"Idealize" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... living conditions, or merely in search of new experience. It is usually the younger generation, the more restless, active, and adaptable, who go out from the security of the old home to seek their fortunes in the new. Once settled on the new land, however, immigrants inevitably remember and idealize the home they have left. Their first disposition is to reproduce as far as possible in the new world the institutions and the social order of the old. Just as the spider spins his web out of his own body, so the immigrant tends to spin out of his experience and traditions, a social organization which ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... feeds through sleepless nights on the recollection of his look, on the memory of his lightest words. Even the old love of Sychaeus seems to revive in and blend with this new affection.[9] Her very queenliness delights to idealize her lover, to recognize in the hero before whom she falls "one of the race of the gods." For a while the figure of Dido is that of happy, insatiate passion. The rumours of war from the jealous chieftains about her fall idly on her ear. She hovers round ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... can be reasoned about theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator accelerating through space.) Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics, but must be used with care. It's too easy to idealize away some important aspect of the real world ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... impressed by intellectual women. His wife had given him a sample of the other kind, and caused him to swing out and idealize the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... walking up and down the long piazza, indifferent for the first time in his life to the loveliness of the soft April atmosphere, that seemed to blend, raise and idealize the features of the landscape until earth, water and sky were harmonized into celestial beauty. Paul was growing very anxious for the reappearance of Miriam, or for some news of her or her errand, yet ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... their folly. . . . . . I have been painting a great deal, beside my regular exercises, for my own amusement; I take such delight in testing my power to reflect the visible charm of beauty, and in endeavoring, however faintly, to idealize humanity. Among other efforts, I have finished a miniature of one of the young sisters here, whose sad, placid face, seemed to sketch itself upon my memory. Of course, the likeness was drawn without her knowledge—she has put away from her thoughts all such vanities. I often look on the picture, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... up one of them and say, "Here her words begin to have a warmer tinge of feeling;" but as spring advanced, imperceptibly yet surely, in spite of pauses and apparent retrogressions, just so surely she revealed a certain warmth of sympathy. He was engaged in a work which made it easy for her to idealize him. His unselfish effort to help men live, to keep bitter tears from the eyes of their relatives, appealed most powerfully to all that was unselfish in her nature, and she was beginning to ask, "If I can make this man happier, why should I not do so?" Nichol's letter gained a new ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... future destiny of which we are conscious and the influence of anterior instincts from which we are not wholly detached,—carnal love and divine love. One man combines them, another abstains altogether; some there are who seek the satisfaction of their anterior appetites from the whole sex; others idealize their love in one woman who is to them the universe; some float irresolutely between the delights of matter and the joys of soul, others spiritualize the body, requiring of it that ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... of the soul which is falling out of human integrity into the purely mechanical mode. If we idealize ourselves sufficiently, the spontaneous centers do at last work only, or almost only, in the mechanical mode. They have no dynamic relation with another being. They cannot have. Their whole power of dynamic relationship is quenched. They act now in reference purely to the mechanical world, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... would say of Calderon, of Moliere, of Corneille, of Racine, of Voltaire, of Alfieri, of Goethe, of those dramatists, in many forms, and with genius the most diverse, who have so steadily set themselves to idealize the great types of public life and of the phases of human history. Let us all beware lest worship of the idiosyncrasy of our peerless Shakespeare blind us to the value of the great masters who in a different world and with different aims have presented the development ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... she asked smiling. "If there are obstacles, so much the more interesting. I don't fancy that romantic streak in your nature which permitted you to idealize Mortimer has quite dried up. Once romantic always romantic—I deduce from human nature ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... Through diversity of function, it gives rise to proportionality of products and equilibrium in exchange, and consequently opens for us the road to wealth; as also, in showing us infinity everywhere in art and Nature, it leads us to idealize our acts, and makes the creative mind—that is, divinity itself, mentem diviniorem—immanent and perceptible ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... modern tendency to idealize progress has been responsible for the neglect of Italian harpsichords and virginals during the present day revival of interest in old musical instruments. Whatever laudable traits the Italian builders may have had, they cannot be considered to have been progressive. Their instruments of the ...
— Italian Harpsichord-Building in the 16th and 17th Centuries • John D. Shortridge
... commonplace although exact and energetic movements of Lord Keith, he was restive, and freely showed what he felt. On the other hand, around Hood and Jervis, who commanded his professional respect and esteem, he quickly threw the same halo of excellence, arising from his tendency to idealize, that colored the medium through which he invariably saw the men whom he himself commanded. The disposition to invest those near to him with merits, which must in part at least have been imaginary, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... country; for his keen insight; for his heroic unselfishness, and for all his other fine qualities. Gordon has become recognised in Spain as an original character, grand and complete, whom future generations will idealize, and whom history will call by ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... But the trait was not disagreeable, for she herself was evidently the foremost dupe of her inventions. She had a fictitious history in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an infinite capacity for extemporized reminiscence adapted to the mood of the hour. She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and picturesque attitudes to her own imagination; and the vivacity and spontaneity of her character gave her, really, a starting-point in experience; so that the many-colored ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... that," he said quickly, "but it is a great puzzle at present and I am thankful to say, I think it is quite safe to wait a year or two yet. You and I live so much apart from society that we idealize it a good deal, though you are a stray-away bit of it. We too seldom see the ideal gentleman or lady; we have to be contented with keeping the ideal in our minds, it seems to me, and saying that this man is gentlemanly, and that woman ladylike. But I do believe in aiming at the best ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... you grasp the offence of these facts, do not be carried away into supposing that this age is therefore unprecedentedly evil. Such dirt, toil, cruelty have always been, have been in larger measure. Don't idealize the primitive cave, the British hut, the peasant's cottage, damp and windowless, the filth-strewn, plague-stricken, mediaeval town. In spite of all these crushed, mangled, starved, neglected little ones about the feet of this fine time, in spite of a thousand other disorders and ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... group—he cannot fail to become convinced that there are no instances of what I have described as romantic love in Latin literature any more than in Greek. And since it is the province of poets to idealize, we may feel doubly sure that the emotions which they did not even imagine cannot have existed in the actual life of their more prosaic contemporaries. It would, indeed, be strange if a people so much more coarse-fibred and practical, and ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... idealize the woman he loved, for he was not a man of ideals, nor of much imagination. Such defects as she might have, he did not see, and if he had seen them he would have been indifferent to them. To such a man, loving meant everything and admitted of no comment, ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... might wish to keep the fact a secret, or otherwise dispose of them by pensions or emigration, but she could not bear to KNOW IT HERSELF! She never could be happy as the mistress of Scrooby Priory with that knowledge; she did not idealize it as a principle! Carefully weighing it by her own practical common sense, she said to herself that "it wouldn't pay." The highest independence is often akin to the lowest selfishness; she did not dream that the same pride which kept her grandfather from the workhouse and support by ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... almost pathetic in the way in which our successful business men seem to idealize the higher learning and to believe in its efficacy for salvation. Never having shared in its blessings, they do their utmost to make the youth of coming generations more fortunate. Usually there is little originality ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... are not very many poets who have the particular kind of ice-cold intellect necessary if one is to detach one's self completely from the idols of the market-place. Indeed, the poetic temperament is only too apt, out of the very warmth of its sensitive humanity, to idealize the old traditions and throw a glamour around them. That is why, both in politics and religion, there have been, ever since Aristophanes, so many great reactionary poets. Their warmth of human sympathy, their "nihil alienum" attitude; ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... other words, progress is accelerated. Among the most effective agencies for the promotion of progress, therefore, must be included those which stimulate this power of idealization. In short, he who in any age helps to idealize those factors and forces upon which the progress of his age depends, is perhaps the most useful man, the most powerful agent in the promotion of human well-being, even though from the strictly realistic point of view he only succeeds in making ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... appearance reminded her of the heroic type of manhood which the ancients had sought to depict in their marbles. In him she had unconsciously recognized the true spirit of the Argonaut on whose brow rests the star of empire. She did not idealize him; she simply recognized him for what he was—a man; one in whose soul the sentiment and enthusiasm of youth still sat enthroned, not smothered by the crushing process of modern civilization which was the case with the men she knew. A terror seized her as ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... I resolve neither to soar into romance nor drop into poetry (as even Chicago drummers do here), nor to idealize nor quote too many prodigious stories, but to write such a book as I needed to read before leaving my "Abandoned Farm," "Gooseville," Mass. For I have discovered that many other travellers are as ignorant as myself regarding practical information about every-day life here, ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... back to it now, by means of impersonal rather than personal arguments. She did not idealize paternity. She was bitterly well aware by this time that parents were no better than other folk, and that only a small proportion of those to whom the blessing came were qualified or willing to bear its responsibilities. She touched ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... brother-in-law, Harry,—assuming, as lovers are wont, that brothers see sisters on their ideal side. This was quite true of Harry and Hope, but not at all true as regarded Emilia. She seemed to him simply a beautiful and ungoverned girl whom he could not respect, and whom he therefore found it very hard to idealize. Therefore he heard with a sort of sadness the outpourings of generous devotion ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... But remember how young you are. You know very little of the world, and often see things in an ideal light. It is your tendency to idealize. You haven't the experience necessary to a woman who goes ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... the temple. It is easy to feel with what joy he would first look upon Zion from the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, as he came over it on his journey from Galilee; to conceive how the temple and the ritual would fill him with awe in his readiness not to criticise, but to idealize everything he saw, and to think only of the significance given by it all to the scripture; to imagine how eagerly he would talk in the temple court with the learned men of his people about the law and the promises with which in home and school his youth had been ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... the models in the Patent Office. A pattern is commonly superficial; a model is usually in relief. A pattern must be closely followed in its minutest particulars by a faithful copyist; a model may allow a great degree of freedom. A sculptor may idealize his living model; his workmen must exactly copy in marble or metal the model he has made in clay. Compare EXAMPLE; ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... in the biblical attitude of woman. Put a woman on the mantelpiece and call her luscious, poetic names and then see how soon she'll hop down when another man simply cries 'I love you.' If a man wishes to spoil a woman successfully let him idealize her." ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... been explored, when the last savage has been tamed, when the final cannon has been scrapped, and the world has settled down into unbroken virtue and unutterable dulness, men will cast their thoughts back to our age, and will idealize our romance and—our courage, even as we do that of our distant forbears. "It is wonderful what these people did with their rude implements and their limited appliances!" That is what they will say when they read of our explorations, our voyages, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is almost possible, by judiciously selecting from his works, and using such keys as we possess, to construct as it were a kind of autobiography. Nor, if we make due allowance for the great writer's tendency to idealize the past, and intensify its humorous and pathetic aspects, need we at all fear that the self-written story of his life should convey a ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... to idealize the village when one views it from this height. To the tourist, who comes merely to admire, it is a view that possesses the glamour of enchantment. How happy should be the people who dwell in this peaceful village, surrounded by such charming scenery! How lofty should be ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... vanish into thin air. Scarcely had I walked three steps in the Tuileries gardens, the place which I had chosen as my destination, before I saw the prototype of the matrimonial situation which has last been described in this book. Had I desired to characterize, to idealize, to personify marriage, as I conceived it to be, it would have been impossible for the Creator himself to have produced so complete a symbol of it as ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... steadily); these devote themselves to the welfare of a brother, or to orphan nephews; they are mothers while remaining virgins. Such old maids attain to the highest heroism of their sex by consecrating all feminine feelings to the help of sorrow. They idealize womanhood by renouncing the rewards of woman's destiny, accepting its pains. They live surrounded by the splendour of their devotion, and men respectfully bow the head before their faded features. ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... mistakes and errors, fraught with pain; to escape from such, he delivered up his soul to poetry, and felt happy when he sheltered himself, from the influence of human sympathies, in the wildest regions of fancy. His imagination has been termed too brilliant, his thoughts too subtle. He loved to idealize reality; and this is a taste shared by few. We are willing to have our passing whims exalted into passions, for this gratifies our vanity; but few of us understand or sympathize with the endeavour to ally the love of abstract beauty, and adoration of abstract ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... Lamartine saw Jerusalem. But Byron was more curious about the pagan cities of antiquity than concerning the places consecrated by the sufferings of our Lord. He cared more to swim across the Hellespont with Leander than to wander over the sacred hills of Judaea; to idealize a beautiful peasant girl among the ruins of Greece, than converse with the monks of Palestine in their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... be a little hard on the women of Elisabeth's type, who idealize their fellows until the latter lose all semblance of reality; for experience, with its inevitable disillusionment, can not fail to put their ideal lovers and friends far from them, and to hide their etherealized acquaintances out of their sight; and to give instead, to the fond, trusting souls, ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... any of those lofty or tender sentiments which form the connecting links between youth and genius; for if poets sing to the young, and the young hail their own interpreters in poets, it is because the tendency of both is to idealize the realities of life,—finding everywhere in the real a something that is noble or fair, and making the fair yet fairer, and ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... deeply bored without knowing it at the time, or without a reasoned suffering. He suffered as a child suffers, simply, almost ignorantly: it was upon reflection that his nerves began to quiver with retroactive anguish. He was also able to idealize the situation when his wife no longer even wished to do so. His fancy cast a poetry about these Venetian friends, whose conversation displayed the occasional sparkle of Ollendorff-English on a dark ground of lagoon-Italian, ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... decidedly remarkable scene, pictorially, I agree with you. And an artist, of course—but isn't it a trifle quixotic, Peter, to idealize them because they are having a good time? There's no virtue in it. It is conceivable that they might have to work just as hard and have just as many little children to look after, and yet not have these dances you praise them ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... come, that wife and I might overwhelm you with a joint letter of thanks, laudation, and praise. But I can wait no longer. That is, the cider does n't come, and I begin to think it is a myth. Poets, you know, deal in such. They imagine, they idealize, nay, it is said they create; and if we were poets, I suppose we should before now have as good as drank some of that Long Island champagne. Speaking of poets reminds me that I did n't tell you how charmed I was with those translations from the Odyssey; ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... her aid to him and magnified his aid to her. All this was in accord with established form, but it was in still stronger accord with her determination to idealize his share in the incident. His arm had grasped hers firmly—and she felt it yet. But when she went on to say—not for the first time, nor for the second—how kind and sympathetic he had been in supporting her chin against those ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... child will understand and even idealize plant and animal life if he learns of plant and animal life first in human terms. His moral development is menaced if this process is reversed so that a counter-tendency is set up,—a tendency to interpret the human functions in animal terms. It is better for the child to ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... jaded or cowed; and they laughed cheerfully and nodded to us as they passed through the rain, on their way to the fields. But the contrast between them and the chief in his soldier's uniform seated at breakfast was rather too striking; and incidentally it etched in bold lines the folly of those who idealize the life of even ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... Savannah, or New York; the general world was going on, and—which of them was idealizing? It mightn't be so bad, after all. Hadn't I, perhaps, over-sentimentalized to myself the case of John Mayrant? Hadn't I imagined for him ever so much more anxiety than the boy actually felt? For people can idealize down just as readily as they can idealize up. Of Miss Hortense Rieppe I had now two partial portraits—one by the displeased aunts, the other by their chivalric nephew; in both she held between her experienced lips, a cigarette; there the similarity ceased. ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... realized, however, that wars are not inevitable, men cease to idealize Demaetia, unless they are sure she did her best to keep the peace. To a realistic poet of war such as Mr. Sassoon, she is an object of pity rather than praise. His sonnet, Glory of Women, suggests that there is another ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... grace of her manner, all during the talk, her winsomeness, and the almost spiritual kindness and tenderness that characterized her, made me feel that she embodied all those qualities with which we of this earth idealize ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... said the Baron, "we must pardon much to men of genius. A delicate organization renders them keenly susceptible to pain and pleasure. And then they idealize every thing; and, in the moonlight of fancy, even the deformity of vice ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the greatest hero in Germany, and all the children idealize him. Whatever he puts his name to, goes. He and a popular pastor worked up a huge subscription for war-waifs, and when the money had been raised it was found the waifs were already well provided for. ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... all man's activities when he comes to man's estate. In science he has always an ideal of a more perfect knowledge before him though he becomes scientific by experience. In art he is always striving to idealize fresh things, though he first becomes an artist from the pure spontaneous pleasure of expressing what is in him. The deliberate projection of the ideal into the future, seeing how far it will take us and whether we are journeying in the right direction, is a late stage. As to progress, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... did not greatly idealize her, under the double glamour of gallantry and loyalty, Victoria was a most extraordinary young woman. A few days before the death of the King, Greville wrote: "What renders speculation so easy and events so uncertain ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... to saying that the writer has been bold enough to stem the current of traditional opinion, and find a poetic view of humanity at the present time and in its most despised portion. The end of dramatic writing is not to reproduce Nature, but to idealize it; a literal copying of the same, as everybody knows, is the merit of the photographer, not of the artist. Again, it should be remembered that the highly wrought characters among the slaves are whites, or whites slightly tinged with African blood. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... "Most women idealize the men they love, honey-girl." Winston Morgan was from the South, and he drew upon its store of picturesque endearments to express his joy and pride in his own Peggy. "And if they didn't where ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... artists also in our daily task,—artists not artisans. The artist is he who strives to perfect his work, the artisan strives to get through it. If I cannot realize my ideal I can at least idealize my real—How? By trying to be perfect in it. If I am but a raindrop in a shower, I will be at least a perfect drop. If but a leaf in a whole June, I will be a perfect leaf. This is the beginning of ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... to eroticism by pictures or novels, if they are sufficiently aesthetic, or even moral. This is a great danger for both sexes, especially for woman—eroticism dissimulated under hypocritical forms, and intended to idealize dishonest intentions (vide de Maupassant: "Ce Cochon ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... favor. Occasionally Mr. Abner Nott, in a practical relapse, raged against the derelicts, and talked of dispossessing them, or even dismantling his tenement, but he was easily placated by a compliment to the "dear old ship," or an effort made by some tenant to idealize his apartment. A photographer who had ingeniously utilized the forecastle for a gallery (accessible from the bows in the next street), paid no further tribute than a portrait of the pretty face of Rosey Nott. The superstitious reverence in which Abner Nott held his ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... eras of Roman art, and is a strong distinguishing feature between Greek and Roman sculpture; for while the Greeks wished to reproduce the face of one of whom they made a bust or statue, they did not hesitate to idealize that face; but the Romans labored to make an exact likeness of the man, leaving him in his statue as nothing more than he looked to be. This manner of portraiture often does great injustice to its model, for the changing expressions which come with emotions and with ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... odd page indeed! Not a creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look at. You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like the circle ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... boys in their copper-toed boots and overalls, at the good-natured, but hopelessly common-place Martha Spriggs, with her thin hair drawn tight into a knob the size of a bullet, and her bare arms akimbo. 'Idealize her real!' Would it be possible to ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... phenomenon has been what has been called its duality-states, which are spoken of as positive and negative. Thus, we speak of the positive plate of a battery and the negative pole of a dynamo; and another troublesome condition to idealize has been, how it could be that, in an electric circuit, there could be as much energy at the most remote part as at the source. But, if one will take a limp rope, 8 or 10 feet long, tie its ends together, ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... what the "something" was, one need not idealize those old conditions. It would be a mistake to suppose that the peasant economy, as practised in this valley, was nearly so good a thing for women as it was for the other sex; a mistake to think that their life ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... use?" Selingman growled. "She is yours, body and soul. You have but to lift up your finger, and she would follow you to the end of the world. I don't idealize women, you know, Maraton, and virtue isn't a fetish with me. But I know that girl. If you hold out your hands, she is yours, but if you withhold them, she is the most virginal creature that ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
