"Illusive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... probable that much of what passes for hallucination proper belongs in reality to the hybrid case, being an illusive interpretation of some induced visual cloud or blur. I spoke of the ever-varying patterns in the optical field; these, under some slight functional change, may become more consciously present, and be interpreted into fantasmal appearances. Many cases could be adduced to ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... that is illumined by the light of knowledge. If knowledge breaks down, there is no law of action which he can obey. The moral law that must be apprehended, and whose authority must be recognized by man, either sinks out of being or becomes an illusive phantom, if man is doomed to ignorance or false knowledge. To extinguish truth is ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... theatre to the world of realities, he is again compressed within its narrow bounds; he is its denizen as before—for it remains what it was, and in him nothing has been changed. What, then, has he gained beyond a momentary illusive pleasure which vanished with ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... illusive and specious, Till chance had there voiced me That one I loved vainly in nonage Had ceased her ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... of projectors, when bubbles are spread With illusive attractions to bother each head, When bulls, bears, jews, and jobbers all quit Capelcourt To become speculators and join in the sport, Who can wonder, when interest with intellect clashes, We should have a new club to dispose of our ashes; ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... is to maintain in the same course men prone to every form of credulity. For, as the mass of mankind remains always at about the same pitch of misery, it never assents long to any one remedy, but is always best pleased by a novelty which has yet proved illusive. ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... Christian reflected, and prepared herself to rebut any such slander. The rain was lighter, and the soaking mist that had all day filled the valley, was slowly thinning, and revealing the mighty scroll of silver that was the river, while the woods and hillsides came and went, illusive as the grey hints of landscape in a Japanese water-colour. But at the mature age of ten years, Christian cared for none of these things. She saw the smoke from the Mount Music kitchen chimney blending ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... agonies of death were mercifully shortened by the physician; why was not this a case for such treatment? The answer was simple enough—in the first place, it was the duty of the surgeons to keep their patient alive till her husband and her father could reach her; and secondly, there was that faint illusive hope of so-called recovery, in which none of them believed, yet which they could not ignore in their treatment. The evening after Mr. Tredegar's departure Wyant was setting this forth at great length to Justine. Bessy ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... my owl-like humors—in the vine-encircled heart of the tall pine! It was a phase of homesickness. I had wrenched myself too suddenly out of an accustomed sphere. There was no choice, now, but to bear the pang of whatever heartstrings were snapt asunder, and that illusive torment (like the ache of a limb long ago cut off) by which a past mode of life prolongs itself into the succeeding one. I was full of idle and shapeless regrets. The thought impressed itself upon me that I had left duties unperformed. ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... beauty would buy wealth and worldly position, and so she cast him off. Yet partly to gratify her own lingering feeling, and partly because she could not wholly renounce what had once been hers, she kept up for years with him just that illusive simulacrum which such women call friendship; which, while constantly denying, constantly takes pains to attract, and drains the heart of ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... operation of the tariff has not proved so injurious to the two former or as beneficial to the latter as was anticipated. Importations of foreign goods have not been sensibly diminished, while domestic competition, under an illusive excitement, has increased the production much beyond the demand for home consumption. The consequences have been low prices, temporary embarrassment, and partial loss. That such of our manufacturing establishments as are based upon capital and are prudently managed will survive ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... that Earl Grey seriously professed that by sending all the convicts to Van Diemen's Land he substantially realised dispersion. He indeed promised to provide an equal amount of emigration, but they knew that these projects were illusive. They had before them the addition of convict ticket holders, by hundreds, to thousands and tens of thousands already in the colony; there to struggle with their predecessors for bread. Such was the prospect ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... it the impression, illusive or otherwise, that it is the outward form or shape of a living ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... seaman and commander more prominently to view even than the former. The conditions were very different. Instead of mapping coasts and islands, the principal duty was exploration of tempestuous seas in high latitudes, amongst ice, searching in vain for the illusive ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... shrowded by curtains. On that side nearest the closet, the curtain was raised. As I passed along I cast my eye thither. I started, and looked again. I bore a light in my hand, and brought it nearer my eyes, in order to dispel any illusive mists that might have hovered before them. Once more I fixed my eyes upon the bed, in hope that this more stedfast scrutiny would annihilate the object which before ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... should look all ideally so if not he? In a little shabby, chilly corridor adjoining is a fresco of Leonardo, a Virgin and Child with the donatorio. It is very small, simple and faded, but it has all the artist's magic, that mocking, illusive refinement and hint of a vague arriere- pensee which mark every stroke of Leonardo's brush. Is it the perfection of irony or the perfection of tenderness? What does he mean, what does he affirm, what does he deny? Magic wouldn't be magic, nor the author of such things stand ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... then, no alternative but to fight. All other schemes were illusive. The supreme crisis of the Nation had come, and there was no other way than for the loyalty of the country to assert itself. The courage of the people had to be put to the proof, to see whether they were worthy of the heritage of freedom ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... to ask him what it was which she felt, and why there seemed some illusive remembrance always haunting her. She grew confused, and they passed on to another frame which contained the Lady Amaryllis who had had the sonnets written to her nut brown locks. She was a dainty creature in her stiff ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... does not prove them infants, but only new-born into that other life, and contrasts their helplessness with the powers, the great presences, now around them. A cow, far enough from Myron's famous illusive animal, suckles her calf. She is [275] one of almost any number of artistic symbols of new-birth, of the renewal of life, drawn from a world which is, after all, so full of it. On one side sits enthroned, as some ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... graceful heads swayed alluringly toward the handsome cavaliers who momentarily had found lodgment in hearts which, like palaces, had many ante-chambers. From hidden recesses, strains of music filled the room with tinkling passages of sensuous, but illusive, harmony; a dream of ardor, masked in the daintiness of ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... in the public journals. England is full of such people, and a hundred other varieties of peripatetic tricksters, higher than these, and lower, who act their parts tolerably well, but seldom with an absolutely illusive effect. I knew at once, raw Yankee as I was, that they were humbugs, almost without an exception,—rats that nibble at the honest bread and cheese of the community, and grow fat by their petty pilferings,—yet often gave them what they asked, and privately owned myself a simpleton. There is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... chiselled out of marble, nor wrought in clay, a more vivid likeness than this, cunning a bust-maker as you think yourself. The portraiture is perfect in character, sentiment, and feature. If it were a picture, the resemblance might be half illusive and imaginary; but here, in this Pentelic marble, it is a substantial fact, and may be tested by absolute touch and measurement. Our friend Donatello is the very Faun of Praxiteles. Is it not ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... disdain, And all the plagues that abus'd maids can feign, Are laid on him, and then to heighten spleen, Their own deaths crown the sum. Press'd thus between His fair accusers, 'tis at last decreed He by those weapons, that they died, should bleed. One grasps an airy sword, a second holds Illusive fire, and in vain wanton folds Belies a flame; others, less kind, appear To let him blood, and from the purple tear Create a rose. But Sappho all this while Harvests the air, and from a thicken'd pile ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... with pleasure and love, Lulling the sense to dreams Elysian, Making life seem a glorious trance, Full of bright visions of heaven, Safe from the touch of reality, Toil none—woe none—pain, Wild and illusive as sleep-revelations. Time to be poured like wine from a chalice Sparkling and joyous for aye, Drained amid mirth and music, The brows circled with ivy, And the goblet at last like a gift Thrust in the bosom ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... from Heaven it seemed, there came stealing into her sense a sound. Or was it a sound? It was so delicate, so illusive. It did not stop knocking at the portals of the ear as other sounds must do. It seemed, rather, to steal past the clumsy senses directly into the spirit ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... row of lighted candles raised in relief of white, gold and silver. Her little face with wide-set eyes looks down upon you from an elaborate silver crown set against a radiant halo of fine and illusive design, and her two beautiful hands clasp to her heart the shining swords that typify the Seven Sorrows. The dignity of her pose, the submission and pathos of her haunting eyes waken you to a new sense of the majesty of pain. I felt, as I looked up, that ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... over his cup of muddy coffee he had a curious sense that his mind was intent on keeping at bay some half-formulated fear. He felt pursued, as by an indistinct dream. Yet he was cunning enough to pretend that this something was too illusive to capture outright, so he turned his thoughts to all manner of remote things. But there are times when it is almost as difficult to deceive oneself as to cheat others. In the midst of his thoughts he suddenly realized that under the stimulating influence of a second cup of coffee ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... were other than illusion, whether the illusion of happiness were not better than any reality. But in the world of grim fact which he had accepted for himself was no palliating mirage. Upon him "the illusive ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... affecting sight, it was one at least strongly indicative of the intractable and indurated attachment which put itself forth with such vague and illusive energy on behalf of his son. At length he recovered, and on opening his eyes he fixed them with a long look of pain and ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... seems to link all other charms together, is the American-ness of everything—oh, an utterly different American-ness from what most people mean when they say "how American that is!" I do wish I could explain clearly; but to explain a thing so delicate, so illusive, would be like taking a soap-bubble in your hand to demonstrate that it was round. It's an effect of imagination and climate: imagination which gave graceful lightness and simplicity to Georgian models; climate which has played Puck-tricks ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... the route, he paused athirst And suddenly across the wastes of heat, He saw cool waters gleaming, and a sweet Green oasis upon his vision burst. A tender dream, long in his bosom nursed, Spread love's illusive verdure for his feet; The barren sands changed into golden wheat; The way grew glad that late had ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... caused that plague to leave no Egyptians alive to enjoy the later ones. With these new opinions of the fly, began a crusade against him; and now the boys can't have any more fun with him—that is, only good boys can—the kind that catch him with illusive traps, for a cent a hundred. The other kind of boys may occasionally be sports enough to hunt him with the swatter; but it's pretty poor hunting: for the game is so shy that generally before you get within reach of him, he is off: so swatting him is difficult, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... off, slowly the reaction began. Hattie was still unconscious, but there was a new look upon her face—a look that Lloyd had learned to know from long experience, an intangible and most illusive expression, nothing, something, the sign that only those who are trained to search for it may see and appreciate—the earliest faint flicker after ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... illusive light and these ever-changing vistas— what lies? I am weary of their vanishing glories. I would not wish to mount up through dreams to behold the true and fall away powerlessly, but would rather return to earth, though in pain, still ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... of the mountain was thickly wooded. Here were great oaks and splendid evergreens with trunks like mossy pillars, from the branches of which hung garlands of ivy and mistletoe, and persimmon trees, the odour of which pervaded every nook and corner of the wood—an illusive, fragrant something that made the heart glad. In places the wild muscadine and scuppernong vines stretched from tree to tree, making arbours which were always full of butterflies and buzzing insects. It was delightful to lose ourselves in the green hollows of that tangled wood in the ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... remained in that city the balance of the year. Wayne occupied the time in urging active operations and trying to infuse a more aggressive spirit into the management of affairs. At this time public affairs were very much hampered by a feeling of indifference as well as an illusive notion that peace would soon follow. This affected the nation and the army. Wayne baffled these false ideas with all his powers. He urged the Government to forward needed supplies of clothing and food. He could not be inactive; fervid, earnest, and aggressive, he ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... and merciful, and that he knows what is in store for me, and that is enough; so let us drop this conversation which really makes me melancholy. Come, my son, and see me anoint myself; for there is a cure for every sorrow; and though the pleasures which the devil affords us are illusive and fictitious, yet they appear to us to be pleasures; and sensual delight is much greater in imagination than in actual fruition, though it ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... communicated by God to man, had become obscured; after man's connection with his Creator had been broken, even outward language necessarily fell into disorder and confusion. The simple and Divine Truth was overlaid with various and sensual fictions, buried under illusive symbols, and at ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... It was a vision! A picture of an Indian camp, not painted on canvas nor yet written. It was dream-stuff, suspended in the thin air, filling the inclosure of the cedar wood container. As she looked upon it, the picture grew more and more real, exceeding the proportions of the chest. It was all so illusive a breath might have blown it away; yet there it was, real as life,—a circular camp of white cone-shaped tepees, astir with Indian people. The village crier, with flowing head-dress of eagle plumes, mounted on a prancing white pony, rode within the arena. Indian men, women and ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... eternal. Thus the way was opened for other apparitional Buddhas, and different sects take different ones as the objects of faith and worship. Moreover, our true nature is also Buddha. The conscious life of all men is apparitional and illusive. Salvation is the comprehension of this fact, and in the apprehension of our essential oneness with the absolute. Hence the way of salvation is by knowledge. In the Mah[a]y[a]na gnosticism was triumphant, and the historic values of Gautama's teaching ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... be but a fancy? Clancy could not be there, either in the trees, or on the earth. She knows it is but a deception of her senses—an illusive vision—such as occur to clairvoyantes, at ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... epitome of Thlinget myth and legend, croaked spasmodically from the white branch of a dead spruce behind them. The damp air had in it the freshness of new-cut hemlock boughs, a wild, vigorous fragrance that stirs the imagination with strange, illusive ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... your clumsy description has strangely stirred my youthful blood, and 'I longs fer ter see this hyar wonderful child dryad of ther primeval forest.' If you ever go back there, you had better wear magic armor as protection against that illusive smile which seems to have cast a spell of enchantment over ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... have real scenery the most illusive method of revealing and hiding the chancel is to have the back of the hut painted on a gauze drop, which is backed by a black curtain. At the cue for showing the chancel the lights in front of the gauze go out leaving the stage dark, ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... modestly in the background, was rarely out of sight; and a white-capped nurse, till now an occasional and illusive vision in the halls, blew in and out of the sick-room like a breeze, bringing liquids in glasses, which the patient obediently swallowed. Laurie, his attention once caught, took it all in. But his face gave no hint of his new knowledge, and the eyes of Louise still met ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... so thin and sallow that one had to look at them twice to see them clearly. At best, they looked vague and illusive. ...
— Two Little Confederates • Thomas Nelson Page
... Poitiers wished—perhaps only dreamed—and an epoch-making art project was born. Madame du Barry admired and made her own the since famous du Barry rose colour, and the Sevres porcelain factories reproduced it for her. But how to produce this particular illusive shade of deep, purplish-pink became a forgotten art, when the seductive person of the king's mistress ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... sustain the roof, and wide Branch the vast rain-bow ribs from side to side. While from above descends in milky streams One scanty pencil of illusive beams, Suspended crags and gaping gulphs illumes, 100 And gilds the horrors of the deepen'd glooms. —Here oft the Naiads, as they chanced to play Near the dread Fane on THOR'S returning day, Saw from red altars ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... The system of secrecy, implacably enforced, helps to maintain the vague awe that has always attached to the idea of administrative authority; and such authority is practically omnipotent within those limits which I have already indicated. To be favoured by authority means to experience all the illusive pleasure of a suddenly created popularity: an entire community, a whole city, is made by a word to turn all the amiable side of its human nature toward the favourite,—to charm him into the belief that he is worthy of the best that the world can ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... the English and the white man's etiquette that he had ever mastered. Night after night he would return from day-long hunting trips, his game-bag filled with delicate quail, rare woodcock, snowy-breasted partridge, and when the illusive appetite of the sick woman could be coaxed to partake of a morsel, he felt repaid for miles of tramping through forest trails, for hours of search ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... they go, one bends to take a flower, That so may be embalmed their happy hour, And in another day, a kindred mood, Haply together, or in solitude, Recovered what the teeth of Time devour, The joy, the bloom, and the illusive power, Wherewith by their young blood they are endued To move all enviable, framed in May, And of an aspect sisterly with Truth: Yet seek they with Time's laughing things to wed: Who will be prompted on some pallid ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... phenomena, and has retained the first and most universal form, that of the idea in general, the form of being object for a subject. Plato attributes actual being only to the Ideas, and concedes only an illusive, dream-like existence to things in space and time, the real world ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... action among that common run that do not habitually formulate their aspirations and convictions in extended and grammatically defensible documentary form, and the drift of whose impulses therefore is not masked or deflected by the illusive consistencies of set speech,—as touches the common run, particularly, it will hold true with quite an unacknowledged generality that the material means of life are, after all, means only; and that when the question ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... gazed, in fateful suspense and indecision, the fog came up again, chilling Richard Calmady's blood, oppressing his brain as with an uprising of foul miasma, blurring his vision, so that Helen's fair, downward-gazing face was distorted, rendered illusive and vague. And, along with this, distressing restlessness took him, compelling him to seek relief in change of posture and of place. He could not stop to reckon with how that which he proposed to do might strike an onlooker. His immediate sensations ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... noticed at Caroline Island alternations, with the advance of the moon, in the respective heights above the right and left solar limbs of the coronal green line, which were thought to imply that the corona, with its rifts and sheaves and "tangled hanks" of rays, is, after all, merely an illusive appearance produced by the diffraction of sunlight at the moon's edge.[552] But the observation was assuredly misleading or misinterpreted. Atmospheric diffusion may indeed, under favouring circumstances, be effective ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... is as illusive as their modesty. Girls who had been betrothed as infants were carefully guarded, and adultery savagely punished by clubbing or strangling; but, as I made clear in the chapter on jealousy, such vindictive punishment does not indicate a regard for chastity, but is merely revenge for ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... and the swell produced by its undulating motion. This was one of the largest we saw, and Mr. Hood ascertained its height to be one hundred and forty-nine feet; but these masses of ice are frequently magnified to an immense size, through the illusive medium of a hazy atmosphere, and on this account their dimensions have often been exaggerated ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... spiritualistic type and is radically opposed to the materialism of the Sankya school. In one school the Divine Being is nothing and materialism has full sway; while in the other Brahm is everything, and all that appears to men—the phenomenal—is false and illusive. ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... passages as I have in these letters I have necessarily followed my own taste, and taste—as I said when I first began writing to you—is illusive. I could do no more than cite that which makes my own heart beat faster from a compelling sense of its ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... deathbed in the hot sands of the desert, they traced the precious waters to its source. Gold they found in plenty with hardship and privation. They encountered a band of hostile Indians, and hardest to bear, a loneliness made sufferable only by the illusive phantasies of the golden fever. Their expectations realized, the majority of these pioneers returned to the Golden State and civilization with the burden of their treasure, saying they had not come to Arizona for their health. Now in these present days there comes a throng of people ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... by its undulating motion. This was one of the largest we saw, and Mr. Hood ascertained its height to be one hundred and forty-nine feet; but these masses of ice are frequently magnified to an immense size through the illusive medium of a hazy atmosphere, and on this account their dimensions have often been exaggerated ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... saw him there waiting for Reddy. Dry-eyed this sorrowful woman had heard the sentence pronounced, dry eyed she had followed the little coffin to its grave; tears had not come even when waking from illusive dreams she put out her hand in bed to a child who was not there; but when she saw Tommy waiting at the door for Reddy, who had been dead for a month, her bosom moved and she could ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... not suffer and the misery he himself might prevent. All that Ireland wants now is rest from political agitation, the orderly development of its resources;—and especially finality in legislation;[E]—so that the one side may know to what it has to trust, and the other may be freed from those illusive dreams and demoralising hopes which destroy the manlier efforts after self-help in the present for that universal amelioration to be found in the coming of the cocklicranes in ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... dream of riches to be quickly gained. Wherever the European landed in America he looked first of all for mines, as Frobisher did on the unpromising shores of Labrador. The precious metals proving illusive, his next recourse was to trade. Hawkins sought his profit from slaves. The French bought furs from the Indians at Tadoussac. Gosnold brought back from Cape Cod a mixed cargo of ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... after two hours' restless sleep, I awoke to find her standing before the bureau, in a gown of silver gauze, which gave her an illusive appearance of being clothed in moonlight. When I called her, and she turned and came toward me, I saw that there was a brilliant, unnatural look in her face, as though she had been dancing wildly or were in a fever. And this brilliancy seemed only to accentuate ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... well require his personal care; and Marius, relieved a little by his preparations for travelling from a certain over-tension [159] of spirit in which he had lived of late, was presently on his way, to await introduction to Aurelius, on his expected return home, after a first success, illusive enough as it was soon to appear, against the ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... the balconies; she played and laughed again,—and her father, in a transport, declared that they should soon have her as hearty as anybody. Miss Ophelia and the physician alone felt no encouragement from this illusive truce. There was one other heart, too, that felt the same certainty, and that was the little heart of Eva. What is it that sometimes speaks in the soul so calmly, so clearly, that its earthly time is short? ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... sweetheart of mine!—Is this her presence here with me, Or but a vain creation of a lover's memory? A fair, illusive vision that would vanish into air Dared I even touch the silence with the whisper of ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... an old person of Woking, Whose mind was perverse and provoking; He sate on a rail, with his head in a pail, That illusive old ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... lagging teams far below, from the blinding white canvas covers of "mountain schooners," and from scorching saddles that seemed to weigh down the scrambling, sweating animals beneath. But it would seem that the hope was vain, the promise illusive. When the terrace was reached it appeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of the valley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hidden crater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating and enervating man and beast, it was said to have induced ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... in the hour of departure you feel a pang. As train or steamer bears you away from the city and its myriad associations, the old illusive impression will quiver back about you for a moment,—not as if to mock the expectation of the past, but softly, touchingly, as if pleading to you to stay; and such a sadness, such a tenderness may ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... the rocks, and flowed along the vales; Or that the tigers mingled with the sheep, To the same fold were led; or shepherd-boys With playful wolves would frolic at the spring; But of its own lot ignorant, and all The sufferings that were in store, devoid Of care it lived: a soft, illusive veil Of error hid the stern realities, The cruel laws of heaven and of fate. Life glided on, with cheerful hope content; And tranquil, sought the haven of ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... were, at any moment, seemingly, at the command of the subject of this memorial. In one or two instances that might be named the assumption was all but identity. An aptitude of this particular kind, as everyone can appreciate upon the instant, would by necessity come wonderfully in aid of the illusive effect produced by readings that were in point of fact the mere vehicle or medium for a whole crowd of vivid impersonations. Anyone, moreover, possessing gifts like these, of a very peculiar description, not only naturally but inevitably enjoys ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... is no less illusive. The following passage occurs in the edition of 1795 of Lyson's Environs of London: "Henry Fielding, the celebrated Novelist, resided at Barnes, in the house which is now the property of Mr Partington." [2] In the edition of 1811 the house ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... weary day's laborious pace, I hasten and beguile By fancies, which I backwards trace To things I loved erstwhile; The weary sweetness of your face, Your faint, illusive smile. ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... and love words with the red-cheeked maids, and something had happened to the dashing spirit of the youth. All through those long days in the forest, those short blue nights under the velvet sky, one image had stood before him, calm, smiling, quivering with that illusive light which held men's hearts. Never a day that he could win forgetfulness of the face of Maren Le Moyne, and now he glanced toward her doorway. It lay in the sunlight without a foot upon its sill, and Marc sighed unconsciously. He was not ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... gold seemed more plentiful than the Spaniards had yet seen, but they were still lured on to distant places, with the illusive hope that this precious metal might there be found in quantities. Yet Columbus felt forced to cease, for a time, the quest of the precious metal, and sail for home with the story of the new world he had found. One of his vessels had deserted him; another had been ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... that the emotion which bursts from my heart, like a too-brilliant light, compels me to close the shutters of my brain as well. In my mind, even as before my eyes, distances are lessened and I see stretched before me that more or less illusive goal which we would all fain reach in the desires of our ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... were in the valley, and you might often observe various groups clustered on the green heights above the mansion, the effect of which was most inspiriting and graceful. Sometimes in the twilight, a solitary form, magnified by the illusive hour, might be seen standing on the brink of the steep, large and black against the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... ready. He signs the Oath, as well as audibly swears it: whereupon his sword is restored to him, and his prison-door opened. He steps forth to the Town Church with his Commissioners; takes the sacrament; listens, with all Custrin, to an illusive Sermon on the subject; "text happily chosen, preacher handling it well." Text was Psalm Seventy-seventh, verse eleventh (tenth of our English version), And I said, This is my infirmity; but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Host High; or, as Luther's ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... incidentally, a critical survey of George Gissing's chief works. And comparatively short as his working life proved to be—hampered for ten years by the sternest poverty, and for nearly ten more by the sad, illusive optimism of the poitrinaire—the task of the mere surveyor is no light or perfunctory one. Artistic as his temperament undoubtedly was, and conscientious as his writing appears down to its minutest detail, Gissing yet managed to turn out rather more than a novel ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... my grief was subsided, I desired to retire from a world which had tempted me only with illusive visions of happiness, and to remove from those scenes which prompted recollection, and perpetuated my distress. My father applauded my resolution, and I immediately was admited a noviciate into this ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... teaspoonful of cold spinach was wasted in these days. Justine's "left-over" dishes were quite as good as anything else she cooked; her artful combinations, her garnishes of pastry, her illusive seasoning, her enveloping and varied sauces disguised and transformed last night's dinner ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... flitting forms of light, That please the ear and then depart; But burning words, that reach the soul, That bring the shreds of error out, That with resistless power do roll, And put the hosts of Wrong to rout. Let others tune their lyres, and sing Illusive dreams of fancied joy; But, my own harp,—its every string Shall find in Truth enough employ. It shall not breathe of Freedom here, While millions clank the galling chain; Or e'en one slave doth bow in fear, Within our country's broad domain. ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... break that spell, and compel the invisible, unsympathetic medium which the enemy of love has stretched cunningly between them, to vanish, and let them come closer together than ever; but, in this case, it might be that the love was the illusive state, and the estrangement the real truth, the disenchanted verity. At all events, when the feeling passed away, in Rose's heart there was no reaction, no warmer love, as is generally the case. As for Septimius, he had other things to think about, and when he next met Rose ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... knew, but none he cared to argue about; and he shrank instinctively from attempting to put names to the contents of this other region, knowing well that such names could only limit and define things that, according to any standards in use in the ordinary world, were simply undefinable and illusive. ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... psychological changes reputed to be known in self-consciousness. That there is no knowledge but of the physical, that there is no knowing except by perception—this is ever reiterated as self-evident. Even psychology, resting as it does largely upon the observation of the self by the self, must be illusive. Physiology, or even phrenology, with the value of which Comte was much impressed, must take its place. Every object of knowledge is other than the knowing subject. Whatever else the mind knows, it can never know itself. By invincible necessity the human mind can observe all phenomena ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... sense is admittedly difficult to define. It connotes a vast group of special experiences and speculations which deal with material supposed to be beyond the reach of sense and reason. It carries us back to the strangely illusive "mysteries" of the Greeks, but is more definitely used in connection with the most characteristic subtleties of the wizard East, and with certain developments of the Platonic philosophy. Extended exposition is not required. Suffice it to state ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... than before. The Protestant, from having tamely allowed himself to be led, began to take a lively interest in his own self-improvement; while the Buddhist, from a former apathetic acquiescence in the doctrine of the universally illusive, set to work energetically towards self-extinction. Curious labor for a mind, that of devoting all its strength to the thinking itself out of existence! Not content with being born impersonal, a Far Oriental is constantly striving ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... life and destiny in exalting man, of course, thereby liberated him, not merely from ecclesiastical domination, but also from those illusive fears and questionings, those remote and imaginative estimates of his own intended worth and those consequent exacting demands upon himself which are a part of the religious interpretation of life. Humanistic writing is full of the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... France annually to protest at the commencement of the Session against the acts of the Emperor Nicholas, and to make a declaration in favour of the nationality of Poland. I think that such annual declarations are illusive; for while they have been made in this manner, they have been followed up by no measures; they are made by a representative assembly, without any action following on that declaration. Be it observed how great is the difference between that and a protest ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... under the broad brim of his sombrero. At times, with ears forward and extended nostrils, the horse gazes intently at the rippling blue waters of the mirage, that most tantalizingly deceptive phenomenon of nature. May it never be the lot of my reader to be misled by the illusive mirage as I have been. How could I mistake vapor for clear, gurgling water? Yet, how many times was I here deceived! Visions of great lakes and broad rivers rose up before me, lapping emerald green shores, where I could cool my parched tongue and lave in their crystal depths; ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... being immensely witty and extravagantly gay. At the end of the half-year these effusions of wit and gayety were printed by the society at the mutual expense of its members, and given to the world under the title of Recueil de ces Messieurs.[Q] Deprived of the illusive accompaniments of the lights, the sparkling eyes, the tinkling glasses, and the indulgent good-nature engendered by an excellent dinner, good wines, and an ample dessert, these table libertinages, when read nearly a century afterwards, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... crossed the bridge and, entering the sycamore avenue, was soon out of sight. Without paying any attention to Lambernier, who was uttering imprecations at the bottom of the ditch, into which he was sinking deeper and deeper, the stranger went to seek a less illusive shelter than the trees under which he had taken his position; but at this moment his attention was attracted to one side of the castle. A window, or rather a glass door, just then opened upon the balcony, ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... beauteous feet, I knew not why, hung chains of lead, Pursued me, as I trembling fled; And, strange to say, as swift as thought, Spite of my pinions, I was caught! What does the wanton Fancy mean By such a strange, illusive scene? I fear she whispers to my breast, That you, sweet maid, have stolen its rest; That though my fancy, for a while, Hath hung on many a woman's smile, I soon dissolved each passing vow, And ne'er was ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... bumblebee fly, which was said to be one of the most conclusive cases, is, after all, a mere childish notion. Patient observation, continually face to face with facts, will have none of it and leaves it to the armchair naturalists, who are too prone to look at the animal world through the illusive ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... thirtieth year has sounded, in three or four years my youth will be as a faint haze on the sea, an illusive recollection; so now while standing on the last verge of the hill, I will look back on the valley I lingered in. Do I regret? I neither repent nor do I regret; and a fool and a weakling I should he if I did. I know the worth ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... social model. He was known to be brave and was therefore expected to be generous. His good humor was regarded as an echo of his prosperity, and a lucky negro, winning at dice, would strive to imitate his manner. At planting, at plowing and at gathering, no detail was too small or too illusive to escape his eye. His interests were under a microscopic view and all plans that were drawn in the little brick office at the corner of the yard, were rigorously carried out in the fields. In the one place he was all business; ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... been in a position to tell you something about that affair, which was beginning just as I left Paris. I saw the first gleams even then of your misfortune. But what gentleman is base enough to open such a subject unless appealed to? Who shall dare to injure a woman, or break that illusive mirror in which his friend delights in gazing at the fairy scenes of a happy marriage? Illusions are ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... centre of Africa, from thence to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and the banks of the Nile. I trust it will here also appear that the means of acting, and the important advantages to be derived therefrom, are neither illusive nor impracticable. ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... starvation and despair. This is evidently a state of affairs which Socialist agitators favour because it will increase their following.—Another prominent Socialist writer says: "Among the many quack remedies for poverty, the most venerable and the most illusive is thrift or saving. The habit of saving is always represented by the rich as the highest of social virtues; but it is one they are careful rarely to practise themselves"[856]—If the rich are so wasteful, how is it then that the national capital, held by the rich, as the Socialists tell us, has ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... well described; and I know not whether it may not be said, in defence of some parts which now seem improbable, that, in Shakespeare's time, it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... which is illusive, may be thus defined: Marriage is a mere compact, and means diversity. Each family, therefore, must have a separate individual representation, out of which arises diversity or division, and discord is the corner-stone ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... prespiration{sic} stream down his temples and you will have no difficulty in understanding his state of mind. He shouted Christine's name, brandished his pistol, knocked his forehead against the glass in his endeavors to run down the glades of the illusive forest. In short, the torture was beginning to work its spell upon ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... Arethusa's life-long dream of becoming a missionary's wife proved neither illusive nor vain; and she had ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... that have been introduced in Teheran of late, may be mentioned gas and the electric light. "Were one to make this statement and enter into no further explanations, the impression created would doubtless be illusive; for although the fact remains that these things are in existence here, they could be more appropriately placed under the heading of toys for the gratification of the Shah's desire to gather about him some of the novel and interesting things he had seen ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... At twenty-six the vocation of the religieuse had lost its fascination; the pious fervor of her childhood had vanished before the skepticism of her intellect, its ardent friendships had grown dim, its fleeting loves had proved illusive, and her romantic dreams ended in a cold marriage ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... during his stay at the Gray home and would be sure to appreciate the resemblance. Roberta, again engaged with the portrait above the desk, had not noticed her sister's departure. There was something peculiarly fascinating about this pictured face of Richard Kendrick's mother. Whether it was the illusive likeness to the son, showing first in the eyes, then in the mouth, which was one of extraordinary sweetness, it was hard to tell. But the attempt ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... Christofori's claim. The hammer action was what all previous instruments lacked, and it seems strange that it took nearly two thousand years for this principle to be discovered and applied. Many times the inventors appeared to be almost upon it. They worked all around it, but the idea seemed illusive and ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... manhood's stoutest strength, And burned within his eagle eye The blaze of tameless energy— Not tameless but untamed—for life Soon breaks the spirit with its strife And they who in their souls have nursed The brightest visions, are the first To learn how Disappointment's blight Strips life of its illusive light; How dreams the heart has dearest held Are ever first to be dispelled; How hope, and power, and love, and fame, Are each an idly sounding name, A phantom, a deceit, a wile, That woos and dazzles to beguile. But time had not yet tutored ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... and its lace-work. But after all, in his secret soul of souls, he had longed to eat of the omelette. Dieu! how often during those slow, quiet years in the little hamlet yonder on the plain, had its sweetness and lightness mocked his tongue with illusive tasting! Little wonder, therefore, that the good cure's praises were sweet in madame's ear, for they had the ring of truth—and of envy! And madame herself was only mortal, for what woman lives but feels herself uplifted by the sense of having ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... Would make us slaves; and we, Who in our blindness struggle for the prize Of this illusive state Called Life, do but frustrate The higher ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... a decanter on the sideboard. The doctor poured some spirit into a glass. "Drink this," he said. Theophil drank it raw, as though it had been water; and presently a certain illusive hope began to stir like an opening rose in his brain, and when the doctor had gone he turned to that decanter again. Perhaps if he drank enough he would find that Jenny was not to die, after all. At all events, the spirit gave ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... himself, and closed the door gently after him. Being a man he entirely failed to note the drift of psychological straws that indicated the sudden sharp turn of the wind, and the presage of storm in the air. He was thinking only of the illusive, desirable, maddening quality of the girl that walked beside him, filled with inexplicable forebodings for a friend, whom he knew to be invulnerable to misfortune. Certain phrases of Dick's were ringing in his ears to the exclusion of ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... is certainly not entitled to deny, that many strong cases of perversion occurred; but, except the superiority of diet, and the high value of labor common to new countries when they prosper at all, the descriptions given were mostly illusive and mistaken. The extreme misery and degradation endured by many, and to which all were liable, rendered the ordinary condition of prisoners one which could not have been desired, except by the most wretched ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... all illusive veil or haze, Each object looms remote, distinct, apart: We know its worth, its limits, weight and ways; It is no longer one with our own heart; No answering ecstasy Is roused in us by earth or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... the thinker and father of his philosophy, has no real existence—is only illusion, concerning which real existence can only be assumed for practical purposes. What must be said of the philosophy begotten by such an illusive being? Shall it not also be doomed to vanish with him into the nothingness whence he came and which he now really is, if he only knew it? Sir Monier Williams aptly remarks,—"Common sense tells an Englishman that he really exists himself and that everything ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... she had hoped to inspire, but rather with the trifling carelessness of one giving himself up to the plaything of the hour. Not having, from the very first, been chary of the sidelong glance and the winning smile, and whatever grace of style or manner could tempt him to pursuit, as an illusive appearance of success seemed to beckon her onward, her heart at times grew desperate with the apprehension that all had been in vain. For Sergius, content that the wife whom he neglected did not disturb his repose with idle ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various |
