however, suppressed—was brought on the stage of Drury Lane Theatre early in 1821, badly mangled, appointed, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... It was not wrong in the first place, for I was a mere baby. The whole world was new and wonderful to me, and one thing seemed about as strange to me as another. I could not see much difference between the real and the unreal, between the "truly true" and the make believe. When I said my mamma had silk dresses, spangled ...
— Aunt Madge's Story • Sophie May
... will one not do for the loved one? What will one not do to the hated one? The child who does not love his teacher gets little good from school while under that teacher. Moreover, school work is often a failure because it is so unreal, has so little relation to an actual world, and seems foreign to any real needs of the child. No one is going to work very hard unless the work is prompted by desire. Our desires come from our needs. Therefore, ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... barbaric sovereign's power in the remote East, and brought back stories of what they had seen; later the Poli, especially the great Marco, undertook still more daring and long-continued journeys, which made India and Cathay less unreal to Europeans, and stimulated the desire for further knowledge. The later mediaeval maps of the world, like that of Fra Mauro (1459),[3] which incorporate this knowledge, are less wildly imaginative ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... a talking serpent, - and should rejoice that evil, by whatever figure presented, contradicts itself and 529:27 has neither origin nor support in Truth and good. Seeing this, we should have faith to fight all claims of evil, be- cause we know that they are worthless and unreal. ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... would life be, stripped of thy encouraging smiles, that teach us to look behind the dark clouds of to-day for the golden beams that are to gild the morrow. To those who have faith in thy promises, the most extravagant fictions are possible; and the unreal becomes material and tangible. The artist who placed thee upon the rock with an anchor for a leaning post, could never have experienced any of thy vagrant propensities. He should have invested thee with the rainbow of Iris, the winged feet of Mercury, ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... author of the phrase; but there was a vision in it more intense than Tennyson's. "Visionary flocks!" For while the shepherds watched Theocritus dreamed the immortal sheep and goats which tempt us for an instant to become shepherds; but Owen knew that the real flocks would seem unreal to him who knew the visionary ones, so he turned away from the coasts without a desire in his heart to trouble the shepherds in the valley with an offer of his services, and walked up and down the deck thinking how he might obtain a ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... his faculties? Why were they hanging back and refusing to come to grips with the crisis? Why did this twilit riverside persist in seeming unreal to him, and the actors, himself included, as ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... curious anguish too pale to be indignation plucked at her heart-strings—anguish in which, unaccountably, the false charge against her husband was scarcely considered; that had become altogether remote and unreal, something barely historical, fading already away in the dim shadows of the past. What hurt her, with a dull pain which she could not analyse, was the sudden tarnishing of a scarcely-admitted ideal by Rainham's deliberate confession, making life appear for the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore |
