"Fanciful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... peasants, there were a goodly assortment; as also of Turks, Highlanders, and men in plain clothes. But being public, it was not, of course, select, and amongst many well-dressed people, there were hundreds who, assuming no particular character, had exerted their imagination to appear merely fanciful, and had succeeded. One, for example, would have a scarlet satin petticoat, and over it a pink satin robe, with scarlet ribbons to match. Another, a short blue satin dress, beneath which appeared a handsome purple satin petticoat; the whole trimmed with yellow bows. They looked ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... fulfilment. The predictions of suffering and death, however, are completely foreign to that apocalyptic conception, being akin rather, as Professor Charles has suggested, to the prophecies of the suffering servant in the Book of Isaiah (Book of Enoch, p. 314-317). Moreover, it may not be fanciful to find in his claims to heavenly authority a hint of the thought of the eighth Psalm, "Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet" (see Dalman WJ I. 218). Although the name ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... from the frenzied lips of the half-maddened bridegroom, as his glance flashed on Hazen. "Had you no mercy? Have you no mercy now, that you should torture her young, credulous soul with these fanciful obligations; obligations which no human being has any right to impose upon another, whatsoever the Cause, ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... reformers pronounced the worship of "idols" to be the root of all evil; and there have been many iconoclasts in different ages of the world. The maxim still holds good; for the worship of idols, that is, of fanciful conceits, if not the source of all evil, is still the cause of much; and it prevails as extensively now as it ever did. Men are ever engaged in worshipping the picturesque fancies of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Our carriage was overtaken by them more than once; they presented flowers and fruits to our ladies, and refused any return. Some of the younger women, though sun-burnt, were handsome; and many of them, from their fanciful dresses, resembled the cottagers as exhibited on the stage. The men, on the other hand, were a most ugly race of beings, diminutive in size, and with the features of an old baboon. Mr. Younge, indeed, in some degree accounted for this, by the information ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... other tack, and necessarily inclined from her enemy. Both vessels were stripped to their top-sails, spankers, and jibs, though the lofty sails of the Frenchman were fluttering in the breeze, like the graceful folds of some fanciful drapery. No human being was distinctly visible in either fabric, though dark clusters around each mast-head showed that the ready top-men were prepared to discharge their duties, even in the confusion and dangers of the impending contest. ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... table-cloth. Here are we forever supplied with pork and oysters and sweet potatoes and rice and hominy and corn-bread and milk; also mysterious griddle-cakes of corn and pumpkin; also preserves made of pumpkin-chips, and other fanciful productions of Ethiop art. Mr. E. promised the plantation-superintendents who should come down here "all the luxuries of home," and we certainly have much apparent, if little real variety. Once William produced with some palpitation something fricasseed, which ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... these baronial residences, some fanciful etymologists have derived the familiar saying of "Chateaux en Espagne." See Bourgoanne, Travels in Spain, tom. ii. ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... imperilling perhaps her religious faith; and she fancied that under Paula's influence Mary had transferred her affections from her to the younger woman with added warmth. Nor was this idea wholly fanciful; the child's strong sense of justice could not bear to see her friend misunderstood and slighted, often simply and entirely misjudged and hardly blamed, so Mary felt it her duty, as far as in her lay, to make up for her grandmother's delinquencies in regard to the guest who in the child's ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be able to make some use of in my records by and by. I said the other day that he had good solid prejudices, which is true, and I like him none the worse for it; but he has also opinions more or less original, valuable, probable, fanciful; fantastic, or whimsical, perhaps, now and then; which he promulgates at table somewhat in the tone of imperial edicts. Another thing I like about him is, that he takes a certain intelligent interest in pretty much everything that interests other people. ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... gentleman one day spoke to him at the club of Catiline's conspiracy, he withdrew his attention, and thought about Tom Thumb. In his Taxation no Tyranny, having occasion to notice a reference made by the American Congress to a passage in Montesquieu, he calls him in contempt the fanciful Montesquieu. Yet this is the man, of whom Burke, when his just horror of every thing fanciful in politics was at its height, has passed the noblest eulogium that one modern has ever made on another, and which the reader will pardon me if in my veneration for a great name I place ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... frequented the retreat, the ice shone with a myriad diamond tints; everything seemed to assume an extraordinary form and life. The fantastically carved walls of rock sparkled with capricious gleams. From the sides of black granite hung pendent icicles, sometimes slender and isolated, sometimes grouped in fanciful clusters. In the hollows, where damp and darkness for ever reign, climbed a bluish-grey moss, a melancholy and incomplete manifestation of life in the bosom of this death-like solitude. Within, the whole ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... sociableness, said she believed Guy did not like to talk to any-body but that little pet of his, and one or two of the old sailors. If left to her own resources, Fleda was never at a loss; she amused herself with her books, or watching the sailors, or watching the sea, or with some fanciful manufacture she had learned from one of the ladies on board, or with what the company about ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... attuned to a particular rate of oscillations, and when the difference between the rate of oscillation of the waves and the receiver exceeds one per cent., resonance ceases altogether, so that the message may be sent, but will not be received. It strikes us as hardly a fanciful supposition that many prayers fail to obtain an answer for a precisely analogous reason, i.e., for lack of attuning. The mere uttering of devotional phraseology, or even the sending forth of anguished appeals, does not ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... she was going to cook her husband a nice piece of toasted cheese. That fortunate man, as she was fond of telling him, with mingled contempt and envy, had the digestion of an ostrich, and yet he was rather fanciful, as gentlemen's servants who have lived in good places ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... my fanciful reminiscences as I lay, part of that day, in the Bay of New York, O! Also as we passed clear of the Narrows, and got out to sea; also in many an idle hour at sea in sunny weather! At length the observations and computations showed ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... saw a yellow whiteness, that, marked by the blue veins of the bared temples, was to her mind death-like. Mary had not been sheltered from taking part in scenes of suffering; she had seen sickness and death in cottages, as well as in her own home, and she had none of the fanciful alarms, either of novelty or imagination, to startle her in the strange watch that had so suddenly been thrust on her but what did fill her with a certain apprehension, was the new and lofty beauty of expression that sat ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is the Great Stone Face, already immortalized by the lamented Hawthorne. It is here presented to us under a new aspect, and while we think that even those grand old rocks fail to embody the glorious ideal of a Christus Judex, we must acknowledge the pleasure we have derived from the fanciful descriptions and pleasant associations offered us in this dainty ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fliers, but like the Grebes, because of their small wings they must get their first impetus from the water in order to rise; in case there is any wind blowing they also make use of this by starting their flight against it. They are very peculiar birds and the expression "crazy as a loon" is not a fanciful one, being formed from their early morning and evening antics when two or more of them will race over the top of the water, up and down the lake, all the while uttering their demoniacal laughter. They ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... observations are frequently exceedingly fanciful, and he is capable of attributing the most absurd reasons to the respect which is always shown by the most undeveloped races to dignity and character. You ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Keats is a wild and fanciful poem, containing some exquisite poetry, as this, to ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... He had with him a holy book, written, as he said, from the dictation of an angel, which he carried in tablets of bone in the nose-bag of a camel. Some chapters of this he read me; but, though the precepts were usually good, the language seemed wild and fanciful. There were times when I could scarce keep my countenance as I listened to him. He planned out his future movements, and indeed, as he spoke, it was hard to remember that he was only the wandering leader of an Arab caravan, and not one of the great ones ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... would draw away as though from something partly spectral. I had moments when I thought of him as of a man of pasteboard—as though, if one should strike smartly through the buckram of his countenance, there would be found a mere vacuity within. This horror (not merely fanciful, I think) vastly increased my detestation of his neighbourhood; I began to feel something shiver within me on his drawing near; I had at times a longing to cry out; there were days when I thought I could have struck him. This ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their own story. "Camp Eden," the fanciful name given to the quiet, shady spot where the low chain of hills met the river; the spot where the very waters seemed to lose themselves in their own cool depths, and depart sighing through the shallows beyond,—Camp Eden was deserted, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... lies past Santo Domingo, the church of the Holy Office, and down a long street where live the purveyors of all things for the muleteers. Here one may buy mats, ropes, pack-saddles—which the arrieros delight to have ornamented with fanciful designs and inscriptions, lazos, and many other things of the same kind. Passing out through the city-gate, we ride along a straight causeway, which extends to Guadalupe. A dull road enough in itself, but the interminable strings of mules and donkeys, bringing in pig-skins full of pulque, are ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... loved fable and allegory. Argument or truth, dressed out in such fanciful garb, gained double force and acceptance. We may not be able to follow a poet in his wanderings; his local allusions may obscure to us much of his meaning; the doctrine of his allegory may be to us largely a riddle; and the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... greet the cliffs of England. As the subject of an Academy picture, or an illustration for "The Hero's Homecoming, or How a Bigamist Made Good," the sketch would be excellent. But, except for the beaming faces, it is fanciful. A shadowy view of the English coast-line draws a crowd to the starboard side of the boat, whence one gazes long and joyfully at the dainty cliffs. Yet there is no outward sign of excitement; the deep satisfaction felt by all is ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... some of the blessings held out to the savage by civilization, and they are only some of them. The picture is neither fanciful nor overdrawn; there is no trait in it that I have not personally witnessed, or that might not have been enlarged upon; and there are often other circumstances of greater injury and aggression, which, if dwelt ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... belief and hallucinatory experiences are still very common in the Highlands, where I have myself collected many recent instances. Mr. Tylor observes that the examples 'prove a little too much; they vouch not only for human apparitions, but for such phantoms as demon dogs, and for still more fanciful symbolic omens.' This is perfectly true. I have found no cases of demon dogs; but wandering lights, probably of meteoric or miasmatic origin, are certainly regarded as tokens of death. This is obviously a superstitious hypothesis, the lights being real phenomena misconstrued. Again, funerals ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... if your wife and daughter had ceased to love you? Do you imagine for one moment that they forget you? It would do you good to talk to Aunt Madge; she has such wonderful ideas about all that. Some people—people like Mrs. Tolman, our vicar's wife—laugh at her and call her fanciful, but to me she is so real. Why should it not be true?" she went on, with gathering excitement, "nothing that is good can die! Love is eternal, and it is only pain and grief and sin that can come to an end. That is what Aunt Madge says, and she does more than ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... part of M. Lefebure's book is devoted to the history of lace, and though some may not find it quite as interesting as the earlier portion it will more than repay perusal; and those who still work in this delicate and fanciful art will find many valuable suggestions in it, as well as a large number of exceedingly beautiful designs. Compared to embroidery, lace seems comparatively modern. M. Lefebure and Mr. Alan Cole tell us that there is no reliable or documentary evidence to prove the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... confess, in that first tumult of my thoughts, there appeared a disorderly kind of beauty in some of them, which gave me hope, something, worthy my lord of Orrery, might be drawn from them: But I was then in that eagerness of imagination, which, by overpleasing fanciful men, flatters them into the danger of writing; so that, when I had moulded it into that shape it now bears, I looked with such disgust upon it, that the censures of our severest critics are charitable ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... Malling would not trust their supervision even to Prudence, much less to the hired girl, Mary. Sarah Gurridge remained in her seat by the stove watching the glowing coals dreamily, her mind galloping ahead through fanciful scenes of her own imagination. Had she been asked she would probably have stated that she was looking forward into the future of the pair who were so ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... disappeared; his imagination had spread its wings only to feel them flop all grotesquely at its sides as he recognised in his hostess's quiet companion, the oppressive alien who hadn't indeed interfered with his fanciful flight, though she had prevented his immediate declaration and brought about the thud, not to say the felt violent shock, of his fall to earth, the perfectly plain identity of Cornelia Rasch. It was she ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... month or more the lonesome husband "stevedored," wrestling freight on the lighters, then he disappeared. He left secretly, in the night, for by now he had grown fanciful and he dared to hope that he could dodge his Nemesis. He turned up in Fairbanks, a thousand miles away, and straightway lost himself ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... cast off as they glide silently into the dark again, to take on some semblance too awful for mortal eyes. Farther and farther we went along these arched, crypt-like ways; passing frequently through lofty chambers where the roof could not be discovered, each with some fanciful and often inappropriate name assigned to it, until we came at length to what looked like a window in the side wall of the cave. Peering through this, and holding my lamp high over my head, I could see neither roof nor sides nor bottom,—only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... frock-coat, the bald head, the fat, reddish face, and the rather rusty "chimney-pot" here recurred to him, and he nearly giggled out loud in thinking how irresistibly funny Mr Buskin would look if he were now going through all these fanciful gesticulations in his walking dress. The fact was that the man himself was perfectly unrecognisable, and Austin was mightily impressed by what was really a signal triumph in the art ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... told him all I knew of Bokhara, and Samarkand, and Tashkend, and Yarkand. I showed him the passes in the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush. I traced out the rivers, and I calculated distances; we talked over imaginary campaigns, and set up fanciful constitutions. It a was childish game, but I found it interesting enough. He spoke of it all with a curious personal tone which puzzled me, till one day when we were amusing ourselves with a fight on the Zarafshan, and I put in a modest claim to be allowed ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... "My own darling, how fanciful you are! your hands have grown cold as ice. Probably when you are seventy you will consider yourself a still fascinating person of middle age, and look upon these thoughts of to-day as the sickly fancies of an infant. Do not let us talk ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... time afterwards, and with fainter ink. There is reason to suppose that nothing was accomplished at that time in the way of getting rid of the "pewter tankards." The farmers were too hard pressed by taxes imposed by the province, and by the weight of local assessments, to listen to fanciful appeals. They probably continued for some time, and perhaps until after receiving Deacon Ingersoll's legacy, in 1720, to get along as they were. They did not believe, that, in order to approach the presence, and partake of the memorials, of the Saviour, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... "and, behold it was a dream." But it was not one of those fanciful dreams, that come and go, and mean nothing. It was a dream from God, a great reality, as he was ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... we could distinguish the moaning cries of monkeys—one seeming to be calling to the other for help in piteous tones. The effect was curious, and had a peculiarly melancholy sound; indeed we might easily have supposed them to be the cries of captive slaves, or perhaps a more fanciful person might describe them as disembodied spirits in some haunted island. Meanwhile the night wind, sighing through the lofty trees, came moaning down towards us. At length darkness compelled us to give up our sport, and, with an abundant ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... and over this last was a collection of books ranged upon shelves of red cedar-wood. A handsome clock adorned the mantelpiece; and in the open fireplace was a pair of small "andirons," with silver knobs, cast after a fanciful device, and richly chased. Of course, there was no fire at that season of the year. Even the heat caused by the mosquito bar would have been annoying, but that the large glass-door on one side, and the window on the other, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... Union Jack, because her cause was her country's cause, and England claimed a title in her sacrifice. It is a far cry from Edith Cavell to the old soldier who gave Germany the giant airship, but the Zeppelin will also be remembered, because the popular imagination, which is often both just and fanciful, found a symbol of Germany's cause in this engine of terror, so carefully and admirably planned down to the minutest detail, so impressive by its bulk, so indiscriminate in its destructive action, and so frail. Its inventor was Count Ferdinand ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... ugly little streaked mountain village that followed the windings of the country road for half a mile and then gave out. The last house was not a house at all, but an old box car. And this was the home of Sal Prout. But she denied that it was a box car, with a hundred fanciful deceptions. First, it was whitewashed within and without; second, it was covered with house vines; third, the dooryard smiled at you from the face of a thousand flowers, like a Heavenly catechism of color. But go as often as we would we never found Sal at home. She was busy with the ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... something about him—don't think me fanciful, but it gives me a nasty little sensation, a tightening of my muscles, when he comes near me. It's a ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... here and there, too, one sees the evidence of real understanding and taste. If every tenant of a sky-scraper demands—as I am informed he does—the same windows, and radiators under every window, then the architect had better begin by accepting that demand openly, with no fanciful or pseudo-imaginative pretense that things are not what they are. The Ashland Building, on Fourth Avenue, where the architectural imagination has exercised itself soberly, honestly, and obediently, appeared to me to be a satisfactory and agreeable sky-scraper; ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... bucentaurus on the analogy of a supposed Gr. [Greek: boukentauros], ox-centaur (from [Greek: bous] and [Greek: Kentauros]). This led to the explanation of the name as derived from the head of an ox having served as the galley's figurehead. This derivation is, however, fanciful; the name bucentaurus is unknown in ancient mythology, and the figurehead of the bucentaurs, of which representations have come down to us, is the lion of St Mark. [v.04 p.0658] The name bucentaur seems, indeed, to have been given to any great and sumptuous Venetian galley. Du ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... occult.[49] All of which would be very wonderful, if true. It is, however, only one more of those fascinating fictions with which mystery-mongers entertain themselves, and deceive others. Small wonder that thinking men turn from such fanciful folly with mingled feelings of pity and disgust. Sages there have been in every land and time, and their lofty wisdom has the unity which inheres in all high human thought, but that there is now, or has ever been, a conscious, much less a continuous, fellowship of superior ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... soon he tunes each quivering chord, And, with preamble wildly sweet He doth the wondering listeners greet;— Then strikes into a changeful chaunt That fits his fanciful romaunt. ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... so it is with the varying opinions of the Western thought regarding it—the various cults advocating some form of its doctrine—the original doctrine may be learned and understood in spite of the fanciful dressings bestowed upon it. "The Truth is One—Men call it ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... remove all traces of that elegant and fanciful disposition of my effects, from which I had hoped for so much credit; for I was now ashamed and angry at having thought an instant upon the mode of receiving a visit which had commenced so agreeably, but terminated in ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... being while others are up and doing. The Austrians are of mixed blood, and partake of South European characteristics less prominent among the purer blooded Teutons of the north. They have life on easier terms, are less intellectual, are more sensuous, emotional, more fanciful, fonder of artistic enjoyment, more sensitive to color and to those effects called "color," by contrast to form, in other arts than that of painting. The art of music is most germane to the Austrian spirit; and we have a ready key to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... leads to results that square with the other facts of nature. Thus these appliances of art supply a protection, perhaps our chief protection, against a recrudescence of these superstitious beliefs, those fanciful myths and infertile imaginings about nature in which so much of the best intellectual power of the past has been spent. If we add one other factor, namely, that such appliances be not only used, but used in the interests of a truly ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... marked deviation from Chinese or Korean models, except that, the tazzas and occasionally other utensils are sometimes pierced in triangular, quadrilateral, and circular patterns, to which various meanings more or less fanciful have been assigned. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... and contentions in the early Church, the disputes between the Jew and the Gentile convert, the excesses of spiritual excitement, the extravagances of fanciful belief, of which the Epistles themselves furnish abundant evidence, ceased to all appearance at the door of the catacombs. Within them there is nothing to recall the divisions of the faithful; but, on the contrary, the paintings on the walls almost universally relate to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... any print dresses. I haven't even got a white one. I've two aprons like this," holding out a fanciful thing trimmed with lace. "That's all, and I never saw any sleeves; I don't know what ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... struggling gentleman, perhaps a married curate, whose dwelling is bare, whose dress is poor, whose fare is scanty, whose wife is careworn, whose children are ill-fed, shabbily dressed, and scantily educated. It is conceivable that fanciful wants, slights, and failures, may cause the rich man as much and as real suffering as substantial wants and failures cause the poor; but the world at large will recognise the rich man's lot as one of success, and the poor man's as ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... 'There's no mistaking YOU. It's Mary's chin, and Mary's brow—with just a little something, perhaps, of her dreamy eye. But you haven't all her looks, Mr Lawford, by any manner of means. She was a very beautiful girl, and so vivacious, so fanciful—it was, I suppose the foreign strain showing itself. Even marriage did not quite succeed in ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... [Footnote 121: Such fanciful descriptions of men and lands are common in the French epic poems, where they are usually applied to the Saracens (F.). Cf. W.w. Comfort, "The Saracens in Christian Poetry" in "The Dublin Review", July 1911; J. Malsch, "Die Charakteristik der Volker ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... have preconceived the case, this narrative might, in the absence of explanation, seem purely fanciful, let me briefly refer to the historical facts on which it is based. The Mormons revere but one prophet. As to his identity there can be no mistake, since many of the "revelations" were addressed to him by name—"To Joseph ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... Socrates, that he must be a good orator because he had learnt of Aspasia, is not coarse, as Schleiermacher supposes, but is rather to be regarded as fanciful. Nor can we say that the offer of Socrates to dance naked out of love for Menexenus, is any more un-Platonic than the threat of physical force which Phaedrus uses towards Socrates. Nor is there any real vulgarity in the ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... interesting, there arises an illative impression that all things of old really were so: and all things in idea associated with that time, whether real or fictitious, are afforded a favorable entertainment. Now these associations are neither trivial nor fanciful:{11} for I remember to have discovered, after visiting the British Museum for the first time, that the odour of camphor, for which I had hitherto no predilection, afforded me a peculiar satisfaction, seemingly suggestive of things scientific or artistic; it was in fact ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... sympathizing tear soothed their dying moments; no clergyman eulogized their heroism, self-sacrifice and virtues; no orator has pronounced a panegyric; no poet has embalmed their memory in song, and no novelist has taken their record for a fanciful story. Since their mission was a failure their memory is doomed to rest without marble monument or graven image. To the merciful and the just they will be honored ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... costumes, and transformed the placid Mellicent into a dozen different characters: Ophelia, crowned with flowers; Marguerite, pulling the petals of a daisy; Hebe, bearing a basket of fruit on her head, and many other fanciful impersonations, were improvised and taken before the week was over. She went about the work in her usual eager, engrossed, happy-go-lucky fashion, sticking pins by the dozen into Mellicent's flesh in the ardour of arrangement, ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... The infrequency of extended fanciful promotion in behalf of the old English nostrums in American newspaper advertising may have been compensated for to some degree in broadside and pamphlet. A critic of the medical scene in New York in the early 1750's asserted that physicians used patent medicines which they learned ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... see nothing in the interior of Africa, but what some compilers of maps or geographers are fanciful enough to imagine. What a happy event, therefore, should we not expect from a voyage of discovery and colonisation undertaken in so magnificent a style as the present! what a pride—what ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... will confute the most stubborn logician. "With all his hardness of mind, and of heart, he is dying of a fright. I heard it in the kitchen, I have heard it from himself,—he could not be deceived. If I had ever heard he was nervous, or fanciful, or superstitious, but a character so contrary to all these impressions;—a man that, as poor Butler says, in his 'Remains of the Antiquarian,' would have 'sold Christ over again for the numerical piece of silver which Judas got for him,'—such a man to die of fear! Yet he IS dying," ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... conversation, and a tumult of obstructive defendants, who impeded, by their want of skill, the very convenience which they were purposed to facilitate. How different the surrounding scene! A table covered with flowers, bright with fanciful crystal, and porcelain that had belonged to sovereigns, who had given a name to its color or its form. As for those present, all seemed grace and gentleness, from the radiant daughters of the house to the noiseless attendants that anticipated ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... clearly know what Mr. Jaggers would be found to be "at," I replied in the affirmative. We dived into the City, and came up in a crowded police-court, where a blood-relation (in the murderous sense) of the deceased, with the fanciful taste in brooches, was standing at the bar, uncomfortably chewing something; while my guardian had a woman under examination or cross-examination,—I don't know which,—and was striking her, and the bench, and everybody present, with awe. If anybody, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... my reading off, as well as I could into Spanish, the description I had just written down. It occasioned a world of merriment, and was taken in excellent part. The lady's cheek, for once, mantled with the rose. She laughed, shook her head, and said I was a very fanciful portrait painter; and the husband declared that, if I would stop at St. Filian, all the ladies in the place would crowd to have their portraits taken, —my pictures were so flattering. I have just parted ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noxiously of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... horizontal lines are required to diminish the apparent height of the building or affect its proportions, make them of brick of different color from those of the main wall or laid in different position. Remember this; fanciful brick decorations are quite sure to look better on paper than when executed. As a rule, the more complex the design the greater the discount. Such work is apt to have an unsafe appearance, as though the whole was at the ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... attendance on her—it was her duty to tell her stories in the night. 'But only the old ones,' Malania Pavlovna would beg—'those I know already; the new ones are all so far-fetched.' Malania Pavlovna was flighty in the extreme, and at times she was fanciful too; some ridiculous notion would suddenly come into her head. She did not like the dwarf, Janus, for instance; she was always fancying he would suddenly get up and shout, 'Don't you know who I am? The prince of the Buriats. Mind, you are to obey me!' ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... spirit of sea-going currents!—thou, being The child of immortals, all-knowing, all-seeing— Thou hast at thy heart the dark truth that I borrow For the song that I sing thee, no fanciful sorrow; In the sight of thine eyes is the history written Of Love smitten down as the strong leaf is smitten; And before thee there goeth a phantom beseeching For faculties ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... word in this communication, I afterward obtained a guinea. The money not being due till after the appearance of the article, I anticipated it with various sketches, stories, etc., all of which were largely fanciful or descriptive, and contained no paragraph which I wish to recall. In other directions, I was less successful. Of two daily journals to which I offered my services, one declined to answer my letter, and the other demanded a quarto ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... that he did it in the park; but when I remember how ghastly he looked I feel sure that the sounds must have had some infernal quality added to them which frightened the man himself. Yet, later, he would persuade himself that he had been getting fanciful. Of course, I must not forget that the effect upon Miss Hisgins must have made him ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... bureau, and, taking three of the ounces, she left the room. In the gloaming, she was again on her way to Paul's workshop, where she found the artist, as usual, with his head bent over the bright desk on the bench, engaged in some of his fanciful creations. Having seated herself in the chair where she had so often sat, she commenced her story of the circumstances of the day,—how Walter Grierson had acted and spoken to her; how he had accounted for the locket and inscription; how ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... is given to reverie quite as much as youth. I can remember a time—long, long ago—when in the twilight of a summer evening it was a luxury to sit apart with closed eyes; and, heedless of the talk that went on in the social circle from which I was withdrawn, indulge in all sorts of fanciful visions. Then my dream-people were all full-grown men and women. I do not recollect that I ever thought about children until I possessed some of my own. Those waking visions were very sweet—sweeter than the realities of life that followed; but they were ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... chosen the steepest places to come down, for the sake of the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystal this way and that, as the wind takes them, with all the grace, but with none of the formalism, of fountains; dividing into fanciful change of dash and spring, yet with the seal of their granite channels upon them, as the lightest play of human speech may bear the seal of past toil, and closing back out of their spray to lave the rigid angles, and brighten with silver fringes and glassy films each lower ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... be lamented that antiquarian zeal is so often diverted from subjects of real to those of merely fanciful interest. The mercurial young gentlemen who addict themselves to that exciting department of letters are open to censure as being too fitful, too prone to flit, bee-like, from flower to flower, now lighting momentarily upon an indecipherable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... causes they presented and the interest they took for granted. The last was their strong point. They simply implicated us in whatever was good and true. Their enthusiasm was infectious and we 'caught' it—to our own lasting spiritual benefit.... I do not believe that I was over-fanciful when I used to feel that Lucy Stone and you, Miss Anthony, looked at us as if you would say, 'Make the best of your freedom for we have bought it ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... Bankes at Kingston Lacy. The scene is a remarkable one, conceived in an absolutely unique way; Solomon is here posed as a Roman Praetor giving judgment in the Atrium, supported on each side by onlookers attired in fanciful costume of the Venetian period, or suggestive of classical models. It is the strangest possible medley of the Bellinesque and the antique, knit together by harmonious colouring and a clever grouping of figures in a triangular design. As an interpretation of a dramatic scene it is singularly ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... done, and the afternoon was all her own, she was able to give herself up to this unexpected delight, and spent many hours composing new groups of flowers, and arranging them in fanciful designs. When a maid brought up her solitary tea she lifted her flushed face and murmured, "Oh, can it be tea-time?" and then spread out all her drawings against the wall, and stared at them while she ate her ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... love God whom he hath not seen? You, Mr. A, L, M, O, you who care not for Milton, and value not the dark sublimities which rest ultimately (as we all feel) upon dread realities, how can you seriously thrill in sympathy with the spurious and fanciful sublimities of the classical poetry—with the nod of the Olympian Jove, or the seven-league strides of Neptune? Flying Childers had the most prodigious stride of any horse on record; and at Newmarket that is ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... allow me this pleasure, I am sure, if only because of the love I bear Tara's son." (One of the whelps this lady had bought from him was a son of Tara.) "I know Mrs. Forsyth quite well—a whimsical, fanciful little person, who takes up a new fad every month, and is apt to change her pets as often as her gloves. I could not possibly let a stranger buy the beautiful mother of my Dhulert, and it gives me so much real pleasure to be the means of bringing ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... necessarily restricted to the selected classes, and the masses either remained untouched by the faiths and fads of the learned, or accepted the same in grotesquely distorted forms. A phrase of a classical writer, or a fanciful conception of some hero of Plutarch, sufficed to enthuse a criminal, or to upset the mental equilibrium of a political speculator. The jumble of heterogeneous mores, and of ideas conformable to different mores, caused numbers to lose their mental equilibrium and to become victims either ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... that still hung heavy on my mind were only the morbid, fanciful thoughts of the hour, here was a man whose society would dissipate them. I resolved to try the experiment, and ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... Crown. His task will be very difficult. "Bread, cheap bread," "the poor oppressed by the aristocratie," etc.—a whole vocabulary of exciting words of that kind will be put forward to inflame the popular mind; and of all the Sovereigns, the Sovereign "People" is certainly one of the most fanciful and fickle. Our neighbour in France shows this more than any other on the whole globe; the Nation there is still the Sovereign, and this renders the President absolute, because he is the representative of the supreme will of the supreme Nation, sending us constantly ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... in the eye, such statuesque lines, such rose-leaf color, such hair—'hair like the thistle-down tinted with gold,' as John Mills, the Scotch poet-player, sang. The old man Raynier worshipped her, perhaps as a wild beast loves its whelp. But he had all sorts of fanciful names for her, Heart's-ease and Heart's Delight, and Violet and Rose and Lily. He grew almost gentle when he spoke to her; and he never knew that she was feeble-minded. She just missed being an imbecile. Perhaps you would not have known that all at once; you might not have ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... the bumps"; she slid gracefully around them, describing fanciful curves and loops in her airy flight. When she arrived in a confused bunch on the cushioned platform below, she was greeted ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... practicable to double the cape in question, and to reach the Lena in the same track as Shalauroff, there would have still remained the space betwixt that river and Archangel, which, though undoubtedly to a great degree explored, does not appear to have been ever altogether navigated. To the merely fanciful caviller at the result of this attempt, it would be a prostitution of time and patience, even if one had both in the requisite quantity, to offer a reply. But the observations which Captain King immediately ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... at the corners, and, on the blank spaces between the windows, quaint allegorical frescoes, faded, half washed-out. And then there were entirely modern-looking portions, of gleaming marble, with numberless fanciful carvings, spires, pinnacles, reliefs—wonderfully light, gay, habitable, and (Peter thought) beautiful, in the clear Italian atmosphere, against the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... I said, that the passage which follows will be new and instructive to most of the company. De Morgan's interpretation of the cabalistic sentence, made up as you will find it, is about as ingenious a piece of fanciful exposition as you will be likely to meet with anywhere in any book, new or old. I am the more willing to mention it as it suggests a puzzle which some of the company may like to work upon. Observe the character and position of the two distinguished philosophers ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... guide than that of the great poet. This accounts for the fact that masterpieces of simple poetry are commonly followed by a host of stale and unprofitable works in print, and masterpieces of the sentimental class by wild and fanciful effusions,—a fact that may be easily verified on questioning the history ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the Himalayas dwells the "snow bear." This species has received from naturalists the very fanciful appellation of the "Isabella bear" (ursus isabellinus)—a title suggested by its colour being that known as "Isabella colour,"—the type of which was the very dirty gown worn by Queen Isabella at the siege of ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... 97: Lysander had probably the following passage more particularly in recollection; which, it must be confessed, bears sufficiently hard upon fanciful and ostentatious collectors of books. "[Il y a] deux sortes de connoissance des livres: l'une qui se renferme presque uniquement dans les dehors et la forme du livre, pour apprecier, d'apres sa date, d'apres la caractere de l'impression, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... strong feeling of balance in the decorations, and the chief motifs were the acanthus beautifully carved, conventionalized flowers and fruit, horns of plenty, swags and wreaths of fruit and flowers, the scroll, dolphin, human figure, and half figure ending in fanciful designs of foliage. Beautiful and fascinating arabesques were carved and painted on the walls and pilasters. The chief pieces of furniture were magnificently carved chests and coffers which were also sometimes gilded and painted, oblong tables with elaborately carved supports ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... frightened of old Nance,' said Justin, with some contempt, 'she'd think her a witch; girls are always so fanciful.' ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth
... its sculptured walls the story of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, in company with the strangely-contrasting "Allegories", from Petrarch's "Triumphs", is enough in itself to keep the mind engrossed with fanciful musings for an hour. How did Petrarch and the Field of the Cloth of Gold come together in the brain of the sculptor who long ago worked at these ancient bas- reliefs? One wonders, but the wonder is in vain,—there ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... if you talk like this. I will not stay here and listen to it; you know I was not here," said Madelon, and she paled a little, for she almost thought, used to his fanciful talk though she were, that ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... eyes, staring unblinkingly, seemed as if set on a vision of his friend prone on the muddy floor of the drive, with the treacherous waters stealing amongst his hair. The present mission had nothing in common with those fanciful adventures that had served to make the boy the wonder and despair of his native township. Richard Haddon was entirely forgotten for the time being, and this concentration of mind and energy served to carry the ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... to the vaults. He had passed the spot not a minute before, and she was certainly not there then. She looked as if she had just glided up that slope from a region so dark that a spectre might haunt it all day long. But Beauchamp was not of a fanciful disposition, and instead of taking her for a spectre, he accosted her with ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... look, hearing the noisy clamor of the sailor crowd, sent the Queen with her damsels in a very light barge to stay on a little island distant from us a quarter of a league; himself remaining a very long time, discoursing by signs and gestures of various fanciful ideas, examining all the equipments of the ship, asking especially their purpose, imitating our manners, tasting our foods, then parted from us benignantly. And one time, our people remaining two ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... unhappy man this meant that she was dead. He demanded that his one faithful valet, known by the fanciful name of Eros, should keep his promise and kill him. Eros drew his sword, and Antony bared his breast, but instead of striking the sword into the vitals of his master, Eros plunged the blade into his own body, and fell ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the waste of mind which takes place in the colonies of a very highly civilised country adverted to in a rather fanciful and rationalistic connection with the desponding reply of the captive Jews to their spoilers: 'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?' Ages, sometimes whole centuries, elapse, remarks the commentator, ere the colonies of even eminently literary ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... fanciful case can be shown by noticing how often we speak of "transparent" honesty, or of "absolute" honesty: this is notably one of the words for which we have a sliding scale of values, which vary considerably with the age and the community. "Political honesty" has a very different ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... that they afterwards wrought the greater part of that choir both with carvings and with tarsia-work; which choir has been finished in our own day, with a manner no little better, by Batista del Cervelliera of Pisa, a man truly ingenious and fanciful. ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... as Angela had expected, knowing by hospital reputation what the doctor was supposed to be to old ladies and fanciful mothers, while perhaps he had also heard of her fracas long ago at the hospital. For he was not more courteous to her than could be helped, treating her much as if she were only the nursery maid, and hardly looking at the opinion which she had made Professor ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... religion and expressed itself in the poetry of the Greeks, and possibly contributed to foster Shelley's sympathies with heathen religion. His mind was peculiarly Greek, simple not complex, imaginative rather than fanciful, abstract not concrete, intellectual not emotional; wanting the many-sidedness of modern taste, partaking of the unity of science rather than the multiformity of nature, like sculpture rather than painting. This mental peculiarity contributed to scepticism by inclining his ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... fanciful fellow and a dreamer, Phil," replied Dick, who was one of the most matter-of-fact individuals who ever breathed. "I mind me how, many a time, when we have been sailing together outside Plymouth Sound, where a clear view could be had of the setting sun, you used to trace cloudy continents with ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... belief is strong; doubtless, with this weakly and fanciful race, it is in many cases strong enough to kill; it should be strong indeed in those who tapu their trees secretly, so that they may detect a depredator by his sickness. Or, perhaps, we should understand the idea of the hidden ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... about here in a gondola, I surprise myself looking into other gondolas as if I hoped to see them. It would overcome me with joy to see them, but I don't think it would surprise me much, at first. In my fanciful times, I fancy that they might be anywhere; and I almost expect to see their dear faces on the bridges or ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... kind young persons who sent the fanciful gift could have seen how it was received, their doubts would soon have been set at rest; for Jessie laughed and cried as she told the story, counted the precious coins, and filled the pretty shoe with water that the buds might keep fresh for Laura. Then, while the needles ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... saying, if you scratch a Russian you will find a Tartar beneath, so, according to M. Ouatrefages, we may suppose that scraping a Prussian would disclose a Finn. The political inferences which he draws are very fanciful. He traces shadowy analogies between the tactics of Von Moltke's veterans and the warlike customs of the ancient Slavs, and suggests that the basic origin of the Prussian population may lead it to cultivate a Russian alliance rather than an Austrian, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... heroes. No Vandyck may delight to warm his canvas with their forms. How many or how few astronomers like Banneker, chieftains like Toussaint, orators like Douglass they may have, it is not worth while to conjecture. It is better to dismiss these fanciful discussions. To vindicate their title to a fair chance in the world as a free people, it is sufficient, and alone sufficient, that it appear to reasonable minds that they are in good and evil very much like the rest of mankind, and that they are endowed in about the same degree with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... judging of the defects or wants of the other. It was not in a speculation which amused itself, as with a curious fact, in seeing that the same material can be made into scholars, legislators, sages, and models of elegance—and also into helots; and then went into a fanciful question of how near they might possibly be brought together: it was in a speculation which, instead of dwelling on the view of what was impossible to the common people in a comparative reference to the highest classes of their fellow-men, considered what was left practicable to them within ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... reckon the advantages, whether of Federation or of Union, in pounds, shillings, and pence, may regard the psychological requirement as fanciful. It is not fanciful; on the contrary, it is related in the clearest way to the concrete facts of the situation. Before there is any question of Federation Ireland needs to find herself, to test her own potentialities, to prove independence ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... said—'for you must allow me to call you that, who have no others within so many hundred leagues—perhaps you will think me fanciful and sentimental; and perhaps indeed I am; but there is one service that I would beg of you before all others. You see me set here on the top of this rock in the midst of your city. Even with what liberty I have, I have the opportunity to see a myriad roofs, and I dare to say, thirty leagues ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Geddes gives a sketch of what he conceives the vast and ever-growing literature of cities will one day be. Even if the comprehensive monographs which he foreshadows are never [Page: 140] written, it is not surely fanciful to expect that, with education universal, almost every dweller in our old towns will acquire some sort of that feeling with which a member of an ancient family looks upon its ancestral house or lands—will, even without much reading, have some sort of notion of his predecessors ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... Westminster. It formed part of the great demesne belonging to the Abbey of Westminster, and was inhabited chiefly by Thames fishermen, who had a settlement on the bank, and by the farmers of the Westminster estates. The derivation of the name from La Chere Reine is purely fanciful. ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant |
