"Ideal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has been, what his predecessor said on a similar occasion ten years ago, and why the object of the deputation is equally mischievous and impossible; and the Minister finally expressing sympathy and promising earnest consideration. Mr. Bright, though the laziest of mankind at official work, was the ideal hand at receiving deputations. Some Ministers scold or snub or harangue, but he let the spokesmen talk their full, listened patiently, smiled pleasantly, said very little, treated the subject with ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... was, she's filled with doubt—she can't believe that that person with the Stars and Stripes wrapped round her and a money-bag in either hand ever was herself. Home, clean and honourable for every man who ever loved her and has pledged his life for an ideal with the Allies—that's what ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... their lethargy, and great efforts are made to remedy the evil. Schools of design are established, and copyright of design has just been conferred by act of parliament. In some of our commercial towns, large rooms or galleries are opened to the mechanic, where he may study the beautiful and ideal from casts and models of the antique. Pictures also are occasionally exhibited for his instruction. These are indeed great and praiseworthy efforts, in which utilitarianism has assumed a new character, and found a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Caesar, and get the book," shouted half a dozen voices, all crowding eagerly around the ideal priest, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... helped it? that laugh would have set silver bells ringing in responsive sympathy!—and patted the lumpy thing which, odd as the fact might be, was also called a hand, with short little pecking pats; she did not altogether like touching so painful a degeneracy from the ideal. But his very evident admiration of hers, went far to reconcile her to his,—as was but right, seeing a man's admirations go farther to denote him truly, than the sort of hands or feet either he may happen to have received from ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... Boy. "Stars and Stripes tell of an ideal of united states. That up there tells of an ideal of United Mankind. It's the great Brotherhood Mark. There isn't any other standard that men would follow just to build a hospice ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... while the sudden invasion of a new and inflated Quebec into the colonial hinterlands was little less than a declaration of war. The whole problem bristled with enormous difficulties, and the circumstances under which it had to be faced made an ideal solution impossible. But an earlier Quebec Act, without its outrageous boundary clause, would have been well worth the risk of passing; for the delay led many French Canadians to suppose, however falsely, that the ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... Fortunately the weather was ideal. It is true that headwinds blew mildly and insistently, causing some bumpiness, but the night was calm and starry, and with the engine running close to full-out, they saw that they were making ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... that is not the only object in life, and that if one must live one had better live in a mansion? That is my choice, my desire. You will only eradicate it when you have changed my preference. Well, do change it, allure me with something else, give me another ideal. But meanwhile I will not take a hen-house for a mansion. The palace of crystal may be an idle dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem. Scott's life was a true poem, of which the music entered into all he wrote. If in his earlier days the consciousness of an unlimited productive power tempted him to make haste to be rich, that he might work out, as founder of a family, an ideal of life touched by his own genius of romance, there was not in his desire for gain one touch of sordid greed, and his ideal of life only brought him closer home to all its duties. Sir Walter Scott's good sense, as Lord ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... do not. Honestly, Mr. Gregory, I have no right to despise any one. I was only giving the reverse of my ideal man. But I assure you I share too deeply in humanity's ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... the most intolerable pathos. It appeared he had no home, nor had ever had one, nor yet any vestige of a family, except a truculent uncle, a baker in Newcastle, N.S.W. His domestic sentiment was therefore wholly in the air, and expressed an unrealised ideal. Or perhaps, of all his experiences, this of the Currency Lass, with its kindly, playful, and tolerant society, approached ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... going to change, and indeed could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to change, into the former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely as the dawn creeps into a room that the former was not, as I had at first rather glibly assumed, an "ideal," but a complete misrepresentation of the quality and ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the home of a man who had taken her with him out of pity and then had turned her away in scorn, and she stood for hours weeping outside his window. Frederick had by no means fully sloughed the skin of the conventional German youth. The old hackneyed ideal of virginity was in his eyes still surrounded by a sacred aureole; but no matter how often he discovered Mara in evil things, no matter how often he rejected her in his imagination, or tried with ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... cooler and more pleasant than the beach of South-west Bay, shut in as the latter was under the lee of high cliffs, and opposed to the afternoon sun; next, there was a little stream of delicious fresh water falling over a low cliff into a small rock basin, affording an ideal freshwater bath; next, we discovered a fine large, perfectly dry cave, close to the shore, with an entrance so narrow that it constituted of itself a perfect rock fortress; and, lastly, a large and varied assortment of very fine fruit trees was discovered growing quite ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... temporal bone lodges the organs of the most sensual, selfish, and violent impulses, the action of which is downward into the muscular and visceral organs of the body. The sphenoid bone as it extends up touches the base of the front lobe and of the Ideal region, where it assumes the name of Somnolence. (See the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... contributed that which was most needed for the evolution of a vigorous national life. He imparted to the very recent historical origin of his country, and his followers imparted to its material conditions, a certain element of poetry and the felt presence of a wholesome national ideal. The patriotism of an older country derives its glory and its pride from influences deep rooted in the past, creating a tradition of public and private action which needs no definite formula. The man who did more than any other to supply this lack in a new country, by imbuing its national ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... employed, though admirable of its kind, still falls short of the perfection which, in his later works, Schiller aspired to achieve, viz. the point at which Pain ceases. The tears which Tragic Pathos, when purest and most elevated, calls forth, ought not to be tears of pain. In the ideal world, as Schiller has inculcated, even sorrow should have its charm—all that harrows, all that revolts, belongs but to that inferior school in which Schiller's fiery youth formed itself for nobler grades—the school "of Storm and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... whose lamented death occurred whilst the earlier pages of this book—in which he took much interest—were passing through the press, was an ideal book-collector. He cared only for books which were in the most perfect condition. The unique character of the Rowfant library, its great literary and commercial value, and its wide interest, may be ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... winter according to the ideal of the sages, in angello cum libello; and now the swallows of the Quai Malaquais find me on their return about as when they left me. He who lives little, changes little; and it is scarcely living at all to use up one's days over ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... hands and knees on a mass of leaves and twigs. He had fallen into a sort of shallow pit, but deep enough to shelter him. It seemed to him to be like a deadfall, such as he knew trappers sometimes make. The place was ideal for such a use, but now no steel-jawed trap yawned for him. And it was only a moment before he realized that this was just the hiding-place for him—and one, moreover, for which he himself might have ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... impulse, in opposition to many rigorous attempts in favour of classical methods, it was at the same time raised above the tone of common expression by the rhythmical mode which it assumed, in a manner decisive of its ideal tendency. It thus displays a combination rare in this kind of poetry: the spirit of an untutored will, embodied in a form the romantic expression of which might seem only congenial to choice and delicate fancies. . ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... Spohr had lived up to the ideal he had conceived in his youth. He was a man of strong individuality, and invariably maintained the dignity of his art with unflinching independence. Even the mistakes that he made, as for instance his criticism of Beethoven, bore the strongest testimony to his ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... its gloomy tree-clad heights and cloven crest, round which the mists hung in sullen vapour, was an ideal position for defence. In its front was a valley forming a natural ditch so deep that the eye could scarcely pierce its depths. The ravine at one point was so narrow that the English and French guns waged duel across it, but on the British side the ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... mythological or Bible times, who by their immutable institutions have preserved the integrity of their empire, whose monuments are gigantic, whose administration is perfect, among whom revolutions are impossible, who have regarded ideal beauty as a barren element in art, who have carried luxury and industry to such a pitch that we cannot outdo them in anything, while they are our equals in things where ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... favourite tree when I had once mastered the difficult and dangerous art of climbing. It was farthest from the house of all the trees, on a waste weedy spot which no one else visited, and this made it an ideal place for me, and whenever I was in the wild arboreal mood I would climb the willow to find a good stout branch high up on which to spend an hour, with a good view of the wide green plain before me and the sight of grazing flocks and herds, ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... from senate-hall or court: Thy magnetism, I feel it there, Thy rhythmic presence fleet and rare, Making the mob a moment fine With glimpses of their own Divine, As in their demigod they see Their swart ideal soaring free; 'Tis thou that bear'st the fire about, Which, like the springing of a mine, Sends up to heaven the street-long shout: Full well I know that thou wast here; That was thy breath that thrilled mine ear; But vainly, in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that he was so heavily to blame. As for Eve, she was just the kind of sister to beg an erring brother to "Forgive me for your trespasses;" but when the union of two souls had been as perfect since life's very beginnings, as it had been with Eve and Lucien, any blow dealt to that fair ideal is fatal. Scoundrels can draw knives on each other and make it up again afterwards, while a look or a word is enough to sunder two lovers for ever. In the recollection of an almost perfect life of heart and heart ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... ideal spot for the founding of a city! That is our first impression, as we glance across the broad sunlit enclosure on to the empurpled slopes of Vesuvius rising grandly above the broken columns of the great temple of the Capitoline ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... hours given to Friendship, if it is forever postponed to unimportant duties and relations? Friendship is first, Friendship last. But it is equally impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. When they say farewell, then indeed we begin to keep them company. How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins. I would that I were worthy ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... impalpable as an abstraction, and abstract liberty the merest phantasy that ever amused the imagination. This world was made for man, and man for the world as it is. We ourselves, our relations with one another and with all matter, are real, not ideal. I might say that I am no more in favor of slavery in the abstract, than I am of poverty, disease, deformity, idiocy, or any other inequality in the condition of the human family; that I love perfection, and think I should enjoy a millennium such as God ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... disillusioning. As he looked into the faces of his Board of Trustees, dominated by that little bald-headed man, he felt the cruel force of Overman's sneer at the modern church as the home of the mean and the crippled and the sick. The appeal to the ideal seemed to ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... You'd risk another day in this place for a nigger? How absurd! They're never grateful. They don't see things from the white man's standpoint. They don't expect ideal treatment. Leave him his wages and tell him to follow when they let ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... Road, and she chose the things she fancied with an inexorable resolution,—sweeping aside my suggestions with—"Oh, YOU want such queer things." She pursued some limited, clearly seen and experienced ideal—that excluded all other possibilities. Over every mantel was a mirror that was draped, our sideboard was wonderfully good and splendid with beveled glass, we had lamps on long metal stalks and cozy corners and plants ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... of what was to become the Diocese of Connecticut. The old Faith enshrined in the historic creeds of the Prayer-Book; the law and life of worship embodied in its formularies, all leading up to and centering in the highest act of Christian worship, the Holy Eucharist; its ideal of the Christian life taught in its Catechism and carried out in all its offices from baptism to burial; on these foundations, no broader and no narrower, was our Church here built up. God grant that on these foundations it may stand till ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... wife, the mother of the nineteen children, did Dunton find his ideal New England wife; in a book-printer did he find ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... penned for the benefit of the youthful Frederick. The preface makes mention of "my little Frizchen" thus:—"It were better had he been an angel, but he is just a human child:" then, facetiously, it is added, "he is less ideal than saucy and conceited." Those who like myself knew only the solemnity of the painter in advanced years have a difficulty in supposing in the child such traits compatible. These songs of the domestic affections were set to music; the father, as a dilettante complete, cultivated ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... animalism he would have been the nobler man. We do not say it. Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporal presence is something less appealing than corporal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real. She found that her personality did not plead her cause so forcibly as she had anticipated. The figurative phrase was true: she was another woman than the one who ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... lately returned from a long trip, crowded with many concerts, when I called at the New York residence of this ideal musical pair and their charming family. Mme. Homer was at home and sent down word she would see me shortly. In the few moments of waiting, I seemed to feel the genial atmosphere of this home, its quiet and cheer. A distant tinkle ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... you to do," he writes. "Take strong coffee, inspire yourself, think of your 'Ideal,' and compose some very pretty music to the enclosed words, with which Rag's ideal flame has inspired Rag—surtout, let it be as good as possible, with accompaniment a l'avenant. An alteration in the music of each ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... Cider Campaign%.—The candidate of the Democrats (Martin Van Buren) was a shrewd and skillful politician. The candidate of the Whigs (Harrison) was the ideal of a popular favorite. To defeat him at such a time, when the people were angry with the Democrats, would have been hard, but they made it harder still by ridiculing his honorable poverty and his Western surroundings. At the very outset of the campaign a Democratic newspaper ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... Warwick. Down and down we trotted—hills and heights of all kinds left behind us—trees, shrubs, hedges, all in the fullest leaf, lay for miles and miles on every side; and the scenery had about as much resemblance to our ideal of a Welsh landscape, as ditch water to champagne. Through this wilderness of sweets, stifling and oppressive from its very richness, we drove for a long way, looking in vain for the hilly region where the Three Cocks had taken up their abode. At last we saw, a little way ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... that make us sigh Ever to have seen such; for she was one Fit for the model of a statuary (A race of mere impostors, when all 's done— I 've seen much finer women, ripe and real, Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal). ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Past Chimney Rock we fly—noble shaft of six hundred feet; then just before landing at Minnieska our attention is attracted by a most striking promontory rising over five hundred feet— the ideal mountain pyramid. Its conic shape—thickly-wooded surface girding its sides, and its apex like that of a cone, cause the spectator to wonder at nature's workings. From its dizzy heights superb views of the forests, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... whose decorous mansion in the old Equerries' Quarter was considerably better known than his bijou maisonnette in the Fourmenny district, at present occupied by the young lady of whom he ardently desired to possess a discreet portrait: one which, as an "ideal figure" might safely decorate drawing-room or library in his ostensible home. But in this affair, as in all other really desirable matters, Prince G——easily perceived the difficulty of complete discretion. Alas! To no famous brush dared he intrust his rather obvious commission. And his search ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... striking, and the whole was like a Poet's Vision! I believe she is equally beautiful when seen close, but at a distance at which we saw her the effect was something more than that of a lovely picture, it was aerial, ideal. On the classically shaped head she wore a diamond crown or diadem, round her waist a row of magnificent diamonds to correspond, and the same as trimming round the "basques" of her gown. Then a sort of cloud or mist of transparent lace enveloped her, which had the effect ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... recovering from his illness, after the long dark spell that has obscured his intellect, wrapping his soul, as it were, in a shroud—no wonder he fancies the scene to be a sort of Paradise, worthy of being inhabited by Peris. One is there he deems fair as Houri or Peri, unsurpassed by any ideal of Hindoo or Persian fable—Adela Miranda. In her he beholds beauty of a type striking as rare; not common anywhere, and only seen among women in whose veins courses the blue blood of Andalusia—a beauty perhaps ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... the various proposals that look to the rectification of industrial wrongs. But there is one source of opposition to these proposals that requires more extended consideration-the fear that they-and especially socialism-unduly threaten that ideal of personal liberty which our fathers so passionately served and we have come to look upon as the cornerstone of our prosperity. What is this ideal of liberty, and how should it affect our efforts at industrial regeneration? What are the essential aspects of the ideal of liberty? ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... of a thought Every object back is brought Gayer than it was when real, Under influence ideal. In remembrance as a glass, Let your happy childhood pass; Dreaming so in fancy's spells, You still shall hear those old ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... were defeated by the steadfastness of the men who received her meagre wages and looked to her as their one ideal. Her explorers were the bravest, her traders the most enterprising and single-minded, her factors and partners the most capable and potent in all the world. No country, no leader, no State ever received half the worship her sons gave her. The fierce Nor'westers, the traders of Montreal, the Company ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... of obsequious London chroniclers, though, so far as my personal observation goes, its inhabitants are merry only when in liquor. Islington is congested, Islington contains criminals, and Islington is an ideal hiding-place. Therefore, says Merrington, let ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... a familiar story, the story of lettered youth; of an ambition, or rather of an ideal; of poverty; of struggles in the 'dusty and stony ways'; of intellectual task-work; of a true love consoling the last months of weakness and pain. The tale is not repeated here because it is novel, nor even because in its hero we have to regret an 'inheritor of ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... to whom it is not given to fight for our beloved home, for help. Let every one now do what lies in her power to lighten the struggle for our husbands, sons, and brothers. I know that in all ranks of our people, without exception, the will exists to fulfill this high ideal, but may the Lord God strengthen us in our holy work of love, which summons us women to devote all our strength to the ...
— 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
... churches have been treated at some length, because they contain certain essential elements of planning in a state of probation. The basilican plan was doubtless the ideal of English builders during the sixth and early seventh centuries, but an ideal which was hard to compass where good building material was not plentiful. Thus Augustine and his companions contented themselves in most instances with a plan which recalled the aisled ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... me to repeat my 'Credo' for you, since you accuse me of not wanting yours? I believe that the future of humanity is in the progress of reason through science. I believe that the pursuit of truth, through science, is the divine ideal which man should propose to himself. I believe that all is illusion and vanity outside the treasure of truths slowly accumulated, and which will never again be lost. I believe that the sum of these truths, always increasing, will at last confer on man incalculable power and peace, if ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... charming sense of what she believed was a superior and even matronly protection; in the utter isolation of her life now—and with her husband's foolish abuse of him ringing in her ears—it seemed a sacred duty. She had lost a son. Providence had sent her an ideal friend to replace him. And this was quite consistent, too, with a faint smile that began to play about her mouth as she recalled some instances of Barker's ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... it evidently created no impression on his mind. In the debate on the Army Estimates he followed Captain TRYON, who had delivered an urgent appeal to the Government from the text, "A strong Army and a shorter War." Mr. PRINGLE'S ideal is just the reverse. In his view the Army is too big already, and is taking too great a toll from our industrial and commercial population. The great men who won the Napoleonic War—after twenty-three years—had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... aught or do anything in matters of policy, consider, what I am sure you have never fairly weighed, the condition of a man whose clearest notion of Government is derived from the Police! Imagine one who had never seen a polyp trying to construct an ideal of the animal, from a single tentacle swinging out from the tangle of weed in which the rest was wrapped! How then any more can you fancy that a man to whose sight and knowledge the only part of government practically exposed is the strong process of police, shall form a proper ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... D. Maurice of the first section of Law's remarks, says: 'I have never seen in our language the elementary grounds of a rational ideal philosophy, as opposed to empiricism, stated with nearly the same clearness, simplicity, and force,' and it was at Sterling's suggestion that Maurice published a new edition of Law's argument with an ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... is a young man, devout, fervent and sincere, a very anchorite in his habits and mode of life, thin, spare of frame, and with features eloquent with the fire of intellect, morally and physically the splendid ideal of what a true priest ought to be—wandered among his flock, exhorting, comforting, admonishing and cheering them; while the Hermandades, a religious brotherhood, headed by their color-bearer, upon whose banner ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... general state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason having come forward and told, in her own quiet way a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rabidly devoured the ideal;—I pronounced judgment to ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the garden, so perfectly a poet's ideal, stretched a landing defended from the incessant swash of the bay by a stone revetment. There was then a pavement of smoothly laid flags, and then a higher wall of dark rubble-work, coped with bevelled slabs. An open pavilion, with ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Sarah went out to him. The twilight was deepening. There was a clear green glow in the sky. Before them stretched the smooth level of field; in the distance was a cluster of hay-stacks like the huts of a village; the air was very cool and calm and sweet. The landscape might have been an ideal ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... issue is chiefly this:—Whether by the star and sceptre some single Israelitish king is designated, or rather, an ideal person—the personified Israelitish kingdom. The latter view I proved, in my work on Balaam, to be the correct one, for the following reasons:—1. The reference to a certain Israelitish king is against the analogy of ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... and kind, were never quite the same. The more he thought of it, the more Chris knew it had to be attempted. He squatted on his haunches, examining the carved wooden figure attentively, and felt convinced that, once alive, the boy would be an ideal and ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... when he took his place at dinner that day, but his behaviour was more quiet and guarded than usual: he conducted himself more like Willie's ideal mouse, than like the noisy, rattling fellow he usually appeared. The brothers sat, three on each side of the table; no one claimed the place at the top, where the mother was accustomed to sit when well. Dr. Campbell looked tired, and was very silent, but took care that his sons' vigorous ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford
... rider, as more easily thrown from the saddle, and already the regrets for Lorenzo were getting less predominant over the murmured desire for government on a broader basis, in which corruption might be arrested, and there might be that free play for everybody's jealousy and ambition, which made the ideal liberty of the good old quarrelsome, struggling times, when Florence raised her great buildings, reared her own soldiers, drove out would-be tyrants at the sword's point, and was proud to keep faith at her own loss. Lorenzo was dead, Pope Innocent was dying, and a troublesome Neapolitan ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... pass around the heads of the fjords of the coast. The tribunal was an ad-)udication board and not an actual court of arbitration, since its function was not to decide the boundary but to settle the meaning of the Anglo-Russian treaty, which provided for an ideal (and not a physical) boundary. This boundary did not fit in with geographical facts; hence the adjudication was based upon the motive of the treaty and not upon the literal interpretation of such elastic terms as "ocean,', "shore'' and "coast-line.'' ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... no interest for him; it was the essential that he sought and wished to put upon the stage—the striving and yearning, and then the inevitable acceptation of the burden of life; in other words, the entrance into the life of resignation. That was what he sought in his own operas, and from this ideal he had never wavered; all other art but this essential art was indifferent to him. It was no longer the beautiful writing of Wagner's later works that attracted him; he deemed this one to be, perhaps, the ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Here an endless amount of work is being, and will be, done, because the reward which beckons on the horizon is an extraordinarily high one, an extraordinarily profitable one, a reward containing the most ideal blessings for humanity—the destruction of English world supremacy, the liberation of the seas. This exalted and noble aim has today come within reach, and it is German intellect and German work that have paved ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... I've met the O'Mores who are frequently in Chicago society. They have friends there. I think them one ideal couple." ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... of busy vulcans—each of whom was the beau-ideal of "the village blacksmith," all the smaller work of the railway was done. As a specimen of this smaller work, Will Garvie drew Mrs Marrot's attention to the fact that two vulcans were engaged in twisting red-hot iron bolts an inch ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... tunnel and there, across the face, was a four inch vein of the ore. It lay between two walls, as a fissure vein should; but the dip was almost horizontal, following the level of the uptilted strata. Except for that it was as ideal a prospect as a man could ask to see—and for sale for five hundred dollars! A single ton of the ore, if it was as rich as it looked, ought easily ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... English horses has not been really improved, certainly not by racing and its requirements. It has been truly observed that 'what is called the turf is merely a name for the worst kind of gambling. The men who engage in it are as far as possible from any ideal of sporting men. It is a grim joke, in fact, to speak of "sport" at all in their connection. The turf to them is but a wider and more vicious sort of tapis vert—the racing but the rolling of the balls—the horses but animated dice. It is difficult to name a single honest or manly instinct which ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... choosing a treatise of some great master. We may then operate either (1) by simple reading and re-reading, or (2) by committing portions to memory verbatim, or (3), best of all, by making some changes according to an already acquired ideal of good composition. This too shows the great importance of attaining as early as possible some regulating principles of goodness of style: the action and reaction of these, on the most exemplary authors, constitute our progress ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... the history, but the poetry and song of all periods are starred with real and ideal embroideries—noble and beautiful ladies, whose chief occupations seem to have been the medicining of wounds received in their honor or defense, or the broidering of scarfs and sleeves with which to bind the helmets of their knights as they ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... legend. Chretien belonged to a generation of French poets who rook over a great mass of Celtic folk-lore they imperfectly understood, and made of what, of course, it had never been before: the vehicle to carry a rich freight of chivalric customs and ideals. As an ideal of social conduct, the code of chivalry never touched the middle and lower classes, but it was the religion of the aristocracy and of the twelfth-century "honnete homme". Never was literature in any age closer to the ideals of a social class. ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... to the girls about embroidery. In old days, when embroidery was the chief occupation of noble dames and demoiselles, the needle was used as a paint-brush might be, to make a picture of some real thing or some ideal occurrence. For instance: the Bayeux tapestry, worked in the eleventh century by Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, and her ladies, is a continuous series of pictures, two hundred and fourteen feet long by about two ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... which afford the best copies for the painter's art. But although sicut pictura poesis is an ancient and undisputed axiom—although poetry and painting both address themselves to the same object of exciting the human imagination, by presenting to it pleasing or sublime images of ideal scenes; yet the one conveying itself through the ears to the understanding, and the other applying itself only to the eyes, the subjects which are best suited to the bard or tale-teller are often totally unfit for painting, where the artist must present in a single glance all that his ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... conception is applied to the essences of things, it leads to the hypostatization of the class concepts or universals. Not the particular individual whom we perceive is the real man, but the typical man, the ideal man as the mind conceives him. He is not a concept but a real existent in the intelligible world. If we apply it also to qualities of things, we hypostatize the abstract quality. Heat becomes really distinct from the hot object, existence from the existent thing, goodness from the ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... Malcolm her husband was with her. Malcolm always declared that Colonel Godfrey was his typical and ideal Englishman. He was a well-built, soldierly-looking man of unusually fine presence. As he was over fifty, his golden-brown moustache was slightly grizzled, and the hair had worn off his forehead; but he was still strikingly ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... begged them, "Come ye not into my town;" he then recounted his good deeds, praising himself as good, just, honest, kind to his neighbours, and so on. I must remark that this man had not been in touch with Europeans, so his ideal of goodness was the native one—which you will find everywhere among the most remote West Coast natives. He urged these things as a reason why no evil should befall him, and closed with an impassioned appeal ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... himself, "the undiscoverable Venus of the older time, for whom we have sought so often, only to find the scattered gleams of her beauty here and there? Oh! to behold once and for one moment, Nature grown perfect and divine, the Ideal at last, I would give all that I possess.... Nay, Beauty divine, I would go to seek thee in the dim land of the dead; like Orpheus, I would go down into the Hades of Art to bring back the life of art from among the shadows ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... had fallen and the solid earth was reeling! Griswold lay back in the deep lounging-chair and fought manfully to retain some little hold upon the anchorings. Could this be his ideal; the woman whom he had set so high above all others in the scale of heroic faultlessness and sublime devotion to principle? And was she so much a slave of the conventional as to be able to tell him coldly that she had recognized ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... that Mr. Aubrey Gilbert is by no means ideal as the leading juvenile of our piece. The time still demands some explanation why the leading juvenile wears no gold chevrons on his left sleeve. As a matter of fact, our young servant of the Grey-Matter Agency had been declined by a recruiting station and a draft ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... he had, indeed, had an almost momentary glimpse of a home where a dashing woman, moving silently and airily, guarded his meditations from the external plagues. Such a woman was created to comfort, cheer and encourage if he flagged. But the love she inspired was ideal, perceived hazily during the hours when he was out of health, and divined rather than watched her ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... is to give the pupils instruction in various household tasks, in order that better living conditions may be secured in the homes. The beauty and sacredness of an ideal home life should receive emphasis, so that the pupils may be impressed with the importance of conscientious work in the performance of their daily household duties. They should have some insight into the sanitary, economic, and social problems that are involved ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Science in Rural Schools • Ministry of Education Ontario
... that? I don't say he is by any means my ideal of a young man," said Miss Ethel. Then she added after a pause: "You must not dream of mentioning the subject to Caroline. It is not ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... of hurrying childhood prevailed in literature, and how it abolished little girls. It may be that there were in all ages—even those—certain few boys who insisted upon being children; whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal. Art, for example, had no little girls. There was always Cupid, and there were the prosperous urchin-angels of the painters; the one who is hauling up his little brother by the hand in the "Last Communion of St. Jerome" might be called Tommy. But there were no "little ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... ideal line for boys of all ages. It contains juvenile masterpieces by the most popular writers of interesting fiction for boys. Among these may be mentioned the works of Burt L. Standish, detailing the ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... weight of the strings and their tension, which led, in these early grands, to many inequalities. The three octaves toward the treble could, with care, be adjusted, the lengths being practically the ideal lengths. It was in the bass octaves (pianos were then of five octaves) the inequalities were more conspicuous. To make a more perfect scale and equalize the tension was the merit and achievement of John Broadwood, who joined to his own practical ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... comes a time when the ideal and the real world begin to separate. No longer content with a "make-believe" process, and unable to control the complex processes of modern life, he feels a need that cannot be satisfied by the resources of his neighborhood alone. ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... gentleman at a ball, or other festive occasion, where the excitement of the scene has reflected on every object around a roseate tint. We are to suppose, of course, that in looks, manner, and address, her incipient admirer is not below her ideal standard in gentlemanly attributes. His respectful approaches to her—in soliciting her hand as a partner in the dance, &c.—have first awakened on her part a slight feeling of interest towards him. This mutual ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... nothing to do with an elephant story. In the forests we saw numberless old elephant pits, and on the grassy slopes there were mazes of elephants' trails, some so big that hundreds of elephants must have moved along them. But we saw no elephants. We scanned the hills for miles and tramped for days in ideal elephant country, but our quest was all in vain. Then our food supplies ran low, our last bullock was killed, and we hurried back to the base camp on the river, a hungry, tired band of a hundred ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... incomplete sentence. This "nevertheless" seemed to express her better self; to correct the rude tendencies of her nature. Had she been educated in her early days, this tendency to self-correction would have made her an ideal woman, but she owed nearly all her intellectual training to the sermons of the Rev. Jason Lee, which she had heard in some obscure corner of a room, or in Methodist ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... The inimitable Grecian standard is an immortal precedent; the Medival carvings embody the rude Teutonic truthfulness; where Canova provoked comparison with the antique, as in the Perseus and Venus, his more gross ideal is painfully evident. How artificial seems Bernini in contrast with Angelo! How minutely expressive are the terra-cotta images of Spain! What a climax of absurdity teases the eye in the monstrosities in stone which draw travellers in Sicily to the eccentric ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... country to which his heart turned. The noble faith and dauntless enterprise of Gutzlaff, pressing into China over obstacles apparently insurmountable, aided by his medical skill and other unusual qualifications, must have served to shape Livingstone's ideal of a missionary, as well as to attract him to the country where Gutzlaff labored. It was so ordered, however, that in consequence of the opium war shutting China, as it seemed, to the English, his lot was not cast there; but throughout his whole life he had a peculiarly lively interest ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... Matter of endurance. Your Middlewest is double-Puritan—prairie Puritan on top of New England Puritan; bluff frontiersman on the surface, but in its heart it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm. There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, and ask why it is, and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... who has not as yet entered upon the path of occult development, what has been described is the ideal state of affairs, but naturally it is not attained by all, or even by the majority. The average man has by no means freed himself from the lower desires before death, and it takes a long period of more or less fully conscious ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... 28, he watched the sunrise from the summit of the Rigi under ideal conditions, and, after describing the scene and saying that the rest of the company had gone back ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... now looks to the East. In the so-called Baltic provinces of Russia the lands to a great extent are owned by Russian subjects of German blood. The peasants are poor, servile, without education or property, an ideal field for the advance of autocracy. It is hoped to either annex these provinces boldly or to establish protectorates, which, sooner or later, at an opportune moment, will fall into German hands—just as Austria gained the consent of Europe to a protectorate over Bosnia and Herzegovina and then ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... seems to have realised this ideal of a country minister. He was attentive to his pastoral duties, and the correspondent of Doddridge and the author of "The Grave," could not fail to be an evangelical, a practical, and a powerful preacher. ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... imagination can invent and imagine a thousand beauties, gifts of mind and virtues of character; but unless he have judgment which enables him to discern the bounds of possibility and to detect the real nature of the woman he has chosen as the representative of his self-formed ideal, he runs great risk of being deceived. As a general rule, however, it has pleased Providence to endow man with much more judgment than imagination; and to this cause we may attribute the small number of poets who ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... seen that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been the want of illustrative examples. In a State where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... great warriors were greedy time-servers like John Churchill; all statesmen plausible placemen; all reformers self-seeking pretenders. Nor did Captain Paget wish that it should be otherwise. In his ideal republic, unselfishness and earnestness would have rendered a man rather a nuisance than otherwise. With the vices of his fellow-men the diplomatic Horatio was fully competent to deal; but some of his most subtle ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... waver under the delusion of a breath of adventure? Had he become—a grave matter in a general—unconscious of peril? Is there an age, in this class of material great men, who may be called the giants of action, when genius grows short-sighted? Old age has no hold on the geniuses of the ideal; for the Dantes and Michael Angelos to grow old is to grow in greatness; is it to grow less for the Hannibals and the Bonapartes? Had Napoleon lost the direct sense of victory? Had he reached the point where ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... way as to allow the hand to clutch it and hold it with ease. There must be no unnecessary extension of the palm and fingers, for it adds so much to the fatigue. Unhappily, every volume does not fulfil this requirement, and the requisite selection must be made with care. Moreover, the ideal bedside book should be not only small, and light, and agreeable to the touch, but distinguished by special internal characteristics. Not only must the print be legible; the matter it furnishes must be in brief instalments. What is wanted is a series ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... vain. Mrs. Quackenboss was impressed; but the doctor smiled always a sphinx-like smile, and reiterated his belief in the unfitness of mid-stream as an ideal place for swopping horses. The more he declined, and the better he talked, the more eager Charles became each day to secure him. And, as if on purpose to draw him on, the doctor each day gave more and more surprising proofs ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... philosophy, or lack of it, that had always made life full of merry hope when their stomachs were filled, taking no thought of the morrow, animated them now. Fate had given Mayo and his associate an ideal crew for that parlous job. It was not a question of union hours and stated wages; they worked all night just as cheerily as they ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... palpably false logic; and I therefore feel myself compelled to infer, that by the Gospel Paul intended the eternal truths known ideally from the beginning, and historically realized in the manifestation of the Word in Christ Jesus; and that he used the ideal immutable truth as the canon and criterion of the oral traditions. For example, a Greek mathematician, standing in the same relation of time and country to Euclid as that in which St. Paul stood to Jesus Christ, might have exclaimed in the same ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of time, the most wonderful of his life, the happiest of hers. They took advantage of Sir Timothy's absolute license, and spent long days at The Sanctuary, ideal lovers' days, with their punt moored at night amongst the lilies, where her kisses seemed to come to him with an aroma and wonder born of the spot. Then there came a morning when he found a cloud on her face. She was looking at the great wall, and away at the minaret beyond. ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... known to the ancients terminated. The name of Fortunate Islands was long in as vague signification, as that of El Dorado among the conquerors of America. Happiness was thought to reside at the end of the earth, as we seek for the most exquisite enjoyments of the mind in an ideal world beyond the limits of reality.* (* The idea of the happiness, the great civilization, and the riches of the inhabitants of the north, was common to the Greeks, to the people of India, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... into print. From that time to this a long line of famous and obscure men, at first mostly men of letters, but afterwards, and especially in our own times, trained specialists in their profession, have devoted much of their lives to the editing of Shakespeare. Their ideal has been, usually, to give readers the text of his poems and plays in their presumed primitive integrity. Constant study of his works, and of other Elizabethan writers, has given them a certain knowledge of the words and grammatical usages ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... Mr. James Pigott remained master of the situation, without a suspicion of its pathetic irony. Ted, whose intellect was incapable of adding two and two together, had to sit on a high stool and work endless sums in arithmetic. Ted, whose soul was married sub rosa to ideal beauty, had to live in a house where every object had the same unwinking self-complacent ugliness, and where the cook was the only artist whose genius was appreciated. Ted was a little bit of a Stoic, and he could have borne the long impressive dinners and the unstudied malice of the ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... itself, or its priceless contents, is the fact that these are here. That, in the midst of war and its demands, France should still find time for the ideal, and for this beautiful tribute to the long-standing friendship between the two countries, is a demonstration of French spirit and of French culture that will not escape the attention of any thoughtful American. For France herself, as it has well been said, her appearance here means as much as a ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... in him. For always before it had been his chief care that nothing at all should happen to him emotionally, and especially had he feared this alchemy of passion. He had been unable to pray for purity, since he felt it an ideal ridiculously not indigenous to this richly-coloured three-dimensional universe, and he had observed that it made men liable to infatuations in later life; but he had prayed for lust, which he knew to be the most drastic preventive of love. ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Literary criticism endeavors to form a correct estimate of literary productions. Its endeavor is to see a piece of writing as it is. It brings literary productions into comparison with recognized principles and ideal standards; it investigates them in their matter, form, and spirit; and, as a result of this process, it determines their merits and their defects. The end of literary criticism is not fault-finding but truth. The critic should be more than a censor or caviler. He should ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... when she was eighteen and has produced a result every year and a half since. She loves him mildly and he loves her after a fashion, but her endurance is wearing thin. His mother had seven children and he thinks that an ideal number, though she was one generation nearer the pioneer woman and also had a nurse trained in slavery who was a wizard with children. Mark wants to have a lot of joy of life and so far he drags poor exhausted Nell with him. It is a question how long ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... than the others in the room—that they were all sustaining him, their hearts like a hammock for him, their minds in a tensity for me to stop.... I did. The fact is, I choked at the discovery.... They were very far from any competitive ideal. They were one—and there's something immortal about that. It gave me the glimpse of what the world will some time be. There is nothing that so thrills as the many made one.... Power bulks even from ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... has to read, and the prolonged effort of accommodation induces myopia. Other minor generalized maladies were also described: an organic debility so widely diffused that hygiene prescribed as an ideal treatment a gratuitous distribution of cod-liver oil or of reconstituent remedies in general to all pupils. Anemia, liver complaints, and neurasthenia were also studied as ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... as the knee-buckles and so on, mentioned in the will, the artistic imagination of St. Gaudens evolved a veritable beau of a mariner, with knee-buckles positively resplendent and an Admiral's wig. And, though it may not be a good likeness, it is an agreeable enough ideal, and I think ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... is—there is no reason why there should be any concealment between relatives—that my poor dear wife is incredibly jealous. She hates that anyone—male or female—should for an instant come between us. Her ideal is a desert island and an eternal tete-a-tete. That gives you the clue to her actions, which are, I confess, upon this particular point, not very far removed from mania. Tell me that you will think no more ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to improve their rates on foreign letters and parcels, as well as to cheapen the delivery of letters and parcels from abroad; but it was entirely forgotten that he had to reckon with foreign Powers. A Postal Reformer had declared, in a letter, that it was possible to create an ideal Post Office. He wished he could accede to every one of his requests, but he had to consider Parliament; he was not master himself. He thought that if they were to meet the requirements of the public as they were anxious to ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs
... I assure you, it is intolerable, among the three characters with whom I am cast. Pauline is daring, like all young persons who are innocent, to whom love is a wholly ideal thing, and who see no evil in anything, so long as it concerns a man whom they intend to marry. The penetration of Gertrude is very acute, but we manage to elude it through Pauline's terror lest my name should be divulged; the sense of this danger gives her strength to dissemble! But now ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... higher laws and principles, and the spontaneity of the ego as the kernel of the personality. By the aid of apperception, therefore, we are lifted gradually from psychical bondage to mental and moral freedom. And now when ideal norms are apperceivingly active in the field of knowledge and thought, of feeling and will, when they give laws to the psychical mechanism, true culture is attained." (Lange's Apperception, edited by DeGarmo, ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... faced. How is it done? he kept vaguely wondering. How is it that men live on to old age and see bond after bond broken, and possession after possession swept away, and still find the years tolerable and the sun pleasant, still cherish in themselves that inexhaustible faith in an ideal something which supplies from century to century the invincible motive power ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... evermore like the waters of the mighty ocean. He who has ears truly touched to this music, is in a manner deaf to the voice of popularity.—The love of fame differs from mere vanity in this, that the one is immediate and personal, the other ideal and abstracted. It is not the direct and gross homage paid to himself, that the lover of true fame seeks or is proud of; but the indirect and pure homage paid to the eternal forms of truth and beauty as they are reflected in his mind, that gives him ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... the representative of the South, I wish I could say that Brown was the representative of the North. He was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood. No man in America ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau |
