"Chimera" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... combine several principles in the same government, so as at the same time to maintain freedom, and really to oppose them to one another. The form of government which is usually termed mixed has always appeared to me to be a mere chimera. Accurately speaking there is no such thing as a mixed government (with the meaning usually given to that word), because in all communities some one principle of action may be discovered which preponderates ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... work they would have to do. It is woman's work all over the world, far more so than a hundred other occupations they now eagerly seek. Their repugnance to the position itself is the sticking point. This repugnance is based upon a chimera. They are, in any position in which they labor for wages, 'servants' in as complete a sense as if they labored for wages in household employments. Far be it from me to say a word to lower that just and honorable pride which is the birthright of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... for withstanding the prejudice that Bacon's moral character was unquestionably settled as base, and for daring to investigate anew the testimony on which the judgment was founded. And there can be no doubt that he has dispelled the horrible chimera, that the same man can be thoroughly malignant or mean in his moral nature and thoroughly beneficent or exalted in his intellectual nature. While we do not doubt that depravity and intelligence can make an unholy alliance, we do doubt that the intelligence thus prompted ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... of hunger and despair for the chimera of nobility, which has no reality to-day unless it has the ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... another fraction; it is composed of young fellows who have been deceived, or have deceived themselves. They mistake a fancy for a vocation, and impelled by a homicidal fatality, they die, some the victims of a perpetual fit of pride, others worshippers of a chimera. ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... But, after all, what I tried to do might be so easily frustrated in that cauldron—why should I risk personal happiness—the most precious and the rarest thing in life, for what may be a chimera—wasted years and a wasted life. Why are we made as we are, if to coax that hidden spark into a steady flame is not our highest destiny? It certainly is our manifest right. . . . Dreams of doing great things in this world ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... with a panegyric upon modern chemistry, the terms of which I shall never forget: "The ancient teachers of this science," said he, "promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... absurd legends, ... the most extravagant systems, the most immoral principles, and those the most dangerous for the peace and preservation of States," and that therefore except the first three degrees of Masonry, which are really ancient and universal, everything is "chimera, extravagance, futility, and lies."[391] Did Barruel and Robison ever ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... disappears, and comes again. I kept my pleasant secret for a long time, but at last I let it slip, and committed myself fortunately, to but one person, and that my daughter; and, even so, I hardly think she understood me. I recollected myself before I had disclosed the grotesque and infernal chimera ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Emperor and miserable old chimera of a Pope shall maintain themselves in Italy, or be obliged to decamp from Italy, is not a question in the least vital to Englishmen. But it is a question vital to us that sealed letters in an English post-office be, as we all fancied they were, respected as things sacred; that opening ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... whether I succeeded or not. I have some recollection that I both whistled and sang as I worked. The idea that I was in any danger of losing my life quite forsook me, and all the hardships through which I had been passing appeared to have been only imaginary—a chimera of my brain, or, at most, only ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... went up to Richmond and he slowly forced himself to renounce her. He began to see his old dream as it was—an emotional chimera; a mental madness. As the year grew on he watched his long hope wither root and branch, until, with the resurrection of the spring, it lay still because there was no life left that might put forth. And when his hope was dead he told himself that his unhappiness ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... suffered no upbraidings of a terrified and remorseful conscience. Many a time they overwhelmed him with agony and a dread of the future, mingling with his slavish terrors of a material Gehenna, and stirring up his turbid thoughts until they drove him to the verge of madness. But the inward chimera of riotous passions was too fierce for the weak human reason, and while he hated himself ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the impressions of the memory, or the conclusions of the judgment, is received on the same footing, and operates with equal force on the passions. A present impression and a customary transition are now no longer necessary to enliven our ideas. Every chimera of the brain is as vivid and intense as any of those inferences, which we formerly dignifyed with the name of conclusions concerning matters of fact, and sometimes as the present ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... have to lament and say: Alas, we were not wise enough! We took transient superficial Semblance for everlasting central Substance; we have departed far away from the Laws of this Universe, and behold now lawless Chaos and inane Chimera is ready to devour us!—'Nature in late centuries,' says Sauerteig, 'was universally supposed to be dead; an old eight-day clock, made many thousand years ago, and still ticking, but dead as brass,—which the Maker, at most, sat looking at, in a distant, singular and ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... of these cogitations, apprehensions, and reflections, it came into my thoughts one day that all this might be a mere chimera of my own, and that this foot might be the print of my own foot, when I came on shore from my boat: this cheered me up a little, too, and I began to persuade myself it was all a delusion; that it was nothing else but my own foot; and why might I not come that way ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... with some declamation I do not remember. I know that it was sincere, and that my wish and aim were to absolve her to herself. In fact, in her case self-accusation was a chimera. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... ghosts, seen only between light and darkness. They are founded upon nothing; they are bred without father or mother; they are hysterical; they are wicked. Think a little of me. You are not going to be conquered by a chimera, to allow a phantom created by your imagination to ruin the happiness that has been so beautiful. You will not do that! ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... head of woman, soaring, bird-like wings And serpent's tail on lion's trunk, were things Puzzling in history; And men invented For it an origin which represented Chimera and a monster double-headed, By ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... long hours now has the world-bedlam roared: call it the world-chimera, blowing fire! The poor Invalides have sunk under their battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets; they have made a white flag of napkins; go beating the chamade, or seeming to beat, for one can hear ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... pleased them to leave me of life is not worth, in truth, my seeking a milder term.... For these twenty years I have always been worse through the remedies administered to me than through my maladies.... Even were animal magnetism a chimera, it should be tolerated; it would still be useful to mankind, by saving many individuals among them from the incontestable dangers of vulgar medicine.... I wish that medicine, so long accustomed to deceive itself, should still deceive itself now, and ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... have always hitherto thought you a prince of great wisdom, and prudence; but what you say convinces me I was mistaken. Tell me, I beseech you, where was your wit or discretion, when you formed to yourself such a chimera as you have proposed to me? Could you conceive a thought of aspiring in marriage to a princess, the daughter of so powerful a monarch as myself? You ought to have considered the great distance between us, and not run the risk of losing ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... which is, of an infallible Thrust, which a great many People think that Masters reserve for dangerous Occasions, or to sell it at a dear Rate. This wonderful Thing, is called the secret Thrust. I don't know whether this Error proceeded from those who have not learned, or from the Chimera of some self-conceited Masters, who have sold to ignorant Scholars, some Thrusts as infallible, of their own Contrivance, as ridiculous and dangerous as the Simplicity of the Scholar and the Knavery of the Master ...
— The Art of Fencing - The Use of the Small Sword • Monsieur L'Abbat
... monarchists, and by the mournful example of all the ancient republics, are we willing to split on the same rock on which we have seen them shipwrecked? Are we willing to give our enemies such a triumph as to fulfil their prophecy and convince the world that self-government is impracticable—a mere chimera—and that man is fit only to be a slave to his fellow man? Are we willing to teach the nations of the earth to despair, and resign themselves at once to the power that crushes them? Shall we forfeit all the bright honors that we have hitherto won by our example, and now admit by our conduct, ...
— Celebration in Baltimore of the Triumph of Liberty in France • William Wirt
... the fields, the painter of allegories may place beside the peasant a radiant angel, sowing the blessed grain broadcast in the smoking furrow. The dream of a serene, free, poetic, laborious, and simple life for the tiller of the soil is not so impossible that we should banish it as a chimera. The sweet, sad words of Virgil: "Oh, happy the peasants of the field, if they knew their own blessings!" is a regret, but, like all regrets, it is also a prophecy. The day will come when the laborer too may be ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... to speak to her. Yet I would suffer this humiliation to see that glorious face once more, to hear again that voice, though it were keyed to scorn. I am a fool, Jack. What! have I gone all these years free-heart to love a chimera in the end? Verily I am an ass. She is a Princess; she has riches; she has a principality; she is the ward of a King. What has she to do with such as I? Three months in the year she dwells in her petty ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... insidious, for its object was so palpable that not a single politician in Europe was deceived by it; and a very simple ruse of Metternich's was enough to draw from the Russian Government an explicit declaration against the independence of Greece, which was described by the Czar as a mere chimera. But of all the parties concerned, the Greeks themselves were loudest in denounciation of the Russian plan. Their Government sent a protest against it to London, and was assured by Canning in reply that the support of this country should never be given to any scheme ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... men told him of the terrible chimera that was in the west of his kingdom. This strange creature had the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a crocodile. Its breath was flames of fire, so the peasants said. ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... the early part of the eighteenth century. Lafitau was perhaps the first writer who ever explained certain features in Greek and other ancient myths and practices as survivals from totemism. The Chimera, a composite creature, lion, goat and serpent, might represent, Lafitau thought, a league of three totem tribes, just as wolf, bear and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... same stocks are rarely suffered to yield a second crop: being nearly all on lands that are under water in the height of the inundation, the stock is rotted in the ground. Mr. Ballard, speaking of the duration of the plant, says that, as for three years' plant and "khoonti," it is a mere chimera, like the many others with which the planters have hitherto deluded themselves, and which it only requires a little reflection to overthrow. A biggah may be cut here and there, on an extensive cultivation, but it can never be relied ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... thickened the callous about his cold heart. Carmen saw it, too. And she knew—and the world must some day know—that but one tie has ever been designed adequate to bridge this yawning canon of human hatred. That tie is love. Aye, well she knew that the world laughed, and called it chimera; called it idealism, and emotional weakness. And well she knew that the most pitiable weakness the world has ever seen was the class privilege which nailed the bearer of the creed of love upon the cross, and to-day manifests in the frantic grasping of a nation's resources, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I forgot what I was about; But when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer.' It is this brain, turned inward upon itself, and darting out on every side in purely random excursions, that was responsible, I cannot doubt, for all the contradictions of a career in which the inner logic is ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... d'ecole' does not mean 'school disputations'; 'ceux qui se font une sorte d'esthetique de l'indifference absolue' is not 'those of which the aesthetics seem to be an absolute indifference'; 'chimere' should not be translated 'chimera,' nor 'lettres ineditees' 'inedited letters'; 'ridicules' means absurdities, not 'ridicules,' and 'qui pourra definir sa pensee?' is not 'who can clearly despise her thought?' M. Masson comes to grief over even such a simple sentence as 'elle s'etonna des fureurs ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... served only to make them the laughing-stock of their antagonists, they assumed the offensive; and, showing that the socialists understood nothing at all themselves of this organization that they held up as a scarecrow, they ended by saying that it was but a new socialistic chimera, a word without sense,—an absurdity. The latest writings of the economists are full ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... to whom he evidently went for political purposes, and with offers of his aid, through the foreknowledge and spiritual intercourse by which he thought himself favoured, yet he still cherished the hope of promotion by such visionary follies. That chimera of the imagination, the invention of the philosopher's stone, still haunted him, and he did not yet despair of one day becoming a ruler among princes, the supreme arbiter and depositary of the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the jungle, no chimera of heathen imagination, could be so appalling. No sooner is the impassable bar placed between God and itself than what theologians call the creature's radical love of the Creator breaks out in a perfect tempest of undying efforts. It seeks its centre and it cannot reach it. It bounds up towards God, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... of the laws of nature, whether we can trace them in the alternate ebb and flow of the ocean, in the measured path of comets, or in the mutual attractions of multiple stars, alike increases our sense of the calm of nature, while the chimera so long cherished by the human mind in its early and intuitive contemplations, the belief in a "discord of the elements," seems gradually to vanish in proportion as science extends her empire. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... respectability,—and the legal bond is necessary both for their sakes and the worldly welfare of the children born to them; but love which is physical and transcendental together,—love that is to last through an imagined eternity of progress and fruition, this is a mere dream—a chimera!—and he feasts his brain upon it as though it were a nourishing fact. However, one must have patience with him—he is not like the ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... a state bordering between exhaltation at his success and collapse over the narrow margin by which he had put through a deal which at one time appeared as elusive as a chimera. ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... ponder again her unhappy lot. "Thy will be done," murmured she, as, throwing herself into a chair, she resigned herself to the terrible reflection that she was a slave and an outcast. The bright dream of love was only a chimera, to make her feel more ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... death. Almost all of his works unveil a murder, suicide, or madness. Moreover, the author, who shows only the injustices, evils, and infamy of life, and who affirms that the only happiness that he foresees for man is the possibility of "creating for himself a chimera" by turning away from reality, finds the clearest colors and the sweetest ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... white; his divestiture of the badge of political serfdom, and deliverance from even the suggestion of thraldom—all of which his enfranchisement contemplates; or that these would assure, in greater degree, his national weal, would be to indulge a wild chimera, which could but superinduce the purest visionary picture of his condition under the operation of the gift. Some might be found, as well, to discredit the notion that there would supervene, on the consigning to the limbo of inutile political systems of the disabling ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... roared Rockamore. "Whoever stuffed you with such idiotic rot as that is making gammon of you! That conversation is a chimera of some disordered mind, if it isn't merely part of a deliberate conspiracy of yours against me! You'll suffer for this, my man! I'll break you if it is the last act of my life! Such a conference never took place, and you ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... any beauty attained? By no means; all the difference, sensibly perceived, lay in the occasional constraints and affectations to which the writer had been driven by his self-imposed necessities. The same chimera exists in Germany; and so much further is it carried, that one great puritan in this heresy (Wolf) has published a vast dictionary, the rival of Adelung's, for the purpose of expelling every word of foreign origin and composition ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... he dreamed that strange dream of mankind, of making ice burn, of turning snow to fire. The old chimera of turning the cold woman to warmth through his own passion began to obsess him. Sometimes he watched Natalie, and had strange fancies. He saw her lit from within by a fire, which was not the reflection of ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... his family—the horror and shame of which he well remembered, when first revealed to him, had held him trembling and tongue-tied for more than an hour before tears came to his relief, and which had ever since blackened his sky, with a monotony of storm and thunder, was in a moment shown to be a chimera. No wonder that he was for a while silent, stunned, and bewildered. At last he was able—pale and cold—to lift up his clasped hands, his eyes, and his heart, in awful gratitude, to the Author of Mercy, the Revealer of Secrets, the Lord of Life ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... of it, with its sheets of glass and steel, its lace curtains, crude-colored walls and floor and couches, and glittering chandeliers of a thousand prisms. Everybody knows the kind of room—a huddle of the chimera ambition wallowing in the chaos of the commonplace—no miniature world of harmonious abiding. The only interesting thing in it was, that on all sides were doors, which must lead out of it, and might lead to ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... early death is to be lamented, in which he disputes the right to argue from a want to the objective reality of its object, and illustrates the point by the example of a man in love, who having fooled himself into an idea of beauty, which is merely a chimera of his own brain, would fain conclude that such an object really exists somewhere. I quite agree with him in this, in all cases where the want is founded on inclination, which cannot necessarily postulate the existence of its object ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... eager glance he gave me as he touched My hand to help me from the carriage. He Has told me since that I returned the look With one which, if not actually scorn, Was next of kin to scorn, and much resembling:— All the chimera of ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... out-of-date, my friends, fit only for the dull and vulgar to live by. Appearance, not reality, is what the clever dog grasps at in these clever days. We spurn the dull-brown solid earth; we build our lives and homes in the fair-seeming rainbow-land of shadow and chimera. ...
— Clocks - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... social ill-being and repeated experiments to determine the remedies (des experiences reiterees de la societe). In any case we cannot look forward to the attainment of an unchangeable or unqualified felicity. That is a mere chimera "incompatible with the nature of a being whose feeble machine is subject to derangement and whose ardent imagination will not always submit to the guidance of reason. Sometimes to enjoy, sometimes to suffer, is the lot of man; to enjoy more ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... discoveries in science have been made, and much which still seems abstruse, had we the key to the mystic phraseology they were compelled to adopt, might open the way to yet more noble acquisitions. The Philosopher's Stone itself has seemed no visionary chimera to some of the soundest chemists that even the present century has produced. (Mr. Disraeli, in his "Curiosities of Literature" (article "Alchem"), after quoting the sanguine judgments of modern chemists as ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... have been written to determine whether or no a republic of Atheists could exist. I maintain that every other republic is a chimera. If you once admit the existence of a heavenly Sovereign, you introduce the wooden horse within your walls!—What you adore by day will be your destruction ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... simplicity of the task of classifying natural objects differentiated by fixed natural laws as compared with the task of classifying the products of the creative and imaginative faculties as applied to the useful arts. The chimera and other animal monsters occur only as figments of the mind. Zoological classification does not have to classify combinations of birds, fishes, reptiles, and mammals, nor does it deal in the way of classification with ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... outside acknowledgment of this is invaluable even to the least vain of authors, because it assures him that, in following his own inner impulse through every doubt and discouragement, he has not been pursuing a chimera, and gives him new heart for the highest enterprises of which he is capable. To attain this, amid the peculiar surroundings of his life, was difficult enough. At that time, Salem society was more peculiarly constituted than it has been in later years. A strong circle of wealthy ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... youth can see, and never sees again when Reality, the hideous hag, appears with witnesses accompanied by the mayor. To live the very poetry of love and not to see the lover—ah, what sweet intoxication! what visionary rapture! a chimera with flowing ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... intelligent; that we shall not, as has so often been done, increase poverty by the very remedies which are intended to remove it, or diverge from the path of steady progressive development, into the chase of some wild chimera, which requires for its achievement only the radical alteration of all the data of experience. "Annihilate space and time, and make two lovers happy," was the modest petition of an enthusiast; and he would probably have been ready to join ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... I only use it here as a figure for the sake of argument. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that a man has come to the conclusion that there probably was such a person as St. George, in spite of all the nonsense about dragons and the chimera with wings and claws that has somehow interwreathed itself with his image. Perhaps he is a little biased by patriotism or other ethical aims; and thinks the saint a good social ideal. Perhaps he knows that early Christianity, so far from being a religion of pacifists, was largely a religion of soldiers. ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... consider you as other, than the bravest and wisest of all Mortals, who could find the Way to reach our World, and had the Courage to undertake the Journey; for it's certain, none cloath'd in Flesh ever (before you) made so bold an Attempt, or at least succeeded in it: Tho' I have read the Chimera's of Dominick Gonzales. While you stay amongst us, you may depend upon our treating you with all the Respect answerable to so great Merit, and in every thing endeavour, as far as the Power we have will permit, that the Design of your Journey may not be frustrated, which I am apt to believe, ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... Sometimes a happy prospect opens before me; but alas! it is only for a moment; and then, when I am lost in reverie, I cannot help saying to myself, "If Albert were to die?—Yes, she would become—and I should be"—and so I pursue a chimera, till it leads me to the edge of a precipice at ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... middle of these cogitations, apprehensions, and reflections, it came into my thoughts one day that all this might, be a mere chimera of my own, and that this foot might be the print of my own foot, when I came on shore from my boat: this cheered me up a little, too, and I began to persuade myself it was all a delusion; that it was nothing else but my own foot; and why might I not come that way from ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... see in the result, in the reformation of morals which appeared incorrigible, in the reclamation of a human soul which seemed to be irretrievably lost, something more than could be produced by a mere chimera of the slumbering fancy, something more than could arise from the capricious images of a terrified imagination; but once presented, we behold in all these things, and in their tremendous and mysterious results, the operation ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... criticised and scourged the religions of chimera, of ignorance, and hypocrisy, in "Lo Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante" and in "L'Asino Cillenico," the author, in "Gli Eroici Furori," lays down the basis for the religion of thought and of science. In place of ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... are derived from the imagination. God is a chimera; and the qualities, attributed to him, ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... admirers of America ... have chosen to fight their English battles upon American soil." Now the American Government "has disgracefully and ignominiously failed" at all points. It is evident that "political equality is not merely a folly, it is a chimera[1357]." At last, in November, the Times openly took the position which its accusers declared to have been the basis of its editorial utterances almost from the beginning of the ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... Canon of the Mass Law Canonical Hours Canonisation Carthusians Castigation Casuistry Catherine, St. Celia, St. Ceremonies one instituted by Christ Charity Charles V. Chastity vows of Children, training of Chimera Christ, our example our greatest blessing our Priest righteousness of Christ, the Rock Christenheit Christian, the name Church membership does not make lord of all Christopher, St. Church authority of corruption of House of Prayer spiritual mother worldliness of not ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Professor Mathews's views, but unluckily till the Board sees fit to further regulate the Southern areas in which scientific experiments may be conducted, we shall always be exposed to the risk which our correspondent describes. Unfortunately, a chimera bombinating in a vacuum is, nowadays, only too capable of producing ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... and not injury, is his province. Strange and terrible chimera! Yet it would not be suddenly dismissed. It was surely no vulgar agency that gave this form to my fears. He to whom all parts of time are equally present, whom no contingency approaches, was the author of that spell which now seized upon me. Life ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... the individual, as an alien being distinguished from the real individual, which is the chimera, the dream, and the postulate of Christianity, is under democracy sensual reality, the present, and the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... fact, from Zalathna to Verespatak abounded in that precious metal which some fool or other has called "a mere chimera," and the gold mining was farmed out to private individuals, the yearly output from the shafts being twelve hundredweights. These private diggers are bound to deliver the gold they obtain to the minting towns at Abradbanya or Gyulafehervar ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... them; the popular assemblies degenerated into vast conspiracies, a troop or seditious band usurped the sacred name of Comitia; the authority of the people, their laws, even themselves, became a mere chimera; and the anarchy rose to such a point that it became impossible to tell whether the people had made an ordinance, or had not. Writers are never tired of descanting on the divisions which ruined Rome; but they have not seen that those divisions always existed, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... than Tolstoy; his faith was firmer; his attacks of epilepsy gave him glimpses of the underworld of the soul, terrifying visions of his subconscious self, of his subliminal personality. And he had the courage of his chimera. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the purpose of exposing the person of one or both of them to injury, tramples upon every principle of reason and equity. Duelling is the vilest of all egotism, treating the public, who has a claim to all my powers and exertions, as if it were nothing, and myself, or rather an unintelligible chimera I annex to myself, as if it were entitled to my exclusive attention. I am unable to cope with you: what then? Can that circumstance dishonour me? No; I can only be dishonoured by perpetrating an unjust action. My honour is in my own ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... laws are fully understood, is this description truer than of that now called Chemistry, which once was Alchemy. That "knowledge of the substance or composition of bodies," which the Arabic root of both words implies, establishes a fact in place of a chimera. Experimental philosophy has made Alchemy an impossible belief, but the faith in it was natural in an age when reason was seldom appealed to. The credulity which accepted witchcraft for a truth, was not likely to reject the theory of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... and suggestions from each of them. Eugene was full of faith. He described Prince Louis Bonaparte to his father as the predestined necessary man who alone could unravel the situation. He had believed in him prior even to his return to France, at a time when Bonapartism was treated as a ridiculous chimera. Felicite understood that her son had been a very active secret agent since 1848. Although he did not clearly explain his position in Paris, it was evident that he was working for the Empire, under the orders of personages whose names he mentioned with a sort ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... house clerkship in Marseilles. The exporting house, which was under American guidance, had flickered and gone out ignominiously, and week by desperate week each new promise of honest work seemed to wither into a chimera at his feverish touch. He had been told of a demand for electrical experts at Tangier, and had promptly worked his passage to that outlandish sea-port on a Belgian coasting-steamer, only to find a week's employment installing a burglar-alarm system ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... time; the explosion thundered, earth gaped, the smoke which hurled through the clefts obscured the sky; the sea flowed back as though driven by the blast of flame which darted from the grotto as if from the jaws of some gigantic fiery chimera; the reflux took the bark out twenty toises; the solid rocks cracked to their base, and separated like blocks beneath the operation of the wedge; a portion of the vault was carried up towards heaven, as if ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... army and their utter subservience to his will and subordination to his orders are all so wonderful that it is impossible to determine which is most so. To control a Parisian populace has hitherto been deemed a chimera. With M. Dantes it is an existing reality. Not an army in Europe is so obedient or so prompt as his army of workmen. The secret is this—they know him to be their friend. All over Paris are to be seen his workshops, savings banks, hospitals ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... voice of the Inspector remorselessly continuing in the vile, the impossible accusation.... And that grotesque accusation was hurled against his only son—the boy whom he so loved. The thing was monstrous, a thing incredible. This whole seeming was no more than a chimera of the night, a phantom of bad dreams, with no truth under it.... Yet, the stern voice of the official came with a ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... cerebral one, that actually mingling sculpture, architecture, music, drama, acting, colour, dancing can never evoke the sensation of unity. Synthesis is not thus to be attained. It must be in the idea of the arts rather than their material realisation. A pretty chimera! Yet one that has piqued the world of art in almost every century. It was the half-crazy E.T.W. Hoffmann, composer, dramatist, painter, poet, stage manager, and a dozen other professions, including that of genius and drunkard, who set off a train of ideas ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the glow of ambition in his fine, mobile face she stifled the altruistic yearnings, which she had come to feel made her husband uncomfortable, and joined him as he gazed into the crystal ball of the future and saw its glistening chimera. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... the good effect of separate confinement to be merely negative; he laughed to scorn the chimera that solitude is an active agent, capable of converting a rogue. Shut a rogue from rogues and let honest men in upon him—the honest men get a good chance to convert him, but if they do succeed it was not solitude ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... citizens, did the kind hand of overruling Providence conduct us, through toils, fatigues, and dangers, to independence and peace. If piety be the rational exercise of the human soul, if religion be not a chimera, and if the vestiges of heavenly assistance are clearly traced in those events which mark the annals of our nation, it becomes us on this day, in consideration of the great things which have been done for us, to render the tribute of unfeigned thanks to that ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... but the Sphinx is winged, and I am not. Secondo, the Sphinx is a woman as well as a winged lion, but the Rajput Sinhas never had anything effeminate in their characters. Besides, the Sphinx is the daughter of Chimera, or Echidna, who were neither beautiful nor good; and so you might have chosen a more flattering ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... great sorrow overtook me before I had completed this agreeable task. It is true, I met on all sides with indications of sympathetic interest in the completion of my great lyric work, although most of my acquaintances regarded the whole thing as a chimera, or possibly a bold caprice. The only one who entered into it with any heartiness or real enthusiasm was Herwegh, with whom I frequently discussed it, and to whom I generally read aloud such portions as were completed. Sulzer was much annoyed at the remodelling ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... is explained why men imagined for many centuries that the sky was a solid superficies, and that the earth was a superficial plane, bounded by the horizon; that the sun moved round the earth; that the existence of the antipodes was a chimera; that the dew fell in the same way as the rain from the upper regions of the atmosphere; and other popular errors which science has corrected, but which were in a certain way justified by the undeniable ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... course over almost the identical pathway once followed by the overland stage-coach, the pony express, and the slowly plodding ox caravans in the days when the possibility of a transcontinental trail of steel was regarded as a chimera. ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... to have been in search of a passage to the East Indies by way of the north-west, a chimera long and anxiously sought after. It is needless to make any observations on these indistinct notices, as the voyage of Cabot will be afterwards given at ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... seems such an amazing fascination over the least revolutionary of European nations. Unfitted for scientific work and full of ardour, Mr. Carlyle found his mission in rushing with all his might to the annihilation of this terrible poet, who, like some gorgon, hydra, or chimera dire planted at the gate, carried off a yearly tale of youths and virgins from the city. In literature, only a revolutionist can thoroughly overpower a revolutionist. Mr. Carlyle had fully as much daring as Byron; his writing at its best, if without the many-eyed minuteness and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... unfortunate. Five years ago he had become acquainted with a person with whom he would have esteemed it the highest felicity of his life to have entered into closer ties; but it was vain to think of it, being almost an impossibility! a chimera! and yet his feelings remained the same as the very first day he had seen her! He added, "that never before had he found such harmony! but no declaration had ever been made, not being able to prevail on himself to do so." This conversation took place in Sept. 1816, at Helenenthal, in Baden, and the ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... superficial minds, losing the chain of ideas which had directed them in their profound studies, or ignorant of the facts on which they were founded, distorted all the conclusions that flowed from them by the introduction of a strange and novel chimera. They pretended that this universe, these heavens, these stars, this sun, differed in no respect from an ordinary machine; and applying to this first hypothesis a comparison drawn from the works of art, they raised an edifice of the most whimsical sophisms. A machine, said they, does ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... almost without the hope of power. I—but you know not my new dignity—I, in the Cabinet of England's ministry, vast fortunes opening to my gaze, the proudest station not too high for my reasonable ambition! You, wedding yourself to some grand chimera of an object, aimless when it eludes your grasp. I, swinging, squirrel-like, from scheme to scheme; no matter if one breaks, another is at hand! Some men would have cut their throats in despair, an hour ago, in losing the object of a seven years' chase,—Beauty and Wealth, both! I open ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... streets of the great South American capital, and saw a nightmare. There is a touch of panic in the despatch which he sent to Mr. Seward at a time when both secretary and public were held too closely in the throes of reconstruction to take alarm at so distant a chimera. Agents of the Southern States, wrote the minister, claimed that not thousands of families, but a hundred thousand families, ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... and Watts were mere hallucinations of his. The general held that Jake and the others were accessory phantasms of his own dream, and Watts and the colonel, being of more poetical temperament, held that the whole outfit was a chimera in some larger consciousness, whose entity it is not given us to know. As for Oscar, he claimed the parliament was crazy, and started to prove it, when it was thought best to shift and modify the discussion; and, therefore, early in September, when the upper currents ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... posture and gazed about him in utter bewilderment; above him only the boundless dome of heaven, around him only endless mountain ranges! Dazed by the strangeness, the isolation of the scene, he began for an instant to doubt his sanity; was this a reality or a chimera of his own imagination? But only for an instant, for with his first movement a large collie had bounded to his side and now began licking his hands and face with the most joyful demonstrations. There was something soothing and reassuring in the companionship even ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... honesty of purpose; its startling originality without its harmonious proportions; its inevitable errors without its persevering energies. He acknowledged no principle; he was actuated by no high aim; he even busied himself—as so many of the unfortunate great have done—with no chimera. From a mind so highly cultured, an organization so finely strung, we expected the rarest blossoms, the divinest melodies. The flowers lie before us, mere buds, from which the green calyx of immaturity has not yet curled, and in whose cold heart the perfume is not born; the melodies vibrate ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Whether a bank of national credit, supported by public funds and secured by Parliament, be a chimera or impossible thing? And if not, what would follow from the supposal ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... doing what England actually desired, although blindly aiming at her object by other means. The French wars, however traditionally popular, were fertile only in glory. The rivalry of the two countries was a splendid folly, wasting the best blood of both countries for an impracticable chimera; and though there was impatience of ecclesiastical misrule, though there was jealousy of foreign interference, and general irritation with the state of the church, yet the mass of the people hated ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... young man, that you could not believe me; this seems a dream, a chimera to you!... and to me, too!... and yet the grades and the honors I obtained were no illusions; those soldiers I led to the cannon's mouth, those redoubts stormed, those flags won, those victories with which all France has rung ... all that was my work ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... synonymous with happiness. The person of whom I speak seemed born for the purpose of foreshadowing the doctrines of Turgot, Price, Priestley, and Condorcet—of exemplifying by individual instance what has been deemed the chimera of the perfectionists. In the brief existence of Ellison I fancy that I have seen refuted the dogma, that in man's very nature lies some hidden principle, the antagonist of bliss. An anxious examination of his career has ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... them creaked an accompaniment to their movements. He saw something gruesome among them—a misshapen figure, decked with tapes and jaundiced paper, out of whose mouth a ticket hung, on which "Lessing" was written. My friend went close up to it and learned the worst: it was the Homeric Chimera; in front it was Strauss, behind it was Gervinus, and in the middle Chimera. The tout-ensemble was Lessing. This discovery caused him to shriek with terror: he waked, and read no more. In sooth, Great Master, why have you written ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... popular ideas, by the artificial, by the trifles of treaties, by the chimera of theories, by the charlatanism of bulletins, by the nonsense of romantic fiction, by the sentimentalities of vain chivalry, Ardant du Picq, triumphant in history, is even more the incomparable master in the field of his ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... being a golden hemlet cristatus of the Grecian type." Swiss and Tyrolean artists also produce exquisite carving, but use wood as a material; and in the famous collection of Baron de Watteville will be found a marvelous piece of carving representing Bellerophon overturning the Chimera. But French pipes are the most interesting of all to collectors, from the fact that tobacco was introduced into that country long before it was known in England, and also from the ingenuity of a people who can give interest of various kinds to what might seem ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... been partially revealed, and the existence of that great continent which, according to Tasman, extended from Tierra del Fuego to New Zealand, began to be doubted; but it still required the long and careful researches of Cook to banish definitely into the domain of fable a chimera so ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... completely hysterical. We have taken turns fanning smouldering ashes which now are blazing. It is too bad that we have both become inflamed at the same time—for her case must be the same as mine, to judge from the passionate letters she writes. What shall I do? Keep on tantalizing myself for a chimera? No! I'll bring matters to a head, see her, and if she is good-looking, sleep with her. I shall ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... posterity the memory of their achievements if those who come after them are to be only their successors in annihilation and extinction. If in this world only we have hope and consciousness duty must be a chimera; our pleasures and our passions should be the guides of conduct, and virtue is indeed a superstition if life ends at the grave. This is the conclusion which the philosophy of negation must accept at last. Such is the felicity of those ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... supernatural functions out of diabolic inspiration. Van Dale, on the other hand, with all his Vandalish followers, treats this hypothesis, both as regards the power itself of looking into the future and as regards the supposed source of that power, in the light of a contemptible chimera. They discuss it scarcely with gravity: indeed, the very frontispiece to Van Dale's book already announces the repulsive spirit of scoffing and mockery in which he means to dismiss it; men are there represented in the act of juggling ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... avoid the towering wall of granite. Then a scream rang back to the man and girl before the cabin. Followed instantly a crash, an extinguishment of the light, darkness, silence, and finally a thin quivering flame at the base of the ledge, delicate and blue, like a dancing chimera. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... was Balzac in pursuit of this apparent chimera, and so ardent was his passion for his "polar star" that the above words of Quinola may well be applied to his experience. So fervent was his adoration, so pathetic his sufferings and so persistent his pursuit during the seventeen long years of waiting that Miss Betham-Edwards ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... pictures of objects which strike us. What can the idea of God represent to us when it is evidently an idea without an object? Is not such an idea as impossible as an effect without a cause? An idea without a prototype, is it anything but a chimera? Some theologians, however, assure us that the idea of God is innate, or that men have this idea from the time of their birth. Every principle is a judgment; all judgment is the effect of experience; experience is not acquired but by the exercise ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... cave. If your friends hold out, they will be starved. If they fight, they will be bayoneted and shot. If they surrender, every living man of them shall be hung. There is no help for them. Lincoln's army, that has been coming so long, is a chimera; it will never come. The power is all in our hands; and not even God can help them. That sounds blasphemous, I know; but it is true. They are doomed. But I can save them—and you ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... inexorable! Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace walls or life-guards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out; but he is here, here at thy very life-breath, and will extinguish it. Thou, whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length becomest a reality: sumptuous Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void Immensity; Time is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked with hideous clangour round thy soul: the pale Kingdoms yawn open; there must thou enter, naked, all unking'd, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... idea, a chimera, entered my head, of gathering during the progress of my life, notes and materials for a work embracing three divisions, Morals, Politics, Education, and I commit this notice to paper now, that many ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... given by a spiritual cause, which spiritual cause having no analogy with matter, ought not to find more difficulty in moving the whole world, than in moving a single atom, nor an atom, than the universe. From this, it is fair to conclude, such a substance is a chimera—a being of the imagination. That it required a being differently endowed, differently constituted, to set matter in motion— to create all the phenomena we behold: nevertheless, it is a being the metaphysicians have made the contriver, the Author of Nature. ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... Murray, that God will work a modern miracle in favor of America! My dear friend, I wish you would abandon this vain chimera of your imagination, and let common sense and reason convince you of the folly of this ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... face. On the 6th, he destroyed the same throne for the sake of the plating which still adhered to it, which he threw into the melting-pot; and passed the next three days in digging up the floors, and taking every other conceivable measure in pursuit of his besetting chimera the hidden treasure. During this interval, however, he appears to have been at times undecided; for, on the 7th he visited the Emperor in his confinement, and offered to put on the throne Mirza ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... Company. I find the responsibility on my shoulders so great that I say the thing must be stopped. Damme, Mr Montague, it must be stopped. We mustn't ruin widows and children, Mr Montague. We mustn't let those shares run down 20 below par for a mere chimera. I've known a fine property blasted, Mr Montague, sent straight to the dogs,—annihilated, sir;—so that it all vanished into thin air, and widows and children past counting were sent out to starve about the streets,—just because one director sat in another director's chair. I did, by ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... subjective; that is one of the reasons given for refusing to recognise history as a science. But subjective is not a synonym of unreal. A recollection is only an image; but it is not therefore a chimera, it is the representation of a vanished reality. It is true that the historian who works with documents has no personal recollections of which he can make direct use; but he forms mental images on the model of ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... Balzac's relations were becoming more and more discontented with his doings, as well as with the general aspect of his affairs. Honore was evidently pursuing a chimera, and because of his illusions, many burdens were imposed on them. Madame de Balzac the principal sufferer, was tired of acting as custodian at the Rue Fortunee, where she was expected to teach Francois how to ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... were a naturally separated people, the rebel party among us insisted that we had the inalienable right to rule ourselves. We were seized with the spirit of independence, or as the people of your way of thinking at that time called it "a chimera of patriotism." Against this natural and inalienable right no authority, we declared, no matter how meritorious and venerable need ...
— The American Revolution and the Boer War, An Open Letter to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on His Pamphlet "The Confederacy and the Transvaal" • Sydney G. Fisher
... it will reveal to us. Let us all thank God, and take heart again, and try to revive those notions of human dignity and common human sense which this story sets at nought, and see if we cannot heal that great jar in our abused natures which this chimera of the nineteenth century makes in it—this night-mare of modern criticism which lies with its dead weight on all our higher art and learning—this creature that came in on us unawares, when the interpretation of the Plays had outgrown the Play-tradition, when 'the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... gainer by the latitude which history affords it. It will be seen that here the latitude is ample and unique; this is, in truth, the decisive hour, the turning-point in Cromwell's life. It is the moment when his chimera escapes from him, when the present kills the future, when, to use an expressive colloquialism, his destiny misses fire. All of Cromwell is at stake in the comedy being played between England ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... baffling the friends who sought to discover her abode. Was not that very possible, very natural? He recalled the tall, finely-moulded form, of which he had caught a glimpse in Lady Langdon's salon, and for awhile he cherished this chimera; then its place was usurped by one more painful: Madeleine was perhaps travelling alone, subjected by her very beauty to the curious scrutiny, the heartless insults of brutal men; and, perchance, through her ignorance ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Capraja, with a smile, and tapping lightly on the tenor's head. "Ride off on the divine Ariosto's hippogriff; hunt down your radiant chimera, musical ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... insobriety. Thus also a man walks in a strong sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insubstantial meditations. And whether he be really so clever or so strong as he supposes, in either case he will enjoy his chimera ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hollow Pope's-Concordat, pretending to be a reestablishment of Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method of extirpating it, 'la vaccine de la religion;' his ceremonial coronations, consecrations by the old Italian chimera in Notre Dame there; 'wanting nothing to complete the pomp of it but the half million who had died to put an end to all that!' Cromwell's inauguration was by the sword and Bible; what we must call a genuinely true one. Sword and Bible were borne before ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... of his house. His son, the vicomte Adolphe, was destined to high fortune; and I assure you that I deeply regretted when a violent and premature death took him away from his family. My presentation permitted his father to realize the chimera which he had pursued with so much perseverance. He flattered himself in taking part with me. I did not forget him in the distribution of my rewards; and the king's purse was to him a source into which he frequently dipped with both hands. The next day I had a visit from ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... whisper. His bleared eyes gazed fixedly from behind the glitter of black-rimmed glasses. Opposite to him, and on a level with his face, the ship's cat sat on the barrel of the windlass in the pose of a crouching chimera, blinking its green eyes at its old friend. It seemed to meditate a leap on to the old man's lap over the bent back of the ordinary seaman who sat at Singleton's feet. Young Charley was lean and long-necked. The ridge of his backbone made a chain of small hills ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... would fain postpone this era, Reluctant as all placemen to resign Their post; but theirs is merely a chimera, For they have pass'd life's equinoctial line: But then they have their claret and Madeira To irrigate the dryness of decline; And county meetings, and the parliament, And debt, and what ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... respect, however, the important results obtained by Cook were incomplete. He had not perfectly proved the impossibility of an antarctic continent. This chimera was still dear to the hearts of scientific men. Although obliged to admit that neither New Zealand nor Australia made part of such a continent, and that the Endeavour had navigated in latitudes in which it might have ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... hurl himself against the two thousand half-armed horsemen, on starved and broken-down animals, under command of General Fitz Lee. A child could have told the result. The idea of resistance, with any hope, in the defences, any longer, was a chimera. Lee was a great soldier—history contains few greater. The army of Northern Virginia was brave—the annals of the world show none braver. But there was one thing which neither great generalship, or supreme courage could effect. Opposed by one hundred and fifty thousand ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... daughter, Marguerite, is made of sterner stuff than her mother. And, with her brother, she toils to pay her father's debts and to keep the home together. At the end, Claes himself dies, still absorbed in his chimera, and his last words are an endeavour to formulate the marvellous revelation which his disordered brain persuades him he has ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... writer, but apparently a cynic as old as Diogenes, has taken the pains of composing a treatise on the present subject enough to terrify the boldest Bachelor of Arts! He has conjured up every chimera against the marriage of a literary man. He seems, however, to have drawn his disgusting portrait from his own country; and the chaste beauty of Britain only looks the more lovely beside this ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Friedrich, not fled to Merseburg at all; but mounted there on the Janus Hill, as on his saddle-horse, with face quite the other way;—and for holster-pistol, has plucked out twenty-two cannon. Clad verily in fire; Chimera-like, RIDING the Janus Hill, in that manner; left leg (or wing) of him spurning us into the abysses, right one ready to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle |
