"Phantasm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had given him a forcible impression of the manner in which the world kept itself cheerful and prosperous by social pleasures and an intercourse of business, while he in seclusion was pursuing an object that might possibly be a phantasm by a method which most people would call madness. It is one great advantage of a gregarious mode of life that each person rectifies his mind by other minds and squares his conduct to that of his neighbors, so as seldom to ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... nails are never driven for nothing. It is the sham work, perhaps, of our day, that shakes faith in purpose and unity; a scrambling, shifty living of men's own, that makes to their sight a chance huddle and phantasm of creation. ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Street" which is currently spoken of by editors and public men as thinking, wanting, working for, certain things? There is a collective interest which is so designated which is real, but the popular notion under "Wall Street" is unanalyzed. It is a phantasm or a myth. In all these cases there is a tyranny in the term. Who dare criticise democracy or the people? Who dare put himself on the side of Wall Street? The tyranny is greatest in regard to "American" and "Americanism." Who dare ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... at last, was the land which we had at one time despaired of ever beholding again, and now we were well assured that it was no airy phantasm; yet strange as it may seem, our feelings were not those of ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... milk, and coal. "Set me some great task, ye gods! and I will show my spirit." "Not so," says the good Heaven; "plod and plough, vamp your old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and the best wine by and by." Well, 'tis all phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... that I can nevermore believe in Jewish reform. A stone must be thrown at this phantasm to make it vanish. Good Jews are either Asiatics, or Christians (unconscious thereof), besides a small minority consisting of myself and a few others, the possibility of mentioning whom saves me from the imputation of conceit, though, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... of the cheat, it was not till the spongy foot of my camel had almost trodden in the seeming waters that I could undeceive my eyes, for the shore-line was quite true and natural. I soon saw the cause of the phantasm. A sheet of water heavily impregnated with salts had filled this great hollow, and when dried up by evaporation had left a white saline deposit, that exactly marked the space which the waters had covered, and thus sketched a good shore-line. The minute crystals of the salt sparkled in the sun, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... remained safely and with honour in Egypt. Euripides has made this idea, which was calculated to please him, the groundwork of his "Helena," but it never had a strong hold on the Greek imagination. Modern fancy is pleased by the picture of the cloud-bride in Troy, Greeks and Trojans dying for a phantasm. "Shadows we are, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... astonishes him by its emission of lava; another will present you with his crocodile, whose malignity he fears; his dangerous serpent, the reptile to which he attributes his good or bad fortune. In short, each individual will make you behold his phantasm or his tutelary ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... practical idea," continued Keyork, amused with his own fancies, "and it will yet be carried out. The great cities of the next century will each have a liver of brick and mortar and iron and machinery, a huge mechanical purifier. You smile! Ah, my dear boy, truth and phantasm are very much the same to you! You are too young. How can you be expected to care for the great problem of problems, for the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding. I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is the mind can be employed about in thinking. Let us, then, suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters—without any ideas. Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... like the emptiness of a vessel; and the use of it, we may say, must be free from all self-sufficiency. How deep and mysterious it is, as if it were the author of all things! We should make our sharpness blunt, and unravel the complications of things. . . . How still and clear is Tao, a phantasm with the semblance of permanence! I do not know whose son it is. It might appear to have been ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... too had been applied to Him by the prophet Daniel. (Dan. vii. 13, iii. 25). But if Jesus claimed to be the Son of Man, if, standing before the Jews as a man, He claimed as man the power of forgiving sins, He thereby showed that He possessed a real human body and not the mere phantasm of ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... shadows had a surprising effect. The phantasm was pointed out, and stared at with superstitious terror by thousands every night. The fact that there was nothing really mysterious about it made no difference. Even those who knew well that it was an inevitable optical result of the division of the bright comet were thrilled with instinctive ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... regarding an Illusion? He had read in some of his mystical and magical writers, that men gifted with certain powers could project to a distance eidola or phantasms of varying likeness to themselves: might not this be such a mocking phantasm of Julius? He drew his hand across his eyes, and looked again: the figure still sat there. He put out his hand to test its substantiality, and the voice cried in a keen pitch ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... in my chair thinking, this phantasm of my father came, and turned, and vanished with a solemn regularity. It was a peculiar figure, strongly made, thick-set, with a face large, and very stern; he wore a loose, black velvet coat and waistcoat. It ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... gazing now in a different mood from any that had come to him before: he had begun to find out something fresh about this same stream, and the life in his own heart to which it served as a revealing phantasm. He recognized that what in the stream had drawn him from earliest childhood, with an infinite pleasure, was the vague sense, for a long time an ever growing one, of its MYSTERY—the form the infinite first takes to the simplest and liveliest hearts. It was because it was ALWAYS flowing ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... illness, and who had refused all the food his wife had offered him. "No," he answered, "I've never been used to nothing but common victual, and I can't eat that." Experience had bred no fancies in him that could raise the phantasm of appetite. ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... might seem to a patriot or to posterity, were unattainable so long as power remained with a caste that were anything we please except patriots. An Assembly of Notables was brought together, but it was only the empty phantasm of national representation. Yet the situation was so serious that even this body, of arbitrary origin as it was, still was willing to accept vital reforms. The privileged order, who were then as their descendants are now, the worst conservative party in Europe, immediately persuaded ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... mere phantasm of the brain," said he at length, attempting to regain his composure; "the coinage of a lively imagination which loves to deceive itself by—but no," continued he, observing her incredulous and agonized ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... Death is again come up into our windows, To cut off little children from without, And young men from the streets. And in the midst Of all these supernatural threats and warnings Doth Heresy uplift its horrid head; A vision of Sin more awful and appalling Than any phantasm, ghost, or apparition, As arguing and portending some enlargement Of the mysterious ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the contemplation of the divine conduct, as it is seen distorted by the predestinarian theology, and retain its just sentiments of what is right, what is just, what is honourable, what is lovely in goodness. The man who imitates the God of the Calvinist, that phantasm of a morbid or dreaming imagination, cannot fail to have his moral sentiments corrupted, and to become deceptive, shuffling, treacherous, and eventually insensible to the ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... occasional outburst of roars from the throat of the howling monkey, which I had come to know as making the night hideous in Remate de Males. But the present environment added just the proper atmosphere to make one think for a second that he was participating in some phantasm ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... regarded as a being who is prone to all that is revolting and cruel. He is cherished in excited imaginations, as a demoniac phantasm, delighting in bloodshed, without a spark of generous sentiment or native benevolence. The philosophy of man should teach us, that the Indian is nothing less than a human being, in whom the animal tendencies predominate over the spiritual. His morals and intellect having received ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... green eyes looking up to my window from the lane below, which on the night of my arrival I had relegated to the limbo of dreamland, had been verity and not phantasm. If that were so, then the uncanny visitant to my cottage had pursued me ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... courtly he was, a true chevalier of adventurous pioneering stock, sprung from the old proud Spanish blood, but there stole behind the girl's vision, as she bade him farewell, the undesired phantasm of a very different face, weary and lined and lighted by steadfast gray eyes—eyes that looked truthful and belonged to a liar! Miss Polly Brewster resumed her final packing in a ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the ancient philosophies maintained that all Nature is but the phantasm of our senses. Had it, after first granting that the senses themselves were evidences of matter and motion, maintained that Nature was only evident to us through them, it would have been simple truth. Our perceptions of Nature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... that quickened it within. I tried to comprehend the birth and growth of planets, and to do this I rose spiritually and passed beyond earth's confines into that seeming void which is the matrix where they germinate. On one of these journeys I was struck by the phantasm, so it seemed, of a planet I had not observed before. I could not then observe closer, and coming again on another occasion it had disappeared. After the lapse of many months I saw it once more, brilliant with fiery beauty—its motion was slow, rotating around some invisible centre. ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... frame was not strong enough to deliver it from a fear. His sensibility to strong contrasts was the foundation of his humor, which was that of a wit at once melancholy and willing to be pleased. He would beard a superstition, and shudder at the old phantasm while he did it. One could have imagined him cracking a jest in the teeth of a ghost, and then melting into thin air himself, out of a sympathy with the awful. His humor and his knowledge both, were those of Hamlet, of Moliere, of Carlin, who shook a city with laughter, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... looked dizzily at the priest trying to believe that this unhuman, sacerdotal phantasm had been telling him that it loved a beautiful young girl of his own ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... affections all seem in delightful accord, working each their task, and glowing through all the reach of years, until the glow is absorbed in the greater light which shines upon Christian graves. But Reuben's desertion from the faith broke this phantasm. Her faith, standing higher, never shook; but the sentiment which grew under its cover found nothing positive whereby to cling, and perished with the shock. Besides which, her father's injunction came to the support of her religious convictions, and made her disposition to shake off that empty fancy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... hand, he softly stole in the dark to the room where Duncan lay; and as he went, he thought he saw another dagger in the air, with the handle towards him, and on the blade and at the point of it drops of blood; but when he tried to grasp at it, it was nothing but air, a mere phantasm proceeding from his own hot and oppressed brain and the ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... occupy at least four times the period we have ascribed to it. The simple-minded priest, who could never have dreamt of such an exhibition, scarcely knew whether he was asleep or awake, and sometimes asked himself whether it was not some terrible phantasm by which he was startled and oppressed. The horrible impress of naked and hardened villany—the light and mirthful delirium of crime—the wanton manifestations of vice, in all its shapes, and the unblushing front of debauchery and profligacy—constituted, when ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... returned:— "So strange thy outcry, and thy words so strange Thou interposest, that my sudden hand, Prevented, spares to tell thee yet by deeds What it intends, till first I know of thee What thing thou art, thus double-formed, and why, In this infernal vale first met, thou call'st Me father, and that phantasm call'st my son. I know thee not, nor ever saw till now Sight more detestable than him and thee." T' whom thus the Portress of Hell-gate replied:— "Hast thou forgot me, then; and do I seem Now in thine eye so foul?—once deemed ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton |
