"Causeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... frantic; Lear is mad; Ophelia is insane. Her sweet mind lies in fragments before us—a pitiful spectacle! Her wild, rambling fancies; her aimless, broken speeches; her quick transitions from gayety to sadness—each equally purposeless and causeless; her snatches of old ballads, such as perhaps her nurse sung her to sleep with in her infancy—are all so true to the life, that we forget to wonder, and can only weep. It belonged to Shakspeare alone so to temper such a picture that we can endure ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... "was an exceedingly proud woman, belonging to a family of social prominence in the East. She felt deeply the causeless gossip connecting her name with the case, as well as the open disgrace of her husband's conviction. She refused to receive her former friends, and even failed in loyalty to your father in his time of trial. It is impossible now to fix the fault clearly, or to account for her actions. Captain Nolan ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... serious, eager for certainties and those enjoyments which do not betray. It is vast and sonorous; let it be stirred ever so little, and from it go forth deep vibrations which render the sound of the infinite. Augustin, before his conversion, had the apprehensions of our Romantics, the causeless melancholy and sadness, the immense yearnings for "anywhere but here," which overwhelmed our fathers. He is ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... post-mortem examination and an inquest. Mrs. Darrell had taken poison. The jury brought in a verdict of suicide while in a state of unsound mind. The act seemed too causeless for sanity. Her strange absent ways had attracted the attention of the servants for some time past, and the evidence of her own maid respecting her restlessness and irritability for the last few months influenced the ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... Cato, whom I did not know to be there, sitting in the library, surrounded by a number of the books of the Stoics. For he had, as you know, a boundless desire for reading, one which was quite insatiable,—so much so, indeed, that he was not afraid of the causeless reproaches of the common people, but was accustomed to continue reading even in the senate-house itself, while the senate was assembling, without, however, at all relaxing in his attention to the affairs of the republic. And now, being in the enjoyment of complete ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... initiations, were heard skylarking along the sidewalk, rattling sticks on the fences, squawking hoarsely, and even attempting to sing in the shocking new voices of uncompleted adolescence. For no reason, and just as a poultry yard falls into causeless agitation, they stopped in front of the house, and for half an hour produced the effect of a ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... frame were developed once for all in the mind of a Creator, or gradually in the creation itself, which from the first monad or protoplasm to the last of the primates, or man, is not, I suppose, to be looked on as altogether causeless, meaningless, purposeless; think of him only as man (and man means the thinker), with his mind yet lying fallow, though full of germs—germs of which I hold as strongly as ever no trace has ever, no trace will ever, be discovered ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... that the only reason that you are unable to think of or picture a Causeless Cause, is because everything that you have experienced in this relative world of the senses has had a cause—something from which it sprung. You have seen Cause and Effect in full operation all about you, and quite naturally your ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... explicit for me. I gave way to a, seemingly, quite causeless impulse of curiosity, I went out into the street, just as I was, to see for myself. It was, perhaps, not the most sensible thing I could have done, and papa would have been shocked; but I am always shocking papa. It had been ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... during her second marriage, it cannot be assumed that mere lack of adaptability was the cause of unfruitfulness between them. There may have been some cause that history has not recorded, or unknown to the state of medical science of those days. There are doubtless many cases of apparently causeless unfruitfulness in marriage that even physicians, with a knowledge of all apparent conditions in the parties, cannot explain; but when, as elsewhere related in this volume, impregnation by artificial means is successfully practised, it is useless to attribute barrenness ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... Crustuminian mountains in a very deep channel, joins the river Tiber not far below the road. Already all places in front and on each side were crowded with the enemy, and this nation, which has a natural turn for causeless confusion, by their harsh music and discordant clamours, filled all places ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... girl inclines to reveries; she seeks solitude; her mother surprises her in causeless tears; her teacher discovers an unwonted inattention to her studies, a less retentive memory, a disinclination to mental labor; her father misses her accustomed playfulness; he, perhaps, is annoyed by her listlessness and inertia. What does it ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... Rinaldo said, "Let not the pair this combat longer ply; Since whichsoever of the two falls dead, Know, that you let him perish wrongfully: This thinks that he is right, and is misled, Vouches the false, and knows not 'tis a lie: Since that which brought his brother to his end, Moves him in causeless battle contend. ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... when they seceded in 1861, and that the organic change created by the Thirteenth Amendment might be practically set aside by State legislation. In this belief they exhibited their policy towards the Negro. Considering all the circumstances, it would be hard to find in history a more causeless and cruel oppression of a whole race than was embodied in the legislation of those revived and reconstructed State governments. Their membership was composed wholly of the 'ruling class,' as they termed it, and, in ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... as a most causeless one," once said an Austrian officer to me, "for had the Federals stood but half an hour longer—which, with their position and supports, there was no earthly reason for their not doing—there could have been but one result. Smith's forces could not have held their own that much longer against ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... "O why, Penelope, this causeless fear, To render sleep's soft blessing unsincere? Alike devote to sorrow's dire extreme The day-reflection, and the midnight-dream! Thy son the gods propitious will restore, And bid thee ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... at discovering, from facts such as these, the causeless rancour with which innocent and industrious people were so recently persecuted. The moral of the history of the accursed race may, perhaps, be best conveyed in the words of an epitaph on Mrs. Mary Hand, who lies buried in the ...
— An Accursed Race • Elizabeth Gaskell
... learned, when time brought round its divine amende, neither to reproach himself so bitterly, nor to blame others; and he knew it was better to accept any sad earthly lot, any cruelty, deceit, or wrong inflicted by others, than to have hardened his heart against any living soul by acts of causeless suspicion or deliberate injustice. ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... thought of times when Pain might be thy guest, 15 Lord of thy house and hospitality; And Grief, uneasy lover! never rest But when she sate within the touch of thee. O too industrious folly! O vain and causeless melancholy! 20 Nature will either end thee quite; Or, lengthening out thy season of delight, Preserve for thee, by individual right, A young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks. What hast thou to do with sorrow, 25 Or the injuries of to-morrow? Thou ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... you wear flannel, a heavy great coat and thick shoes, but all this does not prevent you from passing two months in bed. But when spring returns, with its leaves and flowers, its warm, soft breezes, and its smell of the fields, which cause you vague disquiet and causeless emotion, nobody says ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... themselves in interdependent connection with every thing that exists or has existed. Thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the minutest stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone, have nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless beholding of it when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be called a beholding; for it is neither an act nor an effect; but an impossible creation of a something nothing out of its very contrary! It is the mere quick-silver plating ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the propensities which teach mankind to torment themselves, that of causeless fear is the most irritating, busy, painful and ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... for two or three days and then marched on in the track of the army. While at Shelbyville, the first and only causeless stampede of our pickets and false alarm to the camps which occurred during our squadron organization, took place. Ten or fifteen men were posted on picket some eight miles from the town toward Nashville, near a small bridge, at the southern end of which the extreme outpost vidette ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... at night. He resumed his haunted prowlings through the streets. But he took care that he did not pass Francey Wilmot's house again. He knew now that he was afraid. He was ill, too, with a secret, causeless malady that baffled him. There were nights when he suffered the unspeakable torture of a man who feels that the absolute control over all his faculties, which he has taken for granted, is slipping from him, and that his whole personality ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... falsehood, and of malice, on which our credulous friends are floating. If you have been made to believe that I ever did, said, or thought a thing unfriendly to your fame and feelings, you do me injury as causeless as it is afflicting to me. In the present contest in which you are concerned, I feel no passion, I take no part, I express no sentiment. Whichever of my friends is called to the supreme cares of the nation, I know that they will be wisely and faithfully ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... her—the apparently causeless change in his attitude. It was true that upon, first recognising in his agent's sister the girl he had rescued from her difficulties on the night of the Fete des Narcisses he had appeared disconcerted and by no means ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... by attending some services at a Mission which then happened to be proceeding which, instead of inspiring him with hope, convinced him that his case was past recovery. For some weeks he tasted, day by day, the dreary bitterness of the cup of dark and causeless depression, and laboured under an agonising dejection of spirit. This intensity of suffering seemed to shake his whole life to its foundation. It made havoc of his work, of his friendships, of the easy philosophy ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... interior, with a request of a nature unusually interesting. He stated his name to be Eugene Beauharnois, son of the ci-devant Vicomte de Beauharnois, who, adhering to the revolutionary party, had been a general in the republican service upon the Rhine, and falling under the causeless suspicion of the committee of public safety, was delivered to the revolutionary tribunal, and fell by its sentence just four days before the overthrow of Robespierre. Eugene was come to request of Bonaparte, as general of the interior, that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... I was a man of tender heart, etc., etc.? ... What has all this to do with acts of free-will? If they are free, they must not be conditioned by antecedent circumstances of any sort, by the misery of the beggar, by the pity in the heart of the passer-by. They must be causeless, not determined. They must drop from a clear sky out of the void, for just in so far as they can be accounted for, they are not free.' [Footnote: Loc. cit., ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... imperious sign which abashed her and inspired respect for her neighbor. She sat down beside me. The old man did not choose to leave the charming creature, to whom he clung capriciously with the silent and apparently causeless obstinacy to which very old persons are subject, and which makes them resemble children. In order to sit down beside the young lady he needed a folding-chair. His slightest movements were marked by the inert heaviness, the stupid hesitancy, ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... The particular weekly that you want is not taken in; the dinner is execrable, and the ventilation a farce. All these evils oppressed me to-night. And yet I was puzzled to find that somewhere within me there was a faint lightening of the spirits; causeless, as far as I could discover. It could not be Davies's letter. Yachting in the Baltic at the end of September! The very idea made one shudder. Cowes, with a pleasant party and hotels handy, was all very well. An August cruise on a steam yacht in French waters or the Highlands was all very ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... about it, they would burst with the greatness of their art and science, so hot and eager are they to teach.' But the noise and dust having subsided, there is left us, of those very times, works which men will not willingly let die. Noise and smoke causeless do not come. There is a force at bottom which will ultimately work itself clear, and produce good and substantial fruits. There is a force somewhere, or no foam and dust would rise: but there is little force in the foam and dust themselves. And ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... they are told that they are heroes and patriots, that "Spaniards never shall be slaves," and all the rest of the humbug and claptrap that revolutionary agitators always have upon their tongue's tip. The poor idiots, fizzing and boiling over with their fire-new enthusiasm, aimless and causeless as it is, are in ecstasies for about a week, or until they discover, what is pretty often the case, that instead of being better off, they have exchanged King Log for King Stork. The fact is, Spaniards are not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... agreed, announced magnanimously that he would not pursue the matter, and plunged into a series of causeless and empty inquiries in the hope of stumbling upon an answer with which he might first of all hammer the witness and then erect a defence. His efforts went unrewarded, and behind him in the dock Mr. Morgan ground his teeth ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... old gentleman, "mind you, I do not approve of petty jealousies and quarrelings, nor of causeless assaults. But, when any person is assailed, it is his peculiar privilege, sir, to hit back. And when he hits he should hit hard. He should use both strategy and force. He should see to it, sir, that his enemy is punished. Have your two hostile bodies yet met in open conflict ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... in wordes few, That men have an ill use (To their own shame) women to blame, And causeless ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the Erbprinz's fainting fits were more frequent than ever, and the Erbprincessin sank into a deep and brooding melancholy, which was varied by attacks of painful excitement and sudden bursts of causeless anger. It was whispered at Ludwigsburg that she was surely ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... its original and philosophically-correct usage, the term "accident" signifies a property or quality not essential to our conception of a substance: hence, it has come to mean anything that happens as a result of unforeseen causes—or, lastly, that which is causeless. But, as we know that nothing can happen without causes of some kind, the term "accident" is divested of real meaning when it is used in the last of these senses. Yet this is the sense that is sought to be placed upon it by the objection which we are considering. If the objectors will ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... your wish'd sight I desire, Suspicion you pretend, Causeless you yourself retire Whilst I in vain attend, Thus a lover, as you say, Still made more eager by delay. Is this fair excusing? ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... the listener "from morn to dewy eve," provided a flask of Gascon wine, or a stoup of good English ale, remained on the board. It may be remembered that De Walton, when he dismissed the minstrel from the dungeon, was sensible that he owed him some compensation for the causeless suspicion which had dictated his imprisonment, more particularly as he was a valued servant, and had shown himself the faithful confidant of the Lady Augusta de Berkely, and the person who was moreover likely to know ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... she was shorn of her darlings, Of bairns and brothers: they bent to their fate 25 With war-spear wounded; woe was that woman. Not causeless lamented the daughter of Hoce The decree of the Wielder when morning-light came and She was able 'neath heaven to behold the destruction [38] Of brothers and bairns, where the ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... you call it?—what strange abuse of words! what causeless trifling with honesty! is language of no purpose but to wound the ear with untruths? is the gift of speech only granted us to pervert the use of understanding? I can give you no pleasure, I have no power to give it any one; you can give none to me-the ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... loaf, but I worked harder than ever. I was either in an exalted state of mind or pining away under a spell of yearning and melancholy—of causeless, meaningless melancholy. ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... king,' according to Roper, 'conceiving great indignation towards him, could not be satisfied until he had in some way revenged it. And for as much as he (Thomas) nothing having, nothing could lose, his grace (the king) devised a causeless quarrel against his father (the elder More), keeping him in the Tower till he had made him pay a hundred ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... of artful intelligence came into Nott's eyes, which had remained blankly staring at Renshaw's apparently causeless hilarity. Turning to him he winked solemnly. "That keerless kind o' hoss-laff jist fetched her," he whispered, and vanished before his ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... Aemilius was eminently seen in his countenance and behavior continuing as noble and lofty upon the loss of two dear sons, as when he achieved his greatest victories and triumphs. But Timoleon, after he had justly punished his brother, a truly heroic action, let his reason yield to a causeless sorrow, and, humiliated with grief and remorse, forbore for twenty years to appear in any public place, or meddle with any affairs of the commonwealth. It is truly very commendable to abhor and shun the doing any base action; but to stand in fear of every kind of censure or disrepute, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... of all, on went this noble maid, Until the presence of the king she gained, Nor for he swelled with ire was she afraid, But his fierce wrath with fearless grace sustained, "I come," quoth she, "but be thine anger stayed, And causeless rage 'gainst faultless souls restrained — I come to show thee, and to bring thee both, The wight whose fact hath made thy ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... Unkind returns thy generous ardor chill, Nor causeless censure give thy bosom pain, Nor thankless hearts reward ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... world of nations free to work out their several destinies, self-determining, not subject any more to the threat of causeless war at the hands of a government steeled to barbarity. A world cemented by the blood the monster itself had caused to be shed; by the memory of brave sons fallen that others might live; by the tears of countless women and ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... the further I felt at sea. I recapitulated the elements of mystery, counting them on my fingers: the pavilion secretly prepared for guests; the guests landed at the risk of their lives and to the imminent peril of the yacht; the guests, or at least one of them, in undisguised and seemingly causeless terror; Northmour with a naked weapon; Northmour stabbing his most intimate acquaintance at a word; last, and not least strange, Northmour fleeing from the man whom he had sought to murder, and barricading himself, like a hunted creature, behind the door of the pavilion. Here were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into the room, and Clara explained to her what had happened. As Heidi continued her weeping, the lady, who was evidently getting impatient with her, went up to Heidi and said with decision, "Now, Adelaide, that is enough of all this causeless lamentation. I will tell you once for all, if there are any more scenes like this while you are reading, I shall take the book away from you and shall not let ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... venture on the name, Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame, Bloody dissectors, worse than ten Monroes, He hacks to teach, they mangle to expose: By blockhead's daring into madness stung, His heart by wanton, causeless malice wrung, His well-won ways—than life itself more dear— By miscreants torn who ne'er one sprig must wear; Foil'd, bleeding, tortur'd in th' unequal strife, The hapless Poet flounces on through life, Till, fled each hope that once his bosom fired, And fled each Muse that glorious once inspir'd, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... I was not so happy: and I looked back fondly to the days of the greenwood and the fellowship of the Dry Tree, and the days before that, of my flight with my lord. And moreover with the wearing of the years those murmurs against me and the blind causeless hatred began to grow again, and chiefly methinks because I was the king, and my lord the king's cloak: but therewith tales concerning me began to spring up, how that I was not only a sorceress, but even one foredoomed from of old and sent ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... a rebellious rebel. Yes,' she added, rising, 'I detest with all my heart this wicked, causeless rebellion. I detest the very names of the leaders of it. And yet I am compelled to go about with lies upon my lips, and to act lies, till I detest myself more than all else! I have consoled myself somewhat by ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... evening, in place of that physical contentment which usually heralds the dinner-hour, at sea, I experienced a fit of the seemingly causeless apprehension which too often in the past had harbingered the coming of grim events; which I had learnt to associate with the nearing presence of one of Fu-Manchu's death-agents. In view of the facts, as I afterwards knew them to be, I ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... that the whole of his fortune was subject to an unlimited liability. The mystery of his unconsciousness of all this may be left pretty much where Lockhart, with full acknowledgment, left it. I have said that his action seems to have originated partly in a blind and causeless fear of poverty, which, as blind and causeless fear so often does, made him run into the very danger he tried to avoid, partly in an incomprehensible partiality for the Ballantynes.[30] We have no evidence, in any degree trustworthy, that during the entire term of his connection with ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... "twelve good men and true," in a box in the city. It was in this ardour of spirit that he adopted the Romish cause. No man knew more thoroughly the measureless value of an established church, the endless, causeless, and acrid bitterness of sectarianism, and the mixture of unlearned doctrine and factious politics which constitute their creeds. Against Popery in power, Italian, German, or French, in the days of Louis Quatorze, he would have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... a November Sunday inspired Eustace Reynolds with a melancholy too insistent to be ignored and too causeless to be enjoyed. The grey sky overhead between the house-tops, the cold wind round every street-corner, the sad faces of the men and women on the pavements, combined to create an atmosphere of ineloquent misery. Eustace was sensitive to impressions, and in spite of a ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Clementina and my Lord—Clementina, Henry, and Mackellar (nicknamed Squaretoes) are really very fine fellows; the Master is all I know of the devil; I have known hints of him, in the world, but always cowards: he is as bold as a lion, but with the same deadly, causeless duplicity I have watched with so much surprise in my two cowards. 'Tis true, I saw a hint of the same nature in another man who was not a coward; but he had other things to attend to; the Master has nothing ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... to haunt the Old Palace of Berlin and that of Bayreuth. It is believed by some that this apparition of "the White Lady" appears to a member of the Hohenzollern family as a sure forerunner of death; and Carlyle's picture of the causeless fright of one of the royal rulers when he thought he had seen this ghost, will recur to all who have read "Frederick the Great." We have heard of no visitor so fortunate as to get a sight of the apparition. One ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... people. There is a carefulness of expressing an opinion on any subject as if a reign of governmental terror had begun. The loyalty always so fervent is now intense and loud. The people here think that there is an epidemic of unreasonableness and causeless murmuring raging at ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... of a dominant church. It is amusing to see you, sir, who have availed yourself so lavishly, in all time past, of the freedom of the press to assail others, so sensitive at the mere suspicion of a mere report against causeless attacks upon private individuals, having been ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... knew few of his letters at four; and was superannuated—such was his impenetrability to learning—at the age of five from the school of which his father had been master. He was moreover till the age of six and a half so frequently subject to long fits of abstraction and of apparently causeless crying that his mother and grandmother feared for his reason and thought him 'an absolute fool.' We are told also by his sister—and there is no incongruity in the two accounts—that he early displayed a taste for 'preheminence and would preside over his playmates as ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... the style, non ego, sed dominus; and not so only, but to bind it with the thunder and denunciation of curses and anathemas, to the terror of those which have not sufficiently learned out of Solomon that "The causeless curse shall ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... said Lois, driving back the tears at this causeless injury. "Mr. Leverich said it was best not to. Nobody knows about your being away at all. You're not going now, Justin—without ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... to regard a man's jealousy. It flatters her, yet it pains her. She is the cause of it, yet she would believe it causeless. She deplores it, yet she would not have it quite away. It is proof of love, yet it is fatal to love. How to treat it, puzzles her. Implicit obedience to the man's wishes lowers her in her own eyes, and, consequently, ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... many times had I enveloped her with this moral vitriol, with this jealous hatred, that she was degraded thereby. In the periods of this causeless hatred I gradually uncrowned her. I covered her with ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... with difficulty that he restrained his temper. His life had been made up of a constant recurrence of these scenes, and he was wholly weary of them; and the thought of the absolute want of reason in the causeless jealousy, and the misery that these little bickerings made of his life, exasperated him beyond measure. The dinner proceeded in silence, and every slight remark was a presage of storm. Hubert hoped the girl would say ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... features of later American history. The Republicans succeeded in the next national election; but General Garfield, who was chosen President, was mortally wounded by an assassin (July 2, 1881), a few months after his inauguration. Guiteau, who committed the causeless and ruthless deed, claimed to be "inspired by the Deity," but was judged to be morally and legally responsible, and died on the gallows. Chester A. Arthur, the Vice-president, filled the highest office for the remainder ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... bookmaking; assurance; speculation, gaming &c. 621. V. chance, hap, turn up; fall to one's lot; be one's -fate &c. 601; stumble on light upon; take one's chance &c. 621. Adj. casual, fortuitous, accidental, adventitious, causeless, incidental, contingent, uncaused, undetermined, indeterminate; random, statistical; possible &c. 470; unintentional &c. 621. Adv. by chance, accidentally, by accident; casually; perchance &c. (possibly) 470; for aught one knows; as good would have it, as bad would have it, as luck would have ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... on: "I'm happy now. Always happy." He broke into thin, causeless laughter. "When I wake up in the middle of the night, instead of feeling miserable like I used to, and remembering things that happened at Dawlish when I was a kid, and wishing I hadn't ever been born ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... youth; "even in your presence I return to this gay man's face, the causeless dishonour—which he has flung on my name. My brave father, who fell in the cause of his country, demands that justice at the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... what he had done, to be so detested; and it seemed to her gentle nature that no man, not the worst criminal, could, with justice, be so dealt with by a fellow-creature; but a kind of instinct told her that the hate was causeless, and therefore did it seem to wound her, as if herself had been injured. She followed Lady Randolph through the long galleries, and she whose step had been so fearless on the dangerous mountains, now shrank from the shadows on the wall; for ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... which could be employed against her; but in that he and his partisans had long been adept. Every old libel and pretext for detraction was diligently revived. The old nickname of "The Austrian" was repeated with pertinacity as spiteful as causeless; even the king's aunts lending their aid to swell the clamor on that ground, and often saying, with all the malice of their inveterate jealousy, that it was not to be expected that she should have the same feelings as their father or ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... into trouble; and trouble is upon you; for that is the second causeless blow you have given me. Be careful; the third ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... perspective art, that lay down but one twelve pence a' th' board, 'twill appear as if there were twenty; now should you wear a pair of these spectacles, and see your wife tying her shoe, you would imagine twenty hands were taking up of your wife's clothes, and this would put you into a horrible causeless fury. ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... true, Not then claimed sovereignty his due; While Albany, with feeble hand, Held borrowed truncheon of command, 125 The young King, mewed in Stirling tower, Was stranger to respect and power. But then, thy Chieftain's robber life! Winning mean prey by causeless strife, Wrenching from ruined Lowland swain 130 His herds and harvest reared in vain— Methinks a soul, like thine, should scorn The spoils from such foul ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... when, "drowned in tears," he first beholds the light; for, as the sparks fly upwards, so is man born to trouble, and woe doth he bring with him into the world, even thyself, dark one, terrible one, causeless, unbegotten, without a father. Oh, how unfrequently dost thou break down the barriers which divide thee from the poor soul of man, and overcast its sunshine with thy gloomy shadow! In the brightest days of prosperity—in the midst of health and wealth—how sentient is the poor human creature ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the march of the metre, Is the shrilling, shrilling Of the knife in the killing That ends, when it must, (O the throb and the thrust!) In a death, in the dust, The silence, the stillness, of satiate lust, The solemn pause When the veil withdraws And man looks on his god, on the Causeless Cause. Still, still, Under the hill! The hunter is dead - ...
— Household Gods • Aleister Crowley
... average amount of intellect; but from the nose downward the form and expression of the features were suggestive only of the animal,—a brutal, sensual, repelling look. Margery, who had looked for the great man from London with girlish curiosity, suddenly felt an unconquerable and causeless dislike to him swell up in her heart, a something which she could neither define nor account for, that made her wish to avoid sitting near him, and turn her eyes away whenever his were ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... steward, either simply to run away, and then come in later with corroboration, or actually to be present in the turret, and then escape. Or perhaps the King told his man-in-the-turret tale merely 'in the air;' and then Henderson, having run away in causeless panic, later 'sees money in it,' and appears, with a string of falsehoods. 'Chance loves Art,' says Aristotle, and chance might well befriend an artist so capable and conscientious as his Majesty. To be sure Mr. Hill Burton ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... advice and warning and education and effort and endeavor are useless and without effect. This is contradicted by experience as well as by the testimony of Scripture. But neither is it true on the other hand that a person's will and its conduct are causeless and undetermined until the moment of action. This idea is equally untrue to reason and experience. We know that every effect has a cause and the cause has a cause, and this second cause has again a cause, until we reach the first ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... antecedents is not to destroy them: granted that they are—a man does not cease to be a man when we reflect that he has had a father and mother, nor do will and memory cease to be will and memory on the ground that they cannot come causeless. They are manifest minute by minute to the perception of all sane people, and this tribunal, though not infallible, is nevertheless our ultimate court of appeal—the final arbitrator ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... Such causeless fears when coward minds do take, It makes them fly that which they fain would have; As this poor beast, who did his rest forsake, Thinking not why, ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... no sooner left with the Chieftain and Waverley, the rest of his attendants being at some distance, than he said, 'If I owed less to your disinterested friendship, I could be most seriously angry with both of you for this very extraordinary and causeless broil, at a moment when my father's service so decidedly demands the most perfect unanimity. But the worst of my situation is, that my very best friends hold they have liberty to ruin themselves, as well as the cause they are engaged in, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... ambassage be sent to foreign princes laden with instructions of your rash-advised charge?... I never yet loved you so little as not to moan your infamous dealings, which you are in mind, we see, that myself shall possess more princes witness of my causeless injuries, which I should have wished had passed no seas to testify such memorials of your wrongs. Bethink you of such dealings, and set your labor upon such mends as best may, though not right, yet salve some piece of this overslip; and be assured that you deal ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... causeless Quarrels is call'd Cowardice, and to take an affront Baseness, and Meanness of Spirit; to refuse fighting, and putting Life at a Cast on the Point of a Sword, a Practice forbid by the Laws of God and of all good Government, is yet call'd Cowardice; ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... are mines of treasure in your breast, Seen by that jealous sun, but not possest. He, like a devil, among the blest above, Can take no pleasure in your heaven of love. Go, take her; and thy causeless fears remove; [To the King. Love her so well, that I with rage may die: Dull husbands have no right to jealousy: If that's allowed, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... to shore; that it had peopled the wilderness and made the waste places blossom, and that no highway for wheels and beasts in all the land was so full of blessings and joys as was their own wet Highway of the Flood. Nevertheless, as meseemeth that no name is given to any town or mountain or river causeless, but that men are moved to name all steads for a remembrance of deeds that have been done and tidings that have befallen, or some due cause, even so might it well be with the Sundering Flood, and whereas also I wot something of that cause ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... is lost. There was also the Law, ever ready and anxious to right the wrongs of the common soldier if, in deed, wrong had been done. But he doubted much whether there had been any sufficient wrong. Causeless suspicion over-long brooded upon had led, by his theory, to deliberate crime. But his attempts to minimise the motive failed. The most disconnected witness knew - had known for weeks - the causes of offence, and the prisoner, who naturally was the last of all to know, groaned in the dock while he ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... side by side with this extravagant, apparently causeless merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless, terror. The drug produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror I could not imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. It was terror masked ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... diseased, less preoccupied by revenge, only irritated more the consuming hate of that inexorable spirit. Helen's seraphic purity, her exquisite, overflowing kindness, ever forgetting self, her airy cheerfulness, even her very moods of melancholy, calm and seemingly causeless as they were, perpetually galled and blistered that writhing, preternatural susceptibility which is formed by the consciousness of infamy, the dreary egotism of one cut off from the charities of the world, with ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mirth without a sting; Ere tyrant customs strength sufficient bore To violate the feelings of the poor; To leave them distanc'd in the mad'ning race, Where'er Refinement shews its hated face: Nor causeless hated;... 'tis the peasant's curse, That hourly makes his wretched station worse; Destroys life's intercourse; the social plan That rank to rank cements, as man to man: Wealth flows around him, fashion lordly reigns; Yet poverty is his, ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... I," said Tammas, and was seized with sudden spasm of seemingly causeless merriment. For looking up as M'Adam was speaking, he had caught a glimpse of a boy's fair head, peering cautiously round the cow-shed, and, behind, the flutter of short petticoats. They disappeared as silently as they had come; and ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... sometimes drawing his hand over my clothes with an affectionate manner of caressing that never failed to cause in me an embarrassment of which I was ashamed. But for all that, he was capable of flashes of causeless anger and fits of sturdy sullenness. At a word of reproof, I have seen him upset the dish of which I was about to eat, and this not surreptitiously, but with defiance; and similarly at a hint of inquisition. I was not unnaturally curious, being in a strange place and surrounded ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... weak babe will be in pain and misery all its days and die in agony. And, husband dear, you have once again struck me a causeless blow. Oh, do be on your guard, and not ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... unbars the gate; Hark, the monkeys, how they prate! All ye gods who rule the soul:[5] Styx, through Hell whose waters roll! Let me be allow'd to tell What I heard in yonder Hell. Near the door an entrance gapes,[6] Crowded round with antic shapes, Poverty, and Grief, and Care, Causeless Joy, and true Despair; Discord periwigg'd with snakes,'[7] See the dreadful strides she takes! By this odious crew beset,[8] I began to rage and fret, And resolved to break their pates, Ere we enter'd at the gates; Had not Clio in the ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... over, and nothing remained but that halting of the physical machinery to which we never give a thought during perfect action—the weakness hanging leaden weights to every limb, the unwonted nervousness and irritability, the apparently causeless necessity for inaction—he was anything but a resigned man. Captain George, getting his furlough and carrying him off, was blessed from the deepest heart of the ward nurses. He had a kind of feeling that this his first illness was a matter in which the universe should be concerned, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sun shone, and Mercy was herself again. Her depression of the evening before seemed to her so causeless, so inexplicable, that she recalled it almost with terror, as one might a temporary insanity. She blushed to think of her unreasonable sensitiveness to the words and tones of Stephen White. "As if it made any ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... raised by taxation was squandered in Indian wars, while the great body of the people, living safely along the eastern coast, thought but little about the frontier. Some persons took the sentimental view and considered the government barbarous to make causeless war. Others believed that altogether too much of the public time and money were wasted in looking after outlying settlements. The borderers themselves, on the other hand, thought that the general government ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Celts, who had fallen from it. It is not difficult to account for this latter omission. The Celts, driven from the plains into the mountains and islands, preserved their liberty, and hated their oppressors with fierce, and not causeless, hatred. A proud and free people, isolated both in country and language, were not likely to adopt customs which implied brotherhood ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... their rights as States of the Union. Mr. Shellabarger gave an answer to that question, which, as a caustic summary, is worthy to be quoted in full. "I answer him," said the member from Ohio, "in the words of the Supreme Court, 'The causeless waging against their own Government of a war which all the world acknowledge to have been the greatest civil war known in the history of the human race.' That war was waged by these people as States, and it went through long, dreary years. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... condition—a not unpleasant one—when suddenly the now well-known symptoms of the visitation to which I had become subject suddenly seized upon me,—the leap of the heart; the sudden, causeless, overwhelming physical excitement, which I could neither ignore nor allay. I was terrified beyond description, beyond reason, when I became conscious that this was about to begin over again: what purpose did it answer; what good was in it? My father indeed understood the meaning of it though ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... Shakespeare's suffering. It is not to be called a work of art, it is hardly even a tragedy; it is the causeless ruin of a soul, a ruin insufficiently motived by complete trust in men and spendthrift generosity. If there was ever a man who gave so lavishly as Timon, if there was ever one so senseless blind in trusting, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... judicious, manly, free; Yours, a blind instinct, crouches to the rod, And licks the foot that treads it in the dust. Were kingship as true treasure as it seems, Sterling, and worthy of a wise man's wish, I would not be a king to be beloved Causeless, and daubed with undiscerning praise, Where love is more attachment to the throne, Not to the man who fills ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... and judicious advice we can prevent a bloody and causeless war in Italy we are bound ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... On the other hand, as many farms suffer from lack of workmen, people from whatever country who are industrious, patient, and persevering ought to be admitted as laborers. They would be a great boon to the nation. The fear of competition by cheap labor is causeless; regulations might be drawn up for the control of these foreign laborers, and on their arrival they could be drafted to those places where their services might be most urgently needed. So long as honest and steady workmen are excluded for no reason other ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... who honestly believed that the attempt at independence was a mad one, and who sacrificed all they had rather than rebel against their King. Massachusettensis, the well-known Tory pamphleteer, wrote that the annals of the world had not been deformed with a single instance of so unnatural, so causeless, so wanton, so ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... that lies upon his heart; And dogged York, that reaches at the moon, Whose overweening arm I have pluck'd back, By false accuse doth level at my life.— And you, my sovereign lady, with the rest, Causeless have laid disgraces on my head And with your best endeavour have stirr'd up My liefest liege to be mine enemy.— Ay, all of you have laid your heads together— Myself had notice of your conventicles— And all to make away my guiltless life. I shall ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... uttered. Anathema is a solemn ecclesiastical condemnation of a person or of a proposition. Curse may be just and authoritative; as, the curse of God; or, it may be wanton and powerless: "so the curse causeless shall not come," Prov. xxvi, 2. Execration expresses most of personal bitterness and hatred; imprecation refers especially to the coming of the desired evil upon the person against whom it is uttered. Malediction is a general ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... dark reminder of a causeless deprivation settled it. Captain Pharo seized Miss Pray, blushing with alarm and amaze at such sudden retributive lightning on the part of her long-delayed charms, and bore her out ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene |
