"The absurd" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... half-sovereign which was to have been treasured to his dying day, had shared the fate of the commonplace coins which were destined for Mrs. Bryant and his bootmaker. It was a cruel blow, but Percival saw the absurd side of his misfortune, and laughed aloud in spite ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... though the absurd masquerading of words and thoughts had ceased, she was still weighed down with the horror of the dream, which she knew had a corresponding reality still more awful. And there was no adversary to all this anguish; ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... on the absurd, contradictory and demoralizing Dogmas and Mysteries of the Christian Religion. Now first translated from the French of Freret, but supposed to be written by Baron Holbach, author of the System of Nature, Christianity Unveiled, Common Sense, Universal Morality, Natural Morality. R. Carlile, ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... Levy, with great composure, "you need not threaten me, for what interest can I possibly have in tale-telling to Lord L'Estrange? Again, dismiss from your mind the absurd thought that I hate you. True, you snub me in private, you cut me in public, you refuse to come to my dinners, you'll not ask me to your own; still, there is no man I like better, nor would more willingly serve. When do you want ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... believe," he said to himself, "this is the horse that was in the old villain's head every time he uttered the absurd rime!" ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... Grundy, her love of dress develops itself in bold contrasts of color, in bizarre and showy ornaments, in picturesque, and often in grotesque and tawdry effects. But whatever the details, the whole is always striking. Our women longing for the new, accept the absurd; desiring the picturesque, take the bizarre, and eager for the elegant, content themselves ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... his reticence, it sprang from a fine desire to give forth no breath that might tarnish the clear mirror of Valentine's nature. He would not admit a change that might make his friend again fall into the absurd dissatisfaction which he had combated on the night of their first sitting in the tent-room. While they talked the afternoon had fallen into a creeping twilight. In the twilight ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... taken to a Turkish bath for no other reason—as I was afterwards told—than that it might supply me with a topic. Odd books have been put in my way. A basket of school readers was once lodged with me, with a request that I direct my attention to the absurd selection of the poems. I have been urged to go against car conductors and customs men. On one occasion I received a paper of tombstone inscriptions, with a note of direction how others might be found in a neighboring churchyard if I were curious. A lady in whose company I camped last ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... the handsome appearance of the ambassador's attendants, most of whom carried hawks on their "fists" as a present to Charles. The strangeness of this sight caused the mob to jeer, upon which the diarist characteristically remarks, "but lord! to see the absurd nature of Englishmen that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at every thing that looks strange." Later on he makes a note of having seen the ambassador's retinue at York House engaged in a manner that does not speak well ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... legends. Woe to the native professor who strays from the path of orthodoxy. His wife and children (and in Japan every man, however young, has a wife and children) will starve. From the late Prince Ito's grossly misleading Commentary on the Japanese Constitution down to school compendiums, the absurd dates ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... Constantinople, boast of being descendants of the dethroned imperial families; a circumstance which is probable enough, and which nobody takes the trouble to dispute, any more than the alleged nobility of the Castilian peasantry, or the absurd genealogies ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... It would be only the absurd tableaux I agreed to, with plenty of fun, and nothing more. So I tried to be merry and content, and so I should have been, for there was plenty to talk about, and every one was so solicitous for my comfort; and there was Mr. Enders who would wheel my chair for me wherever ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... once, Mrs. Archdale actually included the sweetmeat stranger in their conversation, and Coxeter at last found himself at her request most unwillingly taking the absurd model out of his bag. "Of course you've got to imagine this in a rough sea," he said sulkily, playing the devil's advocate, "and not in ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... sorry you repudiate the confession, Hippolyte—it is sincere; and, do you know, even the absurd parts of it—and these are many" (here Hippolyte frowned savagely) "are, as it were, redeemed by suffering—for it must have cost you something to admit what you there say—great torture, perhaps, for all I know. Your motive must have been a very noble one all through. Whatever ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... by the United States. The framers of that Constitution probably foresaw that such titles, vain and insignificant in themselves, might be in time, as they generally, and I believe always have been, the introductory to the absurd and unnatural claims of hereditary ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... science, while the attainment of health as a prophylactic measure is rational and in harmony with the ascertained laws of hygiene and consistent with the canons of common-sense. I am firmly convinced that the absurd and unreasonable dogma which assumes to conserve health by propagating disease should receive the open condemnation of every scientific sanitarian. That this health-blighting delusion conceived in the ignorance of a past generation ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... novelist's powers of analysis were equal to every phase of human nature. No complete estimate of Turgenev can be made without reading "Torrents of Spring;" for the Italian menage, the character of Gemma and her young brother, and the absurd duelling punctilio are not to be found elsewhere. And Maria is the very Principle of Evil; one feels that if Satan had spoken to her in the Garden of Eden, she could easily have tempted him; ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... be corrected, abnormal dilations and contractions of blood-vessels may be regulated. The bladder, uterus, even the pancreas and the liver seem to be influenced by the peripheral effects of the central excitement. And while no warning can be serious enough against the absurd belief that diseases like cancer or tuberculosis can be cured by faith, it must be admitted that psychical influences under special conditions may have a retarding influence on any pathological process in the organism. Much ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... from some fanciful story of Mr. H. G. Wells. They scattered for the arcades, and some, quaintly enough, ran under the trees in the near-by Champs-Elysees. There was a "Bang!" at which everybody shouted "There!" but it was not a bomb, only part of the absurd fusillade that now began. They were firing from the Eiffel Tower, whence they might possibly have hit something, and from roofs with ordinary guns and revolvers which could not possibly have hit anything at all. In ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... regard to any work of large dimensions the final test is this: can we sing all the themes and follow them in their polyphonic development? Then only are we really acquainted with the work; then only, in regard to personal like or dislike, have we any right to pass judgment upon it. The absurd attitude, far too common, of hasty, ill-considered criticism is illustrated by the fact that while Brahms is said to have worked for ten years on that Titanic creation, his First Symphony, yet persons will hear it once and have the audacity to say they do not like it. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... another part of the field, had released herself by a consummate use of the same weapon Wilfrid had so clumsily handled. Her object was to put an end to the absurd and compromising sighs of Edward Buxley; and she did so with the amiable contempt of a pupil dismissing a first instructor in an art "We saw from the beginning it could not be, Edward." The enamoured ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... eyes with a little shudder, as though what they saw was terrible to look upon. Emily's hand, the tiny hand that was so unexpectedly firm, tightened its hold on his, and his crushed the absurd fingers until ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... support, the cool-headed adviser, surrounded by a crowd of brainless, empty-headed young fops, who were even now repeating from mouth to mouth, and with every sign of the keenest enjoyment, a doggerel quatrain which he had just given forth. Everywhere the absurd, silly words met her: people seemed to have little else to speak about, even the Prince had asked her, with a little laugh, whether she appreciated her husband's ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... they agree with Billings and Byles as to its angelic and ecstatic properties. Some thought it "heartless, tasteless, trivial, and irreverent jargon." Others thought the tunes were written more for the absurd inflation of the singers than for the glory of God; and many fully sympathized with the man who hung two cats over Billings's door to indicate his opinion of Billings's caterwauling. An old inhabitant of Roxbury remembered ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... pathetic incident by approaching it from a grotesque angle. It came, as Chesterton points out in his own inimitable way, 'into the inner chamber by coming down the chimney.' Which demonstrates the ever nearness of pathos to humour, of the absurd to the pathetic. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... author of affectation and the progenitor of all exaggeration. They should be remitted to limbo with all the other crudities of youth. I have listened to the point of exasperation, through an evening, to the absurd use of adjectives by young girls of education and with some claims to good taste. Somehow it sometimes comes to me, that this use of adjectives is the besetting sin of the female conversationalists of this day. Some young fellows unsex themselves so far as to follow the ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... Batchgrew, with his crimson shiny face, and the vermilion rims round his unsteady eyes, and his elephant ears, and the absurd streaming of his white whiskers, and his multitudinous noisiness, and his black kid gloves, strode half theatrically ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the last remnant of his temper. He swore for half an hour in Hindustani, and for another half-hour in English. After that he felt better. And when, at the end of dinner, Sylvia came to him with the absurd request that she might marry Mr. Reginald Dallas he did not have a fit, but merely signified in fairly moderate terms his entire and absolute refusal to ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Duane had heard the absurd lampoon as a child, and one evening late in August, smoking his after-dinner cigar beside his father in the empty conservatory, he recalled the story, which had been one of ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... fortress style, would have given scope to superb invention, if invention was to be found in the land; and in such an edifice, for such a purpose, Germany would have found a truer point of union, than it will ever find in the absurd attempt to mix opposing faiths, or in the nonsense of a rebel ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... lifted her eyebrows and opened her mouth—stared at him in speechless confusion—and disappeared in the kitchen regions. This strange reception of his inquiry irritated him unreasonably. He knocked with the absurd violence of a man who vents his anger on the first convenient thing that he can find. The landlady opened the door, and looked at him in stern and ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... "As for the absurd position in which you and Uncle Joseph have been making yourselves an exhibition," resumed Michael, "it is more than time it came to an end. I have prepared a proper discharge in full, which you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Along with the absurd statement that prohibition is a failure, comes the warning of the president of the Model License League to the business men of the country, that unless the tide of prohibition is arrested it will "kill our cities." "Blessed are the dead ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... But there was also, on another page, a special financial article in a hostile tone beginning with the words "We have always feared" and a guarded, half-column leader, opening with the phrase: "It is a deplorable sign of the times" what was, in effect, an austere, general rebuke to the absurd infatuations of the investing public. She glanced through these articles, a line here and a line there—no more was necessary to catch beyond doubt the murmur of the oncoming flood. Several slighting references by name to de Barral revived her animosity against the man, suddenly, as by the effect ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... time she believed that quality had ever preferred a barn to a house. She showed at the same time the most pregnant marks of contempt, and again lamented the labor she had undergone, through her ignorance of the absurd taste ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... club smoking-room you are to conceive David vanishing into nothingness, and that it is any day six years ago at two in the afternoon. I ring for coffee, cigarette, and cherry brandy, and take my chair by the window, just as the absurd little nursery governess comes tripping into the street. I always feel that ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... saw. The evident sincerity of his tones, the force of his language, language which I have utterly failed to reproduce, carried conviction with every word. For the time being, at least, they felt that such an accusation bordered on the edge of the absurd, and to say the least of it, there was a tremendous gulf which had to be filled up, and that to fill it up by the belief in the long arm of coincidence, and to commit a man to the scaffold because of ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... upon the Czarina, and through her upon the Czar. This influence was thought to be responsible for many of the Czar's unpopular policies. In times of great public agitation the wildest rumors are easily taken for truth and the absurd legends which were easily associated with his name were greedily accepted by people of every rank. The influence of Rasputin over the Imperial family was denied again and again. It has been said from authoritative sources that the ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... by injudicious kindness; Philips became ridiculous, without his own fault, by the absurd admiration of his friends, who decorated him with honorary garlands, which the ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... of similar import. Oh, that we had teachers to teach more out of this divine book! Oh, that we had a public who would encourage and cherish them for so doing! What blessed results even have I seen, by one's being able to answer such enquiries! The absurd notion that children can only be taught in a room, must be exploded. I have done more in one hour in the garden, in the lanes, and in the fields, to cherish and satisfy the budding faculties of childhood, than could have ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... former peshwa [Footnote: Formerly a chief of the Mahrattas.—Ed.] was living at Bithoor, about six miles from Cawnpore. His real name was Dandhu Panth, but he is better known as Nana Sahib. The British Government had refused to award him the absurd life pension of eighty thousand pounds sterling, which had been granted to his nominal father; but he had inherited at least half a million from the ex-peshwa; and he was allowed to keep six guns, to entertain as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... Mr. Burroughs began to contribute to the columns of the "Saturday Press," an organ of the literary bohemians in New York, edited by Henry Clapp. These were fragmentary things of a philosophical cast, and were grouped under the absurd title "Fragments from the Table of an Intellectual Epicure," by "All Souls." There were about sixty of these fragments. I have examined most of them; some are fanciful and far-fetched; some are apt and ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... "The absurd creature! He imagines that it only depends upon me to give him my daughter. I could as easily dispose of the moon. Since she has had teeth, she had made me desire ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... if you can, when you know what war is, and, knowing it, know also that it is the only way to do your necessary work. The absurd and disgusting thing is the ignorance and cowardice of those who can slaughter an army corps every day for lunch, with words, and would not be able to make so trivial a start toward the "crushing" they are forever talking about as to fire into another man's open eyes or jam a bayonet ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... the real hero, inarticulate and unintelligible to himself except in flashes of inspiration, from the performer who has to talk at any cost through five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespear's tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and physical violences of the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian tissue, you will get a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan is now driven. From ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... which the Governor in those days replied to the respectful address of a large and influential body of Christians. He even went further in another part of his reply, and referred to "the absurd advice offered by your missionaries to the Indians, and their officious interference."[29] Such language from the lips of Her Majesty's Representative, if at all possible in these days, would provoke a burst ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... is, as Mr. Arthur Symons said, an attitude; but it is an attitude in the flat, not in the round; not a statue, but the cardboard king in a toy-theatre, which can only be looked at from the front. In Wilde's own poetry we have particularly a perpetually toppling possibility of the absurd; a sense of just falling too short or just going too far. "Plant lilies at my head" has something wrong about it; something silly ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... He may entirely misunderstand the new facts because he uses wrong old experiences to give them meaning. Such was evidently the difficulty in the case of the young pupil who, after a lesson on the equator, described it as a menagerie lion running around the earth. Many of the absurd answers that a pupil gives are due to his failure to use the correct old ideas to interpret the new facts. He has misunderstood because his mind was not prepared by making the proper ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... quite different. If I give in to the absurd caprices of this woman, that will not keep me from being catalogued down in the red marble hall, as Number 54, or as Number 55, if she prefers to take you ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... of the absurd opposition to Prince Albert's taking his place by the Queen's side on all State occasions. "Let the Queen put the Prince where she likes and settle it herself, that is the best way," said the Duke of Wellington cordially. A lively example of the great Duke's ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... the absurd nature of their tragic plight excited more of wonder than of concern. They merged into hedges and ditches swallowed them. Their case was only one incident of many, and what became of them I have never ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... very clear in her mind: The one was the absurd prediction that she might never go back to her own country; the second was all that extraordinary talk about her pearls. As to the promised lover, the memory of the soothsayer's words made her feel very angry. No doubt Frenchwomen liked that sort of innuendo, but ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the daughter of Zion, she groaneth, spreadeth her hands: Woe to me, for my soul is wearied, through them that kill;" xxx. 6, xlix. 24; Hos. xiii. 13. To consider the pain alone, however, as the tertium comparationis, is inadmissible, because, in that case, we would obtain the absurd meaning: the suffering shall continue until the suffering cometh. It is likewise impossible to understand the bringing forth as the highest degree of affliction,—so that the sense would be: the Lord will give them up until the distress reaches its highest point,—because this meaning could apply ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... two foreigners, two Germans; Philip II. clothed himself with a false Spaniardism to continue the German policy of his father. This masquerading caused us great harm, because there are many men now who think of him as the noblest representation of a Spaniard. The absurd inventions and lapses from truth to which those times give rise are enough to drive one mad. Many Catholics dream of canonising Philip II. for the cold cruelty with which he exterminated heretics, but such a king had really no Catholicism but his ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... man, beyond doubt; and the absurd stories which his enemies attributed to him were not all unfounded. But he had, at all events, the rare quality of professing for his art, as he called it, a respect very nearly akin to enthusiasm. According to his views, the faculty were infallible, ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... eminent philosophers have asserted pleasure to be the chiefest good. So also we are told, that when Cicero, being consul, undertook the defense of Murena against Cato's prosecution, by way of bantering Cato, he made a long series of jokes upon the absurd paradoxes, as they are called, of the Stoic sect; so that a loud laughter passing from the crowd to the judges, Cato, with a quiet smile, said to those that sat next him, "My friends, what an amusing ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... was some exchange of words between the lawyers on the other side of the rail, now with the judge, now with one another; and now it was the clerk of the court who was speaking; and I couldn't repress the absurd feeling of surprise that they should turn their backs and mumble so, since it appeared irresistibly to me that we were an audience, and the thing was being ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... exceptions by the young lady herself. When he met her the second time—which was after church on his first Sunday—his manner was even more loftily reserved than usual. He had distinct recollections of their first conversation. His own part in it had not been brilliant, and in it he had made the absurd statement—absurd in the light of what came after—that he was certainly NOT employed by Z. Snow ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... leaning over my father while he had gone so happily into his old delight of showing his prints and engravings; and Torwood, standing by the fire, watching them with the look of a conqueror, and Jaquetta—like the absurd child she loved to be—teasing them with ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... great demand for miles around. Consequently, the girls would have good music for their frolic and as Mrs. Bonnell looked to the refreshments, everything was satisfactory excepting Miss Woodhull's veto upon "the absurd practices of Hallowe'en:" meaning the love tests of fate and fortune usually made that night. Those were debarred, though many a one was indulged in in secret of which that practical lady ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... by the opinions of his permanent staff. These on the night in question had plied him well with hackneyed objections; but to see him get up and relieve himself of them—the air of originality, the really original air he threw around them; the absurd light which he turned full on the weaknesses of his noble friend's propositions, was as beautiful to an indifferent critic as it as saddening to the man who had at heart the sorrows of his kind. If that minister lived long he would be forced to adopt and advocate in as pretty a manner the ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... necessary consequence of this, but a mighty, a fearfully influential premium on crime? And what is its radical cause, but the absurd indulgence wherewith our law greets the favoured, because the atrocious criminal? Upon what principle of propriety, or of natural justice, should a seeming murderer not be—we will not say sternly, but even kindly—catechised, and for his very soul's ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... did; but when they saw some other youths like themselves get on, they put their pride in their pockets, and each mounted a tricycle. How they did waggle from side to side; and how impossible it was not to laugh and shout at the absurd ...
— Archie's Mistake • G. E. Wyatt
... saw anything at once so ridiculous, and so unpleasant, as this sight—ridiculous in the absurd incidents inseparable from it; and unpleasant in its senseless and unmeaning degradation. There are two steps to begin with, and then a rather broad landing. The more rigid climbers went along this landing on their knees, as well as up the stairs; and the figures they cut, in ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... Hazlitt's works I should put these sentences on the title-page of every volume; for, dogmatist as he thought himself, it is certain that he was in reality purely aesthetic, though, I need hardly say, not in the absurd sense, or no-sense, which modern misuse of language has chosen to fix on the word. Therefore he is very good (where few are good at all) on Dreams; and, being a great observer of himself, singularly instructive on Application ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Among the absurd notions which early turned the heads of the teachers of mankind, and which are so ridiculous as generally to escape our censure, is that of a Golden Age; or the idea that men were more perfect, more moral and more happy in some early stage of their intercourse, before ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... that at last we bought the drivers over to our hours.... The caravanserai at Aintab is so disagreeable a place for Mrs. Cronin that we enquired for a private house, and... we have hired one at the absurd price of three-halfpence sterling! It has a large grassy yard, very convenient for our horses, We have now only four, ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... hypocrisy, as you richly deserve, for ten to one he will drop in again when he comes back from his office, and arrest you wandering in Dreamland in the beautiful twilight. Delighted to find that you are neither reading nor writing,—the absurd dolt! as if a man weren't at work unless he be wielding a sledge-hammer!—he will preach out, and prose out, and twaddle out another hour of your golden eventide, "because he is your friend." You don't care whether he is judge or jury,—whether he talks sense or nonsense; you don't want him ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... affection would have seemed like evidence of childishness, and any one who indulged in it, a baby. Not having yet passed through those bitter experiences which enforce upon older years circumspection and coldness, I deprived myself of the pure delight of a fresh, childish instinct for the absurd purpose of ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... be prepared for her immediate negotiation with the enemy. Should she decide to treat, she would not be unmindful of their interests, she said, nor deliver them over into the enemy's hands. She repeated, however, the absurd opinion that there were means enough of making Philip nominal sovereign of all the Netherlands, without allowing him to exercise any authority over them. As if the most Catholic and most absolute monarch that ever breathed could be tied down by the cobwebs of constitutional or treaty stipulations; ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... pronunciation. I have followed the older authorities in writing "Chilan Balam," the modern preferring "Chilam Balam." Senor Eligio Ancona, in his recently published "Historia de Yucatan," (Vol. I., page 240, note, Merida, 1878,) offers the absurd suggestion that the name "balam" was given to the native soothsayers by the early missionaries in ridicule, deriving it from the well-known personage in the Old Testament. It is surprising that Senor Ancona, writing ...
— The Books of Chilan Balam, the Prophetic and Historic Records of the Mayas of Yucatan • Daniel G. Brinton
... how his humour, which was but the horse- play of vanity, helped him little to understand the world or himself. His vanity was ridiculous, his self-importance was against knowledge or wisdom; and Heaven had given him a small brain, a big and noble heart, a pedigree back to Rollo, and the absurd pride of a little lord in a little land. Angele knew all this; but realised also that he had offered her all he was able ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her diamonds into paste. It IS such a pity. Now, you remember the sudden end of the engagement between the Honourable Miss Miles and Colonel Dorking? Only two days before the wedding there was a paragraph in the MORNING POST to say that it was all off. And why? It is almost incredible, but the absurd sum of twelve hundred pounds would have settled the whole question. Is it not pitiful? And here I find you, a man of sense, boggling about terms when your client's future and honour are at stake. You surprise me, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that sleepest, what is sleep?" asks the curious Leonardo. Modern psychological science has little to offer of a positive nature in answer to this world-old question, but it has at least effectively disposed of the absurd theories of the materialists who would have us believe that sleep is a mere matter of blood circulation or of intoxication by accumulation of waste products in the system. Sleep states are not abnormal, but part and parcel of the life existence of the ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... surpassingly skilful with the needle. I know you once saw a charming morning gown in Paris which I persuaded you not to buy at the absurd price asked for it, after the merchant understood we were Americans. And I remember how you passed to another department, purchased materials, went home to our hotel, and cut and made a surprising imitation of the gown at ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... perfect devotion, cared for nothing but to punish his enemies, and to assure his safety. Faith, the little man would be as glad to thrash her as to overthrow Master Geoffrey. He had come near it, indeed. She smiled a little. The absurd imagination was not unpleasant. Monsieur was welcome to beat her if it would bring Harry any comfort. Aye, it would be very good for her. She would be glad to show Harry the stripes. Nay, but it was Harry who should beat her—only he never would. ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... again, and Reanda smiled at the absurd words—"A few more strawberries, and give me some more cream." But even the few notes, a lazy parody of the prima donna's singing of the phrase, charmed ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... bank, where he sat, after stumbling through a gutter of stagnant water. Harry Baggs followed and filled a cheap ornate pipe. The voice of the auctioneer rose, tiresome and persistent, punctuated by bids, haggling over minute sums for the absurd flotsam of a small house keeping square of worn oilcloth, a miscellany of empty jars. A surprisingly passionate argument arose between bidders; personalities ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... permanence he took for granted, a change of general taxation to suit Ireland was simply impracticable. He did, it is true, point out incidentally that the same hardship might be said to affect poor localities in Great Britain and poor individuals in Great Britain, but he recoiled from the absurd fallacy involved in saying that on that account Ireland was not unjustly taxed. If he had gone to that length he could never have ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... character as a lobbyist in Washington which had been made to appear incidentally in the evidence was also against her: the whole body of the testimony of the defense was shown to be irrelevant, introduced only to excite sympathy, and not giving a color of probability to the absurd supposition of insanity. The attorney then dwelt upon, the insecurity of life in the city, and the growing immunity with which women committed murders. Mr. McFlinn made a very able speech; convincing the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to my wish to explain to them without exaggeration the state of feeling amongst their enemies. Although these Northerners belonged to quite the upper classes, and were not likely to be led blindly by the absurd nonsense of the sensation press at New York, yet their ignorance of the state of the case in ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... round trot. Colonel Philibert, impatient to reach Beaumanoir, spurred on for a while, hardly noticing the absurd figure of his guide, whose legs stuck out like a pair of compasses beneath his tattered gown, his shaking head threatening dislodgment to hat and wig, while his elbows churned at every jolt, making play with the shuffling gait of his spavined ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the Government that it was making an indefensible mistake. But nothing could be done. Just as the first railways had been called toll-roads, so the telephone was solemnly declared to be a telegraph. Also, to add to the absurd humor of the situation, Judge Stephen, of the High Court of Justice, spoke the final word that compelled the telephone legally to be a telegraph, and sustained his opinion by a quotation from ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... members of the S—— family to have been heard by themselves? Miss Freer also has told me, that the same noises were heard at all hours day and night by herself and her guests for months after the H—— family and their servants had left Scotland. This so completely exonerates them from the absurd charge, that I should hardly have mentioned it, had not Miss Freer seemed quite under the impression that practical jokes had been played during the tenancy of the H——s; and as a proof of this, she told me that the doors, especially of two of the rooms, were marked with nailed ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... without making a reply, and immediately addressing the company, descanted on the various qualities of food, and their several adaptations to different ages, constitutions, and temperaments. He condemned the absurd practice which prevailed, for the master or mistress of the house to lavish entreaties on their guests to eat that which they might be better without; and insisted, at the same time, that the guests ought not to consult their own tastes exclusively. ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... caused an universal laugh, and the enraged and mortified judge proceeded to sum up, as he called it, in a fruitless and weak, though laboured attempt, to refute what I had said in my address In fact, he acted as a zealous advocate for the plaintiff, or rather as a stickler for the absurd rule of court, to make the jury give a verdict of damages, notwithstanding the only witness produced, swore, that there was not the thousandth part ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... steamer, as if petrified. I saw the man on the stretcher sit up, lank and with an uplifted arm, above the shoulders of the bearers. 'Let us hope that the man who can talk so well of love in general will find some particular reason to spare us this time,' I said. I resented bitterly the absurd danger of our situation, as if to be at the mercy of that atrocious phantom had been a dishonouring necessity. I could not hear a sound, but through my glasses I saw the thin arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of that apparition shining darkly far ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... continued to pursue the even tenor of a "school-marm's" way, unagitated by my honorary title. In fact, the whole affair was ridiculous; and I was inclined to feel a little ashamed of the distinction, when I reflected on the absurd figure I must have cut, with my head in a string like a grocer's parcel, and Boy imploring me, with all his astonished eyes, not to submit to so silly an operation. So he and I tacitly agreed to hush the matter up ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... one electrifying performance and not a single move of it was lost upon his audience which promptly gave way to hoots and yells of diabolical glee, at least the masculine portion of it did, while Polly and Peggy, though almost reduced to hysterics at the absurd spectacle, implored them to "stop yelling like Comanches and ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... The absolute candor and completely good understanding which existed a short time ago seems to have become clouded. Carraby is trying to suggest in English circles that I have been using my influence over here against the present government. The absurd part of it is that although I have been in France for a month, I arrived in Paris ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to the conventionalism of stage costumes, wrote Churchill's friend, Robert Lloyd, in his poem of "The Actor," 1762. And something he might have added touching the absurd old fashion of robing the queens of tragedy invariably in black, for it seemed agreed generally that "the sceptred pall of gorgeous tragedy" should be taken very literally, and should "sweep by" in the funereal fashion of sable velvet. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... has lifted, so last night I tried the firestep, and got a good sleep. The absurd thing was that I couldn't wake up properly. I came on duty at midnight, was roused, got to my feet, and started to walk along the trench. And then the Nameless Terror, that lurks in dark corners when one is a small boy, gripped me. I was frightened of ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... by the Turks present, it being still Ramadan. The Vayvode was an elderly man, with a white turban and a green benish, having weak eyes, and a alight hesitation in his speech; but civil and good-natured, without any of the absurd suspicions of the Mutsellim of Sokol. He at once granted me permission to see the castle, with the remark, "Your seeing it can do us no good and no harm, Belgrade castle is like a bazaar, any one can go out and in that likes." In the course of conversation he told us that Ushitza is the principal ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... laughed to himself, and his followers smiled at the absurd way in which these strangers loved to ride, while one of the many officers laughingly pointed to the long stirrup of the visitor's horse, but no one stirred; they only watched what was going on some thirty or ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... is pressed home by the Chief Justice, most strongly against him. Whatever makes for him is kept out of sight. To have been born a Roman Catholic is a crime; to have deliberately adopted that faith, is a damnable sin; one for which there is no expiation. The absurd fictions of Oates and Bedlow are commended to the jury as worthy of implicit credence. The whole weight of judicial authority and influence is thrown into the scale ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... expected it to be. Nothing was wanting to complete the article but a summary of the story and quotations from it, for which he had left plenty of space. He condemned the book utterly from the point of view of art, and for the silly ignorance of life displayed in it, and the absurd caricatures which were supposed to be people; he ridiculed the writer for taking herself seriously (but without showing why exactly she should not take herself seriously if she chose); he pitied her ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... trials, from a perishable state of being to a higher existence, is not that enough for a creature that is distinguished from other creatures only by more perfect instincts? If in moral philosophy there is not a single principle which does not lead to the absurd, or cannot be disproved by evidence, is it not high time that we should set to work to seek such dogmas as are written in the innermost nature of things? Must we not reverse ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... occurs at the beginning, rather than the end of an argument; and the difficulty here is that there is no way of testing which is a master-race except by asking which is your own race. If you cannot find out (as is usually the case) you fall back on the absurd occupation of writing history about prehistoric times. But I suggest quite seriously that if the Germans can give their philosophy to the Hottentots, there is no reason why they should not give their sense of superiority ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... and averse to all excess. He knew the absurd stories that were circulated about him, and he was sometimes vexed at theme It has been repeated, over and over again, that he was subject to attacks of epilepsy; but during the eleven years that I was almost constantly with him I never ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... dependence, that their characters have become dwarfed. The thirst for excitement that drives them restless from one amusement to another, and which finds relief in the extravagances of dress,—this passionate devotion to the frivolous and the absurd,—spring from the want of a reasonable employment for mind and body. My great principle is to exchange their passive condition for an active one. I would establish schools, where girls may receive a thorough education, such as is given to boys. In these schools, I should insist upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... suppose that they would again attempt to rebel; they cannot have forgotten how they were treated the last time they ventured to rise in arms. Of course, gentlemen from England and military officers could not be expected to know anything about the matter, and they are therefore ready to believe the absurd reports." ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... of Plato, and some of the plays in good translations, than he now acquires by going through the classical mill at a public school. The classics, like almost all other literature, must be read in masses to be appreciated. Boys think them dull mainly because of the absurd way in which they are made to ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... and with much inward resentment of the folly of the thing, Salisbury told his tale, and repeated reluctantly the absurd intelligence and the absurder doggerel of the scrap of paper, expecting to hear Dyson burst out into ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... little over twenty-three years of age at the time of his marriage. Hortense was nineteen. In his memoirs Louis treats with scorn and contempt the absurd libels respecting his domestic affairs, involving the purity of his wife's character and the legitimacy of his children. Napoleon, also, in his conversations at St. Helena, thought proper to allude to the subject, and indignantly to repel the charges which ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... a fact which of course adds to the interest of the chase, and turns dissolute Fernando's idle preference into something like a passion. Roldan, who has also had an eye upon her, and apparently no more than an eye, discovers that Fernando, in order to gratify his passion, is proposing to go the absurd length of marrying the young woman, and has sent for a priest for that purpose. Roldan, instigated thereto by primitive forces, thinks it would be impolitic for a Spanish grandee to marry with a heathen; ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... a nervous breakdown. This seems to me to be distinctly overdoing it. It is the doctor's love-story (a story so complicated that I cannot attempt a precis) which is the designedly central but actually subordinate theme. I have the absurd idea that this might really have begun life as a pathological thesis and suffered conversion into a novel. The author has no conscience in the matter of the employment of the much-abused device of coincidence. And I don't think the story would cure anyone of drug-taking. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... against seizure. At one time, at any rate, in the French ports were to be found brokers who would insure the evasion of a cargo of goods for a premium of fifteen per cent. At the safe distance of a century and a half, the absurd prohibition and its incompetent administration are equally comic. At the time, however, there was nothing comic in the contempt for law and order thus engendered, in the feeling of outrage on the part of those ruined by seizures, and in the alliance of respectable merchants ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... although naturally enough spoiled by the absurd amount of adulation he has met with, he has not been made cold-hearted or worldly. He is vain, but true and loyal to his class. He does not seek to disguise or belie his profession. In fact, he always dwells upon his past ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... communication with any who are not in the same condition as himself, and that in eating he must not help himself to his food with his hands. The chiefs are in such a case fed by their attendant; but the absurd prohibition is a serious punishment to the common people, who have ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... this outrageous fellow, impassioned, uproarious and exuberant, who, with his nose in the air and bristling moustaches, rushed through life defiantly flaunting the eccentric and whirlwind-like name of Heurtebise,* like a challenge thrown down to all the absurd conventionalities and prejudices of the bourgeois class. How, and by what strange charm had the little woman, brought up in a jeweller's shop, behind rows of watch chains and strings of rings, found the means of captivating ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... long been known, and the modification of this, which might be called the imaginative method, has been made familiar during the last fifty years under the popular name of psychology, and sometimes under the absurd name of electro-biology. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... presumed, to a bill of indictment which was found in the beginning of March, at the sessions at Hick's Hall, against the Count de Guerchy, for the absurd charge of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... morning began to dawn in the east, the chief grew seriously uneasy at the prolonged absence of his agents—a circumstance that he could only account for upon the absurd hypothesis that those stupid brutes had suffered themselves to be overtaken ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... ask," he said, his cruel mouth sneering under the absurd moustache, "what has happened to arouse this ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... legislatures and courts, of the rule of "machines" of graft in city and state and nation. There would be tales of the manners and morals of the idle rich, set against others of the sufferings of the poor. And week by week, as he read and pondered, Thyrsis began to realize the absurd inadequacy of the placid statement which he had made to his first Socialist acquaintance—that the solution of such problems was to be left to "evolution". It became only too clear to him that here was another war—the class-war; ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Upton) gives us another example of this mode of reasoning when, emboldened and satisfied with the absurd theory above exposed, he endeavors to prove the cause of the inefficiency of the Siemens and other machines. Couldn't the writer of the article see that since C E/(r R) that by R/n or by making R r, the machine would, according to his theory, have returned more useful ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... suspect that a genteel villa must formerly have stood near the farm-gate, which we found surmounted by broken statues of Venus and Diana. The poor goddesses were both headless, and some cruel fortune had struck off their hands, and they looked strangely forlorn in the swaggering attitudes of the absurd period of art to which they belonged: they extended their mutilated arms toward the sea for pity, but it regarded them not; and we passed before them scoffing at their bad taste, for we were hungry, and it was yet ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... gentleman—Christian, manly, and enlightened—is more, I believe, than Guizot or Sismondi could comprehend; it is a finer specimen of human nature than any other country, I believe, could furnish'. Nevertheless, our travellers would imitate foreign customs without discrimination, 'as in the absurd habit of not eating fish with a knife, borrowed from the French, who do it because they have no knives fit for use'. Places, no less than people, aroused similar reflections. By Pompeii, Dr. Arnold was not particularly impressed. 'There is only,' he observed, 'the same ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... history of my last interview was never given. My hint is this—I do not believe that self-destruction ever appeared to Miss Mayhew as an awful and revolting crime. Her actual life, hitherto, has been a round of frivolity. Only on the stage or in the absurd woes of her stilted heroes and heroines, has she given any attention to the sad and serious side of life. Men and women committing suicide to slow music is the chief stock in trade in some quarters, and when serious trouble came to her this devil's ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... displeased to learn that his editor had been nursed in that once famous 'nest of singing birds.' Of Boswell's pleasure I cannot doubt. How much he valued any tribute of respect from Oxford is shown by the absurd importance that he gave to a sermon which was preached before the University by an insignificant clergyman more than a year and a half after Johnson's death[45]. When Edmund Burke witnessed the long and solemn procession entering the Cathedral of St. Paul's, as it followed Sir Joshua Reynolds ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... When he went for his constitutional that day he was still chuckling at the absurd story his paper would have had him believe. Wasps indeed—killing a dog! Incidentally as he passed by the site of that first crop of puff-balls he remarked that the grass was growing very rank there, but he did not connect that in any way with the matter of his amusement. "We should certainly ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... proof is needed to refute the absurd hope entertained by "Prussian", according to which "political understanding" is called upon "to discover the roots of ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... beau, and was struck out of the list of visitors. Algernon generally occupied the baronet's disused town-house, a wretched being, dividing his time between horse and card exercise: possessed, it was said, of the absurd notion that a man who has lost his balance by losing his leg may regain it by sticking to the bottle. At least, whenever he and his brother Hippias got together, they never failed to try whether one leg, or two, stood the bottle ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... (q.v.), Alexander approved of Castlereagh's protest against Metternich's policy of "the governments contracting an alliance against the peoples,'' as formulated in the Carlsbad decrees, 1819, and deprecated any intervention of Europe to support "a league of which the sole object is the absurd pretensions of absolute power.''10 He still declared his belief in "free institutions, though not in such as age forced from feebleness, nor contracts ordered by popular leaders from their sovereigns, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... nothing could well be more entirely at variance with our present system of progressive learning, whereby Human Reason is trained and taught to pulverize into indistinguishable atoms all supernatural propositions, and to gradually eradicate from the mind the absurd notion of a Deity or deities, whom it is necessary to propitiate in order to live well. Much time is of course required to elevate the multitude above all desire for a Religion,—but the seed has been sown, and the harvest ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... asked whether the direction would apply to Roman Catholics, Hebrews, and other churches having a prescribed liturgy, and Stanton replied ex cathedra, in the affirmative, repeating his reprimand. Weitzel now appealed to the President, and the absurd controversy was stopped. Stanton seems to have acted at first in ignorance that individual ministers had no power to insert a prayer into the formal liturgy; but he could not yield when better informed, and a temperate memorial of the local clergy stating the canonical difficulty and their earnest ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Undine whispered to him: "My love, had not we better give up the foolish journey, and go home to Ringstetten in comfort?" But Huldbrand muttered angrily, "Then I am to be kept a prisoner in my own castle? and even there I may not breathe freely unless the fountain is sealed up? Would to Heaven the absurd connection"—But Undine pressed her soft hand gently upon his lips. And he held his peace, and mused upon all she ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... make in a little boat; but it would describe the difficulties of each so that a man in a little boat might possibly make them. It would describe the rush of the tide outside Margate and the still more dangerous rush outside Shoreham, and the absurd bar at Littlehampton that strikes out of the sea, and the place to lie at in Newhaven, and how not to stick upon the Platters outside Harwich; and the very tortuous entry to Poole, and the long channel into Christchurch past Hengistbury Head; and the enormous tides ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... losing at last all patience at the absurd idea of chasing a man with one leg all night long, he called his herd together, and fled, in disgust, toward the west, and never more appeared in all that part of ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... door, passing Schwartz by the way, and yawned as she looked out upon the street. Schwartz fawned after her to the door, and with a second yawn she repassed him, and returned to lie at the feet of the fat old gendarme. The absurd little drama of coquetry and worship went on until the old fellow arose with a friendly bon jour, to me, and a whistle to Lil, who followed him with a supercilious nose in the air. The despised Schwartz stood a while, and then set out after her at a ridiculous three-legged run, ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... ignorance that the place was passing from them until it was auctioned off over their heads and Mr. Fletcher became the purchaser. How this was, of course, I do not pretend to say, but when the Hall finally went for the absurd sum of seven thousand dollars life was at best a hard struggle in the State, and I imagine there was less surprise at the sacrifice of the place than at the fact that your grandfather should have been able to put down the ready money. ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... illness. Mr. Seibold's article, which by the way was regarded as a journalistic classic and for which Columbia University awarded the author the Pulitzer prize for the best example of newspaper reporting of the year, exposed the absurd rumours about the President's condition and furnished complete evidence of his determination to fight for the principles to establish which he had struggled so valiantly ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty |
