"Idealist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unraveled and smoothed themselves out. It was better so—better to live his own life than the one into which he was being ground by the inexorable facts of his environment. He was a young man and ambitious, but his hopes were not selfish. At bottom he was an idealist, though a practical one. He had had to shut his eyes to many things which he deplored, had been driven to compromises which he despised. Essentially clean-handed, the soul of him had begun to wither at the contact of that ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... in constant use, while the moods and fashions have been put away and taken out a thousand times. Most people have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions, but such people, least of all, are fitted to find in them that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist when the old moods ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... met him, but I pictured an idealist, one who had suffered in the war and felt the folly of it all, who deplored the egoism of nations, and had found a way to devote himself to humanity as a whole. I was mistaken! It is our weakness as a nation to think of a foreigner merely as a sort ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... been a monarch of somewhat like character to the famous Akhenaton of Egypt—an idealist for whom war had no attractions. He kept his army at home while his foreign possessions rose in revolt one after another. Apparently he had dreams of guarding Assyria against attack by means of treaties of peace. He arranged ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... imagination. He is an idealist, but he is a scholar, too, and a very grim realist. Lenin was a statistician by profession. He had long been trying to foresee the future of society under socialism, and he had marked down definitely the resources, the machinery, and the ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... Sordello? Does he regard him as an idealist of aims too lofty for success in this world, and whose "failure" implied his triumph in another, where his "broken arc" would become the "perfect round"? Assuredly not. That might indeed be his destiny, but Browning makes it perfectly clear that ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... three hundred thousand men—all innocent. And yet to-morrow thirty thousand of them will be lying dead, dead for their country! Among those Prussians there is, perhaps, some great mathematician, a man of genius, an idealist, who will be mown down. On our side we shall assuredly lose many a great man never known to fame. Perhaps even I shall see my best friend die. Shall I blame God? No. I shall bear it silently. Learn from this, mademoiselle, that a man ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... him something the look of a piskie's changeling. Already the first innocence of childhood was wearing away, and the deliberate cleanliness of mind achieved, if at all, in the malleable years between fifteen and twenty was as yet far ahead. Nevertheless, Parson Boase was not wrong in scenting the idealist in Ishmael, and he wondered how far the determined but excitable child, with the nervous strain of his race and all the little bluntnesses of a boy ungently reared, might prove the prey of circumstance; or whether, after ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... French of greater nobility than these Histoires Souveraines in which a regal pomp of speech drapes a more than regal sovereignty of soul. The Villiers who mocked mean things and attacked base things is no longer there; the idealist is at home in his own ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... circumstances—sometimes in victory, sometimes in defeat, but never in despair; always with a load of expense about him, always with the problem of income and outlay to be solved—had made of Harris a man very different from the young idealist of '82. During the first years of struggle for a bare existence in some way the flame of idealism still burned, but with the dawn of the "better times" there came a gradual shifting of standards and a new conception of essentials. At first the settlers attached little ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... has like Chopin embodied in art the romance of the land and people of Poland. And, also, no other poet has like him embodied in art the romance of his own existence. But whereas as a national poet he was a flattering idealist, he was as a personal poet an ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... "The Prince is an idealist," Dominey said. "Sometimes I wonder why he was sent here, why they did not send some one of a ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... responsive and recognizant of human beings, my dear Beers, and it "sets me up immensely" to be treated by a practical man on practical grounds as you treat me. I inhabit such a realm of abstractions that I only get credit for what I do in that spectral empire; but you are not only a moral idealist and philanthropic enthusiast (and good fellow!), but a tip-top man of business in addition; and to have actually done anything that the like of you can regard as having helped him is an unwonted ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... Deryck," retorted Lady Ingleby, crossly. "You ought to have married him! I never could understand such an artist, such a poet, such an eclectic idealist as Garth Dalmain, falling ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... hated the normal release of sex because it seemed to him brutal by comparison with the satisfaction of artistic creation. It seems strange even to myself, when I have described a man who was cruel, selfish, brutal and sensual, to say that he was a great idealist. The fact remains. ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... sure that Mr. Skimpole, in his brilliant study of Bernard Shaw, is quite correct when he says 'the whole case against Chesterton, of course, is that he is a Romantic.' Why is it a something against him that he chooses to be an idealist? Because, says Mr. Skimpole, 'he does not seem to have grasped the fact that the most important difference between the Real and the Ideal aspects of anything is that while the Ideal is permanent and unchangeable as an angel, the Real ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... is mortgaged up to its limit as it stands. The men, as you must know, who are fighting you are fighting me. I am a scoundrel because I am selfish and ambitious—a materialist. You are not a scoundrel, but a dangerous person because you are an idealist. Whether you veto this bill or not, you will never again be elected Governor of Illinois if the people who are fighting me succeed, as they will succeed, in ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... with realism. The photograph is an utter misrepresentation of life, and this not merely because of its false shades and its lack of colour, but because the photographer is not content with literalness. He aspires to art. So far from being a realist, he is the greatest idealist of all. He not only puts you into poses you would never fall into naturally, he not only arranges you so as to hide your characteristic uglinesses, and bids you call up an expression you never use, but he touches up and tones down after ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... through the things which he laughs at. Only a man of a certain kind, with a certain sympathy and antipathy, could laugh as he laughs. The comic writer, however much of a scoffer and a skeptic, and however much he may deny it, is always an idealist. And it is for the revelation of themselves as much as for the revelation of the people whom they portray that we value the work of a Swift, a Voltaire, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Here the idealist created his elysium and came as close to making one as the curious animal he sought to benefit would permit. The King set forth in writing the Grant that it was due "the memory and merits of Sir William Penn in divers services, and particularly his conduct, courage and discretion under ...
— The Tryal of William Penn and William Mead • various
... reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... indeed, was a grand, solitary, shining figure, "the first idealist in history," and a poetic thinker in whom the religion of Egypt attained its highest reach. Dr. Breasted puts his lyrics alongside the poems of Wordsworth and the great passage of Ruskin in Modern Painters, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... An "idealist" is a man who is content to worship a woman from afar—and let some gross, unselfish materialist ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... advancement. Labor organizations of wage earners have existed in the United States since 1827, and between that time and 1840 came a considerable awakening among the laboring classes which was part of a general humanitarian movement throughout the country. Robert Owen, an English industrial idealist, had visited this country about 1825 and provided the initiative for a short-lived communistic settlement at New Harmony, Indiana. Similar enterprises were established at other points; the most famous of these was ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... he was the idealist historian of the poet, and that the adventures which he related of him were not to be taken in the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... reminiscently, "a sort of cross between a dreamer, an idealist, and a sportsman. There was never anything of the practical man of affairs about him. He was scrupulously honourable, and almost a purist in his outlook upon life. I have met a great many Germans," Richard went on, "and I've killed a few, thank God!—but he is about as unlike the ordinary ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reared this great temple of white stone and set it on a hilltop to rule and watch over the land, builded better than they knew. To the simple and ardent idealist its white stateliness must always suggest something symbolic, and, after all, it is the ardent and simple idealist whose dreams and symbols paint to prosaic human minds the beautiful impossibilities whose unattainable loveliness so allures as to force even the unexalted ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... intellectual qualities. He read widely and loved letters. He was a student of philosophy and religion, a thinker, and, best of all, a man of ideals—"the glory of youth," as he called them in his valedictory oration. But he was something still better and finer than a mere idealist; he was a man of action, eager to put his ideals into practice and bring them to the test of daily life. With his mind full of plans for raising the condition of workingmen while he made his own career, he entered the iron mills of the Ames ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... disordered time for securing education and money, patriotic at heart but willing to profit from France, or indeed from Russia, England, the Orient; wherever material advantage was to be found. This boy was both idealist and realist, each in the high degree corresponding to his great abilities. He shone neither as a scholar nor as an officer, being obdurate to all training,—but by independent exertions and desultory reading ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the sacred torch of Liberty from the dying hands of O'Connell, who summoned in vain old Ireland against his young rivals. But men like Davis and Duffy appealed to types O'Connell never swayed. He could carry the mob, but poet, journalist, and idealist were enrolled with Young Ireland. For this reason the history of their failure is brighter in literature than the tale of O'Connell's triumphs. To read Duffy's "Young Ireland" and Mitchel's "Jail Journal", with draughts ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... in perfect order to receive any occupant, but Roger had volunteered to psychologize it in such a fashion as (he thought) would convey favourable influences to the misguided young spirit that was to be its tenant. Incurable idealist, he had taken quite gravely his responsibility as landlord and employer of Mr. Chapman's daughter. No chambered nautilus was to have better opportunity to expand the tender mansions of ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... no friends who could have helped him, and no qualifications for earning his living at any other trade or profession. He had begun life with a luxurious home, a refined and useless education, and the mind of a dreamer, an idealist. None of these things were valuable ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... Among us the Idealist objects to the Materialists that the latter cannot agree upon fundamental points; that they cannot define what is an atom; that they cannot account for the transformation of physical action and molecular motion into consciousness; and vice vers, that they cannot ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... out to be very far from what they seemed. The physicists have come to a point where, it may be to their astonishment, they often find themselves talking in a way which is suspiciously like that of the subjective idealist. They have made the useful discovery that if you sink your shaft deep enough in your search for reality you come upon Mind. Here they are in a somewhat unfamiliar region, in which they may possibly find that other instruments and other methods than those to which they have been accustomed are ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... was still upon her, but, womanlike, she wondered if she liked the would-be tyrant of all North Africa as well as she had once liked the easy-going American idealist, ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... recluse in life had become very vital in death. He had wrought, in his silent, lonely detachment, better even than he knew. His charities, shorn of the degrading elements of many similar ones, were carried on without a hitch. Dr. McPherson, under his crust of hardness, was an idealist and almost a sentimentalist; but above all he was a man to inspire respect and command obedience. No hospital with which he had to deal was unmarked by his personality. Neglect and indifference were fatal attributes for ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... Veranilda. On literary reclame, he says much that is true—if not the whole truth, in the apophthegm for instance, 'You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame.' Biffen, it is true, is a somewhat fantastic figure of an idealist, but Gissing cherished this grotesque exfoliation from a headline by Dickens—and later in his career we shall find him reproducing one of Biffen's ideals with a ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a political moralist of our time and race would be judged. He thinks that Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he is the first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of reverie. The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be politically a republican and socially ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... earliest contacts of Wang with Portuguese, I used Chang Wei-hua's monograph.—While there is no satisfactory, comprehensive study in English on Wang, for Lu Hsiang-shan the book by Huang Siu-ch'i, Lu Hsiang-shan, a Twelfth-century Chinese Idealist Philosopher, New Haven ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... the importance of acquiring land in Palestine by many pithy remarks. Then spoke the Rabbis: Joseph Ha-levi, Shneiur Lenskin, Joseph Arwatz and Joseph Rabbi. All these testified to the great qualities of their host, who besides being a great idealist was also a very practical ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager
... knowledge. His familiar stream of talk was very different: it discarded affectation, and had a directness, a vigour, which never left one in doubt as to his actual views of life. How melody of any kind could issue from a nature so manifestly ignoble might puzzle the idealist. Alma, who had known a good many musical people, was not troubled by this difficulty; in her present mood, she submitted to the arrogance of success, and felt a pleasure, an encouragement, in ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... character, and he was not forgetful of theatrical necessities or dramatic construction. But as he went on he brought all his astounding interest in human nature to focus on the old plot and the stock type. Hamlet, the hesitating avenger, becomes the sentimentalist, the idealist, the thinker at war with himself, the embodiment of that conflict between circumstance and a nature unfitted to its task, which in some measure we have all encountered in life. An arrogant and doting old man, by the force of creative imagination, ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... to the ghostly Toledoan to smooth him out into picturesque harmony with Castillian dances, Gothic cloisters and Moorish songs, it is still worse to transform him into a rampant Idealist of the conventional kind. He belongs neither to the Aesthetics nor to the Idealists. He belongs to every individual soul whose taste is sufficiently purged, sufficiently perverse and sufficiently passionate, to enter the enchanted circle of his ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... at work within him. The third part of the epilogue to 'Dramatis Personae' represented his own creed; though this was often accentuated in the sense of a more personal privilege, and a perhaps less poetic mystery, than the poem conveys. The Evangelical Christian and the subjective idealist philosopher were curiously blended in ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... it may seem, the peasants themselves stood in the way. They did not care to change their condition, miserable as it was. They dreaded the future, preferred present miseries than to risk new ills. For example, on one occasion, a certain political idealist excited the peasants in revolt, assassinated 120 nobles, destroyed 264 castles. This was in the time of Joseph II, of Austria, the ruler filled with amazing ideas of equality. The peasants themselves were the first to protest, much as they detested ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... human idealism was no part of his duty. In any case he greatly preferred the solid assurance of the Primrose League. And, speaking generally, as I have tried to do throughout, I find that New Worlds for Old presents a clearer indication to the possible path for the idealist than any of the other sociological essays. Mankind in the Making dealt very largely with education directed to a particular end, but in the book I am now considering may be found certain outlets for the expression of the less consistently strenuous. ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... terrible thing," said Matilde, her tone suddenly changing and growing thoughtful. "It really does not seem to me such a dreadful thing that you should be Veronica's husband. Of course I do not speak of the material advantages. You were always an idealist, Bosio—you do not care for those things, and I daresay that when you are married you will not even care to take her titles, nor to spend much of her money. I know well enough what passes in your mind. Sit down. Let us talk about it. ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... the American is an idealist is to commit a thoroughgoing platitude. Like most platitudes, the statement is annoying because from one point of view it is indisputably just, while from another it does not seem to fit the facts. With regard to our tradition, it is indisputable. Of the immigrants who since the seventeenth ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... popular conceptions of the man whose business it is to sell books. One is the sentimental notion of an old gentleman in a "stovepipe hat," a dreamer and an idealist, who keeps a second-hand stall. The most delightful pictures of him are in the pages of Anatole France. He is a man of much erudition. And books are his wife and family, food and drink. Then there is the other idea. "Why is it," we report the remark ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... that the girl was anything but perfect; but it was nice to find his high opinion of her corroborated by one who had no reason to exhibit her in a favourable light. He understood her point of view and sympathised with it. An idealist, how could she trust herself to Eustace Hignett? How could she be content with a craven who, instead of scouring the world in the quest for deeds of daring do, had fallen down so lamentably on his first assignment? There was a specious attractiveness about ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... seem to us the charter of the new age of England's song; and the effect is rendered all the more striking by the rhythm of the last line with its prophecy of Marlowe and mighty music to come. Piers, on the other hand, though with less poetic rage, is a truer idealist, and approaches the high things of poetry more reverentially than his Bacchic comrade. When Cuddie, acknowledging his own ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... matter of this difference before us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a fine intemperance, will not suffer ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... idealist (who commonly speaks and always thinks with a Yankee accent) will say, "I've been right away from these little muddy islands, and seen God's great seas and prairies." The sound philosopher will reply, "You have never been in these islands; you have never ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... ceases to love her; and he's kind and obliging and wouldn't hurt a fly if he could avoid it. Why, Joe, you old idiot, you mustn't feel that Joey has disgraced himself. Isn't he planning to marry the woman? Only a decent man—a born idealist—could hold that designing woman in such reverence. Blamed if it isn't kind of sweet of the boy, although I would love to give him a kick that would jar ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... and that the attributes inhere in this external cause or substratum, viz. matter. But at last it was seen that the existence of matter could not be proved by extrinsic evidence; consequently, now the answer to the idealist argument simply is, that the belief in an external cause of sensations is universal, and as intuitive as our knowledge of sensations themselves. Even Kant allows this (notwithstanding his belief in the existence of a universe of things in themselves, ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... no fool; on the other hand, he is a keen observer and an apt student. Although an idealist by nature, many of the race have proved themselves good business men. But under the reservation system they have developed traits that are absolutely opposed to the racial type. They become time-serving, beggarly, and apathetic. Some of their ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... mill wheel, the click of the sewing machine; and he who doubts still may listen to the voice of cannon, the whistling of lances and the clash of swords, and catch the notes of the same chant with a sterner chorus. Hear even the idealist Schelling awaiting that broader freedom than any ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... had not the habit of screaming blasphemies which my Great Example failed to convince anybody that she had discovered in Huxley. In brief, he did not conform to the unscientific idea of what a scientific man must be like. He was a cultured idealist. I will try to recall a few of the marvellous ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... gifted artisan orator, who had never shrunk upon occasion from launching red rhetoric at Society, should actually have shed blood seemed too startling, especially as the blood shed was not blue, but the property of a lovable young middle-class idealist, who had now literally given his life to the Cause. But this supplementary sensation did not grow to a head, and everybody (save a few labor leaders) was relieved to hear that Tom had been released almost immediately, ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... is not without authoritative support, even on the Idealist side, in his demand that individual objects shall be allowed some grade and measure of reality. Spinoza, for instance, allows that each individual thing is a genuine part of the total Idea. Hegel also grants to individual things a certain "self-reference," which constitutes ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... fortnight he lived a dream—and that dream was Paradise. He forgot the past, ignored the future, and lived solely for the moment—with the joy of Nature's own child. It was the pure love of the idealist ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... brought his intellectual qualifications and extensive reading to bear upon a subject until then treated either by philosophical theorizers or eloquent essayists. He has left one of the purest literary reputations in France. He was above all an idealist, and made the World Beautiful more ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Mr. Vaughan realized that the passing of the period of rapid enlargement laid upon him the responsibility of fostering the slow and unostentatious work of profiting by the past and of seeing that the reputation of the School was maintained and increased. He was essentially an idealist, a dreamer of dreams, a visionary, but he never lost sight of the practicable. Organization ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... as insistent as the Washington Administration that Huerta should resign and that Great Britain should assist the United States in accomplishing his dethronement, and that the Mexican people should have a real opportunity of setting up for themselves. He was not enough of an "idealist," however, to believe that the Mexicans, without the assistance of their powerful neighbours, could succeed in establishing a constitutional government. In early August, 1913, President Wilson sent Mr. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... top. That was all right, if only he also tried to push from the bottom. The world needed idealists, but not the old brand, blind to the actual, teaching out of a great ignorance. This probation officer woman, she was the modern idealist, as modern as Jesus Christ, who worked ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... "The old idealist spoke for an hour and a half with the fire of enthusiasm, throwing out every now and then some spark of his humour amidst his stream of eloquence. He did not speak like a dying greybeard, but like a young man ready to take up to-morrow morning ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... you should fall ill, your income would vanish, and your family and you would starve together. No! no! you are an idealist, you dream how life should be, and not as it is in truth! I have listened to you, thinking that you would present some forcible argument upon which to found your pretensions, but I hear only the ravings ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... idealist of the Italian struggle for independence, was born at Genoa, June 22, 1805. His faith in democracy and his enthusiasm for a free Italy he inherited from his parents; and while still a student in the University of Genoa he gathered round ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... perfect type of the idealist. We shall see how, in the midst of what the world calls immorality and sordidness, this quality in him was ever present; even when it led to harshness to persons or facts. Not fitting into the world, his attitude toward it, his actions in it, and ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... the wings of an undulatory theory of light. It is different with us, you know, who have emerged from the land of darkness by the regular classical and literary highway. We feed upon Rabelais and Burton; he flits carelessly from flower to flower of the theory of Quantics. If he were an idealist painter, like Rossetti, he would paint great allegorical pictures for us, representing an asymptotic curve appearing to him in a dream, and introducing that blushing maiden, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... for it. There are two sets of people you have got to consider. First of all, I hope that the Government of India, so long as I am connected with it and responsible for it to Parliament and to the country, will not be hurried by the anger of the impatient idealist. The impatient idealist—you know him. I know him. I like him, I have been one myself. He says, "You admit that so and so is right; why don't you do it—why don't you do it now?" Whether he is an Indian idealist or a British idealist I sympathise with him. Ah! gentlemen, how many ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... one who aims at reproducing the external phenomena of nature, while the idealist is the man who 'imagines things of fine interest.' Yet, while he defined them he would not separate them. The true artist is a realist, for he recognises an external world of truth; an idealist, for he has selection, abstraction and the power of individualisation. To stand apart from the world ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... better, therefore, to treat the subject in a philosophic way. The question which the Editors of the Idler ask is, after all, a question as to the relative advantages of Idealism and Realism—spelled with the largest kind of capital letters. The small boy is ordinarily an Idealist, unless, of course, he belongs to the unhappy class of small boys who have to earn their own living when they ought to be at play, and who, having no time for dreaming, become Realists of the most hardened and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of the most venerated men of history have been criminals; their lives and teachings have been in greater or lesser conflict with the doctrines, habits and beliefs of the communities where they lived. From the nature of things the wise man and the idealist can never be contented with existing things, and their lives are a constant battle for change. If the anti-social individual should be punished, what of many of the profiteers and captains of industry ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... heroine as the mere minx—that the Hon. Mrs. DOWDALL has done well in expending so much cleverness in telling Susie's story. Certainly those who think of marriage as a high calling, for which the vocation is love, will be as much annoyed with her as was her cousin Lucy, the idealist, at once the most amusing and most pathetic figure in the book. I am quite sure that Susies and Lucys both abound, and that Mrs. DOWDALL knows all about them; but I am not equally sure that the Susies deserve the encouragement of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... the people about her were almost equally made up of very good-looking and enthusiastic young people and a great variety of Goopes-like types. In the discussion there was the oddest mixture of things that were personal and petty with an idealist devotion that was fine beyond dispute. In nearly every speech she heard was the same implication of great and necessary changes in the world—changes to be won by effort and sacrifice indeed, but surely ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... If the poet were truly an idealist,—if he found for the world conceptions as pure as those of mathematics, which can be applied equally well to any situation, then, indeed, he might regard himself as the author of progress. But it is the poet's failing that he gives men no vision ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... religious experience—that which the mind brings is bulkier if less important than that which it receives; and only the closest analysis will enable us to separate these two elements. Yet this machinery of apperception—humbling though its realization must be to the eager idealist—does not merely confuse the issue for us; or compel us to agnosticism as to the true content of religious intuition. On the contrary, its comprehension gives us the clue to many theological puzzles; whilst its existence enables us to lay hold of supersensual experiences ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... disillusionment is bound to be the price of their error. In a truly great man, life-theory and life-practice, if seen from a sufficiently lofty point of view, must and do always agree, in an actor, in a romanticist, in an idealist, and in a Christian, there is always a yawning chasm between the two, which, whatever well-meaning critics may do, cannot be bridged posthumously by acrobatic ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... was a great man, if ever there was one. He was a man of big ideas, too big for prejudice or suspicion or self-interest. His mind was at once imaginative and matter-of-fact, making him that rare combination, a practical idealist. But the abiding memory which I shall retain of him as long as I live is not his wide knowledge, his singleness of purpose, his vital energy and driving force, so much as the friendship he gave me. He put the whole of himself into his friendship, and gave himself ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... hedonism on the other, is forced and wooden. The most interesting of the three sections is the second, containing a discussion in which the respective parts are taken by a deist, a pantheist, a subjective idealist, a sceptic, and an atheist. The allegory falls into the background, and we have a plain statement of some of the objections that may be made by the sceptical atheist both to revelation and to natural ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... Pitt's Continental policy, and of Napoleon's relations to the new thought of the age, in two Essays, entitled "Pitt's Plans for the Settlement of Europe" and "Wordsworth, Schiller, Fichte, and the Idealist ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... helping those in need—more especially those who showed talents to which they were unable, through stress of circumstances, to give expression—that he died practically a poor man. He was a high-souled, generous idealist. All his work is purposeful, conveying to his readers a moral lesson. He had the keenest appreciation of the feelings of others and understood the immense significance of the little things of life—a fact evidenced by his vivid descriptions ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... Milton's early genius, is the epitome of the man at the age at which he wrote it. It bespeaks the scholar and idealist, whose sacred enthusiasm is in some danger of contracting a taint of pedantry for want of acquaintance with men and affairs. The Elder Brother is a prig, and his dialogues with his junior reveal the same solemn insensibility ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... that I have ever known Peter. He does not let people perceive what is underneath," said Miss De Voe. "But of one thing I am sure. Nearly everything he does is done from sentiment. At heart he is an idealist." ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... tournaments have not rendered it contrary to the laws of romantic chivalry (which you reverence so much) for me to introduce to you my friend Mr. Pepler, who is a very nice man indeed though a social idealist, and who has, I believe, something of a practical sort to ask of you. Please excuse abruptness in this letter of introduction; we are moving into the country and every piece of furniture I begin to write at is taken away ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and idealism. These also are sides of human nature, which, when unconnected, bring forth disastrous results. Their opposition is as old as the beginning of culture, and till its end can hardly be set aside, save in the individual. The idealist is a nobler but a far less perfect being; the realist appears far less noble, but is more perfect, for the noble lies in the proof of a great capacity, but the perfect in the general attitude of the whole ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Hawthorne, who took up his residence there first at the "Old Manse," and afterward at "The Wayside." Though naturally an idealist, he said that he came too late to Concord to fall decidedly under Emerson's influence. Of that he would have stood in little danger even had he come earlier. He appreciated the deep and subtle quality of Emerson's imagination, but his own shy genius always ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... which the splendid regimental flag floated in the crystal cold air of December. Afar off was a broad plateau for drills, an aviation field, and beyond all, a still, snow-bound world, walled in by jagged peaks of ice. It seemed to Colonel Fortescue, who was an idealist and at the same time a crack cavalry officer, that the great flag on the giant flagstaff dominated the frozen world around it, and its stars were a part of the firmament. When the sun rose and the flag was run up, then indeed it was sunrise. And when the sun descended ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... which we have already spoken, and may speak again in pages yet to come—the vision of the divine ideal at last triumphant. In this vision the preacher must live. To lose it is despair. No one has so many disappointments as the idealist; but it is the glorious fact that no one cares about his disappointments less. Not that he does not see them, but because he sees beyond them. The true preacher—he is your incorrigible optimist. Some men form their expectations ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... the schools which flourished in the second quarter of this century. Another remains, which has incurred from opponents the charge of pantheism, viz. the idealist school, commonly called the Eclectic; (44) which was especially dominant in France, and in the university of Paris, during the rule of the Orleans dynasty. Viewed as a philosophy it is a very noble one. Implying, as its name denotes, an attempt to reap the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... him, and a little later as he drove over the frosted roads, he could still feel, as in a dream, the soft clinging touch of her fingers. Essentially an idealist, his character was the result of a veneering of insufficient culture on a groundwork of raw impulse. People and objects appeared to him less through forms of thought than through colours of the emotions; and he saw them out of relation because he saw them under different conditions ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... past them both, Catie the young materialist and potential tyrant, and Scott Brenton the idealist. The years carried the children out of the perpetual holidays of infancy and into the treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of the primary ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... wasted in expression, style, spread-eagleism; everything is instinctively kept as near to the practical heart of the matter as possible. He is—to the eye of an artist—distressingly matter-of-fact, a tempting mark for satire. And yet he is in truth an idealist, though it is his nature to snub, disguise, and mock his own inherent optimism. To admit enthusiasms is "bad form" if he is a "gentleman"; "swank" or mere waste of good heat if he is not a "gentleman." England produces more than its proper percentage of cranks and poets; it may be taken that ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... I appear to be taking a too eager interest in the girl, that up till now the world of woman had been terra incognita to me; that I had lived a singularly cloistered life, and that first and last I was an idealist. This girl had distinction, mystery and charm, and it is not to be wondered at that I found a joy in her presence. I proved myself a perfect artesian well of conversation, talking freely of the ship, of our fellow-passengers and of the chances of the venture. I found her wonderfully quick in the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... attempt to conceive of India in terms of an ocean island, and of Russia in terms of India so interpreted. Though I am trying to think of Russia and India in world-wide terms, I cannot think that that, or the universalizing of the local, is cosmic purpose. The higher idealist is the positivist who tries to localize the universal, and is in accord with cosmic purpose: the super-dogmatist of a local savage who can hold out, without a flurry of doubt, that a piano washed up on a beach is the trunk of a palm tree that a shark has bitten, leaving his teeth in it. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... philosopher, the first observer who took a metaphysical, non-temporal, analytical view of the world, and so became the predecessor of all those votaries of 'other-world' ways of thinking,—whether as academic idealist, or 'budge doctor of the Stoic fur,' or Christian ascetic or what not, whose ways are such a puzzle to the 'hard-headed practical man,'—was himself one of the shrewdest men of his day, so shrewd that by common consent he was placed foremost in antiquity among the Seven ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... war-training and war itself to a better understanding of the ordinary spontaneous fighting types, and of bringing these by the same discipline to a readier appreciation of the intellectual and idealist position, is well enough worked out. The character-drawing impressed me less favourably. The author, I should say, finds it rather difficult to understand the ordinary good or indifferent fellow with his qualities and their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... those not of the lowest rank, who have thought that this intermediate character of all perception was so evident that there was no need to insist further upon it. John Stuart Mill, who was certainly and perhaps more than anything a careful logician, commences an exposition of the idealist thesis to which he was so much attached, by carelessly saying: "It goes without saying that objects are known to us through the intermediary of our senses.... The senses are equivalent to our sensations;"[4] and on those propositions he rears his whole system, "It goes without saying ..." is ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... of his moral judgments always in prospect, why should Bradley, or any idealist, have pursued ethical studies at all? Since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite consciousness, which must know both good and evil in order to merge and to transcend them, he could hardly nurse any intense enthusiasm for ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... them he expresses a sharp dissatisfaction with the very nature of his actual experience. A painter like Rubens is entranced with his own actual vision of things; but Poussin tells us that he has never even seen anything as he wanted to see it. He is not a vague idealist dissatisfied with reality because of the weakness of his own senses or understanding. Rather he seems to cry, like Poe, of ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... in one view too easily allies itself to materialism, is also the attitude of spiritual idealism, and is seemingly at variance with the excessive value placed by Spiritualists on the discovery of our mere psychic survival. The idealist may recognise this survival; but, whether he does so or not, he occupies a post of vantage when he tells us that it is of no ultimate importance. For he, like the Spiritualist who proclaims his "proof palpable of immortality," ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... king?' Simple, yet endlessly deep the reply: 'Art thou a bishop?' Both alike false to their callings—as father of men and shepherd of souls. Yet the one cold, self-seeking sceptic, the other ignorant, passionate, fanatic idealist. 'Why hast thou destroyed the town and my folk?' 'Priest, I have not destroyed one little maid of thine. Thou hast again thy town, and I can repay thee a hundredfold.' The bishop demands with much curiosity how this miserable captive ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... this," exclaims the idealist, "is what I have always been saying, and you have always been denying." No; I never denied this. But I denied that painters in general, when they spoke of improving Nature, knew what Nature was. Observe: before they dare as much as to dream of arranging her, they must be able ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... no; I don't suffer much, but of course I am a little disturbed. I am like a reflection. Esperance's happiness elates, her sorrow depresses me. I love her purely as an idealist. I would like Count Albert to look like the Duke de Morlay-La-Branche, and still keep the noble soul that we know he possesses. If your cousin should die, I truly believe that I would die. My life would be without aim, without soul; bereft of light, ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... in mind the historical aspect of the matter we can understand how it has come about that the individualistic idealist in America has been much more resolute than in England to effect reforms, much more determined that they shall be very thorough and extreme reforms, and, especially, much more eager to embody his moral aspirations in legal statutes. But his tasks are bigger than in England, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... and to the soul; he is suggesting, inspiring, stimulating; he is presenting thoughts in so beautiful a form that they become desirable and adorable; and what the average man believes to-day is what the idealist has believed half a century before. He must take his chance of fame; and his best hope is to eschew rhetoric, which implies the consciousness of opponents and auditors, and just present his dreams and visions ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the plan of Lord Robert Cecil, although he was reputed to be an idealist favoring a new international order. An examination of his plan (Appendix) shows it to be a substantial revival of the old and discredited ideas of a century ago. There could be no doubt that a plan of this sort, materialistic and selfish as it was, ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... and the conditioned, of the absolute and the relative. They are not opposed to each other in the sense of incompatibility, but are each the complement of the other, and the only reality is in the combination of the two. The error of the extreme idealist is in endeavouring to realize the absolute without the relative, and the error of the extreme materialist is in endeavouring to realize the relative without the absolute. On the one side the mistake is in trying to realize an inside without an outside, and on the ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... with the corresponding expression, as in the thrill of eagerness that perceptibly pervaded the whole figure of a thirsty man who stooped down to drink. But Giotto was no mere realist though he was a great realist; he was also in the highest light an idealist. His sense of harmony and beauty was true and noble; he rose above the real into 'the things unseen and eternal,' of which the real is but a rough manifestation. He was the first to paint a crucifixion robbed of the horrible triumph of physical power, and of the agony which ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler |
