"Rational" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wisdom decreaseth not with time; it hath an ever-flourishing virtue that cleanseth its possession from every venom. O celestial gift of divine liberality, descending from the Father of light to raise up the rational soul even to heaven; thou art the celestial alimony of intellect, of which whosoever eateth shall yet hunger, and whoso drinketh shall yet thirst; a harmony rejoicing the soul of the sorrowful, and never in any way discomposing the hearer. Thou art the moderator and the rule of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... the chief cause of his birth, she is his Janani. For having nursed his young limbs into growth, she is called Amva. For bringing forth a child possessed of courage she is called Virasu. For nursing and looking after the son she is called Sura. The mother is one's own body. What rational man is there that would slay his mother, to whose care alone it is due that his own head did not lie on the street-side like a dry gourd? When husband and wife unite themselves for procreation, the desire cherished with respect to the (unborn) son are cherished by both, but ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... however, is seen in two places. The first is a group of signals for 'attacking the enemy at anchor by passing either outside them or between them and the land,' and for 'anchoring and engaging either within or outside the enemy.' Here we have a rational embodiment of the experience of the Nile. The second is a similar attempt to embody the teaching of Trafalgar, and the way it is done finally confirms the failure to understand what Nelson meant. So extraordinary is the signification ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... inspiration has told us that there is a time for all things. There certainly has been a time for every evil that human nature admits of to be vaticinated of President Jackson's administration; equally certain the time has now come for all rational and well-disposed people to compare the predictions with the facts, and to ask themselves if these calamitous prognostications have been verified by events? Have we peace, or war, with foreign nations? Certainly, we have peace with all the world! peace with ...
— Thomas Hart Benton's Remarks to the Senate on the Expunging Resolution • Thomas Hart Benton
... readings of the First Folio; but his text is deformed by many palpable errors. His practical experience as a playwright induced him, however, to prefix for the first time a list of dramatis personae to each play, to divide and number acts and scenes on rational principles, and to mark the entrances and exits of the characters. Spelling, punctuation, and grammar ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... but what I could carry in my hand; to see my generous benefactress no more; to quit my little arrangements and provision; and to seek once again, in some forlorn retreat, new projects, and, if of that I could have any rational hope, a new friend. I descended into the street with a heavy, not an irresolute heart. It was broad day. I said, persons are at this moment supposed to be roaming the street in search of me: I must not trust to the chance of their pursuing one ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... 'O Sir Gerald!' and 'O you sad boy,' desiring me in a rational way, I don't," said Gerald, imitating the tones, "laughing and letting me go on; I thought she ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... which are the diminutives of madness; in other words, because the soul of a woman has something obscure and mysterious in it, which lends itself to all superstitions and weakens the energies of man. To man belong law, justice, science, and philosophy, all that is disinterested, universal, and rational. Women, on the contrary, introduce into everything favor, exception, and personal prejudice. As soon as a man, a people, a literature, an epoch, become feminine in type, they sink in the scale of things. As soon as a woman quits the state of subordination in which her merits have free play, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... superfluous to dilate on the subject. It is a system of policy which it may be safely asserted is unknown in any other part of the world; and nothing but the indubitable certainly of its existence would convince any rational person that it could ever have entered into the contemplation of any one intrusted with the government of a colony. These duties have had the effect which might have been expected from them; they have in most instances amounted to actual prohibitions. Their operation, ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... My son, I now think myself the happiest of all men, since I find that you have returned to a rational mode of life. ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... strongest advocates of freedom and liberty for the oppressed of both sexes, and of her suffering sisters especially, she was an honour to the time and to womanhood. The women of the old world found in her a powerful, sympathizing, yet rational champion; just in her arguments in their behalf, able in her statements of their needs, and thoroughly interested ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty" (2 Cor. vi. 17, 18). This brings the matter plainly before us. There is the Divine exhortation, human concurrence, and the result—adoption. It is an absurd and unreasonable supposition to imagine that God deals with rational and responsible creatures as He does with vegetable and irrational brutes, which He does if the theory ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... factors affecting the mechanical properties of wood. This is a subject of interest to all who are concerned in the rational use of wood, and to the forester it also, by retrospection, suggests ways and means of regulating his forest product through control of the conditions of production. Attempt has been made, in the light of all data at hand, to answer many moot questions, such as the effect on the ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... coolness; neither yielding to difficulties nor disturbed or exasperated by them; patient and meek yet intrepid; persisting for twenty years through good report and evil report; just and charitable even to his most malignant enemies; unwearied in every experiment to disarm the prejudices of his more rational and disinterested opponents, and supporting the zeal, without dangerously exciting ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... be connected and explained, we have a clew to the criminal. The instances mentioned,—the motherly care of house and family, frugality, miserliness, hardness to servants, cruelty to aged parents,—seem rare and not altogether rational, yet they occur frequently and give the right clew to the criminal. There are still other similar combinations. Everybody knows feminine love for trials at court, for the daily paper's reports of them, and for public executions. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... particular predictions. But it is also a matter of reason, and we have a right to argue upon the question from the character of God, and the nature of man. Which of these views the Jewish or the Christian doth most commend itself to the sincere believer in the moral government of God, and the rational and accountable ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... often, no doubt, difficult to know what to do; but threats are seldom of avail to bring a man back to reason. Your father was angry with him, and yet declared that he was mad. That in itself was hardly rational. One does not ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... landscape snow or shower, If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet, Extend his evening beam, the fields revive, The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings. O shame to men! Devil with devil damned Firm concord holds; men only disagree Of creatures rational, though under hope Of heavenly grace, and, God proclaiming peace, Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife Among themselves, and levy cruel wars Wasting the earth, each other to destroy: As if (which might induce us to accord) Man had not hellish ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... a popular government were already laid in all the colonies. The institutions received from England were admirably calculated to prepare the way for temperate and rational republics. No hereditary powers had ever existed; and every authority had been derived either from the people or the king. The crown being no longer acknowledged, the people remained the only source of legitimate power. The materials ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... position of the philosophic Atheist is so misunderstood that it is the more necessary to put it plainly, and Theosophists, at least, in reading it, will see how Theosophy stepped in finally as a further evolution towards knowledge, rendering rational, and therefore acceptable, the loftiest spirituality that the human ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... on two grounds; first, the right of every rational being to become a "Priest unto himself," and by the test of enlightened reason, to form his own unbiased judgment of all things natural and spiritual: second, that the reputation of the Bishops who extracted these books from the original New Testament, under the pretence of being Apocryphal, ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... notable exceptions, the Dissenting preachers seem to have been decorously dull, and uninspiringly ethical. Without the zeal of the 'enthusiast,' whom they severely scanned from afar, and seeking in all things to prove that Christianity was so 'reasonable' as to be identical with 'rational philosophy,' it is little wonder that when the popular mind began to be stirred by a religious 'Revival' they were not its apostles, but mostly its critics. This is precisely the point where we may fitly turn to consider the growth of ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... philosophical speculation, does, in the treatise in question, lay down an universal first principle as the origin and ground of moral obligation; it is this:—'So act, that the rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law by all rational beings.' But when he begins to deduce from this precept any of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely, to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical (not to say physical) impossibility, in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... news-writers to repeat this lie in their gazettes so long, that they have become the dupes of it themselves. But there is no occasion to recur to this, in order to account for their arming. A more rational purpose avowed, that purpose executed, and when executed, a solemn agreement to disarm, seem to leave no doubt, that the re-establishment of the Stadtholder was their object. Yet it is possible, that having found that this court ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... we are practically bereft of it. But as some improvement may come about in course of time, the attempt will not be altogether thrown away. First of all, then, it is worthy of note that in the old country that advocate for rational feeding, Sir Henry Thompson, has recently expressed his opinion that a large proportion of the town population would profit by exchanging some of their meat, as an article of daily diet, for fish. He further adds that the digestive ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... Europeans of being cold and reserved towards strangers; for my part, I found them sociable and communicative in the extreme. A few hours after I had embarked on board the steamboat I found myself quite at home. I was much pleased to observe the rational manner in which the passengers amused themselves. Little groups were formed, where religion, politics and business matters were discussed with excellent sense and judgment. These seemed to be the common topics of discourse in both ends of the cabin. I frequented ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... stomach and expect to increase the strength of the organ. It is really necessary, if you are seriously desirous of securing the best results in vitality building, to learn at least the fundamental facts relating to rational dietetics; and, after acquiring this knowledge, to apply it to your individual use throughout every day of your life. The suggestions that I have offered in the chapter on Cleansing and Stimulating the Alimentary Canal are truly ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... will disregard the ethics of the thing and look at it from a purely rational viewpoint, if a rational viewpoint is possible to anybody but van Manderpootz. Don't you realize that in order to attain Carter's attitude toward Fitch, you would have to adopt his entire viewpoint? Not," he added tersely, "that I think his point of view is greatly inferior to yours, ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... the beginning again. The whole thing had been an error. Sylvia had been rendered no services at all. Runyon had engaged a horse for his own use, and the bill had simply been sent to the wrong place. That was the rational explanation. It was ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... answered the engineer, laughing, "whether just or not, we must submit to it, and here lies the reason for this peculiarity. The earth does not describe a circle round the sun, but an ellipse, as it must by the laws of rational mechanics. Now, the earth occupies one of the centres of the ellipse, and consequently, at the time of its transfer, it is further from the sun, that is to say, at its apogee, and at another time nearer, that is to say, at its ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... those who are seeking light on the question of rational living and to all who are suffering from the effects of wrong living. Thought along this line expresses growth and progress, and with it comes knowledge. Common sense and judgment, following a natural instinct, will go a long way toward attaining better health. But those who, through ...
— Food for the Traveler - What to Eat and Why • Dora Cathrine Cristine Liebel Roper
... I am no amoeba, no mere sack and stomach; I am capable of discourse, can ride a bicycle, look up trains in Bradshaw; in fact, I am and calmly boast myself a Human Being—that Masterpiece of Nature, a rational, ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... impression is, that these represent the real teachings of their sacred books or their earliest traditions. But when one enters upon a careful study of the non-Christian religions, and traces them back to their sources, he finds more rational accounts of the Creation and the order of nature, and sees striking points of resemblance to the Mosaic record. The story of Genesis represents the "Beginning" as formless, chaotic, and dark. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... science, two things are requisite:—Facts and Ideas; observation of Things without, and an inward effort of Thought; or, in other words, Sense and Reason. Neither of these elements, by itself, can constitute substantial general knowledge. The impression of sense, unconnected by some rational and speculative principle, can only end in a practical acquaintance with individual objects; the operations of the rational faculties, on the other hand, if allowed to go on without a constant reference of external things, can lead only ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to all her purifying, strengthening inspirations. "There is only one kind of prayer," it says, "which is reasonable, and that is the deep, silent adoration of the greatness and beauty and order around us, as revealed in the realms of non-rational life and in Humanity; as we bow our heads before the laws of the universe, and mould our lives into obedience to their voice, we find a strong, calm peace steal over our hearts, a perfect trust in the ultimate triumph of the right, a quiet determination to 'make our lives sublime.' ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Critique of Reason completes its work of destruction when, as Dialectic (Logic cf. Illusion), it follows the refutation of dogmatic ontology—developed in the Analytic—which believed that it knew things in themselves through the concepts of the understanding, with a refutation of rational psychology, rational cosmology, and rational theology. It shows that the first is founded on paralogisms, and the second entangled in irreconcilable contradictions, while the third makes vain efforts to prove the existence of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the true everlasting life—the life of God and Christ—but a life of love, a life of perfect active, self-sacrificing goodness, which is the one only true life for all rational beings, whether on earth or in heaven—in heaven as well as on earth. Form your own notions as you will about angels and saints in heaven, (for every one must have some notions about them,) and try to picture to yourself what the souls ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... accident discovers sense, is not a rational being. A man only is so who understands, who distinguishes, ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... quite at home with the dreaded master of the Abbey. At Miss Wendover's request she played for nearly an hour, and Brian listened with evident appreciation, sitting at his ease just outside the open window, among the roses and lilies of June, under a moonlit sky. It was a calm, peaceful, rational kind of evening, and Ida's mind was tranquillized by the time it was over; and when she went to her room, after a friendly parting with Miss Wendover's nephew, she told herself that she was not likely to be often troubled with his society. He was too much a lover of learned solitude to be ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... about endeavouring to bring the negro to a more rational religious belief, Costal strode ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... but externally with dignity; and he every year celebrated a sort of anniversary of his disgrace, by extraordinary acts, of which ill-humour and solitude were oftentimes absurdly the fruit. He himself spoke of it, and used to say that he was not rational at the annual return of this epoch, which was stronger than he. He thought he pleased the King by this refinement of attention, without perceiving he ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... says the author of "Representative Men." "Evil," according to old philosophers, "is good in the making; that pure malignity can exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent. It is Atheism; it is the last profanation." "The divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself into grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... was stated above (A. 1); it is evident that all things partake somewhat of the eternal law, in so far as, namely, from its being imprinted on them, they derive their respective inclinations to their proper acts and ends. Now among all others, the rational creature is subject to Divine providence in the most excellent way, in so far as it partakes of a share of providence, by being provident both for itself and for others. Wherefore it has a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... him in the face. Was it possible that he had been wrong, and that Heathcote, though he had expressed himself badly, was entitled to some sympathy in his fear of what might be done to him by an enemy? Medlicot also desired to be just, being more rational, more logical, and less impulsive than the other, being also somewhat too conscious of his own superior intelligence. He knew that Heathcote had gone away in great dudgeon, and he almost feared that he had been harsh and unneighborly. After a while he ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... scientific medicine, the medicine of observation, denying prodigies, seeking natural causes for diseases, and already setting up rational therapeutics. There are seventy-two works called "Hippocratical," which belong to his school; some ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... serene about her. Even a wavering note of something more joyous than mere peace, a courage, a strength that promised happiness must have radiated from her to him. For Creed's eyes opened and looked full into hers with a wholly rational expression which had long been ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... main principle. It is that a young democratic country, still almost free from extremes of wealth and poverty, from class hatreds and fears and the barriers these create, supplies an unequalled field for safe and rational experiment in the hope of preventing and shutting out some of the worst social evils and miseries which afflict great nations alike in the old world and ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... fifty miles, one piece being placed high upon Criffel Mountain, on the opposite side of the Solway estuary; so also are fragments of the Alps found far up the slopes of the Jura. There are even blocks on the east coast of England, supposed to have travelled from Norway. The only rational conjecture which can be formed as to the transport of such masses from so great a distance, is one which presumes them to have been carried and dropped by icebergs, while the space between their original and final sites was under ocean. ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... And thus he commenced the downward course of unfaltering, deliberate deceit. Hitherto he had deceived himself chiefly, keeping the truth in the background of his consciousness; now he was carefully planning to deceive others. And oh, what a mean, paltry deceit it was—so low does rational, immortal man stoop when under the iron grasp of a master sin! And so, with carefully-locked door, and stealthy step, and cautious handling of glass and bottle, lest any one should hear, Frank Oldfield drank daily of the poison that was ruining his body and paralysing ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... that the present condition of Canada generally is exceedingly prosperous, and when the resources of the country are fully developed by the railroads now in progress of construction, and by the influx of capital and population from Europe, no rational person can doubt that it will ultimately be as prosperous and opulent as any country in the world, ancient ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... respectable journalist and gracefully anxious to give satisfaction to your editor. But my own impression is that a man has to be a bit of an ass before he can be improved by marriage. Most men get so mercenary, they simply work and do nothing a rational creature should. They are like the male ants that shed their wings after the nuptial flight. And their wives go round talking fashion articles, and calling them dear old stupids, and flirting over teacups with the unmarried ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... are right, my good sir", replied the Governor. "I promise you that as long as you continue your work in the rational mode you have already pursued, making no effort to excite treasonable feelings towards His Majesty's government, you shall ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... seething grass, but the sea itself move and sound in all the cracks and caves round them and below them and on every side. They all felt the note that had been struck—the American as an art critic and the poet as a poet; and the Squire, who believed himself boiling with an impatience purely rational, did not really understand his own impatience. In him, more perhaps than the others—more certainly than he knew himself—the sea wind went ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... all, reason was called to decide upon questions before which man's reason stands impotent; and imagination and emotion, those great auxiliaries to all deep religious feeling, were bid to stand rebuked in her presence, as hinderers of the rational faculty, and upstart pretenders to rights which were not theirs. 'Enthusiasm' was frowned down, and no small part of the light and fire ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... he knew by experience that the lessons he wished to inculcate were more likely to be remembered in that form. Mr. Froude, who takes a higher estimate of Bunyan's verse than is commonly held, remarks that though it is the fashion to apply the epithet of "doggerel" to it, the "sincere and rational meaning" which pervades his compositions renders such an epithet improper. "His ear for rhythm," he continues, "though less true than in his prose, is seldom wholly at fault, and whether in prose or verse, he ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... dyspepsia, have adopted the plan of prolonged fasting advocated by Dr. Dewey, and testify to a cure by this method. While heroic, it is certainly more rational than drug treatment. For acute dyspepsia a ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... of the truth of omens. Perhaps I should not write you these things, but the truth is, I cannot help myself; there is no power of resistance in me. I do not know if I am well or ill; my brain is on fire, and I go on thinking and thinking, trying to arrive at some rational belief, but never succeeding. Sometimes I think of myself as a fly on a window-pane, crawling and buzzing, and crawling and buzzing again, and so ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... whose breasts the affections instinct in woman, not being exercised by conjugal or maternal ties, expand into some other channel; and, if denied some dear object on which to place them, expends them on the domestic animals with which, in default of more rational ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... We shall have to run, not until we are out of breath, but until we have caught up with our own conditions, before we shall be where we were when we started; when we started this great experiment which has been the hope and the beacon of the world. And we should have to run twice as fast as any rational program I have seen in order to get ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... difficult problems which perplex the physician. If I pause to dwell upon these, it is because they exemplify forms of disease in which my method of treatment has had the largest success; it is because some of them are simply living records of the failure of every other rational plan and of many irrational ones; it is because many of them find no place in the text-book, however sadly familiar ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... opinion, and simply state his disagreement or agreement with others, would be contrary to the whole spirit of this work, and leave the subject where it once was—in the realm of hopeless disagreement and controversy. If the problem of the registers is to be solved to the satisfaction of the rational thinker, it must be by evidence, and not the mere opinions of any teacher or writer, however eminent. To lay this evidence before the reader is ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... reluctantly, enterprising traders are long kept back, because they cannot at once borrow the capital, without which skill and knowledge are useless. All sudden trades come to England, and in so doing often disappoint both rational probability and the predictions of philosophers. The Suez Canal is a curious case of this. All predicted that the canal would undo what the discovery of the passage to India round the Cape effected. Before that ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... Lady Macleod, very grimly. Now George Vavasor was Kate's brother, and was therefore also first cousin to Alice. He was heir to the old squire down in Westmoreland, with whom Kate lived, their father being dead. Nothing, it would seem, could be more rational than that Alice should go to Switzerland with her cousins; but Lady Macleod was clearly not of this opinion; she looked very grim as she made this allusion to cousin George, and seemed to be preparing herself for ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... Virginia, about the year 1801. His parents came from Pennsylvania, and their baptism into the church of the Brethren is noted in this biography. About the year 1838, Jacob, their eldest son, became very strongly impressed with the rational and logical arguments given by Dr. Samuel Thompson in a work written and published by him entitled: "GUIDE TO HEALTH." This guide indicated and represented the way from sickness back to health as being very short and easy to find, exempt ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... for a few hours her orderly and kindly ways, Nature runs amok, raving and shrieking. Her transient irresponsibleness and mischievousness are then cited as everyday, persistent vices. Not so. Nature is rational even in her most passionate moments. Vegetation, rank and gross as in an unweeded garden, requires vigorous lopping and pruning. These twenty-year-interval storms comb out superfluous leaves and branches, cut out dead wood, send to ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... chanced, however, even this very rational explanation of Kane's was far from the truth. The truth was that the great wolf had profited by his period of captivity in the hands of a masterful man. Into his fine sagacity had penetrated the conception—hazy, perhaps, but none the less effective—that man's vengeance ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... the American regained his scattered wits than he leaped to the floor. The interne and the nurses tried to force him back upon the cot, thinking that he was in the throes of a delirium, and it required his best efforts to convince them that he was quite rational. ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Grace of this purpose, she felt it was in keeping with all the rest. It might mean what was on the surface; it might mean more. It might be a part of the possible impulse that had driven him into the Vermont woods, or the natural and rational step he would have taken had he never seen her. At any rate, she felt that he was daily growing more remote, and that by a nice gradation of effort he was consciously withdrawing himself. And yet she could scarcely dwell on a single word or act, and say: "This proves it." His manner toward her ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... have that subject newly writ o'er, that I may example my digression by some mighty precedent. Boy, I do love that country girl that I took in the park with the rational hind Costard: she ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... and she held out her hand to the young man; for though to English ears his language might appear overstrained, and his sentiments exaggerated and unnatural, for an Italian she knew it was composed and rational, and it gave her confidence in the ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... been admired as a fine one, the light of it sets down amid mists and storms. I neither regret nor fear the approach of death if it is coming. I would compound for a little pain instead of this heartless muddiness of mind which renders me incapable of anything rational. The expense of my journey will be something considerable, which I can provide against by borrowing L500 from Mr. Gibson. To Mr. Cadell I owe already, with the cancels on these apoplectic books, about L200, and must run it up to L500 more at least; ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... President of the Convention; he has made the Convention decree, so they name it, decreter the 'Existence of the Supreme Being,' and likewise 'ce principe consolateur of the Immortality of the Soul.' These consolatory principles, the basis of rational Republican Religion, are getting decreed; and here, on this blessed Decadi, by help of Heaven and Painter David, is to be ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... me to spring from enthusiasm rather than from art. I do not think I knew then that even prophets correct their proofs. As for Jacobean prose, I thought it too exuberant; and Queen Anne prose appeared to me terribly bald, and irritatingly rational. But Mr. Pater's essays became to me 'the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.' They are still this to me. It is possible, of course, that I may exaggerate about them. I certainly hope that I do; for where ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... train his children." But when she rejoins to this, "Very true; but suppose I choose not to have a husband, or am not chosen for a wife—what then? I am still subject to your laws. Why am I not entitled, as a rational human being, to a voice in shaping them? I have physical needs, and must somehow earn a living. Why should I not be at liberty to earn it in any honest and useful calling?"—the mob's flout is hushed, and the legislator Is struck ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... times the conceit of making an echo talk sensibly, and give rational answers. If this could be excusable in any writer, it would be in Ovid where he introduces the Echo as a nymph, before she was worn away into nothing but a voice. The learned Erasmus, though a man of wit and genius, has composed ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... love us are hastening to enter. Preserve, then, a mind innocent and pure, looking for everything from God; thus will that beauty of soul remain, for which thy bridegroom to-day adores thee. I am no bigot, no fanatic; I am thy aunt of seven-and-twenty. I love all in innocent and rational amusements. But for this very reason I say to thee—be a dear, good Christian, and thou wilt as a mother, yes, as a grandmother, ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... escaped from the seclusion of Cumnor Place, and the dangers to which she was there exposed, it would have seemed her most rational course to retire to her father's, or elsewhere at a distance from the power of those by whom these dangers had been created. When, instead of doing so, she demanded to be conveyed to Kenilworth, Wayland had been only able to account for her conduct by supposing that ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... or not, I do not know; but that it is a perfectly feasible and rational undertaking, under proper conditions, I as firmly believe as I do that I am alive," and he brought his fist down upon the desk by way of emphasis with a whack that made the various loose articles in the little office rattle. Even the bust upon the bracket moved ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... convulsions of her world, this crisis in the history of Judah herself, Jeremiah remains the one constant, rational, and far-seeing power in the national life. But at what terrible cost to himself! His experience is a throng of tragic paradoxes. Faithful to his mission, every effort he makes to rouse his people to ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... they are sure of having their own way, have sometimes ways as odd as those of the unfurred, unfeathered animals, who walk on two legs, and talk, and are called rational. My beautiful white greyhound, Mayflower,* for instance, is as whimsical as the finest lady in the land. Amongst her other fancies, she has taken a violent affection for a most hideous stray dog, who made his appearance here about six ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... in Cambridge," Dickens wrote to Lord Lytton, "I thought I would go over the Medical School, and see the exact localities where Professor Webster did that amazing murder, and worked so hard to rid himself of the body of the murdered man. (I find there is of course no rational doubt that the Professor was always a secretly cruel man.) They were horribly grim, private, cold, and quiet; the identical furnace smelling fearfully (some anatomical broth in it I suppose) as if the body were ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... curious to know why there should be mystery or secrecy connected with Swan Day's meeting with Dorcas, or why they should meet under a pear-tree, instead of her father's roof-tree, in a rational way, it might be a sufficient answer, that there never was and never will be anything direct and straightforward about Cupid or his doings. But the real and more important reason was, that Colonel Fox did not like Swan, and had said, in so many words, that "he wouldn't have Swan Day ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... went upon a much more probable design; and tho' he may be said to act upon a meaner principle than that of pointing his rage at the personal glory of his Creator; yet I own, that in my opinion, it was by much the more rational undertaking, and more likely to succeed; and that was, that whereas he perceived this new species of creatures had a sublime as well as a human part, and were made capable of possessing the mansions of eternal ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... intrigues, envyings, calumnies, murders, fratracidal civil wars, and all the train of miseries which for some years after this history made infamous the house of Baldwin, as they did many another noble house, till they were stopped by the gradual adoption of the rational rule of primogeniture. ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... this extraordinary letter twice or thrice. At first he was tempted to throw it aside as the production of a madman, so little did "the scraps from play-books," as he termed the poetical quotation, resemble the correspondence of a rational being. On a re-perusal, however, he thought that, amid its incoherence, he could discover something like a tone of awakened passion, though expressed in a manner ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... contraries, and are immixed with neither vexation, remorse, nor repentance; and their good is congenial to the mind and truly mental and genuine, and not superinduced. Nor is it devoid of reason, but most rational, as springing either from that in the mind that is contemplative and inquiring, or else from that part of it that is active and heroic. How many and how great satisfactions either of these affords us, no one can ever relate. But to hint briefly at some of them. We have the historians before ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... "The imperative and oracular form of the inspired Scripture is the form of reason itself, in all things purely rational and moral."—Statesman's Manual, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... apprehension of God—so education, which in this department is but the development of our capacity, preparing us to pursue the truth, and master the difficulties which frown us away from its attainment, rises into a duty the most imperative upon all rational beings. The same path here stretches onward before both sexes, the same motives impel them, the same objects are presented to them, the same obligations rest upon them. Neither youth nor age—neither man nor woman, ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... legal origin of the English interest there can be no rational debate. There are some things so simple that one can almost prove them with plans and diagrams, as in Euclid. One could make a kind of comic calendar of what would have happened to the English diplomatist if he had been silenced every time by Prussian diplomacy. Suppose we arrange it in the form ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... inauspicious, unlucky.[1007] Similar lists of lucky and unlucky days are found among existing tribes,[1008] and the popular luck codes in Christian communities are numerous and elaborate.[1009] These have done, and still do, great harm by substituting irrational for rational rules of conduct. ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... justifies such tyranny, but it does seem to contemplate the weighing of one man's loss against another's gain, and such a method of balancing does not at bottom commend itself to our sense of justice. We may lay down that if there is a rational social order at all it must be one which never rests the essential indispensable condition of the happiness of one man on the unavoidable misery of another, nor the happiness of forty millions of men on the misery of one. It may be temporarily expedient, but it is eternally unjust, that ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... of the magnet is thus called sometimes in France; the austral pole of a magnet is the one which points towards the north polar regions As unlike magnetic poles attract each other, it is but rational to call the north-seeking pole of the magnet the south or Austral Pole. In the same nomenclature the south pole of a magnet, or the south-seeking pole, is ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... sword in a scabbard of white polished leather, and clothed in black velvet knee-breeches, with yellow gloves and a cocked hat. The third President of the United States harbored no such illusions and affected no such poses. Governments were made by rational beings—"by the consent of the governed," he had written in a memorable document—and rested on no emotional basis. Thomas Jefferson remained Thomas Jefferson after his election to the chief magistracy; and so contemporaries saw him in the President's House, an unimpressive figure clad in ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... father develops another thesis; a rich and rational bourgeois, he tries to inculcate in his son from his infancy—a son who later augments the ranks of the "restless"—the ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... the Newbury estates who heartily sympathized with their point of view; but on the whole the defenders of the Betts marriage were more. The affair got into the newspapers, and a lecturer representing the "Rational Marriage Union" appeared from London, and addressed large and attentive audiences in the little towns. After one of these lectures, Newbury returning home at night from Coryston was pelted with stones and clods by men posted behind a hedge. He was only slightly ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... verisimilitude, which is opposed to extravagance, and religious truth or hope, which is opposed to the inquietude of absolute despair. For esthetic verisimilitude, the expression of which is sensible, differs from logical truth, the demonstration of which is rational; and religious truth, the truth of faith, the substance of things hoped for, is not equivalent to moral truth, but superimposes itself upon it. He who affirms a faith built upon a basis of uncertainty does ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... His sociable disposition urges him to co-operate in industry, and reason sanctions his inclination. The history of society reveals an increasing influence of the intellect in thus directing instinct and feeling. It is a law of social activity that it tends to become more rational with the increase of education and experience. But it is never possible to determine the quantitative influence of the various factors that enter into a decision, or to estimate the relative pressure of the forces that urge to activity. Alike in mental and in physical activity there ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... pleaded for by Swift Prasini Pratt, Dr., Dean of Down Prayer, an evening Preaching, value of practice in simplicity in, a prime requisite the popular manner the best styles to be avoided in the moving manner jesting in plain reasoning in pathetic versus rational two principal branches of quotations in uselessness of taking the mysteries of Christian religion for subjects for not to perplex with doubts in one of the disadvantages it labours under its great neglect its neglect attended by the misbehaviour of worshippers objections against, and the unreasonableness ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... God and the learning of His creatures. The schoolmistress was not a brilliant woman. Nor was it accomplishments of which Fanny stood in need, so much as the opening of her thoughts and mind by profitable books and rational conversation. Beautiful as were all her natural feelings, the schoolmistress had now little difficulty in educating feelings up to the dignity ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... branch nor the other can have considered its judgment infallible, since they eventually agreed to a transaction by which each gave up its objection to the book patronised by the other. Moreover, the "fathers" argue (in a more or less rational manner) about the canonicity of this or that book, and are by no means above producing evidence, internal and external, in favour of the opinions they advocate. In fact, imperfect as their conceptions of scientific method may be, they not unfrequently used it to the best of their ability. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Paddy Joyce, definitely decide to go and enlist at Fortbrack next Monday, which gave a turn more to the pinching screw of his own banned wish. It was with a concerted scheme for ascertaining whether there were any chance of bringing his mother round to a rational view of the matter that he and his friend dropped into her cabin next morning on the way to carry up a load of turf. Mrs. Doherty was washing her couple of blue-checked aprons in an old brown butter-crock, and Mick ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... had made the one rational, one practical discovery, that life is to be lived, not by helpless assent or aimless drifting, but by active co-operation with the Life that has said "Live." To her everything was part of a whole, which, with its parts, she was learning ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... dear fellow, how often must I explain to you your confusions? Orthodox sentiment and stereotyped emotion master you. And then your temperament! You are really incapable of rational judgments. Cerberus? Pshaw! A flash expiring, a mote of fading sparkle, a dim-pulsing and dying organism—pouf! a snap of the fingers, a puff of breath, what would you? A pawn in the game of life. Not even a problem. There is no problem in a stillborn babe, nor in a dead child. ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... would naturally end, and the audience would feel that both "HAMLET" and the "KING" had conducted themselves in a creditable manner. By such a change as this, Hamlet becomes a rational and enjoyable play. But will, you ever find a REFORMING NUISANCE who will offer to improve Hamlet? Not a bit of it. There is nothing which your NUISANCE is more reluctant to do than to engage in any ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... assemblies; they alone know how to use the pen and how to discuss. Secretaries, councilors, theologians, they participate in all edicts; they have their hand in the government; they strive through its agency to bring a little order out of immense disorder; to render the law more rational and more humane, to re-establish or preserve piety, instruction, justice, property, and especially marriage. To their ascendancy is certainly due the police system, such as it was, intermittent and incomplete, which prevented Europe from falling into a Mongolian anarchy. If, down ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... at last,' said the wise man, 'and this is the dust of it.' So he quieted his household and his negroes, lighted his candles, and went to his scientific books, in that delight, mingled with an awe not the less deep, because it is rational and self-possessed, with which he, like the other men of science, looked at the wonders ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent. I hope some will be inclined to judge impartially, and have yet reserved so much of the Christian as to believe, and at least to hope, that a rational creature cannot abandon himself so as to act without some reason, and are willing not only to have me defend myself, but to be able to answer for me where they hear me causelessly insulted by others, and therefore are willing to have ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... districts were all of different shapes, somewhat in the manner shown in the illustration. The puzzle is to give the three measurements for each of the four districts in the smallest possible numbers—all whole furlongs. In other words, it is required to find (in the smallest possible numbers) four rational right-angled ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... lay in a fund of superstition that serves them for life: but I never heard they had the least opportunity of cultivating the mind, of exercising the powers of reason, or of imbibing a taste for letters, or any rational or useful accomplishment. After being taught to prattle, to dance and play at cards, they are deemed sufficiently qualified to appear in the grand monde, and to perform all the duties of that high rank and station in life. In mentioning cards, I ought to observe, that they learn ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... certain, incontrovertible, rational, substantial, consistent, indisputable, reasonable, true, demonstrable, indubitable, sagacious, undeniable, demonstrated, infallible, sensible, unquestionable, established, logical, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... were resumed, and the practice of smoking began steadily to increase. The German china bowl with globular receiver of the essential oil, the absorbent meerschaum, the red Turkish bell-shaped clay, the elaborate hookah,—a really elegant ornament, and perhaps the most healthful and rational form of smoking,—pipes of all shapes, began to fill the shops of London. Coleridge, when cured of opium, took to snuff. Byron wrote dashingly about 'sublime Tobacco,' but I do not think he carried the practice ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... had only to be frank with each other and commonly reasonable and there would be no quarrel left. But it is doubtful whether this sagacious advice could have done them much good if they had taken it. "Talk things over like rational creatures," was (as usual) the prescription. But if they had really been rational, they would only have come to the conclusion that they ought not to be married. The force of their passion, to be sure, was real enough and still moved in them. To hold them together they ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... the State governments, makes them constituent parts of the national sovereignty, by allowing them a direct representation in the Senate, and leaves in their possession certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power. This fully corresponds, in every rational import of the terms, with the idea of ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... restrictions, it cannot well be, as the world is constituted, more than once or twice in the course of an existence, the rest of the sojourn upon earth being devoted to a sublimation of our thought. But always wise, sensible, sagacious, rational; always in wig and spectacles; always algebraic and mathematical; doctrinal and didactic; ever to sit like FRANKLIN'S portrait, with the index fixed upon 'causality;' one might as well be a petrified ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... it would be bad policy to insert it; if worse, I should be like a tailor who would recommend his abilities by engrafting an old sleeve on a new coat.... Southey tells me that he has known his lady more than twenty years, that the disproportion of their ages is rational, and that having only one daughter left, his necessary absences would be irksome to her. Whatever he does, is done wisely and virtuously. As for Rogers, almost an octogenarian, be it on his own head! A ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... domestic customs of the wealthy classes, could be effected. And so great is the natural indolence of mankind, that the amount of exercise, needful for health, will never be secured by those who are led to it through no necessity, but merely from rational considerations. Yet the pressure of domestic troubles, from the want of good domestics, has already determined many a mother, in the wealthy classes, to train her daughters to aid her in domestic service; and thus necessity is compelling mothers ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... catastrophe competitive national arming has led, and would probably again lead the most civilized nations of Europe. Shall the white race despair of escaping from this hell? The only way of escape in sight is the establishment of a rational international community. Should the enterprise fail after fair trial, the world will be no worse off than it was in July, 1914, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... the people, shooting with the cross-bow at the bird on the top of a pole; large tents are pitched for their reception, and they spend the evening; the court ladies came the second evening. You would have enjoyed it much. The Germans are a more rational people in these matters than we are, the best society enjoy this fair, and sit out under tents taking their coffee and meals and enjoying the sight with their families and wives. All the musicians from Bohemia, Tyrol and various other districts of Germany were here playing on various instruments ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... themselves to the others, but at last there is a movement, known as the arts and crafts movement, more properly called applied esthetics, which is the effort to relate art to life. The old banality, "Art for Art's sake," is obsolete, and the vital meaning of art is in a more rational and beautiful expression of life, as it were, the continent art of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... Spirit of Obligations" was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's Tales[21] of Old Japan, wherein I learned for the first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his country's laws—a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should commemorate all is more than I can hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more to the point, after having said so much upon improving books, to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one accustomed to historical study, to accept as authentic, and without adequate corroboration, documents whose origin and history are so clouded with secrecy, mystery, and ignorance? And how can men and women who are to all appearances rational and high-minded bring themselves to indict and condemn a whole race, invoking thereby the perils of world-wide racial conflict, upon the basis of such flimsy, clouded, and tainted testimony? No decent and self-respecting judge or jury ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... surroundings with eyes that were once more clear and rational, he saw that the dingy little grate had been opened and a bright fire was burning in it. The clothing he had left on the floor in a heap had been put away. The window shade no longer hung askew. He looked round half-expecting to see his Aunt Eunice or Flip, ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... hollandaise est presque inconnue aux etrangers a cause de la langue peu repandue qui lui sert d'organe." Under such circumstances it may be presumed that many a query will now be made, and many a new fact elicited. We may expect, by the means of De Navorscher, the further gratification of rational curiosity, and the improvement of historical ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... ornament. From that time, instead of ornamenting construction, they constructed ornament; and as the Reformation came to the Church in the sixteenth century so to architecture came degradation. And then the Renaissance of pagan types, from which the Gothic had derived its being by a rational development, was by the revivalists of those days hotch-potched into a more or less homogeneous mass, which even the genius of Wren could leave ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... hers, if monsieur will accompany." We walked along several corridors till we reached the room in which hung the parrot, I quite expected it to fly at me again and try to get rid of its miserable secret But no! It sat on its stick, perfectly quiet and rational. ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... find gods, who are everywhere. If all life and sense shall cease, then shalt thou cease also to be subject to either pains or pleasures; and to serve and tend this vile cottage; so much the viler, by how much that which ministers unto it doth excel; the one being a rational substance, and a spirit, the other ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... known, too, that every human being has by creation and hence from birth three discrete degrees or degrees of height, and that he comes at birth into the first degree, called natural, and can grow in this degree continuously until he becomes rational. He comes into the second degree, called spiritual, if he lives according to spiritual laws of order, which are divine truths. He can also come into the third degree, called celestial, if he lives according to the celestial laws of order, which are ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... we engage in explanations and discussions of principles, theories, broad social topics, and the like—when we expound, moralize, or philosophize,—our subject matter is general. We approach our readers or hearers on the thinking, the rational side of their natures. Our phraseology is therefore normally abstract. But when, on the other hand, we narrate an event or depict an appearance, our subject matter is specific. We approach our readers or hearers on the sensory or emotional ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... said Porthos, who went to execute the orders, casting all the while looks behind him, to see if the bishop of Vannes were not deceived; and if, on returning to more rational ideas, he would not recall him. The alarm was sounded, the trumpets brayed and drums rolled: the great bell of the belfry was put in motion. The dikes and moles were quickly filled with the curious and soldiers; the matches sparkled in the hands of the artillerymen, placed ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... distressed as before, looking at each other slyly, understanding each other better with their tails than they ever understood with their mouths, for there is never any equivoque in the transactions of the parts of nature, and everything therein is rational and of easy comprehension, seeing that it is a science which we learn ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... conclusion is that the moral sense is fundamentally identical with the social instincts, which have been developed for the good of the community; and he suggests that the concept which thus enables us to interpret the biological ground-plan of morals also enables us to frame a rational ideal of the moral end. "As the social instincts," he says,[193] "both of man and the lower animals have no doubt been developed by nearly the same steps, it would be advisable, if found practicable, to use the same definition in both cases, and to take as the ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... enjoyer and the Lord of all sacrifices; but they know me not in truth and hence they fall,' and 'Thou art ever worshipped by me with sacrifices; thou alone, bearing the form of pitris and of gods, enjoyest all the offerings made to either.' Nor finally can we admit the contention that it is rational to interpret the Vedanta-texts in accordance with Kapila's Smriti because Kapila, in the Svetasvatara text, is referred to as a competent person. For from this it would follow that, as Brihaspati is, in Sruti and Smriti, mentioned as a pattern ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... offered by the discovery of the anti-toxine for fatigue. "Just think!" exclaims Claparede, "a serum against fatigue. How valuable this would be!" From this point of view, I should say that the ponogenic co-efficients might find a more practical and rational application than that of the revelation of "programs"; indeed these co-efficients indicating the production of toxines would appear destined to determine the dose of anti-toxine necessary to nullify the evil effects resulting from each different ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... an impudent man frank, a modest man dull, an ignorant man good, a knave discreet, and so in all things else. Yet I believe that there exists in everything its own perfection, altho concealed; and that this can be determined through rational discussion by any having knowledge of the ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... will, his affections. But, to satisfy the fathers, it must operate like a drug—like sympathetic powders—like an amulet—or like a conjurer's charm. Precisely the monkish effect of a Bible when hurled at an evil spirit—not the true rational effect of that profound oracle read, studied, and laid to heart—was that which the fathers ascribed to the mere proclamation of Christianity, when first piercing the atmosphere circumjacent to any oracle; and, in fact, to their gross appreciations, Christian truth ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... came: to her mind that Tresten was one of Alvan's bosom friends. How, then, could he be of neither party? And her father spoke of him as an upright rational man, who, although, strangely enough, he entertained, as it appeared, something like a profound reverence for the baroness, could see and confess the downright impossibility of the marriage Alvan proposed. Tresten, her father said, talked of his friend Alvan as wild ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... resources, and guaranties our future security. Every part of the Union displays indications of rapid and various improvement; and with burdens so light as scarcely to be perceived, with resources fully adequate to our present exigencies, with governments founded on the genuine principles of rational liberty, and with mild and wholesome laws, is it too much to say that our country exhibits a spectacle of national happiness never surpassed, if ever ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... you look at it, after a little study of this rational notation. Note also that there is no mathematical absurdity here: the division is logical, and yet the air is perfectly expressed in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... even admitting that this Being did not, by creating the mind also give rise to the evil disposition; and admitting that, as far as regards this disposition it has the same origin with the evil of the second class, or moral evil, the acts of a rational agent. ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... been lit, we all fell to work with a zeal worthy a more rational cause; and, as the glare fell upon our persons and implements, I could not help thinking how picturesque a group we composed, and how strange and suspicious our labors must have appeared to any interloper who, by chance, might ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
