"Idealized" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remarkable difference distinguishes the modern world from all that went before than its attitude toward change itself. The medieval world idealized changelessness. Its very astronomy was the apotheosis of the unalterable. The earth, a globe full of mutation and decay; around it eight transparent spheres carrying the heavenly bodies, each outer sphere moving more slowly than its inner neighbour, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... of the Godhead which obtains in Christianity and that which dominates modern Hinduism there is found a difference of emphasis which amounts almost to a contrast. To the Hindu, the Supreme Soul or Brahm is idealized Intelligence; to the Christian God is perfect Will. To the former, He is supreme Wisdom; to the other, He is infinite Goodness. The devotees of each faith aspire to become like unto, or to partake of, their Divine Ideal. Hence ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... most intense loyalty in thought and action. She was endowed with a spirit which, had she lived in the past, might easily have led her into an effort to restore some overthrown dynasty, and she would have so idealized even a very questionable conspiracy as to render it worthy, in her belief, of unstinted self-sacrifice. A girl of her character would have faced the wild beasts of the Roman amphitheatre for the sake of her faith, or she would have intrigued against the Spanish Inquisition although ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... name, and the reverence that his genius has created and maintains, even upon the shilling gallery, to prevent the tragic interest from turning into another channel. The contrast is too great between the truthfulness of the bed-curtains and easy-chair, and the horrid purpose—which ought to be idealized, and not realized—for which the Moor enters the room. It is a frightful, blackfaced murderer—designed in the seventeenth century, and considered true to nature then, coming into the open daylight of the nineteenth, casting his Elizabethan energies into forms repulsive to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... led them in to the bedroom, and raised a shade so that the tempered sun light revealed the fuzzy head and shut eyes and rotund linen- swathed form of Junior, she felt that words were unnecessary. She never really saw the baby's face, she saw something idealized, haloed, angelic. In later year she used to say that none of the hundreds of snapshots Bert took of him really did the child justice. Junior had been the most exquisitely beautiful baby that any one ever saw, ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... about it. Happily no thought was required beyond the intelligence that lives in sensitive finger-tips. It was almost mechanical labour, and for that Flossie had more than a taste, she had a positive genius. It was mechanical labour idealized and reduced to a fine art, an art in which the personality of the artist counted. The work displayed to perfection the prettiness of Flossie's hands, from the rapid play of her fingers in sifting, and their little fluttering, hovering movements ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the Crusader, there blazed the great glow of hope. This woman movement, spoken of so glibly as Suffrage, was, to the mind of this over-read, under-fed, emotional, dreamy little Russian garment worker the glorious means to a long hoped for end. She had idealized it, with the imagery of her kind. She had endowed it with promise that it would never actually hold for her, perhaps. And so she marched on, down the great, glittering avenue, proudly clutching her unwieldy banner, a stunted, grotesque, magnificent figure. ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... pundit, the pious prayer-monger, any thing but the ladies' man. Yes: it is little wonder that Mrs. Tracy's heart clave to Julian, the masculine image of herself; while it barely tolerated Charles, who was a rarefied and idealized likeness of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Peter Lely, in his female portraits; but the doubt is, whether the works of either are genuine history. Not more so, I suspect, than the narrative of a historian who should seek to make poetry out of the events which he relates, rejecting those which could not possibly be thus idealized. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... passed since that night when she had fallen asleep on his shoulder, and he had watched the ribbons of fire rising and falling in the valley, and the smell of grass-smoke had been strong in his nostrils, through all those years Zen had been to him a sweet, evasive memory to be dreamed over and idealized, a wild, daring, irresponsible incarnation of the spirit of the hills. Even in these last few days he had followed the path simply because it lay before him. He had not sought her out in all that great West; he had been content with his dream of the Zen ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... lodged in the Roman mind. But in every nation some minds much more than others are representative of the national type: they are normal minds, reflecting, as in a focus, the characteristics of the race. Thus Louis XIV. has been held to be the idealized expression of the French character; and among the Romans there can not be a doubt that the first Caesar offers in a rare perfection the revelation of that peculiar grandeur which belonged to the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... staccato passages left me actually limp—I'm starting Myrtle in Tuesday to take of Professor Gluckstein. She wants to take stenography, but I tell her.... Did you think the preludes were just the tiniest bit idealized.... I always say if one has one's music, and one's books, of course—He must be very, very ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... beauty. It was visible through a course of two or three miles, sweeping in a semicircle round the hill on which I stood, and being the central line of a broad vale on either side. At a distance, it looked like a strip of sky set into the earth, which it so etherealized and idealized that it seemed akin to the upper regions. Nearer the base of the hill, I could discern the shadows of every tree and rock, imaged with a distinctness that made them even more charming than the reality; because, knowing them to be unsubstantial, they assumed the ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... generations, was the same, as no merchant ever thought of altering anything for merely a greater personal comfort, but the old fashioned standup desks and the well worn leather seats of the high office stools, did not look as inviting as of old. His memory had mellowed and idealized their appearance. Of course, the influence of the mother was not permitted in the sacred precincts of the office, even most of the cleaning was done by the youngest apprentice. But from the grey walls looked down proudly, the models of the sailing vessels which carried ...
— Bremen Cotton Exchange - 1872/1922 • Andreas Wilhelm Cramer
... betrayed its eagerness to get rid, as soon as possible, of a disagreeable subject. Thus passed away Caroline of Brunswick—a character variously represented by that very unsatisfactory photograph, Party; but, though the likeness has often been idealized by those whose credit was likely to suffer by too natural a resemblance, sufficient physiognomical likeness has remained to show that she was far from being the sort of woman a sensible man would court for a wife, or the kind of Princess that would confer any distinction ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... in it, while Dante was yet in Florence—begun in Latin, and he quotes three lines of it—continued afterward in Italian. This is not impossible; indeed, the germ and presage of it may be traced in the Vita Nuova. The idealized saint is there, in all the grace of her pure and noble humbleness, the guide and safeguard of the poet's soul. She is already in glory with Mary the Queen of Angels. She already beholds the face of the Ever-blessed. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... that the "old man" occupied in the village which he founded may be gained from the novel that the eater of the pasties afterward entitled The Pioneers. In this book, while historical accuracy is disclaimed, Judge Temple is easily identified as an idealized Judge Cooper, and a faithful picture of life in the early village may be recognized; for, as the author says in his introduction, while the incidents of the tale are purely fiction, "the literal facts are chiefly connected with the natural and artificial ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... that, before closing the present course, I shall be able so far to complete that evidence, as to prove to you that the commonly received notions of classic art are, not only unfounded, but even, in many respects, directly contrary to the truth. You are constantly told that Greece idealized whatever she contemplated. She did the exact contrary: she realized and verified it. You are constantly told she sought only the beautiful. She sought, indeed, with all her heart; but she found, because she never doubted that the search was to be consistent ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... downward upon the beloved earth, I ceased to wonder that gods were godlike—indeed, my real wonder was that they were not more so. It seemed difficult to believe that there was anything earthly about earth. The world was idealized even to myself, who had never held it to be a bad sort of place. There were rich pastures, green to the most soul-satisfying degree, upon which cattle fed and lived their lives of content; here and there ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... impression of rugged power and self-respect saves it from becoming merely photographic, and its plastic feeling is excellent. In this and the preceding group, as also in the keystone figure and the tympanum, the courageous employment of the actual commonplace garments of everyday labor instead of idealized draperies has met success. The tympanum group is called "Varied Industries." It appreciates the various daily labors of mankind through which civilization continues and is almost devotional in its expression - "in the handicraft of their work ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... of woman from the mire it was plunged into by the comic poets, or rather satiric dramatists, of the middle period of Greek Comedy preceding him and the New Comedy, who devoted their wit chiefly to the abuse, and for a diversity, to the eulogy of extra-mural ladies of conspicuous fame. Menander idealized them without purposely elevating. He satirized a certain Thais, and his Thais of the Eunuchus of Terence is neither professionally attractive nor repulsive; his picture of the two Andrians, Chrysis and her sister, is nowhere to be matched for tenderness. But the condition ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... poet so markedly illustrates this characteristic as the prince of neo-Hebraic poetry, Yehuda Halevi, in whose poems the principle of Jewish national poesy attained its completest expression. They are the idealized reflex of the soul of the Jewish people, its poetic emotions, its "making for righteousness," its patriotic love of race, its capacity for martyrdom. Whatever true and beautiful element had developed ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... sight of a fisher, and he examined it as one does any animal—or man—that one has so long heard described in superlative terms that it has become idealized into a semi-myth. This was the desperado of the woods; the weird black cat that feared no living thing. This was the only one that could ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... and in comedy, men of all races and times have enjoyed with keen relish the humor of the contrast between the conventional and the natural motives in behavior. In Greek mythology, individual traits of human nature are abstracted, idealized, and personified into gods. The heroes of Norse sagas and Teutonic legends are the gigantic symbols of primary emotions and sentiments. Historical characters live in the social memory not alone because they are identified with political, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... revelations with a suppliant understanding also; and let no characteristic of its method by any means escape you. Notice how it is indeed all one long narrative, from end to end; and see therein GOD'S provision that nothing shall be idealized, nothing explained away. Learn too that Man is thus called upon to look outward, and to sustain himself by an external Law; not to depend on the promptings of his own conscience, and so to become a god unto himself. The Bible, I repeat, is all severest ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... himself, for her part in the deception. It was no less than a conspiracy. What could an innocent young girl like Sheba know of such a man as Colby Macdonald? Her imagination conceived, no doubt, an idealized vision of him. But the real man was ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... been some time in the Presidency before the public estimate of him was correct or appreciative. The people did not at first understand him. In the glamour of the Presidential canvass they had idealized him,—attributing to him some traits above and many below his essential qualities. After his election and before his inauguration there was a general disposition to depreciate him. He became associated in the popular mind with an impending calamity, and tens of thousands who had voted for ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... result of the changed relationship between himself and the friend he idealized, Keith began once more to look up Johan. He did it rather furtively, as if he had known that he was engaged in something unworthy of himself. There was an additional reason for this return to an association long spurned, and it had something to do ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... quarter was, "What! you wish to go to the land of barbarism, where they have negro slavery, and where they do not know how to appreciate talent and genius?" But this could not prevent me from realizing my plans. I had idealized the freedom of America, and especially the reform of the position of women, to such an extent, that I would not listen to their arguments. After having been several years in America, very probably I would think twice before undertaking again to emigrate; ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... assist. For the strife is in this instance between the Chela's will and his carnal nature, and Karma forbids that any angel or Guru should interfere until the result is known. With the vividness of poetic fancy Bulwer Lytton has idealized it for us in his "Zanoni," a work which will ever be prized by the occultist while in his "Strange Story" he has with equal power shown the black side of occult research and its deadly perils. Chelaship was defined, the other day, by a Mahatma as a "psychic resolvent, which eats ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... high aim that Dulac worked. His stature increased. She marveled that such a man could waste his thoughts upon her. She idealized him; her soul prostrated ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... strange and significant of a mysterious human need, the need to look upwards towards a superiority inexpressibly remote, the need of something to idealize in life. They had only that and, maybe, a sort of love as idealized and as personal for the mother of God, whom, also, they had never seen, to whom they trusted to save them from a devil as real. And they had, moreover, a fear even ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... evident devotion to a fixed code of personal conduct. In his writings he was the interpreter of chivalrous, well-bred youth, and his heroes were young, clean-thinking college men, heroic big-game hunters, war correspondents, and idealized men about town, who always did the noble thing, disdaining the unworthy in act or motive. It seemed to me that he was modelling his own life, perhaps unconsciously, after the favored types which his imagination had created for his stories. In ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... yet sensitively understanding and humane. And withal they never worried her by interferences and criticisms; they never presumed on their hospitality, but left her as free as though her age had been twice what it was. Undoubtedly, in the ardour of her gratitude she idealized every one of them. The sole reproach which in secret she would formulate against them had reference to their quasi- cynical levity in conversation. They would never treat a serious topic seriously for more than a few ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... makes you open your eyes to all sorts of historical conditions to which you would otherwise be blind. The domestic novel, even when its art is perfect, gives little but pleasure at the best; at the worst it is simply scandal idealized. ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... contempt is to convey the impression that detectives stand in the way of some evil schemes of their detractor. Fiction of a peculiarly American sort has built up among the people an exalted conception of the sleuth. And it must appear with rather a shock to those persons who have thus idealized the detective to learn that thousands of men who have been in the penitentiaries are constantly in the employ of the detective agencies. In a society which makes it almost impossible for an ex-convict to earn an honorable living it is no wonder that many of them grasp eagerly at positions offered ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... absolute realism. (But there is no absolute, and one day somebody—probably a Russian—will carry realism further.) His climaxes are never strained; nothing is ever idealized, sentimentalized, etherealized; no part of the truth is left out, no part is exaggerated. There is no cleverness, no startling feat of virtuosity. All appears simple, candid, almost childlike. I could imagine the editor of a popular magazine returning a story of Tchehkoff's ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... translation, and this I afterward found to my sorrow. My friend and schoolmate of that time, W. O. S., published a few years since, in the "St. Nicholas Magazine,'' an account of this school. It was somewhat idealized, but we doubtless agree in thinking that the lack of grammatical drill was more than made up by the love of manliness, and the dislike of meanness, which was in those days our very atmosphere. Probably the best thing for my mental training was that Mr. Hoyt interested me in my Virgil, Horace, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... subject to show anything of her own individuality, Miriam had evidently a great scope of fancy, and a singular faculty of putting what looked like heart into her productions. The latter sketches were domestic and common scenes, so finely and subtilely idealized that they seemed such as we may see at any moment, and eye, where; while still there was the indefinable something added, or taken away, which makes all the difference between sordid life and an earthly paradise. The feeling and sympathy in ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... one thing more notable than another in the Venetian features, it is this deep pensiveness and solemnity. In other districts of Italy, the dignity of the heads which occur in the most celebrated compositions is clearly owing to the feeling of the painter. He has visibly raised or idealized his models, and appears always to be veiling the faults or failings of the human nature around him, so that the best of his work is that which has most perfectly taken the color of his own mind; and the least impressive, if not the least valuable, that which appears to have been unaffected and unmodified ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... blindly, with a deep-seated sense of duty which she made a source of offence by preening and parading it, and forcing it to ill-timed notice. She saw that she had looked on her husband as a means not an end. She had wished to absorb him and his work for her own glory. She had idealized for her own uses a very human man whose life had been full of sin and fault. ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the old age and death of Juana la Loca, the daughter of the Catholic Kings, and widow of Philip the Handsome. The Queen's mad passion for Philip is barely mentioned, her figure is idealized, and she is made a symbol of humility, self-effacement, and love for the humble. Closely guarded by a harsh agent of her son Charles V, she escapes for a day to a country village, where she talks in a friendly way with the peasants, discussing their problems with a simplicity which conceals ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... wholly Indian origin. Some of them, notably those of the Tul-tok'-a-na and the second legend of Tis-sa'-ack, have been accepted by eminent ethnologists, and are believed to be purely aboriginal, while others have doubtless been somewhat idealized in translation and in the course ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... close of his life, and a grave under the long grass, as calmly as the laborer at sunset looks to his evening slumber, is no less in harmony with the silent desert in which he wanders. Equally so are the Indians, still his companions, copies of the American savage somewhat idealized, but not the less a part of the wild nature in which they ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... not succeeded in finding a substitute for social ethics in an idealized type of national character. The imagination of the Western nations, like those of antiquity, has shaped ideal types which they believe or would wish themselves to resemble; they know what they mean by "esprit gaulois," ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement. While the matter embodied is idealized emotion, the vehicle is the idealized language of emotion. As the musical composer catches the cadences in which our feelings of joy and sympathy, grief and despair, vent themselves, and out of these germs evolves melodies suggesting higher phases of these feelings; I so, ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... idyllic in literature wherever we find it? Life is full of the idyllic; and no anthropologist will ever persuade the reasonably romantic youth that the sweet and chivalrous passion which leads him to mingle reverence with desire for the object of his affections, is nothing but an idealized property sense. Origins explain very little, after all. The bilious critics of sentiment in literature have not even honest science ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... priest of the Russo-Greek Church; they were displayed in shop windows and held an honoured place in many private dwellings. These portraits ranged from lifelike photographs, which showed a plain, shrewd, kindly face, to those which were idealized until they bore a strong resemblance to the conventional representations of Jesus of Nazareth. On making inquiries, the writer found that these portraits represented Father Ivan, of Cronstadt, a priest noted for his good works, and very widely believed ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... grown, she had become idealized. As three days in April suffice to cover certain trees with flowers, six months had sufficed to clothe her with ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... her up. This idealized interpretation of her betrothed was not the one she had, but for Aline it might be the true one. At least, she could not disparage him very consistently under ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... the number of persons, to whom resemblance may be discovered; and thus, while in fact only describing the characteristics of a class, authors are frequently subjected, very unjustly, to the imputation of having invaded the privacy of individuals. Particularly is this so, when the class is idealized, and an imaginary type is taken, as ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... him too much, and we have idealized childhood too much; we've laughed at his smart tricks and his saucy replies, and tried high moral suasion, but we must turn over a new leaf. When he is bad he must be punished severely enough to make an impression. Are you ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... sort unknown to-day; the cut of his soldier's coat was antique; but the beauty of the boyish face, the straight glance of his eyes, and ease of the broad shoulders that military drill could not stiffen, these were untouched, were idealized even by the old-time atmosphere that floated up from the picture like fragrance of rose-leaves. As I gazed down at the boy, it came to me with a pang that he was very young and I growing very old, and I wondered ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... of equal length it is a Greek Cross, the cross in most frequent use among Eastern Christians. "The Latin cross suggests the actual form, while the Greek cross is idealized, the Greeks being essentially an artistic and poetic race." "The Greek cross is a symbol of the spread of the Gospel and of its triumphs in the four quarters of the world. It is the usual form wherever it is intended to express victory or is ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester
... fantasies of a gemlike brilliancy, as if diamonds and rubies sparkled upward among the bubbles of the fountain. Ever and anon there gleamed across the young man's mind a sense of wonder that he should be walking side by side with the being who had so wrought upon his imagination, whom he had idealized in such hues of terror, in whom he had positively witnessed such manifestations of dreadful attributes,—that he should be conversing with Beatrice like a brother, and should find her so human and so maidenlike. But such reflections were only ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of classic methods, but romantic tastes, who modified the heroic into the idyllic and mythologic. He was a sentimental day-dreamer, with a touch of melancholy about the vanished past, appearing in Arcadian fancies, pretty nymphs, and idealized memories of youth. In execution he was not at all romantic. His color was pale, his drawing delicate, and his lighting misty and uncertain. It was the etherealized classic method, and this method he transmitted to a little band of painters ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... scarcely necessary to point out that, in ordinary civilized society, these fundamental facts are not usually present at the surface of consciousness and may even be absent altogether; on the foundation of them may arise all sorts of idealized fears, of delicate reserves, of aesthetic refinements, as the emotions of love become more complex and more subtle, and the crude simplicity of the basis on which they finally ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... childish imagination glowed with the splendour of their enterprise! I idealized them as the bravest and most generous men that ever sought a home in a strange land. I thought they desired the freedom of their fellow men as well as their own. I was keenly surprised and disappointed years later to learn of their acts of ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... as supreme. With her details we shrink from competition. Who shall presume to imitate the colors of the tulip, or to improve the proportions of the lily of the valley? The criticism which says, of sculpture or portraiture, that here nature is to be exalted or idealized rather than imitated, is in error. No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human liveliness do more than approach the living and breathing beauty. In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true; ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... these mysteries with all the power of her untutored mind. But that power was soon exhausted, and vague, chaotic, abstract conceptions gave place to a definite image which had been eternally impressed upon her inward eyes. It was the figure of the young Quaker, idealized by the imagination of an ardent and emotional woman whose heart had been ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... What's gone was air, the solid good remains; For what is good, except what friend and foe 70 Seem quite unanimous in thinking so, The stocks and bonds which, in our age of loans, Replace the stupid pagan's stocks and stones? With choker white, wherein no cynic eye Dares see idealized a hempen tie, At parish-meetings he conducts in prayer, And pays for missions to be sent elsewhere; On 'Change respected, to his friends endeared, Add but a Sunday-school class, he's revered, And his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... poem, saw to it that the news reached the ears of a reporter, and submitted to an interview by a staff writer who was accompanied by a staff photographer and a staff artist. The result was a full page in a Sunday supplement, filled with photographs and idealized drawings of Marian, with many intimate details of Martin Eden and his family, and with the full text of "The Palmist" in large type, and republished by special permission of Mackintosh's Magazine. It caused quite a stir in the neighborhood, and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... woman saw and understood. She had at last passed out of his world. Only the memory of a girl he had once loved and idealized remained, and that memory was now unapproachable. The living woman was no longer the figure in the mental picture. The struggle ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... idealized as an angel, a saint, and a demigod; he has been caricatured as a self-indulgent sensualist, a vulgar Lothario, a buffoon, a joker ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... book took its name from a negro, half-prophetic, half-crazed, who maintained in the Dismal Swamp a refuge for slaves, and purposed an uprising to conquer their freedom. To Southern imaginations it might well recall Nat Turner and the horrors of his revolt. Mrs. Stowe inevitably idealized everything she touched; and to idealize the leader of a servile insurrection might well be regarded as carrying fire into a powder magazine. The moving expostulation of the Christian slave Milly with Dred, the death of Dred, the frustration of his ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... boys used to admire these sketches and preserve them—some of the bigger boys would value my idealized (!) profiles of Madame Seraskier, with eyelashes quite an inch in length, and an eye three times the size of her mouth; and thus I made myself an artistic reputation for a while. But it did not last long, for my vein ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... of an elevated type. "The nose, mouth, chin, in short all the features," says M. Maspero, "are the same; but in the father they are more refined, more intelligent, more spiritual, than when reproduced in the son. Seti I. is, as it were, the idealized type of Ramesses II." (Letter of M. Maspero in The Times of July 23, 1886.) It may perhaps be doubted whether the shrunken mummy, 3300 years old, is better evidence of the living reality than ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... played to an idealized Hamlet for the real Hamlets came and went bewilderingly. One of Burgess's first triumphs of tact had been to pry the part away from the lady President and give it to the sturdy Secretary. There followed two other claimants to the throne in quick succession and then ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... youth, and of primitive, unsophisticated nations; while science may be called the religion of the mature man, full of experience and immersed in the actual. The Positivism of Comte, like the old myth-worship, sets up for its deity human nature idealized, adorned with genius and virtue. The Positivist worships virtuous human nature, conditioned and limited as it is; while the Mythist worshipped it reflected on the outer world and endowed with supernatural attributes, clothed with mist-caps and wishing-caps that gave it dominion over space and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... and they are all more or less alike—petulant as babes, peevish as women, selfish as misers, and conceited as peacocks. They SHOULD be different? Oh, yes!—they SHOULD be the perpetual youth of mankind, the faithful singers of love idealized and made perfect. But then none of us are what we ought to be! Besides, if we were all virtuous, . . by the gods! the world would become too dull a hole to live in! Enough! Wilt drink with me?" and beckoning ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... lament of those who worship art, that sternest mistress in the world, fell into the silence of the little drawing-room. Rachel understood it in part only, for she had always vaguely felt that Hester idealized Nature, as she idealized her fellow-creatures, as she idealized everything, and she did not comprehend why Hester was in despair because she could not speak adequately of Life or Nature as she saw them. Rachel thought, with bewilderment, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... romancer, the reader will hardly need be told that the two strangers stood in the presence of America's now illustrious artist, George L. Brown. But one seeing him then, as he stood almost scowling at the two strangers, would hardly have idealized him into the artist whose pencil has done so much of late years to give American art a distinctive name through his poetical delineations of the rare, sun-tinted atmosphere that hovers over Italian landscapes. However, our apology for him must be that the day was raw and blustering, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... pianists, and for fifteen years was Liszt's great concert solo. It marks a transition from Moscheles, Dussek and Clementi to Thalberg and Liszt. The "Invitation to the Dance," moreover, was the first salon piece idealized from a popular ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... les Nouvelles Meditations. Graziella, whose heart Lamartine won during his visit to Naples in the winter of 1811-12 and whom he abandoned, was the daughter of a Neapolitan fisherman. She died soon afterward. Later the poet idealized her and his relation to her and immortalized her memory in his works. Cf. le ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... which she never could have had in her own right. It was her identity with that haunting image of loveliness that gave her such a charm. The charm was an imaginary one. Had I never found her on the river and idealized her, the might have gained my admiration; but she would never have thrown over me such a spell. But now, whatever she was in herself, she was so merged in that ideal, that in my longing for my love I turned my steps backward and wandered toward O'Halloran's, with ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... the 'Carden Girl.' Explained that a number of assorted models had posed for that type of beauty. Further explained that none of them resembled the type; that the type was his own creation; that he used models merely for the anatomy, and that he always idealized form and features. ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... the first sentence to the last; the characters are vital and are, also, most entertaining company; the denouement unexpected and picturesque and cleverly led up to from one of the earliest chapters; the story moves swiftly and without a hitch. Robert Burns is neither idealized nor caricatured; Sandy, Jock, Pitcairn, Danvers Carmichael, and the Duke of Borthewicke are admirably relieved against each other, and Nancy herself as irresistible as she is natural. To be sure, she is a wonderful child, but then she ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... Sevigne makes of her regard for her daughter. This regard was a passion, morbid, no doubt, by excess, and, even at that, extravagantly demonstrated; but it was fundamentally sincere. Madame de Sevigne idealized her absent daughter, and literally "loved but only her." We need not wholly admire such maternal affection. But we should not ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... brows; "praise of your mistress is sweeter than flattery to yourself. Why, simply because she is Grace St. John. I imagine that it is her army life that has so blended unconventionality with perfect good breeding. She is her bluff, honest, high-spirited old father over again, only idealized, refined, and womanly. Then she must have inherited some rare qualities from her Southern mother: you see my aunt has told me all about them. I once met a Southern lady abroad, and although she was middle-aged, she fascinated me more than any girl I had ever met. In ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... subjected his work to such a test? Poison him at the very least. And this is what the literary artist should complain of, rather than desire, at the hands of an editor. He should not want the little bit that he selected, narrowed, intensified, idealized, and then imperfectly transcribed from memory, brought out and set up before a reader whose eye is filled at every glance with the overpowering and inexhaustible realities ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... which in fantastic succession on either side threw out their weird arms into the sea; while just around the edge of the shore, where the water was shallow over rocks and weed, was a girdle of lightest, loveliest green. Guernsey, idealized in the morning mist, lay like a dream on the horizon. Here and there a fishing-boat, whose sail flashed orange when the sun touched it, was tossing on the waves; nearer in a boat with furled sail was cautiously making for the narrow passage—the Devil's ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... as Mr. Pickwick and Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Gamp. They are to us not only types of English life, but types actually existing. They at once revealed the existence of such people, and made them thoroughly comprehensible. They were not studies of persons, but persons. And yet they were idealized in the sense that the reader did not think that they were drawn from the life. They were alive; they were themselves." The writer might have added that this is proper to all true masters of fiction who work in the higher regions of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... from a fruitless search for Tod, her bag was already in the little spare bedroom and Frances Freeland gone. The girl had never yet been alone with her aunt, for whom she had a fervent admiration not unmixed with awe. She idealized her, of course, thinking of her as one might think of a picture or statue, a symbolic figure, standing for liberty and justice and the redress of wrong. Her never-varying garb of blue assisted the girl's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... apparently long-forgotten word of cheer, light, and inspiration stored in childhood. The special virtue of the hymn, among all poetic forms of great thoughts, is that memory is strengthened by the music and the thought further idealized by it, while frequent repetition fixes it the more firmly and repetition in congregational song adds the high ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... of her," Hancock kept on. "He idealized her good qualities, and put her so far away that her bad qualities couldn't get on his nerves and prevent him from smoking his quiet lazy pipe of peace and meditating upon the stars. And when the ordinary every-day ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Holy Grail cycle, (4) the Launcelot cycle, (5) the Tristan cycle,—which at first developed independently, were, in the latter half of the twelfth century, merged together into a body of legend whose bond of unity was the idealized Celtic hero, King Arthur. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... creeds, because it "unfits men for the business and duty of life by fixing their speculations on an unknown world." And even its votaries, in all ages, races and faiths, cannot deny that the next world is a copy, more or less idealized, of the present; and that it lacks a single particular savouring of originality. It is in fact a mere continuation; and the ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... under the witchery of the star-studded skies, wearied and hungry, but filled and thrilled with the fragrance and glory of the memories of the mother whom his young heart idealized, he left the launch at the landing by the terrace steps and started blithely for the little restaurant, dreaming, always dreaming, not of ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... and anaemic, not to say exceedingly shame-faced, but which in mature years become strong and selfish and jealous, either for a lover or a son. Mrs. Dwight, being a perfectly respectable woman, had centered all the accumulated forces of her being on the son whom she idealized after the fashion of her type; and as she had corrected his obvious faults when he was a boy, it was quite true that he was kind, amiable, honest, honorable, patriotic, industrious, clean, polite, and moral; if hardly as handsome as Apollo or as brilliant and gifted as she permitted herself ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... a bond between them, though she was the object of an unspoken rivalry between them: for they both loved her jealously. They both saw themselves in her with their pet faults idealized by the grace of childhood: and each strove cunningly to steal her from the other. And the child had in due course become conscious of it, with the artful candor of such little creatures, who are only too ready to believe that the universe gravitates round themselves: and ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... them, not for what she imagined, but for what she saw, though she saw it only in the germ. But as the Greeks beheld a Persephone and Athene in the passing stranger, and ennobled humanity into ideal beauty, Margaret saw all her friends thus idealized. She was a balloon of sufficient power to take us all up with her into the serene depth of heaven, where she loved to float, far above the low details of earthly life. Earth lay beneath us as a lovely picture,—its sounds came ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... The imagination is the image making power of the mind, the power to create or reproduce ideally that which has been previously perceived: the power to call up mental images. By means of the imagination we take the materials of experience and mold them into idealized forms. The aim of creative art is to idealize, that is, to portray nature and experience in perfect forms not with the imperfections of visible nature. "In this" says Hegel, "art is superior ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... of Blent, quite good west-country people. She had broken away from them before she was twenty to marry Benham, whom she had idealized at a tennis party. He had talked of his work and she had seen it in a flash, the noblest work in the world, him at his daily divine toil and herself a Madonna surrounded by a troupe of Blessed Boys—all of good family, some of quite the best. For a time she had kept it up even more than ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... his consumption costs him. Only experience can teach him this, and this experience lasts throughout his life. While laboring and producing, then, Prometheus is subject to an infinitude of disappointments. But, as a final result, the more he labors, the greater is his well-being and the more idealized his luxury; the further he extends his conquests over Nature, the more strongly he fortifies within him the principle of life and intelligence in the exercise of which he alone finds happiness; till finally, the early education of the Laborer ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... struck at sight of her that he had gazed unconsciously, with a glow on his face and a radiance in his eye, as of a young poet spellbound at an inspiration; and because he seemed the physical type of young man she had idealized—a strong, lithe-limbed, blond giant, with a handsome, frank face, clear-cut and smooth, ruddy-cheeked ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... more credit to you on that account. But I saw that by and by you would have to keep it up mainly by your sense of necessity and duty. 'That'll be the pinch,' I said; and now I see it's come. For a long time you idealized the work; but at last its real dulness has begun to overcome you, and you're discontented—and with a discontentment that you ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... going forward in each of the leading nations. The liberalism of Locke and the principles of the Whig revolution profoundly influenced France, and the very fact that distance lent them enchantment and allowed them to be idealized gave them a value as a stimulus to the French critic of absolute government which they could hardly exercise at home, where their real limitations were better known. The French revolution bore on ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... been already adverted to. The result is probably more true to the actual impression of a battle than if Drayton had surveyed the field with the eye of a tactician, but here as elsewhere the poet should rather aim at an exalted and in some measure idealized representation of the object or circumstance described than at a faithful reproduction of minor details. Even the Battle of the Frogs and Mice in Homer is an orderly whole; while Drayton's battle seems ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... in transferable passages, sentences of universal application, from being saturated with the perfumed essence of humanity. We say it with diffidence, but to us it seems that there is a further poetic glance, more idealized fidelity, in Milton; more significance and wisdom and profound hint in Goethe. In Milton the mental reverberation is wider: he rivets us through distant grand association, by great suggestion. Thus, describing the darkened head ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... Caucasus, ironically takes leave of his country, which he calls, "a squalid country of slaves and masters." And he salutes the Caucasian mountains as the immense screen which may hide him from the eyes of the Russian pachas. The Slavophiles themselves, the patriots who in their way idealized both Russian orthodoxy and autocracy, and who were wrongly considered the champions of the existing order of things, showed themselves no less hostile. One of their most celebrated representatives, Khomyakov, sees in Russia ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... heard that Shelley was never better pleased than when his associates made free with his coats, boots, and hats for their own use, and that he appropriated their property in the same way. Shelley was a poet, and perhaps idealized his friends. He saw them, probably, in a state of pure intellect. I am not a poet; I look at people in the concrete. The most obvious thing about my friends is their avoirdupois; and I prefer that they should wear their own cloaks and suffer me to wear mine. There is no neck in ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... than the imagination—after that she was idealized or suspected according to the ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... father liked; and she was more gratified because the man was Corliss. But in his rush of business she saw less of him than formerly, while St. Vincent came to occupy a greater and growing portion of her time. His healthful, optimistic spirit pleased her, while he corresponded well to her idealized natural man and favorite racial type. Her first doubt—that if what he said was true—had passed away. All the evidence had gone counter. Men who at first questioned the truth of his wonderful adventures gave in after hearing him talk. Those to any extent conversant with the parts ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... thrown together without much plot; the tragedy of blood, centering in one character who struggles amidst woes and horrors; romantic comedy and romantic tragedy, in which men and women were more or less idealized, and in which the elements of love, poetry, romance, youthful imagination ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the early adherents to psychological Aesthetic, defining the beautiful as the idealized image of pleasure, the ugly as that of pain. For him the aesthetic fact is the idealized image of the real. Failing to apprehend the true nature of the aesthetic fact, Kirchmann invented a new psychological category of ideal or apparent ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... shutters and throw up the windows. Cool as the weather is in this climate, I stifle for air, and this close atmosphere, laden with fragrance, grows oppressive. Who sent these flowers, by-the-by, Mrs. Clayton? or do they belong to the magnificence of this idealized hotel?" She made no reply to any ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... glass, and the worst immediately happened. It might have been a little less violent, perhaps, if Penrod's expectations had not been so richly and poetically idealized; but as things were, the ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... a shadow of doubt worried him. Yes, it was Josephina, but there was something unusual, idealized about her. Her features looked the same, but they had an inner light that made them more beautiful. It was a defect he had always found in these pictures, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... betrays the same struggle for a greater amplitude and independence. In point of art the book appears to us a failure. The theme is not objectionable in itself. It is similar to that of many works which have sprung from certain phases of individual experience. But if such experience is to be idealized, its origin should disappear. Shakespeare may have undergone all the conflicts of doubt and irresolution represented in "Hamlet"; but in reading "Hamlet" we think, not of Shakespeare's conflicts, but of our own. Volupte is too palpably ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... before I left Grasmere, on the island in that lovely lake; our kettle swung over the fire, hanging from the branch of a fir-tree, and I lay and saw the woods, and mountains, and lake all trembling, and as it were idealized through the suble smoke, which rose up from the clear, red embers of the fir-apples which we had collected: afterwards we made a glorious bonfire on the margin, by some elder bushes, whose twigs heaved and sobbed in the uprushing column of smoke, and the image of the bonfire, and of ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... our second illustration, the great city-festival of Athens. In the Anthesteria it was a moment of nature that was seized and idealized; here, in the Panathenaea, it is the forms of social life, its distinctions within its embracing unity, that are set forth in their interdependence as functions of a spiritual life. In this great national fete, held every four years, all the higher ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... The setting of the sun amidst the islands was full of wild beauty. The airy pinnacles of Samothrace and the wild hills of Imbros, scarred and parched, stood silhouetted against a glorious background of wonderful colouring, high tones and low tones, an idealized Turner canvas. Out to the sinking sun stretched a golden path, while to the right and to the left lay untroubled leagues of blue. The gloaming slowly enveloped the horizon to the north and south, the shining path of light broadened and burnished, as the sun rested a moment, then disappeared, while ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... we know, the lovely Beatrice of Dante was only a Disagreeable Girl, clothed in a poet's fancy, and idealized by a dreamer. Fortunate was Dante that he worshipped her afar, that he never knew her well enough to be undeceived, and so walked through life in love with love, sensitive, saintly, sweetly sad and most ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... superhuman energy, the marvellous recklessness, the bewildering fancy, the spirit of adventure, the physical dexterity, and the coolness of a singularly mysterious individual whom it was impossible not to take for Arsene Lupin, but a new and greater Arsene Lupin, dignified, idealized, and ennobled by ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... economically, but still lingering socially in the scene of his large possessions. Their personality imparts a charm to the many books about them which at present there seems to be no end to the making of; and such a fine touch as Dr. Van Dyke's gives us a likeness of them, which if it is idealized is idealized by reservation, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... ground with his mother, near whom he remained, and to whom he was very attentive. To him the whole thing was very impressive. His poetic fancy idealized it, and carried him back till he seemed to see and hear the dedication of a young, pure spirit to the sweet sacredness of a holy life, as in the days of the preachings of the apostles. When the final hymn was given out ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... candles. These wooded lawns are more beautiful than English park scenery; all the more beautiful for the air of neglect about them, as if not much care of men were bestowed upon them, though enough to keep wildness from growing into deformity, and to make the whole scene like nature idealized—the woodland scenes the poet dreamed of—a forest of Ardennes, for instance. These lawns and gentle valleys are beautiful, moreover, with fountains flashing into marble basins, or gushing like natural cascades from rough rocks; with ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... an idealized aviator was given by Lieutenant Lufbery, of the Lafayette Escadrille, who came to the United States to assist in training the new corps of American flying men. Lufbery himself was a most successful air fighter—an "ace" several times over. Though ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... of her country, with its deep-blue luminous sky, its luxuriant vegetation, its light-hearted, witty populace, and she wrote of them with rare insight and exquisite tenderness. Tasked with having idealized them, she replied:—"Many years of unremitting study, pursued con amore, justify me in assuring those who find fault with my portrayal of popular life that they are less acquainted with them than I am." And in another place she says:—"It is ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... and the only part that is at all idealized is the figure of Christ; that is noble and calm in effect, and the drapery is simple and dignified. The other figures are coarse and dressed like the Nurembergers of the time ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... a rough sketch of my house. Of course I have idealized it somewhat, but only in order to catch the eye of the keenly observant reader. The front part of the house runs back to the time of Polypus the First, while the L, which does not show in the drawing, runs back ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... exquisitely idealized portraits of royal children we turn to the work of Velasquez, to find a faithful reproduction of the totally different type of child-life represented at the court of Spain. Appointed court painter at the age of twenty-four, and retaining this connection ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... really survivals of a world-wide religious practice. But Robin Hood need not be confused with the legendary May King. Mr. Child judiciously rejects these mythological conjectures, based, as they are, on far-fetched etymologies and analogies. Robin is an idealized bandit, reiver, or Klepht, as in modern Romaic ballads, and his adventures are precisely such as popular fancy everywhere attaches to such popular heroes. An historical Robin there may have been, but ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... thousands of American citizens marched to the battle-field with the grand passages of Webster glowing in their hearts. They met death cheerfully in the cause of the "Constitution and Union," as by him expounded and idealized; and if they were so unfortunate as not to be killed, but to be taken captive, they still rotted to death in Southern prisons, sustained by sentences of Webster's speeches which they had declaimed ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... lack of a country of their own, they developed, crystallized and idealized their cosmopolitan reasoning faculty. True, they have not their own empire, but many of them are working for the great moment when the earth will become the home for all, without distinction of ancestry or race. That is certainly ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... soul of an ancestor,[48] I think that he is very much in error. There are very few primitive folk, comparatively speaking, who believe in metempsychosis. In all probability, when a race, like the ancient Egyptians, for instance, had reached a high degree of civilization, they idealized many of their religious beliefs and customs; hence, the serpent probably lost its initial and simple symbolical meaning, and stood for something higher and more ethical during the reign of the great Pharaohs, and the Golden Age of the Greeks ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... for its energies, or feeling its incapacity to reach the ideal towards which it was striving! What longings of disappointed, defeated fellow-mortals, trying to find a new home for themselves in the heart of one whom they have amiably idealized! And oh, what hopeless efforts of mediocrities and inferiorities, believing in themselves as superiorities, and stumbling on through limping disappointments to prostrate failure! Poverty comes pleading, not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... tendencies reached their utmost point in their reverence for animal life. The shallow Romans, who reverenced only themselves, and the Greeks, who worshipped nothing but human nature more or less idealized, laughed at this Egyptian worship of animals and plants. "O sacred nation! whose gods grow in gardens!" says Juvenal. But it certainly shows a deeper wisdom to see something divine in nature, and to find God in nature, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... the founders of them. We are still, as in Plato's age, groping about for a new method more comprehensive than any of those which now prevail; and also more permanent. And we seem to see at a distance the promise of such a method, which can hardly be any other than the method of idealized experience, having roots which strike far down into the history of philosophy. It is a method which does not divorce the present from the past, or the part from the whole, or the abstract from the concrete, or theory from fact, or the divine from the human, or one science ...
— Meno • Plato |
