"Unreal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... That character is genuine which seems built by nature rather than by convention, which is stuff of independence and of good courage. Nothing spurious, bastard, begotten out of true wedlock of the mind; nothing adulterated and seeming to be what it is not; nothing unreal, can ever get place among the nobility of things genuine, natural, of pure stock and unmistakable lineage. It is a prerogative of every truly human being to come out from the low estate of those who are merely gregarious and ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... absence, and that his aged father Laertes was wearing his life away in vain and anxious longings for his return. He also conversed with the ill-fated Agamemnon, Patroclus, and Achilles. The latter {315} bemoaned his shadowy and unreal existence, and plaintively assured his former companion-in-arms that rather would he be the poorest day-labourer on earth than reign supreme as king over the realm of shades. Ajax alone, who still brooded ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... future bent." If force of evidence could authorize us to believe facts inconsistent with the general laws of nature, enough might be produced in favor of the existence of the second-sight. It is called in Gaelic Taishitaraugh, from Taish, an unreal or shadowy appearance; and those possessed of the faculty are called Taishatrin, which may be aptly translated visionaries. Martin, a steady believer in the second-sight, gives the following account ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... illusory, supposed, unreal, fabulous, fictitious, imaginary, supposititious, untrue, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... bass of the moral reformer, and the storm breath of enthusiasm was blowing to a blaze the glowing coals of his humanity. The wail of the fleeing fugitive from the house of bondage sounded no longer far away and unreal in his ears, but thrilled now right under the windows of his soul. The masonic excitement and the commotion created by the abduction of Morgan he caught up and shook before the eyes of his countrymen as an object lesson of the million-times greater wrong daily done the slaves. "All this fearful ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... had become curiously unreal to Prescott. It seemed to him that he was in the presence of the mysterious and weird, but he was resolute to follow, and he wished only that she should resume ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... at him wildly, but he could not speak. The strange sensation of everything being unreal came over him again, and, in a dreamy way, he saw the coming of his aunt and uncle to ask him the same question; while Mark was lying, pale and cold, lifeless in his room. There was the rushing, murmuring sound of the river from close at ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... living beings to be seen in that unreal and miasmal place, that village which bestrews the earth and lies under ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... was faint and unreal. "Do you know," continued he, striking on a new idea, "the padre don't like the guero family. That's evident from the hints he let drop to-night. We may get this fellow out of the way without much ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... I loped up to the top of a dune—there he stood, on another dune, perhaps two hundred yards away. His golden hide reflected the red glow like polished metal, his mane flamed in the wind. You cannot possibly imagine the effect of it, in that unreal light, in that setting of desolation, with the crimson mountains behind him. He stood alone on the hill, with his head high, motionless as a statue. For as long as half a minute he let me look at him. Then he turned, and was gone ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... of delirium . . . she had never hung so near the dizzy brink of the unreal. Sleep was what she wanted—she remembered that she had not closed her eyes for two nights. The little bottle was at her bed-side, waiting to lay its spell upon her. She rose and undressed hastily, hungering now for the touch of her pillow. She felt so profoundly tired that she thought she must ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... thoughts of a dying mortal. And now he was trying to know that those thoughts did not come from God—that they had no authority back of them—that they were children of the "one lie" about God—that they were false, false as hell, and therefore impotent and unreal. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... in hope the long voice of the stream, It seems her heart's lute hath a broken string. Ivy she hath, that to old ruin clings; And rosemary, that sees remembrance fade; And pansies, deeper than the gloom of dreams; But ah! if utterable, would this earth Remain the base, unreal thing it is? Better be out of sight of peering eyes; Out—out of hearing of all-useless words, Spoken of tedious tongues in heedless ears. And lest, at last, the world should learn heart-secrets; Lest that sweet wolf from some dim thicket ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... claim to remembrance rests mainly on his poetry. His plays are written with distinction and refinement, but are deficient in dramatic power; his stories, though marked by fertility of invention, are as a rule conventional and unreal. Most of his prose, indeed, in substance if not in manner, is that of a journalist. His lyrics, however, rank high. A careful and loving student of the finest models, he did even more than his greater and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... of Jane, with far better judgment, endeavored to call back her daughter from that unreal world in which she loved to dwell, and to interest her in the practical duties of life. She began to be impatient for her return home, that she might introduce her to those household employments, the knowledge of which is of such unspeakable importance to every lady. ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... love of mischief, and from a disinterested delight in deformity and cruelty. They are hags of mischief, obscene panders to iniquity, malicious from their impotence of enjoyment, enamoured of destruction, because they are themselves unreal, abortive, half- existences, and who become sublime from their exemption from all human sympathies and contempt for all human affairs, as Lady Macbeth does by the force of passion! Her fault seems to have been an excess ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... "I want to remember it. I try to believe in it. But somehow or other, in this house, it all seems unreal to me. No doubt all you say is perfectly right and wise. I don't venture to argue against it, but I can't feel it—that's all. If I'm to have a soul, either to lose or to save, I must really live. ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... is the one which does most good and such ideals as self-realization or the full development of one's nature and powers. Europeans as a rule have an innate dislike and mistrust of the doctrine that the world is vain or unreal. They can accord some sympathy to a dying man who sees in due perspective the unimportance of his past life or to a poet who under the starry heavens can make felt the smallness of man and his earth. But such thoughts are considered ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... silhouette in comparison, as soon as she begins the march to Siberia is transformed into a clothes-horse upon which Tolstoy drapes his moral platitudes. She is at first much more vital than her betrayer, who is an unreal bundle of theories; but in company with the rest of the characters she soon goes up in metaphysical smoke. Walizewski asserts that all Tolstoy's later life was a regrettable pose. "But this is the usual price of every kind of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... distinct states of existence. My mornings are devoted wholly to reading history, poetry, or belles lettres, which abstract me so completely from the actual present to the past, that the hours so disposed of appear to be the actual life, and those given up to society the shadowy and unreal. ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... seemed more to amuse than trouble him in his half-stupefied state, for everything was unreal and dreamy. He could not fully realise that he was lying there battered and bruised, but found himself thinking as of some one else in whose troubles ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... world—and here he had found more continuous contentment than he had known in the last ten years. The garden was an old one, planned by a master hand. By day it was lovely, but by night it took on a weird beauty that was almost unreal. The light of the moon cast strong black shadows, deep and impenetrable, that hovered among the trees like sinister ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... Richmond at the end of summer in 1864. Society was approaching one of those epochs, when all things appear unreal, monstrous, gliding toward some great catastrophe. All rascaldom was rampant. The night-birds had come forth. Vice stalked, and flaunted its feathers in the light of day. Chaos seemed coming, and with it all ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... and the lines "To Thyrza," which, with other elegies, were appended to the second edition of Childe Harold (April 17, 1812). It was this cry of desolation, this open profession of melancholy, which at first excited the interest of contemporaries, and has since been decried as morbid and unreal. No one who has read his letters can doubt the sincerity of his grief, but it is no less true that he measured and appraised its literary significance. He could and did turn it ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... "there are times when even now this war seems to me like an unreal thing, like something I have been reading about, some wild imagining of Shelley or one of the unrestrainable poets. I can't believe that millions of the flower of Germany's manhood and yours have perished helplessly, hopelessly, cruelly. And ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... stepped out of the tub and dried myself and dressed, I returned mentally to the curious, mythical adventure in the mythical city. It was still impossible for me to feel that it was unreal, it had been so vivid, ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... all seems! how unreal!" said John, in a low voice, when he had walked the length of the garden in silence. "Phineas, how very strange ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... us thither in the constitution of our habitual life, than the use of rhyme by the visionary beings in the mimic scene. Beyond all doubt there might arise in rhyme a most beautiful romantic drama. Unreal infused into real, turns real at once into poetry. But this is of all degrees. In the lowest prose of life there is an infusion which we overlook. We should drop down dead without it. Let the unreal a little predominate; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... her little home in order. Presently, the local expressman arrived with her baggage and was followed by sundry youths bearing sundry provisions; at twelve-thirty, when she and young Don sat down to the luncheon she had prepared, her flight to New York and return appeared singularly unreal, like the memory ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... thought of Kenneth Raymond disturbed her. He belonged to the time of mistaken freedom; he was one who had helped her to think she could make unreal things true. He had no place here and now. She somehow felt that he had ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... bronze, wood and stone, representing dolphins, storks, cows, camels, monkeys and the various fabulous monsters of the Hindu mythology, are scattered in apparent confusion about the temple courtyard, producing an effect as bizarre as it is bewildering. It is so unreal, so incredibly fantastic, that I felt that I was looking at the papier-mache setting for a motion picture spectacle, such as Griffith used to produce, and that the director and the cameraman would appear shortly ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... though his melodramatic or pantomimic endings may smack of "the boards" a little. The world to which he holds up the mirror may be a rather vulgar sort of Vanity Fair, but there are unfortunately few places more real than Vanity Fair, and few things less unreal ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... edifying, as the natural limitations, which are continually breaking in upon the perfection and completeness of the idea, destroy the illusion in the story and throw an air of suspicion even on what is good in the idea, which hence appears fictitious and unreal. ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... out, and giving a mixed attempt at a European cheer, we quickened our pace, running as rapidly as we could over the rubbish which covered the ground and taking advantage of every piece of cover. A few stray shots pecked at us, but in this quarter, so strange that it appeared unreal, the enemy gave hardly a sign of life. Behind us, on our left, a tremendous fusillade was in progress, and the cracking of the rifles came back to us in one high-pitched roar. But the intervening trees and the ruins did not allow us to see ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... contemplation. Had the great artist really painted that? He did not see the master's hand. Although he was an unimportant painter, he had a good eye, and he saw in the canvas hesitancy, fear, awkwardness, the struggle with something unreal which was beyond his reach, which refused to enter the mold of form. He was struck by the lack of likeness, by the forced exaggeration of the strokes; the eyes unnaturally large, the tiny mouth, almost a point, the bright skin with its supernatural pallor. Only in the pupils of the eyes was ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... helped Lempriere to the bed again as he heard his name called, and he stood suddenly still, looking straight before him into space. Angele's voice seemed ghostly and unreal. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... attribution of a quality or action to a subject, by adding to it a predicate. In the sentence, "the man is wise," "the man" is the subject; "is wise" is the predicate. This may be simply an interplay of thoughts, without the presence of the object thought of; or the things thought of may be imaginary or unreal; while observation, induction and testimony always go ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... strangeness of it, the real now became unreal. The mile tramp and the pitching of camp by the edge of the stream seemed like a passage in a nightmare. She cooked the meat, fed the dogs, and unlashed the packs as in a dream, and it was not until Canim began to sketch his next wandering that ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... veritably self-destroyed. And so he sat now, dead amidst his shabby parody of splendor. He had done with thrones; he had even done with Tower Cottage—unless indeed his pale shade were to hold nocturnal converse with the robust and flamboyant ghost of Captain Duggle; the one vaunting his unreal vanished greatness, mouthing orations and mimicking pomp; the other telling, in language garnished with strange and horrible oaths, of those dark and lurid terrors which once had driven him from this very place, leaving it ablaze behind. A strange couple they would make, and ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... avarice, accumulating wealth which they cannot conceivably enjoy; a stupidity so manifest that every age of satire has found it the most facile of commonplaces. Or, again, those who fail to find wisdom in that last phase will constantly pretend an unreal world, making plans for a future that cannot be there. So did a man eleven years ago in the neighbourhood of Regent Street, for this man, being eighty-seven years of age, wealthy, and wholly devoid of friends, or near kindred, took a flat, but he insisted that the lease ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... worked and watched, but when his turn came to use the brush, to the amazement of all, his pictures were quite unlike anything which had ever been painted before in the workshop. Instead of copying the stiff, unreal figures, he drew real people, real animals, and all the things which he had learned to know so well on the grey hillside, when he watched his father's sheep. Other artists had painted the Madonna and Infant Christ, but Giotto painted a ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... before the clock shall strike bedtime, to satisfy myself that the world is not entirely made up of such shadowy materials, as have busied me throughout the day. A dreamer may dwell so long among fantasies, that the things without him will seem as unreal ...
— Beneath An Umbrella (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... returned to him, but just as that dark, water-haunted house had seemed to banish remembrance and the reality of the room in which he now sat, and of the old familiar life; so now the house, the faces of yesterday seemed in their turn unreal, almost spectral, and the thick print on the smudgy page no more significant than a story ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... these crosses symbolical personifications of the Demon of Famine. To indicate the sterility of the domain over which he reigned, he was represented by the figure of a lean and haggard man, with a crown of thorns upon his head; a reed cut from the river's bank was placed in his hands, as his unreal sceptre; and, considering the inhabitants of Judea as the most slavish and mean-spirited race in their knowledge, they placarded this figure with the inscription: "This is the King of the Jews." Thus, to the ancient Egyptians, this sign of the cross was blessed or accursed ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... the great columnar trunks which ran up into the dimness above her, and the cold glimmer of the snows with a pale star beyond them when the red flame sank, while the hoarse roar of an unseen river emphasized the silence. At first she felt there was something unreal and theatrical about it all. The light that blazed up and died, awful serenity of the snow, and the vast impenetrable shadows filled with profound silence, seemed all part of a fervidly-imagined spectacle; but as the silence deepened and gained upon her the position was reversed, ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... of. Just as a billion, minus the billionth fraction of a unit, is no longer a billion, so infinity itself, limited though it be but by a hair's-breadth, is no longer, strictly speaking, infinite. Once we admit this Divine self-limitation as a working theory, we shall no longer be troubled by the unreal difficulty of having to reconcile the principle of Divine immanence with the fact of individual existence. The Divine spark may burn in man, brightly or dimly as the case may be, and yet be separate from the central and eternal Fire whence it has been flung forth; ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the tears which he had wept as he composed the epitaph which was to grace the monument of the famous Friedrich ——, poet, philosopher, etc. Whoever doubts the possibility of such exaggerated folly, has never known an imaginative childhood, or wept over those unreal griefs, which are not the less bitter at the time from being remembered afterwards with a mixture of shame and amusement. Happy or unhappy, however, in his dreams the boy was great, and this was enough; for Friedrich was vain, as everyone is tempted to be who ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... (360 B.C.) and Tschu-tsche (1200 A.D.) an object of philosophical speculation. The doctrine of Lao-tse, the younger contemporary of Kong-tse, which lays down as the basis of the world, that is of the unreal or non-existent, a supreme principle, Tao, or Being, corresponds with the Brahma doctrine of the Indians, among whom he lived for a long time; but this doctrine never became popular ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... regions of Australasia, and of America north of the Rio Grande. The names of the plays that Shakespeare wrote are household words in the mouths of mighty nations, whose wide domains were to him more unreal than the realm of Prester John. Over half the descendants of their fellow countrymen of that day now dwell in lands which, when these three Englishmen were born, held not a single white inhabitant; the race which, when they were in their prime, was hemmed ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... eyes actually filled with tears. Doris was touched, but at the same time set on edge. This loyalty that people born and bred in the country feel to our English country system—what an absurd and unreal frame of mind! And when our country ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... when I reflect upon the lives of theatrical artists, that they are altogether unnatural existences, and produce—pardon the bull—artificial natures, which are misplaced anywhere but in their own unreal and make-believe sphere. They are the anomalous growth of our diseased civilizations, and, removed from their own factitious soil, flourish, I half believe, in none other. Do not laugh at me, but I really do think that creatures ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The man of culture is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him. But the active exercise of politics requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution and enthusiasm, qualities which your man of culture has carefully rooted up, lest they damage the delicacy of his critical olfactories. Perhaps they ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... closer. Under the protecting cloud of ink the mass of octopi pressed nearer. The struggle became fantastic, unreal, as the brilliant beams of white bored through the utter blackness searching for eyes which the men knew were there, yet could not see until their rays chanced upon them. Snaky shadows milled horribly close to the little group of bulging yellow figures. Blacker and blacker grew the water; they ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... at that moment anything warmer or brighter would have been unreal and utterly repellent to me. I hardly took in the meaning of his words, but it was as if a hand had been stretched out to me, struggling in the deep mire, by one who himself felt solid ground beneath him. Where he ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... to Bat the whole thing was unreal. It meant nothing. It could mean nothing. He felt like a man walking towards a precipice he could not avoid. He felt disaster, added disaster, was in the air and was closing in upon them. He knew in his heart that this long, weary inspection, ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... just the whole crux of the absurdity, and as long as so unreal a notion is cherished we can never be freed from the slavery of these huge armaments. Soldiers are only necessary if war is necessary, and war can only be necessary while men are savages. The differences between masters ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... and stood waiting for him to follow, "is a part of the play—I do not deceive myself! When I go back to my world—my trade, I shall remember this little time that you and I have snatched from the grudging grasp of life as an act—a scene only! It's a perfect pastoral, Man, dear, but unreal—absurdly unreal—and we know it ourselves while we ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... Being in this sentimental, unreal city, doesn't help me any! Forgive this, I'm afraid morbid, letter, and believe me affectionately always—write me the truth—your ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... less unreal, a phantasm, the spirit as it were of Nature incarnate in womanhood, is none the less the most delightful of M. Zola's heroines. She smiles at us like the vision of perfect beauty and perfect love which rises before us when our hearts are yet young and full of illusions. She ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... his ambitions seemed as far as ever from realization. Yet the ambitious mind lacks not fuel for its fires; the youth's imagination peopled the woody solitudes with braver company than courts could boast—vivid, unreal dream-people, whose shadowy presence increased his longing for the actuality. The very winds whispered mysteriously of coming triumphs, and as he listened his unrest grew greater. At length there came a time when dreams no longer satisfied him, and he pondered how he might ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... unreal. My well-beloved was I knew in possession of some terrible secret which she dared not betray. Yet why were her lips sealed? ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... catching sight of a heavy old outhouse door, "there is the ghost story. Having examined all realities so far as I can, I will try my hand at things unreal—for even now, though I am very grateful to Providence for such a house and such an inheritance, once show me a good reason, and over it goes, as it should have done at first, if my father could have given ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... demanded, "that I am not one of the children of the cities, that I was not fashioned and made for the gas-lit life, to eat unreal food at unreal hours, and feed my brain upon the unreal epigrams of the men whom you would call decadents. Two days here, a week—very well. In a month I might be bored. Who shall guarantee ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... would distinguish,' answered Gotthold, leaning back and joining the tips of his fingers. 'There are various kinds of popularity; the bookish, which is perfectly impersonal, as unreal as the nightmare; the politician's, a mixed variety; and yours, which is the most personal of all. Women take to you; footmen adore you; it is as natural to like you as to pat a dog; and were you a saw-miller you would be the most popular ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hear that the fish in the water is thirsty: You do not see that the Real is in your home, and you wander from forest to forest listlessly! Here is the truth! Go where you will, to Benares or to Mathura; if you do not find your soul, the world is unreal to you. ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... situation. It seemed incredible, melodramatic, unreal, in sight of the crawling freight train far out ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... and the wooden shoes that once made an endless clatter along the Riva but are heard no more, and Greeks, and Armenians, and priests, and beggars, passing up and down between the arcades and the cafe tables that overflowed far into the square, St. Mark's more unreal in its splendour than ever with its domes and galleries and traceries against the blue of ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... enchanters—that part of it was not new; but to do it without any incantations, or even any rumblings or earthquakes or lightnings or apparitions—that was new, novel, wholly irregular. There was nothing in the books like this. Enchanted things were always unreal. Gold turned to dirt in an unenchanted atmosphere, food withered away and vanished. But this test failed in the present case. The spies brought samples: Father Adolf prayed over them, exorcised them, but it did no good; they remained sound ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... their past adventures, the unreal wonder of their present situation, the bewildering possibilities and impossibilities of their future plans—all these conspired to banish sleep until long past midnight. It was not until, speeding due north with the unswerving obedience of a magnet, their vessel was sailing ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... themselves. In a word, to be filled with the Spirit is the way to possess all the highest forms of the good which men are tempted to intoxication to secure, and which in it they find only for a moment, and which is coarse and unreal. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... overflowing in store; they have dreamed of wisdom in council, and of providence in law; of gladness of parents, and strength of children, and glory of grey hairs. And at these visions of theirs we have mocked, and held them for idle and vain, unreal and unaccomplishable. What have we accomplished with our realities? Is this what has come of our worldly wisdom, tried against their folly? this, our mightiest possible, against their impotent ideal? or, have we only wandered among the spectra of a baser felicity, and chased ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... of all the great men of whom he has read. He becomes them in himself, as Pauline's lover has done before him; but one by one they fade into unreality—for he knows nothing of men—and the last projection of himself into Apollo, the Lord of Poetry, is the most unreal of them all: at which fantasy all the woods and streams and sunshine round Goito are infinitely amused. Thus, when he wants sympathy, he does not go down to Mantua and make song for the crowd of men; he invents in dreams a host of sympathisers, all of whom ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... light gradually broadened, and shed its ghastly chilly beams over the sea, making all look unreal and depressing, and showed the faces of our crew, sitting crouched in the bottom of the boat, ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... panting hard, and our hands hung on every blow. But I remember yet more vividly the strangeness of it all, and the uncanny sensation that the fight itself, the street-lamp, the crowd, and the dim houses around were unreal as a dream: that, and the unnatural hardness of my opponent's face, which seemed the one unmalleable ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... complete a long work, except the Elixiere, and this work, as there has been occasion to point out, consists of two disjointed parts. One of the things that strike us most in reading his books is the peculiar mixture of the real and the unreal, of matters appertaining to actual life and of fantasies born only of the imagination. Very often the imagination would be called by most people a diseased imagination; but it is not always so, sometimes ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... less conventional mind of the two. He protested—but it was a feeble mumble. The world had come to seem unreal; the question of leaving ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... blotted, he noticed, and he would have to copy it in any case. As he laid it aside, his eyes fell upon a loose sheet of note-paper covered with Alves's unfamiliar writing. He took it up and read it, and then looked around him to see her, to find her there in the next room. The letter was so unreal! ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... experiences, vividly described in his 'Grace Abounding,' traceable in the course of his chief Pilgrim, and frequently referred to in his discourses, have been too literally interpreted by some, and too much explained away as unreal by others; but present no special difficulty to those who will but consider ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... know the noun; a common one in every language—it was curious that what so signalized the stranger, and made him look like a kind of foreigner, among the crowd (as to some it make him appear more or less unreal in this portraiture), was but the expression of so prevalent a quality. Such goodness seemed his, allied with such fortune, that, so far as his own personal experience could have gone, scarcely could he have known ill, physical or moral; and as for knowing ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... unreal woes and mimic pain Wept for myself, and so was purified, And in their simple mirth grew glad again; For as I sailed upon that pictured tide The strength and splendour of the storm was mine Without the storm's red ruin, ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... we have the way of approach to which religion to-day must look as its best hope. Thus only can we conquer that museum-like atmosphere of much traditional piety which—agreeable as it may be to the historic or aesthetic sense—makes it so unreal to our workers, no less than to our students. Such a method, too, will mean the tightening of that alliance between philosophy and psychology which is already a marked character of ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Republic and its Government, have been compelled to resort to mendacious criticisms on imaginary instances of maladministration, which were often simply invented. Where the Press is forced to adopt such methods, the true grievances must of necessity be unreal." ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... open suddenly to a hurricane. The dark hurry and tumult, the stress and vehemence of the battle rushed in and overwhelmed them. They were no longer persons but mere spectators, mere impressions of a tremendous convulsion. They became unreal even to themselves, miniatures of personality, indescribably small, and the two antagonistic realities, the only realities in being were first the city, that throbbed and roared yonder in a belated frenzy of defence and secondly the aeroplanes hurling ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... thumping. It was horrible that there should be some one in the world—a lurking, mysterious some one—who planned in secret to do her dreadful harm. The incident seemed unreal. Whom did she know, on this side of the world, who could hate her so bitterly? She was afraid, as of eyes that she could not ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... as his face, and he looks like some nobly-born prisoner. "What untoward fate cast him there?" I often ask myself. He exists in my memory as a veritable Prince Charming, held captive in those gloomy caves of enchantment that yielded up to me their unreal realities in that nightmarish experience. I never fancy him on upper earth living coarsely, even, it may be, talking ungrammatically, defying Horne Tooke and outraging Murray, among beings of a lower order of humanity; but he rises like a statue, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... standest in no Temple; joinest in no Psalm-worship; feelest well that, where there is no ministering Priest, the people perish? Be of comfort! Thou art not alone, if thou have Faith. Spake we not of a Communion of Saints, unseen, yet not unreal, accompanying and brother-like embracing thee, so thou be worthy? Their heroic Sufferings rise up melodiously together to Heaven, out of all lands, and out of all times, as a sacred Miserere; their heroic Actions also, as a boundless everlasting Psalm of Triumph. Neither ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... I would assoil him. Father! 'Tis said, upon the giddy verge of life The eye grows steady, and the soul sees clear Thought guiding action in all human things, Not in the busy, whirling masque of life, Reality unreal, but in truth. Then the eye cuts as the chirurgeon's knife Mocks the poor corpse. I saw not when he died: Yet last night was a scaffold, there! all black, And one stood visor'd by, with glittering ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... her dreaming lay in some far-distant region, All the fairer, all the brighter, that its glories were but guessed; And the daily round of duties seemed an unreal, airy legion— Nothing true save Philip's letters and the ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... them? Clouds of butterflies, such as sleep among the flowers of Paradise,—forgotten dreams of children, who sleep and smile,—fancies of fairy laureates, strung shining together for some high festival,—anything most rich or unreal, might furnish a type for the foliage that was painted upon the golden blue of that October day. I could almost have forgotten my ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... proposed, however, to regard them as connoting the qualities they directly stand for, and not denoting anything; but surely this is too violent. To denote something is the same as to be the name of something (whether real or unreal), which every term must be. It is a better proposal to regard their denotation and connotation as coinciding; though open to the objection that 'connote' means 'to mark along with' something else, and this ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... spread over the jagged western outlines of the Moor an orange-tawny sunset, whereon the solid masses of the hills burnt into hazy gold, all fairy-bright, unreal, unsubstantial as a cloud-island above them, whose solitary and striated shore ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... lips, rightly accepted, might have drawn him in true penitence to a forgiving God. His subsequent confession was rejected because it expressed no real contrition; and the worship which he proceeded to offer, without the sanction of the prophet's presence, was as unreal as his protestation of obedience, and showed how little he had learned the lesson of the great words, 'To obey is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... answered quickly—it almost seemed defiantly. How horribly unreal it was—this carrying on of small talk, as if they were the merest of chance-met acquaintances! "She belongs to a friend of mine, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... contains a little less than two thousand words. It will be seen at once that unless handled in such fashion as to appeal vividly to the imagination, a story with this for its theme will seem weak and unreal. It must be made as suggestive as possible or it will fail. It preaches, but it must avoid the air of preaching. Consider carefully how you would present the stranger—whether first at the window or before—so as to affect the reader with a sense of something more than ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... only ways to increase the national wealth, and the contrary practices can only lead to economic ruin. There is not much fault to find with the old economists so long as they recognised that their science was an abstract science, which for its own purposes dealt with an unreal abstraction—the 'economic man.' Every science is obliged to isolate one aspect of reality in this way. But when political economy was treated as a philosophy of life it began to be mischievous. A book on ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... understand my words?" said the Templar; "for the sound of my voice is frightful in mine own ears. I scarce know on what ground we stand, or for what purpose they have brought us hither.—This listed space—that chair—these faggots—I know their purpose, and yet it appears to me like something unreal—the fearful picture of a vision, which appals my sense with hideous fantasies, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... they know nothing of the thousands and millions on every side. They have not the least idea how the world lives, how it works, how it suffers. They read, of course, now and then, some paragraph in which the misfortune of some wretch is set forth, but the wretch is a kind of steel engraving, an unreal shadow, a something utterly unlike themselves. The real facts should be brought home, the sympathies of men awakened, and awakened to such a degree that they will go and see how these people live, see how they work, ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... an inspiring appeal. Remember, and have done with despair. Think how you and I found our path step by step of the way: political life was full of conventions that suited our fathers' time, but have faded in the light of our day. We found these conventions unreal and put them by. This was no reflection on our fathers; what they fought for truly is our heritage, and we pay them a tribute in offering it in turn our loyalty inspired by their devotion. But their errors we must rectify; what they left undone we must take up and fulfil. That is the task of every ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... shared our agonies. He was deceived, despised, rejected: the first torture and the firstfruits of His Passion was the treachery of a disciple. When I am sorrowful and wretched, He seems Real to me and vivid. But when I am well and wildly happy, He seems far away and unreal—an invisible God, watching mortals with a certain contempt. Now the Pagans had a Divinity for every mood, so they never felt depressed or lowered in their own self-esteem. We have a God for two moods only,—great sorrow, and great exaltation. For the rest we have to beat ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... roaring crowd, with a fantastic dream-sense of a night-sky and a great stone building, dark with age and solemnity, and unreal figures perched on railings and points of vantage, and hurrahing hordes that fused themselves with the procession and became part of its marching. She yearned forwards to vague glories, aware of a poor past. ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... acquisition of knowledge adding to the satisfaction of that which comes after—it is of a sort, however, to be experienced in the presence of the thing itself; any description at a distance must necessarily be shadowy and unreal, only the dry bones of something which one sees there, a thing of beauty and ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... like a belt of varying fire and amethyst, between the two roseate deeps of air and water; the shores were transmuted into solid, the air into fluid gems. Could the pencil faithfully represent this magnificent transfiguration of Nature, it would appear utterly unreal and impossible to eyes which never beheld the reality.... It lingered, and lingered, changing almost imperceptibly and with so beautiful a decay, that one lost himself in the enjoyment of each successive charm, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... IN WAR.—It would be impossible to recount the many remarkable aerial fights which have taken place in the great war. Some of them seem to be unreal, so startling are the tales that have been told. We may well imagine the bravery that will nerve men to fight thousands of feet ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... her, even to me that was never her lover, a radiancy, a nimbus, as it were, of celestial light that gave to pulsing flesh and running blood and circumambient skin a quality that was, as it were, flamelike, ethereal, unreal. ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... way she reached the street, and for a few blocks walked along scarcely conscious of the direction she was taking. Her mind was in turmoil. The night seemed to have been one of harrowing hallucination; it seemed as though it were utterly unreal, like one dreaming that one is dreaming. And then, suddenly, she looked at her watch, and the straight little shoulders squared resolutely back. The hallucination, if she chose to call it that, was not yet over! It was twenty minutes of one, and there was still ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard |
