"Unreason" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was brimming over with unreason. Yet her eyes were like stars, and in an uncomprehended way the woman felt the charm of her beauty. No, she ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... forehead was knitted with vacuous perplexity; his eyes reflected blanks of unreason; his whole body had an effect of weak settling and subsidence. The man who worked next to him in the cutting-room at Lloyd's, and had searched at his side indefatigably from the first, stole a tender hand under his shoulder. ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in the people, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... upon him with horror-widened eyes. Dulac hurled his weapon into the bushes and turned upon her furiously, seizing her arm and dragging her to him so that his eyes, glowing with unreason, could burn into hers. ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... Christophine's problem grew ever more difficult. She was of a compassionate nature, and had a loving, patient and noble heart; prudent she was; the skilfulest and thriftiest of financiers; could well keep silence, too, and with a gentle stoicism endure much small unreason. Saupe says withal, 'Nobody liked a laugh better, or could laugh more heartily than she, even in her extreme old age.'—Christophine herself makes no complaint, on looking back upon her poor Reinwald, thirty years after all was over. Her final record of it is: "for twenty-nine years ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... without fear or flutter, of what he is and what others are. A courage to quell the proudest, an honest pity to encourage the humblest. Withal there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot: much vain unreason he hears; lays up without response. He is not there to expect reason and nobleness of others; he is there to give them of his own reason and nobleness. Is he not their servant, as we said, who can suffer from them, and for them; bear the ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... to each other, without in the least wanting to rob each other: we are all bent on the same enterprise, making the most of our lives. And I must tell you whatever quarrels or misunderstandings arise, they very seldom take place between people of different race; and consequently since there is less unreason in them, they are the ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... think, as an indication of childish unreason, unworthy of any one who faces realities. It is still true that "the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... loathsomely, are dropping from the body. These are peoples that have lost the power of astonishment at their own actions. When they give birth to a fantastic fashion or a foolish law, they do not start or stare at the monster they have brought forth. They have grown used to their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos; and the whirlwind is the breath of their nostrils. These nations are really in danger of going off their heads en masse; of becoming one vast vision of imbecility, with toppling cities and crazy country-sides, all dotted with industrious lunatics. One ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... I shouldn't have come here to meet you. My gift is the thing that takes you: could there be a better proof than that it's to-night's display of it that has brought you to this unreason? It's indeed a misfortune that you're so sensitive to our poor arts, since they play such tricks with your power to see things as they are. Without my share of them I should be a dull, empty, third-rate woman, and yet that's the fate you ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... not at all. For hours after he reached his room in the hotel he paced it frantically. First cumulative anger, long held in leash, swept him like a forest fire, charring his reason into unreason. He had fought for Conscience and lost her. She had thrown her lot with the narrow minds and cast him adrift. He had placed all his trust in her and she had failed to rise above her heritage. But as the night wore on a nauseating reaction of self-indictment ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... unjust as prejudice, unless it be jealousy," exclaimed Lady Angleby with delicious unreason. "You would keep ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... the parliamentarian; "and to contend as much would be the apex of unreason. For this diamond belongs, of course, to my cousin the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... comparable to the women of France It would be hard! ay, then we do it forthwith Making too much of it—a trick of the vulgar More argument I cannot bear None but fanatics, cowards, white-eyeballed dogmatists Push indolent unreason to gain the delusion of happiness Reproof of such supererogatory counsel She had no longer anything to resent: she was obliged to weep Slaves of the priests The healthy only are fit to live The world without him would be heavy matter This girl ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... the tendril cried, In beautiful sweet unreason; Till lo! from its prison, glorified, It burst in the ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... much greater daring and with more of unreason, carried back many billions of years the origin of mankind and has painted vividly a future whose expanse ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... pure fanatics who spilt their blood that they might have Christ's Kirk and Covenant regulated in their own peculiar way; and he will hold them as mere feather-brains who sacrificed their lands and their lives to an obstinate loyalty to the House of Stuart. Yet it is of such unreason, if unreason it be, that the warp and the woof of the historic annals of Scotland have been spun: it is this defiance of what the utilitarian philosopher calls the rules of common sense, as applied to human conduct, that has given the Scottish ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... the fault of Knox or his influence that a man should be sentenced to be hanged for the rough horseplay of a Robin Hood performance, or because he was "Lord of Inobedience" or "Abbot of Unreason," like Adam Woodcock; but the extraordinary exaggeration of a society which could think such a ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... States and Maryland, the tidewater region of South Carolina, and certain parts of Virginia were the seats of the soundest political thought of the day. The men who did this sane, wholesome political thinking were quite right in scorning and condemning the crude unreason, often silly, often vicious, which characterized so much of the political thought of their opponents. The strength of these opponents was largely derived from the ignorance and suspicion of the raw country districts, and from the sour jealousy with which the backwoodsmen ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... argument. Indeed one of their evils is that they make a writer and his readers believe that he is exercising his reason when he is only moving from trite image to image. If eloquence is reason fused with emotion, writing, or speaking, full of dead metaphors is unreason fused with sham emotion. I add in illustration a further list of dead metaphors lately noticed: 'Branches of the same deadly Upas Tree. Turning a deaf ear to. The flower of our manhood. Taking off the gloves. ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... was right. It is better doubtless to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and unreason alike, for when we do this we have not even a rush candle to guide our steps, not even a poor sowlth to dance before us on the marsh, and must needs fumble our way ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... unmoved by the outburst. It was to combat this very unreason of devotion that he had hoped for further confirmation. Villon would surely let slip a phrase which would serve his purpose, a word or two would do, a suggestive hint, and then a little colouring, a ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... sealed. And then came the thought that the insensible boy at her feet, escaping for a little while through sleep's primeval sanctity, was part of the robbed world also. Who had lost more than he by his unreason? If her heart did not melt ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... and action struck the chord which, in a man's heart, always responds to the touch of feminine unreason. She dropped into the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands, while Woburn watched the ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... Le Gardeur! It is mad unreason,—I feel that,—but it is no less true. I love you, but I will not marry you." She spoke with more resolution now. The first plunge was over, and with it her fear and trembling as she ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... an exceptionally personal disqualification is created for the mere purpose of excluding her. When it is added that in the country where this is done a woman now reigns, and that the most glorious ruler whom that country ever had was a woman, the picture of unreason and scarcely disguised injustice is complete. Let us hope that as the work proceeds of pulling down, one after another, the remains of the mouldering fabric of monopoly and tyranny, this one will not be the last to disappear; that the opinion of Bentham, of Mr. ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... and no carriage appeared, neither did a line come from the expected lady explaining her tardiness. Hope deferred made Miss Gordon's nerves unsteady and her heart hard towards the cause of her daily disappointment. By some process of unreason which often develops in the aggrieved feminine mind, she conceived of Elizabeth as that cause, and the unfortunate child found herself, all uncomprehending as usual, fallen from the heights of approbation to which her progress at school had raised ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... together, and will suffer in a collision.' But with mulish stubbornness I thought: 'They wished to go to London'; and on I raged, not wildly exhilarated, so far as I can remember, nor lunatic, but feeling the dull glow of a wicked and morose Unreason urge in my bosom, while I stoked all blackened at the fire, or saw the vague mass of dead horse or cow, running trees and fields, and dark homestead and deep-slumbering farm, flit ghostly athwart the murky air, as the half-blind ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... In my name. This means as representing me; and, therefore, as being like me. Our Lord could not commission any one to be received in his name who could not more or less represent him; for there would be untruth and unreason. Moreover, he had just been telling the disciples that they must become like this child; and now, when he tells them to receive such a little child in his name, it must surely imply something in common between them all—something in which the child and Jesus meet—something ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... side, all the little jerks and jars and jolts and ironical tricks of the hour and the occasion lose their brutish emphasis and sink into humorous perspective. The sense of having some one for whom one's weakest and least effective moments are of interest and for whom one's weariness and unreason are only an additional bond, makes what were otherwise intolerable in our life easy and light ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... unreason, are the etherealized, saccharine effusions of the "Glories of Mary," by Alfonso di Liguori! They represent the other pole of Mariolatry—the gentlemanly pole. And under the influence of Mary-worship a new kind of saintly physiognomy was elaborated, as we can see from contemporary prints ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... good things done by Peter the world knows by heart. The world knows well how he tore his way out of the fetichism of his time,—how, despite ignorance and unreason, he dragged his nation after him,—how he dowered the nation with things and thoughts which transformed it from a petty Asiatic horde ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... Mr. Blood writes to me in a letter, "is past. It was the long endeavor to logicize what we can only realize practically or in immediate experience. I am more and more impressed that Heraclitus insists on the equation of reason and unreason, or chance, as well as of being and not-being, etc. This throws the secret beyond logic, and makes mysticism outclass philosophy. The insight that mystery,—the Mystery, as such is final, is the hymnic word. If you use reason ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... impure assafoetida would mingle with the fumes of the incense; and wicked drinking choruses would rise up along with the holy canticles, in hideous dissonance, reminding one of the old orgies under the reign of the Abbot of Unreason. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the wickedest, the dirtiest, vilest, and most damnable habitation devised by man for the corruption of humanity? Especially in the month of November? Has your lordship any reasonable reason for this unreason of coming here, when the streets are full of mud, and men's hearts are packed like saddle-bags with all the sins they have accumulated since Easter and mean to unload at Christmas? Even your old friends are shocked to see so young and honest a ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... [81] The Abbot of Unreason in Scotland, was a similar character to the Lord of Misrule in England. "This pageant potentate," as Stowe calls him, "was annually elected, and his rule extended through the greater part of the holydays conected with the festival days of Christmas." ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... her logic of the heart, And wisdom of unreason, Supplying, while he doubts and weighs, The needed word ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... were suffering when I last saw you;" and if the person saluted has not been good, or is still snappish, he says so, and is condoled with accordingly. Nay, the straighteners have gone so far as to give names from the hypothetical language (as taught at the Colleges of Unreason) to all known forms of mental indisposition, and have classified them according to a system of their own, which, though I could not understand it, seemed to work well in practice, for they are always able to tell a man what ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... to know that, even in speculations on 666, there are different degrees of unreason. All the diviners, when they get a colleague or an opponent, at once proceed to reckon him up: but some do it in play and some in earnest. Mr. David Thom found a young gentleman of the name St. Claire busy at the Beast number: he forthwith added the letters in [Greek: ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... is less than meets the eye. The House of Commons is a Representative Assembly; the rhetoricians and fencers represent the unreason and the pugnacity of the partisans. A country has the politicians it deserves. I have heard the most ignorant girls rage against Mr. Gladstone; damsels in their teens who knew nothing of life or its problems, nor could have studied any question for themselves; ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... death intervening, his heartless rapacity laid bare to her; that all should not do, and she must still keep the best place in her heart for this accursed fellow, is a thing to make a plain man rage. I had never much natural sympathy for the passion of love; but this unreason in my patron's wife disgusted me outright with the whole matter. I remember checking a maid because she sang some bairnly kickshaw while my mind was thus engaged; and my asperity brought about my ears the enmity of all the petticoats about the house; of which I recked very little, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sign of the cross of God, He knew the Roman prayer, But he had unreason in his heart Because of ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... warning and Charles would ask his employer leave for a "holiday," and stay at home trying by gentle mirth and work to divert the dread visitor of unreason. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... I can see plainly; that every improvement which is made is received by those whom it most concerns with a horror which amounts almost to madness. So lovely to the ancient British, well-born, feudal instinct is a state of unreason, that the very absence of any principle endears to it institutions which no one can attempt to support by argument. Had such a thing not existed as the right to purchase military promotion, would any satirist have been listened to who had suggested it as a possible outcome ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... There was a slight echo of rancor in his own voice, still it was patient, with the patience of a man with a woman and her unreason. All his temper of the night before had disappeared. He was quite honest in saying that he wished to do what was right and honorable. He was really much more of a man than he had been the day before. He was conscious of not loving Maria—his budding boy-love ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... hope his own company will satisfy him until the first fever is past. Do I not know that to be in love is to be possessed? It is in the head—the heart—the blood—it is indeed an uncontrollable fever! I hope, first and foremost, that he will keep away from his mother in his present unreason." ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... man is wise, it is because his spirit is kindled by union with the universal spirit; but there is a baser, or, as Heraclitus termed it, a moister element also in him, which is the element of unreason, as in a drunken man. And thus the trustworthiness or otherwise of the senses, as the {19} channels of communication with the divine, depends on the dryness or moistness,—or, as we should express it, using, after all, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... good-will. We are fighting our battle still, but do not see our victory yet. We are not opposing men and women, but the enemies of men and women—ignorance, prejudice, and injustice. Many people bring into a new movement the whole intensity and unreason of their personal desires and discontents, and the train of progress must carry all this luggage along with it. Woman suffrage means equality in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly well, I still felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of my sight longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of unreason I had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... the Commander-in-Chief, under Congress, of the forces of the United States could re-create these defunct States, and make it mandatory on Congress to receive their delegates, has always appeared to us one of those mysteries of unreason which require faculties either above or below humanity to accept. In addition to this fundamental objection, there was the further one, that almost all of the delegates were Rebels presidentially pardoned into "loyal men," were elected with the idea of forcing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... duty to point out the improbability of anyone dying, but was a little handicapped by the circumstances attendant on Typhus Fever. She had to be concise in unreason. "Don't talk nonsense, Clo dear." The patient ignored the interruption. "Oh dear!—give me another grape to suck without having to open my eyes.... Ta!—now I can talk a little more." The obliging nurse ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... complication passes all understanding, all seems a chaos of prejudice, superstition, pride, vanity, and stupidity. And yet we catch a glimpse here and there that there was some reason in most of that unreason; we see how sense dwindled away into nonsense, custom into ceremony, ceremony into farce. Why then should this surface of savage life represent to us the lowest stratum of human life, the very beginnings of civilization, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller |
