DICTIONARY ONE.COM • More 'Phantasm' Quotes from Famous Books

... not whence they were, or in what form, or from what people, or from what country; but they supposed them to be fairies—duine sidhe—that is to say, gods of the earth, or a phantasm. ...

— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... his heels, the morio slowly made his way up the stairs. Goaded by the taunts of the outlaws, his face was distorted with ferocity; through his lips came a fierce, sibilant breathing; in the dim light his colossal figure and enormous head seemed in no wise human, but rather a murderous phantasm. With head rolling from side to side, stabbing in the air with his knife, he continued to approach,—an object calculated to strike ...

— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... "Set me some great task, ye gods! and I will show my spirit." "Not so," says the good Heaven; "plod and plough, vamp your old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and the best wine by and by." Well, 'tis all phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... rest of the hemisphere, and gelidly self-satisfied in so far as it was not in the least the Boston of her fond preconceptions. It was, doubtless, no more the real Boston we know and love, than either of the others: and it perplexed her more than it need, even if it had not been mere phantasm. It made her suspicious of Mr. Arbuton's behavior towards her, and observant of little things that might very well have otherwise escaped her. The bantering humor, the light-hearted trust and self-reliance with which she had once met him deserted her, and only returned ...

— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells

... that is now left of him,—that is to say, the skin, bones, and corporeal substance, little cocked hat, green coat, white breeches, and small sword, which are still known by his redoubtable name. He was attended only by two policemen, who walked quietly behind the phantasm of the old ex-emperor, appearing to have no duty in regard to him except to see that none of the light-fingered gentry should possess themselves of thee star of the Legion of Honor. Nobody save myself so much as turned to look after him; nor, ...

— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... morning, of course, he knew that it was incredible, a mere phantasm born of the dark; and towards four o'clock that afternoon, he called at the BRUDERSTRASSE with the change. But Louise was not at home, and as he did not find her in on three successive days, he did not venture to return. He wrote his name on a card, and left this, together ...

— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... a kindly phantasm of the brain? Was it the incarnation of the last vision of the lost Volunteers? Was it a Valkyrie assuming that lovely likeness to perch upon this eyrie, waiting to bear their heroic souls to Valhalla, or—was it ...

— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington

... other, "it is not the higher but the lower Reason which leads you, and the Knowledge you covet is not that of realities, but of mere seemings. You do not know the real world. You are the dupes of a Phantasm which you take for Substance." With that he passed on, and the man of Science was left in the company of the traveler who had first accosted him. "What person is that?" asked the former, looking after the retreating figure of him who had just spoken. "He is a poet," returned the grave-faced traveler; ...

— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... that an attempt should be made to photograph any phantasm seen, but Mr. Vincey had not the instant presence of mind to snap the camera that lay ready on the table beside him, and when he did so he was too late. Greatly elated, however, even by this partial success, he made a note of the exact time, and at once took a cab to the Albany ...

— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells

... occupy at least four times the period we have ascribed to it. The simple-minded priest, who could never have dreamt of such an exhibition, scarcely knew whether he was asleep or awake, and sometimes asked himself whether it was not some terrible phantasm by which he was startled and oppressed. The horrible impress of naked and hardened villany—the light and mirthful delirium of crime—the wanton manifestations of vice, in all its shapes, and the unblushing front of debauchery and profligacy—constituted, when brought ...

— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... of turning the choice music of Tasso into his native language was the eccentric satellite of the Sidneyan circle, Abraham Fraunce, fellow of St. John's College in Cambridge. It so happened that he was at the time pursuing that elusive phantasm, the application of the laws of classical versification to English poetry. The resuit was at least unique, in English, at any rate, namely a drama in hexameter verse. It also occurred to him that Watson's Lamentations of Amyntas, a translation of which he had himself published in ...

— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... in discussion he would even justify the other's career, in his heart despised it. It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a slight mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he had seen him come up to Moscow from the country where he was doing something, but what precisely Stepan Arkadyevitch could never quite make out, and indeed he took ...

— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... women Philostratus in his fourth book de vita Apollonii, hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius, a young man twenty-five years of age, that going between Cenchreas and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, [4676]"he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no ...

— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... often infinitely better than much which is accepted by the nonexperimental psychologist. As for the agnostic writer on the Non-Religion of the Future, M. Guyau actually illustrates the Resurrection of our Lord by an American myth about a criminal, of whom a hallucinatory phantasm appeared to each of his gaol companions, separately and successively, on a day after his execution! For this prodigious fable no hint of reference to authority is given.[10] Yet the evidence appears to satisfy M. Guyau, and is used by him ...

— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... Idea, which he will find in the following Treatise. It being that term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding, when a man thinks. I have used it to express whatever is meant by Phantasm, Notion, Species, OR WHATEVER IT IS, which the mind can be employed about in thinking; and I could not avoid frequently using it." Dr. REID follows nearly in the same track:—"It is a fundamental principle of the Ideal system, ...

— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam

... seemed to be the phantasm of a painted city, a wilderness of housetops, of smoke-wreathed spires and chimneys, stretched away to a murky, blood-red horizon. Even as they stood there, a deeper color stained the sky, an angry sun began to sink into the ...

— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... into the domain of truth, not of error, and with such training the meeting must, at one time or another, inevitably take place, for it is the one indispensable precaution against the possibilities of deception and phantasm in the observation of supersensible worlds. It is one of the most indispensable precautions to be taken by every occult student, to work carefully upon himself in order not to become a visionary, subject to every possible deception and self-deception, suggestion and auto-suggestion. ...

— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... immortality have been devised. Fondly fixing attention upon these, men have tried to find comfort and to absorb their thoughts from the dreaded spectre and the long oblivion. The first is the sentimental phantasm of posthumous fame. The Latin bard, ...

— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... akin to much that was best in himself, and of which she made proof under his own eyes, that Nelson recognized; and this, in the thought of the writer, was the body of truth, from which his enthusiasm, enkindled by her charms and by her tenderness towards himself, projected such a singular phantasm of romantic perfections. ...

— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... be free from all self-sufficiency. How deep and mysterious it is, as if it were the author of all things! We should make our sharpness blunt, and unravel the complications of things. . . . How still and clear is Tao, a phantasm with the semblance of permanence! I do not know whose son it is. It might appear to ...

— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... regularly beating heart and sound lungs. He further pointed out that the personality of Katie in appearance and character differed considerably from that of the medium, and that it was impossible to regard the materialized form as but a phantasm of the living. A stupendous discovery or a pitiful figment of a lunatic brain! But no flash of lightning rent the halls of learning; Sir William Crookes' researches into radiant matter could safely be accepted as workable intellectual ground, but ...

— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... some such on earth, Although inferior, and thy children shall Dwell near it—'tis the phantasm of an Ocean. ...

— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... it up as late as August, when Arthur came down for the Bank Holiday. He was still enthusiastic, but uncertainty had dimmed his hope. Marriage had become a magnificent phantasm, superimposed upon a dream, a purely supposititious rise of salary. The prospect had removed itself so far in time that it had parted with its substance, like an object ...

— The Judgment of Eve • May Sinclair

... making towards it; because as yet I knew not that evil was nothing but a privation of good, until at last a thing ceases altogether to be; which how should I see, the sight of whose eyes reached only to bodies, and of my mind to a phantasm? And I knew not God to be a Spirit, not one who hath parts extended in length and breadth, or whose being was bulk; for every bulk is less in a part than in the whole: and if it be infinite, it must be less in ...

— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... replied. "I well know thou hast no power over her. Thou would'st place some phantasm before me. I would see her, ...

— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... inquiring further whether he had any such right or not, why then should not the royalist assume, from the fact of the restoration, and the consequent obliteration of Cromwell's work, that the Protector was a usurper and a phantasm captain? ...

— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley