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More "Absurdity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... raging! A stagnant pool in a passion; a canal insane; a mouton enrage, as the French says; or a snail in a tumultuous state of excitement, were but types of the satirical ideas implied in these words. What a description of labouring nonsense—of the Pythonic genius of absurdity, panting and heaving on ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... those who had supported an absurd proposition with ability over those who had maintained the cause of reason; and it was not superiority of mind which determined his judgment, for he really preferred the man who argued well in favour of an absurdity to the man who argued equally well in support of a reasonable proposition. He always gave out the subjects which were to be discussed; and they most frequently turned upon questions of religion, the different ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... "where he and his successors should have their episcopal see." Beda also tells us that the Metropolis of the East Saxons is London; so that when we, at the present day, speak of it as the Metropolis, we mean it is the chief ecclesiastical city of Essex; which shows the absurdity of a phrase very common at the present day. Sebert lived till 616 or later, but there is no distinct mention of his life in London. His supposed burial, whether in St. Paul's or at Westminster, belongs to ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... But the worst absurdity of all in the tariffist reasoning on this topic is the assumption that in no other respect than wage-rates is German industry affected by the fall of the mark. The wiseacres who point warningly to the exchanges as a reason for firm action on fabric gloves never ask how a falling currency ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... Halderman presiding, Colonel D. R. Anthony, Rev. William Starrett and other Republicans on the platform. Laing's Hall was packed with Irishmen and when he first mentioned woman suffrage all of them hissed, but after he pointed out the absurdity of letting the negroes vote and shutting out their own mothers and wives, the tide turned and they cheered for the women. The next meeting was at Lawrence, and here Mr. Train objected decidedly to the route marked out, saying it was too rough a trip for any man, and ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... measure, and without end, words entirely devoid of meaning? What can have a more ridiculous influence upon our taste, than for the first verses to which our attention is demanded, to consist of such strange and uncouth jargon? To complete the absurdity, and that we may derive all that elegance and refinement from the study of languages, that it is calculated to afford, our first ideas of Latin are to be collected from such authors, as Corderius, Erasmus, Eutropius, and the Selectae. To begin indeed with the classical writers, ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... me dee wi' my bairn?" she asked instantly, without sign of perplexity, smiling on the little one as at some absurdity in her arms rather ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... spoken very little during dinner; he was an intelligent lad, and he feared to utter some absurdity before so many grand people, amongst whom, with dilating eyes, he saw the king's attorney. Then he had been seized upon by Danglars, who, with a rapid glance at the stiff-necked old major and his modest son, and taking into consideration the hospitality of the count, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... theory been more grossly exaggerated and misrepresented than in its application to religion. True philosopher that he was, Marx realized the absurdity of attempting "to abstract religious sentiment from the course of history, to place it by itself."[70] He recognized that all religion is, fundamentally, man's effort to put himself into harmonious relation with, and to discover ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... divided in two; the Doctor seems to have forgotten that he has here placed his cross in the Roman form, and not as the Chinese write it; and it is certainly a strange way of cutting a thing in two, by enclosing it between two lines; but the learned seldom baulk at an absurdity, when a system is to be established. The Chinese character for five is ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... on earth can one govern men if one is denied the use of money, that sovereign means of sway? And he laughed bitterly; for the idea of an idyllic country where all great enterprises would be carried out in an absolutely honest manner seemed to him the height of absurdity. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... in common language, as I have already observed, frequently signifies wealth; and this ambiguity of expression has rendered this popular notion so familiar to us, that even they who are convinced of its absurdity, are very apt to forget their own principles, and, in the course of their reasonings, to take it for granted as a certain and undeniable truth. Some of the best English writers upon commerce set out with observing, that the wealth of a country consists, not in its gold and silver ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... beside the indignation with the natural order which any biological study would arouse except as the scientist perceives that indignation is, for him, beside the point and the religionist believes that it proceeds from not seeing far enough into the process. This is why there is an essential absurdity in any naturalistic system of ethics. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... be proved nor disproved by an appeal to them) and negatively in the sense that what we now know about memory actually conflicts with the "natural" view that past experience which we are unable to recall has been destroyed, which is commonly appealed to to show the absurdity of the rival ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... discordant straight line (its lower edge) to the costume,—its long, ungirdled waist, wrought into peaks before and behind, and its gathered swell below, is an instance in point, of utter disregard of Nature and deliberate violation of harmony, and the consequent attainment of discord and absurdity in every particular. It is rivalled only by the dress-coat, which, with quite unimportant variations, has been worn by gentlemen for fifty years. The collar of this, when stiff and high, quite equals the berthe in absurdity and ugliness; and the useless skirt is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the legislative authority of Parliament. Logically, indeed, there may be difficulty in drawing the precise line of demarcation between a plan for conferring on Ireland the minimum of legislative independence which could without absurdity be dignified with the name of Home Rule, and a plan for giving to the boroughs and counties of Ireland the maximum of law-making power which could, without fraud upon the intelligence of the English people, be comprehended within the elastic phrase "extension of Local Self-Government." But ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... they were married she ran the point of a lead pencil through her eye and it set up inflammation of her brain. And now all the poor fellow has to think of is how to make enough to pay for her keep at a private lunatic asylum. I don't mean to be flippant. It's the very absurdity of it all that makes the mystery of life—that renders it so hopeless for us to attempt to find our way through it by our own judgment. It is like the ants making all their clever, laborious plans, knowing ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... Blasphemy of Depreciating Moral Virtue, 1749. This was replied to in Massachusetts, by Rev. John Porter of North Bridgewater in The Absurdity and Blasphemy of Substituting the Personal Righteousness of Men, etc.; also by a sermon of Rev. Thomas Foxcroft, Dr. Charles Chauncy's colleague; and by Rev. Samuel Niles's Vindication of Divers Important ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... primitive knowledge was almost nothing. The Homeric poems regarded the earth as a circular plain bounded by the heaven, which was a solid vault or hemisphere, with its concavity turned downward. This absurdity was believed until the time of Herodotus, five centuries after; nor was it exploded fully in the time of Aristotle. The sun, moon, and stars were supposed to move upon or with the inner surface of the heavenly hemisphere, and the ocean was thought to gird the earth around as a great ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... sentence, but we do confess our astonishment that the vermilion pencil of the proof-reader suffered it to pass unchallenged. Leaving its bad English out of the question, we find, on referring to Mather's text, that he was never guilty of the absurdity of believing that Satan was less eloquent in English than in any other language; that it was the British (Welsh) tongue which a certain demon whose education had been neglected (not the Devil) could not speak; that Mather is not fool enough to say that the Fiend cannot prevail ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... self-evident.)] hence, although freedom is not a property of the will depending on physical laws, yet it is not for that reason lawless; on the contrary it must be a causality acting according to immutable laws, but of a peculiar kind; otherwise a free will would be an absurdity. Physical necessity is a heteronomy of the efficient causes, for every effect is possible only according to this law, that something else determines the efficient cause to exert its causality. What else then can freedom of the will be but autonomy, that is the property of the ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... from a principle of science, deduced a system of useful knowledge? Wrong opinions often involving contradictions, one of these maxims, as a touchstone, may serve well to show whither they lead. But yet, however fit to lay open the absurdity or mistake of a man's reasoning or opinion, they are of very little use for enlightening the understanding: and it will not be found that the mind receives much help from them in its progress in knowledge; which ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... Verrina, "when a man is smitten in a certain organ, commonly called the heart, he is apt to give utterance to that absurdity which the world denominates sentiment. Such ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... The government treated the Czech nation with special brutality. The persecutions in Bohemia were opposed not only to the liberal ideas of Czechs, but especially to their national feelings. The anxiety of the censor for the safety of the monarchy often bordered on absurdity. The word 'shocking' was deleted from a play, for instance, because it was English. Henry IV. was not allowed to be played 'until we reach a settlement with England,' and it was only when it was reported by the Vienna and Berlin papers ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... however, to anyone—was to get into the eleven. Had it been known it would have been thought the very height of absurdity, and have become such a standing joke that its realisation would have been rendered well nigh impossible. It proved that Buller had sound sense that he was able to see this. He did not much expect to succeed, but he meant to try all he knew, ever since ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... but as it would be sometimes difficult for him to procure a supply of these ready-cooked, I think we may safely conclude that he does not object to eating them raw. The fanciful ideas of these old naturalists are sometimes very amusing from their very absurdity. ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... solemnity of regard, "Captain Gauntlet, upon my honour, I am altogether innocent of that shallow device which you impute to my invention; and I don't think you do justice either to my intellect or honour, in supposing me capable of such insolent absurdity. As for your sister, I have once in my life affronted her in the madness and impetuosity of desire; but I have made such acknowledgments, and offered such atonement, as few women of her sphere would have refused; and before God I am determined to endure every ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... not believe what I have heard and seen, and what I am ready to swear to by any form of oath that can constrain incredulity itself to believe. But, supposing that I have deceived myself, and that this reality was a dream, and that to contend for it is an absurdity, will it not amuse you, Senor Peralta, to see, written in the form of a dialogue, the matters talked of by those dogs, or whoever the speakers ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... since, if these things as His effects exist in time only, this being the condition of their existence in themselves, then the actions of these beings must be simply His actions which He performs in some place and time. Thus, Spinozism, in spite of the absurdity of its fundamental idea, argues more consistently than the creation theory can, when beings assumed to be substances, and beings in themselves existing in time, are regarded as effects of a Supreme Cause, and yet as not [belonging] to Him and His ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... and tenderness, could not refine on what he has done both in good-nature and good-breeding: he even forbad any ringing of bells or rejoicings wherever they passed—but how your representative blood will curdle when you hear of the absurdity of one of your countrymen: the night after the massacre at St. Cas, the Duc d'Aiguillon gave a magnificent supper of eighty covers to our prisoners—a Colonel Lambert got up at the bottom of the table, and, asking for a bumper, called out to the Duc, "My Lord ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... that position been relinquished by us, because involving the absurdity that we should know and not know the things which ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... use and possession saves us from the absurdity of supposing that we do not know what we know, because we may know in one sense, i.e. possess, what we do not know in another, i.e. use. But have we not escaped one difficulty only to encounter a greater? For how can the ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... good day; and a little farther up the road I saw a dark plain chariot, no coronet, no arms, no footman only the man on the box, but the beauty of the horses assured me it must belong to Lilburne. Can you conceive such absurdity in a man of that age—and a very clever fellow too? Yet, how is it that one does not ridicule it in Lilburne, as one would in another man between fifty ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... jury, I have told you already why I consider this romance not only an absurdity, but the most improbable invention that could have been brought forward in the circumstances. If one tried for a bet to invent the most unlikely story, one could hardly find anything more incredible. The worst of such ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... all, his own life might not perhaps prove one of the most complex among human conundrums? He had often meditated on the inaccessibility of ideal virtues, the uselessness of persuasion, the commonplace absurdity, as he had thought, of trying to embody any lofty spiritual dream,—yet he was himself a man in whom spiritual forces were so strong that he was personally unaware of their overflow, because they were as much ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... escape in a boat with his confederates, after firing a train communicating with some barrels of powder in the hold. There is some improbability in this part of the story; but gunpowder plots have special privilege of absurdity. The guardsmen, however, discover the mischief that is brewing against them, just in time to escape through the cabin windows, and swim off to the boat, which is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... nature of Not-being is detected, and there is no longer any metaphysical impediment in the way of admitting the possibility of falsehood. To the Parmenides, the Sophist stands in a less defined and more remote relation. There human thought is in process of disorganization; no absurdity or inconsistency is too great to be elicited from the analysis of the simple ideas of Unity or Being. In the Sophist the same contradictions are pursued to a certain extent, but only with a view to their ...
— Sophist • Plato
... head. Upon notice of this sentence, the friars of Cuzco flocked to prison, and persuaded the unfortunate prince to receive baptism, on which he assumed the name of Don Philip. Though the Inca earnestly entreated to be sent to Spain, and urged the absurdity and impossibility that he could ever intend to rebel against the numerous Spanish colonists who now occupied the whole country of Peru, seeing that his father with 200,000 men was utterly unable to overcome only 200 Spaniards whom he besieged in the city ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... To this absurdity Seguin replied that we could not agree; but, as he did not wish to keep any of their prisoners, he would exchange the twenty-one for ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... curiously at Roger. She was very superstitious and she believed firmly in ghosts, and saw no absurdity in ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... regarded life quite differently. For the first time I realised the necessity to the individual to enjoy absolute personal freedom in love as in all else in life. All my previous ideas and prejudices appeared to me monstrous and iniquitous. I saw the falseness of all our ideas of morality, the absurdity of placing conventions before nature and the detestable character of our dealings with women and of our attitude in such matters. And with this suddenly awakened vision I looked anew on life, and it seemed to me that till then I had never ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... becomes the height of absurdity when the parenthesis are not even fitted into the frame of the sentence, but wedged in so as directly to shatter it. If, for instance, it is an impertinent thing to interrupt another person when he is speaking, it is no less impertinent to interrupt oneself. ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity, profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a so-called court of justice in England as a state paper—a bill of indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order that for two hundred years had been the right arm of the Church and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and stumbling through the roots of the heather. Roddy gazed at them with his fixed and mournful eyes. He couldn't share your excitement. He drew back his shoulders, bracing himself to bear it; his lips tightened in a hard, bleak grin. He grinned at the absurdity of your supposing that he could be interested ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... could the places thus named be always so situated, as to be central in respect to the nation, or the province in which they were included. Writers try to make it out this way: yet they do not seem satisfied with the process. The contradictory accounts shew the absurdity of the notion. It was a term borrowed from Egypt, which was itself an Omphalian region. Horus Apollo not knowing the meaning of this has made Egypt the centre of the earth: [736][Greek: Aigupton ge mese tes oikoumenes]. Pausanias mentions an Omphalus ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... tracing pedigrees, alluding especially to the affinity imagined betwixt the Egyptians and Chinese. On such subjects, it is certain, human ingenuity has been fruitful of extravagancies, and there is much less risk of absurdity if we abide by merely general inferences; but, on the other hand, it must be admitted, that these are often specious pretexts for avoiding the labours of enquiry, and have very rarely contributed any thing ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... the information to the world, would far better have gone their way and said nothing about it; and, as to polygamy, that "those who waxed the hottest against" the practice "are not as a rule the purest of our people" (p. 361); and that the Edmunds Law of 1882 "capped the climax of absurdity" (p. 683). ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... the Roman government, which was severely arraigned by the apostate, and defended by Priscus in a prolix and feeble declamation. The freedman of Onegesius exposed, in true and lively colors, the vices of a declining empire, of which he had so long been the victim; the cruel absurdity of the Roman princes, unable to protect their subjects against the public enemy, unwilling to trust them with arms for their own defence; the intolerable weight of taxes, rendered still more oppressive by the intricate or arbitrary modes ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... administration rather than a change of heart. Though this external change was a boundless blessing to Russia, there is but little evidence that Vlademer then comprehended that moral renovation which the gospel of Christ effects as its crowning glory. He saw the absurdity of paganism; he felt tortured by remorse; perhaps he felt in some degree the influence of the gospel which was even then faithfully preached in a few churches in idolatrous Kief; and he wished to elevate Russia above the degradation ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... a curious illustration of the strength of the current passion for moral maxims in season and out of season, that one scene which to the scoffers of that day seemed, as it cannot but seem to everybody to-day, a climax of absurdity and unbecomingness, was hailed by the party as most admirable, for no other reason than that it contained a number of high moralising saws. Constance, a young widow and a model of reason, takes upon herself to combat the resolution ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... is excellent metaphysical fooling in The Three Voices. But far the best parody in the book—and the most richly deserved by the absurdity of its original—is Hiawatha's Photographing. It has the double merit of absolute similarity in cadence and lifelike realism. Unluckily the limits ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... The feeling does your heart infinite credit, though a little counsel with your head would show you that your only absurdity ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... ceased to exist for me, and it was pleasant to reflect, as I finished my simple breakfast, that I should under professional conditions have been hurrying briskly into school for an hour of Latin Prose. The incredible absurdity and futility of it all came home to me. Half the boys that I teach so elaborately would be both more wholesomely and happily employed if they were going out to farm-work for the day. But they are gentlemen's sons, and so must enter what are called ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... La Planche and Hist. eccles., ubi supra. I need not call attention to the gross absurdity into which Jean de Tavannes falls (Mem. ii. 260, 261), when he makes Catharine, through policy and hatred of Mary of Scots and of the Guises, whom the Scottish queen supported, favor the malcontents! Can the younger Tavannes have been misled by the hypocritical representations ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... inferior wits were employed to write The Popiad, in which his translation is characterized, as unjust to the original, without beauty of language, or variety of numbers. Instead of the justness of the original, they say there is absurdity and extravagance. Instead of the beautiful language of the original, there is solecism and barbarous English. A candid reader may easily discern from this furious introduction, that the critics were actuated rather by malice than truth, and that they must judge with their ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... with M. d'Antin or M. de Torcy, and some ladies of the King's suite. I am angry to this day when I think of it. The King used often to laugh at my anger on this subject; and, whenever the Elector committed some new absurdity, he used to call to me in the cabinet and ask me, "Well, Madame, what have you to say to that?" I would reply, "All that the Elector does is alike ridiculous." This made the King laugh heartily. The Elector had a Marshal, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the compliment was graceful and well meant, but the utter absurdity of his position was now thrust upon him ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... many who still had the utmost confidence in General Buell, and they repelled with some asperity the reflections cast upon him by his critics. These admirers held him blameless throughout for the blunders of the campaign, but the greater number laid every error at his door, and even went to the absurdity of challenging his loyalty in a mild way, but they particularly charged incompetency at Perryville, where McCook's corps was so badly crippled while nearly 30,000 Union troops were idle on the field, or within striking ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... Visitation, though I hold them to have been more reputable, inasmuch as many of them were honest tradesmen and artisans, in some measure exiles for conscience' sake, who would have smiled at the high-flying nonsense of their descendants. Some of the more respectable were Jews. The absurdity of supposing a population of eight millions all sprung from gentle loins in the course of a century and a half is too manifest for confutation. The aristocracy of the South, such as it is, has the shallowest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... an absurdity, M. le Juge d'Instruction. M. de Gery is the young man of whom I have spoken to you. He came to the Territorial as a superintendent, and thought too much of this poor M. Jansoulet to remove the receipts for his payments; ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... madness, finds Hamlet's frequent levity and the buffoonery of Polonius alike regrettable —Shakespeare's favorite foible, he feels, is "that of raising a laugh." The introduction of Fortinbras and his army on the stage is "an Absurdity"; the grave-diggers' scene is "very unbecoming to tragedy"; the satire on the "Children of the Chapel" is not allowable ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... much amused by the mixture, which was now exhibited to him, of taste and incongruity, ingenuity and absurdity, genius and blunder; by the contrast between the finery and vulgarity, the affectation and ignorance of the lady of the villa. We should be obliged to STOP too long at Tusculum were we to attempt to detail all the odd circumstances ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... sending His messenger and calling to Ephraim: 'Turn ye! Turn ye! why will ye die?' For Hosea, in the very act of pleading with Israel on God's behalf, to have declared that God had abandoned it, and ceased to plead, would have been a palpable absurdity and contradiction. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... contradictory stories told about him that one doesn't know what to believe. It seems incredible that he should be a monk; it is such an altogether foolish ending to an intellectual career. For whatever may be the form of faith professed by this particular fraternity, the absurdity of the whole system of religion remains the same. Religion's day is done; the very sense of worship is a mere coward instinct—a relic of barbarism which is being gradually eradicated from our natures by ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... rhapsodist. "At the sound of your [reason's] voice let the enemies of nature be still, and swallow their serpents' tongues in rage." "The eyes of reason restrain mankind from the precipice of the passions, as her decrees modify likewise the feeling of their rights." Many other passages of equal absurdity could be quoted, full of far-fetched metaphor, abounding in strange terms, straining rhetorical figures to distortion.[22] And yet in spite of the bombast, certain essential Napoleonic ideas appear in the paper much as they endured to the end, namely, those on heredity, on the equal division of property, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... extraordinary shape, hairbags and queues, frocks and frills, came into fashion for the men; powdered headdresses an ell in height, diminutive waists, and patches for the women. The deformity, unhealthiness, and absurdity of this mode of attire were vainly pointed out by Salzmann, in a piece entitled, "Charles ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... had read 212 Latin authors and 23 English, on his subject, and he was under considerable obligation to some of them, notably Weyer. But he endeavored to make first-hand observations, attended witch trials and traced gossip to its source. He showed, none better, the utter flimsiness and absurdity of the charges on which poor old women were done to death. He explained the performance of the witch of Endor as ventriloquism. Trying to prove that magic was rejected by reason and religion alike, he pointed out that all the phenomena might most easily be explained ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... a lesson, but not of this melancholy character, on the absurdity of attempting to brave the daylight heat of summer. It is so natural for an Englishman to look upon the mere natives of any place to which he may come in his travels, as cheats and ignoramuses, that we, as a matter of course, and most complacently, admitted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... new angle, the talk didn't run smoothly. Because, precisely as the half-back forgot his terrors and the hopes that had prompted them, and the absurdity of both—precisely as he began to feel, after all, that it was a very superb and grown-up thing to be a familiar friend of a married woman with a limousine and a respectful chauffeur, and wonderful clothes and an air of taking them all for ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... bureaus are under the immediate orders of the Secretary of War, who, through them, in fact commands the army from "his office," but cannot do so "in the field"—an absurdity in military ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Welsh for son, and those to whom Mr. Skeat's modified maqui seems absurd will be pleased to find its absurdity indicated, if not proved, by a Greek author of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... village-green. Tabs entered instantly into the spirit of the game—the littleness and childishness of the attempt at quaintness. He liked the bijou privacy of the Court, its greenness and tidiness, and the absurdity of the narrow windows which glinted at him like spectacles. But there was ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... highest function. If they were not States, or were States out of the Union, their consent to a change in the fundamental law of the Union would have been nugatory, and Congress in asking it committed a political absurdity. The judiciary has also given the solemn sanction of its authority to the same view of the case. The judges of the Supreme Court have included the Southern States in their circuits, and they are constantly, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... "ever presented to Parliament." The appointment was much discussed, for the general feeling had been educated in the views of Lord Selborne, who asserted that no "person" connected with the Press nor any "gentleman in the wine trade" could be permitted to attain to such an honour as the Bench—an absurdity which has long since been dismissed. On one occasion, it is said, when a Beckett lived at No. 10, Hyde Park Gate South, Kensington Gore, he was instructed to hold himself in readiness, as magistrate, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... some of them are cleverer still and make their outspokenness and censure a means of imparting pleasure. As Agis the Argive,[417] when Alexander bestowed great gifts on a buffoon, cried out in envy and displeasure, "What a piece of absurdity!" and on the king turning angrily to him and saying, "What are you talking about?" he replied, "I admit that I am vexed and put out, when I see that all you descendants of Zeus alike take delight in flatterers and jesters, for Hercules had his Cercopes, and Dionysus his Sileni, and with ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... "What absurdity!" cried Moya. Then glancing at him she added quickly, "My father is a hired man. Most fathers who are worth ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... whether he was jealous of Tomassov, but I suspect that he might have been a little annoyed at him as at a sort of walking absurdity of the sentimental order. But these men of the world are impenetrable, and outwardly he condescended to recognize Tomassov's existence even more distinctly than was strictly necessary. Once or twice he had offered him some useful worldly advice with perfect tact and delicacy. ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... opened; and thus taken by surprise, whether from the effect of the horror which he felt, acting as it were hysterically on his nervous system, or that at the first moment he lost the sense of the guilt of the proposal in the feeling of its strangeness and absurdity, he flung her from him and burst into a fit of laughter. Irritated by this almost to frenzy, the woman fell on her knees, and in a loud voice that approached to a scream, she prayed for a curse both on him and on her own child. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... historians worth the name have told us something about that. But when we talk of science, we mean something with more ambitious pretences, we mean something which can foresee as well as explain; and, thus looked at, to state the problem is to show its absurdity. As little could the wisest man have foreseen this mighty revolution, as thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could have been anticipated in America; as little as it could have been foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would have been an outcome of the scientific culture ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... out. Lane sat there with a vague sense of absurdity in the situation. The click of a typewriter sounded from behind him. He wanted to hurry out. He wanted to think of other things, and twice he drove away memory of the girl he had just left at Doctor Bronson's office. Presently Smith returned, slipping along in his shiny black suit, flat-footed ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... knowledge of Celtic superstitions, and always castigates the right thing. Certain diseases of the brain were, till quite recently, believed to be curable if the afflicted man could procure a suicide's skull and take a drink out of it. Mr. Macdonald rightly dwells upon the absurdity of such a specific, but confesses that one might as well try to "bale out the Atlantic" as eradicate the foolish pagan notions that still linger in ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... his visitor's manner, touched by the unexpected poetry of his appeal, and yet keenly alive to the absurdity of an incomprehensible blunder somewhere committed, the editor gasped ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... no scollard, as they would say in Whitford, you know; but it has often struck me, that if folks would but believe that the Apostles talked not such very bad Greek, and had some slight notion of the received meaning of the words they used, and of the absurdity of using the same term to express nineteen different things, the New Testament would be found to be a much simpler and more severely philosophic book than "Theologians" ("Anthropo-sophists" ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... was not wholly emancipated from the state of Philistinism which Trenholme was railing at. Had he been less eager to secure a favorable verdict, or even less agitated by the unlooked-for condescension she was showing, he would have seen the absurdity of classing a girl of twenty with the lovers of art for art's sake, those earnest-eyed enthusiasts who regard a perfect curve or an inimitable flesh tint as of vastly greater importance than the squeamishness of the young person. Painters have their limitations as well as Mrs. Grundy, ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... Time by Geologists, which Have Been Tested, Have Proved Erroneous—the Danish Bogs; the Swiss Lake Villager; Horner's Nile Pottery; the Raised Beaches of Scotland; Lyell's Blunder in the Delta of the Mississippi; Sir Wm. Thompson's Exposure of the Absurdity of the Evolutionists' Demands for Time. Conflicting Geological Theories—the Wernerian, Huttonian, and Diluvian Theories; the Catastrophists and Progressionists; Eleven Theories of Earthquakes; Nine Theories of Mountains; False ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... than madness in the war, and have so pitiless a realisation of its essential futility. The boy forced his father to see—what indeed all along he had been seeing more and more clearly. The war, even by the standards of adventure and conquest, had long since become a monstrous absurdity. Some way there must be out of this bloody entanglement that was yielding victory to neither side, that was yielding nothing but waste and death beyond all precedent. The vast majority of people everywhere must be desiring peace, willing ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Mean by the Proposition I am Explaining, is, That it may without Absurdity be Doubted whether or no the Differing Substances Obtainable from a Concrete Dissipated by the Fire were so Exsistent in it in that Forme (at least as to their minute Parts) wherein we find them when the Analysis is over, that the ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... girl laughed aloud at the absurdity. "The poor Pretender! Don't hint your horrible suspicions to him, please, he'd never get ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... as man inhabits earth, commonsense (if your schoolmen had it) would suffice to teach that the circumfluent infinite which you call space—the countless Impalpable which divides earth from the moon and stars—is filled also with its correspondent and appropriate life. Is it not a visible absurdity to suppose that being is crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space? The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of life does not breathe. In the very charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation. Is ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... was not to be denied, for the classics were hateful to me. Naturally I was afraid to make such a damning admission. My father had succeeded in presenting my ambition as the height of absurdity and presumption, and with something of the despair of a shipwrecked mariner my eyes rested on the green expanses of those book-backs, Bohn's Standard Library! Nor did it occur to him or to me that one might be great in literature ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... often told us that the story of the prophet swallowed by a great fish was an absurdity. They say that, so long in the stomach of the monster, the minister would have been digested. We have no difficulty in this matter. Jonah, was a most unwilling guest of the whale. He wanted to get out. However much ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... finally led to the evolution of a theory or scheme of so-called "neutrality." A similar notion had been imperfectly developed in Maryland, when her legislature declared that she would take no part in a war. The idea was illogical to the point of absurdity, for by it the "neutral" State would at once stay in the Union and stand aloof from it. Neutrality really signified a refusal to perform those obligations which nevertheless were admitted to be binding, and it made of the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... that this same young man did not shrink from the presence of an old withered crone; that he had a certain timid liking for little maidens who had not yet outgrown the company of their dolls, the listener would be apt to smile, if he did not laugh, at the absurdity of the fable. Surely, he would say, this must be the fiction of some fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer, the trick of some playwright. It would make a capital farce, this idea, carried out. A young ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... more restive under the seeming absurdity of their persistent opposition, but before he could think of a polite way of ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... should always STAND. We must also look out for unaccustomed garments that may be required on the stage, and rehearse in them; for instance, hat, helmet, hood, cloak, etc. Without becoming accustomed to them by practice, the singer may easily make himself ridiculous on the stage. Hence comes the absurdity of a Lohengrin who cannot sing with a helmet, another who cannot with a shield, a third who cannot with gauntlets; a Wanderer who cannot with the big hat, another who cannot with the spear, a Jose who cannot with the ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... with regard to what people are so fond of calling psychism. You will not denounce it in the foolish way of many people, because in denouncing it you will know that you denounce all intellectual manifestations, an absurdity of which very few people are likely to be guilty; if you take your intellectual manifestations in the physical world as admirable things, to be always encouraged, strengthened, developed, then you will be compelled, by parity ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... their wisdom when I see them lavishing their admiration upon men such as he who now rules you. The love of power is very puerile; and this man is devoured by it, without having force enough to seize it wholly. By an utter absurdity, he is a tyrant under a master. Thus has this colossus, never firmly balanced, been all but overthrown by the finger of a boy. Does that indicate genius? No, no! when genius condescends to quit the lofty regions of its true home for a human passion, at least, it should grasp that passion in its ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ever styled themselves soldiers. The impossibility of relief, and the certain prospect of wanting every necessary of life, should your opponents confine their operations to a simple blockade, point out the absurdity of resistance....I am at the head of troops accustomed to success...and so highly incensed at your inhumanity, illiberal abuse, and the ungenerous means employed to prejudice them in the minds of the Canadians, that it is with difficulty I restrain them till ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... been as wise a measure as if he had been directed to trace the situation of Lilliput or Brobdignag. The latter are, indeed, confessedly, mere objects of imagination; and the former, destitute of any sufficient external evidence, bear so many striking marks of internal absurdity, as warrant our pronouncing them to be the fabric of imposture. Captain Cook's instructions were founded on an accurate knowledge of what had been already done, and of what still remained to do; and this knowledge pointed out ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... two-fold requirement of fitness for its use and of harmony with its surroundings. A log-house is the appropriate dwelling of the lumberer in the woods; but transplant it to a suburban lawn and it becomes an absurdity, and a double absurdity. It is not in harmony with the place, nor fit for the use of the citizen. Nothing more satisfactory in their place than the old English parish-churches; but transfer one of them from its natural atmosphere and surroundings to the midst of one of our ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... aspect of her own sister in a position of authority was the hugest absurdity, and when the blonde twin sauntered in, tardy, as usual, she joined the class as one of the lions. She intended to give Kate distinctly to understand that she was mixed primary pupil first and a Madigan afterward; that the substitute might ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... may imagine that poor old piano would have worn, to any one who could have taken in the full absurdity of the position. A venerable instrument like itself, after thirty-five years of honorable service, thus to be forced to exhibit a levity so unbefitting ...
— Harper's Young People, June 29, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... such a sharp expression came into the scarcely visible pupils of the blind man's half-shut eyes that (never suspecting that his blindness was feigned, but for the moment convinced that he had seen the old gentleman) I exclaimed, without thinking of the absurdity of my inquiry— ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the light of accepted astronomical theories (which regard our earth as uttterly insignificant compared with the rest of the universe) have pointed out the irrationality and absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all this unimaginable vastness of suns and systems should have any special interest in so pitiful a creature as man, an imperfectly developed inhabitant of one of the smaller planets ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... Brummell was the last of the beaus. The flame of beauism was expiring; but it flamed in its socket brighter than ever, and Beau Brummell made a more conspicuous figure in the supreme bon-ton of elegant absurdity, than any or all his predecessors. The only permanent beau on earth is the American savage. The Indians, who have been lately exhibiting their back-wood deformities in our island at shilling a-head, were prodigious dressers; Greek taste might ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... poor lady, who had pretty well passed the age when ladies are accustomed to have children, nevertheless determined not to give hope up, and even when she came to live at Castlewood, was constantly sending over to Hexton for the doctor, and announcing to her friends the arrival of an heir. This absurdity of hers was one amongst many others which the wags used to play upon. Indeed, to the last days of her life, my lady viscountess had the comfort of fancying herself beautiful, and persisted in blooming up to the very midst of winter, painting roses on her cheeks long after ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the doorway and looked back. "I'm so glad to have my mind settled about it," she said, with a pathos which overcame her absurdity and vulgarity. "I do work awful hard, and it doesn't seem as if I could lose my money." She appeared suddenly tragic in her cheap muslin and her frizzes. She looked old and her ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Indian girl's tendency to laugh increased, but whether because of fresh views of the absurdity of what had passed, or because of some faint perception of the negro's meaning, Lawrence had no power ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering after literary reputation, and has made more ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... our gentlemen of independent estates and fortune, the most useful as well as considerable body of men in the nation; whom even to suppose ignorant in this branch of learning is treated by Mr Locke[d] as a strange absurdity. It is their landed property, with it's long and voluminous train of descents and conveyances, settlements, entails, and incumbrances, that forms the most intricate and most extensive object of legal knowlege. The ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... respect for the past which had bequeathed to France her disorderly government and, above all, her church. His keen eye was continually discovering some new absurdity in the existing order, which, with incomparable wit and literary skill, he would expose to his eager readers. He was interested in almost everything; he wrote histories, dramas, philosophic treatises, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us. So to call such an act, to us appears no other than a naked, impudent absurdity, and we speak of it accordingly. But if, when the war had begun, and had become the cause of the country, the giving of our money and our blood, in common with yours, was support of the war, then it is not true that we have always opposed the war. With few individual exceptions, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... absurdity of separating what is inseparable even in imagination. Would it have been any consolation to the miserable Romans under the second triumvirate to have been asked insultingly, Is it Octavius, is it Anthony, or is it Lepidus that has caused this bitterness of affliction? and when the answer could ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... immortalized. According to Mr. Blaine, on March 27, 1863, Mr. Laird was loudly cheered in the House of Commons when he declared that "the institutions of the United States are of no value whatever, and have reduced the name of liberty to an utter absurdity." ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... which purchased it, simply because other States in the Union which she joined had assumed such power, a discriminating mind of Mr. Benjamin's acuteness should have seen that the very position proved the reverse of what he stated, and demonstrated, in the absurdity of Louisiana's secession, the equal absurdity of the secession of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... ignorant uppishness that does the mischief. A stranger on the planet might expect that its grotesque absurdity would provoke enough ridicule to cure it; but unfortunately quite the contrary happens. Just as our ill health delivers us into the hands of medical quacks and creates a passionate demand for impudent pretences that doctors can ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... first is the unusual intensity and prevalence of the religious temperament. This has a double effect, both conservative and alterative: ancient customs receive an unreasonable respect: they are not abolished for their immorality or absurdity; but since real interest implies some measure of constructive power, there is a constant growth of new ideas and reinterpretations resulting in inconsistent combinations. The second is the absence of hierarchy ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... without the excuse of the imperfectly educated Scythian. The reign of Catherine II. (1762-96), saw the rise of a whole generation of court poets. The great maxim, "Un Auguste peut aisement faire un Virgile," was seen in all its absurdity in semi-barbarous Russia. These wits were supported by the Empress and her immediate entourage, to whom their florid productions were ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... [Greek], or, "Above the Clouds," has a great deal of easy wit and humour in it, without the least degree of stiffness or obscurity; it is equally severe on the gods and philosophers; and paints, in the warmest colours, the glaring absurdity ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... The humour had passed from the situation. The man was a lunatic, a religious maniac. Again he addressed Barney Bill. "As I can't convince Mr. Finn of the absurdity of his request, I must ask you ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... small part of which (says Knappe) did really belong to "an American nigger." The disease spread, the flags were multiplied, the operations of war became an egg-dance among miniature neutral territories; and though all men took a hand in these proceedings, all men in turn were struck with their absurdity. Mullan, Leary's successor, warned Knappe, in an emphatic despatch, not to squander and discredit the solemnity of that emblem which was all he had to be a defence to his own consulate. And Knappe himself, in his despatch ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is characterized by its spontaneity, its disregard of the probable and possible, its vividness of detail. It is its own reward, and does not look to any result beyond itself. Little children's imaginations are of this type—it is their play world of make-believe. The incongruity and absurdity of their images have been compared to the dreams of adults. Lacking in experience, without knowledge of natural laws, their imagination runs riot with the materials it has at its command. Some adults still retain it to a high degree—witness ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... friends at Edinburgh, he had ordered her removal to Saint Kilda, and had supposed it effected long ago. The troubles of the time, which left no boat or men disposable, had caused the delay; and now, between his rage at any command of his having been disregarded, and his sense of his absurdity in bringing a friend of his prisoner to her very door, he was perfectly exasperated. He muttered curses as ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... Eucharist," spoken of in the Tract, was a false print for "Sacrament," I thought the mistake too pleasant to be corrected before I was asked about it. I was not unwilling to draw an opponent on step by step, by virtue of his own opinions, to the brink of some intellectual absurdity, and to leave him to get back as he could. I was not unwilling to play with a man, who asked me impertinent questions. I think I had in my mouth the words of the Wise man, "Answer a fool according to his folly," ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... he said, looking at the water. "She found out my pet besetting sin on the spot, and paid it off. My God, how she understood! And she said I was better than she was! Better than she was!" He laughed at the absurdity of the notion. "I wonder if girls guess at one-half a man's life. They can't, or—they wouldn't marry us." He took her gift out of his pocket, and considered it in the light of a miracle and a pledge of the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... he said, "if only you would reflect for a few moments, I feel sure you would realize the absurdity of such fancies. We did Wingrave a service in introducing him to society here, and I am sure that he appreciated it. If he wished for our ruin, why did he lend us eight thousand pounds on no security? Why does he lend us his yacht to ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lastly, if that law be of human institution, may it not be enacted in any state, with whatever extent or limitation the legislature shall think fit? For the notion of an unchangeable human law is an absurdity in government, to be believed only by ignorance, and supported by power. From hence it follows, that the children of the late Queen of France, although she had renounced, were as legally excluded from succeeding to Spain, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... slowly drawing on his tasselled nightcap, secured it firmly on his head, by tying beneath his chin the strings which he always had attached to that article of dress. It was at this moment that the absurdity of his recent bewilderment struck upon his mind. Throwing himself back in the rush-bottomed chair, Mr. Pickwick laughed to himself so heartily, that it would have been quite delightful to any man of well-constituted mind to have watched ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... the most ludicrous, it would be hard to determine. For some time they merely looked at each other, without speaking—the priest, probably, because he could not articulate—and his guest, perhaps, because his mouth was full—till the absurdity of the whole affair apparently striking them both at once, they mutually broke out into laughter, the violence of which threatened to convulse them. From this, however, the padre was the first to recover, when the intruder, mastering his muscles, regained his countenance ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... business. Thus Napier relates that it was while he was preparing to fight the battle of Salamanca that he had to expose to the Ministers at home the futility of relying upon a loan; it was on the heights of San Christoval, on the field of battle itself, that he demonstrated the absurdity of attempting to establish a Portuguese bank; it was in the trenches of Burgos that he dissected Funchal's scheme of finance, and exposed the folly of attempting the sale of church property; and on each occasion, he showed himself as well acquainted with these ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... only then realising the absurdity of her own remark. It augured well for her good sense that she could recognise the absurdity when it was ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... blamed for a great deal of rubbish he would have died rather than acknowledge. But it's a craze of the new, fatted Germany. It's a fancy type which could never really exist, any more than the Economic Man of the politicians. Mankind has a sense of humour which stops short of the final absurdity. There never has been, and there never could be a real Superman ... But there might ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... no questions, he expressed no opinions, he told no stories. He only smiled and broke into roars of laughter, even if there was no one to share his joy, as if convinced, at last, of the hopeless absurdity of life. Some one told of following him from Springfield to New Salem and of hearing him laugh all the way. Many had noted another peculiarity in the man. He seemed always to have a week's growth ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... Duke, do you imagine, now that I am in sound health and mind again, that I don't see the hideous absurdity of ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... Archie into the middle of its mighty bosom to search an answer there, and he would never reappear, or, if he haply might, it would be with sorry fragments of divers answers in his hands, incongruous to absurdity. Is not the same true of babbling ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... is undoubtedly fulfilled in the case on hand. It cannot, therefore be denied, that, in spite of this difference, in spite also of the absurdity of one article of the creed ascribed to him, Vardhamana Jnatiputra, the founder of the Nirgrantha—or Jaina community is none other than Buddha's rival. From Buddhist accounts in their canonical works as well as in other books, it may be seen ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... Jones Berwick and I am Berwick Jones? What an absurdity! Let reason work; the idea is preposterous! What does it mean? Can it mean any more than that you were known at one time as Jones Berwick and at another time as Berwick Jones? It is insanity to think that you are two persons ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... some point at which the theory of the inviolable better-for-worse marriage breaks down in practice. South Carolina has indeed passed what is called a freak law declaring that a marriage shall not be dissolved under any circumstances; but such an absurdity will probably be repealed or amended by sheer force of circumstances before these words are in print. The only question to be considered is, What shall the conditions ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... who found out how stupid I had been," she said. "When I discovered that our mysterious tenant was Bernard Maddison, of course I saw the absurdity ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... inflammatory bickerings about the right of search, pandering to the thirst for revenge in France, panting for war to prostrate the disputed title of her king—has the sound of this war-trumpet yet faded away upon our ears? Has the supreme and unparalleled absurdity of stipulating by treaty to keep a squadron of eighty guns for five years without intermission upon the coast of Africa, to suppress the African slave-trade, and at the same time denying, at the point of the bayonet, the right of that squadron to board ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... more permanent distinctions of character and manners, it may be questioned whether they can be much relished out of their own country, and whether even there, the effect must not be weakened as fatuity and absurdity shall discover new methods of fastening ridicule upon themselves. They border more nearly on farce than comedy. They have neither of them any thing of fancy, that power which can give a new and higher ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... yet, but everything moves past me. I sit in the gallery looking on. If Nikolai the carpenter had been observant, he would have seen my fingers closing and opening again, my absurdity augmented by affectation and grimacing. Fortunately he was a child. In the end I left it all behind me, and took my proper seat. My address is ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... out the absurdity of "during which" applied to the last part of the sentence. (a) ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... respects between Christ and Plato. He speaks of Plato as "the greatest representative of human reason in the direction of spirituality"; yet he says "Plato is nowhere in this respect as compared with Christ." While in Plato there are errors of all kinds, "reaching even to absurdity in respect of reason, and to sayings shocking to the moral sense," there is, he declares, in literal truth no reason why any of Christ's words should ever pass away in the sense of becoming obsolete. And it is this absence from the biography of Christ of any doctrines ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... hard,' he half murmured to himself, half to me; yet he added whimsically enough, being struck with the seeming absurdity of such a view, 'I must try to bear it. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb'" ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... imprecation on the formality and absurdity of the writer, Lord Etherington let the letter of advice drop from his hand into the fire, and throwing himself into a chair, passed his hand across his eyes, as if their very power of sight had been blighted by what he had read. His title, and his paternal fortune, which he thought ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... slightly. However, there must be many Arthur Dillons, the Irish being so numerous, and tasteless in the matter of names. When she described her particular Arthur his astonishment became boundless at the absurdity ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... to discover it?" Meg spoke dubiously. Her practical mind was fighting against the absurdity ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... by the absurdity of the statement that he stopped to look at her. "Ah," he said, "you have not been running up and down to the stables or you never would ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Muriel breathing fast. Then her eyes fell on Peggy, standing in disdainful quiet, and her expression showed uncertainty. Rosetta Muriel was hardly capable of appreciating that for one in a fit of passion to attempt to correct a child is the height of absurdity, but she recognized the indignation Peggy took ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... these artificial clouds will roll away at once. We have an evil heredity behind us in this matter, for we have inherited all kinds of funereal horrors from our forefathers, and so we are used to them, and we do not see the absurdity and the monstrosity of them. The ancients were in this respect wiser than we, for they did not associate all this phantasmagoria of gloom with the death of the body—partly perhaps because they had a much more rational method of disposing of the body—a method which was not ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... having lived among them since about the commencement of the Christian era, is probably confined to Nepal, and other remote parts, where no means of knowing the contrary exists. Such an absurdity could scarcely pass among actual observers, however degraded in understanding, and in Thibet the Lama of Lassa is probably considered as merely an incarnation ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... upon it, to inform against her would be far worse than letting any amount of absurdity be talked. I should like to know how you would get over ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the powers of luminous reason in contemplating eternal nothing with sweet complacency. This is "exactly" as it should be! Varying from this the proposition would need to be "pruned!" Dear brother, does reason countenance all this absurdity? If it be a pleasure to contemplate non-existence does it not involve the absurdity of enjoying the expectation of ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... were having! Yes, they were absurd, with the absurdity that belongs to youth—happy, light-hearted, inconsequent youth. Eleanor Watson felt that she had left that sort of thing far behind her. Before the summer when Judge Watson had brought home a gay young wife to take his daughter's place at the head of his household, before the ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... study would arouse except as the scientist perceives that indignation is, for him, beside the point and the religionist believes that it proceeds from not seeing far enough into the process. This is why there is an essential absurdity in any naturalistic system of ethics. Even the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... no child under fourteen years of age should be sent to prison at all. It is an absurdity, and, like many ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... was a year older, and therefore considered himself a man at all events, burst into a loud fit of laughter, in which his companion joined him, at the absurdity of their conversation; of which, although they had spoken in earnest, they were both somewhat conscious. "But I say, old fellow, without any more humbug about love and such like bosh, just look at the dear old craft! how beautifully she sits ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... trustee, I am sure that no fraud was committed, and that none was possible. Since that time the Board has been controlled by trustees, some of whom are thorough experts in bridge building, and the others men of such high character that the suggestion of malpractice is improbable to absurdity. ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... General Observation The novel of Cynthio Giraldi, from which Shakespeare is supposed to have borrowed this fable, may be read in Shakespeare illustrated, elegantly translated, with remarks which will assist the enquirer to discover how much absurdity Shakespeare has admitted or avoided. I cannot but suspect that some other had new-modelled the novel of Cynthio, or written a story which in some particulars resembled it, and that Cynthio was not the authour whom Shakespeare immediately followed. The emperour in Cynthio is ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... concerned, so far from having any objection to it, I wish, for their own merits and the good-will that I bear them, that they were incorporated into our navy-list; but as long as they command vessels of the above description, in the event of a war, I will put a case, to prove the absurdity and danger which may result. There is not one vessel at this present time in their service which would not be sunk by one well-directed broadside from a large frigate; yet, as many of their officers are of long standing, it is very probable that a squadron of English frigates ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... time we were decidedly less scrupulous than we are now in our ideas on the subject; and we all said freely that as gunpowder destroyed the feudal system, so the capitalist system could not long survive the invention of dynamite. Not that we are dynamitards: indeed the absurdity of the inference shows how innocent we were of any practical acquaintance with explosives; but we thought that the statement about gunpowder and feudalism was historically true, and that it would do the capitalists good to remind them of it. Suddenly, however, ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... man Miles to the Doctor's Friar Bacon, and listening day after day to innumerable orations addressed by the Doctor to various people, all tending to show that his very existence was at best a mistake and an absurdity, this unfortunate servitor had fallen, by degrees, into such an abyss of confused and contradictory suggestions from within and without, that Truth at the bottom of her well, was on the level surface as compared with Britain in the ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... Hawkins. And the minions of the law would laugh at the truth, even if he told it—which he never would. More than once his imaginative genius had drawn up a picture of that impossible happening. For it was a truth so inconceivable that he found the absurdity of it a grimly humorous thing. Even Nada believed he had killed her scoundrelly foster-father. Yet it was she—herself—who had killed him! And it was Nada whom the law would hang, if the truth was ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... it into your handsome head to marry me—please, I'm only saying "if"—the absurdity would be rather reassuring, wouldn't it? When a man is in love with two women at the same time, it really is a little unlikely that he should fall in ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... commission had interviews with the president, his cabinet, and others, and afterward we had time to look about us. Few things could be more dispiriting. The city had been burned again and again, and there had arisen a tangle of streets displaying every sort of cheap absurdity in architecture. The effects of the recent revolution—the latest in a long series of civic convulsions, cruel and sterile—were evident on all sides. On the slope above the city had stood the former residence of the French governor: it had been a beautiful palace, and, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... vagueness of the service he had rendered made the deed loom larger in her imagination. She felt his breath warm on her cheek, and suddenly into her dispassionate musings there came a fresh sense, which made her face grow hot. She was angry at the absurdity of flushing there in the dark, and asked herself why the mere breath on her cheek of an insensible and wounded man should set her to blushing like a self-conscious fool! Then she remembered how he had held her in his ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... gods the Fijians have, as any man who can distinguish himself in murdering his fellow-men may certainly secure to himself deification after death. Their friends are also sometimes deified and invoked. I have heard them invoke their friends who have been drowned at sea. I need not advert to the absurdity of praying to those who could not save themselves from a watery grave. Tuikilakila, the chief of Somosomo, offered Mr. Hunt a preferment of this sort. 'If you die first,' said he, 'I shall make you my god.' In fact, there appears to be no ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... appear to the modern student or engineer, they were denounced as nothing short of absurdity at the time of their promulgation—especially so with regard to Edison's proposal to upset the then settled dictum that the armature resistance should be equal to the external resistance. His proposition was derided in the technical press of the period, both at home ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... to make me marry that stick of a Connemara. What is there in him, I should like to know, to make any girl admire or love him? And yet half the girls in London would be glad to get him, for all his absurdity. It's monstrous, it's incomprehensible, it's abominable; but it's the fact. For my part, I must say I do like a little originality. And whenever I hear Papa, and Uncle Sussex, and Lord Connemara talking at dinner, it does seem to me too ridiculously absurd that they should each have ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... are entitled to some indulgence from the reader, when they occur in a work of real genius. Those, who do not strive at excellence, will seldom fall into absurdity; as he, who is contented to walk, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Not-being is detected, and there is no longer any metaphysical impediment in the way of admitting the possibility of falsehood. To the Parmenides, the Sophist stands in a less defined and more remote relation. There human thought is in process of disorganization; no absurdity or inconsistency is too great to be elicited from the analysis of the simple ideas of Unity or Being. In the Sophist the same contradictions are pursued to a certain extent, but only with a view to their resolution. ...
— Sophist • Plato
... nice distinctions that savor of the schools, but to be guided by true good sense and manly reason. After the Statute of Uses, it is much to be lamented that the courts of Common Law had not adopted all the rules and maxims of courts of equity. This would have prevented the absurdity of receiving costs in one court and paying them ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the by-play with an amused expression. There was not much cynicism in her nature. She believed that experience would soon prick the bubble of his vanity, and it was her disposition to smile rather than to sneer at absurdity in others. Besides, she was just. She never applied to a young man of twenty the standard by which she would measure those of her own age, and she remembered Haldane's antecedents. But Mr. Arnot went ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... Lords. But here the fallacy of their grand scheme of political mystification begins to develop itself. Had, indeed, their new constituency, as they have long impudently pretended, really been 'the people,' a struggle between such a body and the House of Lords would have been brief but final. The absurdity of supposing that a chamber of two or three hundred individuals could set up their absolute will and pleasure against the decrees of a legislative assembly chosen by the whole nation is so glaring that the Whigs and their scribes might reasonably suspect that in ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... modern (and very Gallic) Caesar Augustus, the avenger of his ill-used uncle, and the crusher of the Junii and the Crassi, and all the rest of the aristocrats, who overthrew him, and caused his early death. It is not necessary to point out the utter absurdity of this attempt to justify modern despotism by referring to the action of men who lived and acted in the greatest of ancient revolutions; and those men who admire Julius Caesar, but who are not disposed to see in his conduct a justification of the conduct of living men, object ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... nature and simple poetic beauty of this class of superstitions have doubtless often induced the moralist to hesitate in exposing their absurdity, and, like Burns in view ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... little girl's. High-heeled boots tilted her well forward, a tiny muff pinioned her arms, and a spotted veil, tied so closely over her face that her eyelashes were rumpled by it, gave the last touch of absurdity to ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... a case of belief; that is, of settled conviction. There is no religion until some interpretation of life, some accommodation between man and God, has been so far accepted as to be unhesitatingly practised. The absurdity of doubt in matters of religion has been pointed out in the well-known parody, "O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul." The quality of religion lies not in the entertaining of a speculative hypothesis, but in an assurance so confident ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... according to the saying of Plato, "none but the pure ought to approach the pure." Now, no superfluity of our food, and no excrementitious substance, is looked upon by them as pure and clean; such, however, are all kinds of wool and down, our hair and our nails. It would be the highest absurdity, therefore, for those who, whilst; they are in a course of purification, are at so much pains to take off the hair from every part of their own bodies, at the same time to clothe themselves with that of other animals. So when we are told by Hesiod "not ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... contradicted, we can only reassert. If the old words, "He that made the eye, shall he not see? he that planted the ear, shall he not hear?" do not at once commend themselves to the intellect of any person, we shall never convince that person by any arguments drawn from the absurdity of conceiving the invention of optics by a blind man, or of music by a ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... oversight of the College of which they were the legal guardians. In April, 1850, a Committee of the Board of the Royal Institution was appointed to suggest a solution of the peculiar problem. They wrote to the Governor-General, setting forth the absurdity and the hopelessness of a condition which permitted the College to be controlled by Governors no longer resident in Montreal, and emphasising the necessity that existed for "a prompt application of remedies ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... practice in the Christian virtue of patience. Dr. Barlow's was not the worst, though his hearers regarded it as an admirable 'confutation' of the text. The preacher, among the four, who reached the climax of absurdity was Dr. Andrewes, Bishop of Chichester. He was one of the extreme High Churchmen of his time: no man urged the doctrine of passive obedience to a more abject degree, or did more to support with the sanction of religion the most extravagant pretensions of the Crown. ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... we'd have to keep away from town or the mine for a while. He wanted to go right back and finish up the fight!" Dade grinned at the absurdity. "I sat down hard on that proposition." Not that phrase, exactly, did he use. One may be pardoned a free translation, since, though he spoke in excellent Spanish, he did not twist his sentences like a native, and he was not averse to ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... built, with a commanding figure, prominent features, watchful, gray-hazel eyes, and a rich, manly voice, he was very ready in debate. When the army bill was up, and it was argued that the South was in danger of intimidation, he showed the absurdity of such a position by giving the exact numbers of troops then stationed in each State: "And the entire South has eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers to intimidate, overrun, oppress, and destroy the liberties of fifteen million people! In the Southern States there are twelve hundred and three ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... heard the whole of this case, will be a verdict of guilty,) will be a most salutary verdict:—It will shew the world that as there is no man beneath the law, so there is no man above it. It will teach evil minded persons, the absurdity of expecting that schemes of fraud can be so formed as to provide for all events. It will teach them that no caution can insure safety: that there is no contrivance, that there is no device, no stratagem, ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... to say you warned me months ago. Mind, it is no fault of hers, she is behaving beautifully; but oh! the absurdity, and the worst of it is, I have promised not to ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in a great measure, the seeming absurdity of their interference with the subject of the drama: being deemed so indispensable a part of the performance, that the scene itself was hardly more so: consequently, there was no secret supposed to be more violated by speaking before them, than before the inanimate ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... furor, the sister of the departed wife walked calm and still. The power of the silent woman has often been dwelt upon, but I really do not think that half enough has been said, although I am aware of committing an absurdity when I recommend voluble speech on the subject of silence. Jesting and paradoxes aside, however, the silent woman wields a power known only to the man toward ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... she had told you that the sun goes round the earth, you would quite readily have believed her. My dearest Morris, that way madness lies. Perhaps you understand now what I have been driving at, and the best proof of the absurdity of the whole thing is that I, stupid as I am, from my intimate knowledge of your character since childhood, was able to predict that something of this sort would certainly happen to you. You will admit that is ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... be) might have known before now. Or, (if he had not before known it) he might have learned, (by what I shew him upon a like occasion, in my Hob. Heaut. pag. 142. 143. 144.) How to understand that language, without an Absurdity. ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... Much has been rightly written about the horrors of war. Everyone knows them to be sudden, hideous, and overwhelming; those who have seen them can speak also of the squalor, the filthiness, the murderous swindling, and the inconceivable absurdity of the whole monstrous performance. But the horrors of peace, if not so obvious, come nearer to our daily life, and we are naturally terrified at its softness, its monotony, and its enfeebling relaxation. Of all people in the world ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... correspondence with strangers, however, this adapted and unusual signature frequently becomes a source of loss to himself and irritation to his correspondents. In the case of hundreds of such individuals, the writing to a stranger in expectation of a reply becomes an absurdity for the reason that the person addressed is hopelessly barred from reading the name attached to the letter. A plain ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... vocal organs; and even if Mr. Herbert Spencer's theory be rejected, it is too late now to deny that music is conceived by its creators as a language of the emotions and so applied by them. The German philosopher Herbarth sought to reduce the question to an absurdity by expressing surprise that musicians should still believe that feelings could be "the proximate cause of the rules of simple and double counterpoint;" but Dr. Stainer found a sufficient answer by accepting the proposition as put, ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... debt was nothing new: he had always been so at school, and probably always will be. Had you reproached him with it in those young self-conscious days of glorious absurdity, he would probably have retorted, with a toss of his vain ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... they assumed the offensive; and, showing that the socialists understood nothing at all themselves of this organization that they held up as a scarecrow, they ended by saying that it was but a new socialistic chimera, a word without sense,—an absurdity. The latest writings of the economists are full of these ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... dying; I shall keep mine even though my heart break.' And again: 'Forget, therefore, the girl who has loved you so much: she is now the betrothed of another, and honor requires she should forget even your name!'" He read these passages with an extravagant emphasis, which heightened their absurdity. "And what shall I say of these mistakes in spelling?" he resumed. "You noticed them, of course, mother?—command is written with a single 'm,' and supplicate with one 'p.' These are certainly not mistakes that we can attribute to ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... thought about himself. He acknowledged, though with a certain lenience of judgment, the absurdity of being where he was. He should have shown more resolve, he admitted, at 2 A.M., and have gone to his lodgings, a mile or so away. But he had been doing good work the night before; that, at least, ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... what greater nonsense can there be in connection with what we are now discussing than for an infant to appear in swaddling clothes in the first scene of the first act, and in the second a grown-up bearded man? Or what greater absurdity can there be than putting before us an old man as a swashbuckler, a young man as a poltroon, a lackey using fine language, a page giving sage advice, a king plying as a porter, a princess who is a kitchen-maid? And then what shall I say of their ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... involved in this exemplary remark, combined with the absurdity of repentance taking the form of interest in mining speculations, was almost too much for Richard's sense of humor; but he only nodded with gravity, as became a man who was imbibing information, and inquired further, whether, in addition to these ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... with Myra, Clem, and a lanky, freckled youth of about sixteen, whom he introduced as Archelaus Libby. She could not help a smile at this odd name, and the young man himself seemed to be conscious of its absurdity. He blushed, held out his hand and withdrew it again, dropped his hat and caught it awkwardly between his knees. Myra (who had made the sign of the cross as Hester entered) stood and regarded him ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is necessary to a recognition of the full absurdity of intolerance. One of the greatest absurdities of it is evident when we are annoyed and caused intense suffering by our intolerance of others, and, as a consequence, blame others for the fatigue or illness which follows. However mistaken or blind other people may be in ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... and all became communicative. Family histories, not excepting our own, were now discussed, with a confidence new to my boyish conjectures. Charlatanski's career abroad and at home seemed to be as well known as if he had been pilloried in the county town; the infinite absurdity of the noble duke who suffered him to make his way under his roof, and the palpable penchant of his ward, next underwent discussion; until the ignorance of my noble father on the subject, gave, with me, the death-blow to his penetration. The prettinesses which had won ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the injunctions grew less nerve-racking: "You must use a medium soft black pencil (which will be furnished)"—law-breaking under such conditions would be absurdity—"use no ditto marks and"—here I could not but shudder as there passed before my eyes memories of college lecture rooms and all the strange marks that have come to mean something to me ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... their sisters. Was it wrong in the nature of things? [Here Dr. Wisner spoke out, and said, "Certainly."] I deny it. What an absurdity, to suppose that God could not provide for the propagation of the human race from one pair, without requiring them to sin! Adam's sons and daughters must have married, had they remained in innocence. They must then have sinned in Eden, from the very necessity of the command ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... that prince in recalling those circumstances; no doubt, he acted upon the suggestion of others, and perhaps, also, under a sincere emotion on witnessing the enthusiasm of those outside; but that could not cure the original absurdity of recognizing as a representative audience, clothed with the national functions of recognizing himself, a chance gathering of passengers through a single street, between whom and any mob from his own stables and kitchens there could be ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... in his own story, I could not doubt; and he told it throughout with the oddest mixture of vanity and modesty, and an obvious struggle between a dim perception of his own absurdity and the determination to spare himself in no single particular, which, though it did not overcome my scepticism, could not fail to enlist sympathy. But for all that, by the time he entered upon the more sensational part of his case, I was driven to form conclusions respecting it which, ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... even what beating, could be so unendurable as this total want of sympathy, as this deadness in life, which her present lot entailed upon her? As for that matter of beating, she ridiculed the idea in her very soul. She sat smiling at the absurdity of the thing as she thought of the beauty of Burgo's eyes, of the softness of his touch, of the loving, almost worshipping, tones of his voice. Would it not even be better to be beaten by him than to have politics ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... so easily disposed of. In fact, the separating of the literature from the language, you will say, is a self-evident absurdity. That, however, only shows that you have not looked carefully into examination papers. I am not concerned with what the a priori imagination may suppose to be Literature, but with the actual questions put by ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... his hat, his hose, and his shoes were dazzling to the eye. Add to this wondrous raiment feet and hands that could not be satisfactorily disposed of, and an unrest of manner painful to behold, and you may possibly conceive the grandiose absurdity of Dorothy's wooer. The sight of him almost made Sir George ill; and his entrance into the long gallery, where the queen was seated with her ladies and gentlemen, and Sir George and his friends standing about her, was a signal for laughter in which ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... adopted a method of procedure of which he did not approve; they were, his friend Calcraft wrote to him, "completely disgraced," and Chatham styled their bill "a compound of connexion, tyranny and absurdity".[83] While the opposition was in this distracted state the ministerial party was united. In three years' time at most opposition in parliament was practically dead, and the ministry was thoroughly ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... "appears to be probable. But what you said just now, Socrates, that philosophers should be very willing to die, appears to be an absurdity, if what we said just now is agreeable to reason—that it is God who takes care of us, and that we are his property. For that the wisest men should not be grieved at leaving that service in which they govern them who are the best of all masters—namely, ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... much of the claims of scientists who announce that they are on the eve of "creating life" from non-living matter. This is all nonsense—life can come only from life. Life from non-life is an absurdity. And all Life comes from the One Life underlying All. But it is true that Science has done, is doing, and will do, something very much like "creating life," but of course this is merely changing the form of Life into other forms—the lesser form into the higher—just as one produces ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... exclaimed. "The idea of Cuthbert Hartington rebuking us for laziness is rich indeed," and a roar of laughter showed the general appreciation of the absurdity. ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... the sincerity of his visitor's manner, touched by the unexpected poetry of his appeal, and yet keenly alive to the absurdity of an incomprehensible blunder somewhere committed, the ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... for his thorough knowledge of Nat Burns's character he would have laughed at the absurdity of the thing and thrown the ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... had seen it in that flashing glimpse, rose again before his consciousness. It seemed for a startling instant to be grimly, portentously familiar, then the fancy faded before the fact of its obvious absurdity, and he laughed contemptuously. The danger of the moment had played tricks ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... the movement for the emancipation of woman has for its final end the making of never so fine a quality, never so sublimated a sort of non-child-bearing women, it is an absurdity upon the ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... the scene one of motion and variety. Everywhere was water,—color, new forms, childish figures, little details, all glossy and fresh,—an ingenuous display of prettiness—a mixture of the primitive and the theatrical, of grace and absurdity, which was partly European, partly Chinese, partly belonging to no land,—and over all a delightful air of peace ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... life occur on all sides to elucidate the utter absurdity, and, in fact, total impracticapability of the system of free trade, as applied to nations who are, or are becoming, rivals of each other in manufacturing industry. Those who have the advantage, will always advocate free competition; those ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... suppose, that He, who is the Fountain of all wisdom, could have been the Author of such inevitable disorder,—a kind of disorder which must ever keep the axe at the root of that unity for which He prayed,—is not only an absurdity, but an opinion equally repudiated by all parties." "It is manifest," therefore, "that whatever may prove itself to be THE form of ministry, established and authorized by Jesus Christ, every other must be altogether void ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... pervade the whole union in as energetic a manner, as the authority of the state governments extends over the several states. To be fearful of investing congress, constituted as that body is, with ample authorities for national purposes, appears to me the very climax of popular absurdity and madness. Could congress exert them for the detriment of the people, without injuring themselves in an equal or greater proportion? Are not their interests inseparably connected with those of their constituents? By ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... principally at Ephesus during the last thirty years of the first century; [242:5] so that, according to this tale, the beloved disciple must have been nearly all this time under the ecclesiastical supervision of Timothy! The story otherwise exhibits internal marks of absurdity and fabrication. It would lead us to infer that Paul must have distributed most unequally the burden of official labour; for whilst Timothy is said to have presided over the Christians of a single city, Titus is represented as invested with the care of a whole island ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Branches of the Legislature here: Nor do we concede, that even his Majesty in Council has any Constitutional Authority to decide such Questions, or any other Controversy whatever that arises in this Province, excepting only such Matters as are reservd in the Charter. It seems a great Absurdity, that when a Dispute arises between the Governor and the House, the Governor should appeal to his Majesty in Council to decide it. Would it not be as reasonable for the House to appeal to the Body of their Constituents to decide ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... cigar, looked thoughtfully at Lorraine, and said, "Well, Alfred, as we are kinsmen and life-long friends, I will not resent your asking my reason for doing that which seems to you the climax of absurdity, and if you will have the patience to ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... measurable interest, the same in kind and roughly the same in degree for each; and the vote of the majority, if it could be taken on this question alone and based on self-interest alone, might be conceived without absurdity as representing a sum of individual interests. Even here, however, observe that, though the greatest number is considered, the greatest happiness does not fare so well. For to raise the same sum the tax on wine will, as less is drunk, have to be much larger than the ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... so much yearning in his eyes that the man was touched, in spite of the absurdity of it. "Go on," ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... on the part of the States was a manifest absurdity. The new reinforcement of the garrisons in Canada did not, when I was in Canada, amount, as I believe, to more than 2000 men. But had it amounted to 20,000, the States would have had no just ground for complaint. Of all nationalities that in modern days have risen to power, ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... that my wife, if they ever mean to send me one at all, shall be a member of the Episcopal church. There is about that church, what attaches to no other sect, a sort of dignified reserve, that never breaks out in four-day meetings, revivals, or any other similar ebullition of fanaticism and absurdity. ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... Milton made sad work with his artillery, when he armed his devils therewithal. He did so; and this artificial object must have had much of the sublime to attract his attention for such a conflict. He has made an absurd use of it; but the absurdity consists not in using cannon against the angels of God, but any material weapon. The thunder of the clouds would have been as ridiculous and vain in the hands of the devils, as the "villanous saltpetre:" the angels were ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... and the supporters of this amazing abuse assured the world that Greek and Latin versification was an essential element of a liberal education. It took a good many generations to deliver England from this absurdity, and there are others like unto it which still hold their own in the scholastic world. To sweep these away should be the first object of the educational reformer; and, when that preliminary step has been taken, the State will be able to say ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... for them, you well know, I'd demolish you in the twinkling of an eye, and give your body to the fowls of heaven and the lilies of the fields!' Then, planting a chair by Lady Lowborough's side, he stationed himself in it, and began to talk to her with a mixture of absurdity and impudence that seemed rather to amuse than to offend her; though she affected to resent his insolence, and to keep him at bay with sallies ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Spear of State in the other, and a dagger in either lower hand. With his left hand, von Schlichten detached the bayonet from the rifle of one of his followers and went forward, trying not to think of the absurdity of a man of the Sixth Century A.E., the representative of a civilized Chartered Company, dueling to the death with swords with a barbarian king for a throne he had promised to another barbarian, or of what could happen ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... and warning, were, "Never trust a nigger with a gun;" and accustomed to chafe each other into a fever heat of excitement over any matter of public interest, were ready to give credence to any report—all the more easily because of its absurdity. On the other hand, the colored people, hearing these rumors, said to themselves that it was simply a device to prevent them from voting, or to give color and excuse for a conflict ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... breath and he started to speak, but in the end shook his head and remained silent. Through the whirl and din of falling skies he was yet able to see the utter futility of words. He could have adduced a hundred arguments to prove her absurdity. He could have shown her that before he ever read Hartley's note he had decided upon Stewart's guilt—and for much better reasons than Hartley had. He could have pointed out to her that it was he, not Hartley, who discovered young Benham's whereabouts, that it ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... following the Baron's arrival, when the company assembled to breakfast, my old uncle introduced me to the Baroness; and, as usually happens with people in the frame of mind in which I then was, I behaved with indescribable absurdity. In answer to the beautiful lady's simple inquiries how I liked the castle, &c., I entangled myself in the most extraordinary and nonsensical phrases, so that the old aunts ascribed my embarrassment simply and solely to my profound ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... promises which Sir Edward Grey indicated; and with a potentially hostile Bulgaria in her flank Greece could not march to Servia's aid. So M. Venizelos, under the impulse of ambition, set his energetic brain to work, and within a few hours produced a scheme calculated to correct the "absurdity" of the British notion, to earn the gratitude of the Entente to himself, and an Asiatic Empire for his country. It was nothing less than a complete reversal of his former attitude: that Greece should not only withdraw her opposition to concessions on the part of Servia, but should voluntarily ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... than being patted on the head and called "My dear boy" by the lady of your love. Ted ducked from under the delicate caress, and rose to his feet with dignity. His emotion was spent, and he was chiefly conscious of the absurdity of the situation. Every object in that ridiculous room accentuated the distasteful humour of the thing. Psyche looked downcast virgin disapproval from her pedestal under the Malay creeses, and the frivolous little Parisienne flung her ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... a conception as that of those mysterious super human beings, whom I have named "the gods," into a serious philosophic system, may well appear to many modern scientific minds the very height of absurdity. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... for the common practice of speaking of the present inhabitants of Britain as an "Anglo-Saxon" people. It is, in fact, just as absurd as the habit of talking of the French people as a "Latin" race, because they speak a language which is, in the main, derived from Latin. And the absurdity becomes the more patent when those who have no hesitation in calling a Devonshire man, or a Cornish man, an "Anglo-Saxon," would think it ridiculous to call a Tipperary man by the same title, though he and his forefathers may have spoken English for as long ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... his resolve, Dink, with the assistance of Finnegan and the Tennessee Shad, had started the fad of souvenir toilet sets; which, like all fads, ran its course the faster because of its high qualities of absurdity and uselessness. Dink's intention of recouping himself by selling his own set of seven colors at a big advance was cut short by a spontaneous protest to the Doctor from the house masters, whose artistic souls were stirred ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... consider the absurdity of swearing to take for law what another man will declare to be law, and before you hear it! Suppose the judge should be drunk and declare the fugitive slave bill in perfect harmony with the Sermon on the Mount, those noble words "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... which the people publicly profess, and is a relic of a far older paganism. There are, indeed, independent grounds for thinking that the Arabs enjoyed the advantage of a comparatively well-regulated solar year before the prophet of God saddled them with the absurdity and inconvenience of a purely lunar calendar.[557] Be that as it may, it is notable that some Mohammedan people of North Africa kindle fires and bathe in water at the movable New Year of their lunar calendar instead of at the fixed ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Mr. Strafford went back to the Cottage with a new page in her sorrowful life to tell to Mrs. Costello. To say that she heard with great grief of the probable nearness of that widowhood which, for years past, would have been a welcome release, would be to say an absurdity; but, nevertheless, it is true that a deep and tender feeling of pity, which was, indeed, akin to love, seemed to sweep over and obliterate all the bitterness which belonged to her thoughts of her husband. She wished at once ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... (c) The implied Absurdity of it. What a contrast between the safe 'munitions of rocks' and the unsheltered security of these Damascene gardens! What fools to leave the heights and come down into the plain! Think of the contrast between the sufficiency of God and the emptiness of the substitutes. Forgetfulness of Him ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... working hours in Germany have also been reduced and wages have risen up to 400 per cent.[181] The German Socialists have been honest enough to abandon the Doctrine of Increasing Misery under the guidance of Bernstein; the French have dropped it under the guidance of Sorel; the Dutch have seen its absurdity, guided by Vandervelde, their foremost leader. The British Socialists, on the other hand, have not abandoned it, though they must see its absurdity, probably because, though palpably and ridiculously false, the Doctrine of Increasing Misery is considered ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... in a child by means of bribery, to promise him a reward in case he obeys you, is manifestly an absurdity. You are destroying the very traits in his character you are presumably endeavoring to build up. You are educating a human being who knows good from evil, and who should be taught deliberately to choose the right for the right's sake, who should ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... worthy indeed. When honour is paid to such a one, he makes no great account of it, feeling that it is but his due, or even less than his due. If he is dishonoured and insulted, he despises the insult as an absurdity, offered to a man of his deserts. He is too conscious of his real worth to be much affected by the expression of his neighbour's view of him. For a man is most elated, when complimented on an excellence ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... in some measure removed this absurdity, by destroying the old convention that it was middle-class to be sane, and that between the artist and the outer-world yawned a gulf which few could cross. Modern artists are beginning to realize their social duties. They are the spiritual teachers of ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... for a moment as it passed over them, but making no noise. "There he goes," whispered Sam. "That's the Screech Owl. Not much of a screech, was it?" Not long afterward Yan came across a line of Lowell's which says, "The song of the Screech Owl is the sweetest sound in nature," and appreciated the absurdity ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... trade, these fits of coughing were succeeded by a handkerchief act, in which the dying Camille appeared to spit blood in carmine splotches. No burlesque that I have seen of a play frequently burlesqued ever approached the side-splitting absurdity of these rehearsals for the benefit of the heroine of ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... here. Pardon me if I ask you to ride on.' Of course I wished him good day; and a little farther up the road I saw a dark plain chariot, no coronet, no arms, no footman only the man on the box, but the beauty of the horses assured me it must belong to Lilburne. Can you conceive such absurdity in a man of that age—and a very clever fellow too? Yet, how is it that one does not ridicule it in Lilburne, as one would in another man ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... conceal their real disbelief in one half of Christian doctrine by judicious silence about it; or by flight to those refuges for the logically destitute, accommodation or allegory. But the faithful who fly to allegory in order to escape absurdity resemble nothing so much as the sheep in the fable who—to save their lives—jumped into the pit. The allegory pit is too commodious, is ready to swallow up so much more than one wants to put into it. If the story of the temptation is an allegory; if the early recognition ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... form and manners must be sacrificed to efficiency of business. The judge who said that he did not hear the constant objections of the lawyer because he made his objections sitting down was not so much an adherent of good form as a protestor against the absurdity of professional objections. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... no doubt, appear fantastic in its absurdity to those who hear it asked for the first time; but those who are at all familiar with the mysterious but undisputed phenomena of hypnotism will realize how naturally this question arises, and how difficult it is to answer it otherwise than in the affirmative. ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... my pupils. But, however it was broken off, I repeat that I am glad it happened. One is never sure of a man's wisdom, till he has been really and vainly in love. You know what that moralizing lump of absurdity, Lord Edouard, has said in the Julie—'the path of the passions conducts us to philosophy!' It is true, very true; and now that the path has been fairly trod, the goal is at hand. Now, I can confide in your steadiness; now, I can feel that you will ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... exaggerated views with regard to what people are so fond of calling psychism. You will not denounce it in the foolish way of many people, because in denouncing it you will know that you denounce all intellectual manifestations, an absurdity of which very few people are likely to be guilty; if you take your intellectual manifestations in the physical world as admirable things, to be always encouraged, strengthened, developed, then you will be compelled, by parity ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... assuming that such facts existed in some life which has left no trace, or by forcing a metaphorical sense on words which sound wonderfully like the sad language of a real sufferer. Of course, if we believe that prediction is an absurdity, any difficulty will be lighter than the acknowledgment that we have prediction here. But, unless we have a foregone conclusion of that sort to blind us, we shall see in this psalm a clear example of the prophecy of a suffering Messiah. ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... I'm not going to leave it entirely alone, old Ham," said Bones, shrugging his shoulders at the absurdity of such a suggestion. "The business can be doubled if a man with a capable, up-to-date conception of ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... straight in the present is all they ask in Canada, and homeless adventurers with no possessions—the kind of comrades I've generally met—are charitable. As a rule, it wouldn't become them to be fastidious. Anyway, sir, you must see the absurdity of believing that Bertram could have failed in his duty in ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... Dealer holds any suit which counts 7, on the basis of an Ace or face counting 2, and any lower card, 1. The believers in this doctrine would, therefore, bid a Club from such a hand as Queen, Knave, X, X, X, without any possibility of another trick; or even from Knave, X, X, X, X, X. The absurdity of this becomes obvious when it is remembered that the only real object in bidding a Club or Diamond is to show strength which will justify the partner in declaring one of the three game-going declarations. Any such holding as that mentioned ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... cuts is droll enough. It is entitled, "L'Enfant Prodigue est chasse par ses maitresses." The expulsion consists in the women driving him out of doors with besoms and hair-brooms. It is very probable, however, that all this character of absurdity attaches to some of our own representations of the same subject; if, instead of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... time, when the importunity of parents, and the example of a few injudicious young men of my acquaintance, had almost prevailed on me to thwart my genius, and prostitute my abilities by an application to serious pursuits. And if you had not opened my eyes to the absurdity and profligacy of such a perversion of the best gifts of nature, I am by no means clear that I might not have been a wealthy merchant or an eminent lawyer at this very moment. Nor was it only on my first setting ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... her dainty feet. I never saw a bevy of more beautiful women than officiated at one senatorial afternoon tea I visited; so beautiful were they as to make me entirely forget what seemed to my untutored European taste the absurdity of their wearing low-necked evening gowns while their guests sported hat and jacket and fur. The whole tone of Washington society from the President downward is one of the greatest hospitality and geniality towards strangers. The ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... meant to be under the guidance of reason and conscience looking up to God, and put it in the supreme place, and so, setting a beggar on horseback, ride where we know such equestrians are said in the end to go! The desires are meant to be impelling powers. It is absurdity and the destruction of true manhood to make them, as we so often do, directing powers, and to put the reins into their hand. They are the wind, not the helm; the steam, not the driver. Let us keep things in their right places. Remember that the constitution ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... during Joan's journey, and which were magnified by report into miracles, added to the feeling in her favor. The king and his council doubted if it were wise to give her an audience. That a peasant girl could succor a kingdom in extremity seemed the height of absurdity. But something must be done. Orleans was in imminent danger. If it were taken, the king might have to fly to Spain or Scotland. He had no money. His treasury, it is said, held only four crowns. He had no troops to send to the besieged city. Drowning men catch at straws. The people ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... marriage. Even while I had been holding Edith Bartlett's great-granddaughter in my arms, I had not, till this moment, so illogical are some of our feelings, distinctly realized that but for that marriage I could not have done so. The absurdity of this frame of mind could only be equalled by the abruptness with which it dissolved as Edith's roguish query cleared the fog from my perceptions. I laughed as ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... Phellion. "Ask him to come in," he added, with that solemnity in little things which gave him even now a touch of absurdity, though it always impressed his family, which accepted him ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... so, Hermogenes; all that has preceded would lead to this conclusion. And if, as I think, the conclusion is true, then I shall again say to you, come and help me, that I may not fall into some absurdity in stating the ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... had only to get my pitch, and could then go on interminably. Many passages of this book ought to be finished with the minuteness of a Dutch picture, in order to give them their proper effect. Sometimes, when tired of it, it strikes me that the whole is an absurdity, from beginning to end; but the fact is, in writing a romance, a man is always, or always ought to be, careering on the utmost verge of a precipitous absurdity, and the skill lies in coming as close as possible, without actually tumbling over. ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... thenceforth the greater part of the original drawings and verses for the first "Book of Nonsense" were struck off with a pen, no assistance ever having been given me in any way but that of uproarious delight and welcome at the appearance of every new absurdity. ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... exposing himself to well meant ministrations from men who were his inferiors: the theory of the equalizing effect of the sacred office, which appears to be held in great tranquillity by many who see the absurdity of parallel ideas applied in other spheres, was one of the fictions that proved entirely powerless over his mind at this juncture. He did not say to himself that fools were fools and blind men blind, whatever their office, degree, or profession, but he was driven to the Retreat by a thought ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... scene displays in a full light the barbarity of this theological faction: the sequel will sufficiently display their absurdity. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... rave as they like about the absurdity of love at first sight; but the young and sensitive always love at first sight, and the love of after-years, however better and more wisely bestowed, is never able to obliterate from the heart the memory of those sudden and vivid impressions made ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... tell him I advise him to relinquish his knight-errant project, or I will expose his absurdity by taking the advantage which the law offers in ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... I could have done something for her; she's a pretty girl, but you see all these things take a long time, and Lucy wanted an engagement at once. When we left the theatre I began to realise the absurdity of the adventure, and the danger to which I was exposing myself. I, a man of over forty, seeking the seduction of a girl of seventeen—for that is the plain English of it. We walked on side by side, and I asked myself, 'What ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... of her fitness for a dramatic career, but on the ground of an urgent and bitter necessity for exertion on her part, to ward off actual destitution and suffering,—he exclaimed, somewhat impatiently,—"Why, Zelma, it is an impossibility, almost an absurdity, you urge! You could never make an actress. You are too hopelessly natural, erratic, and impulsive. You would follow no teaching implicitly, but, when you saw fit, would trample on conventionalities and venerable stage-traditions. You would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
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