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More "Absurdity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ne l'est tout seul.' As she said of herself: 'elle est toujours tentee d'arracher les masques qu'elle rencontre.' Those blind, piercing eyes of hers spied out unerringly the weakness or the ill-nature or the absurdity that lurked behind the gravest or the most fascinating exterior; then her fingers began to itch, and she could resist no longer—she gave way to her besetting temptation. It is impossible not to sympathise with ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... said that his principles in relation to his fellows were fiendishly cynical. He was certainly not a very good man; and if he pretended to no reputation for devoutness, it was probable that he recognised the absurdity of his attempting such a pose. But politically he believed in Cardinal Antonelli's ability to defy Europe with or without the aid of France, and laughed as loudly at Louis Napoleon's old idea of putting the sovereign Pontiff at the head of an Italian federation, as he ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... a dozen Alabamas than as a man who applies himself deliberately to set class against class, and to cry up the institutions of another country which, when they come to be tested, are of no value whatever, and which reduce the very name of liberty to an utter absurdity." This utterance was greeted with great cheering—shouted not so much in approval of the Alabama as in approval of the ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... laughing-stock of their antagonists, they assumed the offensive; and, showing that the socialists understood nothing at all themselves of this organization that they held up as a scarecrow, they ended by saying that it was but a new socialistic chimera, a word without sense,—an absurdity. The latest writings of the economists are full of these ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... crackling, mirthless, ironical laugh; for it really was absurdity made sublime that this man, who had been abandoned by his wife, should now want to kill one who had abandoned her! This outdid Don ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the absurdity of the idea, and then with a gesture of impatience threw his cigarette into the fire and went to his room to try and get some sleep, for ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... see the absurdity of judging the Bible outside its historic conditions, or by standards not comparative. Said James Hinton, "The Bible needs interpreting by Nature even as Nature by it." And it is by this canon that we must interpret the concept of a Chosen People, ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... amazed the "help"; in fact, its absurdity convulsed them. The man laughed loudly; the cook buried her ebony face in her apron; the second girl bent double with mirth. Here was a quaint gentleman, indeed, and a great joker. But the gentleman was not joking. On the contrary, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... that this same young man did not shrink from the presence of an old withered crone; that he had a certain timid liking for little maidens who had not yet outgrown the company of their dolls, the listener would be apt to smile, if he did not laugh, at the absurdity of the fable. Surely, he would say, this must be the fiction of some fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer, the trick of some playwright. It would make a capital farce, this idea, carried out. A ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... ladies are accustomed to have children, nevertheless determined not to give hope up, and even when she came to live at Castlewood, was constantly sending over to Hexton for the doctor, and announcing to her friends the arrival of an heir. This absurdity of hers was one amongst many others which the wags used to play upon. Indeed, to the last days of her life, my Lady Viscountess had the comfort of fancying herself beautiful, and persisted in blooming up to the very ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... the book increased in scope and power as it proceeded. The beginning was conceived almost in a spirit of farce. The incidents and adventures had scarcely any other object than to create amusement. Mr. Pickwick himself appeared on the scene with fantastic honours and the badge of absurdity, as "the man who had traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and agitated the scientific world with the Theory of Tittlebats." But in all this there is a gradual change. Mr. Pickwick is presented to us ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... see around you. I also represent the United States government that does not tolerate a foreign power near her coast, since the days of President Monroe and before. The treaty you have made with Messenwah is an absurdity. There is only one king with whom ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Parliament. Logically, indeed, there may be difficulty in drawing the precise line of demarcation between a plan for conferring on Ireland the minimum of legislative independence which could without absurdity be dignified with the name of Home Rule, and a plan for giving to the boroughs and counties of Ireland the maximum of law-making power which could, without fraud upon the intelligence of the English people, be comprehended within the elastic phrase "extension ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... those who are aware of the petty retaliations of the little tyrants will well understand how with this crude arrangement it is possible to have the most absurd agriculture. True it is that for some time this absurdity, which would be ludicrous had it not been so serious, has disappeared; but even if the words have gone out of use other facts and other provisions have replaced them. The Moro pirate has disappeared but there remains the outlaw who infests the fields and waylays the farmer to hold him ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... reductio ad absurdum, which he occasionally drives home, showed the keenness of Puritan wit. How he must have smiled, nay even laughed, in the midst of his abstractions at that[E] metaphysical animal which illustrates the absurdity of his opponents. When 'The Freedom of the Will' was finished, and the author had sent it forth to do battle, he felt that the work of his ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... statesmen, beggars, men of fortune, and journalists, and goes about committing the most inconceivable crimes without the possibility of discovery, becomes simply ludicrous. Balzac, as usual, labours to reconcile our minds to the absurdity; but the effort is beyond his powers. The amazing disease which he invents for the benefit of the villains in the 'Cousine Bette' can only be accepted as a broad joke. At times, as in the story of the 'Grande ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the women of New York City for having gone so actively into partisan politics during the recent campaign, although none of the parties advocated giving them the right of suffrage, and pointed out the absurdity of hoping for "good government" from any party until it was reinforced by the votes of women. The speech created something of a sensation, and when she reached home a reporter was waiting for her, to whom she gave an interview which intensified ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... more independent: we do what we like; we dress as we find most suitable and most convenient; we are totally without the fear of any Mr. or Mrs. Grundy; and having shaken off the trammels of Grundyism, we laugh at the absurdity of those who voluntarily forge afresh and hug ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... candidate to hang on—yet the time is clearly coming when many of those who ought to be welcomed will be excluded for life, or else shelved at last, when past work, with a scientific peerage. Coupled with this attempt to create a kind of order of knighthood is an absurdity so glaring that it should always be kept before the general eye. This distinction, this mark set by science upon successful investigation, is of necessity a class-distinction. Rowan Hamilton, one of the greatest names of our day in mathematical science, never could ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... interviewing Miss Smith, as he certainly would if he were able. I tried to quiet him by offering to interview her myself. Think of me in a district school-house, talking to the teacher about the diameter of a grindstone! The absurdity must have struck my uncle. You should have seen the look he gave me over his spectacles, as he said, 'You, who know nothing, except ball games, and boat races, and raising the devil generally, interview a girl with a diploma! You would probably end ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... didn't mean to play the fool. But you must admit that it had a queer sound." I repeated the adjectival sentence under my breath. It really was a rather remarkable piece of onomatopoeia. And then I reflected on the absurdity of our conversation. How could we achieve all this ordinary trivial talk of everyday in the gloom ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... such a phenomenon to have weathered the "boom,"—would have been impressed with the fact that the valuation thus placed upon the infant camp aggregated something like twenty millions of dollars. The absurdity of the whole thing struck Wakefield with added force, as he read the solitary announcement which now ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... be considered, above all, that a member of the proudest Imperial family in the wide, wide world demonstrates, by inference, the absurdity of King-worship! ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... on," said Hazlehurst, "have been pretending houses, and, I am sorry to say, churches too, in the interior of the country; chiefly in the would-be Corinthian and Composite styles. They set every rule of good taste and good sense at defiance, and look, withal, so unconscious of their absurdity, that the effect is as thoroughly ridiculous, as if it had been the object of the ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... mopping his bald head after one of his energetic failures at lawn tennis, grunted assent, and remarked that a few years more would see a like development in their elder son, a remark which bordered on absurdity; for Johnny was but eight, and ten years are not a few years to a lady of twenty-eight, whatever they may seem to ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... chalk (and the strata associated withit) without an underlying stratum of oolite (and the strata associated withit;) or a stratum of oolite unsupported by the trias or system of new red sandstone. Bunsen's dictum, that "the question whether a language can begin with inflections, implies an absurdity," may have seemed too strongly worded: but if he took inflections in the commonly received meaning, in the sense of something that may be added or removed from a base in order to define or to modify its meaning, then surely the simple ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... truths which were overshadowed by errors and crimes. Nor, inflamed with rage and scorn, was he wise in the remedies he proposed. Only God can overrule the wrath of man, and cause melodious birth-songs to succeed the agonies of dissolution. Burke saw the absurdity of sophistical theories and impractical equality,—liberty running into license, and license running into crime; he saw pretensions, quackeries, inexperience, folly, and cruelty, and he prophesied what their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... and a little hurt; but I was too wise to explain, and three minutes later he was rattling off some delicious absurdity to my four-year-old hopeful, who had fallen down on his nose and needed comforting—and a handkerchief. Bobbie was supplying the latter from his pocket, and from his penguinacious brain the former was effectively coming in the shape of a description ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... conversation with little Miss Lilywhite. Bertha was a rather shy girl of fifteen, not easily induced, under circumstances such as these, to utter more than monosyllables, and Godwin, occupied with the unforeseen results of his call, talked about the weather. With half-conscious absurdity he had begun to sketch a theory of his own regarding rain-clouds and estuaries (Bertha listening with an air of the gravest attention) when Fanny reappeared, followed by Sidwell. Peak searched the latter's face ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... excellent and erudite Quicherat, who all unconsciously introduces into the piety of the Maid a great deal of eclectic philosophy. This point was not without its drawbacks. It led free-thinking historians to a ridiculous exaggeration of Jeanne's intellectual faculties, to the absurdity of attributing military talent to her and to the substitution of a kind of polytechnic phenomenon for the fifteenth century's artless marvel. The Catholic historians of the present day when they make a saint of the Maid are much nearer to nature and to truth. Unfortunately ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... there are those who would never be men, lived they to be as old as Methuselah, so there are some whose minds are as well filled, whose judgments are as mature at twenty-five and eight, and their energy as decisive as though they were in their tenth lustrum. Conscious of this fact, it is the absurdity of folly for the young colored men of the country to sit idly by and see the grandest opportunities slipping away, the best cases lost by default because of the lack of energy displayed by many ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... the scene presented by the two rooms became eccentric to a pitch of absurdity which is quite indescribable. The grim, ancient walls of the bedroom had the liveliest modern dressing-gowns and morning-wrappers hanging all about them. The man in armor had a collection of smart little ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... man of wit and imagination, though both were deformed by the most unnatural affectation that ever disgraced a printed page.]—he, in short, who wrote that singularly coxcomical work, called Euphues and his England, was in the very zenith of his absurdity and his reputation. The quaint, forced, and unnatural style which he introduced by his "Anatomy of Wit," had a fashion as rapid as it was momentary—all the court ladies were his scholars, and ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... also to be found among the nations of Southern Europe and of Asia,[61] and it is more than probable that the Greeks transferred to the festival of John the Baptist, who is also held in high esteem among the Mahometans, a part of their Bacchanalian mysteries, an absurdity of a kind which it but too frequently met with in human affairs. How far a remembrance of the history of St. John's death may have had an influence on this occasion we would leave learned theologians to decide. It is of importance here to add only that in Abyssinia, a country entirely separated ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... thousand things rushed through my head without reason or order. I begin to believe that a first love never dies. A boy falls in love at eighteen or nineteen. The attachment comes to nothing. It is broken off for a multitude of reasons, and he sees its absurdity. He marries afterwards some other woman whom he even adores, and he has children for whom he spends his life; yet in an obscure corner of his soul he preserves everlastingly the cherished picture of the girl who first ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... ring in it. There is Assurance for you. "I Know." Do you think that the God who has justified me will condemn me? That is quite an absurdity. God is going to save us so that neither men, angels, nor devils, can bring any charge against us or Him. He will have the ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... (or Bryant), the minister in that part of Braintree which became the town of Quincy, published a sermon which he entitled The Absurdity and Blasphemy of Depreciating Moral Virtue. It condemned reliance on Christ's merits without effort to live his life, and showed that it is the duty of the Christian to live righteously. Briant said ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... purpose and after this fashion. I shall have to say more on the same subject when I come to The Snob Papers. In this instance he wrote a very pretty ballad, The Willow Tree,—so good that if left by itself it would create no idea of absurdity or extravagant pathos in the mind of the ordinary reader,—simply that he might render his own work absurd by ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... painted chains hung in loops; the apparent intention was to create the illusion of a village-green. Tabs entered instantly into the spirit of the game—the littleness and childishness of the attempt at quaintness. He liked the bijou privacy of the Court, its greenness and tidiness, and the absurdity of the narrow windows which glinted at him like spectacles. But there was something ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... souls. Hooker felt too strongly the unfairness, the folly, the intolerant aggressiveness, the malignity of his opponents—he was too much alive to the wrongs inflicted by them on his own side, and to the incredible absurdity of their arguments—to do justice to what was only too real in the charges and complaints of those opponents. But Bacon came from the very heart of the Puritan camp. He had seen the inside of Puritanism—its ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... sure," he said, fervently, "that Caspar Brooke could not commit murder as I am sure that you could not. It is an absurdity to think ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... winning a favour, of accepting a hazard, she would have taken alarm, dismayed. But it was why she loved him so that here, as everywhere, his standpoint was her standpoint's own reflection. She was, as she would have said, deadly in earnest; deadly in earnest to a depth that she could let go to absurdity and never know it for ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... voice let the enemies of nature be still, and swallow their serpents' tongues in rage." "The eyes of reason restrain mankind from the precipice of the passions, as her decrees modify likewise the feeling of their rights." Many other passages of equal absurdity could be quoted, full of far-fetched metaphor, abounding in strange terms, straining rhetorical figures to distortion.[22] And yet in spite of the bombast, certain essential Napoleonic ideas appear in the paper much as they endured to the end, namely, those on heredity, on the equal division ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... than any one else among us a gleam of fine absurdity: that's a product that seems unable, for the life of it, and though so indispensable (say) for literary material, to grow here; but, exquisitely determined she shall have Character lest she perish—while it's assumed we still need her—Mother ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... their mistaken notions and correct their judgment at once, on being shown their errors. Sane people see the force of logical argument, and act upon it, abandoning all irrational ideas. The insane person, on the other hand, cannot see the force of logical argument; cannot realize the absurdity or impossibility of error. He clings to his own beliefs, for the evidence of his perverted senses or the deductions from his disease-irritation are very real to him. When we find this to be the fact ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... another class of critics whose cant is simply can't, and who, being unable or unwilling to surrender themselves to these simple sources of enjoyment, are grandiloquent upon the dignity of manhood, and the absurdity of full-grown men in playing monkey-tricks with their bodies. Full-grown men? There is not a person in the world who can afford to be a "full-grown man" through all the twenty-four hours. There is not one who does not need, more than he needs ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... ever better formed for the business of education; if it be not a sort of absurdity to speak of a person as formed for an inferior object, who is in possession of talents, in the fullest degree adequate to something on a more important and comprehensive scale. Mary had a quickness of temper, not apt to take ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... nevertheless the black brows bending down toward the point where they almost met gave her in repose a look of something like severity, strangely redeemed by the open curves of the mouth. Trent said to himself that the absurdity or otherwise of a lover writing sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow depended after all on the quality of the eyebrow. Her nose was of the straight and fine sort, exquisitely escaping the perdition of too much length. Her hat lay pinned to the grass beside her, and the lively breeze ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... lack of logic and sincerity Irish demand for self-government was unheeded. Base passions as well as noble instincts were stirred easily. Greedy was the appetite of the mob for atrocity tales. The more revolting they were the quicker they were swallowed. The foul absurdity of the "corpse-factory" was not rejected any more than the tale of the "crucified Canadian" (disproved by our own G.H.Q.) or the cutting off of children's hands and women's breasts, for which I could find no ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... hundred yards away from any of the others, and who worked a claim by themselves. They did not seem to have any communication with the rest of the diggers, and kept themselves entirely apart. While at work Frank had heard several jeering remarks as to the absurdity of working a claim in a part of the ground which had over and over again been tried and abandoned, and Frank felt sure that the men ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... might, without any great harshness, bear the name of absolute dominion, and regal authority, when under the title of paternal power it seemed appropriated to the father, would yet have founded but oddly, and in the very name shewn the absurdity, if this supposed absolute power over children had been called parental; and thereby have discovered, that it belonged to the mother too: for it will but very ill serve the turn of those men, who contend so much for the absolute power and authority of the fatherhood, as they ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... shop; not so much, indeed, more especially under such leases as those of the Rensselaers; for the debtor on a book-debt can be sued at any moment, whereas the tenant knows precisely when he has to pay. There is the great absurdity of those who decry the system as feudal and aristocratic; for they do not see that those very leases are more favourable to the ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... Cassandra's conduct and entangled herself with Ralph Denham." From which it appeared that Katharine was NOT absorbed, or which of them was it that had entangled herself with Ralph Denham? From this maze of absurdity Mr. Hilbery saw no way out until Katharine herself came to his help, so that he applied himself, very philosophically on the whole, to ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... away in some discomfiture to join Enriquez, who was calmly awaiting me, with a cigarette in his mouth, outside the sala. Yet he looked so unconscious of any previous absurdity that I hesitated in what I thought was a necessary warning. He, however, quickly precipitated it. Glancing after the retreating figures of the two women, he said: "Thees mees from Boston is return to her house. You do not accompany ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... of modern political economy. Their leader, Quesnay, believed that positive legislation should consist in the declaration of the natural laws constituting the order evidently most advantageous for men in society. When once these were understood, all would be well, for the absurdity of all unreasonable legislation would become manifest. He taught two cardinal principles; first, "that the land was the only source of riches, and that these were multiplied by agriculture;" and, second, that agriculture and commerce should ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... the doctrine and discipline of the Koran: [2] his private indiscretion must have been sacred from the vulgar ear; and we should suspect the credulity of strangers and sectaries, so prone to believe that a mind which is hardened against truth must be armed with superior contempt for absurdity and error. Under the tuition of the most skilful masters, Mahomet advanced with an early and rapid progress in the paths of knowledge; and besides his native tongue it is affirmed that he spoke or understood five languages, [3] the Arabic, the Persian, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... education. Perhaps that is why geniuses are such erratic people, and mediocrities so respectable. I grant you that I was very limited when I first came out; I was absolutely incapable of comedy. But I never took any trouble about it; and by and by, when I began to mature a little, and to see the absurdity of most of the things I had been making a fuss about, comedy came to me unsought, as romantic tragedy had come before. I suppose it would have come just the same if I had been laboring to acquire it, except that I would have attributed its arrival to ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... in most countries, so that all who wished could read. I saw one of these stands, which turned on a pivot, in an old Catholic church in Yorkshire, England, where it remains to this day. And as regards the absurdity that Luther found the only copy of the Bible extant in a monastery or university, that story is refuted by the fact that there were millions of Bibles, and countless editions of it, printed before Luther was born. Indeed, I have just read in this Protestant paper, ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... herself to look up at him. "If it is, it's the sort of splendid absurdity I am proud of. I was wondering what ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... encounter with the centaur. And in this connexion it is worth while mentioning that, when revising his translation and introducing a number of verbal changes, in most cases distinctly for the better, Sir George appears to have been struck by the absurdity of this machinery, and throughout replaced the centaur by a 'wild man.' After telling how she was seized and carried to 'the middle of a ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... accept such a state of things, not among people of revolutionary mind, but among those of religious mind that might possess any culture and breadth of view? Plainly enough it was all mere childishness and absurdity. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... weather would have been better than that girlish naivete which she felt seemed to force upon him, too, a recollection of the very letter of a promise which had, no doubt, long since become in his mind nothing but a quaint episode not untinged with absurdity. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... everywhere with harmonious and accordant symbols of her consistent doctrines. Nothing would be more easy than, by the ordinary principles of sound logic and common sense, to demonstrate the impossibility and expose the absurdity of the corpuscularian or mechanic system, or than to prove the intenable nature of any intermediate system. But we cannot force any man into an insight or intuitive possession of the true philosophy, because we cannot give him abstraction, intellectual ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... by the support she had gathered from her children, passionately declared that it could only be because he was himself in love with the murtheress. Lord Shrewsbury could not help laughing a little at the absurdity of the idea, whereupon my lady rose up in virtuous indignation, calling her sons and daughters ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... love and genuine hate, and always, till then, obedience and the respect of reason. It was her father who appeared tragically ridiculous; and, in turn, the whole movement against her grew grotesque in its absurdity. Here was this antique wreck, helpless, useless, powerless—merely pathetic —actually thinking that he had only to mumble in order to make her 'understand'! He knew nothing; he perceived nothing; he was a ferocious egoist, like most bedridden invalids, out of touch with ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Let us sit here, in this corner.' He was ridiculous, she thought, yet to-night, unconscious of any absurdity himself, he had a dignity; he was not so ugly as she had thought; his somewhat protruding eyes had less vacancy, and though his tie was crooked, she was not ashamed of him. Nevertheless, she said as ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... to be done while a great French army was already pouring in through the passes of the Pyrenees. No more tremendous, or, it may be said, impossible, task was ever assigned to an English commander; and to add to the absurdity of their scheme, the British government sent off Sir David Baird without instructions, and even without money. The Duke of York had vainly protested against the plan of the ministry, and had pointed out that nothing short of ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... imperfectly the language, the arts, and the family traditions of their parents. Such is the origin of the unfortunates sometimes met with, who are ignorant even of the use of fire." Against the spontaneous generation of the human race in several localities he argues at length as an utter absurdity, the point of his argument being, that isolated couples so produced would be unable to resist the inhospitality of nature without miraculous aid, and one miracle, he contends, is more admissable than ten or a dozen. But the chief ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... that reviewers have in some cases been inclined to treat the chapters on Machines as an attempt to reduce Mr. Darwin's theory to an absurdity. Nothing could be further from my intention, and few things would be more distasteful to me than any attempt to laugh at Mr. Darwin; but I must own that I have myself to thank for the misconception, for I felt sure that my intention would ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... to speculations concerning the processes of Nature, which, though interesting, were unprofitable. They also showed a curious tendency to mingle their scientific speculations with ancient and base superstitions. They were often given to the absurdity commonly known as the "black art," or witchcraft, and held to the preposterous notions of the astrologists. Even the immortal astronomer Kepler, who lived in the sixteenth century, was a professional astrologer, and still ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... and, consequently, exportation and the encouragement of the islands. But not less fatal is the opinion that the authorities of Manila themselves are fed on such abuses. Complaints are continually presented against the alcalde, at times very captious and filled with falsehood and absurdity. The Audiencia and office of the captain-general receive those complaints kindly and very easily dictate measures humiliating for the alcalde, and impose fines on him, of which a copy is given to the complaining parties. Rarely is it that one ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... ride. Fences and ditches, rough or smooth, he never interfered with my wildest pace. I could not extract from him a look of surprise, far less the admiration that I wanted. What was a girl's riding to him? He knew a pace—all the paces—that I could never follow. I felt the absurdity of our mutual position, its utter artificiality, and how ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... hole in its ear, in order that that grandson of yours may be surfeited with goose liver, and indulge in patrician amours. Am I to be a living anatomy that his pope's stomach may shake with fat."[23] Alluding to the absurdity of the prayers generally offered up, he uses language worthy of a Christian. "You ask for vigour, but rich dishes and fat sausages prevent the gods from granting your behest. You ask what your fleshly mind suggests. What avails gold in sacrifice? ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... connect the crime in the Arctic wastes with the will he had signed in the Aasvogel Syndicate office, on that fine spring morning, eighteen months ago. His only suspicion, which in nine thoughts out of ten he had almost rejected for its absurdity, was against the man Garnet whose place he had filled in the Expedition. Garnet, who was an author and a vile-tempered fellow even in good health, had gone half crazy because the Expedition was not postponed for a year on his account. He had cursed Alan as a scheming interloper, and so forth, ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... and entered the public-house. Tom waited patiently outside until he should reappear. His movements hitherto had puzzled him completely. For a moment the wild hope came into his head that Kate might be concealed in this strange hiding-place, but a little reflection showed him the absurdity and impossibility of ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... say that an idol of that absurdity could have no effect upon sane men. Change the terms and give it another name, and you would laugh at the idea of its having an effect upon any men. But we know as a matter of fact that it commands the thoughts of nearly all men to-day and makes cowards ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... little respect for the past which had bequeathed to France her disorderly government and, above all, her church. His keen eye was continually discovering some new absurdity in the existing order, which, with incomparable wit and literary skill, he would expose to his eager readers. He was interested in almost everything; he wrote histories, dramas, philosophic treatises, romances, epics, and innumerable letters to his innumerable admirers. He was a ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... former animosities wiped out forever. These and other like sentiments called forth loud applause, the band playing "The Star Spangled Banner." Speech followed toast and song until the hours wore on unheeded. Lest it might be considered an absurdity, we will not say how many toasts were actually made—not in water, either, on this occasion. The strongest proof of this fact was found in the dozens of empty bottles lying scattered in profusion upon sideboards, ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... chronicle history, dealing with the story of Walter Terill in the reign of William Rufus. This he hurriedly adapted to include the satirical characters suggested by "Poetaster," and fashioned to convey the satire of his reply. The absurdity of placing Horace in the court of a Norman king is the result. But Dekker's play is not without its palpable hits at the arrogance, the literary pride, and self-righteousness of Jonson-Horace, whose "ningle" or pal, the absurd Asinius Bubo, has recently been shown to figure forth, in all ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... formula on which our civilization is built, HUMAN equal ANIMAL plus or multiplied by SPARK OF DIVINITY is basically and elementarily wrong, and is mathematical nonsense, which is identical to such an absurdity as x square inches equal y linear inches plus or ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... order which any biological study would arouse except as the scientist perceives that indignation is, for him, beside the point and the religionist believes that it proceeds from not seeing far enough into the process. This is why there is an essential absurdity in any naturalistic system of ethics. Even the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... think that I had perished; when the application of my friend the doctor told him where I was to be found. The message of the head of the Republic, requiring a confidential bearer of documents, struck him as affording an opportunity of my liberation; and though the palpable absurdity of my worthy friend Pantoufle prevented any communication with him, no time was lost in proposing my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... cart-wheel. His mother came out and looked joy to see him back; the soldiers strolled down from the fort and the boys and women from the town. Uncle Van Swearingen was there, smiting the ground with his shodden staff, and ejaculating, "Foei! weg! fychaam u! Fie! leave off! fie on you! What absurdity is this on the property of ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... asked Lady Baldock; and then, when Phineas explained, she begged the Earl to go back to Violet. The Earl, feeling the absurdity of this, declared that Violet knew her way very well herself, and thus ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... continues to be ignored by the professorial world, it is Kant's moral principle that prevails in the universities. Among its various forms the one which is most in favour at present is "the dignity of man." I have already exposed the absurdity of this doctrine in my treatise on the Foundation of Morality.[1] Therefore I will only say here that if the question were asked on what the alleged dignity of man rests, it would not be long before the answer was made that it rests upon his morality. ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Maria than either of those women. She did not altogether love Aunt Maria, but at least she was used to her. Suddenly it occurred to her that Aunt Maria was disappointed, that she felt badly. The absurdity of it struck her strongly, but she felt a pity for her; she felt a common cause with her. After her father had gone into his room, and the house had long been silent, she got up quietly, opened her door softly, and crept across the hall to the spare room, which ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... came into being. We moderns, however, see the absurdity of it. In real life no one thinks aloud or in an empty room. The up-to-date dramatist must certainly avoid this hallmark of ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... King. "I remember the little wretch of old. Fortune, to make him the model of absurdity, has closed a most lofty soul within that little miserable carcass. For wielding his sword and keeping his word, he is a perfect Don Quixote in decimo-octavo. He shall be taken care of.—But, oddsfish, my lords, is not this freak of Buckingham too ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... happy consequences of that great national union, of those special institutions, which by offering in a self-governed people the most perfect example of social order that ever existed have reduced to absurdity and ridicule the anti-popular arguments of pretended statesmen in other countries. In whatever way I may he disposed of by the duties and feelings, in which you have been pleased to sympathise, I shall ever rank this day among the most fortunate of my life; and, while I beg you, sir, personally ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... Booth's extravagance in the country, that he firmly believed both the husband and wife to be the vainest, silliest, and most unjust people alive. It was, indeed, almost incredible that two rational beings should be guilty of such absurdity; but, monstrous and absurd as it was, ocular demonstration appeared to be the ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... the affectation of Gallicism had reappeared in Denmark; and the tragedies of Voltaire, with their stilted rhetoric, were the most popular dramas of the day. Johan Nordahl Brun (1745-1816), a young writer who did better things later on, gave the finishing touch to the exotic absurdity by bringing out a wretched piece called Zarina, which was hailed by the press as the first original Danish tragedy, although Ewald's exquisite Rolf Krage, which truly merited that title, had appeared two years before. Wessel, who up to that time had only been known as the president of a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... Hugh, Sunday was inevitable, and he had to set out for Salem Chapel. He found it a neat little Noah's Ark of a place, built in the shape of a cathedral, and consequently sharing in the general disadvantages to which dwarfs of all kinds are subjected, absurdity included. He was shown to Mr. Appleditch's pew. That worthy man received him in sleek black clothes, with white neck-cloth, and Sunday face composed of an absurd mixture of stupidity and sanctity. He stood up, and Mrs. Appleditch ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... some of them are cleverer still and make their outspokenness and censure a means of imparting pleasure. As Agis the Argive,[417] when Alexander bestowed great gifts on a buffoon, cried out in envy and displeasure, "What a piece of absurdity!" and on the king turning angrily to him and saying, "What are you talking about?" he replied, "I admit that I am vexed and put out, when I see that all you descendants of Zeus alike take delight in flatterers and jesters, for Hercules had his Cercopes, and ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... sensation can not be put indiscriminately one for the other, it is supposed that they can not both signify the same thing, namely, the impression or feeling with which we are affected through our senses by the presence of an object; though there is at least no absurdity in supposing that this identical impression or feeling may be called a sensation when considered merely in itself, and a quality when looked at in relation to any one of the numerous objects, the presence of which to our organs excites in our minds that among various other sensations ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... did not perform sacrifice. At the same time he saw the necessity of a total reformation in paganism, if it was to revive as the rival of Christianity; and planned, as Pontifex Maximus, a scheme for effecting it, which involved the concealment of the absurdity of its origin by allegorical interpretation, together with the establishment of a discipline and organisation similar to the Christian, and special attention on the part of the priesthood to morality and to public works of mercy.(228) His ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... heroine was a thing unnatural, and a theme for inextinguishable Homeric laughter. That Pamela, through all her trials, could really have cherished any affection for her unscrupulous admirer would seem to him a sentimental absurdity, and the unprecedented success of the book would sharpen his sense of its assailable side. Possibly, too, his acquaintance with Richardson, whom he knew personally, but with whom he could have had no kind ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... first noted in her with wonder and admiration was the absence of weediness and flabbiness. Better known, she stirred in him, as a child might, an altogether indescribable sense of tenderness and absurdity. She stood out for him simply by the fact that, of all the young ladies of the Polytechnic, she was the only one he really knew—barring Maudie Hollis, and Maudie, though she was the proud beauty of the ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... not guess; but it was with breathless wonder that he presently became aware that, so perfect and convincing was the old man's style and deportment, not only the simple officials but even the bystanders were profoundly impressed by this farrago of absurdity. A happy word here and there, the full title and rank given, even with a slight exaggeration, to each individual, brought a deep and guttural "So!" from lips that would have found it difficult to repeat a line ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... say, quite illogical unless one accepts as a truism, as Wagner accepted it, the patent absurdity that by sacrificing him-or herself one being can save the soul of another being. But Wagner was not a German of the Romantic epoch for nothing. He believed the absurdity with a fervour now laughable, and was especially enthusiastic when the sacrificed person was a woman: woman, to his ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... and a dry, drolling, or laughing levity took such full possession of him, that I can only refer the idea of him to your imagination. In some of his low characters, that became it, he had a shuffling shamble in his gait, with so contented an ignorance in his aspect, and an awkward absurdity in his gesture, that had you not known him, you could not have believed, that naturally he could have had a grain of common sense. In a word, I am tempted to sum up the character of Nokes, as a comedian, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... because he is systematic and philosophical, may reveal to us what that error is in us as well as in himself. We do not state it as if it were a splendid truth; we merely act upon it. He stated it for us with such histrionic and towering absurdity that we can laugh at his statement of it; but we must not laugh at him without learning to laugh at ourselves. All this talk about the iron will, about set teeth and ruthlessness, what does it mean except that the German chose to glorify openly and to carry to a logical ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... moment as it passed over them, but making no noise. "There he goes," whispered Sam. "That's the Screech Owl. Not much of a screech, was it?" Not long afterward Yan came across a line of Lowell's which says, "The song of the Screech Owl is the sweetest sound in nature," and appreciated the absurdity of the name. ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... man now often thinks back and smiles to himself at the grotesque absurdity of a small boy's idea of ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... them, and gave them practice in the Christian virtue of patience. Dr. Barlow's was not the worst, though his hearers regarded it as an admirable 'confutation' of the text. The preacher, among the four, who reached the climax of absurdity was Dr. Andrewes, Bishop of Chichester. He was one of the extreme High Churchmen of his time: no man urged the doctrine of passive obedience to a more abject degree, or did more to support with the sanction ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... Lippi comments freely and quaintly on the absurdity of showing soul by means of bodies so ill-painted that no one can bear to dwell upon them, as on the fallacy involved in all contempt for the earthly life. "He will never believe that the world, with all its life and beauty, is an unmeaning blank. He is sure, 'it means ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... weakness rather than the vigour, of their predecessors. While painting was in the ascendant, Raphael could take the best of Perugino and discard the worst; in its decadence Parmigiano reproduces the affectations of Correggio, and Bernini carries the exaggerations of Michelangelo to absurdity. All arts describe a parabola. The force which produces them causes them to rise throughout their growth up to a certain point, and then to descend more gradually in a long and slanting line of regular declension. There ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... of cover, he could not make out the horseman who was evidently passing him and going in the same direction. At first he thought it was some one who was making a detour to avoid him. Then he smiled at the absurdity of the guess and concluded that he himself was off the trail. This conclusion was confirmed a little later when two other travellers, announcing themselves to the ear as the first one had, and also, like the first, invisible to the sharpest eye-sweep ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... Pederson, who stood there scowling into space as though at some incredible absurdity. Suddenly Pederson straightened, and there was something strangely different ... his gaze as it met Beardsley's was neither shocked nor accusing but held an ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... the opinion that Shelley's letters were more valuable than his poetry it was, of course, as Lamb said of Coleridge "only his fun." In the words of another classic, he "did it to annoy, because he knew it teased" some people. The absurdity is perhaps best antagonised by the perfectly true remark that it only shows that Mr. Arnold understood the letters and did not understand the poetry. But it was a little unfortunate, not for the poetry but for the letters, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... wouldn't bend right." Sally's truthful nature postpones laughing at the Professor's absurdity; looks at the case on its merits. When she has done justice to this point, she laughs and adds: "What ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... The telephone, as a statement, was absurd, but not to the men who worked for its accomplishment and finally succeeded. The lines grow narrow. It requires now a high intelligence to decide even upon the fact of absurdity within the domain of ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... he called "The Crime against Kansas"; and the excuses for the crime he denominated the apology tyrannical, the apology imbecile, the apology absurd, and the apology infamous. "Tyranny, imbecility, absurdity, and infamy," he continued, "all unite to dance, like the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... pleasant face; has been a rebel soldier, foolishly committed himself to Booth, with perhaps no intention to do a crime, recanted in pen and ink, and was made a national character. Had he recanted by word of mouth he might have saved himself unpleasant dreams. This shows everybody the absurdity of writing what they can so easily say. The best thing Arnold ever wrote was his letter to Booth refusing to engage in murder. Yet this recantation is more in evidence against than then his ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... the Doctor on the nature of the Sun, we have many similar objections; but they are all eclipsed by the grand absurdity which he has there committed, in his hasty and erroneous theory concerning the influence of the solar spots on the price of grain. Since the publication of Gulliver's voyage to Laputa, nothing so ridiculous has ever been offered to the world. We heartily wish the Doctor ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... and in the evening accompanied his Majesty to the residence of M. Marescalchi, and dressed him as best I could in a black domino, taking great pains to render him unrecognizable; and everything went well, in spite of numerous observations on the Emperor's part as to the absurdity of a disguise, the bad appearance a domino makes, etc. But, when it was proposed to change his shoes, he rebelled absolutely, in spite of all I could say on this point; and consequently he was recognized the moment he entered the ballroom. He went ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... have reached the height of injustice and absurdity, and in these days it is the man who does not work who reaps the largest returns, who is thus guaranteed the individual monopoly of wealth which accumulates by means of hereditary transmission. This wealth, moreover, is only very rarely ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... palette-plate very nearly resemble. But were it otherwise, were there all and more than the wit, and humour, and sarcasm, and pungent phrase, and graphic power, which may be found scattered through Mr Carlyle's best performances, there is here a substratum of sheer and violent absurdity, which all these together would fail to disguise or compensate. Certainly there are pages of writing in this Introduction which contain such an amount of extravagant assertion, uttered in such fantastic jargon, as we think could nowhere be paralleled. Dulness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... He confessed to himself that his whole relation to Constance Bledlow had been one blunder from beginning to end. His own arrogance and self-confidence with regard to her, appeared to him, as he looked back upon them, not so much a fault as an absurdity. In all his dealings with her he had been a conceited fool, and he had lost her. "But I had to be ruined to find it out!" he thought, capable at last of some ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Providence with supernatural power, constituted a second Witch of Endor, and able by "examining the ball of Josephine's left thumb with great attention," to discover the minute particulars of her future life, we must discredit the absurdity. A prediction believed sometimes effects its own fulfillment; and Josephine, whose ambition seems to have been most ardent, may have been inspired with romantic hopes by the foolish promise of an ignorant impostor, that she would rise to great eminence, and have been stimulated ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... not a personable gentleman. The early Saxon strain in him had taken the form of obesity, a tendency not confined, if we may trust the evidence of scholars, to descendants of Saxon kings. To those who had little sympathy with genius in its more alarming shapes, his fair chin whisker seemed an absurdity. The more discriminating, however, welcomed it. Anything might be expected of a man with a chin whisker which some one, with more imagination than restraint, had described as an "attenuated shredded wheat biscuit seen through a glass darkly." Leofwin's work had of late years suffered ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... disinterested sympathy or justice. No one would now consciously employ this argument to maintain the subjection of women; yet in multitudes, below the stratum of their conscious thoughts, it blindly upholds that subjection. A single consideration is enough to show the logical absurdity of the assumption. If men are entitled to the exclusive enjoyment of political privileges, simply because they have more physical might, then, by the same principle, among men themselves, the weak should be ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... presupposed an average child, and then prepared a course of study which would fit his needs. The new education recognizes the absurdity of averaging unlike quantities, and accepts the ultimate truth that each child is an individual, differing in needs, capacity, outlook, energy, and enthusiasm from every other child. An arithmetic average can be struck, but when it is applied to children ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... There are so many contradictory stories told about him that one doesn't know what to believe. It seems incredible that he should be a monk; it is such an altogether foolish ending to an intellectual career. For whatever may be the form of faith professed by this particular fraternity, the absurdity of the whole system of religion remains the same. Religion's day is done; the very sense of worship is a mere coward instinct—a relic of barbarism which is being gradually eradicated from our natures by the progress of civilization. The world knows ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... summers as possible, the expense of the intermediate journeys making it difficult of solution. On examination of the whole case, it appeared manifest that we were throwing money into the like to hear you talk of poor France; how I hope that you are able to hope for her. Oh, this absurdity of communism and mythological fete-ism! where can it end? They had better have kept Louis Philippe after all, if they are no more practical. Your Madame must be insufferable indeed, seeing that her knowledge of these subjects ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... to introduce. In a free industrial society like that of America it had no proper place or meaning; and the attempt to set up such a form might well have been cited in illustration of the partial reversion toward militancy which eight years of warfare had effected. The absurdity of the situation was quickly realized by Washington, and he prevailed upon the society, in its first annual meeting of May, 1784, to abandon the principle of hereditary membership. The agitation was thus allayed, and in the presence of graver questions the much-dreaded brotherhood ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... during the eighteenth century, a Radical at all. He altogether repudiated and vigorously denounced the 'Rights of Men' doctrines of Rousseau and his followers, and regarded the Declaration of Independence in which they were embodied as a mere hotchpotch of absurdity. He is determined to be thoroughly empirical—to take men as he found them. But his utilitarianism supposed that men's views of happiness and utility were uniform and clear, and that all that was wanted was to show them the means by which their ends could be ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... be the only excuse; insanity can alone account for his preposterous conduct. We have seen enough of him. The repetition of absurdity is only wearisome. Pray assist me in ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... "What an absurdity it is to talk of giving a 'lesson' to you!—you who will barely listen to a friend's advice,—you who will never take a hint for your mental education or improvement, you who are apt to fly into a passion, or take to the sulks when ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... added without injury and sacrilege and disgrace. So it had been, or rather so it was now, with the Hall at Humblethwaite. No rule ever made for the guidance of an artist had been kept. The parts were out of proportion. No two parts seemed to fit each other. Put it all on paper, and it was an absurdity. The huge hall and porch added on by the builder of Queen Anne's time, at the very extremity of the house, were almost a monstrosity. The passages and staircases, and internal arrangements, were simply ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... sovereign, but were content to sell over their native country, to those who stood at that time in the highest terms of hostility with the crowns of England and Ireland.' 'Yet,' adds the king, 'to make the absurdity and ingratitude of the allegation above mentioned so much the more clear to all men of equal judgment, we do hereby profess in word of a king that there was never so much as any shadow of molestation, nor purpose of proceeding in any degree against them for matter concerning ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... boarders regarded him with a half-malignant contempt? Why did they subject the oldest among their number to a kind of persecution, in which there was mingled some pity, but no respect for his misfortunes? Had he brought it on himself by some eccentricity or absurdity, which is less easily forgiven or forgotten than more serious defects? The question strikes at the root of many a social injustice. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... human happiness?' It did not require much sagacity to foresee that such a sentiment would not be permitted to pass without due animadversion. JOHNSON. 'Do not allow yourself, Sir, to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim,—Here am I with this cow and this grass; what being ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... something else under the same roof with the rest of his furniture,—the wife deaf and blind, and the something else given to drinking. And if you ever get to the end of this letter you will find out that I subscribe myself on paper, as on everything else (some atonement perhaps for its length and absurdity)," ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... does not require particular notice. Its lively absurdity could not have failed to be entertaining to an easy audience, and is not tiresome now. Thersites indulges plentifully in one of the privileges of the old Vice—that of talking incoherent nonsense. There is a vigour in some parts quite unusual in these things, and many of the lines in Skelton's ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... the prose passages, the little work is in effect simply a poem—is not all sentiment and dreams. With admirable art the author has interspersed here and there contrasting episodes of realism or of absurdity; he has woven into his story a succession of vivid dialogues, and by means of an acute sense of observation he has succeeded in keeping his airy fantasy in touch with actual things. The description of Nicolette, escaping from her prison, and stepping out over ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Alicia Derosne, his fate would have been different, and he need not now have trembled at his story being told. Immersed in thought he wandered on, out of the town and down to the shores of the bay, and checked himself, with a sudden laugh, only on the very brink of the sea. The absurdity struck him; he laughed again, as he lit a cigar and rebuked ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... you, nor have I an idea that I ever can be." Keith's comment—the other point of view—is worth quoting. "Anything absurd coming from the quarter you mention does not surprise me," he wrote to Paget, who succeeded Hamilton as minister. "The whole was a scene of fulsome vanity and absurdity all the long eight days I ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... as an attempt to invalidate a principle by showing that its application to persons of widely different times and circumstances involves an absurdity and then from the absurdity inferring a sin. I do not pretend to give the exact words used, but they were in this style: "Think of Paul dancing; or Peter playing billiards! Do you think we shall have checker-boards in heaven?" And much ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... has been the target of similar malignity, and to leave you to conclude that consequently Wilson is in the same class with Washington and Lincoln. If he had put his thesis in a different form, the publicist might have seen himself, as his hearers did, the absurdity of it. Suppose he had said, for instance: "In spite of the fact that Washington and Lincoln each kept a cow, they were both peerless patriots, therefore, as President Wilson keeps a cow, he must be a peerless patriot." One fears that logic is somewhat neglected even in the training ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... yearly to temporal and eternal ruin. But this is not all. The attention of the public has been strongly turned to this subject. The minds of men have been enlightened, and their responsibility pressed home upon them. The subject has been presented to them in a new light, and men cannot but see the absurdity of reprobating the tempted, while the tempter is honored—of blaming drunkards, and holding in reputation those whose business it is to ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... to define the popular theory of the Bible. Like its kindred theory of Papal Infallibility, it is a true chameleon, changing constantly in different minds, always denying the absurdity of which it is made the synonym, ever qualifying itself safely, yet never ceasing to take on a vaguely miraculous character. Various theories are given in the books in which theological students are mis-educated, all of which unite in claiming ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... With incredulous surprise, with a constant struggle between past images and present revelations, were we forced to acknowledge the improbability of the story, the clumsiness of the style, the awkwardness of the dialogue, the want of Nature in many of the characters, the absurdity of many of the incidents, and the painfulness of some of the scenes. But with all this, a candid, though critical judgment could not but admit that these grave defects were attended by striking merits, which pleaded in mitigation of literary sentence. It was stamped ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will also suppose great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own part, I find few things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never tired of their bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their irresistible touches of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the relenting parent (Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while Arlecchino, as the ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... had talked of him; he had been too much for one woman—the dashing Constantia: he had worn one woman, sacrificing far more for him than Constantia, to death. Still, with such a prize as Clara Middleton, Willoughby's behaviour was past calculating in its contemptible absurdity. And during courtship! And courtship of that girl! It was the way of a man ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to a stand or desk in each parish church in most countries, so that all who wished could read. I saw one of these stands, which turned on a pivot, in an old Catholic church in Yorkshire, England, where it remains to this day. And as regards the absurdity that Luther found the only copy of the Bible extant in a monastery or university, that story is refuted by the fact that there were millions of Bibles, and countless editions of it, printed before Luther was born. Indeed, ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... at the absurdity of this scene, the more so as Lionel, just passing his fingers through his hair, and then pulling up his shirt collar, took his position, saying, "Now, Miss Valerie, we'll see who performs best: I think you will be sooner tired of sitting ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... in debt was nothing new: he had always been so at school, and probably always will be. Had you reproached him with it in those young self-conscious days of glorious absurdity, he would probably have retorted, with a toss of ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... man should go straight in the present is all they ask in Canada, and homeless adventurers with no possessions—the kind of comrades I've generally met—are charitable. As a rule, it wouldn't become them to be fastidious. Anyway, sir, you must see the absurdity of believing that Bertram could have failed in his duty in the way the ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... precipitation, feeling that he had gone the very way to ruin his cause. All that afternoon, while his daughter had been peering into coppers and washing-tubs and dustholes, he had been meditating upon the absurdity of his conduct, and hating himself for his folly. He was not a man who suffered from a mean opinion of his own merits. On the contrary, in all the ordinary commerce of life he fancied himself more than the equal of the best among his fellow-men. He ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... by the obscure intrigues of the Catholics themselves, and the fortuitous circumstance of Godfrey's murder, had been able to cram down the public throat such a mass of absurdity as his evidence amounts to, had no other talent for imposture than an impudence which set conviction and shame alike at defiance. A man of sense or reflection, by trying to give his plot an appearance of more probability, would most likely have failed, as ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... degrade matter, the plastic and prolific creature of the Deity, beyond what we are authorized to do? Why may it not perceive, why not think, why not become conscious? What eternal and necessary impediment prevents? or what self-contradiction and absurdity is hereby implied? Let us examine Nature as she presents herself to us in her most simple and inorganized forms; let us trace her through her gradual and ascending stages of power and perfection. In its simplest form, matter evinces the desire of reciprocal union, or, as it is commonly ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... give her a kind of pre-emptive right to the love and gratitude of our young folks. It requires genius to conceive a purely imaginary work which must of necessity deal with the supernatural, without running into a mere riot of fantastic absurdity; but genius Miss Ingelow has, and the story of Jack is as careless and joyous, but as delicate, as a ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... comprising eleven foolscap columns). The government treated the Czech nation with special brutality. The persecutions in Bohemia were opposed not only to the liberal ideas of Czechs, but especially to their national feelings. The anxiety of the censor for the safety of the monarchy often bordered on absurdity. The word 'shocking' was deleted from a play, for instance, because it was English. Henry IV. was not allowed to be played 'until we reach a settlement with England,' and it was only when it was reported by the Vienna and Berlin papers that the ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... disguised somewhere. And the multiplicity of mirrors, and the message of the laconic monosyllable "Hot" on silver taps, and the discretion of the lighting, all indicated that the architect and creator of these marvellous microcosms had "understood." The cosy virtue of littleness, and the entire absurdity of space for the sake of space, were strikingly proved, and the demonstration amounted, in Audrey's mind, to a new ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... was in the highest degree uncomplimentary to his human kinsman and lover. He lay down. In so doing he broke several portions of the ragged harness, and then proceeded, with the most deliberate absurdity, to get himself thoroughly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... all through life she had kept her heart full of childlike simplicity and faith, which was as pure and clear as crystal; and, looking at all matters through this transparent medium, she sometimes saw truths so profound, that other people laughed at them as nonsense and absurdity. ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... a request as had been now made had been already discussed between Dolly and her father. Dolly had said that the idea was absurd. Mr. Grey had not seen the absurdity. There had been nothing more common, he had said, than that a young partner should marry an old partner's daughter. "It's not put into the partnership deed?" Dolly had rejoined. But Dolly had never believed that the time would come. Now it ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... a condition of election to their corps of instructors. That one who is not a college graduate should be appointed to a professorship or instructorship in a college or university might seem to a college man of the old school very near an absurdity. Yet as matters now stand it would be impossible to fill the collegiate musical departments with holders of the A.B. degree. The large and increasing number of college graduates who are entering the musical profession, especially with a view to finding a home in ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Alesia, when for the nation more depended on him than on a hundred thousand ordinary brave men. It was the knight, not the hero, who gave himself up as a sacrifice, when the only thing gained by that sacrifice was that the nation publicly dishonoured itself and with equal cowardice and absurdity employed its last breath in proclaiming that its great historical death-struggle was a crime against its oppressor. How very different was the conduct of Hannibal in similar positions! It is impossible to part from the noble king of the Arverni without a feeling of historical and human sympathy; ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Sancho, "is it possible that enchantments can have such power as to have changed my master's right senses into a craze so full of absurdity? O Senor, Senor, consider yourself! Have a care for your honor, and give no credit to this silly stuff that has left you scant ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... mercy, as the reward of their own righteousness, are guilty of gross absurdity. They may claim to employ the mercy which they have earned: why plead with the God of justice for that to which they consider themselves in justice entitled? God will give to all that to which they are entitled, without being sued ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... they not unreasonable, absurd, and directly contrary to right reason. 2. The Scriptures condemn it as a great brand upon men, that they are absurd or unreasonable; "Brethren, pray for us—that we may be delivered from absurd and evil men," 2 Thes. iii. 2; and therefore if absurd men be so culpable, absurdity, and unreasonableness itself, which make them such, are much ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... recommended as a likely place, where, instead of Henri, a Louis Renaud turned up, shivering under the eaves in company with the fermier, who introduced Louis in due form as the accomplice. They received conjointly and submissively a lecture on the absurdity of calling it a rainy morning, and the impossibility of staying at home, even if it came on much worse, and then pointed the way to the true Henri Renaud, half-way down the village. When I arrived at the place indicated, and consulted ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... that into the words, of course. But nothing less than a complete and conclusive deliverance can be the legitimate end of the experience of the Christian life here. Absurdity can no further go than to suppose that a soul which has delighted itself in God, and looked in His face with frank confidence, and poured out his desires to Him, and been the recipient of numberless answers, and the seat of numberless thank-offerings, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... where we could hardly sit, so much were we annoyed by the smoke from the fire; we could scarcely decide which was hardest to bear, the smoke within, or the cold without. With a hearty laugh at the absurdity of coming to such a place as Teniet in search of game, and with a determination to set out on our return the next day, we betook ourselves to ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... excellent point noted, Mr. Godfrey very inconsistently fails to do this in connection with his theory of slabs, otherwise he would have perceived the absurdity of any method of calculating a multiple-way reinforcement by endeavoring to separate the construction into elementary beam strips. This old-fashioned method was discarded by the practical constructor many years ago, because ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... daylight as cheerful as need be upon the appointments of the elegant cabin, and upon the good-natured face of the steward when he brought me the caffe latte, and the buttered toast for my breakfast. He said "Servitor suo!" in a loud and comfortable voice, and I perceived the absurdity of having thought that he was in any ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... Rabelais sex is treated with the same reverence, and the same humor, as meat and wine. Why not? Is not the body of man the temple of the Holy Ghost? Is it not sacrosanct and holy within and without; and yet, at the same time, is it not a huge and palpable absurdity? ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... the—pooh! pooh! I'm making a fool of myself talking to you—but to make a long story short, I would rather wrastle out a logical dispute any day, or a tough argument of one of the fathers, than refute some absurdity which fell from a pretty mouth with a ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... he asked himself, that Maria Consuelo was trying to make him say the words, and that her will, with her question, acted directly on his mind? He scouted the thought as soon as it presented itself, not only for its absurdity, but because it shocked some ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... natives of either of the other two divisions of the united kingdoms. The reason probably is, that the consciousness of wealth, and a sturdy feeling of independence, which generally pervade the English nation, are, in a few individuals, perverted into absurdity, or at least peculiarity. The witty Irishman, on the contrary, adapts his general behaviour to that of the best society, or that which he thinks such; nor is it any part of the shrewd Scot's national character unnecessarily to draw upon himself public attention. ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... "What absurdity!" said the other. "You did a thousand things which no one else did. First, when you sat down at the table, what did you do with your napkin?" "My napkin? Why just what every body else did with theirs. I unfolded ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... in this sense also we may interpret without absurdity the apostolic declaration when the blessed Apostle Paul says: "Being ready to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled" [II Cor. 10:6]. Whence also the Lord himself bids the guests to be brought first to His great supper, and afterward ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... Queen has suffered enough in her misguided effort to conquer the world," said Ozma, smiling at the absurdity of the undertaking, "so no doubt she will hereafter be contented in her own little Kingdom. Please send her there, Wizard, and with her the ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... scattered abundantly among the humblest rangers of these pastoral solitudes, there was here a depth and a brightness that filled him with wonder, combined with a quaintness of humour, and a thousand little touches of absurdity, which afforded him more entertainment, as I have often heard him say, than the best comedy that ever set the pit in a roar." Scott remained several days in the forest, daily accompanied in his excursions by Hogg and Laidlaw, both of whom rapidly warmed in his regard. From the recitation ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... ostrich-egg of his bobbing up and down above the gay and giddy rout is one of the most ridiculous sights on earth. Are you urging me to furnish a similar absurdity?" ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little, and the universe to them is but a mass of little things. It is true, the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former method;—but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favour? I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... Lord Lackington. "Leonardo, indeed! What absurdity! Really, Duchess, you should tell Crowborough to be more careful about his things. We mustn't give ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has he to carry against them that will be a loss to the world, if he fails?" I felt a little apologetic for my devotion to Douglas as Abigail talked. Had I made a god of a poor piece of clay? No, it was not true. I knew him, I believed in him. He was the clearest voice in all this rising absurdity of American life. But Abigail had given me one idea that I ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... to Robina, kindly but firmly, the utter absurdity of her idea. How could I leave them, three helpless children, with no one to look after them? What would the Little Mother say? What might not Veronica be up to in my absence? There were other things to be considered. The donkey might arrive at any ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... public repudiation of her. The whole house vibrated to the shutting of his door at Good-night time. Yet when Bartie came down in the morning, late, and more morose than ever, Vera's mouth made as if it kissed some visionary image of the poor thing's absurdity. She didn't believe for one minute in his cancer. It was an excuse for the shutting ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... peculiar gratification; but his preliminary performances must also be recorded. Upon my signifying my desire that he should pluck me the young fruit of some particular tree, the handsome savage, throwing himself into a sudden attitude of surprise, feigns astonishment at the apparent absurdity of the request. Maintaining this position for a moment, the strange emotions depicted on his countenance soften down into one of humorous resignation to my will, and then looking wistfully up to the tufted top of the tree, he stands on tip-toe, straining his neck and ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... chosen, he might have come to us; but he was contented to dine with M. d'Antin or M. de Torcy, and some ladies of the King's suite. I am angry to this day when I think of it. The King used often to laugh at my anger on this subject; and, whenever the Elector committed some new absurdity, he used to call to me in the cabinet and ask me, "Well, Madame, what have you to say to that?" I would reply, "All that the Elector does is alike ridiculous." This made the King laugh heartily. The Elector had a Marshal, the Count d'Arco, the brother of that person ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... and Emperors." "Surely you are mad," replied the boy, "for there are no such people in America." "Very true," answered Benjamin, "but there are plenty in other parts of the world." The other, still more amazed at the apparent absurdity of this speech, reiterated in a tone of greater surprise, "You are surely quite mad." To this the enthusiast replied by asking him if he really intended to be a taylor. "Most certainly," answered the other. "Then you may ride by yourself, for I will no longer keep your ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... examine the tapestry, she perceived, that it represented scenes from the wars of Troy, though the almost colourless worsted now mocked the glowing actions they once had painted. She laughed at the ludicrous absurdity she observed, till, recollecting, that the hands, which had wove it, were, like the poet, whose thoughts of fire they had attempted to express, long since mouldered into dust, a train of melancholy ideas passed over her ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... procession to Mr. Paige's house. As Judge Hoar described the interview, he seemed very glum. He shook hands with the young men as they passed by him, but said very little. There was an awkward silence, and they were about to take leave, when the absurdity of the position struck Mr. Hoar, who was the youngest of the party, rather forcibly. Just then he heard Mr. Webster say to somebody near him: "The day for eminent public men seems to have gone by." Whereupon Hoar stepped forward and made him a brief speech, which he began by ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... required retraction or modification: and though you might guess the contemptuous estimate which he had formed of some particular person's character or doings, he rarely permitted himself to express it. He would sometimes smile significantly at the recital, or witnessing, of some particular absurdity or weakness; but I think that no one ever heard him utter a hasty, harsh, or uncharitable judgment of any body. He seemed, in fact, equally chary of giving praise or blame. No man would laugh louder, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... to wander for ages in the night of absurdity before we reach the radiant light of the truth. All our sciences witness to this fact; even the science of numbers. Try to add a column of Roman figures; you will abandon the task, stupefied by the confusion of symbols; and will recognise what a revolution was ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... freely grant, it may turn out that the Presbyterians are right and we are wrong—in brief, that God loves a moral man more than he loves an amiable and honourable one. Stranger things, indeed, have happened; one might even argue without absurdity that God is actually a Presbyterian Himself. Whether He is or is not we do not presume to say; we simply record the fact that it is our present impression that He is not—and then straightway admit that our view is worth no more than that of any ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... deprived of the presence of a force which had so long usurped, maltreated, and exhausted, while falsely sustaining them. The disciples, although they had already the power to cast out demons, could not cast this one out, and were surprised to find it so. There appears to me no absurdity, if we admit the demons at all, in admitting also that some had greater force than others, be it regarded as courage or obstinacy, or merely as grasp ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... bit of absurdity about what I say. I am in earnest." There was something in the expression of Harry's face and the tone of his voice which arrested the banter on ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... the credit of having produced him! Then indeed they were ready to bear witness to him, take his part, adopt his cause, and before the world stand up for him! As to his being the Messiah, that was merest absurdity: did they not all know his father, the carpenter? He might, however, be the prophet whom so many of the best in the nation were at the moment expecting! Let him do ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... be a sin for half the race and not a sin for the other half? For centuries men have proclaimed that women must not give themselves to men, but men may give themselves to women. Is there any greater absurdity? Wine may mix with water, but water must not mix ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... her single-mindedness, the vividness of her emotions and her unrestrained expression of them, were the varied forms which this central characteristic assumed. It was her sincerity which gave her at once her impressiveness, her charm, and her absurdity. She moved through life with the imposing certitude of one to whom concealment was impossible—either towards her surroundings or towards herself. There she was, all of her—the Queen of England, complete and obvious; the world might ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... Louvain. Montgelas organised and levelled with a remorseless common sense. Among his victims there was a class which had escaped destruction in the recent changes. The Knights of the Empire, with their village jurisdictions, were still legally existent; but to Montgelas such a class appeared a mere absurdity, and he sent his soldiers to disperse their courts and to seize their tolls. Loud lamentation assailed the Emperor at Vienna. If the dethroned bishops had bewailed the approaching extinction of Christianity in ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... simple old lady, full of love for her children, Mildred had despised her mother, she had despised herself for her want of love, and she had envied Harold his sincere love for his mother. He had never, but she had always been aware of her mother's absurdity, and therefore could not grieve quite so sincerely as Harold. She had known all the while that her mother's death did not matter much. Very soon she would be forgotten even by Harold. He could not always grieve for ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... them, and declared that they were mere trifles to what the whole corps, officers and men, committed whenever they met, and no one cared except one old sergeant who had been in the Light Dragoons. Louis's very repentance for them was another piece of absurdity. He smiled, indeed, but seemed to give himself up as a hopeless subject. His spirits flagged as they had not done throughout his illness, and, unwell, languid, and depressed, he spent his days without ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to see my old friends, whom distance cannot diminish, figuring up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on terra firma still—for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue, which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, had made to spring up beneath ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... fade away before the universal. It is difficult to express that black rains in England do not originate in the smoke of factories—less difficult to express that black rains of South Africa do not. We utter little stress upon the absurdity of Dr. Bedding's explanation, because, if anything's absurd everything's absurd, or, rather, has in it some degree or aspect of absurdity, and we've never had experience with any state except something somewhere between ultimate absurdity and final reasonableness. Our acceptance ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... she hoped her child might be at two years. Suppose he were in a burning house, would she have the courage to rescue him? What would be the limit of her endurance in the flames? She laughed to herself at the absurdity of the question. How well she knew its answer! She wished with passionate intensity that she could look into the magic depths of some fairy mirror and see, for just the flash of one instant, exactly how her boy ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... like her father, generous to the point of absurdity with her meagre possessions. Mary admired a Spanish fan—a Mexican treasure that had come down from one of the grand ladies of the Court of the Emperor Maximilian. Polly's delight flamed like wild-fire. Mary found herself ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... of luminous reason in contemplating eternal nothing with sweet complacency. This is "exactly" as it should be! Varying from this the proposition would need to be "pruned!" Dear brother, does reason countenance all this absurdity? If it be a pleasure to contemplate non-existence does it not involve the absurdity of enjoying the expectation of the discontinuance ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... relief. The absurdity of such an accusation, she was sure, would carry proof in itself that Charlie was innocent. No matter who was trying to spoil his reputation, they could not possibly succeed with such a ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... owls to Athens, and that he would never have thought it necessary to prove either the right or the expediency of taxing our American colonies, "had not many arguments been lately flung out... which with insolence equal to their absurdity deny them both." With this conciliatory preliminary disclaimer of any lack of intelligence on his own part, Mr. Jenyns proceeded to point out, in his most happy vein, how unsubstantial American reasoning really appeared when, ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... which preparation for marriage is an elementary part of education. We need not follow them into absurdity, but more than the last silly whispered words to bride and groom at the ceremony is necessary. A formal antenuptial enlightenment, frank and expert, ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... with himself. The greatest misfortune was that Lady Mabel should be there. While she was present to his father's eyes he did not know how to declare his altered wishes. Every now and then she would say to him some little word indicating her feelings of the absurdity of his passion. "I declare I don't know whether it is you or your father that Miss Boncassen most affects," she said. But to this and to other similar speeches he would make no answer. She had extracted ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... real seat of all superiority, even of manners, must be placed in the mind: dignified sentiments, superior courage, accompanied with genuine and universal courtesy, are always necessary to constitute the real gentleman; and where these are wanting, it is the greatest absurdity to think they can be supplied by affected tones of voice, particular grimaces, or extravagant and unnatural modes of dress; which, far from becoming the real test of gentility, have in general no other ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... nor Haney were out of their space suits when Kent brought Joe a note. A note was an absurdity in the Platform. But this was a ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body can act upon another body at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has any philosophical nature or competent faculty of thinking can ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... miraculous character be denied. . . . There can be no intuition, no direct perception, of the truth of Christianity." And in a pamphlet supporting the same side of the question he added: "It is not an intelligible error, but a mere absurdity, to maintain that we are conscious, or have an intuitive knowledge, of the being of God, of our own immortality, . . . or of any other fact of religion." Ripley and Parker replied in Emerson's defense; but Emerson himself would never be drawn into controversy. He ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... miniature St. James on reality-loving New England: as though the soil which had been furrowed for a race of sovereigns could grow a crop of lords; as though the Norman role of privilege could be engrafted on a society imbued with the Saxon spirit of equality: and he clinched the absurdity of his thought by uttering the prediction, that, though the people might bluster a little when such reform was proposed, yet they never would resist by force; and if they did, a demonstration of British power, such as the presence of the King's troops in a few coast-towns and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... of the constitution itself), that, if their petitions had literally been complied with, the state would have been convulsed, and a gate would have been opened through which all property might be sacked and ravaged. Nothing could have saved the public from the mischiefs of the false reform but its absurdity, which would soon have brought itself, and with it all real reform, into discredit. This would have left a rankling wound in the hearts of the people, who would know they had failed in the accomplishment of their wishes, but who, like the rest of mankind in all ages, would ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... to Hastings, he immediately addressed a letter to the president, demanding that his offer of serving on board the fleet should be either definitely refused or accepted by the Greek government. He, at the same time, pointed out to Maurocordatos the absurdity of suspecting him as a spy. We translate his own letter, which is in French. "I am suspected by your excellency of being an English spy. Considering the conduct of the British government to Greece, I expected to meet with some prejudice against the English among the ignorant; but I own ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... said, when we mooted the subject to him. "How on earth can we get up a decent eleven to play chaps like those, who have been touring it all over the country, and licking professionals even on their own ground? It's impossible, and a downright absurdity. We can't ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... absurdity of my situation to my companion, Scarsmere, who has accompanied me from England," Omar ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... "Rock" seems to have become the established landing place of the Pilgrims, from the time of the first visit of the third exploring party on December 11/21. The absurdity of the claims of the partisans of Mary Chilton, in the foolish contention which existed for many years as to whether she or John Alden was the first person to set foot upon the "Rock," is shown by the fact that, of course, no women were with the third exploring party which first landed there, ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... St. Vitus disease. Tommies and Jocks saluted every subaltern with an automatic gesture of convulsive energy. Every subaltern acknowledged these movements and in turn saluted a multitude of majors, colonels, and generals. The thing became farcical, a monstrous absurdity of human relationship, yet pleasing to the vanity of men lifted up above the lowest caste. It seemed to me an intensification of the snob instinct in the soul of man. Only the Australians stood out against it, and went by ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... imbecility—supererogation because he already knows that it is dangerous, and imbecility because it is quite impossible to kill a passion by arguing against it. The way to kill it is to give it rein under unfavourable and dispiriting conditions—to bring it down, by slow stages, to the estate of an absurdity and a horror. How much more, then, could be accomplished if the wild young man were forbidden polygamy, before marriage, but permitted monogamy! The prohibition in this case would be relatively easy to enforce, instead of impossible, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the strength of the 'powers on earth' that would oppose the Africanization of more than half the Western Hemisphere. We have no motive in noticing this gorgeous dream of 'the Committee' except to show its fallacy—its impracticability, in fact, its absurdity. No sensible man, whatever his color, should be for a moment deceived by such impracticable theories." However, in spite of all opposition, the Emigration Convention met. Upon Delany fell the real brunt of the work of the organization. In 1855 Bishop James Theodore ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... has erected; and that all military and civil officers rewarded or favoured by Napoleon the First will not only be discarded, but disgraced, and perhaps punished, by a Louis XVIII. Any person who would be imprudent enough to attempt to prove the impossibility, as well as the absurdity, of these impolitic and retrospective measures, would be instantly taken up and shot as an emissary ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... over it for the appointed number of days, until the moment when, crazily, through the hole which she digs with a hatchet in the middle of the skull, she absorbs the sleep which stupefies her and grants her oblivion for a given period. And here again we see absurdity and madness. Why does she fix that period at so many days? Why should one victim ensure her a hundred and twenty days of sleep and another a hundred and twenty-five? What insanity! The calculation is mysterious ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... Otto, 'what is this to me? Useless is not the question; I cannot rest at uselessness; I must be useful or I must be noxious - one or other. I grant you the whole thing, prince and principality alike, is pure absurdity, a stroke of satire; and that a banker or the man who keeps an inn has graver duties. But now, when I have washed my hands of it three years, and left all - labour, responsibility, and honour and enjoyment too, if there be any - to Gondremark and to - Seraphina - ' He hesitated at the name, and Gotthold ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have included pacificism in fleeting religious systems of varying degrees of impossibility and absurdity are still more open to suspicion on mental and moral grounds. The Cathari, the Waldenses, the Anabaptists, and the "Family of Love," not only developed monstrous doctrines: they also boasted of an antinomian freedom from legal ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... claim to fame and immortality as any of the heroes of the present age. We acknowledge he had his faults, but every body knows a perfect character is quite out of fashion, and that the authors of the present age hold it as an absurdity to draw even a fictitious hero without an ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... of the strange chalice of fear, went to the church early every morning while Prosper was away and prayed that she might not love him so much as to make God jealous. The absurdity of such a prayer never occurred to her. She made it with childish simplicity. Probably it did no harm. For when Prosper came home she loved him more than ever. Then she went to High Mass every Sunday morning with him ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... statement, circulated in Ireland many years since, that America abounded in roasted pigs that ran about the streets, carrying knives and forks in their mouths, and making vocal requests to be devoured. Notwithstanding the absurdity of the story, it is ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... But, besides the absurdity of disarming his principal performer of so necessary an adjunct to his instrument, in such an emphatic part of the composition too, which must have had a droll effect at the time, all such minutiae of adaptation are at this time of day very properly exploded, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... counting 2, and any lower card, 1. The believers in this doctrine would, therefore, bid a Club from such a hand as Queen, Knave, X, X, X, without any possibility of another trick; or even from Knave, X, X, X, X, X. The absurdity of this becomes obvious when it is remembered that the only real object in bidding a Club or Diamond is to show strength which will justify the partner in declaring one of the three game-going declarations. Any such holding as that mentioned not only ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... two sides have fairly sundered, and each occupies its own ground, and we get a good look at them, what absurdity is this? You don't mean to say that those fifty or sixty boys in white trousers, many of them quite small, are going to play that huge mass opposite? Indeed I do, gentlemen. They're going to try, at any rate, and won't ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... there was actually a little shy reserve, or distance, in the manner of some of them, as if they expected that their sister would have become a fine lady since so much fuss had been made with her. But Grace, who soon detected this feeling, laughed so merrily at the absurdity of the idea that it soon vanished, and they were brought to see and feel that her honours had not made her one whit less affectionate and humble than she was when they all lived together, and their sister had not been so much as heard of in the great world. ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... is that our civilization is an absurdity. Even the children go mad," thought Caesar, and took refuge in ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... judicature of learning and integrity, to one, the greatness of which is both illiterate and unprincipled. Yet such is the force of prejudice with some, and of the want of reflection in others, that many of our constitutions have copied this absurdity, without suspecting it to be one. I am glad to hear that our new Constitution is pretty sure of being accepted by States enough to secure the good it contains, and to meet with such opposition in some others, as to give us hopes it will be ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... declining to go into the pit because it was vulgar, the Major took him to the boxes, left him there, and went down himself to the pit. He had not been seated there very long before he felt an arm thrust under his, and a dandy little hand in a kid-glove squeezing his arm. George had seen the absurdity of his ways, and come down from the upper region. A tender laugh of benevolence lighted up old Dobbin's face and eyes as he looked at the repentant little prodigal. He loved the boy ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Massinger's." Now the words of Gifford's note on the dialogue of which I have already spoken, between the saint and the angel, are these: "What follows is exquisitely beautiful.... I am persuaded that this also was written by Dekker." And seeing that no mortal critic but Kingsley ever dreamed of such absurdity as Kingsley rushes forward to refute, his controversial capacity will probably be regarded by all serious students of poetry or criticism as measurable by the level of his capacity for accurate report of fact or accurate ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... has been quoted as if he were living as a beggar at this time, and the world has been asked to believe that a man who had a tenth of the revenue of the Indies due to him in some fashion, was actually living from hand to mouth from day to day. But this is a mere absurdity of exaggeration. ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... may produce animals of an inferior kind, I see not any so very great a difficulty, but that one may, without much absurdity, admit: For as there may be multitudes of contrivances that go to the making up of one compleat Animate body; so, That some of those coadjutors, in the perfect existence and life of it, may be vitiated, and the life of the whole destroyed, and yet several ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... Fifty more than there are in the city could find places in one hour," said he, laughing at the apparent absurdity of the question. "However, as you have applied to me, I have no doubt I ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... well as more gently, upon the system. As our dinner-hour was at sunset, I proposed taking hasheesh at that time, but my friends, fearing that its operation might be more speedy upon fresh subjects, and thus betray them into some absurdity in the presence of the other travellers, preferred waiting until after the meal. It was then agreed that we should retire to our room, which, as it rose like a tower one story higher than the rest of the building, was in a manner ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... was a strange mixture of absurdity, presumption, and profanity, and I felt relieved to hear his long 'amen,' and to see Joe rise and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... but Bordman felt hopelessly undignified riding what amounted to a hobbyhorse. Under the sunshade it was infuriatingly like a horse on a carousel. That there were three of them together made it look even more foolish. He stared about him, trying to take his mind from his own absurdity. His goggles made the light endurable, but he ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... out of town—near Mrs. Foster. However, I'm not going to give in just yet.... I could understand a slight sacrifice—or even a big one if I were in love with Captain Foster, but I'm not. I suppose you'll say that I needn't be, but that isn't the point. The utter absurdity is that all Daphne wants of him she could see now. No one minds her seeing him. But why should she break up her life and spoil her future for it? Of course, that part is his idea. He is so selfish that he isn't satisfied with the harmless fun they have now, but wants her to live ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... foul and deadly practices, had been driven from society, had copulated in the desert with infernal spirits; and that the Huns were the offspring of this execrable conjunction. [58] The tale, so full of horror and absurdity, was greedily embraced by the credulous hatred of the Goths; but, while it gratified their hatred, it increased their fear, since the posterity of daemons and witches might be supposed to inherit some share of the praeternatural powers, as well as of the malignant temper, of their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... of these people, awkwardly contrasted with their personal absurdity and insipidity, at length provoked the serious notice of the two illustrious associates: the result was this German Dunciad; a production of which the plan was, that it should comprise an immense multitude of detached couplets, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... said that Jack Wonnell, being a poor man, could not buy all the fashions, and was merely wearing out a bargain; that he knew he was ridiculous, and set no such conceit on his absurdity as that grim Milburn; and they rather enjoyed his playing the Dromio to that Antipholus, and turning into farce the ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... of explaining that his theoretic preference for Republicanism would not constrain him to upset a monarchy which happened to suit the nation where it existed, he wrote Prince Florestan, as though to say: 'This is what you take me for'; and even while it satirized the absurdity of Florestan's court and constitution, the book showed that it would be still more absurd to upset even the most ridiculous Government so long as it suited the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... has successively made, has formed all these compositions in this desert island without the help of any man's art;" for such an assertion is a natural consequence of the principles of the Epicureans. But the very absurdity of the consequence serves to expose the extravagance of the principle they lay down. When men, by the natural rectitude of their common sense, conclude that such sort of works cannot result from chance, ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... Braddock, attended by his staff, and his guard of light horse, set off for Wills' Creek by the way of Winchester, the road along the north side of the Potomac not being yet made. "This gave him," writes Washington, "a good opportunity to see the absurdity of the route, and of damning it very heartily." [Footnote: Draft of a letter, among Washington's papers, addressed to ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... myself, indeed, at a loss to conceive how the absurdity of employing me to make such a proposition was overlooked, for I had, really no advantage to offer in return to the Hanse Towns. Against whom did Bonaparte propose to protect them? The truth is, Napoleon then wished to seize these towns by direct ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... right; of course he must, and I am rather ashamed ever to have thought otherwise. Where should the light come from? Has a man a flame inside of his head? Does his spirit manifest itself in the semblance of flame? The moment we think of it, the absurdity becomes evident. I am not quite sure, however, that the outer surface of the eye may not reflect more light in some states of feeling than in others; the state of the health, certainly, has an influence ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... say that he would not, but I am her uncle, and her uncle protests, and he says that this marriage is an absurdity." ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to chance or to the errors of his adversary. [Footnote: The reverse has been stated again and again with very great injustice, not only by British, but even by American writers (as e.g., Prof. W. G. Sumner, in his "Andrew Jackson as a Public Man," Boston, 1882). The climax of absurdity is reached by Major McDougal, who says (as quoted by Cole in his "Memoirs of British Generals," ii, p. 364): "Sir Edward Packenham fell, not after an utter and disastrous defeat, but at the very moment when the arms of victory ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... inventor must be obvious, in view of the fact that if the doctrine of mechanical equivalents were applied to his claim, then the fundamental device on which he improved would probably infringe upon it, which would be an absurdity. It is thus seen that the pioneer inventor may have a claim so broad in its terms that its terms cannot be escaped; that he may invoke the doctrine of equivalents and have his claim dominate structures not directly responding to the terms of the claim; that the secondary inventor, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... not the aftereffects of liquor. The astonishing possibility occurred to Joe Rix that this seemed to be a man with a broken spirit and a great sorrow. He blinked that absurdity away. ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... influence, owing to the sarcastic tone in which the author attacked his calmer adversary. In the honest conviction of profound knowledge, the clever, vigorous champion of materialism endeavoured to brand the opponents of his dogmas with the stigma of absurdity, and those who flattered themselves with the belief that they belonged to the ranks of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was in the ascendant, Raphael could take the best of Perugino and discard the worst; in its decadence Parmigiano reproduces the affectations of Correggio, and Bernini carries the exaggerations of Michelangelo to absurdity. All arts describe a parabola. The force which produces them causes them to rise throughout their growth up to a certain point, and then to descend more gradually in a long and slanting line of regular declension. There is no real break of continuity. The end is the result of simple exhaustion. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... "Bedad," says Roger Sterne, "that long fellow spoke French so beautiful that I shouldn't have known he wasn't a foreigner, till he broke out with his hulla-ballooing, and only an Irish calf can bellow like that." And Roger made another remark in his wild way, in which there was sense as well as absurdity—"If that young gentleman," says he, "would but ride over to our camp, instead of Villars's, toss up his hat and say, 'Here am I, the King, who'll follow me?' by the Lord, Esmond, the whole army would rise and carry ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
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