illusory
Definition: Deceiving by false appearance
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A Tale of Two Cities - By Charles Dickens, Hablot Knight Browne, Frederick William Roe
...s Sixth Brother -RRB---is used to mean pleasures that prove illusory, like a feast where there is nothing to eat ....
Don Quixote - By Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
...I had no hopes to give her, nor treasures to offer her, for mine are given to Dulcinea, and the treasures of knights-errant are like those of the fairies, i illusory and deceptive; kll I can give her is the place in my memory I keep for her, without prejudice, however, to that which I hold devoted to Dulcinea, whom thou art wronging by thy remissness in whipping thyself and scourging that flesh--would that I saw it eaten by wolves--which would rather keep itself for the worms than for the relief of that poor lady . ' '...
The Portrait of a Lady - By Henry James
...He had evidently taken Henrietta 's affairs much to heart, and believed that he owed her a set-off to this illusory visit to Bedfordshire ....
The House of the Seven Gables - By Nathaniel Hawthorne
...A wider scope of view, and a deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station, all proved illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos ....
Middlemarch - By George Eliot
...Whatever certain dissatisfactions in marriage, which some silly tinklings of gossip had given him hints of, might have to do with this change, Mr. Farebrother felt sure that it was chiefly connected with the debts which were being more and more distinctly reported, and he began to fear that any notion of Lydgate 's having resources or friends in the background must be quite illusory ....
Of Human Bondage - By William Somerset Maugham
...Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calcula-tion is no refutation of the rule ....
Ben-Hur - By Lew Wallace, Joseph Autier
...Their hair is long, unkempt, and strangely white; they make us shrink and shudder with ar indefinable repulsion, though the effect may be from an illusory glozing of the light glimmering dismally through the unhealthy murk; or they may be enduring the tortures of hunger and thirst, not having had to eat or drink since...
The mill on the Floss - By George Eliot, Charles Henshaw Ward
...The promise was void, like so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in F-aen before the seasons were divided, pnd when the starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach--impossible to be fulfilled when the golden gates had been passed ....
Adam Bede - By George Eliot
...On the door-stone stood a clean old woman, in a dark-striped linen gown, a red kerchief, and a linen cap, talking to some speckled fowls which appeared to have been drawn towards her by an illusory expectation of cold potatoes or barley ....
The Black Tulip - By Alexandre Dumas
...Yet although somewhat comforted hy this illusory supposition, Boxtel was not able to resist the burning curiosity which was devouring him ....
Victory - By Joseph Conrad
...All the objects in there--the books, the gleam of old silver familiar to him from boyhood, the very portrait on the wall--seemed shadowy, unsubstantial, the dumb accomplices of an amazing dream-plot ending in; ji illusory effect of awakening and the impossibility of ever closing his eyes again ....
Romola - By George Eliot
...The possibilities about that other wife, which involved the worst wound to her hereditary pride, mingled themselves as a newly embittering suspicion with the earliest memories of her illusory love, eating away the lingering associations of tenderness with the past image of her husband; and her irresistible belief in the rest of Baldassarre 's revelation made her shrink from Tito with a horror which would perhaps have urged some passionate speech in spite of herself if he hadnot been more than usually absent from home ....
History of Prose Fiction - By John Colin Dunlop, Henry Wilson
...Nothing can be more happy than Terrasson 's picture of the subterranean Elysium, and the art with which the priests employed its scenes in the illusory visions which they presented to those who consulted them ....
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft - By George Gissing
...And, after all, we learn that the vision was illusory ....
James Russell Lowell - By Horace Elisha Scudder
...But there came an event which made all speculation regarding his plans vain and illusory ....
The Grain of Dust - By David Graham Phillips
...But his voice had the tremulous note of excitement in it and his hands fumbled nervously, touching evidence of the agitated gropings of his mind in the faint, perhaps illusory, light of a new-sprung hope . "...
Zoroaster - By Francis Marion Crawford
...The man, therefore, who seeks to bound what has no bounds, endeavors to define what is, by its nature, undefinable; and finding that the one poor means which he has of conveying fallacious impressions of illusory things to his mind through his deadened senses, is utterly insufficient to give him an idea of what alone is real, he takes refuge in his crass ignorance and coarse grossness of language, and asserts boldly that the human mind is too limited in its nature to conceive of infinite space, or of infinite time ....
Desperate Remedies - By Thomas Hardy
...Second, that finding his mistake, he had endeavored to regain his standing by the illusory path of speculation ....