"Unreason" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tree I know not, it was planted so long ago: but surely it is none of God's planting, neither of the Son of God: yet it grows in all lands and in all climes, and sends its hidden suckers far and wide, even (unless we be watchful) into your hearts and mine. And its name is the Tree of Unreason, whose roots are conceit and ignorance, and its juices folly and death. It drops its venom into the finest brains; and makes them call sense, nonsense; and nonsense, sense; fact, fiction; and fiction, fact. It drops its venom into the tenderest hearts, alas! and makes them call wrong, right; ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... without insolence as without fear or flutter, of what he is and what others are. A courage to quell the proudest, an honest pity to encourage the humblest. Withal there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot: much vain unreason he hears; lays up without response. He is not there to expect reason and nobleness of others; he is there to give them of his own reason and nobleness. Is he not their servant, as we said, who can suffer from them, and for them; bear the ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... thoughtfully, "that, if we really knew how, it would surprise us. Married life is as much a mystery to us outsiders as the life to come, almost. The ordinary motives don't seem to count; it's the realm of unreason. If a man only makes his wife suffer enough, she finds out that she loves him so much she must forgive him. And then there's a great deal in their being bound. They can't live together in enmity, and they must live together. I dare say the offence had merely ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... act of Congress to engage in the coasting trade;[842] as was also a Louisiana statute ordering masters and wardens of the port of Orleans to survey the hatches of all vessels arriving there and to enact a fee for so doing.[843] "The unreason and the oppressive character of the act" was held to take it out of the class of local legislation protected by the rule of the Cooley case.[844] Likewise, while control by a State of navigable waters wholly within its borders has ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... University Presidency. His constant liberality and labors. His previous life; growth of his fortune; his noble use of it; sundry original ways of his; his enjoyment of the university in its early days; his mixture of idealism and common sense. First celebration of Founder's Day. His resistance to unreason. Bitter attacks upon him in sundry newspapers and in the Legislature; the investigation; his triumph. His minor characteristics; the motto "True and Firm'' on his house. His last days and hours. His political ideas. His quaint sayings; intellectual and moral characteristics; ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... often supposed to the realm of politics. Political causes are often incidental causes and determine the time and place of wars but do not create them. Cramb (66) says that wars persist in spite of their unreason, because there is something transcendental that supports them, and this transcendental purpose is the desire for empire. Powers (75) says that nations fight for tangible things and also for intangible things. The tangible things are existence, commerce, independence, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... her, till the hour when she could bear the room no more. She had fought with beasts there, and had prevailed. Yet unreason (as she had made herself call it) lifted a bruised head at the last. Papers! Papers, after such a kiss! Oh, the folly of the wise! Caught up she knew not whence, harboured in the mind she knew not how, the bitter words of an ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... on property is set aside, and an exceptionally personal disqualification is created for the mere purpose of excluding her. When it is added that in the country where this is done a woman now reigns, and that the most glorious ruler whom that country ever had was a woman, the picture of unreason and scarcely disguised injustice is complete. Let us hope that as the work proceeds of pulling down, one after another, the remains of the mouldering fabric of monopoly and tyranny, this one will not be the last to disappear; that the opinion of Bentham, of Mr. ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... who are called Pepyzitae [Montanists] and also those who by this one opinion are worse than all heretics, in that they dissent from all as to the venerable day of the Easter festival, we subject to the same punishment, viz.: confiscation of goods and exile, if they persist in the same unreason. But this we especially demand of Christians, both those who are really such and those who are called such, that they presume not, by an abuse of religion, to lay hands upon the Jews and pagans who live peaceably and who attempt nothing riotous or contrary to the laws. ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... difficult to a stranger's comprehension as a transition state of affairs. But this I can see plainly; that every improvement which is made is received by those whom it most concerns with a horror which amounts almost to madness. So lovely to the ancient British, well-born, feudal instinct is a state of unreason, that the very absence of any principle endears to it institutions which no one can attempt to support by argument. Had such a thing not existed as the right to purchase military promotion, would any satirist have been listened to who ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... treason and fierce unreason should league and lie and defame and smite, We that know thee, how far below thee the hatred burns of the sons of night, We that love thee, behold above thee the witness written ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... amendment to the Constitution providing for two presidents, one from the South and one from the North, with a veto over each other's acts. Any absurdity for the sake of slavery! Perhaps disease had something to do with this unreason. He died in April ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... decision of the Supreme Court. Under such circumstances, how the Commander-in-Chief, under Congress, of the forces of the United States could re-create these defunct States, and make it mandatory on Congress to receive their delegates, has always appeared to us one of those mysteries of unreason which require faculties either above or below humanity to accept. In addition to this fundamental objection, there was the further one, that almost all of the delegates were Rebels presidentially pardoned into "loyal men," were elected with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... would deprive him, too, of his place among these great masters of free and exuberant farce. Diderot, at any rate, must rank in the second class among those who have attempted to tread a measure among the whimsical zigzags of unreason. The sincere sentimentalist makes ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and that it did not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of your system." ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... unruffled: "My dear, I scent unreason. This is a high matter. If the French King compounds with Rome, it means war for Protestant England. Even you ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... scenes, or perhaps in the orchestra sitting near the conductor, Meroni; but now jealousy sprang up in her. If Claude were with Adelaide Shiffney in that box while she sat alone! If Claude had really known all the time that Adelaide Shiffney was coming and had not told her, Charmian! Unreason, which is the offspring of jealousy, filled her mind. She burned ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking voice: "Oh, why didn't you ever tell her? She thought you didn't like her." What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we have told her? His unreason endeared him to me more ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Mondement. It was the key of the swamp of St. Gond, the French centre. The Tower was held by the French when, by every military rule, they should have given it up. At length they lost it. They won it again, but because of sheer unreason, so far as the evidence shows, for at the moment they regained it Mondement had ceased to be anything but a key to a door which had been burst wide open. Foch, by the books, was beaten. But Foch as we know was fond of quoting Joseph de Maistre: "A ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... himself rightly know. The discovery that he bore the same name as his employer had once might have set off some unpleasant train of subconscious reflection, accentuating the bitter sense of class distinction and the unreason of it, which he was only too prone to entertain. He did not want any "kindness" from rich people. He worked for them because he must, but he worked in a spirit of armed neutrality at the best, like so many of his kind, and he spat mentally upon Carnegie ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... which epithet I would signify that comradeship at Chigi's villa at Rome in orgies of paint pots and brushes, flesh pots and flagons, feasts of reason and of unreason, wherein we were alike insatiable until the light of our revels went out in the death of ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... work as inexorably in France as elsewhere; he predicted that if this new issue were made there would come a depreciation of thirty per cent. Singular, that the man who so fearlessly stood against this tide of unreason has left to the world simply a reputation as the most brilliant cook that ever existed! He was followed by the Abbe Goutes, who declared,—what seems grotesque to those who have read the history of an irredeemable paper currency in any country—that new issues of paper money "will supply ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... "Unreason has a potent advocate in you, Miss Liddell," said Errington; smiling a softer smile than usual. "But I want you to understand and appreciate Miss Bradley. She is a fine creature in every sense of the word. As friend, I am sure she would be loyal with a reasonable loyalty, and ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... are dependent on the fund, Champney Googe works many a night overtime and gives his extra pay to help out. I know, too, that when a strike threatens, he, who is now in the union because he is convinced he can help best there, is the balance-wheel, and prevents radical unreason and its results. There's trouble brewing there ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... believes his country better than any other country. Now, they cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it follows that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active manifestation—it is fond of shooting—patriotism would be well enough if it were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same feeling that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels us likewise to go over the border to quench the fires and overturn ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... unreason of women. Beata began to cry as I handed her over to Miss Leslie, who looked daggers at me, and I am quite sure called me, in her own mind, "A ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... experiences. In religion as in everything else the father was a formalist, and such religious views as he held were those of the Aufklaerung, for which all forms of spiritual emotion were the folly of unreason. Religion was a permanent and sustaining influence in the life of Goethe's mother, but her religion consisted simply in a cheerful acquiescence in the decrees of Providence. Of the soul's trials and sorrows, as they ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... discrepancy between reading his plays and seeing them Tried to like whatever they bade me like Truth is beyond invention We did not know that we were poor We see nothing whole, neither life nor art What I had not I could hope for without unreason What we thought ruin, but what was really release When was love ever reasoned? Wide leisure of a country village Words of learned length and thundering sound World's memory is equally bad for failure and success Worst came it was not half so bad as what had gone before You cannot be ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... 'Mere unreason to think of the performance alone,' said James, setting up his trusty ladder. 'What would become ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... good to know that, even in speculations on 666, there are different degrees of unreason. All the diviners, when they get a colleague or an opponent, at once proceed to reckon him up: but some do it in play and some in earnest. Mr. David Thom found a young gentleman of the name St. Claire busy at the Beast ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong. There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and in exhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a soldier—passe encore. But the death of Shelley was not his goal. And the death of the birds is so little characteristic of them that, as has just been said, no ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Indeed one of their evils is that they make a writer and his readers believe that he is exercising his reason when he is only moving from trite image to image. If eloquence is reason fused with emotion, writing, or speaking, full of dead metaphors is unreason fused with sham emotion. I add in illustration a further list of dead metaphors lately noticed: 'Branches of the same deadly Upas Tree. Turning a deaf ear to. The flower of our manhood. Taking off the ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... sometimes withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for the same sea. By that road he would travel over a swell of rising ground covered with short, withered grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason. Beyond the ridge, which was crowned with some sort of street-lamp, anything was possible; but up to the lamp it seemed to him that he knew the road as well as he knew the parade-ground. He learned to look forward to the place; for, once there, he was sure of a good night's rest, and ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... was sweet," thought I, "last season, but 'twere surely wild unreason Such tiny hope to freeze on as was offered by my Star, When she whispered, something sadly: 'I—we feel your going badly!'" "And you let the chance escape ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... one's mother? ... Richard! I think you're trying what dreadful things you can find to say ... when I write home every three months!" And provoked by this fresh piece of unreason she opened fire in earnest, in defence of what she believed to be their true welfare. Richard listened to her without interrupting; even seemed to grant the truth of what she said. But none the less, even as she pleaded with him, a numbing sense of futility ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... those emotional moralities in the way of sympathy and benevolence and justice which he adored would be lowered to the level of mere mechanism. "If men are not free in what they do of good and evil, then," he cries, in what is surely a paroxysm of unreason, "good is no longer good, and evil no longer evil." As if the outward quality and effects of good and evil were not independent of the mental operations which precede human action. Murder would not cease ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... unreason! Ah, yes, you are all that is ruthless and abominable, but then what eyes you have! Oh, very pitiless, large, lovely eyes—huge sapphires that in the old days might have ransomed every monarch in Tamerlane's stable! Even in the night ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... up from his newspaper in mild protest at such unreason. "Me? I ain't sittin' in this game. Seems like I mentioned ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... indeed. So the aerolites, or glacial boulders, or polished stone weapons of an extinct race, which looked like aerolites, were the children of Ouranos the heaven, and had souls in them. One, by one of those strange transformations in which the logic of unreason indulges, the image of Diana of the Ephesians, which fell down from Jupiter; another was the Ancile, the holy shield which fell from the same place in the days of Numa Pompilius, and was the guardian genius of Rome; and several ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... occasion lose their brutish emphasis and sink into humorous perspective. The sense of having some one for whom one's weakest and least effective moments are of interest and for whom one's weariness and unreason are only an additional bond, makes what were otherwise intolerable in our life easy and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... her logic of the heart, And wisdom of unreason, Supplying, while he doubts and weighs, The needed word ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... authorities had arranged everything, so that every traveller could have his own seat. At the Austerlitz station, however, a human avalanche assaulted the train. The doors were broken open, packages and children came in through the windows like projectiles. The people pushed with the unreason of a crowd fleeing before a fire. In the space reserved for eight persons, fourteen installed themselves; the passageways were heaped with mountains of bags and valises that served later travellers for seats. All ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... station he met a very charming widow, with a young step-daughter, who was shortly to return to England. Cecil Trafford admired him with a girl's unreason, and at last committed such an imprudence that the astute step-mother, seeing her opportunity, proposed the only reparation possible,—marriage. Cecil was a bright, pretty, wilful girl, and he liked her, yet he had a strong ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... while: valiantly, with swift decision, wilt thou strike in, when the favouring East, the Possible, springs up. Mutiny of men thou wilt sternly repress; weakness, despondency, thou wilt cheerily encourage: thou wilt swallow down complaint, unreason, weariness, weakness of others and thyself;—how much wilt thou swallow down! There shall be a depth of Silence in thee, deeper than this Sea, which is but ten miles deep: a Silence unsoundable; known ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... quieted down. A pot that has been boiling furiously doesn't grow cool in a moment, but it ceases almost instantly to boil; and though it may cool slowly, it cools surely. There was not an end of prejudice and unreason the moment the people had disposed of those who were plundering them, but prejudice began to lose its force as soon as men had the opportunity to engage in calm discussion, and to look forward hopefully ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... madness, yet who, in her months of sanity, was a worthy sister of such a brother. His kindness to her knew no bounds. It was strange that she had premonition of the recurring fits of her disorder; and when the ghost of unreason beckoned, Charles took her by the hand and led her to the appointed home. Charles Lloyd relates, that, at dusk one evening, he met them crossing the field together on their melancholy way toward the asylum, both of them in tears. In the smiles of Charles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... think of going on the stage,"' she said, childish yet very feminine unreason combining with atavistic puritanism. "I shouldn't like ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... but in the end nobody can follow after his own thinking and his own desire. At every turn he is confronted by that which is expected, and obligation follows obligation, and in the long run no champion can be stronger than everybody. So we succumb to this world's terrible unreason, willy-nilly, and Helmas has been made wise, and Ferdinand has been made saintly, and I have been made successful, by that which was expected of us, and by that which none of us had ever any real chance to resist in a world wherein all men ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... divided between the sickly sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And I have written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to rid one's self once for all of the canting unreason of "equality and brotherhood," to rise above the coils of material getting, and to make noble and beautiful and free one's own life. Sodom would have been saved had the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and our hope to-day depends primarily, not on the ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... intervening, his heartless rapacity laid bare to her; that all should not do, and she must still keep the best place in her heart for this accursed fellow, is a thing to make a plain man rage. I had never much natural sympathy for the passion of love; but this unreason in my patron's wife disgusted me outright with the whole matter. I remember checking a maid because she sang some bairnly kickshaw while my mind was thus engaged; and my asperity brought about my ears the enmity of all the petticoats about the house; of which I recked very little, but it amused ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... often in men's affairs unexpectedly—even irrationally—illuminating moments when an otherwise insignificant sound, perhaps only some perfectly commonplace gesture, suffices to reveal to us all the unreason, all the fatuous unreason, of our complacency. "Go ahead" are not particularly striking words even when pronounced with a foreign accent; yet they petrified me in the very act of smiling at myself in the glass. And then, refusing to believe my ears, but already boiling with indignation, ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... length to the downfall and destruction of all authority. Our opponents' objection that we, too, once made use of these rights, will not hold water; for we made use of an unreasonable right, which was part and parcel of an unreasonable system, in order to overthrow the unreason of this system.[125] ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... twilight had only begun to deepen, when, glancing from one of the windows of the chaise, I fancied I saw, between me and the hedge, the dim figure of a horse keeping pace with us. I thought, in the first interval of unreason, that it was a shadow from my own horse, but reminded myself the next moment that there could be no shadow where there was no light. When I looked again, I was at the first glance convinced that my eyes had deceived me. At ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... not as a rule a judge of good looks; and no doubt 'tis unreason in me to pity her the more for her comeliness. But as a matter of fact ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... prayed the Prioress, with folded hands, "give me patience in dealing with wilfulness; grant me wisdom to cope with unreason; may it be given me to share the pain of this heart in torment, even as—when thou didst witness the sufferings of thy dear Son, our Lord, on Calvary—a sword pierced through thine ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... But instead of a continual progress towards greater elegance and convenience, which might be expected to occur did people copy the ways of the really best, or follow their own ideas of propriety, we have a reign of mere whim, of unreason, of change for the sake of change, of wanton oscillations from either extreme to the other—a reign of usages without meaning, times without fitness, dress without taste. And thus life a la mode, instead of being life conducted in the most rational manner, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... of order and uprightness, he gave it that high place which it yet holds, and which it must hold; for when the decisions of the Supreme Court are questioned by a State or people, the fabric of our government is but a spider's web through which anarchy and unreason will stalk. ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... a great deal worse," Elinor said, in her unreason; "the one might be borne, but the other I will not endure. Sympathy, yes! They will all be sorry for me—they will say they knew how it would be. Oh, I know I have not profited as I ought by what has happened to me. I am unsubdued. ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... once more, of choosing between depravity and decency. But what had been taken out of his life seemed to leave a dreadful silence in his brain. And, at moments, this silence became dissonant with the clamour of unreason. ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... very widely contrasting with what we should consider right and sane to-day. The extraordinary neolithic civilizations of the American continent that flourished before the coming of the Europeans, seem to have got along with concepts that involved pedantries and cruelties and a kind of systematic unreason, which find their closest parallels to-day in the art and writings of certain types of lunatic. There are collections of drawings from English and American asylums extraordinarily parallel in their spirit and quality ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... than could be justified to reason." Englishmen might well have difficulty in justifying to their reason their affection for America; for to hear an Englishman speak of American peculiarities and eccentricities, it would often seem that to love such men would be pure unreason. But these criticisms are no true index to the British national feeling for the Americans as a people. Does a brother not love his sister because he says rude things about her little failings? Americans hear the criticisms and, their own hearts being alienated from Great ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... rule the political contests of our country go on without deeply affecting the peace of families. In the cotton States opinion was or had to appear to be at one. In the North the bitterness and unreason of limited groups of anti-slavery people excited the anger of men who saw in their ways and speeches continual sources of irritation, which made all compromise difficult. The strife of parties where now men were earnest as they never were before since revolutionary ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... which break out from the isolation of men from the community and the separation of their thoughts from the social principles will be extinguished in blood and unreason; but if the distress first creates the understanding, and if the political understanding of the Germans discovers the roots of social distress, then these incidents would also be felt in Germany as the symptom ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... this curious and very John Bullish unreason is still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws with a certain amount of regret, and his general attitude is quite Eldonian. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... was a pet name, the very familiarity of which suited every lip. Merely through enunciating it thus, the throng worked itself into a state of gaiety and became highly good natured. A fever of curiosity urged it forward, that kind of Parisian curiosity which is as violent as an access of positive unreason. Everybody wanted to see Nana. A lady had the flounce of her dress torn off; ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... between her words and action struck the chord which, in a man's heart, always responds to the touch of feminine unreason. She dropped into the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands, while Woburn watched the ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... five sinister comedians to entertain me. And I, what can I call myself—pure reason? No, a disgusting title. Rather, Unreason, since I am after all the Indifferent One. But all this is a quibble inspired by modesty. I am God. I am that which men have worshipped—the aloof one, the pitiless ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... tidewater region of South Carolina, and certain parts of Virginia were the seats of the soundest political thought of the day. The men who did this sane, wholesome political thinking were quite right in scorning and condemning the crude unreason, often silly, often vicious, which characterized so much of the political thought of their opponents. The strength of these opponents was largely derived from the ignorance and suspicion of the raw country ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Gladstone for several years threw himself with the whole weight of his untiring tenacity and force. He plunged into masses of accounts, mastered the coil of interests and parties, studied legal intricacies, did daily battle with human unreason, and year after year carried on a ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of unreason and injustice with what you call my "counsels of despair." I say there may be a future life and there may not be a future life. If there is a future life, a man will deserve it no less, and enjoy it no less, for having been happy here. If there is no future ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... could see them, feel them, hear them, address them - Halo-bedecked - And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason, Rigid in hate, Smitten by years-long wryness born of ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... know, I know," the tendril cried, In beautiful sweet unreason; Till lo! from its prison, glorified, It burst in the ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... at Eugene's College of Unreason was in this wise. In 1887, Mr. Ben Ticknor, the Boston publisher, was complaining that he needed some new and promising authors to enlarge his book-list. The New York "Sun" and "Tribune" had been copying Field's rhymes and prose extravaganzas—the former often very ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... Mr. Skimpole. "That's the crowning point of unreason in the business! I said to my landlord, 'My good man, you are not aware that my excellent friend Jarndyce will have to pay for those things that you are sweeping off in that indelicate manner. Have you no consideration for HIS property?' ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... sisters, only in a vastly enhanced degree; and besides these, they have others, born of and nurtured by that terrible slavery system under whose black shadow they live and die. Their idleness, their lack of neatness and order, their dependence, their quick and sometimes cruel passions, their unreason, their contempt of inferiors, their vanity and arrogance, their ignorance, their lightness and superficiality, are all the outgrowth of its diabolical influences. They are, in fact, no more idle, thriftless, passionate, or supercilious, than Northern women ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... symbols which lead to a final comprehension of the truth is no service to humanity or truth. The suppression of the Roman Catholic religion in Italy, if possible, would be only to leave its place vacant for unreason and anarchy, for the intellectual status of the common people does not admit of a more abstract belief. For that evil influence, however, which a recent writer has designated as Curialism, which to-day has its seat at the Vatican, and whose aim and ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... was unmoved by the outburst. It was to combat this very unreason of devotion that he had hoped for further confirmation. Villon would surely let slip a phrase which would serve his purpose, a word or two would do, a suggestive hint, and then a little colouring, a little sophistry, would make the little much and the ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... words of his confession from his throat. But Leopold never dreamed of attributing his emotion to any other cause than compassion for one who had been betrayed into such a crime. It was against his will, for he seemed now bent, even to unreason, on fighting every weakness, that he was prevailed upon to take a little wine. Having ended, he sat silent, in the posture of one whose wrists are already clasped by the double ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... 'Promises,' and she should hae waited wi' mair patience. Davie was doing weel to himsel' and going to be an honor to her, and to the village, and the country, and the hale Kirk o' Scotland, and it was the heighth o' unreason to mak' him accountable for trouble that cam' o' ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... condition already existed in the years of Lincoln's life which we are now observing, although the profound cause of that condition lay wholly in the future, in the years which were still far away. There is a charm in the very unreason and mysticism of such a faith, and mankind will never quite fail to fancy, if not actually to believe, that the life which Lincoln had to live in the future wrought in some inexplicable way upon the life which he was living in the present. The ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... which they call the universe is left to the guidance of unreason and chance medley, or, on the contrary, as our fathers have declared, ordered and governed by ...
— Philebus • Plato
... his forehead was knitted with vacuous perplexity; his eyes reflected blanks of unreason; his whole body had an effect of weak settling and subsidence. The man who worked next to him in the cutting-room at Lloyd's, and had searched at his side indefatigably from the first, stole a tender ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... people everywhere. But in political ideas they were more logical, sophisticated, and deeply revolutionary than is the case with the American anarchists, who, on the other hand both in their lives and their opinions, are extreme rebels against sex conventions. It is only another instance of how unreason in one extreme tends to bring about unreason in the other. Our prudishness, hypocrisy and stupid conventionality in all sex matters is responsible for the unbalanced license of ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... harm; abstract illogicalities do matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm. And this for a reason that any one at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself. All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times before he got out of bed. The practical politicians might say that this power was a harmless anomaly; that it was not a grievance. It ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... bonds of priestly dictum. Though one should swear by the altar of God, his oath could be annulled; but if he vowed by the corban gift or by the gold upon the altar,[1136] his obligation was imperative. To what depths of unreason and hopeless depravity had men fallen, how sinfully foolish and how wilfully blind were they, who saw not that the temple was greater than its gold, and the altar than the gift that lay upon it! In the Sermon on the Mount the Lord had said ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... no carriage appeared, neither did a line come from the expected lady explaining her tardiness. Hope deferred made Miss Gordon's nerves unsteady and her heart hard towards the cause of her daily disappointment. By some process of unreason which often develops in the aggrieved feminine mind, she conceived of Elizabeth as that cause, and the unfortunate child found herself, all uncomprehending as usual, fallen from the heights of approbation to which her progress ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... our work in common has gone on we have grown in good-will. We are fighting our battle still, but do not see our victory yet. We are not opposing men and women, but the enemies of men and women—ignorance, prejudice, and injustice. Many people bring into a new movement the whole intensity and unreason of their personal desires and discontents, and the train of progress must carry all this luggage along with it. Woman suffrage means equality in and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... against the organised force of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted Gods. It is the Kingdom of Heaven within us fighting against the brute powers of the world; and it is apt to have those qualities of unreason, of contempt for the counting of costs and the balancing of sacrifices, of recklessness, and even, in the last resort, of ruthlessness, which so often mark the paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children of light. It brings not ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... man rues them. He accepts himself as a slave: the slave (as I read this passage) to what is true in the idea of woman's purity. The insufferable creature of the smile is (as he says) the "mistaken and obtuse unreason of a she-intelligence"; but somewhere there was right in her demand. If man could but return, unstained! He must go forth, must explore the rays—of all the claims of woman on him this is most insistent; but if he could explore, and not return "absurd as frightful." . . . He cannot. Experience ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... employ Lily in the show-room: as a displayer of hats, a fashionable beauty might be a valuable asset. But to this suggestion Miss Bart opposed a negative which Gerty emphatically supported, while Mrs. Fisher, inwardly unconvinced, but resigned to this latest proof of Lily's unreason, agreed that perhaps in the end it would be more useful that she should learn the trade. To Regina's work-room Lily was therefore committed by her friends, and there Mrs. Fisher left her with ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... be the Master who orders all things,—(Reason or Unreason),—and although the social organization prepared by syndicalism might constitute a certain comparative stage in progress for the future, Olivier did not think it worth while for Christophe and himself to scatter the whole of their ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... as a token, but the doctor said that it belonged to him according to miners' law; and so it came to a moderate argument. Each was a thoroughly stubborn man, according to the bent of all good men, and reasoning increased their unreason. But the doctor won—as indeed he deserved, for the extraction had been delicate—because, when reason had been ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... problem grew ever more difficult. She was of a compassionate nature, and had a loving, patient and noble heart; prudent she was; the skilfulest and thriftiest of financiers; could well keep silence, too, and with a gentle stoicism endure much small unreason. Saupe says withal, 'Nobody liked a laugh better, or could laugh more heartily than she, even in her extreme old age.'—Christophine herself makes no complaint, on looking back upon her poor Reinwald, thirty years after all was over. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... history proper, cannot do so any longer without losing caste, without falling ipso facto out of court with men of education. It is enough for a man of letters if he has helped ever so little in the final staking out of the boundaries between reason and unreason!' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Their confidence was in each other; with Balder at her side, Gnulemah was fearful of the world no longer. But her visions were all spiritual; even the kisses on her lips were to her a sacred miracle! Love makes children of men and women,—shows them the wisdom of unreason and the value of soap-bubbles. These lovers must meet the world, but the light and freshness of the Golden Age should accompany them. The man held the maiden's hand, and so faced ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... from such straightforward unreason, are the etherealized, saccharine effusions of the "Glories of Mary," by Alfonso di Liguori! They represent the other pole of Mariolatry—the gentlemanly pole. And under the influence of Mary-worship a new kind of saintly physiognomy was elaborated, as we can see from ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... great relief at his heart. Everything at last seemed to be working out to advantage. He could not but remember how so very few weeks ago he had been urgent that Richard should spend his summer at Little Beeding and lend a hand in the noble work of defending Stella Ballantyne against ignorance and unreason. But the twinge only lasted a moment. He had made a mistake, as all men occasionally do—yes, even sagacious and thoughtful people like himself. And the mistake was already being repaired. He looked across the meadow that night at the lighted blinds ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.'s room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.'s bell away and balked ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... riddles, "Where does Mont Blanc end and where do I begin?" We do not want to be paralysed by philosophic doubt for the rest of our mortal lives on the hills. We prefer to be stirred to emotional life by those who are transported by love of beauty to the realms of unreason. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... made the sign of the cross of God, He knew the Roman prayer, But he had unreason in his heart Because of ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... Donald, cows distress me! They call up sad memories. I was chased by one in the park at Grantoun when I was a child. A fly had stung it, so it tried to kill me. This struck me as unreason run riot, and ever since then I have wished the Spaniards would go a step farther and make cow-fights the national pastime. I ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... Cape Colony would like to recover it for the Colony, while many white adventurers would like to prospect for mines, or to oust the natives from the best lands. The natives themselves are armed, and being liable, like all natives, to sudden fits of unreason, may conceivably be led into disorders which would involve a war and the regular conquest of the country. The firmness as well as the conciliatory tactfulness which the first Commissioner, Sir Marshal Clarke, and his ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... my pulses, and exclamation of 'Oh, Richie, Richie, if only I had my boy up and well!'—assuming that nothing but my tardy recovery stood in the way of our contentment—were examples of downright unreason such as contemplation through the comic glass would have excused; the tragic could not. I knew, nevertheless, that to the rest of the world he was a progressive comedy: and the knowledge made him seem more tragic still. He clearly could not learn from misfortune; he was not to be contained. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mine; The rest was Love's. He took me by the hand, And fired the sacrifice, and poured the wine, And spoke the words I might not understand. I was unwise in all but the dear chance Which was my fortune, and the blind desire Which led my foolish steps to Love's abode, And youth's sublime unreason'd prescience Which raised an altar and inscribed in fire Its dedication ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... passion. That penetrating fire ran in and roused those primary instincts that make their lair in the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better than cant,—and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning which enables them to supplant ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Barnaby Rudge's lunatic symptoms are compatible with the keenest enjoyment of nature's sights and sounds, fresh air and free sunlight, and compatible with loyalty and high courage. Many men might profitably change their reason for his unreason. Mr. Dick's flightiness is allied to an intense devotion and gratitude to the woman who had rescued him from confinement in an asylum; there lives a world of kindly sentiments in his poor bewildered brains. Of Mr. Toots, Susan Nipper says truly, "he may not ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... not been long distances that day. There was a vague fear in the young man's mind, although he tried to dispel it by the force of argument. "What has the girl to fear now?" his reason kept dinning in his ears, but, in spite of himself, something else, which seemed to him unreason, made him anxious. When he reached Annie Lipton's home, a fine old house, overhung with a delicate tracery of withered vines, he saw Annie's pretty head at a front window. She opened the door before he had time to ring the bell, and she ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... how his real life began in the middle teens, when his energy was "directed to one end, to improve myself"; "to form my own mind; to sound things thoroughly; to be free from the bondage of unreason and the traditional prejudices which, when I first began to think, constituted the whole of my mental fabric." He entered upon life with a "hide-bound and contracted intellect," and depicts "something of the steps by which I emerged from that frozen condition." He believes ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the discrepancy is less than meets the eye. The House of Commons is a Representative Assembly; the rhetoricians and fencers represent the unreason and the pugnacity of the partisans. A country has the politicians it deserves. I have heard the most ignorant girls rage against Mr. Gladstone; damsels in their teens who knew nothing of life or its problems, nor could have studied any question ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... accepted the explanation that Zimmern had given for his interest in Marguerite, I had never quite accepted it in my unreasoning heart. And in the depths of me the battle between love and reason and the dark forces of jealous unreason and suspicion had smouldered, to break out afresh on the ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... however, awaited the Senora. Without asking any questions, without taking anything into consideration, perhaps, indeed, because she feared to ask or consider, she had assumed that she would immediately re-enter her own home. With the unreason of a child, she had insisted upon expecting that somehow, or by some not explained efforts, she would find her house precisely as she left it. Little had been said of its occupancy by Fray Ignatius and his brothers; perhaps she did not quite believe ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... of an irreverent choir boy. At a Christmas party, a sort of feast of an Abbot of Unreason held in the less sacred parts of the cathedral precincts, the brat decorated the statue of an Archbishop with a pink and blue paper cap taken from a cracker. The effect must have been much the same as that produced by the subsidence of ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... old friend Ben Gaynor had built a summer home there two years ago and had christened the pond among the trees. Lake Gloria! Mark King liked the appellation little enough, telling himself with thorough-going unreason that there was a silly name to fit to perfection a silly girl, but altogether out of place to tie on to an unspoiled Sierra lake. Ben would have done a better job in naming it Lake Vanity. Or Self-Regard. King could think of a score of designations more to the ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... the newspapers, to be verified here, commented on there, gossiped about everywhere; and I, for my part, am frightened to look at a paper as a child in the dark—as unreasonably, you will say—but what then? what drives us mad is our unreason. I will tell you how it was. First of all, an English acquaintance here told us that she had been hearing a lecture at the College de France, and that the professor, M. Philaret Chasles, in the introduction ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... boy. There was a slight echo of rancor in his own voice, still it was patient, with the patience of a man with a woman and her unreason. All his temper of the night before had disappeared. He was quite honest in saying that he wished to do what was right and honorable. He was really much more of a man than he had been the day before. He was conscious of not loving Maria—his budding boy-love for her ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... instinctive prompting as to what is right and what is wrong, cohabitation, like many other points of the behavior, is left for reason or the will to determine; or, rather, as things now are to unreason; for reason is neither consulted nor enlightened as to what is proper and allowable in the matter. Nature's rule, by instinct, makes it devolve upon the female to determine when the approaches ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... his opponent with the brilliancy of his unreason, Kenny enlarged upon the humiliation he must experience when Garry learned the truth. At a familiar climax of self-glorification, in which Kenny claimed he had saved Brian from no end of club-gossip by his timely evasion of the truth, Whitaker lost ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the matchless "Lord of Misrule" (also known as the "Abbot of Unreason" and the "Master of Merry Disports"), who, attended by his mock court, king's jester and grotesquely masked revelers, visited the castles of lords and princes to entertain them with strange antics and uproarious ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... rob each other: we are all bent on the same enterprise, making the most of our lives. And I must tell you whatever quarrels or misunderstandings arise, they very seldom take place between people of different race; and consequently since there is less unreason in them, they ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... nebula thus presents itself to reason as a problem which demands solution no less than the origin of the planets. All the properties and laws of the nebula require to be accounted for. What origin are we to give them? It must be either reason or unreason. We may go back as far as we please, but, at every step and stage of the regress we must find ourselves confronted with the same question, the same alternative—intelligent ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... sister Margaret should take Josette, and return with Mata to open the house and make it ready for our reception. It had been the head-quarters of militia, Indians, and stragglers of various descriptions during our absence, and we could easily imagine that a little "misrule and unreason" might have had sway ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... madness and folly is perfect sanity with me. After all, Alf, is there not an amount of unreason in ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... figures duly noted as ornaments by contemporary rhetoricians, Sidney no doubt borrowed from Spain. There in one famous example they were shortly to excite the enthusiasm of the knight of La Mancha—'The reason of the unreason which is done to my reason in such manner enfeebles my reason that with reason I lament your beauty'—a sentence which one is sometimes tempted to imagine Sidney must have set before him as a model. Thus it would appear that, for their essential elements, Euphuism and Arcadianism, though ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... if it be but a little—in the gradual and healthful dissolving away of this mass of unreason, that the stream of "religion pure and undefiled" may flow on broad and clear, a blessing ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... It seems to him the most delightful thing in the world when she confesses that she never likes what she has, but always craves what she has not—that she hates everything useful and prosaic and likes everything which people declare she ought to renounce. She is unreasonable, and he loves her unreason—it bewitches him: she is obstinate, and he loves to feel the strength of her tiny will, as if it were the manifestation of some phenomenal force in her nature. Her scorn for common things, her fastidiousness, her indifference to the little obligations which compel less dainty ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... heather-roots, the grass-blades pressed upon the palm of her hand, were all so perceptible that she could experience each one separately. After this her mind made excursions into the dark of the air, or settled upon the surface of the sea, which could be discovered over there, or with equal unreason it returned to its couch of bracken beneath the stars of midnight, and visited the snow valleys of the moon. These fancies would have been in no way strange, since the walls of every mind are decorated with some such tracery, but she found herself suddenly pursuing such ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... that the blame for all complaints of that kind is to be charged to character, not to a particular time of life. For old men who are reasonable and neither cross-grained nor churlish find old age tolerable enough: whereas unreason and churlishness cause uneasiness at every time ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... dismissed, I think, as an indication of childish unreason, unworthy of any one who faces realities. It is still true that "the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... tranquil sea, his fancy and passions were plainly shown to be under the control of reason. And this had not escaped the notice of Plato,[285] it seems, who had earlier expressed in form and outline the part that fancy and unreason played in sleep in the soul that was by nature tyrannical, "for it attempts incest," he says, "with its mother, and procures for itself unlawful meats, and gives itself up to the most abandoned desires, such as in daytime the law through shame and fear ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... flagrant, rousing in its turn the indignation of injury to a pain unendurable. It is strange that the man who most keenly feels the wrong done him, should so often be the most insensible to the wrong he does. So dominant is the unreason of the moment, that the injury he inflicts appears absolute justice, and the injury he suffers absolute injustice. Yet such disputes turn seldom upon the main point at issue between the parties; it may not ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... world could not be sealed. And then came the thought that the insensible boy at her feet, escaping for a little while through sleep's primeval sanctity, was part of the robbed world also. Who had lost more than he by his unreason? If her heart did not melt then, it ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... in Monterey that if she ever made up her mind to marry she thought she would select Adan: he was more tolerable than any one she knew. It is doubtful if he had crossed her mind since; and now, with all a woman's unreason, she conceived a sudden and violent dislike for him because she had treated him too kindly in her thoughts. I liked Adan Menendez; there was something manly and sure about him,—the latter a restful if ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... mad. Her words had made me so. And when, to ask me that insistent question, she brought her face still nearer, I flung down the reins of my unreason and let it ride amain upon its desperate, reckless course. In short, I too leaned forward, I leaned forward, and I kissed her full upon ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... her poor Dim-outlined form Chancewise at night-time, Some old allure Came on me, warm, Fresh, pleadful, pure, As in that bright time At a far season Of love and unreason, And took me by ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... He knew his own vagabond unreason so well! No doubt he was mistaken. He had piled up the evidence as a charge is drawn up against an innocent person, whom it is always so easy to convict when we wish to think him guilty. When he should have slept he ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... of a compassionate nature, and had a loving, patient, and noble heart; prudent she was; the skilfulest and thriftiest of financiers; could well keep silence, too, and with a gentle stoicism endure much small unreason.—Life of Schiller. ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... little more for the Stoic than destiny or fate. Harmony with nature was simply a sense of proud self-sufficiency. Stoicism is the glorification of reason, even to the extent of suppressing all emotion. Sin is unreason, and salvation lies in an external control of the passions—in indifference and apathy begotten of the subordination ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Ann Veronica became habituated to the peculiar appearance and the peculiar manners of the people "in the van." The shock of their intellectual attitude was over, usage robbed it of the first quaint effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in direct relation to ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... perhaps the fault of Knox or his influence that a man should be sentenced to be hanged for the rough horseplay of a Robin Hood performance, or because he was "Lord of Inobedience" or "Abbot of Unreason," like Adam Woodcock; but the extraordinary exaggeration of a society which could think such a punishment reasonable ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... possibility, they say, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind can for an instant tolerate in the world. What is it, they ask, but barefaced crazy unreason, the negation of intelligibility and law? And if the slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent the whole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaos from recommencing her ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Hyslop, Ramachaska. And they will go hurrying home with their treasures pressed close to them. Stuffy bedrooms lined with hints of Sabbatical horror, strewn with bizarre refuse; musty smelling books out of whose pages fantastic shapes rear themselves against the gaslights, macabre worlds in which unreason rides like a headless D'Artagnan; evenings in the park arguing suddenly with startled strangers on the existence of the philosophers' stone or the astrological causes of influenza—these form a background for the curious men whom the ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... persistence of those shadows in his face worried her loving heart. She wondered if Mrs. Comerford saw a great change in him. It ought to have been a very happy occasion. Mrs. Comerford had met Shawn with an air of affection mingled with deprecation, as though she asked pardon for the old unreason. If she saw that the years had changed him she ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... apparatus. Till this moment the doctor had supposed himself to be an entirely normal man, but he had been sitting only a very short time before he began to become aware of the silent murmurs of these three minds around him. The darkness set his own mind free from clouds of excitement and from mists of unreason. That was the first step. But it did more. It developed in him this marvellous faculty of the hearing of silence, called by some divination. All his senses were rendered amazingly acute. A perfectly distinct impression of the precise feelings of Cuckoo, of Valentine, and of Julian respectively ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... ache and yearning. He had lost her. It was true—no denying it, no softening it. But a new idea had seared his sky—what of Bloeckman! What would happen now? There was a wealthy man, middle-aged enough to be tolerant with a beautiful wife, to baby her whims and indulge her unreason, to wear her as she perhaps wished to be worn—a bright flower in his button-hole, safe and secure from the things she feared. He felt that she had been playing with the idea of marrying Bloeckman, and it was well possible that this ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... to his face again, peering at Newman with his small blank eye-holes. There was something almost imbecile in the movement, and Newman hardly knew whether he was taking refuge in a convenient affectation of unreason, or whether he had in fact paid for his dishonor by the loss of his wits. In the latter case, just now, he felt little more tenderly to the foolish old man than in the former. Responsible or not, he was equally an accomplice of his detestably mischievous daughter. Newman was going to leave him ...
— The American • Henry James
... reflections represented, no doubt, many dicta that in the course of her young life she had heard from her father. To Stephen Fountain the whole Christian doctrine of sin was "the enemy"; and the mystical hatred of certain actions and habits, as such, was the fount of half the world's unreason. ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... common faith,' there was a snarl and a rush. The police-sergeant checked it, but advised the Society to keep on going. The Society withdrew into the brake fighting, as it were, a rear-guard action of oratory up each step. The collapsed harmonium was hauled in last, and with the perfect unreason of crowds, they cheered it loudly, till the chauffeur slipped in his clutch and sped away. Then the crowd broke up, congratulating all concerned except the sexton, who was held to have disgraced his office by having sworn at ladies. We strolled across ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly well, I still felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of my sight longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of unreason I had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Therefore, seeing the continuous unreason of the love-driven male, we say, "Love is blind"; seeing his light-mindedness, we say, "Love has wings"; seeing his evident lack of intelligence and purpose, we make him a mere child; seeing the evil results of his wide license, we euphemistically indicate some pain ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... restored, and containing those natural and ideal activities which disease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order, cannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and life with continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, and strife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that since no equilibrium is maintained for ever ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... of irritation went over the man's limbs. It was the utter, persistent unreason, the maddening blindness of the voice and ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... It was not, said her heart, that the thing itself was so dear to her; it was only that David ought to want immeasurably to do it. She always put great stress upon the visible signs of an invisible bond, and she would be long in getting over her demand for the unreason of love. ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... O, among other things, the bold unreason Of modern Zacharies who seek for fruit. If the tree blossom'd to excess last season, You must not crave the ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... should it not last? Is there any reason, in earth or Heaven, why we two should part? If there is—I will make that reason itself folly, and madness, and unreason. Dear, do not speak of this not lasting. Die, you say? Worse, far worse; as much as eternal death is worse than bodily dying. Last? Does any one know what for ever means, if we do not? Die, we must, in these dying bodies of ours, but ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... It is better doubtless to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and unreason alike, for when we do this we have not even a rush candle to guide our steps, not even a poor sowlth to dance before us on the marsh, ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... rises the feldaltar of Saint Barbara. Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns. From the high barbacans of the tower two shafts of light fall on the smokepalled altarstone. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies, naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly. Father Malachi O'Flynn in a lace petticoat and reversed chasuble, his two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mass. The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a plain cassock ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... infinity of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. Or it was like the stunning statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed stars. He was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason itself. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... over to the church from nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre and a gilt coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something to go with its mace and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker) it wanted less of Lady Ella. The cruelty and unreason of these attacks upon his wife distressed the bishop beyond measure, and baffled him hopelessly. He could not see any means of checking them nor of defending or ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... divined, and the determination to arrest her purpose, the desire to possess her entirely and at once, excluded every other wish or plan, and to feel was to act with Anthony Clarke, for he was born to emotional experience as the sparks fly upward. He had ever been a creature of unreason, morbidly conscious of self—and naturally, for in him struggled the blood of three races. His father was Scotch, and his mother—Spanish on the spindle side and Irish by way of a most mercurial father—remained an unsolved problem all her days, even to her husband. Her laughter was as ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... no reason for any special thing.[8] "Philosophy," Mr. Blood writes to me in a letter, "is past. It was the long endeavor to logicize what we can only realize practically or in immediate experience. I am more and more impressed that Heraclitus insists on the equation of reason and unreason, or chance, as well as of being and not-being, etc. This throws the secret beyond logic, and makes mysticism outclass philosophy. The insight that mystery,—the Mystery, as such is final, is the hymnic word. If you use reason pragmatically, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Aileen's nature was a portion that was purely histrionic, a portion that was childish—petted and spoiled—a portion that was sheer unreason, and a portion that was splendid emotion—deep, dark, involved. At this statement of Cowperwood's which seemed to throw her back on herself for ever and ever to be alone, she first pleaded willingness ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser |
