"Visionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is neither shy nor slow nor visionary. Nor shall his theory of immanent morality trouble him for the while. Reality is met with reality on solid, though sometimes slippery, ground. His animalism, long leashed and starved, is eager for prey. His Phoenician passion is awake. And fortunately, Khalid ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... for Clay Westmore, the brother, was but a boy and in college at the time. He had graduated only a few months before, and was now at home, wrapped up, as Richard Travis had heard, in what to him was a visionary scheme of some sort for discovering a large area of coal and iron thereabouts. He had heard, too, that the young man had taken hold of what had been left, and that often he had been seen ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... in 1808, while Luisa yet lived, a few scientists and professors of Konigsberg had formed a sort of Union—vague enough and visionary—to encourage virtue and discipline and patriotism. And now, in 1812, four years later, the memory of Luisa still lingered in those narrow streets that run by the banks of the Pregel beneath the great ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... was introduced on the state railways of Hungary by M. Barosz, the Hungarian Minister of Commerce, on the 1st of August, 1889. The adoption of the new tariff was ridiculed and condemned as visionary by road experts, who even went so far as to prove to the satisfaction of practical railroad men that the innovation was destined to be a failure. For a month or two it almost seemed as if their prediction might be fulfilled, ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... and his romance was always a fruit of the soil. The artist in him, seeming to be in conflict with the peasant, fortified, clarified the peasant, extracted from that hard soil a rare fruit. You see in his face an extraordinary mingling of the peasant, the visionary, and the dandy: the long hair and beard, the sensitive mouth and nose, the fierce brooding eyes, in which wildness and delicacy, strength and a kind of stealthiness, seem to be grafted on an ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... visionary a hope, for Nat's designs grew prettier and prettier, and the agent bought all I carried him. One week I remember he paid me thirty dollars; and as he handed it to me, seeing how pleased ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the struggling artist, who (as Cromek taunted him) was frequently "reduced so low as to be obliged to live on half a guinea a week." Not that this was entirely the fault of his contemporaries. Blake was a visionary, and an untuneable man; and, like others who work for the select public of all ages, he could not always escape the consequence that the select public of his own, however willing, were scarcely numerous enough to support ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... ideas—and then I called to mind the poor fellow's speech about the beetle's being "the index of his fortune." Upon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled, but, at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity—to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary, by ocular demonstration, of the fallacy of the ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... Catholicism in public, he had been indoctrinating disciples in private with his peculiarities; and, when they were numerous enough, he wanted to leave the Jesuits. By reasonings and kindness, they managed to retain him for a while; but he grew more odd and visionary, fasting often, eating only herbs, and having divine revelations. After a dangerous illness, which brought him to death's door, he did obtain his dismissal from the Jesuit order in April 1639, and went over France propagandizing. The Bishop of Amiens, caught by his eloquence, made him prebendary ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... the early cloud and morning dew, to leave behind only a memory of mingled pain and sweetness, recalled in after time with something of self-pity and something of surprise that such things had ever seemed real and not visionary, and had touched the warm springs in the heart now chilled, it may be, by the stern exigencies of this ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... Haygarth's thousands. Indeed, since that interview in which Philip Sheldon had made so light of his stepdaughter's chances, and ratified his consent to her marriage with so humble a literary adventurer as himself, Mr. Hawkehurst had come to consider the Haygarthian inheritance as altogether a visionary business. If it were certain, or even probable, that Charlotte was to inherit a hundred thousand pounds, was it likely that Mr. Sheldon would encourage such an alliance? This question Mr. Hawkehurst always ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... of art, with a peasant strain in him like Millet, and, like Millet, very near to the soil; a natural man, yet crossed by nature with a perverse strain; the possessor of a sensibility exalted, and dolorous; morbid, sick-nerved, and as introspective as Heine; a visionary and a lover of life, very close to the periphery of things; an interpreter of Baudelaire; Dante's alter ego in his vast grasp of the wheel of eternity, in his passionate fling at nature; withal a sculptor, always profound and ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... manner of flights? No old maid's gown, though it had been tormented into all the fashions from King James to King George, ever underwent so many transformations as those poor plains have in my idea. At first I was contented with tending a visionary flock, and sighing some pastoral name to the echo of the cascade under the bridge. How happy should I have been to have had a kingdom only for the pleasure of being driven from it, and living disguised in an humble vale! As I got further ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... to a man of civilization, when shown towards an ignorant, tyrannical, and despotic tyrant. Any attempt to force a channel of commerce, beyond the territories of these savage chiefs, without having first, either by presents or other means, obtained their co-operation, is too visionary a scheme for even the most enterprising adventurer to dare to undertake. King Jacket and King Boy, with the king of Eboe, may be said to be in the command of the estuary of the Niger, and, therefore, any attempt to establish a channel of commerce without allowing ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... on in a droning tone, giving theories of his own as to the nature of the Magrepha, and I, with my arms around Sigmund, half listened to the sleepy monotone of the good old visionary. But what spoke to me with a more potent voice was the soughing and wuthering of the sorrowful wind without, which verily moaned around the old walls, and sought out the old corners, and wailed, and plained, and sobbed in a way ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... This is no vague, visionary theory. It is a well known and proven psychological fact, and thousands have worked marvelous changes in their ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... thought of! It will die if it please of its own choosing; it will despise life and coquette with death; but to die unconsulted, with not so much as "Will it please your honour to die to-morrow week?" is an indignity inconceivable to youth, however visionary and devoted to ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... hand to each of the dolls, and walked slowly round and round the miserable room, pointing out visionary persons of distinction and objects of interest. "Here's the queen, my dears, in her gilt coach, drawn by six horses. Do you see her scepter poking out of the carriage window? She governs the nation with that. Bow to the queen. And now ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... in the ineffable, used to listen to her with a certain amazement, as if the plump, strong woman had been a visionary incapable of ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... devout veneration. Yet he ceases to be a sentimentalist when duty calls him to face the realities of life. An order to shorten sail transforms him at once into another being. He usually swears with refined eloquence on unexpected occasions, when a sudden order draws him from visionary meditation. Dreams, which may be the creation of indigestible junk—that is, salt beef which may have been round the Horn a few times—are realities: privileged communications from a mystic source. There is great ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... Chapel are above all rules: and how preferable is what no one can imitate, to all that is imitated even from the best models! Your partiality to the pageantry of popery I do approve, and I doubt whether the world would not be a loser (in its visionary enjoyments) by the extinction of that religion, as it was by the decay of chivalry and the proscription of the heathen deities. Reason has no invention; and as plain sense will never be the legislator of human affairs, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... history, wherein one may set forth joys and sorrows which in a real history must walk shadowed under the veil of modesty; for the soul, still less than the body, will consent to be revealed to all eyes. Hence, although most of my books have seemed true to some, they have all seemed visionary to most. ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... the reformers, and which were necessary to a just exercise of power in the people, whose representatives should share in the administration of the government. And many of the leaders in the revolution, even in its incipient stage, on the other hand, had such ambitious views, or visionary projects, that nothing would satisfy them, but an entire relinquishment of power long claimed and exercised by the Kings of ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... contrary of his. Run over the names that will readily occur of modern novelists and short-story writers, and ask yourself whether the vivid coloring of these realistic schools must not inevitably have blanched to a still whiter pallor those visionary tales of which the author long ago confessed that they had "the pale tints of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade." With practice has gone theory; and now the critics of realism are beginning to nibble at the accepted estimates ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... commercial development, was elected President in 1879. M. Leon Say, a man of wealth and of business, from whom more circumspection might have been expected, lent himself, as Minister of the Finances, in combination with the rather visionary M. de Freycinet, to a grand scheme devised by M. Gambetta 'in a single night,' like Aladdin's Palace, for spending indefinite millions of money upon docks, railways and ports all over France, wherever there was a seat in the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... in its glory and blessedness. Chap. 4:13-18. In both of the epistles he admonishes the Thessalonians against the neglect of their proper worldly business, a fault that was apparently connected with visionary ideas respecting the speedy second coming of our Lord, and which he rebukes in severe terms. 1 ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... of becoming a new man; if it makes you understand that pain is a deliverer; if it increases your respect for the conscience of others; if it renders forgiveness more easy, fortune less arrogant, duty more dear, the beyond less visionary. If it does these things it is good, little matter its name: however rudimentary it may be, when it fills this office it comes from the true source, it binds you to ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... grew up in my heart a deep yearning to know Christ in a more real way, for he seemed so unreal, so far away and visionary. One night when still quite young I remember going out under the trees in my parents' garden and, looking up into the starlit heavens, I longed with intense longing to feel Christ near me. As I knelt down there on the grass, alone with God, Job's cry became mine, "Oh, that I ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... Leam were their names. At the same time that Foil reappeared in the doorway of the dun, fully armed and equipped for battle, Cuculain awoke and sat up. At first he was dazed and bewildered, for divine voices were sounding in his ears, and fleeting visionary presences were departing from him. Then he heard the people how they shouted and saw his enemy descending the slope of the dun, sights and sounds indeed diverse from those his dreams and visions. With a cry he started from his bed, like a deer starting from ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... before him now he got to his feet and, with that look of the visionary in his eyes, which those only know who have watched the born gamester, said, "I'll back my hand till the last throw." Then it was, as his eyes gazed in front of him dreamily, he saw the card on his mirror ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... A full statement of Hutchinson's views may be found in the Works of G. Horne, by W. Jones (of Nayland), Pref. xix-xxiii, 20-23, &c. His own views were visionary and extreme. Natural religion, for example, he called 'the religion of Satan and of Antichrist' (id. xix). But he had many admirers, including many young men of promise at Oxford (id. 81). They were attracted by the earnestness of his opposition to some theological tendencies of the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... could have died to save it) near'd, Touch'd, clink'd, and clash'd, and vanish'd, and I woke, I heard the clash so clearly. Now I see My dream was Life; the woman honest Work; And my poor venture but a fleet of glass Wreck'd on a reef of visionary gold.' ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... reasonable from their application. The young theorist in mechanics thinks he can produce a perpetual motion! When he has been accustomed to refer to the plain dictates of common sense and experience, on this, as well as on every other subject, he will not easily be led astray by visionary theories. ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... him at the river and the hills. There was a flush of sunset through the air, and the blue of the river was interlaced with rosy or golden reflections from a sky piled with stormy cloud and aglow with every "visionary majesty" of light and colour. The great cloud-masses were driving in a tragic splendour through the west; and hue and form alike, throughout the wide heaven, seemed to him to breathe a marvellous ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was Mrs. Barnes' only near relative, a brother. Always a visionary, easy-going, impractical little man, he had never been willing to stick at steady employment, but was always chasing rainbows and depending upon his sister for a home and means of existence. When the Klondike gold fever ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... made by this minister, of paying so vast a debt, under the pressures of a long war, and the difficulty of finding supplies for continuing it, was, during the time of his illness, ridiculed by his enemies as an impracticable and visionary project: and when, upon his return to the House, he had explained his proposal, the very proprietors of the debt were, many of them, prevailed on to oppose it; although the obtaining this trade, either through Old Spain, or directly ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... apparent favor the cause of colonization received from the press, it was an impractical, impossible, wild, and visionary scheme that could not be carried to the extent its projectors designed. It lost strength yearly, until all were convinced that the Negro would be emancipated here and remain here; that it was as impossible to colonize a race of people as to ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... very meritorious command of myself, and was the only man in the town fit for a magistrate; for in everything I was seen to be most cautious and considerate. I could not, however, when I saw the turn the affair took to my advantage, but reflect on what small and visionary grounds the popularity of public men ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... Are the committee to understand that you, the respondent, in your own case, have found it a vain speculation, countenanced only by visionary lawyers, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... wing of the Socialist Party is the slave of obvious success. It boasts that it has ceased to be "visionary" and has become "practical." Votes, winning campaigns, putting through reform measures seem a great achievement. It forgets the difference between voting the Socialist ticket and understanding Socialism. The vote is the tangible thing, and for that these Socialist ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... she had led with her father since she was old enough to understand his visionary, happy-go-lucky temperament, he had regarded her and taught her to regard herself as a flower of the field. He had petted her, praised her beauty, and had managed to pay their board spasmodically in first one, then another locality; ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... understand that we do not support the views which we are about to set forth; neither, however, do we treat them lightly, because we have lived long enough to see proposals which, not many years ago, would have been deemed worthy of the most visionary of lunatics, carried out to a successful issue and reduced to ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... echoed to the voice of her triumphs; and the poor Doctor Brown, in the midst of all this hubbub, cut his own throat with his own razor. Whether this dismal catastrophe were exactly due to his mortification as a baffled visionary, whose favorite conceit had suddenly exploded like a rocket into smoke and stench, is more than we know. But, at all events, the sole memorial of his hypothesis which now reminds the English reader that it ever existed is one solitary notice of good-humored satire pointed ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... a full acknowledgment of its beauty. A single word would have impaired it; but she did not utter a syllable. On retiring, she slowly raised her expressive countenance, fixing her eyes above, as if she thanked some visionary protector of France for this crowning triumph; and then, with hands clasped, and step by step, sank back ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... described in this book, that there is as yet no prospect of coming to an understanding with many people. It is here that we come to the point where the desire must arise that it should no longer be a characteristic of our present day culture to at once decry as fanciful or visionary a method of research which differs from its own. But on the other hand it is also a fact at the present time that a number of people can appreciate the supersensible method of research, as it is presented in this book, ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... Much could be said for either type of establishment. The thing must come; it is as logical as one, two, three. There are some, perhaps, who remember the roars of derision which went up when the first automobile garage was established in their town. Such a thing was visionary-there would never be enough ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... to send her some very beautiful thing indeed,' cried Ella, with emphasis, and eyes dilating at some visionary magnificence. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... carry the greater likelihood of originality, because those demands must have been administered to from a period coeval with the existence of the people themselves. Or if complete originality be regarded as a visionary idea, engendered from ignorance and the obscurity of remote events, such arts must be allowed to have the fairest claim to antiquity at least. Arts of accommodation, and more especially of luxury, are commonly ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... zootheistic systems, the leading beast-god is regarded as the creator of the lesser deities of the earth, sun, and sky, of the mythic under-world and its real counterpart the ground or mid-world, as well as the visionary upper-world, of men, and of the ignoble animals; sometimes the most exalted beast-god is worshiped especially by the great man or leading class and incidentally by all, while other men and groups choose the lesser ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... cover his expenditure, and the profits derived from his books being fluctuating and altogether inconsiderable, he experienced the worst pangs of poverty in the terrible knowledge of being constantly in debt. To improve his position, he formed a thousand plans, some practicable and some visionary; but all equally barren as to the net result. The first and most natural idea that occurred to him was to write as many verses as possible and to sell them immediately. In order to effect this, and seeing the very moderate success of his last published ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... talk so before, Guy," said his mother, looking at him. His eyes had grown dark with intensity of expression while he was speaking, gazing at visionary flowers or beauties through the dinner-table mahogany. He looked up and laughed as she addressed him, and rising, turned off lightly ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... said Burke, are not governed primarily by laws, still less by force; and behind all power stands opinion. To believe in public opinion rather than in might excludes the believer from the regular forces of militarism and condemns him as a visionary and blind. For advocates of the Balance of Power bear a striking resemblance to the Potsdam school; and even so moderate a German as the late Dr. Rathenau declared in his unregenerate days before the war that Germans were not in the habit of reckoning with public opinion. Nevertheless, ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... such unusual fire, I wish him absent whom I most desire. And now I faint with grief; my fate draws nigh; In all the pride of blooming youth I die. Death will the sorrows of my heart relieve. Oh, might the visionary youth survive, I should with joy my latest breath resign! 90 But oh! I see his fate involved in mine.' This said, the weeping youth again returned To the clear fountain, where again he burned; His tears defaced the surface of the well With circle ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Phoebus, far from all the warrior throng To his own shrine the sacred dome beneath Of Pergamus, AEneas bore; there him Latona and shaft-arm'd Diana heal'd And glorified within their spacious fane. 525 Meantime the Archer of the silver bow A visionary form prepared; it seem'd Himself AEneas, and was arm'd as he. At once, in contest for that airy form, Grecians and Trojans on each other's breasts 530 The bull-hide buckler batter'd and light targe. Then thus ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... boys to live without meat or practical jokes, to love truth, honesty, and hard lessons; he would teach girls to forego jewelry and cucumber-pickles, to study physiology, and to abhor flirtations. Visionary, was he? You can not help smiling at a man who has a "vocation," and who wants to give the world a good send-off toward its "goal." But there is something noble about it after all. Something to make you and me ashamed of our selfishness. ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... and must not be a country without ideals. They are useless if they are only visionary; they are only valuable if they are practical. A nation can not dwell constantly on the mountain tops. It has to be replenished and sustained through the ceaseless toil of the less inspiring valleys. But its face ought always to be turned upward, its vision ought always to be fixed ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the faith and practice of Christian life. And here it is necessary to guard against what is childish, visionary, and exuberant, against things that only feed the fancy or excite the imagination, against practices which are adapted to other races than ours, but with us are liable to become unreal and irreverent, against too vivid sense impressions and especially ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... appreciation, sentimentalism was likewise temperamental; but, unconfined to actuality, became far broader in scope, more spiritual, and more consistently philosophic. Indeed, Blake was the ultimate sentimentalist of the century. A visionary and symbolist, he passed beyond Shaftesbury in his thought, and beyond any poet of the school in his endeavor to create a new and appropriate style. His contemporary, Erasmus Darwin, author of The Botanic Garden, was trying to give sentimentalism a novel interpretation by describing the life ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... in the language of Plato, a meditation or practising of death. This excessive preoccupation with a problematic future has been a fruitful source of the most fatal aberrations both for nations and individuals. In pursuit of these visionary aims the few short years of life have been frittered away: wealth has been squandered: blood has been poured out in torrents: the natural affections have been stifled; and the cheerful serenity of reason has been exchanged for the melancholy gloom ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... his subordinates, generous to his adversaries, and cordial to his equals. A man whose head has not been turned by the honors thrust upon him. A plain, everyday, practical man without illusions or visionary ideas. A man that is a supporter of stable government. A man intensely American ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... rich endowment as poet and philosopher, and in his gentleness and sweetness of disposition, he was more like Shakespeare than any other Englishman whom I can think of; but in Coleridge the poet soon disappeared, and a little later the philosopher in him faded into the visionary and sophist; he became an upholder of the English Church and found reasons in the immutable constitution of the universe for aprons and shovel-hats. Shakespeare, on the other hand, though similarly endowed, was ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... seems an unreal power because it is intangible; but it is the mightiest power in the world. It is a power that is free for you to use. No one can use it for you. The Mental Demand is not a visionary one. It is a potent force, which you can use freely without cost. When you are in doubt it will counsel you. It will guide you when you are uncertain. When you are in fear it will give you courage. It is ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... man situated as Smith is must be beset with requests of all kinds. Now it is an inventor needing capital; again it is some visionary who comes to advocate a brilliant scheme which must surely yield millions of profit. A choice has to be made between these projects, rejecting the worthless, examining the questionable ones, accepting the meritorious. ...
— In the Year 2889 • Jules Verne and Michel Verne
... was the outgrowth of a project, formed by Hawthorne during his residence in England, of writing a romance, the scene of which should be laid in that country; but this project was afterwards abandoned, giving place to a new conception in which the visionary search for means to secure an earthly immortality was to form the principal interest. The new conception took shape in the uncompleted "Dolliver Romance." The two themes, of course, were distinct, but, by a curious process of thought, one grew directly out of the other: ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... their control as implicitly as though they were realities. Such was now my case. The good Numa could not more thoroughly have persuaded himself that the nymph Egeria hovered about her sacred fountain and communed with him in spirit than I had deceived myself into a kind of visionary intercourse with the airy phantom fabricated in my brain. I constructed a rustic seat at the foot of the tree where I had discovered the footsteps. I made a kind of bower there, where I used to pass my mornings reading poetry and romances. I carved hearts and darts on the tree, and ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... his visionary habits and absorbing experiments would permit him to remember my arrival at all, and I was accordingly relieved to hear from the solitary porter that the "professor" had sent a "veeckle" to meet me, and that I was thus free to send my bag and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... it was the deep voice of the maid of the long trail speaking of the streams and the waving grass of that visionary Land of ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... to his will drove him into almost insane fury, and in these fits he allowed his natural ferocity full play. His whole life was spent in visionary schemes pursued by means equally irrational. He began by distributing enormous sums of money amongst his nobles, spending, so it is said, in one day as much as [pound sterling]500,000. He bought off the invading ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... in short, must supply the world with those active, skilful hands, and clear, sagacious heads, without which the affairs of life would be thrown into confusion, by the theories of studious and visionary men. Wherefore, teach them their multiplication table, good Master Cheever, and whip them well, when they deserve it; for much of the country's ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Being no visionary, he did not underestimate the power of circumstance. This Betty had learned from him. And what could practically be done with circumstance such as this? The question had begun to recur to her. What could she herself have done in the care of Rosy and Stornham, if chance had not placed in her hand ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... mysterious valleys—and I want to love it, too. And I will love it! I'll find his mine if it takes me all the rest of my life. And I'll show the people back home that he was right, that he did know that the gold was here, and that he wasn't just a visionary and a ne'er-do-well!" ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... his own again, and Roger is at home. Not yet—and now it is the next morning—has his return become real to me. Still there is something phantom and visionary about it: still it seems to me open to question whether, if I look away from him for a moment, he may not melt and disappear ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... great multitude of selected men, chosen volunteers, will be collaborating upon this new step in man's struggle with the elements. Bacon's visionary House of Saloman [Footnote: In The New Atlantis.] will be a thing realised, and it will be humming with this business. Every university in the world will be urgently working for priority in this aspect of the problem or that. Reports of experiments, as full and as prompt as the telegraphic reports ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... leaving out of consideration for the present details which are subject to modification and change, believe that it will be a fatal error for the nation to commit itself to the practically hopeless and visionary sea-level project and to delay for many years the opening of this much needed waterway connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific. I for one am opposed to a waste of untold millions and to additional burdens of needless taxation, while the project of a lock ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden
... of miracles, O my sweet visionary! for on that very day when you dreamed yourself away to me I beheld you suddenly standing before me, so life-like and appearing so wistfully beautiful that I reached out my hand to touch you—but grasped only the impalpable air. All day ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... little fund, her money and his, that lay in savings bank began to spend itself fantastically. One day he reckoned that two-thirds of the cross had been put by, and banished the disloyal thought with difficulty. Visionary plans of selling something and making the collection pay for itself were entertained, but when it came to the point nothing could be spared. Perhaps the gnawings of this hunger might have been controlled, had he thought to confide in Miriam. More likely yet, a system ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... he said. "The lady is a base materialist, while I—your funny old master—am sprouting wings and growing a halo as a visionary." Vane looked sideways at the girl. "He manages to make his own life, Joan. He'd be as happy with me in a garret as he would in a palace. . . . Probably happier, because he'd mean more to me—fill a ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... Sister was bewitched. To her a great lover had come—a lover who had added to a boy's delicacy and beauty of ideal, a man's certainty and power. This was the trusting, visionary part of Beth, that had not entered at all into the other romance. Beth refused now to be ruled by it. The world had hurt her. The fault was not hers, but the world's. The only profit she could see to be drawn from her miseries of the past was to use her head ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... distance a man has got on his journey is of less consequence than the direction in which his face is turned. The arrow may fall short, but to what mark was it shot? In all regions of life a wise classification of men arranges them according to their aims rather than their achievements. The visionary who attempts something high and accomplishes scarcely anything of it, is often a far nobler man, and his poor, broken, foiled, resultless life far more perfect than his who aims at marks on the low levels and hits them full. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... know they are; and those among them with whom I am acquainted are especially lovers of the true faith, and are persons in whom I have unbounded confidence." The inquisitors, on hearing this, were so fully convinced that the poor widow's representations had no other foundation than the visionary workings of a disordered brain, that they allowed the learned doctor to depart with her under his charge. Thus was the danger to the infant Church at Seville for the time mercifully removed, and while it gained strength to endure the coming ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... of church government under these conditions confronted the nobler impulse of humility in the visionary's mind. "When have I said, Brother Darling, that they all should think what they like? But, behold, I say unto thee, it is not with the Lord to save with many or with few, but by whom he ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... even though it be wax And the fires are kindling that must melt it out. Judith, thou hast now five days more to live This life of beautiful passion and sweet sense: And now my love comes to thee like an angel To call thee out of thy visionary love For lost Manasses, out of ghostly desire And shadows of dreams housing thy soul, that are Vainer than mine were, dreams of dear things which death Hath for ever broken; and lead thy life To a brief shadowless place, into an hour Made splendid to affront the coming night By passion ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... day, arising out of the very important casuistical question which it involves. We Protestant nations are in the habit of treating casuistry as a field of speculation, false and baseless per se; nay, we regard it not so much in the light of a visionary and idle speculation, as one positively erroneous in its principles, and mischievous for its practical results. This is due in part to the disproportionate importance which the Church of Rome has always attached to casuistry; making, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... nearly always vividest when the art is weakest; and the technical skill only reaches its deliberate splendor when the ecstacy which gave it birth has passed away forever. It is as vain an attempt to reason out the visionary power or guiding influence of Athena in the Greek heart, from anything we now read, or possess, of the work of Phidias, as it would be for the disciples of some new religion to infer the spirit of Christianity from Titian's ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... common union, let the churches of Milton as a unit work and pray and sacrifice to make themselves felt as a real power on the side of the people in their present great need. It was Christian America, but Philip's plan was not adopted. It was discussed with some warmth, but declared to be visionary, impracticable, unnecessary, not for the church to undertake, beyond its function, etc. Philip was disappointed, ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... afternoon was half gone, through which it was impossible to see more than twenty yards. My hill loomed gigantic for a time with a tantalising appearance of being only a mile or two ahead, then wavered, became visionary, and finally disappeared as completely as though the forest mist had drunk ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... before Prout was up and, yelling at him for a thief and supplanter, drove at his throat with a knife. He missed: but the next instant, these two fond friends, whose friendship had fenced us others off almost as strangers, were wallowing and knifing one another on the bottom-boards,—all over the visionary legacy of a Jew, thousands of miles away, whose picking of their pockets had been their common reminiscence and their standing joke through days of horror! And political economists used to tell us that money is a medium and ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... always flowing in the same direction. This could not last long without having a bad effect on the body. I had an illness, which, although I was racked with pain, was a positive relief to me, as it compelled me to live in the present suffering, and not in the visionary researches I had been continually making before. My kind uncle came to nurse me; and after the immediate danger was over, my life seemed to slip away in delicious languor for two or three months. I did not ask—so much did I dread falling ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... applied in all cases, and to every possible "subject of legislation." The principle of equality should reign everywhere, and mold every institution. Surely, after what has been said, no comment is necessary on a scheme so wild, on a dream so visionary. "As distant as heaven is from earth," says Montesquieu, "so is the true spirit of equality from that of extreme equality." And just so distant is the Senator in question, with all his adherents, from the true idea ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... to swim in the same watery uncertainty in which I floated. I began to doubt everything, to distrust the stars, the line of low bushes for which I was wearily striving, the very land on which they grew, if such visionary tiring could be rooted anywhere. Doubts trembled in my mind like the weltering water, and that awful sensation of having one's feet unsupported, which benumbs the spent swimmer's heart, seemed to clutch at mine, though not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... occasion and circumstance. He was constructing what seemed to be some kind of a frail mechanical toy; and was apparently very much interested in his work. He was a white-headed man, now, but otherwise he was as young, alert, buoyant, visionary and enterprising as ever. His loving old wife sat near by, contentedly knitting and thinking, with a cat asleep in her lap. The room was large, light, and had a comfortable look, in fact a home-like look, though the furniture was of a humble ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... will remember, there arose an unhappy difference in middle life which was never mended or healed. I never heard him speak of her. His standards were high and severe, for all the sensitive delicacy of his long, distinguished face and visionary eyes; and neither he nor she was of the stuff that allows kinship to supersede conscience. He published a somewhat vehement criticism of a book in which she was part author, and she never forgave it. And although to me, in the University Hall venture, he was gentleness and courtesy itself, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the dream of a visionary? Is it merely the fancied perception of an inexistent star? Is it nothing more than a groundless hope and an alluring vagary? The answer is visible everywhere. And the hope of peace finds its safest assurance among the institutions of learning in America. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... pleasure to the presence of sundry Bulgarian komitadjis in Albania, Finzi declared that the Italian Government would satisfy the Croats and give them Rieka as soon as Croatia had achieved her independence and a less visionary promise was made of disturbances in Rieka. On March 1 the two Italian officers left for Triest and on March 3 Rieka was confronted with another coup d'etat. The fascisti of Triest and of Gulia ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... insists upon the finality of his judgment. Those who have worked with him have remarked upon his eagerness, once he has decided a course of action, to carry it into practical effect. The President of the Czecho-Slovak Republic, Thomas G. Masaryk, said that of all the men he had met, "your visionary, idealistic President is by far and away the most intensely practical." One of the Big Four at Paris remarked: "Wilson works. The rest of us play, comparatively speaking. We Europeans can't keep up with a man who travels a straight path ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... rich adobe, half the year presenting a billowy sea of tossing verdure breaking on the far-off horizon line, half the year presenting a dry and dusty shore, from which the vernal sea had ebbed, to the low sky that seemed to mock it with a visionary sea beyond. A row of rough, irregular, and severely practical sheds and buildings housed the machinery and the fifty or sixty men employed in the cultivation of the soil, but neither residential mansion nor farmhouse offered any nucleus of rural comfort or civilization ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... rights of man. Lloyd Garrison has been, for the last twenty-five years, the best-hated man in these Northern States, not because he failed to see just how a Union of Free and Slave States could endure; not because of any visionary theory of political action or the structure of society he cherished; but, strangely enough, because he stood-up for man and his divine right to freedom. This was what the aristocracy hated in him, and this is what, with inexpressible rage, it saw gaining in the North. It ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... church," said Udell thoughtfully; "Well, Mr. Wicks, I'll tell you why I don't go to church. Just because I've got too much to do. I make my own way in the world and it takes all the business sense I have to do it. The dreamy, visionary, speculative sort of things I hear at meeting may be all right for a fellow's soul, but they don't help him much in taking care of his body, and I can't afford to fill my mind with such stuff. I am living this side of the grave. Of course I like to hear a good talker, and I enjoy the music, ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... intelligence on European questions seems much better than ours and they depress me by expressing doubts as to whether the Grand Duke Nicholas has munitions enough to make further headway against the Turks in the Caucasus: also, as to whether he has even stuff enough to equip Istomine and my rather visionary Army Corps. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... philosophical reflection; but it is "a monarchical" history, by a writer of very strong anti-republican principles. "It was composed," says Alison, the distinguished historian of modern Europe, "during, or shortly after, the French Revolution; and it was mainly intended to counteract the visionary ideas in regard to the blessings of Grecian democracy, which had spread so far in the world, from the magic of Athenian genius." Says Chancellor Kent: "Mitford does not scruple to tell the truth, and ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... romantic; the child of whim, and the slave of an imagination so freakish and deceptive, that it was always impossible to foretell his course. He was alike capable of sacrificing all his feelings to worldly considerations or of forfeiting the world for a visionary caprice. At present his favourite scheme, and one to which he seemed really attached, was to educate Imogene. Under his tuition he had persuaded himself that she would turn out what he styled "a great woman." An age of vast ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... so." He lifted his starry eyes with their mystic, visionary rapture fully on the young physician. "And yet I remember how George Eliot prayed that when her troubles came she might get along without being drugged by that stuff—meaning the Christian religion, sir—and I guess I'd kind o' like that me and mine ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... and pig clubs he proposed to have in operation the next summer, seemed highly practical; but to Jennie's mind, the fact that they introduced dissension in the neighborhood and promised to make her official life vexatious, seemed ample proof that Jim's work was visionary and impractical. Poor Jennie was not aware of the fact that new truth always comes bringing, not peace ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... shepherds, fishermen, rural people, remains what it always has been in Sicily and in the isles of Greece. The habits and the passions of his countryfolk have not altered, the echoes of their old love-songs still sound among the pines, or by the sea-banks, where Theocritus 'watched the visionary flocks.' ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... shuts himself from all supplies from Europe, but through Canada, and exposes his army and navy to the danger of perishing. The idea of his cutting off the communication between the eastern and southern states, by means of the North River, is merely visionary. He cannot do it by his shipping; because no ship can lay long at anchor in any river within reach of the shore; a single gun would drive a first rate from such a station. This was fully proved last October at Forts Washington and Lee, where one gun only, on each side ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... as it has been elegantly described, "Philosophy teaching by Example,"—what example more necessary to be held out to public view, and transmitted to posterity, than that which shews the dreadful effects of a Revolution attempted by force? Where the visionary politician enjoys for so short a time his sanguinary triumph—suspected even by those whom he calls his friends, he is superseded by such as are more ferocious than himself, while the fury of Fanaticism equally destroys his prospects in the ...
— An Impartial Narrative of the Most Important Engagements Which Took Place Between His Majesty's Forces and the Rebels, During the Irish Rebellion, 1798. • John Jones
... has each successive season sway'd The fruitful sceptre of our milder clime Since My Loved ****** died! but why, ah! why Should melancholy cloud my early years? Religion spurns earth's visionary scene, Philosophy revolts at misery's chain: Just Heaven recall'd it's own, the pilgrim call'd From human woes, from sorrow's rankling worm; Shall ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... to his only son,—myself. Quiet, but unremitting, were his efforts to make me avoid the rock on which his worldly fortunes had been wrecked. In vain: to me there was a light in his eye which lured me on to those visionary shores from which he warned me; and whilst he was holding out the labors and duties of a regular and steadfast practitioner as merciful and honorable among the highest, there was an undertone in his voice, of which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... strange visionary moments. She seemed to be able at times to detach herself from her surroundings and, guided by almost forgotten words of Northrup's, find herself—with him. And always he was alone. She never visualized his mother; she ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... visionary, when Lake explained, as he did in his effort to enlist capital with which to build his first submarine boat, that he could safely submerge his invention and steer it about on the bed of the ocean as ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... been introduced to Bob, and had heard that young gentleman's flowery description of the vast amount of wealth which was only waiting to be brought to the surface of the earth, he was disposed to look upon it as a visionary scheme, the value of which only existed in ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... the key-note of Schumann's deepest nature. But these feelings could only find their fullest outlet in the musical form expressly suited to subjective emotion. Accordingly, the "Sturm and Drang" epoch of his life, when all his thoughts and conceptions were most unsettled and visionary, was most fruitful in lyric song. In Heinrich Heine he found a fitting poetical co-worker, in whose moods he seemed to see a perfect reflection of his own—Heine, in whom the bitterest irony was wedded to the deepest pathos, "the spoiled favorite of the Graces," ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... of divine certainty, as though it trod upon a rock! Such a miracle, contrary to all reason, is worthy of acceptance only by the blind, childish, credulity of infidelity. Whatever the object before him, then, it is real; his convictions are soberly and well founded; he runs his race to no visionary, misty goal; but some actual reality is the lode-star of his life. Let us listen to his own explanation: "forgetting those things that are being, reaching forth unto those that are before, I press toward the mark ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... you, it's what brought me to Lunnon Bridge was a quare dhrame I had at home in Ireland, that tould me just to come here, and I'd find a pot of goold." For such was the interpretation given by Shamus to the vague admonition of his visionary counsellor. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... enchanted garb of the opera, with all the attractions of music and scenery, but form a perpetual subject of pleasing study to the recluse, far from the pomp and magnificence of theatric representation. It is impossible to imagine any thing more attractive than his dramas, considered as visionary pieces. Formed on the events of the ancient world, he depicts, under the name of Alexander, Titus, Dido, Regulus, Caesar, and Cleopatra, ideal beings having about as much resemblance to real mortals as the nymphs of the ballet have to ordinary women, or the recitative of Mozart to the natural ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... these propositions were more or less visionary and advanced by men of theory with little or no capital. They had the effect of awakening public interest and paved the way for a more feasible plan. The question of a Pacific railway, its practicability, earnings, and effect, were constantly before the ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... impregnable capital of his prodigious empire, and the work that he did was solid. He never perceived the value of Bombay, which is the best harbour in Asia, and did not see that the key of India is the Cape of Good Hope. His language was sometimes visionary. He beheld a cross shining in the heavens, over the kingdom of Prester John, and was eager for an alliance with him. He wished to drain the Nile into the Red Sea. He would attack Mecca and Medina, carry off the bones of ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... combination of socialism and Islam derived in part from tribal practices and is supposed to be implemented by the Libyan people themselves in a unique form of "direct democracy." QADHAFI has always seen himself as a revolutionary and visionary leader. He used oil funds during the 1970s and 1980s to promote his ideology outside Libya, supporting subversives and terrorists abroad to hasten the end of Marxism and capitalism. In addition, beginning in 1973, he engaged in military operations in northern Chad's Aozou Strip - to gain ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... is the seer, the prophet, like Langland, or Wyclif, who sees a vision and quietly goes to work, in ways that men understand, to make the present world a little more like the ideal one which he sees in his vision. The third, who appears in many forms,—as visionary, enthusiast, radical, anarchist, revolutionary, call him what you will,—sees a vision and straightway begins to tear down all human institutions, which have been built up by the slow toil of centuries, simply because they seem to stand in the way of his dream. To the latter ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... late king, Kalakaua. That amiable, far from unaccomplished, but too convivial sovereign, had a continued use for money: Gibson was observant to keep him well supplied. Kalakaua (one of the most theoretical of men) was filled with visionary schemes for the protection and development of the Polynesian race: Gibson fell in step with him; it is even thought he may have shared in his illusions. The king and minister at least conceived between them a scheme ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and kind spirits delighting in beauty. The sky was grey and heavy,—floating mists on the hill-sides, which softened the objects, and where we lost sight of the lake it appeared so near to the sky that they almost touched one another, giving a visionary beauty to the prospect. While we overlooked this quiet scene we could hear the stream rumbling among the rocks between the lakes, but the mists concealed any glimpse of it which we might have had. This small lake ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... finally in all the enlightenment of modern times with the French Revolution (that terrible farce, quite superfluous when judged close at hand, into which, however, the noble and visionary spectators of all Europe have interpreted from a distance their own indignation and enthusiasm so long and passionately, UNTIL THE TEXT HAS DISAPPEARED UNDER THE INTERPRETATION), so a noble posterity might ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... was fighting the party over in her dream; and as the visionary custard-cups crashed down through one lobe of her brain into another, she gave a start as if an inch of lightning from a quart Leyden jar had jumped into one of her knuckles with its sudden and ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... I loved him. I knew, and, father, you knew, and he knew, that I never did. I was not wholly indifferent, for I had a hope of being pleasant and useful to Tom. I made that wild escape into something visionary, and have slowly found out how wild it was. But Tom had been the subject of all the little tenderness of my life; perhaps he became so because I knew so well how to pity him. It matters little now, except as it may dispose you to think ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... help these men to secure work for a time after their discharge from prison. This would prevent a vast majority of criminals from returning to the prison after their first term. That my views on this subject may not be considered visionary, and that I may not be regarded as standing alone in my suggestions, I will give a portion of the report of Rev. J. Gierlow, ex-chaplain of the ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... woman's lover! It was too amazing. Brangwen went home despising himself for his own poor way of life. He was a clod-hopper and a boor, dull, stuck in the mud. More than ever he wanted to clamber out, to this visionary ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... for the first time by reading an account of the Congress of Boulogne. He had no previous knowledge of, or leanings towards, a universal language; and if he had thought about it at all, it was only to laugh at the idea as a wild and visionary scheme. In short, his attitude ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... questions, Mr. Bryan followed a much more radical tendency than Mr. Wilson. His opponents call him a dishonest demagogue. I, on the contrary, would prefer to call Mr. Bryan an honest visionary and fanatic, whose passionate enthusiasm may go to make an exemplary speechmaker at large meetings, but not a statesman whose concern is the world of realities. He who in his enthusiasm believes he will be able to see his ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... he answered. "We had no funds for special research and Dr. Veeder's ideas were so far ahead of his time that, then, they seemed visionary. Now, twenty years later, when a great deal of similar work has been done in Europe and in this country, we see that Dr. Veeder was a real pioneer, although, of course, many of his conclusions are still doubtful. Yet, in poverty, in discouragement, in the turmoil of a busy life, ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... and his essay were fruitless, his project most probably being deemed the dream of a visionary. Still it continued to haunt his mind, and he would often talk of making an expedition to Aleppo some time or other, when his means were greater, to inquire into the arts peculiar to the East, and to bring home such as might be valuable. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... their ardor cools off their energies become dormant, and by the time they are ready to commence business they are as unfit to do so as they were visionary ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... I am far from sure. What about Dante? Haven't you sometimes stumbled over his grave assurances that this and that did really befall him? Putting aside the feeble notion that he was a deluded visionary, how does one reconcile the artist's management of his poem with the Christian's stem faith? In any case, he was more poet than Christian when he wrote. Milton makes no such claims; he merely prays for the enlightenment ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... swerve; Oh, let thy grace remind me of the light Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored; Which, at this moment, on my waking sight Appears to shine, by miracle restored: My soul, though yet confined to earth, Rejoices in a second birth! —'Tis past; the visionary splendour fades; And night approaches ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... told the S. Q. N. our joke. I dreamt of that visionary terrier, that son of the soil, all night; and in the very early morning, leaving the S. Q. N. asleep, I walked up with the Duchess to the same spot. What a morning! it was before sunrise, at least before he had got above Benvorlich. The loch was lying in a faint mist, beautiful exceedingly, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... as if she were in a dream. Could this unlooked-for, bewildering satisfaction be indeed real, and not a visionary thing which would presently fade? She looked about. There was actuality in the scene. The cottonwoods rustled crisply, Alejandro Vigil was calling to his dog, and the tinkle of his herd stole softly upon ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... felt by all the Procter family lingered for days after father's Saturday afternoon at home. And then ordinary hours intruded and filled the small lives with their duties and their pleasures. Still shadowy, deeply hidden, the influence of the visionary father lay. Even small Maizie awoke to tiny dreams, her literalness for moments ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... with the prophetic imagination usually vouchsafed only to the poet and the seer. He had in him all the lift toward greatness of the visionary, without any of the visionary's fanaticism or egotism, without any of the visionary's narrow jealousy of the practical man and inability to strive in practical fashion for the realization of an ideal. He had the practical man's hard common sense and willingness to adapt means to ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... it were, the University for you, it was with great pleasure that I received from a number of you, Gentlemen, last May year, a spontaneous request which showed that my original anticipations were not visionary. You suggested then what we have since acted upon,—acted upon, not so quickly as both you might hope and we might wish, because all important commencements have to be maturely considered—still acted on at length according to those anticipations ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Mr. Mumbles was very rich, and although in person he was not very imposing he made up in quantity for what he wanted in quality, and the prospect of plenty of meat and a good name to one destitute of either had such an effect on Miss Squeamish as to put to flight all her visionary ideas of perfection—love in a cottage and platonic affection—and she settled down, in appearance at least, as a very spruce butcher's wife, and took to caps, aprons, and ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... creation upon chaos, will be as successful in evoking the concrete from the abstract. The farmer saw round figures among the possessions of the family, and he assisted mentally in this money-turning of Anthony's, counted his gains for him, disposed his risks, and eyed the pile of visionary gold with an interest so remote, that he was almost correct in calling it disinterested. The brothers-in-law had a mutual plea of expense that kept them separate. When Anthony refused, on petition, to advance one hundred pounds to the farmer, there was ill blood to divide them. Queen Anne's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... church, school, or parsonage, rum was the grand master of ceremonies, the indispensable celebrant at the various stages of its completion. The party who dug the parson out after a snow-storm, verily got their reward, a sort of prelibation of the visionary sweets of that land, flowing not, according to the Jewish notion, with milk and honey, but according to the revised version of Yankeedom, with milk and rum. Rum was, forsooth, a very decent devil, if judged by the exalted character of the company it kept. It ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... reply. Our friend, like many other Corsicans we met with, still nourished the visionary hopes which had caused his country so much blood and misery during her long and fruitless struggles ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... become what London now is,-the great central point of exchange, the heart of trade, the force of whose contraction and expansion will be felt throughout every artery of the commercial world; and San Francisco will then stand the second city of America. Is this visionary? Twenty years ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... order to give them good flour in place of the bad that they had stolen from him by mistake—this simple-minded being, whose only desire was to suffer for the "truth," possessed without doubt the soul of a saint and a visionary. ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... country with a cabal of bad ministers, or, equally unprincipled, supported its cause with bad patriots,—one laments that such parts should have been devoid of every virtue: but when Alcibiades turns chemist; when he is a real bubble and a visionary miser; when ambition is but a frolic; when the worst designs are for the foolishest ends,—contempt extinguishes ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... upon guesses and surmises, so that the whole edifice was just as shadowy and unsubstantial as it could well be. But then it is curious to see how much real torment people manage to extract from visionary troubles. ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... circles which we see after having been so dazzled, and that if we are to represent the rays we ought also to cover our sky with pink and blue circles. I should on the whole consider it utterly false in principle to represent the visionary beam, and that we ought only to show that which has actual existence. Such we find to be the constant practice of Turner. Even where, owing to interposed clouds, he has beams appearing to issue from the orb itself, they are broad bursts of light, not spiky rays; and ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... to misunderstand your meaning for I have known others as visionary as yourself in fancying that such an ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... his cheeks, and overflows His sight with tender dew? What through his frame Melts languor sweeter than approaching sleep To one made weary by a hard day's toil? It is the memory of primal love, Whose visionary splendour steeped his life In hues of heaven; and which grown open day, Revealing perilous falls, his steps confined Within the pathways to the noblest end. Now following this dimmed glory, tired, his soul Haunts ever the mysterious gates of Death; ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... You will not, I hope, think I apply these mighty names to my own case with any vanity, when it is only their enormities that I quote, and that in defence, not of myself' but of my countrymen, who have good-humour enough to approve the visionary scenes and actors ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... felt dull and tired, his thoughts were chaotic. He saw before him no clear course. Whichever way he looked at it the horrible tangle grew more horrible. There was a recurring sense of unreality, a visionary feeling of detachment which enabled him to view the situation from an impersonal standpoint, as one criticises a nightmare, confident in the knowledge that it is only a dream. But in this case the confidence was based on nothing tangible and the ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... mind travelled farther yet and saw all the country beyond, all the land of the To Be, all the giant valley of the Mississippi, all the rolling, endless plains, all Mexico with snowy peaks and mines of gold. The apparition did not come dazzlingly. He was no visionary. He weighed and measured and reckoned carefully with his host. But there, beyond the mountains, lay no small part of the habitable world,—and the race of conquerors had not died with Alexander or Caesar, Cortez or Pizarro! Witness Marengo and Austerlitz and that throne at Fontainebleau! ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... his friend, and looked with the same wild gaze around him. Such a look! I shall never forget it; there was that intense expression of searching anxiety, as if he sought to trace the outlines of some visionary spirit as it receded before him. Quickly reassured, as it seemed, by the glance he threw on all sides, his countenance lighted up, not with pleasure, but with a fiendish expression of revengeful triumph, which even his voice ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... iron rod it sinks and disappears; how will you do all this?' and receiving no answer but a broad Northumbrian, 'I can't tell you how I'll do it, but I can tell you I will do it,' dismissed Stephenson as a visionary. Having prevailed upon a company of Liverpool gentlemen to be less incredulous, and having raised funds for his great undertaking, in December of 1826 the first spade was struck in the ground. And now I will give you an account of my yesterday's excursion. A party of ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... magnificent;—in storm, Or calm—when summer wantons with thy waves, Or winter clouds thy crystal brow with gloom, Oh! mayst thou still entrance the wanderer's eye, And keep congenial quiet in his soul. Thy fairy haunts, where solitude pervades The feelings like a spirit, might allure Some visionary youth to muse beneath The rocks empurpled with the sunny beam, And blend the music of his harp with thine In ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... cad, for it mattered little whether or not I loved her. I had won her trust, and my first duty was to speak her name with pride. But I had had that brief glimpse of Penelope Blight, the companion of my boyhood; I had walked with her, grown lovelier than my dreams, through visionary woods and fields. She was before me, a dainty woman of the world; behind her the firelight fanned the leaves carved for her long ago by the old Italian artist; from above Reynolds's majestic lady looked down at her kindly, at me with a haughty stare, as if she read presumption in my mind. Never ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... to be a redeemer, and a King; [189:4] but they did not understand how their lowly Master was to establish His title to such high offices. [189:5] Though they "looked for redemption," and "waited for the kingdom of God," [189:6] there was much that was vague, as well as much that was visionary, in their notions of the Redemption and the Kingdom. We may well suppose that the views of the multitude were still less correct and perspicuous. Some, perhaps, expected that Christ, as a prophet, would decide the ecclesiastical ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... commerce was thus closed up, while the forces which should have been employed in saving Ghent and in the protection of the English shores against the threat of invasion were squandered by John of Gaunt in a war which he was carrying on alone the Spanish frontier in pursuit of the visionary crown which he claimed in his wife's right. The enterprise showed that the Duke had now abandoned the hope of directing affairs at home and was seeking a new sphere of activity abroad. To drive him from the realm had been from the close of the Peasant Revolt the steady purpose of the councillors ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green |
