"Visionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... jury of Salem could be regulated on a similar plan. I was persuaded that government was a practical thing, made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians. Our business was to rule, not to wrangle; and it would have been a poor compensation that we had triumphed in a dispute, whilst we lost ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... perilous situation, abandoned by Europe, was pushed to a measure that he himself knew was a desperate hope? Or was it the generous prompting of a great dream that beats down, that refuses to be disconcerted by the obstacles that stand before it—that in its failure we call visionary, but in its success the reform for which the world has waited? Be that as it may, the proclamation was not without its response. The Supreme Council modified its wording, and sent it into Great Poland—the so-called "Prussian" Poland—with the result that the ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... as a pedantic and exacting taskmaster; but, on the other hand, to a certain class of mind, there is nothing in fiction so moving as the spectacle of Heathcliff dying of joy—an unnatural, unreal joy—his panther nature paralysed, aneanti, in a delirium of visionary bliss. ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... be said that all this is visionary and impossible? The plan we propose rests on no supposed reformation in the passions and propensities of mankind; but upon obvious principles of national interest, deduced from reason and experience, and susceptible of the plainest demonstration. It is a plan adapted to the existing ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... me thy face— My faith and love Shall henceforth fixed be, And nothing here have power to move My soul's serenity. My life shall seem a trance, a dream, And all I feel and see Illusive, visionary—thou The one reality. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... 520 Then 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 Apollo to the warrior God. Gore-tainted ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... and care and servitude to business, excites impracticable hopes in the minds of those who are even more ignorant and unreflecting—and their locomotive habits fit them for a dangerous agency in schemes, wild and visionary, but disgusting and annoying. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... general diffusion of intelligence, have conduced to establish sounder ethics and juster practices, throughout the whole civilized world. Thus, he who admits the conviction, as hope declines with his years, that man deteriorates, is probably as far from the truth, as the visionary who sees the dawn of a golden age, in the commencement of the nineteenth century. That we have greatly improved on the opinions and practices of our ancestors, is quite as certain as that there will be occasion to meliorate the legacy ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... itself with him of late; and before long, I venture to predict, London and New York will also have discovered him. English versions of a few of his earlier novels appeared, to be sure, twenty years ago—in very bad translations—and accordingly attracted no great attention. "The Visionary," which has recently been published in London, has had better luck, having been accorded a flattering reception. Of its popular success it is yet too early to speak. But even if Jonas Lie were not about to knock at our gates, I venture to say that I shall earn the gratitude of many a reader ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... two, Bonbright's reasons most nearly approached the normal, and therefore the safe; Ruth had been urged by a motive, lofty perhaps, visionary, but supremely abnormal. Therefore the adjustments to be made, the problems to be mastered, the difficulties in their road to a comfortable, reasonably happy future, were multiplied many times. Instead of being probable, the success of their ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... political despotism, was, however, ruthlessly condemned to the guillotine, along with the head of the Capets, never to be replaced by the ferocious spirit of democracy, revelling in the realization of all other visionary abstractions of perfect liberty, equality, levelling of distinctions and monopolies. With the reign of the rights of man was established, in the body politic, that of prohibition and restriction over the body industrial—gradually ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... same booths and from within them came the same laughter and chatter and suppressed song. Opposite the tiny table the same man with the broad, good-natured face was making critical, smiling observation, as of yore. As ever, the look recalled the visionary ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Like a lamp deprived of air, his mind has revived at this idea, that he can at last be useful to others than himself. The inhabitant of San Ambrosio shall be indebted to him for an alleviation of his sorrows; for companionship in them. What is there visionary about this hope? Had he not already conceived the project of preparing a barque to explore that unknown coast? God seems to encourage his design, by sending him at once this double manna for the body ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... 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 ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... the shape and substance of the accursed ones at which he looked. As he felt the change going on he tried to utter a cry, but he could not make a sound nor move a limb. The ground under him rocked and pitched; it grew darker and darker, till everything was visionary; and he thought himself surrounded by spirits, and in the mansions of the damned. Something like a deep black cloud began to gather gradually round him. The gigantic structure, with its tall terrific arches, turned slowly into darkness, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... annihilates all the treaties that have been made with that people—tramples under foot the laws of nations, and deprives the Indian of his hunting-grounds, one of his sources of subsistence. He says,—"But it seems to me visionary to suppose that, in this state of things, claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain, or passed them in the chase." It certainly may be unphilosophical to permit ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... weed. For religion must always be an exotic which makes a far-off land sacred rather than the earth underfoot: where the Great Spirit whose home is the vast seems no more a moving glamour in the heavens, a dropping tenderness at twilight, a visionary light on the hills, a voice in man's heart; when the way of life is sought in scrolls or is heard from another's lips. The noxious weed, the unendurable bitter which mingled with the sweet and ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a little more than was observable in other children of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all these offsprings of her own heart and mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... nor woollen, but dress like their fathers, in the skins and furs of animals; they must not drink ardent spirits; and I do not remember whether he extended his inhibitions to the gun and gunpowder, in favor of the bow and arrow. I concluded, from all this, that he was a visionary, enveloped in their antiquities, and vainly endeavoring to lead back his brethren to the fancied beatitudes of their golden age. I thought there was little danger of his making many proselytes from the habits and comforts they had learned from the whites, to the hardships ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... banks, many of which pay their stockholders 15 per cent. or more. It can relieve the stagnation and make profitable investment by an active campaign for public and private contracts and for sound and fair concessions, not visionary or ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... uneasiness. "Do you?" she said, making an effort to stay balanced under the visionary gaze of the shining ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... fictitious 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 ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... had not been a cheerful one, subjected to the ever-changing whims of a visionary father, with whom one of her practical cast of mind could have no point of sympathy. And since she came to Lindsleyville it was harder than ever, for there was no neighbor nearer than Gager's, ten miles away, and ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... nor would allow it to be questioned. Neither misfortune, nor disappointment, nor accidents, nor delay, nor the protracted gloom of years, could avail to disturb the public trust in him. It was apart from circumstances; it was beside the action of caprice; it was beyond all visionary, and above all changeable feelings. It was founded on nothing extraneous; not upon what he had said or done, but upon what he was. They saw something in the man, which gave them assurance of a nature and destiny of the highest elevation—something ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... dilemma to do exactly what I am sure any decent doctor would do without any dilemma at all: to treat the man simply as a man, and give him no more and no less favour than he would to anybody else. In short, I am sure a practical physician would drop all these visionary, unworkable modern dreams about type and criminology and go back to the plain business-like facts of the French Revolution and the Rights ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Paarl, which proved to be a town of one long street, decked with stately oaks, and mellowed old Dutch homes. The mule-cart was waiting for her, and on the driver's seat a woman with the austere features and blue, pure, visionary eyes of Galahad, the stainless knight. But she was dressed in breeches and a slouch hat, a cigarette hung from the corner of her mouth, and she beckoned April gladsomely ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... 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. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... subsoil to bring plant nutrients back up, making them nature's nutrient recycler. Because they greatly increase soil fertility, J. Russell Smith called trees "great engines of production." Anyone who has not read his visionary book, Tree Crops, should. Though written in 1929, this classic book is ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... teaching works upon him till the true SPIRIT OF POETRY speaks within his soul, and combats the misanthropy and weakness of the sensuous MAN, showing him that Action is the end of Life, not mere indulgence in abstract and visionary rhapsodies. ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... familiar passage in Shakspeare as emanating from the inspired pen of the Psalmist, is not to so great extent an example of ignorance as an illustration of the lofty peerage instinctively assigned the great dramatist in the ordinary associations of our thoughts. This faith in the visionary world of poets is instilled into us (and it is for this reason that Rousseau, in his masterly work on education, the "Emile," reprobates the custom as promotive of superstition) in early infancy by our parents and nurses with their stories of nymphs, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... as it is visionary, has entered into the minds of the generality of mankind, that empire is traveling westward; and every one is looking forward with eager and impatient expectation to that destined moment when America is to give the law to the ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... not. But, unless some of you wild young men come to your senses, we shall have a second edition of the Australian madness at Port Natal. Nothing can be more futile than these visionary schemes, Roland Yorke; they are like the apples of Sodom—fair and promising to the eye, ashes to the taste. Do not you ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... 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 yet to enter it. I was more absorbed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... took shape next morning—there was nothing visionary about them. She did surprise her father with a neat breakfast table, and Johnnie surprised himself ...
— Dorothy Dale • Margaret Penrose
... "That is very visionary—a French poet! Horrible, long-haired, frowsy creature! Impossible! Surely you see how necessary it is for you to marry Christopher as soon as you can, Evangeline, don't you?" she said, and I was obliged to admit ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... me dear names: I am unworthy," said Leam. "No," checking him as he would have spoken, smiling with a sense of relief that her craze—if it was a craze—went to the visionary side of her own unworthiness, and was not due to any knowledge of his misdemeanors, as she might think them. "Do not speak. I have to tell you. I had forgotten it," she went on to say in the same tense, compressed manner—the manner of one who has a task to get through, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... system is a 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 ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... interest to this 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 ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... in this error in Parleyings with Certain People, in which book, with the exception of the visionary landscapes in Gerard de Lairesse, and some few passages in Francis Furini and Charles Avison, imagination, such as belongs to a poet, has deserted Browning. He feels himself as if this might be said of him; and he asks in Gerard ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the way, we may give a brief account of this visionary world within the crystal. The things were in all cases seen by Mr. Cave, and the method of working was invariably for him to watch the crystal and report what he saw, while Mr. Wace (who as a science student had learnt the trick of writing ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... curious fact, giving a kind of completeness to this sense of the thing as something that happened outside the world, that its first great act of arms and also its last were both primarily symbols; and but for this visionary character, were in a manner vain. It began with the taking of the old and almost empty prison called the Bastille; and we always think of it as the beginning of the Revolution, though the real Revolution ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... Thurstan, a farmer who lived over the border in Blundell parish; but as he was an Anabaptist—or Baptist as they were then beginning to call themselves—and my father had a great contempt and dislike for the visionary ideas of that sect, even he came but seldom to our house. His daughter Patience was a great favourite with my mother; and for that matter I did not dislike the child, and would oftentimes pluck her an apple from our trees or cut a ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... believed it was all in vain. The feeling grew upon her that belief or unbelief was a matter of education and temperament, and that the feelings of which Dennis spoke were but the deceptive emotions of our agitated hearts. To that degree that the Divine love seemed visionary and hopeless, she longed for him to speak of his own, if in truth it still existed, that she could understand and believe in. If during what remained of life she could only drink the sweetness of that, she felt it was the best she ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... be, fair lady; yet your youth May run to drought in visionary schemes: And a late waking to perceive the truth, When day falls shrouding her supreme adieu, Shows darker wastes than unaccomplished dreams: And that may be in store ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... English readers an invincible prejudice against German mysticism and German sentimentality. The romantic chiaroscuro, which puzzled Southey even in "The Ancient Mariner," became dimmest twilight in Tieck's "Maehrchen" and midnight darkness in the visionary Novalis. The Weichheit, Wehmuth, and Sehnsucht nach der Unendlichkeit of the German romanticists were moods not altogether unfamiliar in English poetry. "Now stirs the feeling infinite," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... partisanship, but from partisan rancor, and they made for honesty and independence. His firm stand against political corruption, socialistic vagaries, the misguided and often criminal efforts of labor agitators, and all the visionary schemes of diseased minds, has contributed to the stability of sound ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... attainment of his object, without respect for the most sacred things, he is generally allowed to be a man of integrity, and even by his enemies, an enthusiast, who deceives himself as much as others. Now in the hopes of obtaining some uncertain and visionary good, and even while declaring his horror of civil war and bloodshed, he has risen in rebellion against the actual government, and is the cause of the cruel war now raging, not in the open fields or even in the scattered suburbs, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Arthur himself, the cause of it. Since the night when the "ghost," as he called it, first entered his heart, and since the dream of home hovered over his pillow, he had felt as if it might be possibly a visionary counterpart of one of those events which "cast their shadows before," and he had striven right manfully against every impulse which might in any way tend to make himself the fulfiller of it. Often, when the stern reproof, or the sly sneer, had awakened his resentment and called the flush of anger ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... is proposed to raise an immediate sum of L2,000 in furtherance of the Projector's views, and as some protection to the parties who may embark in the matter, that this is not a visionary plan for objects imperfectly considered, Mr Colombine, to whom the secret has been confided, has allowed his name to be used on the occasion, and who will if referred to corroborate this statement, and convince any inquirer ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... out; and it is only a few days since a large meeting was held in Liverpool with a view of tunnelling under the Mersey, and thus connecting Liverpool and Birkenhead. Nor do these schemes seem at all visionary when we learn that our go-ahead Transatlantic cousins have a project before the Legislature of New Jersey for laying wooden tubes underground, through which the mails and small parcels will be forwarded ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... would call, petty duties! How little it signifies what are the special duties to which we are called, how much the spirit in which we do them! I don't think I ever longed so much for long talks day after day with you. Don't say such hopes are visionary, though, alas! they have over and over again vanished before ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... distant mountains, but the eye of his 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
... course, signor," said the barber; "and therefore, if such a man ever did live, he must have been an insane visionary—for who would believe that knowledge could possibly make us richer, happier, or better? All the philosophy in the universe could never convert this ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... attach no credit to the story of the exhumation of his body, and its mysterious reinterment in Redcliff. His fathers were sextons; and he, too, was in some sort a sexton also—but spiritually and transcendantly. He buried his genius in the visionary grave of Rowley, "an old chest in an upper room over the chapel on the north side of Redcliff church;" and thence, most rare young conjurer, he evoked its spirit in the shape of fragments of law-parchment, quaintly inscribed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... language is the language of the future, and whose humour is of a date to which I humbly hope my own days may not be prolonged. A Psychical Researcher, with a note-book; he gets at the Duchess at once, and cross-examines her about a visionary Piper who plays audible pibrochs through Castle Blawearie, her ancestral home. Does she think the pibroch could be taken down in a phonograph. Could the Piper be snapped in a kodak? The Duchess does not know what a phonograph ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... opposite to him at the long window; the view over a lawn and flower-garden; the pattering of the rain against the glass; the stretching out of the Shadow's arm, and the fall of the statue in fragments on the floor—these objects and events of the visionary scene, so vividly present to his memory once, were all superseded by later remembrances now, were all left to fade as they might in the dim background of time. He could pass the room again and again, alone and anxious, and never once think of the boat drifting away in the moonlight, and the ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... expounding a new evangel, which might, indeed, be visionary and impracticable, but was none the less essentially noble and Christian in spirit, yet Theydon was debating whether or not he should give testimony which would bring to that very room a couple of detectives whose first questions would make clear to Forbes that ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... premises were correct the terrible conclusion would be correct, and the Socialist position visionary and dangerous. Of course people are afraid of anything that controverts the laws of economics and human nature—they ought to be. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... preachers, such as Whitfield and the two Wesleys, who propagated their doctrine to the most remote corners of the British dominions, and found means to lay the whole kingdom under contribution. Fanaticism also formed a league with false philosophy. One Hutchinson, a visionary, intoxicated with the fumes of rabbinical learning, pretended to deduce all demonstration from Hebrew roots, and to confine all human knowledge to the five books of Moses. His disciples became numerous after his death. With the methodists, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... with joy I hear!— But there's a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have looked upon,— Both of them speak of something that is gone; The pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat. Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... in thy quiet, a cessation, a coolness from business, an indolence almost cloistral, which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spake of the past; the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the two angels and also myself were seized with a desire of seeing those who from worldly love are in the visionary concupiscence or phantasy of possessing all wealth; and we perceived that we were inspired with this desire to the end that such visionaries might be known. Their dwellings were under the earth of our feet, but above hell: we therefore looked ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... beauteous. Nor, that time, Would he forget those beings, to whose minds, Warm from the labours of benevolence, The world, and man himself, appeared a scene Of kindred loveliness: then he would sigh With mournful joy, to think that others felt What he must never feel: and so, lost man! On visionary views would fancy feed, Till his eye streamed with tears. In this deep vale He died, ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... unhappy tendency—an unhappy tendency, which I have more than once remarked—to recommend to others to do some vague and impossible thing—to call upon Government, or Parliament to do something, the practicability of which is not considered; to confer some benefit that may be visionary or impossible, whilst the plain practical duty of paying the rates, for the sustenance of starving men, women and children in the neighbourhood, is left neglected and unperformed" (hear, hear, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... who {334} published at Paris in 1686. He does it in a very serious style, and shows himself a mathematician. And yet in the year in which, in the Phil. Trans., he was a geometer, and one who rebukes his squarer for quoting Matthew xi. 25, in that very year he was the visionary who, in the Leipzig Acts, professed to build a world resembling the divine mind by multiplying together 1, 2, 3, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... man," 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 bigger part ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... wretch, who lay under a sentence which he had iniquitously brought upon him, had suggested, sleep promised him relief; but this promise was, alas! delusive. This certain friend to the tired body is often the severest enemy to the oppressed mind. So at least it proved to Wild, adding visionary to real horrors, and tormenting his imagination with phantoms too dreadful to be described. At length, starting from these visions, he no sooner recovered his waking senses, than he cryed out—"I may yet prevent ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... the eyes of the observers, on the clouds, by laws of optics now generally well known, before her actual outlines could be discerned by them on the horizon. As the sun sunk behind the western hills, and his rays were gradually withdrawn, the visionary ship slowly disappeared; and the approach of night effectually concealed the vessel as she continued ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... impossible for me to do that, as you will readily believe when you come to know my story; for, on this eventful evening there happened something which, somehow or other, thenceforth, whether owing to what visionary folk term "Destiny," or from its arising through some curious conjuncture of things beyond the limits of mere chance, appeared to exercise a mysterious influence on my life, affecting the whole tenor and course of ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... never—since he was a youth—felt an immoderate fondness for anybody; he had likes and dislikes, admirations and partialities, jealousies, too, and well-defined tastes where feminine beauty was in question, but it was not in him to err from excess of charity. The imaginative and visionary parts of life—and no one is wholly without them—soon turned into severe reality whenever he found himself confronted with that sole absorbing interest—his career. Marriage, in his own case, seemed an imperative ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... foresta. Vines now occupy the whole ground. If they had only left a few trees by the wayside! Walking along, I encountered a sportsman who said he was on the look-out for a hare. Always that hare! They might as well lie in wait for the Great Auk. Not long ago, an old visionary informed me that he had killed a hare beside the Ponte Milvio at Rome. Hares at Ponte Milvio! They reminded me of those partridges in Belgrave Square. In my younger days there was not a general in the British army who had not (1) shot partridges in Belgrave ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... say one man, this man only, if you are so particular. We are a strange, visionary race down where I come from, and perhaps that accounts for it. The Beloved of this one man, then, has had many incarnations—too many to describe in detail. Each shape, or embodiment, has been a temporary residence only, which she has entered, ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... any price, and of 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 Chamber to ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... fellow Florent hasn't an idea about politics, and would have done far better to seek a berth as writing master in a ladies' school! It would be nothing short of a misfortune if he were to succeed, for, with his visionary social sentimentalities, he would crush us down beneath his confounded working men! It's all that, you know, which ruins the party. We don't need any more tearful sentimentalists, humanitarian poets, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Frances Willard: "The Temperance cause, in spite of the gigantic strides it has made of late years toward success, is still relegated to the shadowy land of unpopular and supposedly impracticable and visionary reform." ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... peace to the land. Whereat the King smiled, and bid him return to Ireland." The saving was questionable; for to prevent an insurrection by timely concessions, is incomparably less expensive than to suppress it when it has arisen. The "purchase of peace" was equally visionary; for the Irish never appear to have been able to sit down quietly under unjust oppression, however hopeless resistance ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... apparitions; I had almost said who changes this world into another that does not seem to be and yet is the same. Whence has he drawn that undefinable light, those flashes of electric rays, those reflections of unknown stars that like an enigma fill us with wonder? What did this dreamer, this visionary, see in the dark? What is the secret that tormented his soul? What did this painter of the air mean to tell us in this eternal conflict of light and shadow? It is said that the contrasts of light and shade corresponded in him to moods of thought. And truly it seems that as Schiller, before beginning ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... was set on marrying her daughters "advantageously," and she gave all of her narrow mind to that thankless department. Josephine insisted on a romantic attachment, and pursued a visionary spouse with all the ardor and obstinacy of first-rate stupidity. Adelaide had the weakness to hate Josephine, the shrewdness to fear Madeline, and the viciousness to despise her mother; she skilfully and diligently devoted herself to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... suggested, that luxury corrupts a people, and destroys the spirit of liberty. JOHNSON. 'Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual[502]. Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private man. What Frenchman is prevented from passing his life as he pleases?' SIR ADAM. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... of 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 ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... himself; the next time he was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. He was indeed always cheerful, though I thought I could see in his eyes (swift as the eyes of a rabbit, when they peered out of their wrinkled holes) a melancholy which was well-nigh a portion of their joy; the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... 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
... obstinate to excess. He formed his attachments with caution and timidity, but when once formed they were cordial and permanent. In the midst of a tumultuous crowd he walked in solitude. Wrapped in his own visionary ideas, he was often a stranger to the world about him; and, sensible of his own deficiency in the knowledge of mankind, he scarcely ever ventured an opinion of his own, and was apt to pay an unwarrantable deference ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... I, reaching out my hand and shaking it in the air with my visionary friend—"thanks. I've studied these things with some care, and I've tried to find a reason for everything in life as I know it. I have always regarded Henry as a moral man—as is natural, since in spite of all you can say he is the real head of the English Church. He wasn't willing ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... evils from the first. It induced an excited, hysterical tone of mind, which is most remarkable in the best men; violent, querulous, suspicious, irritable, credulous, visionary; at best more womanly than manly; alternately in tears and in raptures. You never get in their writings anything of that manly calmness, which we so deservedly honour, and at which we all aim for ourselves. They are bombastic; excited; perpetually mistaking virulence for strength, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... The visionary equality of metaphysical impostors is become a substantial one—not constituted by abundance and freedom, but by want and oppression. The disparities of nature are not repaired, but its whole surface ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... a sudden so discreet? I had been told thou wert a visionary— A wanderer from the paths of common men. Thou lov'st the marvelous. So have I now Cull'd out for thee a task of special daring. Another man might pause and hesitate;— Thou dashest at it, heart and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... immediate, unconditional emancipation; I believe not, but he is for doing the deed; whether he goes before or lags after the Government I do not at this moment know. He is, too, a high-principled man, full of moral sensibility and of a grave, reflecting, philosophical character, and neither a visionary in religion nor in politics, only of a somewhat austere and uncompromising turn of mind, and with some of the positiveness of a theorist who has a lofty opinion of his own capacity, and has never undergone that discipline of the world, that tumbling and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... city, all of whom had been expelled from adjacent states, till Rome became their last rallying-point, and, to many, their final resting-place. Among these was to be seen every variety of age, sentiment, and condition,—striplings and blanched heads; wild, visionary enthusiasts; grave, heroic men, who, in the struggle for freedom, had ventured all, and lost all; nobles and beggars; bandits, felons and brigands. Great excitement naturally existed; and, in the general apprehension which pervaded all classes, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of words an electric flash so transcendently illuminative that what is commonplace becomes radiant with that light which dwells not in nature, but only in the visionary eye of man. Form for the mere beauty of form, is a playing with the wind, the acceptance of a shadow for the substance. If nothing animate it, it may possibly be fair of aspect, but only as the frozen smile ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... honestly believes that his programme is at once Christian and practicable. How does it come about, then, that an educated man like himself can believe in, and devote himself to preaching, doctrines so visionary and preposterous? Let us examine his arguments more minutely, and we ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... national principle is to the carrying out either of a visionary or a predatory foreign policy in Europe, it does not imply any similar hostility to a certain measure of colonial expansion. In this, as in many other important respects, the constructive national democrat must necessarily differ from the old school of democratic "liberals." A nationalized ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... papers of the past week the beginning of what concerned Notely Garrison was a medley. 'Reformer,' 'The old never-heeded cry of a St. John in the wilderness,' and again, from the other side, 'Fanatic,' 'Visionary,' 'Throwing out his by no means boundless wealth like water for the sake of chimeras, ideally noble enough, but still vain chimeras!' And the news at the week's end, 'Young Garrison stricken: a shock. Overwork, over-excitement, and the result ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... the designation of their party, and would in so doing probably convulse the country. As long as Lord George Bentinck lived, with his iron will and strong convictions, this was a contingency that could not be overlooked. But he died in 1848, and with his death it became a visionary dream. Yet I remember well Sir Robert Peel saying to me, when I was endeavouring to stir him up on some great fault (as I thought it), in the colonial policy of the ministers, 'I foresee a tremendous struggle in this country for the restoration ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... then sprang dancing, dancing away. But Winter-Head and Long-Back, gravely bright, Stood firm as if for ever and a day and a night— As they were more than a wave before 'tis caught Back to the tossing tide, more than a flying thought, More than a dream that an old God once dreamed When visionary not ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... books, despise all worldly blessings and wisdom. Everything is void, frail, visionary and delusive as a mirage. Though you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... me then to vast embowering shades, To twilight groves and visionary vales, To weeping grottoes and prophetic glooms, Where angel forms, athwart the solemn dusk Tremendous, sweep, or seem to sweep, along, And voices more than man through the void, Deep sounding, seize the enthusiastic ear. Or is this gloom too much? Where creeping ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... certainly what they could not see; 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... his own state, must be for every man the highest objects of his efforts; then only, starting from his own nation, may his wishes have a higher aim. I cannot respect anyone who abandons the soil of patriotism in order to waste his time on visionary schemes in the domain of politics, to wax enthusiastic over universal peace and to ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because she did ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... queer, visionary child! One would not look for it in these wilds. The ladies over yonder talk of them because it is a fashion, but when they ride through the parks and woods they want a train of admirers. And with you it is pure love. Could you love any one as you do nature? ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... visionary than trying to run a world without dreams, especially an economic world. It is because even bad dreams are better in this world than having no dreams at all that bad people so called are so largely ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... most unfavorable circumstances, I determined to accompany him, at whatever hazard. I had still two years of my apprenticeship to serve out; I was entirely without means, and my project was strongly opposed by my friends, as something too visionary to be practicable. A short time before, Mr. Griswold advised me to publish a small volume of youthful effusions, a few of which had appeared in Graham's Magazine, which he then edited; the idea struck me, that by so doing, I might, ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... abject pauperism,' put in Herbert blandly; 'a reductio ad absurdum of all your visionary Schurzian philosophy, my dear Ernest. Look at it another way, now, and just consider. Which really and truly matters most to you and me, a great work of art or a highly respectable horny-handed son of toil, whose acquaintance we have never had the pleasure of personally ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... of this fear could not have been resisted long. Lincoln was not a man who could be accused of taking any course without a reason well thought out; we can safely conclude that in the summer of 1862 he nursed a hope, by no means visionary, of initiating a process of liberation free from certain evils in that upon which he ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... Professor Meiser, one of the least visionary men of the age, was persuaded that science could put a living being to sleep and wake him up again at the end of an infinite number of years—arrest all the functions of the system, suspend life itself, protect an individual against the ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... I took a sentimental view of our subject. We women always instinctively take the sentimental view, you know. My doctor was severely scientific and frightfully sceptical. He thought me an absurd visionary." ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... to 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, ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... 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 that was enough ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... believed in the Elizabethan portrait theory. If it had been Aunt Henrietta, the ghost would have been in armour. Ghosts and all visitors from the other world obligingly correspond with the preconceived notions of the visionary. When a white robe and a halo were considered the proper celestial outfit, saints and angels always appeared with white robes and halos. In the same way, the African savage, who believes in a god with a crooked leg, always sees him in dreams, waking ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... Church doctrine of future retribution, they yet agree with Benjamin Whichcote, the Cambridge Platonist, that "heaven is first a temper, then a place"; while of hell there is much to recall the noble sentence of Juliana of Norwich, the fourteenth-century visionary, "to me was showed no harder hell than sin." "Nothing burneth in hell but self-will," is a saying in the "Theologia Germanica."[24] They insist that the difference between heaven and hell is not that one is a place of enjoyment, the other of torment; it is that in the one we are ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... thirtieth of April. On the fifth day from this the Visionary Nun is expected to appear. In my last visit to the Convent I provided myself with a dress proper for the character: A Friend, whom I have left there and to whom I made no scruple to confide my secret, readily consented to supply me with a religious habit. Provide a carriage, ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the history of human life from the beginning, what a visionary spectacle it is! How miraculously permanent in the whole! how sorrowfully ephemeral in the parts! What pathetic sentiments it awakens! Amidst what awful mysteries it hangs! The subject of the derivation of the soul has been copiously discussed by hundreds of philosophers, physicians, and poets, from ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... comprehensive and instructive volume. It is a triumphant refutation of the opinions of those who, to the vast injury of literature, and serious inconvenience of men of letters, slight common sense and real utility in favour of visionary ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various
... with amazement. The colossal impudence and audacity of the proposal took my breath away. But I soon collected my scattered faculties, and forthwith proceeded vigorously to remonstrate with the visionary enthusiast who, I instantly recognised, must be ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... encounter all these strange and visionary dangers it was necessary for him, however, to have a war horse, a stout lance and a suit of armor, and he cast about among his possessions to see what he could find that would answer the purpose—for he had no money to buy them, and no shop could have furnished ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... right to do; and what [HAND] provided there was no fact to be passed upon) he had precedents for doing. And yet Judge Hunt erred—erred as, but too probably, every other judge would, in like circumstances, have erred. At the hazard of being called, for the ten thousandth time, a visionary and a fanatic for holding opinions which, though they will be entirely welcome to the more enlightened future sense of men, are as entirely repugnant to their present sense, I venture to say that the Judge erred in allowing himself to look into the Constitution. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... purity, and love, poised on the empurpled air, and requiring no other support; looking out with her melancholy, loving mouth, her slightly dilated, sibylline eyes, quite through the universe, to the end and consummation of all things; sad, as if she beheld afar off the visionary sword that was to reach her heart through Him, now resting as enthroned on that heart; yet already exalted through the homage of the redeemed generations who were to salute her as Blessed.' (Legends of the Madonna: Introduction, ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... circumference of the vast and gathering mob, battle orders, which he knew would be quickly circulated. They were really his own composition, but, like a good general keeping open his means of retreat, he attributed them to some visionary people, who, in the event of failure, could bear the ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... much faith 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
... to suppose that Peter Cartwright was a mere visionary or dreamer. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He was abundantly possessed with what, in Western parlance, is known as "horse sense." He was a student of men, and kept in close touch with the affairs of this world. His shrewdness, no less than ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... regard to the second merit, that of activity, there can be little doubt as to where it lies between the planner of the Utopia and the convert of the brotherhood. The modern Socialist is a visionary, but in this he is on the same ground as half the great men of the world, and to some extent of the early Christian himself, who rushed towards a personal ideal very difficult to sustain. The visionary who yearns ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward |
