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More "Delusive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reunion than the Conversation-house at Baden-Baden. It was a small, low structure of brightly painted wood, containing but three or four rooms, and furnished all along its front with a narrow covered gallery, which offered a delusive shelter from the rougher moods of the fine, fresh weather. It was somewhat rude and shabby—the subscription for the season was low—but it had a simple picturesqueness. Its little terrace was a very convenient place for a stroll, and the great view of the ocean ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... mind to enable us to determine that one great inducement to these gifts is the conviction felt by the giver that the disposition he makes of them is immutable. All such gifts are made in the pleasing, perhaps delusive hope, that the charity will flow forever in the channel which the givers have marked out for it. If every man finds in his own bosom strong evidence of the universality of this sentiment, there can be but little reason to imagine that the framers of our Constitution ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... the beloved object, seemed to vanish in her presence, and, like one striving to recover the particulars of a forgotten dream, he would have given the world at that moment to have recollected the grounds on which he had founded expectations which now seemed so delusive. He accompanied Fergus with downcast eyes, tingling ears, and the feelings of the criminal, who, while the melancholy cart moves slowly through the crowds that have assembled to behold his execution, receives no clear sensation either from the noise which fills his ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... centre; and where the other strata 2, 3, 4, 5 are coiled round it; the entire mass being 20 feet in perpendicular height. This appearance of concentric arrangement around a nucleus is, nevertheless, delusive, being produced by the intersection of beds bent into a convex shape; and that which seems the nucleus being, in fact, the innermost bed of the series, which has become partially visible by the removal of the protuberant portions ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... held us in its grip, Would raise the prisoning paw, And Nature, like a mouse set free, Enjoyed delusive liberty, While every water-pipe must drip To greet the passing thaw. Then rudely dashed from eager lip The cup of joy would be, And fingers numbed, and chattering jaw, Owned unexpelled the winter's flaw, And ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... it is also all-important; for it cannot be too emphatically insisted that without a personal God religion simply ceases to be. It is a strange and delusive fancy on Professor Hudson's part, and that of a good many people, that "the religious emotions" will survive the de-ethicising, depersonalising of the Deity, and that men will remain "deeply religious" even when it is recognised that the "Great Enigma," the "eternal and inscrutable energy," ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... civilizations) has been the one recognized—and to such an extent that always there prevails the obsession of separation, and the conviction that each person is an isolated unit. The whole of our modern society has been founded on this delusive idea, WHICH IS FALSE. You go into the markets, and every man's hand is against the others—that is the ruling principle. You go into the Law Courts where justice is, or should be, administered, and you find that the principle ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... surprise We see Britannia's monarch rise, A godlike form, by thee displayed In all the force of light and shade; And, awed by thy delusive hand, As in the presence-chamber stand. The magic of thy art calls forth His secret soul and hidden worth, His probity and mildness shows, His care of friends and scorn of foes: 10 In every stroke, in every line, Does some exalted virtue shine, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... execrators of slavery, the upholders of the tie of brotherhood across the Atlantic, may well look back with shame to the time—and it was no matter of days or weeks, but a period of about four years together—when the loudest and most accepted voices in England exulted over the now ludicrously delusive proposition that the United States were a burst bubble, and slavery the irremovable corner-stone of an empire. It may be a lesson to nations against the indulgence in rancor, the abnegation of the national conscience, and the dear delight of prophesying one's own likings. "Now, therefore, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... family attachment is delusive if it prevents the devotee from seeking the Giver of all boons, including the one of loving relatives, not to mention life itself. Jesus similarly taught: "Who is my mother? and who ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... of Burgoyne, Ticonderoga and Mount Independence were evacuated and the garrison retired to Isle aux Noix and St. John's. The effect produced by this event on the British cabinet and nation was great and immediate. It seemed to remove the delusive hopes of conquest with which they had been flattered, and suddenly to display the mass of resistance which must yet be encountered. Previous to the reception of this disastrous intelligence the employment of savages in the war had been the subject of severe ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... over to their side. Nevertheless, as it will appear hereafter, the Bourbons themselves did not as yet altogether despair; and it must be admitted, that various measures of the provisional government were not unlikely to keep up their delusive hopse. We may notice in particular a change in the national oath of allegiance, by which one most important clause was entirely erased: namely, that expressive of hatred to royalty: and an edict, by which the celebration of the day on which Louis XVI. died, was formally abolished. ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... good "copy" occasionally leads to artful embroidering on humdrum actuality; but, after spending much time in scanning similar embroidery in the literature of the Napoleonic Era, I unhesitatingly place the work of Archibald Forbes, and that of several knights of the pen still living, far above the delusive tinsel of Marbot, Thiebault, and Segur. I will go further and say that, if we could find out what were the sources used by Thucydides, we should notice qualms of misgiving shoot through the circles of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... bribery of a customer's servant, is any worse than bribery of an elector? or whether the gaining of suffrages by claptrap hustings-speeches, containing insincere professions adapted to the taste of the constituency, is not as bad as getting an order for goods by delusive representations respecting their quality? No; it seems probable that close inquiry would show few if any classes to be free from immoralities that are as great, relatively to the temptations, as those which we have been exposing. Of course they will ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... could discern a mode of construction, in layers of brick and stone, similar to that of Roman buildings in our own country, while many of the bricks, from their texture and shape, appear also to be Roman. Tradition, if we follow that delusive guide, teaches us that we are contemplating a work of the middle of the eighth century, and of one of the sons of Charles Martel. If we follow William of Jumieges, the Chronicle of St. Vandrille, and William of Poitiers, we ascribe it to the uncle and rival of the Conqueror; other writers tell us ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... London, and Oakwood was desolate, painfully desolate to the young man, who, when lingering within its ancient walls, forgot everything around him, save the bright and beautiful being who was to him its charm. When, however, that fair form had departed from his sight, he was awakened to the delusive nature of his hopes, and with the knowledge, exquisite even in its despair, that he loved Emmeline Hamilton, his profession became more and more distasteful. Had he followed the paths of ambition, as his inclination prompted, had he but had the means ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... stuffed veal repent themselves, and send in a delicate broth or a bit of tenderloin, hovering softly in a sudden regard, and at length a healthier thought is born. It is to arise with desperate will, put a fresh rose in the bonnet and a delusive veil over the face, creeping down to the street with what steadiness can be summoned. There one meets friends, and is pretty well, with thanks, and is congratulated. Affairs grow brilliant, but the veil never comes up; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... Juno had this ordain'd: for oft the dame The frailer nymphs upon the hills had caught, In trespass with her Jove; but Echo sly With lengthen'd speech the goddess kept amus'd, Till all by flight were sav'd. Soon Juno saw The trick:—"The power of that delusive tongue,"— She cry'd, "I'll lessen, and make brief thy words;" Nor stay'd, but straight her threaten'd vengeance took. Now she redoubles (all she can) the words Which end another's speech; reporting back, But only ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... of this kind—common as it is—is practised upon the public in advertising and selling nostrums as safe and valuable medicines. These are ushered into newspapers with a long train of pompous declarations, almost always false, and always delusive. The silly purchaser buys and uses the medicine chiefly or solely because it is sold by a respectable man, under the sanction of advertisements to which that respectable man lends his countenance. Were good men to decline this wretched employment, the medicines ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... landscape, excite the admiration of the eye of taste by the architectural and horticultural beauties of mansions which have sprung out of the profits or artifices of trade. The multiplication of these dormitories of avarice is considered by too many as the sign of public prosperity. Fallacious, delusive, and mischievous notion! Was the world made for the many, or the few? Can any one become rich from domestic trade without making others poor; or can another bring wealth from foreign countries except by adding to the circulating medium, and thereby diminishing ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... country still retained the same woody, hilly, and irregular, though not unpleasing, appearance; but in running along the shore it manifestly grew worse, having more tendency to sand. The small projections of land which appeared as they sailed along often presented the delusive appearance of openings behind them; and they were the more inclined to entertain these hopes, as Captain Cook passed along this part of the coast ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... success. This also has added a fresh interest in my favor, and I begin to hope that I am on the eve of realizing something in the shape of compensation for my time and means expended in bringing my invention to its present state. I dare not be sanguine, however, for I have had too much experience of delusive hopes to indulge in any premature exultation. Now there is no opposition, but it may spring up ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... a conspiracy of delusive kindness from the day Wesley entered Rosedale. The frankness and kindliness of the Atterburys had been assumed to lure him to his fatal adventure. Boone himself believed that Jack's ignoble ambition and envy had been the main motives in the murder. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... but his tears did not bring him comfort, for they were tears of anguish and despair. Ten times a day he would proceed to her chamber, or follow her to the garden where she loved to walk, always in the delusive hope that he might catch some spark of returning reason from those calm-looking but meaningless eyes, after which he would weep like a child. With respect to his daughter, every thing was done for her that wealth ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... ledger, and sandwich lunches, had no attraction for me. I had always had a turn for mechanics, but was never allowed to adopt engineering as a profession, my father's one idea being that I should follow in his footsteps—a delusive hope entertained by many a ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... comprehends body and mind. Much stress is laid on the moderate and tranquil pleasures; the intense pleasures, coveted by mankind, belong to a distempered rather than a healthy state; they are false and delusive. Pleasure is, by its nature, a change or transition, and cannot be a supreme end. The mixture of Pleasure and Intelligence is to be adjusted by the all-important principle of Measure or Proportion, which connects the ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... in his pamphlet twenty years before, insisted that this progressively liberal system of Turkey had no existence. Which of these two propositions was true may be left to the decision of those who lent to the Turk many millions of money on the strength of Lord Palmerston's ignorant and delusive assurances. It was mainly owing to Lord Palmerston, again, that the efforts of the war were concentrated at Sebastopol. Sixty thousand English and French troops, he said, with the co-operation of the fleets, would take Sebastopol in six weeks. Cobden gave ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... deceived. I was guided too much by appearances, and they were very delusive. I am beyond measure glad I came here to-day. I called at your house and learnt that you were here; and as I was going out of town, in any indefinite direction, I settled then to come this way. What a happy idea it was! To think of ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... spectator of the delusive character of all that splendor of color. He lifts a box from the ooze: he appears to have uncorked the world. The hold is a bottomless chasm. Every indentation, every acclivity that casts a shadow, gives the impression of that soundless ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... loved any one it was the Earl of Leicester, the man who sent his lovely wife, Amy Robsart, to a cruel death in the delusive hope of marrying a Queen. We are unwilling to harbor the suspicion that she was accessory to this deed; and yet we cannot forget that she was the daughter of Henry VIII.!—and sometimes wonder if the memory of a crime as black as Mary's haunted her sad old age, when ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... admirable, as a rule, they are!) of soldiers at the front, telling their families to expect them back in a month or two's time. The other danger is that, harassed by the continuance of the struggle, or attracted by delusive offers of peace or affected by economic or industrial conditions which have fortunately not so far developed, a section of the nation may cry out for peace before the victory has been consummated and before the peril we are fighting ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... this, that we, thus unsuspecting, should be led away by delusive joy; that now in hope, {all} fear being removed, we might during our supineness be surprised, so that there might be no time for planning a rupture of the marriage. ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... supreme good could predestine or foreknow evil, there would be sin in Deity, and this would be the end of infinite moral unity. "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!" On the contrary, evil is only a delusive deception, without any actuality which ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... poison too drained; Ah! 'twas all delusive, for sorrows would come, Oh, 'tis home where the heart is, where ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... in the sphere of liberty and social enjoyment and among those who did not believe that wine was a mocker, but something to make glad the heart and give joy to the countenance; and when it began to flow he was among the first to taste its delusive sweets. Blanche, for whom he poured a glass of champagne, took it from his hand, but with only half a smile on her lips, which was veiled by something so like pain or fear that Ellis felt as if the lights about him had suddenly lost a portion of their brilliancy. ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... you mention people whom he himself knows, people in various grades of life, widows and orphans amongst them, whose little all has been dissipated, and whom he has reduced to beggary by inducing them to become sharers in his delusive schemes. But the mechanic says, "Well, the more fools they to let themselves be robbed. But I don't call that kind of thing robbery, I merely call it out-witting; and everybody in this free country has a right to outwit others if he can. What a turn- out he has!" One was once heard to add, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... the sea-coast are of importance only in a maritime war, except for depots: they may even prove disastrous for a continental army, by holding out to it a delusive promise of support. Benningsen almost lost the Russian armies by basing them in 1807 on Koenigsberg,—which he did because it was convenient for supply. If the Russian army in 1812, instead of concentrating on ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... more with Mary Backhouse, and the austere influences of the visit had perhaps had more share than she knew in determining her own mood that day. The world seemed such dross, the pretences of personal happiness so hollow and delusive, after such a sight! The girl lay dying fast, with a look of extraordinary attentiveness in her face, hearing every noise, every footfall, and, as it seemed to Catherine, in a mood of inward joy. She took, moreover, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it into shape," and "advise generally" preparatory to its "being laid before counsel," was Mr. Traverse, a young pleader, whom Messrs. Quirk and Gammon were disposed to take by the hand. He wrote a very showy, but superficial and delusive opinion; and put the intended protege of his clients, as it were by a kind of hop, step, and jump, into possession of the Yatton estates. Quirk was quite delighted on reading it; but Gammon shook his head with a somewhat sarcastic smile, and said he would ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations. Aristotle, the great master of reasoning, cautions us, and with great weight and propriety, against this species of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments as the most ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... off in all directions. Dingy Clerkenwell and Aldersgate Street were gilded with a plentiful and radiant deposit of that precious metal of which healthy youth has such an infinite store—actual metal, not the "delusive ray" by any means, for it is the most real thing in existence, more real than the bullion forks and spoons which we buy later on, when we feel we can afford them, and far more real than the silver tea-service with which, still later, we are presented amidst cheers by our ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... preparations to the unprincipled brewer of porter or ale; others perform the same office to the wine and spirit merchant; and others again to the grocer and the oilman. The operators carry on their processes chiefly in secresy, and under some delusive firm, with the ostensible denotements of a ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... stirring incidents that are daily befalling mankind. I was, indeed, much in the position of those who stimulate the fancy by extraneous applications; all the boasted efforts of judgment I tried to mix up with and control the workings of my fancy, I found were but a species of delusive energies, to take myself out of a class of dreamers I heartily despised. I was, in fact, just as complete a visionary as they—with this difference,—I thought I required to satisfy the condition of a waking judgment, which, after ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... fall, Croesus is said by Herodotus to have reproached the Pythian with those treacherous oracles that conduced to the loss of his throne, and to have demanded if the gods of Greece were usually delusive and ungrateful. True to that dark article of Grecian faith which punished remote generations for ancestral crimes, the Pythian replied, that Croesus had been fated to expiate in his own person the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... read them. This told upon me and made my physical burdens harder for me than for other children of my years around me. That third was the strongest part of me. In it I lived a dream-life with writers, artists, and musicians. Hope, sweet, cruel, delusive Hope, whispered in my ear that life was long with much by and by, and in that by and by my dream-life would be real. So on I went with that gleaming lake in the distance beckoning me to come and sail on its silver waters, and Inexperience, conceited, blind Inexperience, ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... of Abyssinia, surrounded by every luxury which can make life agreeable, and shut off from all knowledge of those evils which can make it painful. The aim of the story is to show the vanity of expecting perfect happiness, and the folly of sacrificing present advantages for the delusive promises of ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... these calls. He soon feels symptoms of mild interest. The contagion is pleasing. These visits grow in length and frequency. Sir Donald is losing zeal for man-capture. He is in danger of yielding to the delusive heresy which sees more of interest in human suffering than ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... sustaining her equanimity in this pressing emergency. "Love, dear, delusive love!" as she expressed herself to a friend some time afterwards, "rigorous reason had forced her to resign; and now her rational prospects were blasted, just as she had learned to be contented with rational enjoyments". Thus situated, ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... catastrophe which should have been more overwhelming than the first. "For God's sake, Mrs. Carstairs, don't become obsessed by that idea. The morphia habit is one degrading slavery of mind and body, and only the miserable victims know how delusive are its promises, how unsatisfactory its rewards. What can you expect from a cult whose highest reward—the only thing, indeed, it ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... of all these facts, could it be possible for Generals to deceive themselves or to deceive others, or how President Davis could have such delusive hopes, is now impossible to comprehend. On February 22nd, after the fall of Wilmington, the Army of Sherman was on the border of North Carolina, while Hood's was straggling through the upper part of this State, with no prospects of forming a junction with Beauregard. President Davis ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... indeed war that had gathered them. In calling his Parliament Edward the First sought mainly an effective means of procuring supplies for that policy of national consolidation which had triumphed in Wales and which seemed to be triumphing in Scotland. But the triumph in Scotland soon proved a delusive one, and the strife brought wider strifes in its train. When Edward wrung from Balliol an acknowledgement of his suzerainty he foresaw little of the war with France, the war with Spain, the quarrel with the Papacy, the upgrowth of social, of political, of religious ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... passed within the circuit of those walls! Yet, how the eye cheats reality!—that city of imprisonment and frantic liberty, of royal sorrow and of popular exultation, now looked a vast circle of calm and stately beauty. How delusive is distance in every thing! Across that plain, luxuriant with harvest, surrounded with those soft hills, and glittering in the purple of this glorious evening, it looked a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... spectacle; those sufferings I did not now regret, for their simple recollection acted as a most wholesome antidote to temptation. They had inscribed on my reason the conviction that unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure—its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... its branches will aid it in gradually assuming its original position, till hardly a trace of that power which attempted to guide its growth can be perceived. There may be some who would neglect that moral influence on the young which is necessary, trusting in the delusive expectation, that the law will keep them in the right path; that the example of punishment, the terror of the gallows, the prison, or the penitentiary, will prevent the commission of crime. But let us not wait for the saving influence of these things; ...
— Reflections on the Operation of the Present System of Education, 1853 • Christopher C. Andrews
... which would cover many different types, such as apports, where objects are brought from a distance, levitation of objects or of the human frame into the air, the production of lights and other wonders. Then comes prophecy, which is a real and yet a fitful and often delusive form of mediumship—never so delusive as among the early Christians, who seem all to have mistaken the approaching fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, which they could dimly see, as being the end of the world. This mistake is repeated ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... commenting intelligently on them; and who not only gave these proofs of an understanding mind, but of a heart and soul, manifesting almost Mavortian affection for his captor's family, and occasionally betraying even the existence of some religious sentiments. Was all this delusive? Did this Batrachian really possess a rational soul, with sentiments of piety and justice, or only a wonderfully constructive faculty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... they had done all that. Lincoln's administration might have done apparently little, and after it the pendulum would probably have swung back. But the much-talked-of swing of the pendulum is the most delusive of political phenomena; America was never going to return to where it was before this first explicit national assertion of the wrongfulness of slavery had been made. It would have been hard to forecast how the end would come, or how ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... mean by clasping God? I mean making daily efforts to rivet our love on Him, and not to let the world, with all its delusive and cloying sweets, draw us away from Him. I mean continual and strenuous efforts to fix our thoughts upon Him, and not to allow the trivialities of life, or the claims of culture, or the necessities of our daily ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... assault, but I well know my life would be in jeopardy if I attempted to interfere. I, however, screwed up my courage to stay, in the hope that some sense of shame might induce the fellow to hold his hand. This was, however, a delusive hope, for he continued to lay on the whip until he ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... Nirvana. This is the doctrine of Pessimism. Now Wagner was, when he wrote The Ring, a most sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous of the reasoning faculty, which he typified in the shifty, unreal, delusive Loki, and full of faith in the life-giving Will, which he typified in the glorious Siegfried. Not until he read Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving that he had always been a Pessimist at heart, and that ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... arms, comes on us with a shock. Much slighter, but quite perceptible, is the effect of Antony's victory on land, and of the last outburst of pride and joy as he and Cleopatra meet (IV. viii.). The frank apology of Hamlet to Laertes, their reconciliation, and a delusive appearance of quiet and even confident firmness in the tone of the hero's conversation with Horatio, almost blind us to our better knowledge, and give to the catastrophe an added pain. Those in the audience who are ignorant of Macbeth, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... themselves, originates in the perceiving organs or in the cognising mind, thus much is purely relative; but since, by supposition, it does not all so originate, the part that does not is as much absolute as if it were not liable to be mixed up with, these delusive subjective impressions."—(P. 30.) ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... fancy I see them speeding up and down that departed staircase, trying to help the men carry water to pour on the roof. The earnestness of their faces is very striking as Susy brandishes a pail, Dotty a glass pitcher, and Prudy a watering-pot, in the delusive hope that they are ...
— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May
... possessed, He wrung his hands and beat his breast: "O, had the earth concealed this gold, I had perhaps in peace grown old! But there is neither gold nor price To recompense the pang of vice. Bane of all good—delusive cheat, To lure a soul on to defeat And banish honour from the mind: Gold raised the sword midst kith and kind, Gold fosters each, pernicious art In which the devils bear a part,— Gold, bane accursed!" In angry mood ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... formerly of poor people of the lower orders, who turn their backs on the German fatherland, or liberal declaimers, dreaming of an ideal of freedom which could scarcely be realized in Utopia, but of sober excellent families of the middle class, who, free from all delusive fancies, do not expect to find in the western world wealth and honorable offices, but desire only to inhabit a land, wherein they may dwell quietly and happily with their children." "What the German wants is room—a new broad ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... soldiers were drawn up on the moor, about a mile distant. He sent some of his men to a point where they should be partly visible to the enemy over a hedge; these he caused to pass and repass, so as to give a delusive idea of numbers. When the night fell the Highland soldiers were drawn up along the wall on the road, and in the enclosures behind the hedges; Lord George and Cluny stood with drawn swords on the highway. Every man stood at his post on the alert, in the breathless silence. ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... uses his 'delusive power' in order to provide each girl with a semblance of himself. He asks them to dance and then projects a whole series of Krishnas. 'The cowgirls in pairs joined hands and Krishna was in their midst. Each thought ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... enough, on the score of the delusive farces which, with pretences almost as transparent as the above, are from time to time played off for the purpose of easing the public of their superfluous cash. Let us glance briefly at a speculation of a different kind, no less a bubble as it proved, but one whose tragic issues have already wrought ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... With the fourth sun a warm dispute arose, On Durfey's poesy, and Bunyan's prose: The learned war both wage with equal force, And the fifth morn concluded the divorce. Phoebe, though she possesses nothing less, Is proud of being rich in happiness: Laboriously pursues delusive toys, Content with pains, since they're reputed joys. With what well-acted transport will she say, "Well, sure, we were so happy yesterday! And then that charming party for to-morrow!" Though, well she knows, 'twill languish into sorrow: But she dares never boast the ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... education; with an inherited mental inertia that is being dispelled and can only be eradicated by contact with superior environment, that there awaits him peace, plenty, and equality, is an ignis fatuus the most delusive. Peace is the exhaustion of strife, and is only secure in her triumphs in being in instant readiness for war; equality a myth, and plenty the ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... total abstinence, and, now that he was no longer under the observation of his family, he again tried to satisfy his conscience by promising himself that he would gradually reduce the amount used until he could discontinue it utterly—delusive hope, that has mocked thousands like himself. If he could have gone to an asylum and surrounded his infirm will by every possible safeguard, he might have been carried through the inevitable period of horrible depression; but even then the ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... the Devil by the Instigation of the Witch at Endor appeared in the Likeness of the Prophet Samuel. I am not ignorant that some have asserted that, which, if it were proved, would evert this Argument, viz. that it was the true and not a delusive Samuel which the Witch brought to converse with Saul. Of this Opinion are some of the Jewish Rabbies[1] and some Christian Doctors[2] and many late Popish Authors[3] amongst whom Cornel. a Lapide is most elaborate. ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... these look forward to the day when posterity will canonize them, and lift them to the glory of those who were not received by their age because they were in advance of their age. So they regard with contempt the pigmy world, wrap the mantles of their mortified pride about them, and lie down in a delusive dream of immortality. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... said, "occurring in those moments, when I still enjoyed a delusive idea of happiness, is deeply imprinted in my remembrance, which, respecting all that has since happened, is waste and unvaried as an Arabian desert. But I have no right to inflict on you, Margaret, agitated as ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... is Shakespeare! and around him, back to Chaucer and forward to Tennyson, a band of such poets, that this prosaic nation has the richest poetic literature in Christendom. Especially in this matter are appearances delusive, and hasty inferences liable to be illogical. From the prosers that one hears in pulpits, legislatures, lecture-rooms, at morning calls and well-appointed dinner-tables in Anglo-America, let no man infer against our poetic endowment. Shakespeare, and Milton, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... another. He stretched himself on the sofa; his good friend considerately took up a newspaper. For the first time that day, he had now the prospect of a quiet interval for rest and thought. In less than a minute the delusive prospect vanished. He started to his feet again, disturbed by a new anxiety. Having leisure to think, he had thought of Regina. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed; "she's waiting to see me—and I never remembered it till this ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... of London?' said my father; and for some time he succeeded in making us sit for the delusive picture of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bottom man was working in the bowels of the earth, and every shovelful he took out had to be passed up from step to step, so that four or five other men had been employed before it reached the top. Damp patches were sometimes found quite early but the hopes they raised were usually delusive and water was only struck at a considerable depth, and then not in any abundance. Fortunately wells sunk in other parts of the wadi proved more successful, but it was a little trying to read in Mr. Belloc's few paragraphs on ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... house in London. Could you not come down and beat up agents for me? I know you will not deny me your help. I hear of a house at Brixton, with a garden of two acres, and only L130 a year." In a day or two even this last hope had proved delusive: "I find the house at Brixton will not do, and I hear of nothing else.... I am anxious as to having become perfectly deaf on the right side of my head. Partial approaches to this have sometimes occurred to me and passed away, so I will ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... itself a benefit; that Ireland ought, as of right, to have the same institutions as England; that Local or Municipal Self-Government will meet the real if not the nominal wish of the Irish people. This hope I believe to be delusive. The reasons on which it is grounded are—one of them probably, and two of ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... received from Chremes and his family as for the entire friendship that is between thee and Gisippus, whose bride she is, to have yonder damsel in such respect as a sister? Whom, then, lovest thou? Whither lettest thou thyself be carried away by delusive love, whither by fallacious hope? Open the eyes of thine understanding and recollect thyself, wretch that thou art; give place to reason, curb thy carnal appetite, temper thine unhallowed desires ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... the throne to his son Ferdinand, an invalid incapable of any serious exertion. It soon appeared that nothing was changed in the principles of the Imperial Government, and that whatever hopes had been formed of the establishment of a freer system under the new reign were delusive. The leader of the Transylvanian Opposition was Count Wesselenyi, himself a Magnate in Hungary, who, after the dissolution of the Diet, betook himself to the Sessions of the Hungarian counties, and there delivered speeches against the Court which led to his being arrested and ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... But at Moscow the delusive impression was of short continuance. The rumor of the destruction of half his army was almost immediately propagated in that city, from the singular commotion produced by extraordinary events, which is known frequently to spread almost instantaneously to prodigious distances. ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... many of its class, has a strong tendency to become monoecious, and planters in general are well pleased at this habit, thinking they secure a double advantage by having the male and female flowers on the same plant. This is, however, delusive, and being against the order of nature, the produce of such trees is invariably inferior, showing itself in the production of double nuts and other deformities. It is best, therefore, to have only female trees, with a due ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... scholars and disciples of them, converted to them and to their doctrine. O! it is easy for souls to appropriate conversion to themselves, that know not what conversion is. It is easy, I say, for men to lay conversion to God, on a legal, or ceremonial, or delusive bottom, on such a bottom that will sink under the burden that is laid upon it; on such a bottom that will not stand when it is brought under the touchstone of God, nor against the rain, wind, and floods that are ordained to put it to the trial, whether it is true ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... Etherington remained standing, as if uncertain whether to advance or retreat, while with incredible rapidity she poured out her hurried entreaties that he would begone, sometimes addressing him as a real personage, sometimes, and more frequently, as a delusive phantom, the offspring of her own excited imagination. "I knew it," she muttered, "I knew what would happen, if my thoughts were forced into that fearful channel.—Speak to me, brother! speak to me while I have reason left, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... the last. Not another sail was visible on the whole of the watery expanse, with the exception of one that hung lazily from its yard, in a small bark that was pulling towards St. Gingoulph, bearing Savoyards returning to their homes from the other side of the lake, and which, in that delusive landscape, appeared to the eye to be within a stone's throw of the base of the mountain, though, in truth, still a weary ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... erroneous, untrue, false, devoid of truth, fallacious, apocryphal, unreal, ungrounded, groundless; unsubstantial &c. 4; heretical &c. (heterodox) 984; unsound; illogical &c. 477. inexact, unexact inaccurate[obs3], incorrect; indefinite &c. (uncertain) 475. illusive, illusory; delusive; mock, ideal &c (imaginary) 515; spurious &c. 545; deceitful &c. 544; perverted. controvertible, unsustainable; unauthenticated, untrustworthy. exploded, refuted; discarded. in error, under an error &c. n.; mistaken &c. v.; tripping &c. v.; out, out ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... senor, that although I entered this inn, as they have doubtless told you, in the dress of a man, I am an unhappy maiden, or at least I was one not eight days ago, and ceased to be so, because I had the folly to believe the delusive words of a perjured man. My name is Teodosia; my birth-place is one of the chief towns of the province of Andalusia, the name of which I suppress, because it does not import you so much to know it as me to conceal it. My parents, who ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... dressing-gown, she sat long at her toilet-table. And all the time she wondered—a far-reaching, mazelike, elaborately intricate and wholly inconclusive wonder. Hers was a nature which suffered perpetual solicitation from possible alternatives, hearing warning voices from the vague, delusive regions of the might-be or might- have-been. She had never grasped the rudimentary but very important truth that only that which actually is in the least matters. And so to arrive at what is, with all possible despatch—in so far as such arriving is practicable—and then to go forward, comprises ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... are reminded of the Spaniards under Narvaez and Soto, who struggled through the swamps and interminable pine-barrens of Florida, cheered on by the delusive assurance that when they came to the country of Appalachee they would find gold in abundance. (See "Pioneer Spaniards in ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... this picturesqueness, is the topographic reality of Dante's journey through Hell. You should note and dwell on this as one of his great charms, and which gives a striking peculiarity to his poetic power. He thus takes the thousand delusive forms of a nature worse than chaos, having no reality but from the passions which they excite, and compels them into the service of the permanent. Observe the exceeding truth of ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... only. I fear we are being placed in an awkward position. I am desirous to have the language of the proposition clear and not delusive. The amendment of Mr. JOHNSON embarrasses me; I hardly know how to vote upon it. If I vote for Mr. JOHNSON'S motion, I shall have the semblance of favoring the limitation of the proposition to present territory. Mr. RUFFIN and myself both want the same thing, but on Mr. JOHNSON'S ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... will now tell Menelaus the truth devoid of all delusive shows; ere the latter can leave Egypt and return to Greece he must put himself into harmony with the Greek Gods, Zeus and the rest. So he has to go back to Egypt's river and start over again in the right way. Then he will make the ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... to elucidate the invisible by means of the visible. The true mystic, he says, fixes his eyes on eternity and the infinite; he loses himself when he becomes entangled in the things of time, that is, in the phenomenal. Still more explicit is the statement of a famous modern Yogi. "This world is a delusive charm of the great magician called Maya. . . . Maya has imagined infinite illusions called the different things in the universe. . . . The minds which have not attained to the Highest, and are a prey to natural beauties in the stage of Maya, will continually have to turn into ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... commercial contract of property and slavery by subjecting it to some religious restraint and elevating it by some touch of poetry. But the actual result is that when two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. And though of course nobody expects them to do anything so impossible and so ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... alas for the boulder-clay portion of it! A bar of impenetrable shadow has rested long and obstinately over the newer deposit; and I scarce know whether the light which is at length beginning to play on its pebbly front be that of the sun or of a delusive meteor. But courage, patient hearts! the boulder-clay will one day yield up its secret too. Still further on by a few hundred yards, I could have again found use for the calotype, in transferring to paper the likeness of a protuberant picturesque cliff, which, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and went straight to Shine's house. Fortunately the troopers, in response to information received, were searching a worked-out alluvial flat about a mile off, and Downy was pursuing a delusive clue as far as Cow Flat, so his visit excited ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... never knew! How give intelligible expression to a pang none but I could ever understand!— No one has entered Rome. None will ever come. I smile bitterly at the delusion I have so long nourished, and still more, when I reflect that I have exchanged it for another as delusive, as false, but to which I now cling with the same ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... by saying that the speech at Columbia "was delivered after the publication of McClellan's letter avowing his purpose to force reunion by war if we declined reconstruction when offered, and therefore warned the people against delusive hopes of peace from any other influence than that to be exerted by the manifestation of ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... gleam of the delusive well-being in which Madame de la Baudraye had lived since coming to Paris. Three days later she observed a cloud on Lousteau's brow as he walked round the little garden-plot smoking a cigar. This woman, who had acquired from her husband the habit and the pleasure ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... owed their conversion to Louisa's books; it was written some years ago. His mother spent Saturday here. She is very bright and cheerful and full of sly humor; he did everything to amuse her and she enjoyed her visit amazingly. I long to see you. Letters are more and more unsatisfactory, delusive things. M. is going to have a "party" this afternoon, and is going to one this forenoon. The others are bright and busy as ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... where the people stand so pious at the church door waiting for my father, and I could weep tears of blood that I cannot go into the church with them and worship God as a human being should, for this is no Christian life we lead down here, but a delusive half-heathen one. And only think, dear John, that we can never marry, as there is no priest to join us. Do, then, plan some way for us to leave this place, for I cannot tell you how I long to get once more to my father, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... common trials of life, to mar our happiness in our family- like institution (February 23d) was the listless waywardness of some of our dear students, in a determined purpose to attend a dancing party under the guise of an oyster supper. How many delusive snares are laid to entrap and turn aside the youth into divergent paths. We found it necessary to suspend eight of our students for the remainder of the term. It is a painful duty of the surgeon to amputate a limb, yet it may be ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... church. A few months after my coming Benton and his bunch got an evangelist from over east, somewhere, to come here, and he made a mighty stir along heretical lines and many of the best citizens of our community were drawn into the delusive net. Some of us, in those days, stood firm in the faith and employed every thinkable means to stamp out the nefarious cult; and allow me to humbly say that had it not been for Deacon Gramps and me and a few other faithful ones, our ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... surprised to learn, that, in the exercise of his profession, he contracted an intimacy with a clergyman's wife, whom he attended as a physician, and whose conjugal virtue he subdued by a long and diligent exertion of his delusive arts, while her mind was enervated by sickness, and her husband abroad upon his necessary occasions. This unhappy patient, who was a woman of an agreeable person and lively conversation, fell a sacrifice ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... is claimed again that females should have the ballot as a protection against the tyranny of bad husbands. This is also delusive. If the husband is brutal, arbitrary or tyrannical, and tyrannizes over her at home, the ballot in her hands would be no protection against such injustice, but the husband who compelled her to conform to his wishes in other respects ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... have resented the notion that a mere man could have led her. Besides there was another woman in the muddle now!... In her disgust she longed for her own zone of silence. In her heart she called Ibsen and Nora Helmer delusive guides; her chief intellectual staff had failed her and she began to see Torvald Helmer's troubles in a different light. Perhaps when Nora reached the street that terrible night, she thought of her children—perhaps Helmer was watching her from the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... had fallen into the general and delusive mistake of those who err, in supposing himself unfortunate rather than criminal. With an ingenuity, that, exercised in a better cause, would have made him a respectable man, he had been endeavouring to excuse his crime to himself, on various ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... ourselves passed through much the same phases. Vandal and others have told us of the Utopia which was created in the minds of the French when the old regime crashed to the ground. Sydney Smith caricatured the delusive hopes excited by the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, when he said that all the unmarried young women thought that they would at once get husbands, and that all the schoolboys expected a heavy fall in the price of jam tarts. A process of disillusionment may confidently ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... my limbs compose. O woman, woman, when to ill thy mind Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend: And such was mine! who basely plunged her sword Through the fond bosom where she reign'd adored! Alas! I hoped the toils of war o'ercome, To meet soft quiet and repose at home; Delusive hope! O wife, thy deeds disgrace The perjured sex, and blacken all the race; And should posterity one virtuous find, Name Clytemnestra, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... sure this word itself does not help us to understand it. O young man, young man, do you not feel now how thoroughly right I was? I trusted this man unlimitedly, because he was not girt round with any delusive deceitful show; because nothing in my heart sallied forth to meet him, and I did not lie to myself in his behalf for the sake of pampering my own vanity. Ay, my friend, now everything is detected and noised abroad; he is going ... and in this will he gives me back what the ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... immortals slumber'd on their thrones above, All but the ever-watchful eye of Jove. To honour Thetis' son he bends his care, And plunge the Greeks in all the woes of war. Then bids an empty phantom rise to sight, And thus commands the vision of the night: directs Fly hence, delusive dream, and, light as air, To Agamemnon's royal tent repair; Bid him in arms draw forth th' embattled train, March all his legions to the dusty plain. Now tell the king 'tis given him to destroy Declare ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... which the self-same tints still seem to rest, Why feels my heart a shivering sense of pain! Is it, that many a summer's day has past Since, in life's morn, I carolled on thy side! Is it, that oft since then my heart has sighed, As Youth, and Hope's delusive gleams, flew fast! Is it, that those who gathered on thy shore, Companions of my youth, now meet no more! Whate'er the cause, upon thy banks I bend, Sorrowing; yet feel such solace at my heart, As at the meeting of some long-lost friend, From whom, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... such an exception being made in their favour during the general ruin which they see impending over others. I am, however, not the less convinced of the truth of my own opinion, which is unhappily already confirmed by too many instances of the effects which this delusive security, as I think it, has produced, and is daily producing. I can see no grounds, in the state of this country, to hope for such an exception in our favour, and I do verily believe that we must prepare to meet the storm here, and that we must not count upon the continuance ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... and France more especially, from giving America aid in this war. Prospects of accommodation, it is well known, would effectually prevent foreign interference, and, therefore, without one serious design of accommodating on any principles, but the absolute submission of America, the delusive idea of conciliation has been industriously suggested on both sides of the water, that, under cover of this dividing and aid-withholding prospect, the vast British force sent to America, might have the fairest chance of succeeding, and this policy has in fact done considerable ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... still lay between moonlight and sunrise, the Hassler started for Tarn Bay. It was a beautiful Easter Sunday, with very little wind, and a soft sky, broken by few clouds. But such beginnings are too apt to be delusive in this region of wet and fog, and a heavy rain, with thick mist, came up in the afternoon. That night, for the first time, the Hassler missed her anchorage, and lay off the shore near an island, which afforded ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... gushes pleasure with the tide of woe; And when its waves retire, like those of Nile, They leave behind them such a golden soil That there the virtues without culture grow, There the sweet blossoms of affection blow. These were his words; void of delusive art I felt them; for he spoke them from his heart. Nor will I now attempt with witty folly To ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... weep At what a sailor suffers; fancy, too, Delusive most where warmest wishes are, Would oft anticipate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... be issued and put in circulation almost at will, and again be withdrawn at will. We do not mean that the issue and withdrawal of it are wholly unchecked, but that the checks, as the entire history of banking would seem to prove, are comparatively inefficient and delusive. If the rise and fall of prices, caused by the fluctuations of metallic money, are to be compared to the rise and fall of the tides, the rise and fall of paper prices are more like the increase and decrease of steam in a boiler, which is an admirable agent, but demanding an incessant and scientific ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... not being able to produce them by art is, that in every instance in which we see a human mind developing itself, or acting upon other things, we see it surrounded and obscured by an indefinite multitude of unascertainable circumstances, rendering the use of the common experimental methods almost delusive. We may conceive to what extent this is true, if we consider, among other things, that whenever Nature produces a human mind, she produces, in close connection with it, a body; that is, a vast complication of physical facts, in no ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... any one it was the Earl of Leicester, the man who sent his lovely wife, Amy Robsart, to a cruel death in the delusive hope of marrying a Queen. We are unwilling to harbor the suspicion that she was accessory to this deed; and yet we cannot forget that she was the daughter of Henry VIII.!—and sometimes wonder if the memory of a crime as black as Mary's haunted her sad old ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... Turandot." Her will Decrees my death—from her 'tis, welcome still. Adieu, fond hopes. Delusive joys, farewell! ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... him from Evanthe? haste, to tell me, And feed my gready ear with the fond tale— Yet, hold—for I shall weary you with questions, And ne'er be satisfied—Beware, Cleone, And guard your heart from Love's delusive sweets. ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... all this clamour from the rural districts was the stagnation of ideas, and incapacity of improvement, engendered by an artificial monopoly of the national food supply. This was not the special lesson impressed upon landlords or tenants by Cobbett, whose violent and delusive writings had a large circulation in the country. But his teaching was so far beneficial that it quickened the demand for parliamentary reform, though the fruits of that reform were destined to be very different from ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... front and the back view of any temptation to which we yield—all radiant and beautiful on the hither side, and when we get past it and look back at it, all hideous. Like some of those painted canvases upon the theatre-stage: seen from this side, with the delusive brilliancy of the footlights thrown upon them, they look beautiful works of art; seen at the back, dirty and cobwebbed canvas, all splashes and spots and uglinesses. Let us be thankful if memory can show us the reverse side of the temptations that on the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... notices. They had rightly dated the beginning of his career from his first appearance as an authority on foreign politics, but they had not realised that Grosse had begun to work only in the midstream of life. Many brilliant springs are delusive in their promise, but rarely is there such ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... such delusive flattery lead to, but vanity and folly? The lover, it is true, has a poetic licence to exalt his mistress; his reason is the bubble of his passion, and he does not utter a falsehood when he borrows the language of adoration. ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... both good, and much exercise worked wholesome changes in minds as well as bodies. They seemed to get clearer views of life and duty up there among the everlasting hills. The fresh winds blew away desponding doubts, delusive fancies, and moody mists. The warm spring sunshine brought out all sorts of aspiring ideas, tender hopes, and happy thoughts. The lake seemed to wash away the troubles of the past, and the grand old mountains to look benignly down upon them ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... ancestral park, half a mile away from the great house, where, for all its corridors and galleries, she could never feel, at all events, spiritually alone. All that was most sugared and musical and generally delusive in the old library of her fathers had been brought out to this little woodland library, and to that nucleus of old leather-bound poets and romancers, long since dead, yet as alive and singing on their shelves as any bird on the sunny boughs outside, ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... safety seemed a delusive one; the skiff swooped away from the rock, spun more giddily about, and threw both men upon their knees. Another instant that seemed endless,—an instant which decided the fate of both, as far as this world was concerned,—these men trembled ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... on a few; and had there been missionaries there at the time, their efforts might have proved successful. But the influence of the "men of medicine," who strenuously withstand a religion which exposes their delusive tricks, and consequently deprives them of their gains,—together with the dreadful depravity everywhere prevalent,—renders the conversion of the Tekallies an ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... disclosures? It made her bring down her foot sharply on the pavement with vexation as she suspected that he thought her so foolish, and then again her heart warmed with the perception of self-denying care for her. She trusted to that same prudence for no delusive hopes having been given to Mark ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that brow so fair, so young, Affliction trace an early furrow, If Hope's too dear, delusive tongue Has broke its promise of to-morrow, Seek not the world again, to borrow The deathful print its votaries reap. Man gives his loved ones pain and sorrow, God "giveth ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... them send to their king for aid; and if that be done, I know quickly what time of day it will be with us. Therefore let us assault them in all pretended fairness, covering our intentions with all manner of lies, flatteries, delusive words; feigning things that never will be, and promising that to them that they shall never find. This is the way to win Mansoul, and to make them of themselves open their gates to us; yea, and to desire us too to come in to them. And the reason why I think that this project will do is, because ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... project seemed to him delusive, and his sense of dignity rose against it—Harvey had begun with unwonted decision, but he was soon uncomfortably self-conscious and self-critical; he spoke with effort, vainly struggling against that peculiar force of Alma's personality which had long ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... that family attachment is delusive if it prevents the devotee from seeking the Giver of all boons, including the one of loving relatives, not to mention life itself. Jesus similarly taught: "Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?" ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... partisans of Montmorency should at once be repressed by his guards. It was not until the soldiers returned with the assurance that everything was quiet throughout the city, that he consented to retire to his rest again. For an entire week the delusive cries seemed to return at the self-same hour.[1228] These fancies—the creations of his fevered brain—may soon have left him, not to return until the general closing in at the death-bed. But there were marks of the violence of the passions ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... will. He asserted and obtained it. For his will was that the divine will should be fulfilled, and fulfilled it was. He set aside one form of his will, his private and isolated will, knowing it to be delusive. But his true or conjunct will—and he knew it to be his true one—he abundantly obtained. It is no wonder, then, that in explaining these things to his disciples he says, "My meat it is to do the will of my Father." ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... wish success to the undertaking, and that nothing but the improbability of success should hinder every Scotsman to join in it. This tho' a verrie material point, you take for granted without assigning a single reason; but as I know it is one of their delusive arguments, now much in use where you are, and the chief engine of the party to seduce well-meaning men to concur in the ruin of the constitution and their country, I shall give you what I apprehend you must mean by it in the most favourable light it will bear; and then from an ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... Use. The Character of Shamela, will make young Gentlemen wary how they take the most fatal Step both to themselves and Families, by youthful, hasty and improper Matches; indeed, they may assure themselves, that all Such Prospects of Happiness are vain and delusive, and that they sacrifice all the solid Comforts of their Lives, to a very transient Satisfaction of a Passion, which how hot so ever it be, will be soon cooled; and when cooled, will afford them ...
— An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews • Conny Keyber
... a "heaven" a neglected soul may have, can be shown to be an ignorant and delusive dream. How is the soul to escape to heaven if it has neglected for a lifetime the means of escape from the world and self? And where is the capacity for heaven to come from if it be not developed on earth? Where, indeed, is even the smallest spiritual appreciation of God and heaven to come ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... that for several weeks of the last year I have not opened a volume, and through the whole time I have not had the use of it, on an average, for more than an hour a day. Nor can I cheer myself with the delusive expectation, that, impaired as the organ has become, from having been tasked, probably, beyond its strength, it can ever renew its youth, or be of much service to me hereafter in my literary researches. Whether I shall have the heart to enter, as ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... try to hold out hopes of one or two legislative reforms beneficial to Ireland; but these hopes, I am afraid, will prove delusive. You hint that you have prepared a Registration bill, of which the effect will be to extend the elective franchise. What the provisions of that bill may be we do not know. But this we know, that the matter is one about which it is utterly impossible for you to do anything ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... after the wedding, the bridegroom held high festival, and gave a grand dinner to all the masters. Our big boys were equal to the occasion, and as the hired waiters from the Falcon brought out the viands (all was a delusive peace as they went in) our harpies flew upon the spoil, and each meat, fish and fowl was cleared off the great dishes held between the helpless hands of the astonished servitors! It was really too ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... next year? 15 Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom, hope, 20 until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of Nature hath placed ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... fictions, "The Agreeable Caledonian," had previously been used as the basis of a revision entitled "Clementina" (1768). The reviewer of "Leonora" in the "Critical," though aware of the novel's shortcomings, still laments the passing of "the author of Betsy Thoughtless, our first guide in these delusive walks ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... should possess, besides their own share in the representative hall of the nation, the exclusive privilege of appointing two-fifths of the whole number of the representatives of the people. This is now your condition, under that delusive ambiguity of language and of principle, which begins by declaring the representation in the popular branch of the legislature a representation of persons, and then provides that one class of persons shall have ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... perceived its beauty, and saw how his language and his imagery often recalled those of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals, such as Crashaw, too readily perhaps asserted a bond between his thought and theirs. Like them, it is true, he turned his back on the delusive splendours of the world; he accepted and expressed in song the divine ordinance of the universe. But he was afflicted with the pain of modern doubt; fear and speculative curiosity struggled with his faith; sometimes the sheer beauty of the external world, so far ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... Church. She had clung day by day to their plastic associate, plying him with her deep, narrow passion, doing her simple utmost to convert him, and so working on him that he had at last really embraced his fine chance. That the chance was not delusive was sufficiently guaranteed by the completeness with which he could finally figure it out that, in case of his taking action, neither Ida nor Beale, whose book, on each side, it would only too well suit, would make any ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... baseless, idle, trifling, unserviceable, bootless, inconstant, trivial, unsubstantial, deceitful, ineffectual, unavailing, useless, delusive, nugatory, unimportant, vapid, empty, null, unprofitable, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... nay, always strengthens to the performance of duty, gives courage, and clears the judgment. St. Paul says we are saved by hope. Hope is the most rational thing in the universe. Even the ancient poets, who believed it was delusive, yet regarded it as an antidote given by the mercy of the gods against some, at least, of the ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... options for the consideration of LINCOLN, to bid the wayward States "depart in peace." The great republic appeared to have its emblem in the vast unfinished Capitol, at that moment surrounded by masses of stone and prostrate columns never yet lifted into their places, seemingly the moment of high but delusive aspirations, the confused wreck of inchoate magnificence, sadder than any ruin of Egyptian ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... Where, presumptuous thoughts, ah! where, Would you lead me, whither go? If for certain now you know That the high attempts you dare Are delusive dreams of bliss, Since you strive to scale heaven's wall, But from that proud height to fall Headlong down a dark abyss? I Justina saw..... So near Would to God I had not seen her, Nor in her divine demeanour All the light ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... 25 seconds south. The country still retained the same woody, hilly, and irregular, though not unpleasing, appearance; but in running along the shore it manifestly grew worse, having more tendency to sand. The small projections of land which appeared as they sailed along often presented the delusive appearance of openings behind them; and they were the more inclined to entertain these hopes, as Captain Cook passed along this part of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... the slightest hint to the American minister of their intended sacrifice of their "identical interest with the United States," they allowed this treachery to be sprung upon us. The sixty-mile limit was established by the tribunal, and it has proved utterly delusive. The result of this decision of the tribunal was that this great industry of ours was undermined, if not utterly destroyed; and that the United States were also mulcted to the amount of several hundred thousand dollars, besides the very great expense attending ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... conclusions so paradoxical was advanced by eminent and experienced politicians, and accepted by many persons, both in the North and in the South—not so much, perhaps, from intelligent conviction as under the delusive hope that it would afford a satisfactory settlement of the "irrepressible conflict" which had been declared. The terms "popular sovereignty" and "non-intervention" were plausible, specious, and captivating to the public ear. Too many lost sight of the elementary truth that political sovereignty ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... characters of that age. Equally full of fraud and of ardor, these pious patriots talked perpetually of seeking the Lord, yet still pursued their own purposes; and have left a memorable lesson to posterity, how delusive, how destructive that principle is by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... all that apparent byplay of the six paper bags, and of the Weissnichtwo allusions which drop as puzzling fragments into Book I. The second book is wholly biographical. It is in human life and experience that we must fight our way through delusive appearances to reality; and Carlyle constructs a ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... innocence, under the colour of clemency to guilt. He ordered her to call on his chamberlain, Darinsson, in an hour, and she should obtain an answer. There, either seduced by paternal affection, intimidated by threats, or imposed upon by delusive and engaging promises, she exchanged her virtue for an order of release for her parent; and so satisfied was Louis with his bargain that he added her to the number ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... climbed Olympus' crest; Each slumbering mariner his limbs unbends, Stretched by his oar, along the bench at rest, When lo! false Sleep his feathery wings extends. To guiltless Palinurus he descends, Parting the scattered shadows. Down he bears Delusive dreams, and cunning words pretends, As now, in Phorbas' likeness he appears, Perched on the lofty stern, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... under the Spanish flag were only taxed to the amount of one per cent.; but, as scarcely any export trade existed with Spain, and as Spanish vessels, from their high rates of freight, were excluded from the carrying trade of the world, the boon to commerce was a delusive one. [16] ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... pronounce upon lofty political and moral questions. I would merely say that New York, for a deserted city, is singularly animated; that Broadway yesterday was thronged with pretty women, who, famished as they are, present, nevertheless, the delusive appearance of health, and brave with heroic indifference the bloody tumults of which our streets are daily the theatre; that Art is not so utterly dead among us but that Maretzek gives "Un Ballo in Maschera" to crowded houses, and Church sees his studio filled with amateurs desirous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... people, that they can obtain, and that white men will give them, more for the productions of their soil than for the hands which can produce these—and the work is done. All other steps are futile, can only be mischievous and delusive, and terminate in disappointment and defeat. To eradicate the slave trade will not eradicate the passions which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... said Philip, vehemently; "and you are shutting yourself up in a narrow, self-delusive fanaticism, which is only a way of escaping pain by starving into dulness all the highest powers of your nature. Joy and peace are not resignation; resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed, that you don't expect to be allayed. Stupefaction ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... earlier, a proposition to establish such a court for the purpose of strengthening the cause of international peace would have been looked upon as "a splendid but delusive dream." To-day many of the ablest men on both sides of the Atlantic believe that the time is not far off when England and America will agree to settle by arbitration all questions which diplomacy cannot ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... and describing the dreadful situation of her mind, the conflict she suffered in endeavouring to conquer this unfortunate attachment, and concluded with saying, her only hope of future comfort consisted in the (perhaps delusive) idea she indulged, of being once more folded in their protecting arms, and hearing the words of peace and pardon ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... fickle maid, My love is turned to grief and pain; In vain delusive hopes I stray'd, Through days that ne'er will dawn again; And she, in beauty like the dawn, From me has now her heart withdrawn! A constant suitor—on her ear My sweetest melodies I pour'd; Where'er she wander'd I was near; For her whose face ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... bound. A serving-maid was she, and fell in love With one who left her, went to sea and died. Her fancy followed him through foaming waves To distant shores, and she would sit and weep At what a sailor suffers; fancy too, Delusive most where warmest wishes are, Would oft anticipate his glad return, And dream of transports she was not to know. She heard the doleful tidings of his death, And never smiled again. And now she roams The dreary waste; there spends the livelong day, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... back with shame to the time—and it was no matter of days or weeks, but a period of about four years together—when the loudest and most accepted voices in England exulted over the now ludicrously delusive proposition that the United States were a burst bubble, and slavery the irremovable corner-stone of an empire. It may be a lesson to nations against the indulgence in rancor, the abnegation of the national conscience, and the dear delight ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... frost that held us in its grip, Would raise the prisoning paw, And Nature, like a mouse set free, Enjoyed delusive liberty, While every water-pipe must drip To greet the passing thaw. Then rudely dashed from eager lip The cup of joy would be, And fingers numbed, and chattering jaw, Owned unexpelled the winter's flaw, And on the steps the goodmen slip, And shout ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... slumber'd on their thrones above, All but the ever-watchful eye of Jove. To honour Thetis' son he bends his care, And plunge the Greeks in all the woes of war. Then bids an empty phantom rise to sight, And thus commands the vision of the night: directs Fly hence, delusive dream, and, light as air, To Agamemnon's royal tent repair; Bid him in arms draw forth th' embattled train, March all his legions to the dusty plain. Now tell the king 'tis given him to destroy Declare ev'n now The lofty walls of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... made great havoc in their time among the hearts of the young, the gay, and the generous. Like 14most of her society, Clara has no idea of prudence, and hence to escape some pressing importunities, she levanted for a short time to Scotland, but has since, by the liberal advances of her present delusive, been enabled to quit the interested apprehensions of the Dun family. The swaggering belle in the green pelisse yonder, on the pave, is the celebrated courtezan, Mrs. St*pf**d, of Curzon-street, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of Hope, until our enemies shall have bound us ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... that are seen are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal." But this pregnant utterance conveyed nothing more to him than a belief of a material heaven to follow his exit from a world of matter. It had never occurred to him that the world of matter might be the product of those same delusive physical senses, through which he believed he gained his knowledge of it. It is true that while in the seminary, and before, he had insisted upon a more spiritual interpretation of the mission of Jesus—had insisted that Christian priests should obey the Master's injunction, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... servants, who would doubtless come before long to extinguish the lights, was far from pleasant. Moreover, though Keyork had declared the patient out of danger, there seemed no absolute certainty that a relapse would not take place before morning, and Kafka might actually lay in the certainty—delusive enough—that Unorna could not ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... five personal senses. This delusive evidence, [1] Science has dethroned by repeated proofs of ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... those men so well as his being thoroughly knowing in business, having a judgment to weigh all the delusive schemes and the fine promises of the wheedling projector, and to see which are likely to answer, or which not; to examine all his specious pretences, his calculations and figures, and see whether they are as ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... again, that females should have the ballot as a protection against the tyranny of bad husbands. This is also delusive. If the husband is brutal, arbitrary, or tyrannical, and tyrannizes over her at home, the ballot in her hands would be no protection against such injustice, but the husband who compelled her to conform to his ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... desert—among vestals, who rendered themselves habitants of wilds and of caverns, that they might perform in secret those Christian rites which they dared not assist in openly; that this should be so, in truth and in reality, seemed too incredible—it must be a dream—a delusive trance of the imagination. While these thoughts passed through the mind of Kenneth, the same passage, by which the procession had entered the chapel, received them on their return. The young sacristans, the sable nuns, vanished successively through the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... is nothing invisible, and that that which is manifest to his senses and intellect contains everything which can possibly exist. But such an illusion is only possible on the surface of consciousness and not in its depths. Feeling and desire do not yield to this delusive belief. They will be perpetually craving, in one way or another, for that which is invisible. And if this is withheld, they drive man to doubt, to uncertainty about life, or even to despair. Occult science, by making manifest what is unseen, is calculated ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... outgathering of the church from the world, and not the ingathering of the world into the church. To set such an end before themselves as the world's conversion would therefore not only be unwarranted by Scripture, but delusive and disappointing, disheartening God's servants by the failure to realize the result, and dishonoring to God Himself by making Him to ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... legislation as I have done, when I think they must come to the same conclusions as those which have forced themselves on my own mind—namely, that the Home Rule desired by the Parnellites is not only a delusive impossibility, but is also high treason against the integrity of the Empire, and would be a base surrender of our obligations to the Irish Loyalists; that, whatever the landlords were, they are now more sinned against than sinning; and that in the orderly ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... of the wild untutored hordes among whom the proud pageantry of pretended faith, false honour, and affected punctilio, had its rise. He traced it through its gilded course of blood and carnage, stripped of the fantastic and delusive mantle which romance delights to fling over its native deformity, to the present time, when the general civilization and protection enjoyed in this enlightened age, has left nought but the grim shadow of the destructive ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was at that time the western terminal of the few railroads then in existence, and there was very little probability that they would make farther progress toward the setting sun. The individual who had determined to start for the new, but delusive, western mountainous El Dorado, must perforce make his wearisome journey by slowly plodding ox-teams, pack-mules, or the lumbering stage-coach. Such means of travel had just been inaugurated by Mr. W. H. Russell (then the senior partner of the firm of Russell, Majors, & Waddell) and a Mr. John ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... is," said Tracy savagely, "that music's a fashion, and as delusive a growth as Cobbett's potatoes, which will go back to the deadly nightshade, just as music will go back to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for lots of drunkards every year. The only time I am tempted to soak my sorrows in rum is after I have read a delusive bill of fare and eaten a broiled barn-hinge with gravy on it that tasted like the broth of perdition. It is then that the demon of intemperance and colic comes to me and, in siren tones, says: "Try our bourbon, with 'Polly ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... a shade of ruined loveliness, with dust among her golden hair and her bright garments all faded and defaced, stealing from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach; she was your fondest Hope, but a delusive one; so call her Disappointment now. A sterner form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles, a look and gesture of iron authority; there is no name for him unless it be Fatality, an emblem of the evil influence that rules your fortunes; a demon to whom you subjected yourself by some ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... encounter no collegiate hindrance, excepting this, that the average liberal education, as it is called, gives so little knowledge of physical science, that the educated classes often fail to distinguish between the real inventor and the deluded, or delusive, impostor. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... chiefly by functional disturbance and organic lesions, causing its very defenders as a food to stultify themselves when in fealty to facts they are compelled to disclose its destructions, and to find the only defense in that line of demarcation, more imaginary than the equator, more delusive than the ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... they would sacrifice whatever they possess to enable me to play once more the game so often lost; but I will not abuse their affection, nor suffer them again to be slaves to my caprices, nor dupes to their own delusive expectations. I have sent them word I am happy; I have not yet told them how or where. I fear much the affliction of their disappointment, and, for a while, shall conceal from them my situation, which they would fancy was disgraceful, and grieve at ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... glittering bubble had burst. The shares, each one of which had seemed a fortune, found no more purchasers, and in its fall the Company dragged down with it its ally and chief creditor, the bank. All was dismay and despair, except in those who had sold out in time, and turned delusive paper into solid values. John Law, lately the idol and reputed savior of France, fled for his life, amid ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... the agitators proved as delusive as those of the propagandists. The muzhik turned a deaf ear to their instigations, and the police soon prevented their further activity. Thus the would-be root-and-branch reforms found themselves in a dilemma. Either they must abandon their schemes for ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... The rough prairie boy looked resolute, and seemed to have conquered his fears. She wondered whether he had discovered any possible avenue of escape, for nothing but the promptings of a strong hope, whether real or delusive, could have produced such a change ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... awaiting the moment for avenging their wrongs; the dangers which he was about to confront, those which he left behind him, even in his own family: it showed him, that like the returns of his army, the census of the population of his empire was delusive, not so much in respect to its numerical as to its real strength; scarcely any men were included in it but those who were old in years, or worn out in the service, and children—few men in the prime of life. Where were they? The tears ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... one of those delusive sounds which the anxious mind sometimes conjures up, or did an answer really come to the lad's cry ...
— The Wizard of the Sea - A Trip Under the Ocean • Roy Rockwood
... bright regions of eternal day, Where now thou shin'st amongst thy fellow saints, Array'd in purer light, look down on me! In pleasing visions and delusive dreams, O! sooth my soul, and teach me ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... From this delusive scene of domestic condescension and kindliness he passed to his Hall of Audience to consider official matters. Twice a week at sunset he appeared at one of the gates of the palace to hear the complaints ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... caelum, alii dixerunt esse mundum." Dr. Frazer, citing this passage (Kingship, p. 286) in support of his view that Janus was a duplicate of Jupiter, has omitted to notice that some theorisers fancied he was the universe, which by itself is enough to betray the delusive nature of this kind of theological speculation. Varro elsewhere gives us a clue to the liability of Janus to be exalted in this unnatural fashion, L.L. vii. 27, "divum deo" (in the Salian hymn), if this be taken as referring to Janus, as it may ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... and what of their daring wearers? As the crowd thickened, they began to shine out upon the general blackness in obvious distinction. At first, the howling multitude, eager for filthy lucre, took no particular notice of them beyond an occasional hurried poke or pat, but this delusive mildness did not long continue. After the first fifteen or twenty minutes, during which the favorite stocks had been danced up and down a few times, like so many crying babies, the appetite of the hundred-headed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... only be undertaken when the enemy's fleet has been either rendered helpless by a crushing defeat or blockaded in its ports. Before sending the transports to Lissa Persano should have steamed across to Pola and blockaded Tegethoff, fighting him if he came out. But Persano had a delusive hope that he could perhaps score a victory without encountering the Austrian fleet by swooping down on Lissa, crushing the batteries with a heavy bombardment, landing the troops, hoisting the Italian flag, and getting back to his safe anchorage at Ancona before Tegethoff ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... he onward, like a phantom he disappears there on the border of the forest. Was it only a delusive appearance, a ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence. If it were to be otherwise—if I were to live on to the age most men desire and provide for—I should for once have known whether the miseries of delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true provision. For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... precisely the same as before"—rejoined the other complacently—"Only we should have learned to accept them merely as the means whereby to sustain the IMPRESSION that we live,—an impression which would always be agreeable, however delusive!" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... majesty of the human mind, as "an arbiter enthroned in its own dominion, endowed with an initiating power, and forming its determinations for good or for evil by an inherent and indefeasible prerogative." It tells us that we have neither power to act nor freedom to fall—that our sense of liberty is delusive, that we are predestined to sin or to holiness by a decree of the infinite mind, and that our fate has been sealed from eternity! If we really believe it and act upon it, our moral energies are for ever suppressed, and the consciousness ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... suspected nothing of John's plots against him, wrote to the governors of the city, that they would provide a lodging and necessaries for John; which favors, when he had made use of, in two days' time he did what he came about; some he corrupted with delusive frauds, and others with money, and so persuaded them to revolt from Josephus. This Silas, who was appointed guardian of the city by Josephus, wrote to him immediately, and informed him of the plot against him; which epistle when Josephus ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... their own rights; and are made to respect the just pretensions of mankind; in proportion as they are willing to sustain, in their own persons, the burden of government, and of national defence; and are willing to prefer the engagements of a liberal mind to the enjoyment of sloth, or the delusive hopes of a safety ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... they say, some evil spirit attends, Hovering and blazing with delusive light, Misleads th' amaz'd night wand'rer from his way To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool; There swallowed up and lost ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... constitutional obligations; you will not regard your oaths. What am I to do? Am I a freeman? Is my State, a free State, to lie down and submit because political fossils raise the cry of 'The Glorious Union'? Too long already have we listened to this delusive song. We are freemen. We have rights: I have stated them. We have wrongs: I have recounted them. I have demonstrated that the party now coming into power has declared us outlaws, and is determined to exclude four thousand ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... imprisonment, there would be an amazing change in the behavior of schoolmasters, the quality of school books, and the amenities of school life. That Consciousness of Consent which, even in its present delusive form, has enabled Democracy to oust tyrannical systems in spite of all its vulgarities and stupidities and rancors and ineptitudes and ignorances, would operate as powerfully among children as it does now among grown-ups. No doubt ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... Othello meanwhile, thanks to the trimming of her sails, flew over the water like a swallow; but she was making, to all appearance, so little headway, that the unlucky Frenchmen began to entertain sweet delusive hopes. At last, after unheard-of efforts, the Saint-Ferdinand sprang forward, Gomez himself directing the shifting of the sheets with voice and gesture, when all at once the man at the tiller, steering at random (purposely, no doubt), swung the vessel round. The wind ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... of 'Land!' on the morrow caused passengers unseen before to appear like worms after a shower; all heroically did up their back hair, put on their best suits, and walked forth with the delusive hope that no one would know how ill ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... reconcentrados, despite the reiterated professions made in that regard and the amount appropriated by Spain to that end. The proffered expedient of zones of cultivation proved illusory. Indeed no less practical nor more delusive promises of succor could well have been tendered to the exhausted and destitute people, stripped of all that made life and home dear and herded in a strange region among unsympathetic strangers hardly less necessitous ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... before the war more than one third of the tonnage afloat under the British flag was launched from American dock-yards. The war had violently deprived England of this enormous advantage, and now she sought to make the privation perpetual, in the delusive hope of confining British trade to British keels, and in the belief that it was the height of wisdom to impoverish the nation which she regarded as her best customer. In July, 1783, an order in council ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... doing well enough here already? Are not the United States this day busily using, working, more printer's type, more presses, than any other country? uttering and absorbing more publications than any other? Do not our publishers fatten quicker and deeper? (helping themselves, under shelter of a delusive and sneaking law, or rather absence of law, to most of their forage, poetical, pictorial, historical, romantic, even comic, without money and without price—and fiercely resisting the timidest proposal to pay for it.) Many will come under this delusion—but ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... post-offices, and resign his power as to all important affairs into the hands of his Secretary of State. It seems to-day incomprehensible how a statesman of Seward's calibre could at that period conceive a plan of policy in which the slavery question had no place; a policy which rested upon the utterly delusive assumption that the secessionists, who had already formed their Southern Confederacy and were with stern resolution preparing to fight for its independence, could be hoodwinked back into the Union by some sentimental demonstration against ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... impressive and yet so attractive, that the senator, as he bent over the couch, though the warm, soft breath of the young girl played on his cheeks and waved the tips of his perfumed locks, could hardly imagine that the scene before him was more than a bright, delusive dream. ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... "advise generally" preparatory to its "being laid before counsel," was Mr. Traverse, a young pleader, whom Messrs. Quirk and Gammon were disposed to take by the hand. He wrote a very showy, but superficial and delusive opinion; and put the intended protege of his clients, as it were by a kind of hop, step, and jump, into possession of the Yatton estates. Quirk was quite delighted on reading it; but Gammon shook his head with a somewhat sarcastic smile, and said he would at once prepare a case for the ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... United States." The trouble and expense of obtaining justice in the United States courts, but one, or at most two existing in any of the Southern States, would debar the African from applying to them for redress. "Your remedy," said the Senator, "is delusive; your remedy is no remedy at all; and to hold it up to the world as a remedy is a gross fraud, however pious it may be. It is no remedy to the poor debtor that you prosecute his judge, and threaten him with ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... so changed as enormously to diminish the strength of the competitive instinct. If an economic reorganization can effect this it may pro- vide a real safeguard against war, but if not, it is to be feared that the hopes of universal peace will prove delusive. ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... 212: Mr. Morley has the doubtful merit of consistency. As recently as April 27th, 1906, he alluded to the South African War as "that delusive and guilty war," in an address to the Eighty Club. According to The Times report this expression ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... corrupted by the hope of money; while the mass of private citizens either showed no foresight, or else were caught by the bait of ease and leisure from day to day; and all alike had fallen victims to some such delusive fancy, as that the danger would come upon every one but themselves, and that through the perils of others they would be able to secure their own position as they pleased. {46} And so, I suppose, it has come to pass that the masses have atoned for their great and ill-timed indifference ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... past forever! Now I am doubting and misjudging the woman I have asked to be my wife. I must be misjudging her—the alternative is horrible. I can't escape one conviction, however. It is turning out just as I expected and told her it would. Arnault's aid to her father has been delusive, and Wildmere is deeper in the mire than ever. This is a fine ending of my social career! The girl of my choice puts me off until she can end this Wall Street business more satisfactorily. She must wait and hear her ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
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