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More "Delusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... patient historical investigation, when founded upon a reverence for traditional authority. Had it not been for such an honest chronicler as Giovanni Villani, our historic thirst might have been tantalized for seven centuries longer with this delusion. Certainly, to confound Tantalus, ancestor of all the Trojans, with Attalus, ancestor of all the Tuscans, would be worse than that "confusion of Babel" which the quiet-loving potentate came to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... really warn you seriously," said he, biting his lip, "that if you persist in that preposterous delusion about my being Louis Leczinski, you'll be most awfully sold. I have nothing on earth to do with Louis Leczinski. Your ingenious little theories, as I tried to convince you at ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... her eyes wide with joy and astonishment, saying: "Can it be possible? is not this a delusion? Tell me ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... yielding my heart to the first tenderness of the passion, watch over me, if the object be not every way worthy of me, my equal, my superior.—Oh! as you would wish to snatch me from the grave, rouse me from the delusion—save me from disappointment, regret, remorse, which I know that I could ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... you'd go into brass and do yourself no credit. And the oncommonest workman can't show himself oncommon in a gridiron,—for a gridiron IS a gridiron," said Joe, steadfastly impressing it upon me, as if he were endeavouring to rouse me from a fixed delusion, "and you may haim at what you like, but a gridiron it will come out, either by your leave or again your leave, and ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... his presence through the blur of her tormented nights. That was one of the reasons why she had turned again to Mrs. Hatch's prescription. In the uneasy snatches of her natural dreams he came to her sometimes in the old guise of fellowship and tenderness; and she would rise from the sweet delusion mocked and emptied of her courage. But in the sleep which the phial procured she sank far below such half-waking visitations, sank into depths of dreamless annihilation from which she woke each morning ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... average seaside resort, which is built and designed rather as if the "authorities" believed that God made Blackpool on the Seventh Day, and it was their religious duty to erect replicas of His handiwork up and down the coast. And under this delusion piers, ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... no man would really believe that the spectacle of two grown men playin' cat-fight in the ruins of a drug store, whilest his own wife looked on and said 'Sick 'em!' was anything but an optickle delusion, caused by reasons he was ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... Francis Vandeleur in question? he wondered. Were they discussing the name under which he was to be married? Or was the whole affair a dream and a delusion of his own ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... change in the rate of increase in the purchasing power of the coinage metal has a really disturbing effect; a steady and calculable appreciation does not. There exists in some acute minds what I venture to call a delusion about the effect on business classes of an advance in the purchasing power of gold that proceeds for a long time at a uniform rate. Conceding the prospect of a decided gain in the value of this metal, we may deny absolutely that, ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... a halo, a vague, blue loveliness, which is all unreal. The tired wayfarer, who is weary with the dust, the din, and stony footing of the Actual and the Present, may sometimes fondly imagine, that, if he could return to the far Past, he would find all smooth and golden there; but it is a pleasant delusion of that glorious arch-cheat, the Imagination. Yet if we cannot go back to the Past, we can march forward to a Future, which opens a deeper and more wondrous and airier vista, with its magicians of the Actual casting into shade the puny ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... investment began Paris was already afflicted with a spy mania. Sala's adventure, which I recounted in an earlier chapter, was in a way connected with this delusion, which originated with the cry "We are betrayed!" immediately after the first French reverses. The instances of so-called "spyophobia" were innumerable, and often curious and amusing. There was a slight abatement of the mania when, shortly before ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... I had some difficulty in collecting my thoughts, and I said to myself: "Can all this of which I have such a vivid impression be other than a reality, or was it only a dream, a magical delusion? Whatever it may be, I will not quit this place till I find out the truth, and I will place myself under the protection of the ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... kept as much out of his way as possible. This was not difficult, for the artist was too much wrapped up in himself to meddle with any domestic affairs. He seemed to be under some mystification that the lively French girl was a guest of Miss Rothesay's, and his sister ventured not to break this delusion. Christal's surname created no suspicions; the very name of his former model, Celia Manners, had long since passed from ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... upon my being his son. For a moment he would seem puzzled, and would then call me Arthur. At last, when he became vexed, and said angrily that I was behaving worse than Hugh, I recalled Dr. Rush's advice, and humouring his delusion, said, "Uncle, let me help you." Meanwhile he was fumbling nervously at the papers, tying and untying the same bundle, which seemed to be chiefly old bills ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... turned to getting ready things to take with me. Having opened upon myself the sluice gates of advice, I rapidly became distracted. My friends and their friends alike seemed to labour under the delusion that I intended to charter a steamer and was a person of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. This not being the case, the only thing to do was to gratefully listen ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... on earth are you talking about? You are labouring under some strange delusion. Uncle Richard died of apoplexy more than six weeks ago, and lies buried in ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... Naturalists say, is stronger a thousand times than Lightning. And so I appeal to Philip sober;—and indeed have hardly said as much about Goethe since I saw you, for nothing reigns here but twilight delusion (falser for the time than midnight darkness) on that subject, and I feel that the most suffer nothing thereby, having properly nothing or little to do with such a matter but with you, who are not "seeking recipes for happiness," but something far ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in a dream presented to our view, Those airy forms appear so like the true; Nor heaven nor hell the fancy'd visions sends, But every breast its own delusion lends: For when soft sleep the body wraps in ease, And from th' unactive mass our fancy frees, Whatever 'tis in which we take delight, And think of most by day, we dream at night. Thus he, the now sackt ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... and level, and shaded all the way with trees, look, from the railway-carriage window, as if they would be good for cycling; but this is a delusion. I crossed in the boat from Harwich once, with a well-known black and white artist, and an equally well-known and highly respected humorist. They had their bicycles with them, intending to tour Holland. I met ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... of Botany, and remarks that some authors contrive titles seemingly of set purpose to entrap the unwary. He instances a fine example in the case of Bishop Alexander Ewing's Feamainn Earraghaidhiell: Argyllshire Seaweeds (Glasgow, 1872. 8vo). To enhance the delusion, the coloured wrapper is ornamented with some of the common marine alg, but the inside of the volume consists solely of pastoral addresses. Another example will be found in Flowers from the South, from the Hortus Siccus of an Old ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... finally glories in betraying the fool who trusts her. No matter how fair the mountain upon which she has leave to feed, she will batten on the moor. Love was her excuse when first she went astray, and she hugs the delusion to her heart that Cupid can sanctify a crime; but where honor spreads not its wings of snow love perishes in the fierce simoon of lust. The man with whom she enters the primrose path feels that he is as good as his fellows. He may watch with a ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... with overpowering reality and force, made stronger by the very light. In the dimness it had not seemed so certain; now, gazing at each other in the clear light of the natural morning, we saw what had happened to us. No more delusion was possible. We could not flatter ourselves now that it was a trick or a deception. M. le Clairon stood there like the rest of us, staring at the closed gates which science could not open. And there stood M. le Cure, which was more remarkable still. The Church herself had not been ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... hedge, projecting through the foliage, and the bird, perched near its end, sat only about five feet above the bare ground of the lane. Now, I owe my best thanks to this individual nightingale, for sharply calling to my mind a common pestilent delusion, which I have always hated, but had never yet raised my voice against—namely, that all wild creatures exist in constant fear of an attack from the numberless subtle or powerful enemies that are always waiting and watching for an opportunity to spring upon ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... in requisition far beyond what their warmest advocates are wont to assign to those "night-tripping" personages. Hotspur was at least one-and-twenty years old when Henry of Monmouth "lay in his cradle-clothes." The pencil also of the painter has lent its aid to confirm and propagate the same delusion as to the relative ages of these two warriors. In the representation (for example) of the Battle-field of Shrewsbury, Hotspur and Henry, the heroes in the (p. 347) fore-ground, are models of two gallant youths, equal in age, struggling for the mastery: and in the chamber-scene, ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... them, it is not surprizing that they throw everything into confusion. But those who, while they profess to be the disciples of Christ, still seek for free-will in man, notwithstanding of his being lost and drowned in spiritual destruction, labor under manifold delusion, making a heterogeneous mixture of inspired doctrine and philosophical opinions, and so erring as ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... the embodiment of the old delusion, so common among people who handle the machinery of finance, that you can really increase the supply of necessary goods by increasing the supply of money, which is nothing else than claims to goods expressed either in pieces of metal or pieces of ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... is that of the Methodist apostate, because there is so much elasticity about grace in our church, and it is so easy to fall from it that a modest man is, by the very delicacy and humility of his spirit, apt to fall under the delusion that God has had enough patience with him, that he has "sinned away ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... to have held out hopes to Lincoln that he would soon attack, but he was writing to his wife that he expected to be attacked by superior numbers. It is certain, however, that he was possessed now and always by a delusion as to the enemy's strength. For instance Lincoln at last felt bound to work out for himself definite prospects for a forward movement; it is sufficient to say of this layman's effort that he proposed substantially the line of advance which Johnston a little later began to dread most; Lincoln's ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... had told them he thought this delusion a sin; No such creature as "Santa Claus" ever had been; And he hoped, after this, he should never more hear How he scrambled down chimneys with presents ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... worked perversely. Elsa, you are under a spell, poor woman; you do not know the truth. I gave you the philtre in your drinking water, and Foy, the traitor Foy, has reaped its fruits. Dear girl, shake yourself free from this delusion, it is I whom you really love, not that base thief ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... discovery of its principle. For a long time after its existence was familiar to every ball-player and spectator of the game, there were wise men who proclaimed its impossibility, who declared it to be simply an "optical delusion," and its believers the victims of the pitcher's trickery. It was only after the curve had been practically demonstrated to them, in a way which left no room for doubt, that they consented to find for it ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... portion, which he had intended to embezzle) furnish amusement to the audience to the end of the play; at last, on Hazard and Penelope coming in married, Wilding is informed that he has been deceived, and that his wife is unstained, having arranged with Hazard to keep up the delusion in order to frighten him into good behaviour; whereupon Mr. Wilding promises to be a good husband henceforth, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... fairly to you, my friend, I am afraid that, were I to be tried, I should be found so deficient in the forms, the quirks and the quiddities, which early habit acquires, that I should expose myself. Yet the delusion of Westminster Hall, of brilliant reputation and splendid fortune as a barrister, still weighs upon my imagination.' Ib. p. 267. 'Aug. 23, 1789. The Law life in Scotland amongst vulgar familiarity would now quite destroy me. I am not able to acquire the Law of England.' ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... a new sound disturbs the tranquillity of the forest—the same, which the assassin at first fancied was the voice of one wailing for his victim. The coon-hunter has no such delusion. Soon as hearing, he recognises the tongue of a stag-hound, knowing it to be Clancy's. He is only astray about its peculiar tone, now quite changed. The animal is neither barking nor baying; nor yet does it yelp as if suffering chastisement. The soft tremulous whine, that comes pealing ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... he was thinking—or imagined that she did. There was no one now to inherit Herresford's money but Mrs. Swinton, and she believed that Trimmer was wondering how much of it he would get for himself; for it was a popular delusion below stairs that Mr. Trimmer had mesmerized his master into making a will in his favor, ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... see at Boulogne, and we soon saw it. For a week or so Mrs O'D. used to go out muffled like one of the Sultan's five hundred wives, protesting that she'd surely be recognised; but she grew out of the delusion at last, and discovered that our residence at the Cour de Madrid as effectually screened us from all remark or all inquiry as if we had taken up our ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... distant. What happened to him when he arrived there must be left untold; suffice it to say that Major Alvaros was never more seen of men, and the mystery of his disappearance remains unsolved to this day, although Carlos Montijo and Jack Singleton are under the delusion that they know what became of him. Furthermore, the inhabitants of the hacienda were never troubled by inconvenient enquiries about him, for it afterwards transpired that when he set out upon his fateful journey he had not thought fit to say whither he was going, or how long ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... brought the new dog to the Place failed somehow to destroy the illusion of size and fierceness. But the moment the crate door was opened the delusion was wrecked ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... to be confined with unruly lunatics than to be heeded as a teller of future events. However, I would not advise severity towards the followers of old Jeremiah. They are rather to be pitied than blamed. As long as they keep their delusion within their own circles, we shall let them alone; but let them be careful that they step not too far and disturb the happiness and enjoyment of others. Among themselves, let them talk about the 'Law of their God,' to their hearts' content; but as for us, we know ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... have been presented in this chapter were, doubtless, well weighed by the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century, and brought them to the conclusion that Catholicism had altogether failed in its mission; that it had become a vast system of delusion and imposture, and that a restoration of true Christianity could only be accomplished by returning to the faith and practices of the primitive times. This was no decision suddenly arrived at; it had long been the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... mind, she took in her breath for a torrential explanation of the whole matter. But the next minute she realized that this was hardly the moment to say anything which would prejudice her sister against Arthur Alce. If Ellen would value him more as a robbery, then let her persist in her delusion. The effort of silence was so great that Joanna became purple and apoplectic—with a wild, grabbing gesture she turned away, and burst out of the house into the drive, where her trap ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... monk, returning to the church, spent the remainder of the night in prayer and meditation. When it was day, he related his vision to St. Hugo, who was then abbot. As is natural, some believed his account, and others thought it was some delusion. The next day the monk fell sick, and continued growing worse, constantly affirming the truth of what he had related, till his death, which occurred ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly 'Liberty first and Union afterward'; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the same I have acted on from the year 1775 to this day, and are the same, I am sure, with those of the great body of the American people. I only wish the real principles of those who censure mine were also known. But warring against those of the people, the delusion of the people is necessary to the dominant party. I see the extent to which that delusion has been already carried, and I see there is no length to which it may not be pushed by a party in possession of the revenues and the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... genius, in public situations, sighing for this solitude. Amidst the impediments of the world, they are doomed to view their intellectual banquet often rising before them, like some fairy delusion, never to taste it. The great VERULAM often complained of the disturbances of his public life, and rejoiced in the occasional retirement he stole from public affairs. "And now, because I am in the country, I will send you some of my country fruits, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... same naive way that Communism is interpreted by the German peasantry. The wide spread among them of communistic doctrines, the eagerness with which they listened to a plan for the partition of property, seemed to countenance the notion that it was a delusion to suppose the peasant would be secured from this intoxication by his love of secure possession and peaceful earnings. But, in fact, the peasant contemplated "partition" by the light of an historical reminiscence ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Isabella; "you have one inducement to wish for life, that pleads strongly in a woman's breast. It is a delusion that nothing but death can destroy—" Exhaustion compelled her to pause, and her auditors continued in breathless suspense, until, recovering her strength, she laid her hand on that of Frances, and continued more mildly, "Miss Wharton, if there breathes a ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... light of nature! You have just as many senses as Wilmet, and almost as much experience; and as to oppressing yourself with the determination to do the very, thing she would have done under all circumstances, it is a delusion. People must act according to their own nature, not ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... many timid people to grief. They imagine that they have achieved the conquest of poise, while they are really only deceiving themselves by the idea that they are giving a good illustration of it. They become the victims of a peculiar type of delusion akin to that of the cowards who deliberately invite danger while trembling ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... said, "is absent on a journey;" and Thorarin and Arnkill, having searched the house in vain, were obliged to depart with this answer. They had not, however, gone far before the well-known skill of Katla, in optical delusion occurred to them, and they resolved on a second and stricter search. Upon their return they found Katla in the outer apartment, who seemed to be shearing the hair of a tame kid, but was in reality cutting the locks of her son Oddo. Entering the inner room, they found the large ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... long ago. He was recovering from a fever—and though tolerably well in health, the delirium had not finally left him. But since Lois came, how headstrong he had been at times! how unreasonable! how moody! What a strange delusion was that which he was under, of being bidden by some voice to marry her! How he followed her about, and clung to her, as under some compulsion of affection! And over all reigned the idea that, if he were indeed suffering from being bewitched, he was ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... so deep As that its bed is dark, the shape returns So faint of our impictur'd lineaments, That on white forehead set a pearl as strong Comes to the eye: such saw I many a face, All stretch'd to speak, from whence I straight conceiv'd Delusion opposite to that, which rais'd Between the man and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... business, and to suppose that a young man who religiously spent his month's allowance the day it was received, could make a success at the bar shows the vain delusion that often fills the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... I, "he has done it unwittingly; I never heard before that he was a favourer of the popish delusion." ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... the Chapel of the Capucins. After he had received the consecrated wafer, he was persuaded by one of his comrades, Mathurin Lejeusne, to take it out of his mouth, wrap it in a cloth, and, on returning to his lodging, fry it over a fire, under the delusion that by reducing it to powder he would make himself invulnerable. The young man was arrested, confessed his guilt, and himself asked for punishment. Condemned to be strangled, he heard the sentence without ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... no delusion of any age or clime which cannot find dupes among the readers of this ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... about to marry the girl you had been attending, and that everybody in the island regretted it. She said it would be a mesalliance for him, Tardif! What then would it be for you, a Dobree? No; it is a delusion, an infatuation, which will quickly pass away. I cannot believe you are so weak as to be taken in by mere prettiness without character; and this person—I do not say so harshly, Martin—has no character, no name. Were you free you could not marry her. There is a mystery about ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... to see you," cried Tom, frantically, thrusting his hat in her face, in a wild delusion that he was offering his hand, for he was so upset by the sight of Elsie that he felt as if rapidly going up in an ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... cheerfulness of spirit. [Sattva.] Fortune that first shows like nectar, and finally appears as poison, Chaining the senses to the world, belongs to the realm of passion. [Rajas.] Fortune that immediately and thereafter strikes the soul with delusion, In sleep, indolence, laziness, such Fortune ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... of Herodotus to those set forth in yesterday's "Times," all history is to be read subject to the warning that fiction has its share therein. The modern vast development of fugitive literature cannot be the unmitigated evil that some do vainly say it is, since it has put an end to the popular delusion of less press-ridden times, that what appears in print must be true. We should rather hope that some beneficent influence may create among the erudite a like healthy suspicion of manuscripts and inscriptions, however ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sorts of persons, were most decisive and satisfactory to myself when made upon well-educated physicians, upon medical professors, my learned colleagues, upon eminent lawyers or divines, upon strong-minded farmers or hunters, entirely unacquainted with such subjects, and incapable of psychological delusion, or upon persons of very skeptical minds who would not admit anything until the phenomena were made very ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... which I take my departure to-morrow morning is even now ready to slip her moorings; I awake from my delusion that I am other than a stranger and a foreigner. I am ready to go back to my place and country; but, before doing so, let me, by way of epilogue, tender to you my most hearty thanks for the kind and cordial ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... to his being out of place. His bitter disappointments at his half successes were really pitiable because to him they were more than failures. He had not the slightest sense of color, yet went through life under the delusion that ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... it is remembered that in some localities they have been left entire masters of themselves, have in other instances labored months for the Government under promise of pay, and have had that pay prove a delusion. Certainly it is fair to judge of a whole by a part. Given a bone, Professor Agassiz can draw the animal of which the bone forms a part. Given many thousands of negroes, we should be able to judge somewhat of four millions. Had ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... routine and gradual disappointment and decay? Open those dim eyes of yours, good sir! stir those thin old legs! inflate that sunken chest!—Ha! is that cough imaginary? those trembling muscles,—are they a delusion is that misty glance only a momentary weakness There is no youth left in you, Mr. MacGentle; not so much as would keep a rose in bloom ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... warm, the nurse covers it in her lap with a shawl, and, under this blind, surreptitiously inserts a finger between the parched lips, which possibly moan for drink; and, under this inhuman cheat and delusion, the infant is pacified, till Nature, balked of its desires, drops into a troubled sleep. These are two of our reasons for impressing upon mothers the early, the immediate necessity of putting themselves sympathetically in communication ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... be full of light; they kept up appearances so well as to delude others, and most effectually to delude themselves with a notion that they might be found in the right way at last. In this dreadful delusion they went on to the end, and till they were finally plunged in the dark valley, never discovered the horrors which awaited them on the dismal shore. It was remarkable, that while these Pharisees were often boasting how bright their light burned, ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... replied that he (the Frenchman) was labouring under a delusion; that perhaps, after all, I should not be expelled from the Baron's presence, but, on the contrary, be listened to; finally, that I should be glad if Monsieur de Griers would confess that he was now visiting ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... bookcase side of it fell out upon the floor. His arrangement was better than the ordinary folding-bed, he said, because the bookcase side of it was not a sham, but the real thing, while that of the folding-bed of commerce was a delusion and a snare. As a hater of shams he justified his invention, though of course it couldn't be put to much practical use unless the purchaser was willing to take his books out of the shelves when he intended using the piece of furniture for sleeping purposes. If the purchaser was ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... waking senses Philip adhered to his story that his little sister Dolly had stood at the foot of his bed, called him 'le pauvre' and had afterwards disappeared, led away by the nursing lady. It seemed to Berenger a mere delusion of feverish weakness; for Philip had lost a great deal of blood, and the wound, though not dangerous, permitted no attempt at moving, and gave much pain. Of the perfections of the lady as nurse and surgeon Philip could ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... who have been fortunate in securing material advantages, too many times look upon the world as an accident placed here for their personal enjoyment. It never takes long in business to relieve their minds of this delusion, but they sometimes accomplish a tremendous amount of damage before it happens. For a pert, know-it-all manner coupled with the inefficiency which is almost inseparable from a total lack of experience is not likely to make personal contacts pleasant. Every young man worth his salt believes ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... recollect to have seen the name of God" in any part of his works. On reading such words, it is natural to rub one's eyes, and suspect that all one has ever seen in this world may have been a pure ocular delusion. In particular, I begin myself to suspect that the word "la gloire" never occurs in any Parisian journal. "The great English nation," says M. Michelet, "has one immense profound vice"—to wit, "pride." Why, really, that may be true; but we have a neighbour not absolutely ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... Hughie would go to school for a couple of hours each morning. Alma could have wished it any other school than Mary Abbott's, but the thought was no longer so insupportable as when she suffered under her delusion concerning the two children. Now that she had frequently seen Minnie Wager, she wondered at the self-deception which allowed her to detect in the child's face a distinct resemblance to Harvey. Of course, there was nothing of the kind. She had been the victim of a ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... collect armor and relics: in this period grew up such an antiquary as Mr. Oldbuck, who curiously sought out every relic of the Roman times,—armor, fosses, and praetoria,—and found, with much that was real, many a fraud or delusion. It was an age which, in the words of old Walter Charleton, "despised the present as an innovation, and slighted the future, like the madman who ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... peoples.[1960] They are not primarily religious. They are a reaction of men under the experience of the ills of life, inventing a world philosophy and putting agents behind it, in order to have something, if it be only a delusion, to which hope of escape can attach. Human sacrifices are based on an inference or deduction. There is behind them an assumption as to the character and logic of the superior powers who rule the aleatory interest. It ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... disease—circumstance, not temperament. The injury to the brain is the result of a special blow. Grief for the loss of his son, and brooding over the event, no doubt contributed to the particular shape the delusion has assumed. But the injury's the main thing. I don't doubt there's a clot of blood formed just here on the brain, obstructing its functions in part, and disturbing its due relations. In every other way, you say, he's a good man of ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... criminal, or a criminaloid; but in certain cases the examination may be of value in establishing the innocence of an accused person, or in recognising in an accuser an insane individual whose accusation originates in some delusion and not in a knowledge ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... we examine the writings of Lord Bacon, the more unworthy does he seem to have been of the great reputation which has been awarded to him. The popular delusion to which he owes so much originated at a time when the history of science was unknown. They who first brought him into notice knew nothing of the old school of Alexandria. This boasted founder of a new philosophy could not comprehend, and would ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... piled up, credit was gone, clamor of creditors deafened him, and the gaunt wolf of actual want looked in through the door of the cottage upon the dear wife and little ones. Another shadow, and a yet darker one, settled upon them. The unhappy man had been tampering with the delusion of spiritualism, and his wife had been drawn with him into a partial belief in its vagaries. In their troubles they sought the aid of the "familiar spirits" that peeped and muttered through speaking, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... hear it not seldom said that ignorance is the mother of admiration. No falser word was ever spoken, and hardly a more mischievous one; implying, as it does, that this healthiest exercise of the mind rests, for the most part, on a deceit and a delusion, and that with larger knowledge it would cease; while, in truth, for once that ignorance leads us to admire that which with fuller insight we should perceive to be a common thing, one demanding no such tribute from us, ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... greatness, be eminent in his name, was the sole ambition permitted to her—an ambition tender and devoted, which seduces a woman whilst it suffices to her disinterested genius. She could only be the mind and inspiration of some political man; she sought such a one, and in her delusion ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... unrest has been a sudden growth because its outward manifestations have assumed new and startling forms of violence is a dangerous delusion; and no less misleading is the assumption that it is merely the outcome of Western education or the echo of Western democratic aspirations, because it occasionally, and chiefly for purposes of political expediency, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... one as they did of the dear old days, long before the war was thought of, and before the war of life had taken me to Labrador. If one had hoped that a life in the wilds had succeeded in eradicating natural desires, those relapses in the midst of war-time completely destroyed any such delusion. Every day was full of excitement. Bombs fell on the city only twice while I was there, and, moreover, we were bitterly disappointed that we did not know it till we read the news in the morning paper. But every day flying machines of all sorts ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... queer part is that I offered it to her. I thought at the time I wanted him to have it. Now, I ask you, as man to man, is it canny? And she has a traveling-bag with gold fittings. I presented it under the delusion that I owed it to her as my—temporary relative. Heavens, where is this to end? Not at Katwyk, with the Rhine. But we've got to go there. Anything ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... Flashes of intelligence appeared and failed and came again. It seemed to me, who watched, that in some desperate way, with her broken mind, she tried to solve the mystery of this refusal. Then 'twas as though some delusion—some terror of her benighted state—seized upon her: alarm changed to despair; she rose in bed, but put her hand to her heart ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... so swollen now that it was closed to a mere slit. There was no optical delusion about its nomenclature and in diameter and chromatic depth it was at the head of its class; in fact, it gave promise of being by daylight in a class by itself. It was the sort of decoration which could be relied upon implicitly ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... far land! Bind her flowing tresses up! Crown her with a fadeless garland, And with crystal brim the cup. From her haunts of deep seclusion, Let intemperance greet her too, And the heat of his delusion ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... and then closing the door he struck out across the field in the direction of Break Neck Falls. He wished to go there to view the scene where David planned to erect his plant and do such wonderful things. He smiled grimly to himself as he thought of the old man's delusion. Reaching the brow of the hill just where the trail started from the main road, he paused and looked down to his left. He could see clearly Peter Sinclair's house with the tall trees surrounding it. Bitter feelings came into his heart as he stood ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... Nevil and Lilamani, her clear call could never seem either a puritanical snare of the flesh or a delusion of the senses; but rather, a grace of the spirit, the joy of things seen detached from self-interest: the visible proof that love, not power, is the last word of Creation. Happily for him, its outward form and inward essence had been his daily bread ever since he ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... she was not the victim of an optical delusion, her face was a remarkable sight, exhibiting as it did surprise and delight alternately. It appeared as if it was difficult for her to speak, for she tried several times before she ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... attended to, the seeds of knowledge afterwards cast into the soil thus broken up and prepared, will be readily received and nourished to perfection; but if the soil be neglected, both the seed and the labour will be lost, the anticipations of the spring and summer will end in delusion, and the folly of the whole proceeding will be shewn by a succession of noxious weeds, and at last by ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... faculty, instead of always appealing to the imagination. By sentimental persuasives, a child may be successfully governed for a time, but that time will be of short duration, and no power can continue the delusion long. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... and we lunched at W——'s. I was horribly bored. Imagine running down a long corridor, so long that you cannot see the end, springing forward and finding only a delusion, coming with your outstretched hands against a wall. ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... against mystery; it is with mystery alone we can love without trouble; it is with love without trouble alone that we can be happy. But let us return to ourselves, to that devotion of which you were speaking, or rather let me labor under a pleasing delusion, and believe ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... writing to Jehoram;" and probably the King of Judah scoffed at the warning, and perhaps referred him to the unexecuted judgments denounced upon the house of Ahab, and to the present prosperity of the family, and the continued stability of the kingdom, as a proof of the fanatical delusion of the pretended prophets of the Lord. Yet the doom of the guilty Jehoram was accomplished even before the woes denounced upon Jezebel were fulfilled. Tributary kingdoms revolted, and in vain he sought to bring them ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... desire. But Love content, regains full vision, and, as time goes on, those powers of vision increase and become, by means of daily, hourly, use,—microscopic and telescopic. Wedded love is not blind. Bah! An outsider staying with married people is apt to hear what love sees, on both sides, and the delusion of love's blindness is dispelled forever. I know Garth was blind, during all those golden days, to my utter lack of beauty, because he wanted ME so much. But when he had had me, and had steeped himself in all I have to give of soul and spirit beauty; when the daily routine of life began, which after ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... rivers. For a period as low down as the American revolution, it was common for the ignorant and credulous to dig along these banks in search of hidden treasures; and impostors found an ample basis in these current rumours for schemes of delusion. Black Beard, though tradition says a great deal more of him than is true, was yet a real person, who acquired no small fame by his maritime exploits during the first part of the eighteenth century. Among many authentic and recorded ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... that and found no solace. "Delusion," he snorted. "Hyper synapse-disorder ... that's how Jeff Arnold would explain me. I wish he'd confine his diagnostics to the Mechanical Division where it belongs! He's amused, they're all amused at me—but damn it they just ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... morning of the 13th, and also to support our general depot at Miscoac. The stratagem against the south was admirably executed throughout the 12th and down to the afternoon of the 13th, when it was too late for the enemy to recover from the effects of his delusion. ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... to laugh him out of his delusion, but the thing was real to him. Soon he jumped up and said: "I'm going on board; I'm tired ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... I hope I was mistaken," Frank went on. "I don't see anything up there now; and perhaps it was only a delusion. All these bright colors affect the eyes, you see. Then, again, it might have been some goat jumping, that started that rock on its ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... now leaping into the air, and often turning head over heels. All the time not a sound proceeded from the phantom-looking dancers. The Gilpins could scarcely help fancying themselves under some delusion. ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... the South to look into the nature and character of this great institution, and to correct many false impressions that even we had entertained in relation to it. Many in the South once believed that it was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... seventeen inches by eleven inches, if laid on with the glass rod. A weaker solution will do, but with the above splendid tints may be produced. As to the ammonio-nitrate of silver, I have totally abandoned its use, and, after many careful experiments, I am satisfied that its extra sensitiveness is a delusion, while the rapid tendency of paper prepared with it to spoil ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... at all things through a magnifying glass of about eighteen power. I know that he was perfectly honest in the delusion of considering himself one of the most important State prisoners that had ever been confined here. He would have it that half Maryland was in mourning for him, and ready with ransom of untold gold, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... thinking she saw Charles Clancy among the tree-tops. Is it a like delusion, that now shows her his assassin in the streets of Natchitoches? No; it cannot be! It is a reality; assuredly the man ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... when we first heard this sweet bird: how we listened and refused to believe—for we were young, and our idea had of course been that his song was a melancholy one—that those madly hilarious sounds could come from the mournful nightingale. Wordsworth attempts thus to account for the delusion under which the older poets laboured on ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... the more of an alien I find myself in the world; I cannot get used to it, cannot believe that it is real. I think I must have been made to live on some other Star. Or perhaps I am subject to hallucinations and hear voices; perhaps what I seem to see is delusion and doesn't happen; perhaps people don't really say the things I ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... stronger art than Wine, Pleasing Delusion, Witchery divine, Want to be prized above all Wealth, Disease that has more Joys than Health; Though we blaspheme thee in our Pain, And of thy Tyranny complain, We all ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... that he sometimes gave undue prominence to the facts which supported his theory. It was only fair and reasonable that critics should draw attention to this characteristic of Froude as an historian. That he deliberately falsified history is a baseless delusion. A sterner moralist, a more strenuous worker, it would have been difficult to find. An artist he could not help being, for it was in the blood. Once his fingers grasped the pen, they began instinctively to draw a picture. He was not, like Macaulay, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... slavery, and the re-establishment of the Union on permanent foundations enlisted his whole nature. In the same spirit, he devoted his later years to the overthrow of the spoils system. He did this under no delusion as to the magnitude of the undertaking. Probably no one else comprehended it so well. He had studied the problem profoundly, and had solved every difficulty, and could answer every cavil to his own satisfaction." There can be no question that "his name imparted a strength ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... to comprehend that it was cheaper to buy the beef he required in the Grassmarket at Glasgow than to obtain it without price, by harrying the lowland farms. So the first man whoever imbibed or conceived the fatal delusion that it was more advantageous to him, or to any human being, to procure whatever his necessities or his appetites required by address and scheming than by honest work—by the unrequited rather than the fairly and faithfully recompensed toil of his fellow-preachers—was, in essence ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... truth of my words, that that whole concern is a bubble. You may travel on it all your lifetime, were you to live thousands of years, and yet never get beyond the limits of Vanity Fair. Yea, though you should deem yourself entering the gates of the blessed city, it will be nothing but a miserable delusion." ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... love, and was to shed tears over our grave? Where are the choice companions of our youth, with whom we were to breast the difficulties and share the triumphs of existence? Even in this inconstant world, what changes like the heart? Love is a dream, and friendship a delusion. No wonder we grow callous; for how few have the opportunity of returning to the hearth which they quitted in levity or thoughtless weariness, yet which alone is faithful to them; whose sweet affections ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... "Poor innocent! What a delusion. Money shuts the door of your cage. A golden cage, excellently padded, but—its bars shut out all the ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... its risks, to address an appeal on these subjects to the French people and the world at large. The voice of reason advocating liberty as well as order might still, he conceived, make a salutary impression in this period of terror and delusion; the voice of a distinguished man would at first sound like the voice of the nation, which he seemed to represent. Schiller was inquiring for a proper French translator, and revolving in his mind the various arguments that might ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... revolting noises like a water-logged trump. It was odious not to be able to worry oneself in comfort on board one's own ship. Everything in this world, I reflected, even the command of a nice little barque, may be made a delusion and a snare for the unwary spirit of pride ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... the least belief, in the outset of this story, that the unknown was anything but a delusion of Mr. Dick's, and one of the line of that ill-fated Prince who occasioned him so much difficulty; but after some reflection I began to entertain the question whether an attempt, or threat of an attempt, might have been twice made to take poor Mr. Dick himself from under ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... could have been proved, would have been an important addition to our knowledge of physiological laws; but the mere invention, or arbitrary supposition of them, could not unless by the strongest delusion be supposed to render the phenomena of animal life more comprehensible, or less mysterious. Nothing, however, seemed satisfactory, but to make out that motion was caused by motion; by something like itself. If it was not one kind of motion, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Notwithstanding the general lukewarmth of the age in matters of religion, it produced considerable effect among the fanatic sectaries that swarm through the kingdom of England. The leaders of those blind enthusiasts, either actuated by the spirit of delusion, or desirous of recommending themselves to the protection of the higher powers, immediately seized the hint, expatiating vehemently on the danger that impended over God's people; and exerting all their faculties to impress the belief of a religious war, which never ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... set on fire, and why the houses of our citizens were surrounded by a ruffian mob? They may be told now by the perpetrators of these outrages, that all has been occasioned by the conduct of the abolitionists. But the delusion cannot last. Truth will make its way to the abused ear of the community; and it will be known that the scenes which have disgraced our city, are directly attributable to the influence of southern slavery. The spirit of free inquiry, now fairly awakened, will never again slumber in this state. ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... back Aguara's love, lost to Nacena; and as the bulk of the reward promised will depend upon this, she has yet another proposal to make that may ensure its payment. She acts as one who would hedge a bet, and drawing closer to the victim of her delusion, she says— ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... fiendish design as regards emigration, more than a million Jews having left Russia within the last twenty years; if he has almost succeeded in causing them to die of starvation; yet his hope of forcing a third of them to conversion was a disappointment and a delusion. The Jews showed that the traditional description applied to them, "stiff-necked," was not undeserved. While the Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Armenians have undergone conversion in multitudes, they ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... delusion!" said The Author, severely. "You have made Scholarship and Wisdom put on cap and bells and prance like a morris-dancer. Isn't that mischief ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... virtue, and their ferocious looks and veiled threats at the intruder as he passed along betokened the belief in their prescriptive right to plunder the Revenue. I think it is Macaulay who says that "no man is so merciless as he who is under a strong self-delusion." ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... heaven and hell, which men are so near; and see what most men in the world are minding, and what they are doing every day, it would be the saddest sight that could be imagined. Oh how should we marvel at their madness, and lament their self-delusion! Oh poor distracted world! what is it you run after? and what is it that you neglect? If God had never told them what they were sent into the world to do, or whither they are going, or what was before ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... a lover than to feel that his mistress is of a higher nature and a finer quality than himself. With many lovers, no doubt, this feeling is but the delusion of a fond fancy, having no basis in any real superiority on the part of the loved one. But the mystery surrounding Ida would have tinged the devotion of the most prosaic lover with an unusual sentiment ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... be so, unless the fallow of a peace comes to recruit her fertility. But whatever may be represented concerning the meanness of the popular spirit, I, for one, do not think so desperately of the British nation. Our minds, as I said, are light, but they are not depraved. We are dreadfully open to delusion and to dejection; but we are capable of being ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... all, it has been my opinion that spiritists are either fools or frauds. But I am endeavouring to give a faithful account of my feelings and sensations at the time of which I am writing, and the incident of the voice cannot be ignored. Perhaps it was all a delusion—an hallucination, if you will, due to the gradual breaking down of my body and mind. As to that, the reader can form his own conclusions. Certain it is, that from this time on, when I needed help and encouragement the most, I felt a vague assurance that my wife was by my side; and ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... and in my own conscience, I find no reason for considering the medium in question responsible for anything seen or heard on that occasion.' But 'I consider that the seeking for intercourse with any particular spirit would be apt to end either in disappointment or delusion,' and she uses the phrase 'the ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... that you should cling to a foolish delusion. You are only preparing trouble for yourself. If ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... moments last; Vain HOPE! the gay delusion's past, That voice!—ah! no, 'tis but the blast, Which echoes through the ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... of the books about gold and silver of which Diocletian decreed the destruction about A.D. 290—an act which Gibbon styles the first authentic event in the history of alchemy (Decline and Fall, chap. xiii.). The author of these receipts is not under any delusion that he is transmuting metals; the MS. is merely a workshop manual in which are described processes in daily use for preparing metals for false jewellery, but it argues considerable knowledge of methods of making alloys and colouring metals. It has been suggested by M. P. E. Berthelot that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... suppose by infusing the tea for a very brief period only—two or three minutes —the passage of the tannin into the beverage can be prevented, but, as Sir William Roberts has pointed out, this is quite a delusion. Tannin is one of the most soluble substances known, and melts in hot water just as sugar does. Tea made experimentally, by pouring boiling water on the dry leaves placed on filter paper, contains tannin. As Sir William remarks, you can no more have tea ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... thou that hast restrained thy senses, if, indeed, the Vedas are not competent to rescue a person without the aid of virtue, whence then is this delusion of the Brahmanas that the Vedas ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... again, who set only certain bounds to man's understanding, reality consisting, they hold, of knowable and unknowable parts; and others still who see in the very shifts and changes of philosophic and scientific opinion the delusion of reason and the illusiveness of reality. The history of thought certainly does present an array of conflicting views concerning the limits of human reason. But all the contradictions and conflicts of thought prove to Hegel the sovereignty of reason. The ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... heaven, when you imagined that you had no tie upon earth. You were deceived; there was one whom you still loved, and who still adored you. Vows made in delusion are not registered. Leave this convent with me, become my wife, and you will do your duty better towards heaven than by pining between these walls, which contain nothing but ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... the part of the housekeeper intended to be a substitute for watchfulness, will prove a delusion and a snare.—Sel. ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... that it was a delusion, and that he must soon wake and find relief; but when he did, the relief did not come for the horrors of the dream were continued in the reality, and his lips parted to utter a wild cry; but lips, tongue, and throat were ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... his castle building troubled him in a way, as a sweet delusion, but a detriment to study, and then he resolved to put it away. "It may never come, and it may," he said to himself, "but if it does it will only be by hard work." He had never felt satisfied to become a farmer like his father, but what else ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... brought life to a close without any very great pain, bodily or mental. To measure the happiness of a life by its delights or pleasures, is to apply a false standard. For pleasures are and remain something negative; that they produce happiness is a delusion, cherished by envy to its own punishment. Pain is felt to be something positive, and hence its absence is the true standard of happiness. And if, over and above freedom from pain, there is also an absence of boredom, the essential conditions ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... majority of the "prominent citizens," who had been convoked as a part of the stage retinue to intimidate him by the threat of a mob, had not yet even heard of the affair. Detecting readily the sham and pretense of the performance, he seems to have at least accorded them the merit of an honest delusion. He quietly and politely explained to them the regularity of his orders and proceedings, and the good faith of himself and his brother officers. But he firmly declined to return the muskets until he should be directed to do so by the Government. Yet willing to go to the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... impress. This resplendent theophany confirmed the fact of a universal apostasy, with the inevitable corollary—that the Church of Christ was nowhere existent upon the earth. It effectively dissipated the delusion that direct revelation from the heavens had forever ceased; and affirmatively proved the actuality of personal communication ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... wise to force himself upon that gray-headed sufferer in this cruel hour, in which he had been awakened from the one delusion of a blameless life to discover that he had been the dupe of a false face, and the fool of a nature which was too coldly mercenary, too cruelly heartless, to be sensible of ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... piece of cloth a thousand yards long of a uniform harmonious pattern, smooth, glossy, and respectable. His individuality gone, he would in a sense be lost to her; and although by nature a weak timid woman, though poor, and a stranger in a strange place, this thought, or feeling, or "ridiculous delusion" as most people would call it, had made her strong, and she had succeeded in keeping ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... the one to the other. It had always seemed possible that this dreadful mania might develop into actual insanity, and he had little doubt but that the younger man's brain was slightly affected. But this did not account for the delusion and expectations of the elder. Harry Custer, as the consul remembered him, was a level-headed, practical miner, whose leaning to adventure and excitement had not prevented him from being a cool speculator, and he had amassed more than a competency by reason ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... ground, I have done. To talk of that, would be wasting our time on nothing; or 'our eternity,' for with that sect time is altogether a delusion. It may be true, but the believer, even in the act of declaring his faith, must practically prove himself persuaded of the ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... his Imperial Majesty or his Ministers of State implicitly accept his divine descent, but this I do know—that those persons who regard the present Emperor of Japan as a State puppet, arrogating more or less divine attributes, are labouring under a profound delusion. There is no abler man in Japan at the present moment. There is no abler man among the sovereigns of the world. In fact, I should be inclined to place the Emperor of Japan at the head of the world's great statesmen. He is no monarch content to reign but not to govern, ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... consideration that somebody would win the prize, and that his chance was as good as anybody. It is always unlucky for a boy or young man when he yields for the first time to the fatal fascination of the lottery. He may fail time after time, but continue to hug the delusion that the next time will bring him luck. There are clerks in New York and other large cities who have not only squandered all their own savings, but abstracted money from their employers, led on by this ...
— Sam's Chance - And How He Improved It • Horatio Alger
... French National Convention (quite contrary to its own Program) became the astonishment and horror of mankind; a kind of Apocalyptic Convention, or black Dream become real; concerning which History seldom speaks except in the way of interjection: how it covered France with woe, delusion, and delirium; and from its bosom there went forth Death on the pale Horse. To hate this poor National Convention is easy; to praise and love it has not been found impossible. It is, as we say, a Parliament in the most original circumstances. To us, in these pages, be it as a fuliginous ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... and what if, from his refuge among the Scots, and even with the Scots as his instruments, he could recommence, in some way or other, his struggle with the English? Charles did labour under this delusion. When he had come among the Scots it was actually with some absurd notion that Montrose, who still lurked in the Highlands, might be forgiven all the past and brought back, as one of his Majesty's ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... established; men began to collect armor and relics: in this period grew up such an antiquary as Mr. Oldbuck, who curiously sought out every relic of the Roman times,—armor, fosses, and praetoria,—and found, with much that was real, many a fraud or delusion. It was an age which, in the words of old Walter Charleton, "despised the present as an innovation, and slighted the future, like the madman who ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... his piety he was not sure that he himself had escaped the snare of the fowler. He turned first for guidance to some quiet Protestants, and was told by them, to his horror, that the Pope was Antichrist, that the worship of saints was a delusion, and that only through faith in Christ could his sins be forgiven. He was puzzled. As these Protestants were ready to suffer for their faith, he felt they must be sincere; and when some of them were cast ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... they attributed to themselves the lion share in the overthrow, presumably on the ground that masses follow leaders and the Constitutional Democrats were the only ones who had a chance for open protest in the Duma and made use of it. This delusion led to a series of tactical errors and cost them dearly. In all elections they polled a comparatively small vote. Trying to save Russia for the Allies they failed to meet the Russian Socialists on their own ground and ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, or a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first and Union afterwards'; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... But I am not even capable of that. Systematically, I concede no importance to outward forms. Maja does not count me among her devotees. What are houses? What are the phantoms who inhabit them? A transient semblance, a delusion of the senses! And yet, I am conscious that I miss just those houses which happen to stand, in Berlin and that I feel an unspeakable longing for the phantom called Dr. Schrotter. Once again it has been proved to me that I am an unconscious plaything in the hands ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... be caught napping in such a fashion again! Her foolish blindness is partly explained by her delusion that her enemy would not torpedo merchant vessels. Common sense should have told her that her enemy will play the game that suits them best—that they will not inquire what they may do, but they will do it ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he looked at the hill and bethought him of what lay beyond it, he drew a Winchester from the scabbard under his left leg and made sure that he had not forgotten to load it. For Racey laboured under no delusion as to the danger that menaced not only his own existence but that of his friend Swing. He knew that their lives hung by a thread, and a thin thread at that. They were but two against many, and their position had not been aided by the string of uneventful ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... no solid security for happiness; therefore, we should early cultivate the reasoning faculty, instead of always appealing to the imagination. By sentimental persuasives, a child may be successfully governed for a time, but that time will be of short duration, and no power can continue the delusion long. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... written," he thought. "Everything is written. But we are tricked into a semblance of vigorous life and energy by our great delusion that we ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... looked up the wall of the cliff to enjoy one more sight of the magical beauty, when there fell upon my eyes, or seemed to fall, a sight that, though I felt it must be a delusion, took away my breath. Standing on a piece of rock that was flush with one of the steps by which I had descended was a slender girlish figure, so lissom that it might have been the famous 'Queen of the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... would, however, be willing to support any other method which would give a sensible increase in the Cavalry strength of our Peace establishment, and only protest against any scheme which would seek to swell out the ranks or create new units on mobilization; for all these are mere self-delusion, increasing, no doubt, the numbers on paper, but in reality striking at the efficiency of the Arm ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... said, "in one respect seems to be under the delusion that we are still in the Middle Ages, instead of the twentieth century, since he assumes the right to meddle with the lives of his parishioners, to be the sole judge of their actions. That assumption will ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... profess to think that Northern fanaticism, as they call it, acted like a mordant in fixing the black dye of slavery in regions which would but for that have washed themselves free of its stain in tears of penitence. It is a delusion and a snare to trust in any such false and flimsy reasons where there is enough and more than enough in the institution itself to account for its growth. Slavery gratifies at once the love of power, the love of money, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... at me. "They call that being 'locoed' out on the Plains, don't they?" he said with a twinkle in his eye. "You have a delusion mixed up in your gray matter somewhere. One thing more," he added as an unimportant afterthought, "I see Miss Melrose ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... that Indian unrest has been a sudden growth because its outward manifestations have assumed new and startling forms of violence is a dangerous delusion; and no less misleading is the assumption that it is merely the outcome of Western education or the echo of Western democratic aspirations, because it occasionally, and chiefly for purposes of political expediency, adopts the language of Western demagogues. ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... enough to take the houses they build. And if in the course of time the families die off, as is so often the case, nobody ever thinks of blaming any but Providence[8] for the result. Ill-informed medical men aid in sustaining the delusion, by laying the blame on "current contagions." Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house is stagnant, and ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... thank you for the great confidence you place in me. You talk of nonsense; alas! what are all our opinions else? if we search for truth before we fix our principles, what do we find but doubt? And which of us begins the search a tabula rasa? Nay, where can we hunt but in volumes of error or purposed delusion? Have not we, too, a bias in our Minds—our passions? They will turn the scale in favour of the doctrines most agreeable to them. Yet let us be a little vain: you and I differ radically in our principles, and yet in forty years they have never cast a gloom over our ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... The witchcraft delusion at Salem Village, in 1692, has attracted universal attention, constitutes a permanent chapter in the world's history, and demands a full exposition, and, if possible, a true solution. Being convinced that it cannot be correctly interpreted without a thorough knowledge of ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... entry in his record I call attention to my brother's statement that he did not regard Clifton Hines as entirely sane on this one matter, and to his conviction that the hatred Hines then bore him, amounting to a delusion of persecution, might on his death turn against Judson Clark. He instructed me to go to Clark, tell him the story, and ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and anyhow Flannigan was the sanest person I ever saw in my life. But it all seemed a part of the mystery that had been hanging over us for several days. I felt my way across the room and knelt by the pans. Yes, they were there, full of paper and mounted on bricks. It had not been a delusion. ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... minds, are too frequently and too fatally attempted to be obliterated by recourse to the Bacchanalian fount. Reason becomes obscured, and all decency and propriety abandoned. Passion rules predominantly until it extinguishes itself, and leaves the wretched victim of early delusion, vitiated both in body and mind, to drag on a miserable existence, without character, without friends, and almost without hope. There is unfortunately, however, no occasion for the exercise of imagination on this subject. The annals of our police occurrences, furnish too many examples of actual ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... should cling to a foolish delusion. You are only preparing trouble for yourself. If my word ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... unsubstantial as the tail of Halley's comet. On rare occasions, it is true, its existence is prolonged; many worthy people are beguiled; and some enthusiasts are so effectually hoodwinked as to persist in their delusion, and even to form societies for its propagation. But mankind at large is sufficiently sane to avoid a fall into this abyss of the absurd, and, having paid its tribute of laughter, goes its way without being a ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... hope—in fact the most futile hope that any stammerer ever had. I wish I could paint in the sky, in letters of fire, the truth that "Stammering cannot be outgrown," because this, of all things, is the most frequent pitfall of the stammerer, his greatest delusion and one of the most prolific causes of continued suffering. I know whereof I speak, because I tried it myself. I know how many different people held up to me the hope that I ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... palms with long drooping creepers, and a blaze of brilliant orchids. Smoking-room, house, England, all were gone, and he sat on a settee in the heart of a virgin forest of the Amazon. It was no mere optical delusion or trick. He could see the hot steam rising from the tropical undergrowth, the heavy drops falling from the huge green leaves, the very grain and fibre of the rough bark which clothed the trunks. Even ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 'and live with us. Nobler hearts than yours have sat here in this darkness to wait, and they have come to us and we to them; and they have never left us, never. All else is a delusion, but we are real, we are real, we are real. Truth is a shadow; the valleys of superstition are a farce: the earth is of ashes, the trees all rotten; but we—feel us—we live! You cannot doubt us. Feel us how warm we are! Oh, come to us! Come ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... a politic sanction, they despise in their hearts the people who are so barbarous as to maintain such an institution; and the Southern rebel or Northern demagogue who thinks his championship of slavery really earns him any European respect is under that kind of delusion which it is always for the interest of the plotter to cultivate in the tool. It was common, a few years ago, to represent the Abolitionist as the dupe or agent of the aristocracies of Europe. It certainly might ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... casual, or due to degeneration or to the existence of monstrosities of the criminal type, as science, going hand in hand with the government, explained it, but an unavoidable consequence of the incomprehensible delusion that men may punish one another. Nekhludoff saw that cannibalism did not commence in the marshes, but in the ministry. He saw that his brother-in-law, for example, and, in fact, all the lawyers and officials, from the usher to the ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... it was very pleasant, but, by and by, Rose began to wish Charlie would find something to do like the rest and not make dawdling after her the business of his life. The family was used to his self-indulgent ways, and there was an amiable delusion in the minds of the boys that he had a right to the best of everything, for to them he was still the Prince, the flower of the flock, and in time to be an honor to the name. No one exactly knew how, for, though full of talent, he seemed ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... taken us directly to the garden on our arrival, and now led the way, through large evergreens, and by a winding path, to the house. The land was not half an acre in size, yet I was sure that I had been over a large estate. The same delusion clung to the house, which was in looks like one of Gainsborough's cottages, and ought to have been at least two hundred years old, instead of two. But Downing's advent had already wrought miracles here ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... and her alarms are those produced by a delusion under which she labours that there are assassins, gnomes, vampires, or what not, in our house at night, and that it is my bounden duty to leave my bed at any hour or temperature, and to do battle with the same, in very inadequate ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... would see the portrait of Dugald looking on them wondering at their folly, and that must daunten him. It would not take long till some extravagance of these elders made him wince, and there was Cornal Colin again in the dolours, poor company for them that would harbour any delusion of youth. It was pitiful then to see them take their departures, almost slinking, ashamed to have sounded the wrong note in that chamber of sober recollections. Miss Mary, lighting them to the door with one of her mother's candlesticks, ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... had never quite got over that great grief of earlier years. One felt better and more hopeful for the sight. I suppose many people, after meeting some overwhelming loss or trial, have fancied that they would soon die; but that is almost invariably a delusion. Various dogs have died of a broken heart, but very few human beings. The Inferior creature has pined away at his master's loss: as for us, it is not that one would doubt the depth and sincerity of sorrow, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... that not alone pleasure, but happiness, could be bought with money, and in no other way. And the few who were stung by the prevailing suffering and wretchedness into recognition of our parlous state, we, for the most part, cherished my wild delusion, and insisted that the trouble could be remedied if the State would contract and discharge new obligations. We clamoured for more rights, more help, more liberty, more freedom from this and that; never seeing that our trouble was ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... unsinged, however, and it was one of the earliest accomplishments of my infancy to thread my poor, half-blind Aunt Stanley's needles for her. We were close neighbors and gossips until my fourth year. Many an hour I sat by her side drawing a needle and thread through a bit of calico, under the delusion that I was sewing, while she repeated all sorts of juvenile singsongs of which her memory seemed full, for my entertainment. There used to be a legend current among my brothers and sisters that this aunt unwittingly taught me to use ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... Pursued by Miss Mullett's admonitions to keep out of the sun as much as possible, they went down the garden and through the gate, and turned countryward under the green gloom of the elms. Alexander the Great, laboring perhaps under the delusion that he was a dog instead of a cat, followed them decorously for some distance, and then, being prevailed on to desist, climbed a fence-post and blinked ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... cavern, but only an entrance to a cavern a few feet in depth. Visible from a distance, it must often have been passed by the hunters, although, as we were assured by our companions—who were astonished at the delusion—-no one had ventured to enter it from stress of ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... thoughts to work out the solution, but none presented itself. Was he the victim of some strange form of insanity that caused him to lose his identity and believe himself another man? Drunken men he had seen under the delusion that all the rest of the world were drunken and they alone sober. Oh, madness, madness! At least he was sane and knew himself, and this was a confusion brought about by those who had undertaken his arrest. He would wait for the Elder to come, and in the meantime live in his memories, thinking ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... standpoint—evil is a mere negation, a shadow where light should be; or to be quite logical, evil is that which is not—in other words, there is no evil, except to deluded minds, whose business is to get quit of their delusion. The one and only cosmic will being declared good, it follows that for the monist "all's right with the world," in a sense scarcely contemplated by Browning when he penned that most dubious aphorism. We propose briefly to show how this creed works out—what is its ethical counterpart ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... his benefactor that the learned judge should be for a time confined in Graeme's Tower; and, conforming to a private hint of his Lordship before he departed from the jail, he kept up in his wife Margaret's mind the delusion that it was truly "an auld lurdon" whom he was to steal, as a condition for getting out of prison. On the morning after his arrival at Gilnockie, Will held a consultation with two tried friends, whose assistance he required ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... superior for the new institution to be founded at Quebec—Marie of the Incarnation, a woman of some fifty years, a widow like Madame de la Peltrie, and, like Madame de la Peltrie, a mystic dreamer of celestial visions and divine communings and heroic sacrifices. How much of truth, how much of self-delusion, {73} lay in these dreams of heavenly revelation is not for the outsider to say. It is as impossible for the practical mind to pronounce judgment on the mystic as for the mystic to pronounce sentence on the scientist. Both have their truths, both have their ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... disguised sword of Damocles ready to fall upon him. Soon his mate came and alighted on a low branch of the tree. The feeding crow regarded him a moment, and then flew up to his side, as if to give him a turn at the meat. But he refused to run the risk. He evidently looked upon the whole thing as a delusion and a snare, and presently went away, and his mate followed him. Then I placed the bone in one of the main forks of the tree, but the crows kept at a safe distance from it. Then I put it back to the ground, but they grew more and ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... that groove of trees, and mysteriously beckoned to her as she stood at the window, turning her heart to sickness as she gazed? Was it a human being, one to bring more evil to the house, where so much evil had already fallen? Was it a supernatural visitant, or was it but a delusion of her own eyesight? Not the latter, certainly, for the figure was now emerging again, motioning to her as before; and with a white face and shaking limbs, Barbara clutched her shawl around her and went down that path in the moonlight. The beckoning ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... stories that are told of the mad dog covered with froth, are altogether fabulous. The dog recovering from, or attacked by a fit, may be seen in this state; but not the rabid dog. Fits are often mistaken for rabies, and hence the delusion. ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... as if dazed for a few minutes, striving to think coherently, and master the delusion, under which ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... Initiations, Adeptship being the fifth. A general idea of the line of this higher evolution may be obtained by studying the list of what are called in Buddhist books "the fetters" which must be cast off—the qualities of which a man must rid himself as he treads this Path. These are: the delusion of separateness; doubt or uncertainty; superstition; attachment to enjoyment; the possibility of hatred; desire for life, either in this or the higher worlds; pride; agitation or irritability; and ignorance. The man who reaches the Adept level has exhausted all ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... us point-blank that he was extremely dissatisfied with our manner of working. We were too slow: we nursed our tasks. Did we think we were being kept at Sennelager for the benefit of our health or to make holiday? If so that was a fond delusion. Henceforth he was going to estimate a certain time for each task which would have to be completed within the period allowed, even if we had to work every hour God gave us and, if need be, on ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... have told you, Mr Pinch,' said Mary, 'if I could have helped it; but your delusion is so absorbing, and it is so necessary that we should be upon our guard; that you should not be compromised; and to that end that you should know by whom I am beset; that no alternative is left me. I came here purposely to tell you, but I think I should have ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... humorous (save the mark!) point of view! Now I never make jokes myself—at least intentionally—nor do I think it becomes a man of position to do so—and I quite agree with SWIFT or SHERIDAN (I know it was one of these infernal clever literary chaps) who said, "A humorous woman is a delusion and a snare!"—so you may imagine my disgust at finding My Wife writing for a Journal!—why couldn't she have asked Me to help her?—and signing her articles anonymously too!—for I need hardly tell ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... everything in order for nursing him. She would have sent at once to Redware to let his father know where and in what condition he was, but not a single person came near the cottage the whole day, and she dared not leave him before the fever had subsided. He raved a good deal, generally in the delusion that he was talking to Dorothy—who sought to kill him, and to whom he kept giving directions, at one time how to guide the knife to reach his heart, at another how to mingle her poison so that it should act with speed ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... marvel of a coat, and was in the last stages of tottering old age before it fell to the blousard. They wear leather boots too sometimes, instead of the wooden shoes belonging to their station, but they are boots which are but a mockery and a delusion, and yield the wearer no comfort. A respectable blousard—a carpenter or a shoemaker or a member of any honest trade—would scorn to be seen in any other dress but his neat blouse, unless on some great day, a fete, his wedding or at church, when he wears his only coat, or his father's or a friend's. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... the stupidity and thoughtlessness often betrayed in attendance on public religious services; in the impossibility of imparting religious truths, with any degree of clearness, to ignorant persons, when alarmed into some serious concern by sickness; in the insensibility and invincible delusion sometimes retained in the near approach to death.—Rare instances of the admirable efficacy of religion to animate and enlarge the faculties, even in the old age of an ignorant man.—Excuses for the intellectual inaptitude and perversion ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... POLICY OF SILENCE.—there is no greater delusion than to suppose that vast number of boys know nothing about practices of sin. Some parents are afraid that unclean thoughts may be suggested by these very defences. The danger is slight. Such cases are barely possible, ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... he, in a whisper, "I have heard from Sir Philip; his letter is dated since—since-my good woman told you what I saw,—well, since then. So that it must have been all a delusion of mine, as you told her. And yet, well—well—we will not talk of it, doctor; but I hope you have kept the secret. Sir Philip would not like to hear of it, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... side. One becomes rather tired of the average seaside resort, which is built and designed rather as if the "authorities" believed that God made Blackpool on the Seventh Day, and it was their religious duty to erect replicas of His handiwork up and down the coast. And under this delusion piers, I suppose, ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... huge pie that is to be divided according to the capacity of each to absorb and digest his share. The territory is not squared off, that is, taking in whole sections of contiguous country, but in a much more subtle way, so that the delusion of competition may be undisturbed. When several of these concerns are requested to make prices, they readily comply and seem eager for the order. The delusion extends even to their agents, who are as innocent as the would-be purchaser of the real conditions, and are doing their utmost ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... the ledger,—and, above all, that there should be no hurry in printing what is written. Not the least use in all this. The poetaster who has tasted type is done for. He is like the man who has once been a candidate for the Presidency. He feeds on the madder of his delusion all his days, and his very bones grow red with the glow of his foolish fancy. One of these young brains is like a bunch of India crackers; once touch fire to it and it is best to keep hands off until it has done popping,—if it ever stops. I have two ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Tarkowski, though he was an exceptionally self-controlled person, in the first moments after the receipt of the despatch, knelt in prayer and began to beseech God that the intelligence should not prove to be a delusion, a morbid chimera, bred from sorrow, longing, and pain. Why, they had both toiled so hard to learn that the children were even alive! Mr. Rawlinson had despatched to the Sudan whole caravans, while Pan Tarkowski, disguised as an ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... first had been published and commented on, public curiosity was quelled by a brief statement from the District Attorney's office, and the rest of his communications remained unprinted. Ascham came to see him, and begged him to travel. Robert Denver dropped in, and tried to joke him out of his delusion; till Granice, mistrustful of their motives, began to dread the reappearance of Dr. Stell, and set a guard on his lips. But the words he kept back engendered others and still others in his brain. His inner self became a humming factory ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... right, and the jagged pinnacle of a granite tor stood up against the lower curve of its silver disc. There, outlined as black as an ebony statue on that shining back-ground, I saw the figure of a man upon the tor. Do not think that it was a delusion, Holmes. I assure you that I have never in my life seen anything more clearly. As far as I could judge, the figure was that of a tall, thin man. He stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... the hearts of struggling human beings. And above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black. ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... evidence, and I am sure that the vast majority of critics would decide against most of De Quincey's stories on that. I do not suppose that he ever, like Lamb, deliberately begat "lie-children": but opium-eating is not absolutely repugnant to delusion, and literary mystification was not so much the exception as the rule in his earlier time. As to his "impenetrability," I can only throw myself on the readers of such memoirs and reminiscences as have been published respecting him. The almost unanimous verdict of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... all, but it was explicable if the motive were imperial—not so if it were financial. No; to accept the suggestion we must declare the whole quest a mare's nest from beginning to end; the attempt on Davies a delusion of his own fancy, the whole structure we had ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... notice, also suffers from a form of the same delusion. When talking to a Frenchman, he employs a mangled cross between West Coast and China pidgin, and by placing a long E at the end of every word imagines he is making himself completely clear to the suffering Gaul. And the suffering Gaul listens to it all with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... of the Neapolitan clergy; but he keeps up the falsehood for the sake of gain and power. In like manner, he has an extensive Roman laboratory ever at work for the manufacture of all the instruments of delusion which his emissaries propagate throughout Christendom. There he makes false relics, from portions of the true cross downwards; there he sells pardons and indulgences; and there he has a corps of writers employed ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... common delusion that the mesmerist or hypnotizer counts for anything in the experiment. The operator, whether priest, physician, charlatan, self-deluded enthusiast, or conscious imposter, is not the source of any occult influence, does ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... same instincts, and make their fortunes in the same way; they spend nothing, make small profits, and let them accumulate at compound interest. Such is their trading charter, and that charter is no delusion. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... so, the effect which Mr. Giddings's report attributed to his invasion failed to disclose itself to me. Then the delirium became manifest, and swept over the town like a were-wolf delusion through a medieval village. ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... Beth, "I strongly disapprove of such deceptions. It seems to me that making a poor hen hatch out ducks, under the delusion that they are chickens, is one of the most cruel and treacherous acts that humanity can be guilty of. Imagine the poor thing's feelings when her children take to water! I'm surprised you could suggest such a ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... had asked her to pledge herself to him. Fortunately—oh, how very fortunately!—she had refused, and he had been left free. Now he knew that his fancied love for her had been merely a passing whim, a delusion of the moment. This—THIS which he was now experiencing was the grand passion of his life. He wrote a poem with the title, "The Greater Love"—and sold it, too, to a sensational periodical which circulated largely among sentimental shopgirls. ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... to be angry?" was the question asked in old time of the Hebrew prophet. And he answered, "I do well." This was evidently the temper of Junius; and to this cause we attribute the savage cruelty which disgraces several of his letters. No man is so merciless as he who, under a strong self-delusion, confounds his antipathies with his duties. It may be added that Junius, though allied with the democratic party by common enmities, was the very opposite of a democratic politician. While attacking individuals ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... from every trace of the mental servitude which is the curse of militarism, and stimulated initiative and individuality. Long before the War, most Territorials believed in universal training, not so much on account of the German peril, which to too many Englishmen seemed a mere delusion, as on account of its social value. It is pleasant to remember how solidly Lord Roberts received local Territorial support when he made the most prophetic of all his speeches in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on the ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... day would be only to establish a precedent for day after day of inactivity. The prevailing winds would be head winds. We clung to the shoddy hope held out by that magic name—Milk River. We knew too well that Milk River was only a snare and a delusion; but one must fight toward something—it makes little difference what you call that something. A goal, in itself, is an empty thing; all the virtue lies in the moving ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... in the north of Devon, or even the wisest woman, to reason with young Frida now, or even to let her have the reason upon her side, and be sure of it. She, for her part, was astray from all the bounds of reason, soaring on the wings of faith, and hope, and high delusion. Though the winter-time was coming, and the wind was damp and raw, and the beauty of the valleys lay down to recover itself; yet with her the spring was breaking, and the world was lifting with the glory underneath ...
— Frida, or, The Lover's Leap, A Legend Of The West Country - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... pools He calls an ocean? or unchallenged sought Britannia's cliffs; then turned his back in flight? Or does he boast because his citizens Were driven in arms to leave their hearths and homes? Ah, vain delusion! not from thee they fled: My steps they follow — mine, whose conquering signs Swept all the ocean (29), and who, ere the moon Twice filled her orb and waned, compelled to flight The pirate, shrinking from the open sea, And humbly begging ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... got over the superstitious dread with which the first sight of white men had inspired them, and now they believed that the strangers held the demon of the plague at their disposal and had let him loose upon the red men in revenge for the murders they had committed. This wholesome delusion kept their tomahawks quiet for a while. When they saw the Englishmen establishing themselves at Plymouth, they at first held a powwow in the forest, at which the new-comers were cursed with all the elaborate ingenuity that the sorcery of the medicine-men could summon for so momentous an occasion; ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... together with his followers, reign over the whole island." Which being heard, the monarch, gathering together a multitude with him, hastened, in the violence of his wrath, to extinguish the fire. And he brought with him thrice nine chariots, for the delusion of foolishness had seduced his heart and persuaded him that with that number he would obtain to himself a complete triumph; and he turned the face of his men and his cattle toward the left hand of Saint Patrick, even as ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... nothing regarding the cause of this demoniac obsession, and the preachers prefer to pass over it rapidly, or else to treat it as a delusion of the insane, notwithstanding the direct statement of the New Testament narrative and its sequel or concluding statement. But the occult traditions have it that these two men were victims of their dabbling into certain phases of psychic phenomena, i.e., the "raising up of spirits" ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... in Joash's life for how long a time a man may go on in this self-delusion of external and barren service and never know it. Joash came to the throne at the age of seven. Up till that age he had lived in the Temple in concealment. Until he was one and thirty he went on in a steady, upright course, never knowing that there was anything ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... side while you deride religion, serious indeed himself while he makes you laugh, not able to laugh at his own jests, while he carries you dancing forward to perdition,—doubtless you would tremble, even as he does while he tempts you. But this you cannot possibly see, you cannot break your delusion, except by first taking God's word in this matter on trust. You cannot see the unseen world at once. They who ever speak with God in their hearts, are in turn taught by Him in all knowledge; but they who refuse to ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... more dismal and more excluding than even Ford's sect: the congregation were all of the very lowest class, with about twelve or thirteen exceptions, and those were decidedly mad. The pastor was an arch rogue, that fattened upon the delusion of his communicants. They held the doctrine of visible election, which election was made by having a call— that is, a direct visitation of the Holy Ghost, which was testified by falling down in a fit—the testification being the more authentic, if it happened in full congregation. The ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... "'Tis a strange delusion this, if it be one; for it is plain they have been ably counselled. Whilst they retain the castle their position may be reckoned as impregnable. It is a powerful support, on which they have placed ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... when, if you will but recollect your thoughts, and gather the sum of them, you will not find one serious advised thought of him or his matters in a whole week! I profess I wonder how so many can enforce upon themselves a persuasion that God is always in their heart. I think it is the height of delusion! I am sure he is not in one of ten thousand thoughts, that travel, walk, lodge, and dwell in the souls of men, and yet they will needs bear upon themselves that they always mind him. I am sure most of you cannot say, that ever you shut the ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... fiat of the people has gone forth proclaiming me the Chief Magistrate of this glorious Union, nothing upon their part remaining to be done, it may be thought that a motive may exist to keep up the delusion under which they may be supposed to have acted in relation to my principles and opinions; and perhaps there may be some in this assembly who have come here either prepared to condemn those I shall now deliver, or, approving them, to doubt the ...
— Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Harrison • James D. Richardson
... proclamations for statutes; in doing everything in his power, in short, to smooth the path for his successor to the scaffold. As father of a family he consecrated many years of his life to the wondrous delusion of the Spanish marriages. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... if statesmen, either [lvi] with their tongue in their cheek or through a generous impulsiveness, tell them their natural taste for the bathos is a relish for the sublime, there is the more need for culture to tell them the contrary. It is delusion on this point which is fatal, and against delusion on this point culture works. It is not fatal to our Liberal friends to labour for free trade, extension of the suffrage, and abolition of church-rates, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... stuff'—noblenesses and royalnesses which make me loyal. Do pardon me for intruding all this on you, though you cannot justify me—you, who are occupied beyond measure, and I, who know it! I have been under the delusion, too, during this writing, of having something like a friend's claim to write and be troublesome. I have lived so near your friends that I keep the odour of them! A mere delusion, alas! my only personal ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... began the study of law, he was connected with a clique or club of young men, who made light of religion, and read books that treated it as a delusion. It was at this time that he read Paine's "Age of Reason" and Volney's "Ruins," through which he was influenced to array himself against the Bible for a time,—as much of a skeptic, almost, as any one of his boon companions. But his early religious training soon asserted itself, and we ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... rightly understood and generally practiced, is productive of the most salutary and beneficial consequences to society, yet nothing has a more pernicious influence than mistaken notions of it. Of all kinds of delusion, religious enthusiasm is the most deplorable, and has often been attended with the most melancholy and dismal effects. By abusing the best things, they may be made the innocent occasion of the worst. Many ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... wonderful is the power of self-delusion! Here we have two clever well-informed people, persuading themselves that they experience extraordinary raptures mingled with the most exquisite philosophic calm, from believing that unconscious matter ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the evening that he was left to doze quietly in his chair. His family ascribed his condition to weariness and reaction from his long strain of anxiety; and opium had already so far produced its legitimate results that he connived at their delusion if he did not confirm it by actual assertion. It is one of the diabolical qualities of this habit that it soon weakens and at last destroys all truth and honor in the soul, eating them out with a ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... admit—but this is all. The author of the review has wholly failed, in my opinion, to prove his case and the remark he makes on Mr. Britton's theory (as to Col. Barre) may equally well apply to his own, namely, that it affords "a [another] curious instance of the delusion to which ingenious men may resign themselves, when they have a favourite opinion to uphold!" The reviewer, indeed, admits that he has "traced the parallel from the scantiest materials;" and in another passage repeats, that but "few materials ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over the dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow, but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... plebeian orders of older civilizations. These were the people that seemed to justify Schopenhauer's cynical contention concerning the economy of Nature, who invests youth with just enough transient beauty to ensure the perpetuation of the race, making men and women serve her purpose under the delusion that they are free agents and ministers to their own pleasure. Here were no pomp and circumstance to interpose their false colours before the sordid vista of the future. It lay glaringly before the imagination of the onlookers; and to avoid depths ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... monstrous delusion is this? It can't be! My good creature, you're oddly deceived, I imagine. What is the man's name? I can understand that she has lost her will and distinct sight; but you are clear-sighted, and can estimate. What ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... eyes, and looked again. It was no delusion. Things never did come as they are expected to come. There was still no doubtful speck on the horizon; but within eight miles of the island—and in this lovely air that looked nearly close—was a ship, under canvas. She bore S. E. from Mount Lookout, and S. S. E. from ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... up from the hedge, projecting through the foliage, and the bird, perched near its end, sat only about five feet above the bare ground of the lane. Now, I owe my best thanks to this individual nightingale, for sharply calling to my mind a common pestilent delusion, which I have always hated, but had never yet raised my voice against—namely, that all wild creatures exist in constant fear of an attack from the numberless subtle or powerful enemies that are always waiting and watching for an opportunity to spring upon and destroy ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... another step nearer him. "But what I'm not in any doubt about at all is the scorn I feel for myself for ever having cherished the delusion. If I'd been a woman with—with more claim, let ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... stone now. The 'Star in the East' has already dimmed the fearful halo which the devotion of bloodshed once wreathed round their forms. Forsaken and alone, they stand but as the gloomy monuments of the greatest delusion ever organised by ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... produced,—that there be likeness in the difference, difference in the likeness, and a reconcilement of both in one. If there be likeness to nature without any check of difference, the result is disgusting, and the more complete the delusion, the more loathsome the effect. Why are such simulations of nature, as wax-work figures of men and women, so disagreeable? Because, not finding the motion and the life which we expected, we are shocked as by a falsehood, every ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
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