"Illusory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and anon arose to entrance and disappoint the longing eyes of thoughtful men in this century—a free, universal, and legitimate council of the Church. But the hopes founded on these promises were as illusory as any previously conceived. Instead of a formal and unambiguous ratification of the terms by Charles himself, the Cardinal of Chatillon was treated only to complaints about the causeless rising of the Protestants, and expressions of astonishment that Conde had not instantly countermanded ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... first few years, while Oglethorpe was in personal charge at Savannah and supplies from England were abundant, there was an appearance of success, which soon proved illusory. Not only were the conditions unfit for silk and wine, but the fertile tracts were malarial and the healthy districts barren, and every industry suited to the climate had to meet the competition of the South Carolinians ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... interdependence of parts wholly understood which appeals to the intellect, and satisfies it: they would please the mind, though the order they embody were purely imaginary, just as science would delight it, were the order of nature itself illusory. Creative art would thus still have a ground of being under a sceptical philosophy; man would delight to dream his dream. But it is not necessary to take this lower ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... slanting street, and that his father was there again too, chiding him severely because of his degenerate mode of life,—which censure he regularly regarded as quite proper. And this present moment now had nothing to distinguish it from one of those illusory and unrending dream-fabrics, in which one may ask himself whether this be hallucination or reality, and of necessity and with deep conviction declare for the latter, only to wake up after all ... ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... room was not real, and yet you saw it; had you wished, you might have touched it, which is certainly all the evidence you have of the existence of the room in which we are now sitting. Hypnotism is not a cause of hallucination, as is commonly supposed, but of fact. Its effects are not illusory, but real. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that they are as real as anything else, and that all the phenomena of nature are mere illusions of the senses, which they undoubtedly are. But whichever side we take, all appearances are the result ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... their hand. Seeing that she was endowed with natural gifts of intelligence and good looks, they also felt solicitous to bestow upon her a certain knowledge of books, with no other purpose than that of satisfying, by this illusory way, their wishes of having a son to nurture and of dispelling the anguish felt by them, on account of the desolation and void in their family ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... conception of the improvement of the race embodies a new ideal. We are familiar with legislative projects for compulsory certificates as a condition of marriage. But even apart from all the other considerations which make such schemes both illusory and undesirable, these externally imposed regulations fail to go to the root of the matter. If they are voluntary, if they spring out of a fine eugenic aspiration, it is another matter. Under these conditions the method may be carried ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... right just now, when she said she was not my first love. 'Twas one of those banale expressions" (here Mr. P. blushed once more) "which we use to women. We tell each she is our first passion. They reply with a similar illusory formula. No man is any woman's first love; no woman any man's. We are in love in our nurse's arms, and women coquette with their eyes before their tongue can form a word. How could your lovely relative love me? I was far, far too old for her. I am older than I look. ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the phantom towns which men had thrown up breathlessly and abandoned when the search for gold had proved illusory. Only permanency could dig the gold of fertility from the prairie, and thus far the people who had made a brief attempt to cope with it had been in too much of a hurry. Those abandoned quarter-sections had defeated the men who would have ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... history. A fair proportion of the workers who have delved so enthusiastically in the fields of Egyptian and Assyrian exploration would never have taken up the work at all but for the hope that their investigations might substantiate the Hebrew records. For a long time this hope proved illusory, and in the case of Egyptian archaeology the results have proved disappointing even up to the very present. Considering the important part played by the Egyptian sojourn of the Hebrews, as narrated in the Scriptures, it was certainly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... proved illusory. Leigh Hunt, Wraxall and the rest made but ineffectual martyrs; the Bourbons straggled back into France and Spain, with such results as we see; George IV. weathered, by no merit of his own, a fresh series of storms at home; the clouds that lowered upon his house were made glorious summer by the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... ship, he stipulated, would form part of this illusory space-navy. He volunteered the Horus for it. That ship would signal to the Mekinese when they arrived. It would make the king's proposal to surrender, on the Mekinese promise to spare the civilian population ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... a lasting manner the poor human creature torn from his home, debased to the role of a piece of mechanism. Not knowing where he is being led to, he goes, making murderous gestures, the meaning of which he does not know, without even having the illusory consolation of possible personal bravery, being killed by the shots of an invisible enemy, or, what is worse, being killed by the shots of his own comrades—and all of this, automatically, stupidly. The feeling of terror, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... 91: The Queen and her Ministers, however, insisted that the neutralisation clause (the Third Point) should be made effective, not left illusory, and incorporated in the principal and not in a supplementary treaty. Modified in this and other particulars, an ultimatum embodying the Austrian proposals, which stipulated, inter alia, for the cession of a portion of Bessarabia, was despatched to St Petersburg on the 15th ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... history of a Government is always a very critical and has often been a very unfortunate year. It is quite true that Mr. Disraeli's Government, which assumed office in 1874, did enjoy in its fourth year a fleeting flush of success, which, however, proved illusory. With that single exception, every other modern Government that has lasted so long, has occupied an unsatisfactory position in its fourth year. The Government of 1880 in the year 1884 was brought very low, and was deeply involved ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... exhibited to all the wealthy young men, but in vain. Had she not come across so easy a victim as Pontianus she would perhaps still have been sitting at home a widow who had never been a bride. Pontianus, in spite of urgent attempts on our part to dissuade him, gave her the right—false and illusory though it was—to be called a bride. He did this knowing that, but a short time before he married her, she had been seduced and deserted by a young man of good family to whom she had been previously ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... beyond its real value, the most assiduous and also the most profuse were the British, agitated at one moment by the prospect of an Afghan invasion of India, at another by the fear of an overland march against Delhi of the combined armies of Napoleon and the Tsar. These apprehensions were equally illusory; but while they lasted they supplied the excuse for a constant stream of embassies, some from the British sovereign, others from the viceregal court at Calcutta, and were reproduced in a bewildering succession of Anglo-Persian Treaties. ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... amid its floating masses of moist vivid green leaves—the large alamanda-like flower of a purest divine yellow that when plucked sheds its lovely petals, to leave you with nothing but a green stem in your hand. To ride at noon on the hottest days, when the whole earth is a-glitter with illusory water, and see the cattle and horses in thousands, covering the plain at their watering-places; to visit some haunt of large birds at that still, hot hour and see storks, ibises, grey herons, egrets of a dazzling ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... and not even a cow grazing near it. The river was between me and the church, so I went up-stream, a mile and a half, to cross by the bridge, then doubled back to look for the church, and couldn't find it! Yet it was no illusory church; I have seen it again on two occasions, but again from the other side of the river, and I must certainly go back some day in search of that lost church, where there may be effigies, brasses, sad, eloquent inscriptions, and other memorials ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... purifying it, not in any way of replacing it. But we must distinguish in it what is pure fact, and what is ulterior arrangement, in order to see what are the problems which really are presented, and what are, on the contrary, the false problems, the illusory problems, those which relate only to ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... myself safe in choosing Sir GEORGE GREENWOOD and Mr. JOSEPH KING. The former is so devoted to animals that he would not turn upon a worm; the thought of bloodshed so shocks the latter that he welcomes any suggestion of peace however illusory. But, when Mr. KING described a proposal of Sir GEORGE'S as "infected with Prussianism," that gallant knight promptly invited him to repeat his language outside the House; and Mr. KING, nothing daunted, declared his readiness "to meet the hon. Member where he likes and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... of love is assuredly eternal fidelity. Moral and religious laws have aimed at consecrating this ideal. Material facts obscure it. Civil laws are so framed as to make it impossible or illusory. Here, however, is not the place to prove this. Nor has Mauprat been burdened with a proof of the theory; only, the sentiment by which I was specially penetrated at the time of writing it is embodied in the words of Mauprat ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... Here you see the absolute, material results of right and wrong thinking, just as if you were looking at two different patterns, woven by two different workers. I said material results, because matter here is just as real as it was on earth, and just as illusory, in one sense, in both spheres. Your matter is unreal to us. Our matter is unreal to you. The truth is, both are shadows cast by an antecedent reality on the Screens of ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... astonishment. Many of course refused to believe it. Some there were who having been shown them refused to believe their eyes, and asserted that although the telescope acted well enough for terrestrial objects, it was altogether false and illusory when applied to the heavens. Others took the safer ground of refusing to look through the glass. One of these who would not look at the satellites happened to die soon afterwards. "I hope," says Galileo, "that he saw them on his ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... of all this banter and sarcasm, these passages express a real dread which, at the time when Household Suffrage was claimed and conceded, really possessed Arnold's mind. He came with the lapse of years to see that it was illusory, and that the working-classes of England are as steady, as law-abiding, as inaccessible to ideas, as little in danger of being hurried into revolutionary courses, as unwilling to jeopardize their national interests and their stake in the country, as the Aristocracy and the Middle Class. But at the ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... heron, the heathen renewed the charge, and a second time was fain to retreat without coming to a close struggle. A third time he approached in the same manner, when the Christian knight, desirous to terminate this illusory warfare, in which he might at length have been worn out by the activity of his foeman, suddenly seized the mace which hung at his saddle-bow, and, with a strong hand and unerring aim, hurled it against the head of the Emir, for such and not less his enemy appeared. The Saracen was just aware of the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... molasses candy, investing in missionary enterprises which paid no dividends, subscribing to the North Labrador Orphan Fund, and sending capital out of the country gene rally, Johnny would be sticking sixpences into the chimney-pot of a big tin house with "BANK" painted on it in red letters above an illusory door. Or he would put out odd pennies at appalling rates of interest, with his parents, and bank the income. He was never weary of dropping coppers into that insatiable chimney-pot, and leaving them there. In this latter respect he differed notably from his elder brother, Charlie; for, although ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... substantial reality so long as it is maintained, yet the maintaining of the particular form is entirely dependent on the action of the spirit of which the form is the external clothing. This resurrection body would therefore be no mere illusory spirit-shape, yet it would not be subject to the limitations of matter as we now know it: it would be physical matter still, but entirely subject to the will of the indwelling spirit, which would not regard the denser atomic relations of the body but only its absolute and essential nature ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... Tripos. This will compel me to be definite: and as definite proposals invite definite objections, by this method we are likeliest to know where we are, and if the reform we seek be realisable or illusory. ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... of the magnetic field in which its source is placed. It could not, therefore, be strictly considered as independent of the earth; and the theoretical advantage which might be expected from this alteration would be somewhat illusory. ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... reduction of its price to existing preemptors to 62-1/2 cents per acre, with a credit of two years, will so diminish the sale of other public lands as to render the expectation of future revenue from that source, beyond the expenses of survey and management, illusory. The Secretary of the Interior estimated the revenue from the public lands for the next fiscal year at $4,000,000, on the presumption that the present land system would remain unchanged. Should this bill become a law, he does not believe ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... outward aspect, a renowned name—all these are merely turned into the means by which an insatiable, personal will to live craves for new life, with which, again, it hankers after an eternity that is at last seen to be illusory. ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... everything is illusory, we had better make our illusions as pleasant as possible. 'That,' he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... The old, illusory France has collapsed [he wrote to Brandes on December 20, 1870, two days after the engagement at Nuits]; and as soon as the new, real Prussia does the same, we shall be with one bound in a new age. How ideas ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... to regain consciousness of its unity, was about to rise up as one man and hurl the foreigner from its borders; but the rivalries of the cities were too strong for them to see that local liberty without a common independence is precarious and illusory. Henry VI., the successor of Barbarossa (1183-1196), laid Italy under a yoke of iron; he might perhaps in the end have assured the domination of the empire, if his career had not been suddenly cut short ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... business to see to it; accordingly no one done it; no wonder Brother DAY, sitting on Bench, has looked forth with stony stare, his heart consumed with secret sorrow. Whilst everyone congratulating Judges on rare honour done to them by both Houses of Parliament, the distinction has proved illusory. World pictured each learned Judge with copy of Vote of Thanks, framed and glazed, hung in best parlour; and behold! they have never had it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... have a fancied control, than on those which confessedly transcend our understanding. Thus is it ever with men. The wonders of creation meet them at every turn, without awakening reflection, while their minds labor on subjects that are not only ephemeral and illusory, but which never attain an elevation higher than that the most ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... continued his travels in Italy, France, and Germany, in the hope of recovering his powers of virility. He failed not, as usual, to meet with physicians who, from mercenary motives, held out to him the most illusory prospects of a perfect cure. At length, after six years passed in travelling and in vain attempts to regain the generative faculty, he returned to the candid and able physician from whom he had the truth, and whose opinion ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... head impatiently. "I didn't say that. But I'll say, now, that you're losing your grip on reality. You are constructing a system of fantasies, and the first thing you know, they will become your reality, and the world around you will be unreal and illusory. And that's a state of mental incompetence that I can ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... talent, appearing in a perverted age, are carried by their very genius all the more certainly to ruin. All that, in a more favorable period, would have raised them to be stars in the art firmament, now made them fall like some ignis fatuus, the brilliant light of which owes its illusory existence only to miasma. This striking fact appears, at first sight, inexplicable; but it is easy to understand, if we consider the different character of the two arts. Plastic art had formerly emulated painting, and thus, especially in relief, had suffered unmistakable injury to its ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... derive a large profit from the expected mine. On one occasion the bells of Horncastle Parish Church were rung in the night, announcing the joyful tidings that coal had been found. But, alas! all these hopes were illusory. Mr. Parkinson himself became a ruined man, and many a poor investor lost his all, sunk in the mine. The attempt thus proving abortive, the mine was closed, and remained so for several years, Mr. Parkinson himself disappearing from the scene, and his Woodhall ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... style, and indulging in the usual licence. Deputies from witchdom attended from all parts, even from Scotland. When reproached by some of his slaves for failing to come to the rescue in the torture-chamber or at the stake, their lord replied by causing illusory fires to be lit, bidding the doubters walk through the harmless flames, promising not more inconvenience in the bonfires of their persecutors. Lycanthropic criminals were also brought up who had prowled ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... much more widely understood by the colored mothers. Indeed, there is a sort of illusory tradition abroad that the negroes are a race of cooks; though, according to my observation, nothing could be farther from the truth. And cooking is only one part of domestic economy. Of this art as a whole, ...
— The American Missionary—Volume 39, No. 02, February, 1885 • Various
... two courses. Either it must discriminate in their favor or it must discriminate against them. The third alternative—that of being what is called "impartial"—has no real existence; and it is essential that the illusory nature of a policy of impartiality should in the ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... reputation for their reckless indulgence in an erotic life. They know most, and it is psychologically not surprising that just on that account they are most reckless. The instinctive fear of the half knower has left them; they live in an illusory safety, the danger has become familiar to them, and they deceive themselves with the idea that the particular case is harmless. If the steps to be taken were to be worked out at the writing desk in cool mood and sober deliberation, the knowledge would at least often be a certain ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... That he had not a sister had been one of the sorrows of his childhood: it seemed to him that a sister would have understood him more than a brother could have done. And when he met Judith he felt that childish and illusory hope of having a brotherly love spring up in him. Not being in love, love seemed to him a poor thing ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Ward also came seeking, boyish, eager, contemptuous of any barrier so illusory as the fact of her trances, which she confessed to him. Her words hardly impressed themselves on his mind, and he replied, flippantly: "That cuts no ice with me. You couldn't be anything I wouldn't like. You're living too close and your nerves are sort ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... restrained by bringing the murderers to condign punishment, all the exertions of the Government to prevent destructive retaliations by the Indians will prove fruitless and all our present agreeable prospects illusory. The frequent destruction of innocent women and children, who are chiefly the victims of retaliation, must continue to shock humanity, and an enormous expense to drain the Treasury of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... these and other better thoughts, the visitor, lightly humming a tune, now began indifferently pacing the poop, so as not to betray to Don Benito that he had at all mistrusted incivility, much less duplicity; for such mistrust would yet be proved illusory, and by the event; though, for the present, the circumstance which had provoked that distrust remained unexplained. But when that little mystery should have been cleared up, Captain Delano thought he might extremely regret it, did he allow ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... into a passage which would have led us to the Chiostro Grande, where strangers, and especially ladies, have no right to go. It was a secluded corridor, very neatly kept, bordered with sepulchral monuments, and at the end appeared a vista of cypress-trees, which indeed were but an illusory perspective, being painted in fresco. While we loitered along the sacristan appeared and offered to show us the church, and led us into the transept on the right of the high altar, and ushered us into the sacristy, where we found two artists copying some of Fra Angelico's pictures. ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Madame, to confer with divers notable persons of the political and religious worlds who reside at Neuilly. The Marquise de Rieu wishes me to be a candidate, in her country, for a senatorial seat which has become vacant by the death of an old man, who was, they say, a general during his illusory life. I shall consult with priests, women and children—oh, eternal wisdom!—of the Bineau Boulevard. The constituency whose suffrages I shall attempt to obtain inhabits an undulated and wooded land wherein willows frame the fields. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... the rest of the coastwise ragtag, which was seeking harbor and holding-ground, came the ancient schooner Polly. Fog-masked by those illusory mists, she was a shadow ship like the others; but, more than the others, she seemed to be a ghost ship, for her lines and her rig informed any well-posted mariner that she must be a centenarian; with her grotesqueness accentuated ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... authenticity to the story, which sometimes make us smile, and sometimes rather bore us, in other novels are all to the purpose; for there is a real point in putting such a story in the mouth of the sufferer, and in giving us for the time an illusory belief in his reality. It is one of the exceptional cases in which the poetical aspect of a position is brought out best by the most prosaic accuracy of detail; and we imagine that Robinson Crusoe's island, with all his small household torments, will always be more impressive than ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... was still left to the Jews. The law courts, at least, being the organs of the public conscience of Russia, were bound to condemn severely the sinister pogrom heroes. But this hope, too, proved illusory. In the majority of cases the judges treated act of open pillage and of violence committed against life and limb as petty street brawls, as "disturbances of the public peace," and imposed upon their perpetrators ridiculously slight penalties, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... would be brought forward which would show a still greater progress. Within the last fifteen days, nearly 2,000 patents had been taken out, as against 5,000 in the whole of the previous year, which showed how operative a very small and illusory inducement had been to encourage invention. He had long been known as an advocate of patent law reform, and, therefore, felt bound to lose no opportunity of calling attention to its importance. Invention was in the hands of the inventor, the creator of trade. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... A fleeting, illusory hint of spring appeared for the moment in that street known among all the world's great avenues—the Champs Elysees, the Nevsky Prospect, the Corso, Unter den Linden—as "The Avenue." Its pavements ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. visionary &c. (imaginary) 515; immaterial &c. 137; spectral &c. 980; dreamy; shadowy; ethereal, airy; cloud built, cloud formed; gossamery, illusory, insubstantial, unreal. vacant, vacuous; empty &c. 187; eviscerated; blank, hollow; nominal; null; inane. Phr. there's nothing in it; " an ocean of dreams without a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... lover—come before the magistrate or the minister, and declare their motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not, he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them, and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After three months more, he should ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... visible increase of Indian control over the conduct of public affairs. Whilst disclaiming warmly any intention of paving the way for the introduction of parliamentary institutions into India, Mr. Morley had allowed an illusory semblance of parliamentary institutions to be introduced into the enlarged Councils by requiring their sanction for legislative measures brought forward by the Executive. The latter had to go through the same forms of procedure as if ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... he came nearer to it, and saw the mountain so different from what it had appeared, and the intervening space that, seen from afar, had looked so bare and sterile, all covered with fruit-trees and enriched with vineyards, he began to see how illusory the judgment of the senses may be; and the first doubt was planted in his young soul as he perceived that, while the mind may grasp Nature in her grandeur and majesty, the work of the sage must be to examine her in detail, and penetrate to the cause ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... trust, our eyes rather than our ears; and such is the conventional temper in which we receive the impression of our senses that I had no idea they were so near us. The destruction of my illusory feeling of distance was the most startling thing in the world. Instantly, it seemed, with the second swing and plash of the oars, the boats were right upon us. They went clear. It was like being grazed by a fall of rocks. I seemed to feel the wind ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... advance. Bread, meat, and vegetables were sold at prices greater than had ever before been known; while the wages of labour rose in exactly the same proportion. The artisan who formerly gained fifteen sous per diem now gained sixty. New houses were built in every direction; an illusory prosperity shone over the land, and so dazzled the eyes of the whole nation, that none could see the dark cloud on the horizon announcing the storm that was ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... to grumble; but if the case of unappreciated genius is hard, it goes harder still with the stomach whose claims are ignored. Slighted affection, a subject of which too much has been made, is founded upon an illusory longing; for if the creature fails, love can turn to the Creator who has treasures to bestow. But the stomach! . . . Nothing can be compared to its sufferings; for, in the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... being equal it is perfectly obvious that nothing but mere chance influenced my decision in the end. It is a mighty force that of mere chance; absolutely irresistible yet manifesting itself often in delicate forms such for instance as the charm, true or illusory, of a human being. It is very difficult to put one's finger on the imponderable, but I may venture to say that it is Flora de Barral who is really responsible for this novel which relates, in fact, the ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... would have been actually possible to see him grow. He grew at the rate of about an inch a week for the best part of a year. When he had finished he looked like nothing on earth. At one time we cherished a brief but illusory hope that he was going to turn into some sort of an imitation of a St. Bernard; but the symptoms rapidly passed off, and his final and permanent aspect was that of a rather badly ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... afresh by the physical and moral sense of the imperfections of their relations—a sense which made him desire her constant nearness, before his eyes, under his hand, and which, when she was out of his sight, made her so vague, so elusive and illusory, a promise that could ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... of indulgence in this illusory life became such that I lingered every summer longer, and finally until November, when, in that high and northerly locality, the snow had fallen and the lake began to freeze, living only under a bark roof, open to the air and to the snow, which fell on my bed during the night. I can easily ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... about that other wife, which involved the worst wound to her hereditary pride, mingled themselves as a newly-embittering suspicion with the earliest memories of her illusory love, eating away the lingering associations of tenderness with the past image of her husband; and her irresistible belief in the rest of Baldassarre's revelation made her shrink from Tito with a horror which would perhaps have urged some passionate speech ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... worth of these speculations in yet another way. Christian Science declares evil to be non-existent, illusory, an "error of thought." But that which is true of a species must be true of all its genera; if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, it follows that Socrates is mortal; if evil as a whole is nonexistent, that which applies to the general phenomenon ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... sleep such nights as these. I call them nights, yet what a strange mistake. The sunshine still lingers in the heavens with a golden glow; the evening vanishes dreamily in the arms of the morning; there is nothing to mark the changes—all is soft, gradual, and illusory. A peculiar and almost supernatural light glistens upon the gilded domes of the churches; the glaring waters of the Neva are alive with gondolas; miniature steamers are flying through the winding channels ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Mordecai, even if their communication had been free from that peculiar claim on himself strangely ushered in by some long-growing preparation in the Jew's agitated mind. This claim, indeed, considered in what is called a rational way, might seem justifiably dismissed as illusory and even preposterous; but it was precisely what turned Mordecai's hold on him from an appeal to his ready sympathy into a clutch on his struggling conscience. Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... duly considered, and the orthography, as far as feasible, is ruled by authority and custom, with an occasional slight glance at the probable etymology of the words—slight, because derivation is a seductive and frequently illusory pilot. Our language is said to have been arraigned by foreigners for its hissing enunciation; but, regardless of the rebuke, our pundits have, of late, unnecessarily increased the whistling by substituting the sibilant s for the vocal z, in all sorts of cases. Happily this same ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Red Cross, international laws on trade, fishery, travel, copyright, political crimes, barbarities in war-time, &c. But this war shows quite clearly that education—before anything else—should be a matter of international consideration and regulation. Behold, how illusory are all international restrictions when the education of a nation is quite excluded from any control! When the Nitzschean education of Germany teaches the German youth to despise all neighbours, all nations and races as inferior ...
— The New Ideal In Education • Nicholai Velimirovic
... excites my fancy, and leads me to attempt divinations of her past, until I find myself evolving a story which is not only of vast complexity, but has got painted into it merely the colours of my own hopes and aspirations. It is a story necessarily illusory, necessarily bound to make life seem even worse than before. Yet it is a grievous thing NEVER to distort actuality, NEVER to envelop actuality in the wrappings of ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... unreal. For such, the world is a far distant thing, lying out on the rims of consciousness, delicate and impermanent as sunset hues or the lights and gestures of the dream. The music of Debussy is the magistral and classic picture of this distant and glamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and transparent show, this thing that changes from moment to moment and is never twice the same, and flows away from us so quickly. But Strawinsky, on the other hand, is in the very midst ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... an instance of bitter irony on the part of Miss STORM JAMESON. Certainly a more formless mass of writing never within my experience masqueraded as a novel. There are ideas and reflections—these last mostly angry and vaguely socialistic—and here and there glimpses of illusory narrative about a group of young persons, brothers and a girl-friend, who live at Herne Hill, attend King's College and talk (oh, but interminably) the worst pamphlet-talk of the pre-war age. It is, I take ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... the assurance of their own peculiar happiness; its promises faithfully fulfilled—its menaces regularly executed, will unquestionably have much more weight than those of a gloomy superstition, which never exhibits to their view other than illusory benefits, fallacious punishments, which the man hardened in wickedness will doubt every time he finds an interest in questioning them: present motives will tell more home to his heart than those which are distant and at best uncertain. The vicious ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... and a patient and thorough comparison of all the methods proposed for obtaining the objects we all have in view. So far as my own participation in final legislative action is concerned, no one will expect me to acquiesce in any proposal that I regard as inadequate or illusory. If, as the outcome of a free interchange of views, my own judgment and that of the Committee should prove to be irreconcilably different and a bill should be presented to me which I could not accept as accomplishing the essential things sought, it would manifestly be my duty to veto it ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... Socialism" promise to counteract it. The citizen owes it to society to ask of every proposed program of change, "Will it, within a reasonable period, bring equality of opportunity?" To rest satisfied with less—a so-called tendency of certain reforms in the right direction may be wholly illusory—is not only to abandon one's rights and those of one's children, but to rob society of the only possible assurance of ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... as in many other things, the perspicacity of his genius enabled him to comprehend all the importance of a consecration bestowed on him by the Pope; more especially as Louis XVIII., without subjects, without territory, and wearing only an illusory crown, had not received that sacred unction by which the descendants of Hugh Capet become the eldest sons ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... entertaining two related ideas, it is to become a cold or furious monomania, fiercely and unrelentingly destroying a past it curses, and attempting to establish a millennium, and all in the name of an illusory contract, at once anarchical and despotic, which unfetters insurrection and justifies dictatorship; all to end in a conflicting social order resembling sometimes a drunken orgy of demons, and sometimes a Spartan convent; all aimed at replacing the real human being, slowly formed by his past with ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... is infinite can have no bounds. The man, therefore, who seeks to bound what has no bounds, endeavours to define what is, by its nature, undefinable; and finding that the one poor means which he has of conveying fallacious impressions of illusory things to his mind through his deadened senses, is utterly insufficient to give him an idea of what alone is real, he takes refuge in his crass ignorance and coarse grossness of language, and asserts boldly that the human ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... was easy to walk thirty to forty miles, and see neither a person nor a house. The more intelligent do sometimes guide their steps by sun, moon, and stars, or by glimpses of mountain peaks or natural features on the far and high horizon, or by the needle of the compass; but the perils are not illusory, and occasionally the most experienced ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... said, we want space to enter into these details, and we can only generalise bibliographically, repeating that literature is broadly classifiable into Books and Things in Book-Form—Specimens of Paper, Typography and Binding, or counterfeit illusory distributions of printer's letter into words and sentences and volumes by the passing favourites of each succeeding age—what Thoreau ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... towards the door; but he seemed to take no interest in the girl who was standing there, pale, trembling, and quite forgetting all she had been enjoined to do. Lionel, with those restless, fatigued eyes, regarded her for but a second—then he turned away, shaking his head. He had seen that illusory phantom ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... was fleeting, that everything wore out, that everything that was not dead would die, and that even the illusory ties holding them together would not endure. Their sadness did not bring them together. On the contrary, they were separated by all the force of their two sorrows. To suffer together, ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... as the ancients have it; and some of these latter will even lie on their backs, after a fall, and lift up their voices, and prove to you that in the nature of things they ought to have gone up, and their being down is monstrous; illusory. ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... much guilt as Huerta's, and the opposition to it was on the scale of banditry rather than revolution; but Mexico was far worse off after years of the war than it had been in 1913, and disregard of American rights was still the cardinal policy of the Government. Carranza's security, however, was illusory. In the Spring of 1920 Presidential elections were announced at last, and Carranza's attempt to force Ygnacio Bonillas, his Ambassador in Washington, into the Presidential chair led to a revolt which eventually attracted the leadership of Obregon. Carranza fled from Mexico City ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... British Museum shall have been deciphered, studied, and translated, it will probably be found that they contain a tolerably full indication of what Assyrian science really was, and it will then be seen how far it was real and valuable, in what respects mistaken and illusory. At present this mine is almost unworked, nothing more having been ascertained than that the subjects whereof the tables treat are various, and their apparent value very different. Comparative philology seems to ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... that she adored me; for the wrath of lovers always ends in curses. I had no hopes to give her, nor treasures to offer her, for mine are given to Dulcinea, and the treasures of knights-errant are like those of the fairies,' illusory and deceptive; all I can give her is the place in my memory I keep for her, without prejudice, however, to that which I hold devoted to Dulcinea, whom thou art wronging by thy remissness in whipping thyself and scourging that flesh—would that I saw it eaten by wolves—which would rather keep ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... beating tumultuously because in himself he carried the impression of the desert solitudes he had been traversing for the last six hours—the oppressive sense of an uninhabited world. When he raised his head a gleam of light, illusory as it often happens in dense darkness, swam before his eyes. While he peered, the sound of feeble knocking was repeated— and suddenly he felt rather than saw the existence of a massive obstacle in his path. What was it? The spur of a hill? Or was ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... appearance is mistaken for reality; and where consequently there is illusion and deception. Mother Juliana is aware that the crucifix is not really bleeding, as it seems to do, and she explicitly distinguishes such a vision from her later illusory dream-presentment of the Evil One. This dream while it lasted was, like all dreams, confounded with reality; whereas the other phenomena, even if made of "dream-stuff," were rated at their true value. Hence it seems to me that if such things have any outward independent ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... all, it is far more sensible than real love-making, where if the pleasure be more acute, the pangs are therefore the greater. She addresses to him the tenderest counterfeit verses; he returns them in kind. She even simulated such an illusory sadness that the duke has sent his own jester, who has but just arrived at court, to amuse her (ahem!) dullness, until he himself ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... really impressive books and other art-works of the world were produced by ordinary men, they would express more fear of women's pursuit than love of their illusory beauty. But ordinary men cannot produce really impressive art-works. Those who can are men of genius: that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. Accordingly, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... determined that for once 'a priori reasoning should have fair play, and not be crushed by a thing so illusory as fact. Accordingly, they got the gates closed, and collected round them. We came up, one after another, and were received with ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... they wanted to see the poultry fed, to view them from a distance on the horse-block; a restriction which had been imposed ever since Tom had been found guilty of running after the peacock, with an illusory idea that fright would make one of ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... find gradations, or a sufficient number of uniting links between two things, they become united or made one thing, and any classification of them must be illusory. Classification is only possible where there is a shock given to the senses by reason of a perceived difference, which, if it is considerable, can be expressed in words. When the world was younger and less experienced, people were shocked at what appeared great differences between living forms; ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... had deceived the metropolitan public; that no one had been taken and had then escaped, he would tell Miss Brown that he did not see his way. The light of his intelligence told him that promissory notes from such a source, even though signed by all the firm, would be illusory. If, on the other hand, Johnson of Manchester had been taken, then, he thought, he might accept ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... in a frightful state; and will not survive the destruction of my House and Family. That is the one consolation that remains to me. You will have fine subjects for making Tragedies of. O times! O manners! You will, by the illusory representation, perhaps draw tears; while all contemplate with dry eyes the reality of these miseries: the downfall of a whole House, against which, if the truth were known, there is no solid complaint. I cannot ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... scene of alarms. They began to comprehend that the insatiate Revolution was irritated even by the concessions they had made; that the blind fury of factions which had not paused before royalty surrounded by its guards, would not hesitate before the illusory inviolability decreed by a constitution; and that their lives, those of their children, and those of the royal family which remained, had no longer any assurance ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... intimate scheme of smaller scale. The one to the left, as seen from the Court of the Universe, tells of the dreams which led to the exploring and exploiting of the great West. Carefully designed figures of great refinement. represent "Hope" and "Illusory Hope," scattering tempting bubbles, heading the procession of stately women. They are followed by "Adventure," "Art," "Imagination," "Truth," and "Religion" and a group ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... and was clearly enjoying the pipe he used but rarely. Ann at his feet on the porch-step read aloud to him with indifference to all but the man she now and then looked up to with the loving tenderness his brief betterment fed with illusory hope. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit different for its having taken place; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense that SOMETHING IS TRANSACTING, is of course a feeling of what is illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as containing elements of delusion—these undoubtedly everywhere exist—but as being rooted in delusion altogether, just as materialists and atheists have always said it was. At most there might remain, when the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... design he should proceed thither. To what end should he? No more now can he build castles in the air, basing them on the power of creditor over debtor. That bubble has burst, leaving him only the reflection, how illusory it has been. Although, for his nefarious purpose, it has proved weak as a spider's web, it is not likely Colonel Armstrong will ever again submit himself to be so ensnared. Broken men become cautious, and shun taking credit a ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... of particles of soil. We confess to some original misgivings that a pipe resting only on an inch at each end, and lying hollow, might prove weak and liable to fracture by weight pressing on it from above; but the fear was illusory. Small particles of soil trickle down the sides of every drain, and the first flow of water will deposit them in the vacant space between the two collars. The bottom, if at all soft, will also swell up into any vacancy. Practically, if you reopen a drain well laid ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... Parma and Placentia were given in full propriety to Marie Louise, for herself, her son, and his descendants: yet, after long refusal to put them into possession, the injustice was consummated by an absolute spoliation, under the illusory pretext of an exchange without valuation, without proportion, without sovereignty, without consent; and the documents existing in the office of foreign affairs, of which we have had an account presented to us, prove, that it was at the instance and through the intrigues of the Prince of ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... that can put a stop to these abuses: they will exist, in spite of legislation, as long as the double character of owner and better can be united in the same person. If this person should not act in perfect good faith, all restraining laws will be illusory, because the betting owner has the cards in his own hands, and can withdraw a horse or make him run at his pleasure, or even make him lose a race in case of need. If the thing is managed with skill, it is almost impossible to discover ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... he met with at the outset of his enterprise could not but confirm him in his illusory hopes. Whilst he was at Lyons, engaged in preparations for his departure, Duke Charles of Savoy, whose territories were the first he would have to cross, came to see him on a personal matter. "Cousin, my good friend," said the king to him, "I ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... keep Americans in touch with the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the continent of Europe. No attempt will be made to give what Americans miscall "the best books," if by this is meant conformity to some high and illusory standard of past greatness; any twentieth-century book which displays creative power or a new outlook or more than ordinary interest or charm will be eligible for inclusion. Nor will the attempt be made ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... he was afterwards called to the bar, but literary pursuits withheld him from practicing. He had brought with him from Ireland his translations from Anacreon; and published these by subscription in 1800, dedicated to the Prince Regent (then the illusory hope of political reformers), with no inconsiderable success. Lord Moira, Lady Donegal, and other leaders of fashionable society, took him up with friendly warmth, and he soon found himself a well-accepted guest in the highest ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... great trial of his virtue was yet to come. The main object of our trip down the River of Barks—the terminus ad quem of the expedition, so to speak—was a bear. Now the bear as an object of the chase, at least in Canada, is one of the most illusory of phantoms. The manner of hunting is simple. It consists in walking about through the woods, or paddling along a stream, until you meet a bear; then you try to shoot him. This would seem to be, as the Rev. Mr. Leslie called his book against the deists of the eighteenth ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... the house, he went down to the cellar to see if the furnace was all right. He was amazed to see how naturally and cheerfully he had slipped back into the old sense of responsibility. Where was the illusory freedom he had dreamed of? Even the epiphany on the hilltop now seemed a distant miracle. That fearful happiness might never come again. And yet here, among the familiar difficult minutiae of home, what a lightness he felt. A great phrase ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... quitting the house the dread of some disaster had been pursuing her; only she had refused to see it—she had found oblivion from it in the new and agitatingly sweet sensations which Louis Fores had procured for her. But now the real was definitely sifted out from the illusory. And nothing but her own daily existence, as she had always lived it, was real. The rest was a snare. There were no forests, no passionate love, no flying steeds, no splendid adorers—for her. She was Rachel Fleckring and ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... as inevitably to bring about war. Of the dully unresponsive pacificist and the jingo patriot, quick to anger, the latter no doubt is the more dangerous to the cause of true freedom, yet both are "undesirable citizens." He who believes that peace is illusory and spurious, unless it be based upon justice and liberty, will be proud to battle, if battle he must, for ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... consciousness—a general sense of unreality having thus come to pervade the whole conception of Devachan. When the Eastern thinker speaks of the present earthly life as Maya, illusion, dream, the solid Western at once puts down the phrases as allegorical and fanciful, for what can be less illusory, he thinks, than this world of buying and selling, of beefsteaks and bottled stout. But when similar terms are applied to a state beyond Death—a state which to him is misty and unreal in his own religion, and which, as he sadly feels, is lacking in all the substantial comforts ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... observation point. How things appear when viewed from a Thought-Form. A wonderful phase of occult phenomena. Advantages and disadvantages of this form of clairvoyant visioning. Hindu Psychic Magic, and how it is performed. Remarkable illusory effects produced by Hindu Magicians. All is explained when the principle of the creation and projection of Thought-Forms is understood. Why the Hindus excel in this phase of occultism. An interesting description of Hindu Magic feats. The power of concentrated "visualization." ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... in mediation between Your Government and the Government of Austria-Hungary. While this action was taking place, Your troops were being mobilized against my ally Austria-Hungary, whereby, as I have already communicated to You, my mediation has become almost illusory. In spite of this, I have continued it, and now I receive reliable news that serious preparations for war are going on on my eastern frontier. The responsibility for the security of my country forces me to measures of defence. I have gone to the ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... either, having made up their minds early to seek a career in India, have failed to pass the Civil Service examinations, or, having originally intended to take up the teaching profession in England, are subsequently induced to come out to India by disappointments at home or by the often illusory hope of bettering their material prospects. When they arrive they begin work without any knowledge of the character and customs of the people. Some are employed in inspection and others as professors, and the latter especially are apt to lose heart when they realize ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... to increase and elevate, rather than simply to imitate and reduplicate, existence? No one who has read Lotze can fail to remember his striking comment on the ordinary view of the secondary qualities of matter, which brands them as 'illusory' because they copy nothing in the thing. The notion of a world complete in itself, to which thought comes as a passive mirror, adding nothing to fact, Lotze says is irrational. Rather is thought itself a most momentous part of fact, and the whole mission of the pre-existing ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... the self of man. The belief that the soul could be realized in some stage as being permanently divested of all action, feelings or ideas, led logically to the conclusion that the connection of the soul with these worldly elements was extraneous, artificial or even illusory. In its true nature the soul is untouched by the impurities of our ordinary life, and it ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... calls for help. A mechanic had written from South Boston asking us to see his wife's automatic writing, and a farmer had come down from Concord to tell us of a haunted house and the mysterious rappings on its walls. Almost in a day I was made aware of the illusory side of life." ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... facts in their defence. The difficulty was how to explain the association of the State Attorney and State Secretary, in whose good intentions and integrity there was a general belief. The solution was to be found in the illusory promises of reform under the heading of franchise and reorganization of the finances and other matters. These proposals, it was believed by Mr. Kruger and his party, would secure the support of the two above-named officials, as well as entice the capitalists ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... better afford to wait for further and more certain evidence than to commit itself to theories which may prove stumbling-blocks to truth until that indefinite time when future investigations shall show their illusory nature. ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... of the six paramita, principal means of attaining Nirvana, knowledge of the illusory character of all existence." ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... it is the spirit of Tsunemasa, and has come to thank those who have piously celebrated his obsequies. No one answers him, and the spirit vanishes, its voice becoming fainter and fainter, an unreal and illusory vision haunting the scenes amid which its life was spent. The priest muses on the portent. Is it a dream or a reality? Marvellous! The ghost, returning, speaks of former days, when it lived as a child in the palace, and received the Azure Mountain lute from the Emperor—that lute with the ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that "there ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... more, read, smoke, and behave like an ordinary citizen again. At first it was very confusing to him to have these two pictures overlapping each other like the changing views of a lantern, but in a little while he began to distinguish the real from the illusory. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... chicanery, and crooked intrigues which subsist in a real scene of the same character, although the objects of the ambition which prompts such arts had no existence. Men seemed to play at being courtiers in that illusory court, as ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... revolutions, the rises and falls of states are the most shadowlike dance of all. Even if the historian tries to go deeper, if he deals with economic conditions, with social organisations, with the study of the tendencies of the currents of thought, even then he is in the midst of shadows, the illusory shadows cast by unseen realities. This world is full of forms that are illusory, and the values are all wrong, the proportions are out of focus. The things which a man of the world thinks valuable, a spiritual man must cast aside as worthless. The diamonds of the world, with their glare and glitter ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... as outside of society, whose movements it governs from on high (a wholly gratuitous and probably illusory opinion); or whether we deem it immanent in society and identical with that impersonal and unconscious reason which, acting instinctively, makes civilization advance (although impersonality and ignorance of self are contrary ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... to enjoy greatly this theory of his own final extinction, and he exclaims with infinite self-satisfaction, "this pure and ennobling sense of truth he would scorn to barter for the selfish and illusory hope of an eternity of personal existence." This is quite a jolly ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... you part off from pleasures and pains the element which makes them appear to be greater or less than they really are: you will acknowledge that this element is illusory, and you will never say that the corresponding excess or defect of pleasure or pain is ...
— Philebus • Plato
... Raoul by the halter of an IOU. By means of this relief the funds of the paper were secured for six months. In the eyes of some writers six months is an eternity. Besides, by dint of advertising and by offering illusory advantages to subscribers two thousand had been secured; an influx of travellers added to this semi-success, which was enough, perhaps, to excuse the throwing of more bank-bills after the rest. A little ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... kept to the strand as much as possible. It was there that he met with the pitfalls. They were multiplied before him under three forms: the pitfall of water, the pitfall of snow, and the pitfall of sand. This last is the most dangerous of all, because the most illusory. To know the peril we face is alarming; to be ignorant of it is terrible. The child was fighting against unknown dangers. He was groping his way through something which might, perhaps, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of myself. I often jeer at myself mentally as I feel myself throbbing and fearful, knowing that when I stand up I shall be all right, and yet I cannot conquer the physical terror and trembling, illusory as I know them to be. People often say to me, "You look too ill to go on the platform." And I smile feebly and say I am all right, and I often fancy that the more miserably nervous I am in the ante-room, the better I speak when once on the ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... white boulder at ebb tide. On the door-stone stood a clean old woman, in a dark-striped linen gown, a red kerchief, and a linen cap, talking to some speckled fowls which appeared to have been drawn towards her by an illusory expectation of cold potatoes or barley. The old woman's sight seemed to be dim, for she did not recognize Adam till he said, "Here's the key, Dolly; lay it down for me ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... no sense of motion at all. She, too, like Jorgenson, was tired of thinking. She abandoned herself to the silence of that night full of roused passions and deadly purposes. She abandoned herself to an illusory feeling; to the impression that she was really resting. For the first time in many days she could taste the relief of being alone. The men with her were less than nothing. She could not speak to them; she could not understand them; the canoe might have been moving by ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... tired of the day with its profitless labours, And tired of the night with its lack of repose, I am sick of myself, my surroundings, and neighbours, Especially Aryan Brothers and crows; O land of illusory hope for the needy, O centre of soldiering, thirst, and shikar, When a broken-down exile begins to get seedy, What a beast of a country ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... pan-German literature is certainly not only bold but ingenious in this respect. Is any one great outside Germany? Very well, let us trace his German origin. It may be remote, it may be hidden by centuries of illusory nationality, but it must be there. France has her apostles of superiority. Their style is more flexible, their pretensions less clumsy, but they neglect no opportunity of seducing us into a belief that ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... the success of that candidate, than the needle of a compass can help pointing awry when there is a magnet hidden in the binnacle. Here, again, we have no right to censure or complain. Yet we cannot help marvelling at the hallucination which can induce able men to prefer the brief and illusory honors of political station to the substantial and lasting power within the grasp of the successful journalist. He, if any one,—he more than any one else,—is the master in a free country. Have we not seen almost every man who has held or run for the Presidency during the ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... be referable to an earlier era. But although compulsory sacrifices appear to have ceased from about the first century of the Christian era, it is certain that voluntary sacrifices continued through many subsequent ages. This clue is therefore illusory. Neither does the custom itself serve to connect the Yamato with any special race, for it is a wide-spread rite of animistic religion, and it was practised from time immemorial by the Chinese, the Manchu Tatars, and many other nations of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... had broken down before the gradual inroads of an alien luxury and the opening of wide fields of empire to plunder. It is an age of incredible scandal, of mob law, of coups d'etat and proscriptions, saved only from utter gloom by the illusory light shed from the figures of a few great men and by the never absent sense of freedom and expansion. There still remained a republican liberty of action, an inspiring possibility of reform, an outlet for personal ambition, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... to commit to writing a proposal which has been ripening in my mind during our three months' acquaintance. My age and my convictions alike disincline me to set too much store on the emotion men call 'love,' which in my experience is illusory as the attractions provoking it are superficial. But as a solitary man I have long sighed for the blessings of Christian companionship, or a union founded on mutual esteem and fruitful in well-doing. While from the ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of musical instruments, and "the delights of the sons of men,"—he did so that, having tried and sifted all these things, he might, by the exercise of a ripe and untrammeled judgment, decide what amongst them is illusory and but as a passing show, and what—be it never so small a remnant—has in it the promise of eternal subsistence, and therefore of vital worth; and that, having so decided and thus gained an even mind, he might prepare serenely to take leave of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... discounted in the country districts by the deliberate plans of the Sinn Feiners, and in the towns, or rather in Dublin, by a sense of the futility of all war, and in particular this war, whose aims were vague enough to the statesmen, and appeared almost illusory to the worker. Hence anyone reading the Workers Republic could have noticed whole passages that might have been taken direct from the German ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... seem to follow naturally upon my observation, which was, indeed, born of idle fancy. (I know very well C.'s death eventuated long prior to the building of the stately colonnade that fronts the present baths, and that therefore the footprint is illusory.) I am growing used to a certain irrelevancy in YAHKOB's conversation. My German is of the date of CHARLEMAGNE, and is no more understood here than is the Greek of SOCRATES in the streets of Athens. YAHKOB was especially told off for my service because he thoroughly understood and talked English. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... generals, as the rising power in Japan. Hideyoshi, in the hope of preserving the rule in his own family, had married his son, a child of six, to Iyeyasu's granddaughter, and appointed six ministers to act as his guardians. He did not count, in cherishing this illusory hope, on the strength of human ambition. Nor did he give thought to the bitter disgust with which the haughty lords and nobles had yielded to the authority of one whom they regarded as an upstart. The chances of the child's coming to power were ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... almost tremulous elation. He was bringing her home after bridal wanderings that had never lost their element of dream-like unreality. There had always been the feeling that he might wake any day to find Italy and Karen both equally illusory. But to see Karen in his home, taking her place in his accustomed life, would be to feel his joy linking itself ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... logical pros and cons of the measure before him. We see, in fact, that not only is his thinking determined by a complex of whose action he is unconscious, but that he believes his thoughts to be the result of other causes which are in reality insufficient and illusory. This latter process of self-deception, in which the individual conceals the real foundation of his thought by a series of adventitious props, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... likeness stamped among visible realities, the more sagacious grew its expression, the more lifelike its gestures and movements, and the more intelligibly audible its voice. Its garments, too, glistened so much the brighter with an illusory magnificence. The very pipe, in which burned the spell of all this wonderwork, ceased to appear as a smoke-blackened earthen stump, and became a meerschaum, with painted ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to moulder in a room over the north porch of this church Chatterton professed to find the Rowley manuscripts. In this room, "here, in the full but fragile enjoyment of his brief and illusory existence, he stored the treasure-house of his memory with the thoughts that, teeming over his pages, have enrolled his name among the great in the land of poetry and song. Happy here, ere his first joyous aspirations ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... night six months ago, when she had called him 'the limit.' Whence came it, or was it ghost of scent—sheer emanation from memory? She looked round her. Nothing—not a thing, no tiniest disturbance of her hall, nor of the diningroom. A little day-dream of a scent—illusory, saddening, silly! In the silver basket were new cards, two with 'Mr. and Mrs. Polegate Thom,' and one with 'Mr. Polegate Thom' thereon; she sniffed them, but they smelled severe. 'I must be tired,' she thought, 'I'll go and lie down.' Upstairs ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
