"Chimerical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... support of the grant, M. Gaizot, in the sitting of the 10th inst., asserted that the project of piercing the isthmus of Panama was not a chimerical one, and proceeded to read a letter from Professor Humbolt, dated Angust 1842, in which that learned gentleman observed, that "it was twenty-five years since a project for a communication between the two ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... greatly rejoice; Cabarus Balls gyrate: the well-nigh insoluble problem Republic without Anarchy, have we not solved it?—Law of Fraternity or Death is gone: chimerical Obtain-who-need has become practical Hold-who-have. To anarchic Republic of the Poverties there has succeeded orderly Republic of the Luxuries; which will continue ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... his head, lowers his eyes, says nothing, strikes the soil with his foot. And, in the silence, the impious thing which he had hardly dared to formulate to himself, seems to him little by little less chimerical, attainable, almost easy.—No, it is not impossible to regain her. And, if need be, doubtless, Arrochkoa, her own brother, would lend a hand. Oh, what a temptation and what a ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... increase in the number of seats. Such a proposition on the part of the Government of Pretoria shows plainly that it wished to evade enquiry into a law so fettered with formalities that its working was chimerical. And when Sir Alfred Milner referred to his proposal at Bloemfontein, the State Attorney decreased to five years the term of retrospective registration, gave eight seats to the Rand, and two to ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... Nautilus? Yes, I repeat it, it must be so. One part of the mysterious existence of Captain Nemo had been unveiled; and, if his identity had not been recognised, at least, the nations united against him were no longer hunting a chimerical creature, but a man who had vowed a deadly hatred against them. All the formidable past rose before me. Instead of meeting friends on board the approaching ship, we could only expect pitiless enemies. But the shot rattled about us. Some of them struck the sea ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... The public were delighted with it, but what were my feelings? Anything, alas! but those of delight. No sooner did the public express its satisfaction at the result of my endeavours, than my perverse imagination began to conceive a thousand chimerical doubts; forthwith I sat down to analyse it; and my worst enemy, and all people have their enemies, especially authors—my worst enemy could not have discovered or sought to discover a tenth part of the faults which I, the author and creator of the unfortunate ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... soldiers occasionally wore English-made shoes and clothing. English ships carried naval stores out of Russian harbors, and colonial wares found their way from the wharves of Riga to the markets of Mainz. But the chief offenders in defying Napoleon's chimerical policy were the Dutch and Hanseatic cities. The resistance elsewhere in the Continent was passive compared with the energetic smuggling and the clandestine evasion of decrees which went on under the eyes of the officials in places ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of the armament of Austria, having visited Vienna in 1859, with a letter from the United States War Department, which gave me some facilities for observation. At first I considered the getting of anything from an Imperial Austrian Arsenal as chimerical. But my would-be intermediary was so persistent that, finally I accompanied him to Vienna and, within a few days, closed a contract for 100,000 rifles of the latest Austrian pattern, and ten batteries, of six pieces each, of field artillery, with harness complete, ready for service, and a quantity ...
— The Supplies for the Confederate Army - How they were obtained in Europe and how paid for. • Caleb Huse
... great feature of Philadelphia. In a very few years it could buy up all its certificates of stock and own its collections free. The handsome surplus, before alluded to, accruing annually to the London society shows that this is not chimerical. The city railways are interested in this movement, and should subscribe liberally. It is proposed in the Legislature to charter a railroad running north and south in West Philadelphia, and if this be done it will render the Garden ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... vote, the noes, in both Assembly and Senate, came from Clinton's opponents, including the Tammany delegation and their friends. From the outset Tammany, by solemn resolutions, had denounced the canal project as impractical and chimerical, declaring it fit only for a ditch in which to bury Clinton. At Albany its representatives greeted the measure for its construction with a burst of mockery; and, by placing one obstacle after another in its ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the older man answered, without hesitation. "If you take my advice, you will not trouble yourself any more with fancies which seem to me—pardon me—quite chimerical. Accept Lord Arranmore's kindness as the offshoot of some sentimental feeling which he might well have entertained towards a fellow-countryman by whose death-bed he had stood in that far-away, lonely country. You may even yourself ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Sir John C——, the late mayor of Windsor, assisted me very effectually, and the upshot of the matter is, that the king expressed his desire to see the Indian chiefs, although every body treated this as a most chimerical idea. They wore, for the first time, the brilliant clothes which Mr. Butterworth had had made for them, and you cannot conceive how grand and imposing ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... of her conversation with Volktman on the subject rushed into her mind, and she resolved that very night to prove the efficacy of the charm on which he had so confidently insisted. Fraught with the chimerical delusion, she now longed for the hours to pass, and the night to come. She looked again and again at the singular image and the portentous figures wrought upon the charm; the very strangeness of the characters inspired her, as was ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... too obvious to be specified. He claimed to be constructing a science, comparable to the physical sciences. The attempt was obviously chimerical if we are to take it seriously. The makeshift doctrine which he substitutes for psychology would be a sufficient proof of the incapacity for his task. He had probably not read such writers as Hartley or Condillac, who might have suggested some ostensibly systematic theory. If ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... but their project was rejected. Des Groseilliers then went to France in hopes of a more favorable hearing at Court; but after presenting several memorials and spending a great deal of time and money, he was answered as he had been at Quebec, and the project looked upon as chimerical." [Footnote: Oldmixon, Vol. I. p. 548.] This voyage to Hudson's Straits proved unremunerative. "Wee had knowledge and conversation with the people of those parts, but wee did see and know that there was nothing to be done unlesse wee went further, and the season of the year was far spent by the ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... things by their real essence, and not by their outward false appearance, would be, perhaps, a more desirable situation than any of those which ambition persuades us, with such difficulty, danger, and often villainy, to aspire to. The wants of a beggar are commonly as chimerical as the abundance of a nobleman; for besides vanity, which a judicious beggar will always apply to with wonderful efficacy, there are in reality very few natures so hardened as not to compassionate poverty and distress, ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... what passed, overhearing this assurance, and looking upon it as an impossible occurrence at her time of life, laughed in derision. She had long come to the conclusion that she should produce no son to Abraham, and, therefore, that all such expectations were chimerical and ridiculous. This excessive incredulity—excessive, because a distinct assurance of the fact had been already given to Abraham upon the occasion of their change of names—was highly culpable; but while we denounce it with merited severity, let us examine our own hearts. Have ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... of plea for a holiday visit to his beloved Italy. 'Take care! If I am Mr. Fossil, you will be Mrs. Fossil, and Jack will be Jack Fossil, and all the boys will be little fossils, and then we shall be a collection.' There was no fear more chimerical for Fleeming; years brought him no repose; he was as packed with energy, as fiery in hope, as at the first; weariness, to which he began to be no stranger, distressed, it did not quiet him. He feared for himself, not without ground, the fate which had overtaken his mother; others ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from historic accuracy by the poetical aspect of his subject. The fictitious and romantic dress of his work has enabled him to make it the medium of reflecting more vividly the floating opinions and chimerical fancies of the age, while he has illuminated the picture with the dramatic brilliancy of ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... substituting a new and superior motive-power for steam will no doubt strike many minds as extravagant, if not chimerical. We have been so accustomed to regard steam-power as the ne plus ultra of attainment in subjecting the modified forces of nature to the service of man, that a discovery which promises to supersede this agency will have to contend with the most formidable preconceptions as well as with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... of skill. This maxim holds equally true in common life; those who aim at perfection will come infinitely nearer it than those desponding or indolent spirits, who foolishly say to themselves: Nobody is perfect; perfection is unattainable; to attempt it is chimerical; I shall do as well as others; why then should I give myself trouble to be what I never can, and what, according to the common course of things, I need not ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... that this legislator of morality is a man without a heart, and, if we were not touched by the original sincerity of the language, one would only see in this lapidary style the conventional precepts of a chimerical system or the aspirations of an impossible perfection." The Discourses are more illustrative, more argumentative, more diffuse, more human. In reading them one feels oneself face to face with a human being, not with the marble statue of the ideal wise ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... Lewis XV. in all his degradation. The season of scorn and shame begins with him. The best of his later contemporaries followed his example, and laid the basis of opposing criticism on motives of religion. They were the men whom Cardinal Dubois describes as dreamers of the same dreams as the chimerical archbishop of Cambray. Their influence fades away before the great change that came over France about ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... by Qing, King Nqusha's huntsman. Qing "had never seen a white man, but in fighting," till he became acquainted with Mr. Orpen.(1) The chief force in Bushmen myth is by Dr. Bleek identified with the mantis, a sort of large grasshopper. Though he seems at least as "chimerical a beast" as the Aryan creative boar, the "mighty big hare" of the Algonkins, the large spider who made the world in the opinion of the Gold Coast people, or the eagle of the Australians, yet the insect (if insect he be), ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... things for their own sake, for the sake of what they can never, except by suggestion, express. Thus an artificiality, even, in the use of words—that seeming artificiality which comes from using words as if they had never been used before, that chimerical search after the virginity of language—is but the paradoxical outward sign of an extreme discontent with even the best of their service. Writers who use words fluently, seeming to disregard their importance, do so from an unconscious confidence in their ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... courage of the greatest general and shrewdest statesman. The plan was divulged by individual Indians to officers at two or three of the posts, but was either disbelieved or its importance ignored. While this gigantic and almost chimerical plot was being developed by Pontiac and his associate chiefs, the treaty of peace between France and England was signed at Paris, February 10, 1763. By this compact France yielded to England all her territory north of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... many contemporaries; chimerical it has seemed to historians, and to us who have passed through the World War. Yet in the World War it was the possession of food stuffs and raw materials by the United States which gave her a dominating position ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... out of the room. M. de Marigny did the same, though without appearing at all affected by what had been said. "You heard De La Riviere," said he,—"but don't be alarmed, the conversations that pass at the Doctor's are never repeated; these are honourable men, though rather chimerical. They know not where to stop. I think, however, they are in the right way; only, unfortunately, they go too far." I wrote this ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... slander, cowardice, murder, and other crimes, and to them they give the name of abatements of honour; others have called them blots in the escutcheon: but as no instance can be produced of such dishonourable marks having been borne in a coat of arms, they may justly be considered as chimerical, or at any rate obsolete, and unworthy of consideration at the present time. Porney pithily observes, "that arms being marks of honour, they cannot admit of any note of infamy, nor would any one bear them if they were so ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... it was of my friend to read no further, once he had been enlightened (thanks to that chimerical vision) concerning the Straussian Lessing and Strauss himself. We, however, read on further, and even craved admission of the Doorkeeper of the New Faith to the sanctum of music. The Master threw the door open for us, accompanied us, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Leon was so delighted with the beauty and fertility of the island that he imagined he could find there the fountain of perpetual youth for which he so long sought in vain. In this chimerical idea, however, as in Florida, ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... one way of unifying the profession. As an argument this is nothing short of picturesque, and can be traced to those unique and professedly scientific mentalities that solve all vocal problems by a mathematical formula. As an example of the chimerical, impossible and altogether undesirable, it commands admiration. If it is impossible to establish a standard tone for pianos where the problem is mechanical, what may we expect to do with voice where the ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... committed it to paper, without the least suspicion of error. Yet I find, on returning to my letters of that date, that the Empress refused permission at once, considering the enterprise as entirely chimerical. But Ledyard would not relinquish it, persuading himself, that, by proceeding to St. Petersburg, he could satisfy the Empress of its practicability, and obtain her permission. He went accordingly, but she was absent on a visit to some distant part of her dominions, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... they differ at all from the rest of the atheistic banditti, (which from their actions and principles I have no reason to think,) were they ever any other than the temporary tools and instruments of the more determined, able, and systematic regicides. Several attempts have been made to support this chimerical Democratie Royale: the first was by La Fayette, the last by Dumouriez: they tended only to show that this absurd project had no party to support it. The Girondists under Wimpfen, and at Bordeaux, have made some struggle. The Constitutionalists ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... would he have replaced the worn-out vision of this chimerical phantom with the likeness of some young girl, with sweet look ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... but hopeful, at my bedside, until it was safely passed, when they drove him, weak and exhausted, from the room. As for me, I knew little about it at the time, and cared less. I was too busy in my fight with death. To my chimerical vision there was only a black but gentle demon that came and went, alternating with a white fairy, who would insist on coming in on her head, growing larger and larger and then dissolving. But the pathos and devotion ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... are preconceived, as our actions are accomplished in our minds before they are reproduced by the outer man; presentiments or predictions are the perception of these causes"—I think we may deplore in him a genius equal to Pascal, Lavoisier, or Laplace. His chimerical notions about angels perhaps overruled his work too long; but was it not in trying to make gold that the alchemists unconsciously created chemistry? At the same time, Lambert, at a later period, studied comparative anatomy, physics, geometry, and ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... mind of man to be like a looking-glass, wherein the images of all the neighbouring bodies imprint themselves. Now what being was able to stamp within us the image of the infinite, if the infinite never existed? Who can put in a looking-glass the image of a chimerical object which is not in being, and which was never placed against the glass? This image of the infinite is not a confused collection of finite objects, which the mind may mistake for a true infinite. ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... the necessity of going to prison. The state in which he passed his time, and the treatment which he received, are very justly expressed by him in a letter which he wrote to a friend: "The whole day," says he, "has been employed in various people's filling my head with their foolish chimerical systems, which has obliged me coolly (as far as nature will admit) to digest, and accommodate myself to, every different person's way of thinking; hurried from one wild system to another, till it has quite made a chaos of my imagination, and nothing done—promised—disappointed—ordered ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... only be the Queen of the West, but Queen of the Western World. Then will come the real clashing of interests, and the Eastern States must be content to succumb and resign their present power, or the Western will throw them off, as an useless appendage to her might. This may at present appear chimerical to some, and would be considered by many others as too far distant; but be it remembered, that ten years in America, is as a century; and even allowing the prosperity of the United States to be checked, as very probably it may soon ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... an admirable tragedy of the same kind, as Shakespeare wrote it: but as it is reformed according to the chimerical notion of POETICAL JUSTICE, in my humble opinion it ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... Palestrina employed as yet only the triads or perfect chords; this prevented absolutely all expression, although some traces of it appear in the "Stabat Mater" of that composer. This music, ecclesiastical in character, in which it would have been chimerical to try to introduce modern expression, flourished in France, in Flanders, in Spain at the same time as in Italy, and enjoyed the favor of Pope Marcellus, who recognized the merit of Palestrina in breaking loose from the grievous practice of adapting ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... reserved for America, the land of daring schemes and audacious plans, to formulate the most chimerical ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... William Wylder was often at the Lodge now. Larkin had struck out a masterly plan. The vicar's reversion, a very chimerical contingency, he would by no means consent to sell. His little man—little Fairy—oh! no, he could not. The attorney only touched on this, remarking ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... batteries must then either be replaced, or a delay of some three hours must occur while they are being recharged. The idea of establishing charging stations at almost every conceivable terminus of a run is quite chimerical; and, even if hundreds of such stations were provided for the convenience of the users of electric traction, the limitation imposed by being forced to follow the established routes would always give to the non-electric motor an advantage ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... Their Work (or Chimerical hard Slavery) is not very laborious; their greatest Hardship consisting in that they and their Posterity are not at their own Liberty or Disposal, but are the Property of their Owners; and when they are free, they know not how to ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... the comet had attained, at length, a size surpassing that of any previously recorded visitation. The people now, dismissing any lingering hope that the astronomers were wrong, experienced all the certainty of evil. The chimerical aspect of their terror was gone. The hearts of the stoutest of our race beat violently within their bosoms. A very few days sufficed, however, to merge even such feelings in sentiments more unendurable We could no longer apply to the strange orb any ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of superstition are worthy of contempt. Witchcraft, its instruments and miracles, the compact ratified by a bloody signature, the apparatus of sulpherous smells and thundering explosions, are monstrous and chimerical. These have no part in the scene over which the genius of Carwin presides. That conscious beings, dissimilar from human, but moral and voluntary agents as we are, some where exist, can scarcely be denied. That their ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... of her death her conversion continued steadily, and her penitence augmented. She had first to get rid of the secret fondness she still entertained for the Court, even of the hopes which, however chimerical, had always flattered her. She was persuaded that nothing but the fear of the devil had forced the King to separate himself from her, that it was nothing but this fear that had raised Madame de Maintenon to the height she had attained; that age and ill-health, which ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... secret for the maintenance of life. Those who dabbled in alchemy declared that Maitre Cornelius had the power of making gold. Men of science averred that he had found the Universal Panacea. According to many of the country-people to whom the townsfolk talked of him, Cornelius was a chimerical being, and many of them came into the town to look at his house out of ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... from one end of the intellectual world to the other. Here we find no trace of the systematic order or severe method that distinguish the work of the scholar of Alexandria. Of course, the doctrines of astrology are just as chimerical as those of magic, but they are deduced with an amount of logic, entirely wanting in works of sorcery, that compels reasoning intellects to accept them. Recipes borrowed from medicine and popular superstition, primitive practices rejected or abandoned by the sacerdotal rituals, beliefs repudiated ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... monastic, royal, seignorial awkwardness of the figures and their high colouring. . . . Celestin had made his own the angular anatomy of coats-of-arms, the extravagant contours of the mantles, the chimerical or monstrous figures of heraldry, the branchings of the emblazoned skirts, the lofty attitude of the feudal baron, the modest air of the chatelaine, the sanctimonious physiognomy of the big Carthusian Carmelite, the furtive mien of the young page with parti-coloured ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... what matters, they found their match; yes, yes," said I, "but I am in their power, perhaps"—but I instantly dismissed the apprehension which came into my mind, with a pooh, nonsense! In a little time, however, a far more foolish and chimerical idea began to disturb me—the idea of being flung from my horse; was I not disgraced for ever as a horseman by being flung from my horse? Assuredly, I thought; and the idea of being disgraced as a horseman, operating on my nervous system, caused me very acute misery. ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... of these chimerical visions, that he acted with his foot as if she had been really before him, and unfortunately gave such a push to his basket and glasses, that they were thrown down, and ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... seventh heaven of stupidity; and knew nothing but that somebody was paddling a canoe, while I was counting his strokes and forgetting the hundreds. I used sometimes to be afraid I should remember the hundreds; which would have made a toil of a pleasure; but the terror was chimerical, they went out of my mind by enchantment, and I knew no more than the man in the ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rhetoric of the Jesuits and the active zeal of the Bavarian minister, represented this dreaded alliance between the Huguenots and the Swedes as an undoubted fact, and filled the timid mind of Louis with the most alarming fears. Not merely chimerical politicians, but many of the best informed Roman Catholics, fully believed that the king was on the point of breaking into the heart of France, to make common cause with the Huguenots, and to overturn the Catholic ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... as a perversion of the judgment, a chimerical thought; an illusion, an incorrect impression of the senses, counterfeit appearances; hence we speak of a delusion of the mind, an illusion of the senses. Lawyers lay great stress on the presence of delusions ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... cries his lordship; "the chimerical system of Plato's commonwealth, with which we amused ourselves at the university; politics which are inconsistent with the state of ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... solemnity. She carried a magnifying glass in one of her hands, and was clothed in a loose, flowing robe, embroidered with several figures of fiends and specters, that discovered themselves in a thousand chimerical shapes as her garment hovered in the wind. There was something wild and distracted in her looks. Her name was Fancy. She led up every mortal to the appointed place, after having officiously assisted him in making up his pack, and laying it upon his shoulders. My heart melted within me to see ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... waited to hear her come out again, a hope that he knew to be chimerical rose in him. She would, perhaps, return, throw herself in his arms and, weeping, say that she loved him and could not leave him. Gregory's ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... purposes, governed only by the conviction which I have uttered, and by no other view than that of the emancipation of my country from the superinhuman oppression under which she has so long and too patiently travailed; and I confidently hope that, wild and chimerical as it may appear, there is still union and strength in Ireland to accomplish this noblest of enterprises. Of this I speak with confidence, of intimate knowledge, and with the consolation that appertains to that confidence. Think not, ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... say the best of it, can only serve to favour the indolence of man, while professing to furnish him with a compendious method of becoming wise and good, it supersedes the necessity of his own personal labours. Quitting therefore all these slothful and chimerical speculations, it is true wisdom to attach ourselves to what is more solid and practical; to the work which you will not yourself deny to be sufficiently difficult to find us of itself full employment: the work of rectifying the disorders of the passions, and of implanting ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... as a gradually improving property would, I repeat, be easy; but to work it so as to produce a great success in a few years can only, in my opinion, be done in one way. That way, to many, would be chimerical; to some, incomprehensible; and possibly I may be looked upon myself as somewhat visionary for even suggesting it. That way, however, to my mind, lies through the extension of railway ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... with mere living and making the best of life as it is. I don't know why, but I feel that there are depths in your heart which no one understands. Be careful, dear child, and be patient. Don't yield to some morbid idea of duty, or be involved in some chimerical plan ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... adventures; and it gives more spur to our courage. And this idea—even though it may possibly be as difficult to alter the character of our unconsciousness as to modify the course of Mars or of Venus—still seems less distant and less chimerical than the other; and when we have to choose between two probabilities, it is our imperative duty to select the one that presents the least obstacles to our hopes. Further, should misfortune be indeed inevitable, there would be I know not what proud consolation in being able to ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... thought and your gaze were riveted upon this little whirlwind, hissing and humming with wings of purple and azure, in the midst of which floated an imperceptible body, veiled by the very rapidity of its movement. The aerial being which was dimly outlined amid this quivering of wings, appeared to you chimerical, imaginary, impossible to touch, impossible to see. But when, at length, the dragon-fly alighted on the tip of a reed, and, holding your breath the while, you were able to examine the long, gauze wings, the long enamel robe, the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... meum terra tegit (The earth covers my sweet), was pronounced faulty, because the liquorice-plant could not be readily distinguished from other shrubs, the roots of which wanted the property of sweetness so necessary to give point to the device. Unnatural or chimerical figures could not be admitted, excepting those to which tradition or classical authors had given fixed forms and attributes—as the mermaid, harpy, phoenix; consequently, a device representing a winged ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... to accomplish it, and the eager enthusiasm with which they thronged about any one who seemed likely to give them any light on the subject lent sudden reputation to many would-be leaders, some of whom had little enough light to give. However chimerical the aspirations of the laboring classes might be deemed, the devotion with which they supported one another in the strikes, which were their chief weapon, and the sacrifices which they underwent to carry them out left no doubt of ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... Clothes is now to all readers, as we predicted it would do, unfolding itself into new boundless expansions, of a cloud-capt, almost chimerical aspect, yet not without azure loomings in the far distance, and streaks as of an Elysian brightness; the highly questionable purport and promise of which it is becoming more and more important for us to ascertain. Is that a real Elysian brightness, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... institution, there existed no motive to prompt men to subject it to a closer critical investigation; and in the absence of such an investigation its influence upon the nature and extent of demand could not be discovered. The old economists were therefore compelled to believe it chimerical to think of demand as falling short of production; for they said, quite correctly, that man produces only to consume. Here, with them, the question of demand was done with, and every possibility of the discovery of the true connection cut off. Their successors, on the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... much which she was incapable of understanding, and that subtle arguments of casuistry found her a patient, but unedified hearer. Upon receiving the citation, therefore, her thoughts did not turn upon the chimerical scruples which alarmed her father's mind, but to the language which had been held to her by the stranger at Muschat's Cairn. In a word, she never doubted but she was to be dragged forward into the court of justice, in order ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... advice that Sir Charles was about to go to London. His heart was, I knew, affected, and the constant anxiety in which he lived, however chimerical the cause of it might be, was evidently having a serious effect upon his health. I thought that a few months among the distractions of town would send him back a new man. Mr. Stapleton, a mutual friend who was much concerned at his state of health, ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... Should all at once be left in the lurch For want of reverend men endued With this gift of never requiring food,— To try, by way of experiment, whether There couldn't be made of wood and leather,[1] (Howe'er the notion may sound chimerical,) Jointed figures, not lay,[2] but clerical, Which, wound up carefully once a week, Might just like parsons look and speak, Nay even, if requisite, reason too, As well as ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... true, absolutely, and which, instead of confining itself to the explanation of transitory phenomena, invests them with all the dignity of principles. We shall endeavor to avoid the peril pointed out by Mallebranche. "Learned men study rather to acquire a chimerical greatness in the imagination of other men, than to acquire greater breadth and strength of mind themselves. They make their heads a kind of store-room, into which they gather, without order or discrimination, everything ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the romantic to the realistic, from the chimerical to the actual, from the child's poetic interpretation of life to life's practical version of itself, is too gradual to be noticed while the process is going on. It is only in the retrospect we ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the Krupp organisation is stated to have perfected, and which it is claimed will create considerable surprise, is the aerial torpedo. Many of the Krupp claims are wildly chimerical, as events have already proved, but there is no doubt that considerable effort has been expended upon this latest missile, for which the firm is said to have paid the inventor upwards of L25,000—$125,000. Curiously enough the projectile ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... pressure of the other separated spheres, and all the more onerously inasmuch as the Jew is in religious antagonism to the dominant religion. But the Jew also can only conduct himself towards the State in a Jewish fashion, that is as a stranger, by opposing his chimerical nationality to the real nationality, his illusory law to the real law, by imagining that his separation from humanity is justified, by abstaining on principle from all participation in the historical movement, by waiting on a future which has nothing in common ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... there?" replied the priest; "now, by my faith, he shall soon make his appearance in the yard, notwithstanding his strange birth and chimerical adventures; for the harshness and dryness of his style will admit of no excuse. To the yard with him, and ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Queen Elizabeth, and in conclusion advised him to push his fortune: the Duke of Nemours imagined at first that the King was not in earnest, but when he found to the contrary, "If, by your advice, Sir," said he, "I engage in this chimerical undertaking for your Majesty's service, I must entreat your Majesty to keep the affair secret, till the success of it shall justify me to the public; I would not be thought guilty of the intolerable vanity, to think that a Queen, who has never seen ...
— The Princess of Cleves • Madame de La Fayette
... marriage-settlements of one man with one woman, and a permanent, prosperous empire can never be reared upon so frail a foundation. The leading thought of the first Charlemagne was a noble and a useful one, nor did his imperial scheme seem chimerical, even although time, wiser than monarchs or lawgivers, was to prove it impracticable. To weld into one great whole the various tribes of Franks, Frisians, Saxons, Lombards, Burgundians, and others, still in their turbulent youth, and still composing one great Teutonic family; to enforce ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... rate Mackenzie at about his true value. They recognized his talents, which were many and considerable. He had a clear head for accounts, and was full of suggestive ideas about matters of finance. Some of these ideas were unpractical, and even chimerical, but anyone capable of separating the wheat from the chaff could learn much from him, and could render his suggestions available. He was an excellent subordinate, useful on committees, and active in the management ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... remaining outside the centuries, scorning to designate the origin, nation and epoch, by placing his Salome in this extraordinary palace with its confused and imposing style, in clothing her with sumptuous and chimerical robes, in crowning her with a fantastic mitre shaped like a Phoenician tower, such as Salammbo bore, and placing in her hand the sceptre of Isis, the tall lotus, sacred flower of ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... of academic service, if ever an affair like this of the Nabob makes it possible for me to recoup my losses, I will not wait a moment, I will take myself off in hot haste to look after my little vineyard near Monbars, cured forever of my speculative ideas. But alas! that is a very chimerical hope,—played out, discredited, well known as we are on 'Change, with our shares no longer quoted at the Bourse, our obligations fast becoming waste paper, such a wilderness of falsehood and debts, and the hole that is being dug deeper and deeper. (We owe at this moment three million five hundred ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... influence declared the conditions published by the directors of the railway chimerical in the extreme. One gentleman of some eminence in Liverpool, Mr. P. Ewart, who afterward filled the office of Government Inspector of Post-office Steam Packets, declared that only a parcel of charlatans would ever have issued such a set of conditions; that ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... the face of the precautions which would be taken, this seemed to be a wildly chimerical scheme, one which was not likely to succeed, and he shook his head sadly as a feeling of despair began to close him in like ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... I expect this bill to promote the prosperity of the country, I by no means intend to encourage those chimerical hopes which the honourable and learned Member for Rye (Mr Pemberton.), who has so much distinguished himself in this debate, has imputed to the Reformers. The people, he says, are for the bill, because they expect that it will immediately relieve all their ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... quedar(se) to stay, remain; —— en algo to abide by something. quehacer m. business, duty. queja lament. quejar vr. to complain. quemar to burn. querellante plaintiff. querer to wish, love. quien, quien who, whom, which. quijotesco Quixotic. quimerico chimerical, extravagant. quince fifteen. quinientos, -as five hundred. quinta conscription. quinto conscript. quitar to take away, ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... they laughed louder than ever. As they laughed, he grew mad, and shouted: "Gentlemen, I will bar the years, and do it." And he did it. Without help from any one, for every man who claimed a right to express an opinion upon it scouted the project as chimerical, and no capitalist would put a dollar in it, Hiram Sibley built the line of telegraph to San Francisco, risking in it all he had in the world. He set about the work with his customary energy, all obstacles vanished, and the line was completed in an incredibly short ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... Prince Charles brought with him a head full of indigested romance, a heart rich in chimerical expectations. He now prided himself on being a plain hardy mountaineer. He took a line of his own; he concealed his measures from the spy-ridden Court of his father in Rome; he quarrelled with his brother, ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... conquest to the quadrille in which the most brilliant women in the room made it a point of chimerical importance to dance in preference to any other. While the orchestra played the introductory bars to the first figure, the Baron felt it an incredible gratification to his pride to perceive, as he reviewed the ladies forming the lines of that formidable square, that Madame de Soulanges' ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... is no limit to what can be done. The idea of our present trip would have seemed more chimerical to people a hundred years ago than this ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... there is no fancy so vain and so chimerical that may not be a more real and true medicine for an enthusiastic heart than any herb, mineral, oil, or other sort ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... have uttered, and no other view than that of the emancipation of my country from the superinhuman oppression under which she has so long and too patiently travailed; and that I confidently and assuredly hope, wild and chimerical as it may appear, that there is still union and strength in Ireland ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... she paid a rent of L20 a year. But her dominion was not subject to such limitations. She ruled imaginatively, transcendentally; the solid glory of Chatham had been transmuted into the phantasy of an Arabian Night. No doubt she herself believed that she was something more than a chimerical Empress. When a French traveller was murdered in the desert, she issued orders for the punishment of the offenders; punished they were, and Lady Hester actually received the solemn thanks of the French Chamber. It ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... finer or more perfect emblem on earth than a woman of genuine simplicity. She affects no graces which are not inspired by sincerity. Her opinions result not from passion and fancy, but from reason and experience. Candor and humility give expansion to her heart. She struggles for no kind of chimerical credit, disclaims the appearance of every affectation, and is in all things just what she seems, and others would be thought. Nature, not art, is the great standard of her manners; and her exterior ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... bound himself never swerves nor relaxes; his feeling of what is right is to be at all times wrought up to a pitch of enthusiastic self-devotion; he must become the unshrinking martyr and confessor of the public good. If it be said that this scheme is chimerical and impracticable on ordinary occasions, and to the generality of mankind, well and good; but those who accuse the author of having trampled on the common feelings and prejudices of mankind in wantonness or insult, or without wishing to substitute something better (and only unattainable, because ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Groseillers then relinquished all idea of restitution, and tried to interest merchants in another expedition to Hudson Bay by way of the sea.[2] He might have spared himself the trouble. His enthusiasm only aroused the quiet smile of supercilious indifference. His plans were regarded as chimerical. Finally a merchant of Rochelle half promised to send a boat to Isle Percee at the mouth of the St. Lawrence in 1664. Groseillers had already wasted six months. Eager for action, he hurried back to Three Rivers, where Radisson awaited him. The ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... many, these things are but as dreams; they are chimerical. But one thing is certain: the history of the Church and Providence in the future are appallingly grand. Providence was grand in leading forth His people of old from Egypt. But He will be no less grand when He shall set His hand a ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... maintained a high position; but it was not chimerical or theoretical; it was practical and Scriptural; here was solid ground, a rock-foundation. On it were no sidings, no off-sets, no bogs. The truths they held were clear, clean-cut, adamantine, foundational, and unchangeable. Their oath bound them to defend the sovereignty of Christ, the ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... clasps of solid silver ornamented with precious stones, and known in the Middle Ages as fermillets, are pretty presents, and these ornaments can be also enriched with gold and enamel without losing their silver character. Chimerical animals and floral ornaments are often used in ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... who complained of their quarters to follow my example. I dare say a dozen of others agreed to do so, and I thought we should have been quite a party. Yet, when I brought up my rug about seven bells, there was no one to be seen but the watch. That chimerical terror of good night-air, which makes men close their windows, list their doors, and seal themselves up with their own poisonous exhalations, had sent all these healthy workmen down below. One would think we had been brought up in a fever country; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at having missed this letter till it was too late to act upon its contents; but he had chastened himself considerably of late, and at last his chimerical expedition to Kennetbridge really did seem to have been another special intervention of Providence to keep him away from temptation. But a growing impatience of faith, which he had noticed in himself more than once of late, ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... word to banish from your minds the chimerical apprehensions which the suspicions of Marcel may have ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... instances, which has to be guided, not by objective facts, but by subjective opinions and impressions. History written in a purely positivist spirit, ad narrandum, and in no sense ad docendum, is a chimerical notion by which Renan beguiled himself into thinking that his Vie de Jesus was a bundle of facts and nothing more. And Mrs. Humphrey Ward is no less beguiled, if she is unaware that in threading together, classifying ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... further reasons when I declare that I should wish to send Siegfried into the world in different fashion from that which would be possible to the good people there. With regard to this, I am busy with wishes and plans which, at first look, seem chimerical, yet these alone give me the heart to finish Siegfried. To realize the best, the most decisive, the most important work which, under the present circumstances, I can produce—in short, the accomplishment of the conscious mission of my life—needs a matter of perhaps 10,000 ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... at the rate the population of the United States is increasing, and the rate walnut consumption is increasing, by the time every available acre in Oregon is in full bearing the supply will still fall far short of the demand. Judging by past experience in California this is no chimerical conception. Since 1896 the walnut crop in that state has steadily increased, and in like proportion has the price advanced, from seven cents in 1896 to twenty cents ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... yet upon sight of a fine woman, I have stretched into proper stature, and killed with a good air and mien. These are the gay phantoms that dance before my waking eyes and compose my day-dreams. I should be the most contented happy man alive, were the chimerical happiness which springs from the paintings of Fancy less fleeting and transitory. But alas! it is with grief of mind I tell you, the least breath of wind has often demolished my magnificent edifices, swept away my groves, and left me no more trace of them than if they had never been. My exchequer ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... the space of fifty years, extend its influence to all the European courts; and that, in 1759, the most zealous patron of literature in Europe should be a Russian sovereign? The man who had said this would have been regarded as the most chimerical mortal on earth.' But all this has been done, and the career is not closed. More will be done still. It may even be our most essential policy to bring Russia into full collision with France. She is now the only rival: and I shall scarcely regret the fall of the German sovereignties, if ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... wishes its influence and its power to be omnipotent over the globe, so that it may be able to know, at any given instant, the state of the atmosphere at every point on its surface. Let it not be supposed that this is a chimerical imagination, the vain dream of a few philosophical enthusiasts. It is co-operation which we now come forward to request, in full confidence, that if our efforts are met with a zeal worthy of the cause, our associates will be ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Animal in Nature as a Basilisk; that Health is to be secur'd by Temperance and Exercise; and that the Art of making Health consistent with Luxury, is altogether as impracticable, and an Art, in all Respects, as idle and chimerical, as those of the Philosopher's Stone, judicial Astrology, or any other Reveries of the like ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... then, we saw that the theoretical attack on interest, on the ground that it is income which is not earned by the recipients, but is virtually taken by the few from the products of the labour of the many, is chimerical in its moral and ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... of restoring to the Roman Republic its old supremacy. And for a moment even this dream seemed hardly chimerical. Europe was really dazzled by the revival of its ancient capital. Louis of Hungary and Joanna of Naples submitted their quarrel to Rienzi's arbitration. Thus encouraged, he set no bounds to his ambition. He called upon ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... California has within her borders five million acres of land suitable for vine-culture. Suppose it to average no larger yield than that of Italy, yet, at 25 cents a gallon, it would give an income of $551,875,000. That this may not seem an entirely chimerical estimate, it may be remarked that trustworthy statistics show that in France five millions of acres are planted in vines, producing seven hundred and fifty millions of gallons, while Hungary has three millions of acres, yielding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... positive authority is universally recognised, and in taking for my theme a subject not, like theirs, distinct in its definitions or consecrated by tradition and history, I am aware that I perform what you may, if you choose, call an act of blameworthy audacity. My subject is chimerical, vague, and founded on conjectures which you may well believe yourselves at least as well fitted as I am to propound. Nevertheless, and in no rash or paradoxical spirit, I invite you to join with me in some reflections on what is the probable course of English poetry during, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... forfeiture of their constitutional engagements? It is impossible. The storm of frenzy and faction must inevitably dash itself in vain against the unshaken rock of the Constitution. I shall never doubt it. I know that the Union is stronger a thousand times than all the wild and chimerical schemes of social change which are generated one after another in the unstable minds of visionary sophists and interested agitators. I rely confidently on the patriotism of the people, on the dignity ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... vague images linked according to the least rigorous modes of association. Emotional abstractions; their nature.—Its characteristic of inwardness.—Its principal manifestations: revery, the romantic spirit, the chimerical spirit; myths and religious conceptions, literature and the fine arts (the symbolists), the class of the marvelous and fantastic.—Varieties of the diffluent imagination: first, numerical imagination; its nature; ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... managed to plant on the Island of Ithaca, in the gaping empty purses of all those unfortunate small tradesmen, village priests, and petty nobility, whose poor savings he has swallowed up dazzling their eyes with chimerical combinazioni. Truly, for him to dare to come back here, it needed all his phenomenal audacity, as well as the resources now at his ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... at that time regarded as but the dream of a chimerical projector. It stood before the public friendless, struggling hard to gain a footing, scarcely daring to lift itself into notice for fear of ridicule. The civil engineers generally rejected the notion of a Locomotive Railway; and when no leading man of the day could be found ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... the printing of the first edition to be suspended. Fenelon has sometimes been regarded as a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement; but he would rather, by ideas in which, as events proved, there may have been something chimerical, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... that breaking of windows was not humour; and I question not but several English readers will be as much startled to hear me affirm, that many of those raving, incoherent pieces, which are often spread among us, under odd chimerical titles, are rather the offsprings of a distempered brain than works ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... see or hear more. I had already descried what a peaceful family life—upright, pure, and devoted—my friend Meurtrier hid under his chimerical gasconades. But the spectacle with which chance had favored me was at once so droll and so touching that I could not resist the temptation to watch for some moments longer. That indiscretion sufficed to show me the ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... and agitated within. Whilst foreign powers announce the intolerable (inadmissible) project of attacking our national sovereignty, and avow it as a principle! at the same time the enemies of France, its interior enemies, intoxicated with fanaticism and pride, entertain chimerical hopes, and annoy us with their insolent malevolence. You ought, gentlemen, to repress them; and you will have the power so to do, only when you shall become constitutional and just. You wish it, ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... fact of her return to complete health by the unusual effort of coming down to breakfast. She was in high feather, and her cheery conversation lifted, to some extent, the gloom which had settled on her young friends. While exhorting to patience she was full of hope, and dismissed as chimerical all the darker explanations which the disconsolate lovers invented to account for the silence their communications had met with. Under her influence the breakfast-table became positively cheerful, ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... efforts were made to attract French colonists to the country, the colonization of Algeria appearing as a means towards the extinction of pauperism in the mother-country. This point of view suggested numerous projects, as chimerical as they were generous; two millions sterling (50 million francs) were expended with a view to installing Parisian unemployed workmen as colonists, but this attempt failed miserably. The most remarkable military events of this period were (1) the siege and destruction ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... become a thorough believer in them. This aroused my curiosity, and I procured the book called "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," and read it. Before reading very far in it, I became pretty thoroughly nauseated with what I thought the chimerical ideas of the author, but kept on reading,—more because I had promised to read the book than because of interest in its teachings; but before I had gotten through with it, I did become interested in the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... exhausted. Our energy is dispirited. Sleep does "not weigh our eyelids down." We stare upon the vacancy. We conjure up a thousand restless, disheartening images. We abandon projects we have formed, and which, viewed through this medium, appear fantastical, chimerical, absurd. We want ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... for ever higher than man's; but an ideal nevertheless. If its construction is less complete than that of "Gil Blas," it is because its aim is infinitely higher; because the form has to be subordinated, here and there, to the matter. If its political economy be imperfect, often chimerical, it is because the mind of one man must needs have been too weak to bring into shape and order the chaos, social and economic, which he saw around him. M. de Lamartine, in his brilliant little ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... made all possible haste, fearing that Madame de Fondege and Madame Leon might return at any moment. But this was truly a chimerical apprehension. It was nearly six o'clock when the two shoppers made their appearance, wearied with the labors of the day, but in fine spirits. Besides purchasing every requisite for that wonderful costume of hers, the General's wife had found some laces of rare beauty, which she ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... and beast, heaven and earth; if this be beyond me, 'tis not possible.—What consequence then follows? or can there be any other than this—if I seek an interest of my own, detached from that of others; I seek an interest which is chimerical, and can never have existence."—HARRIS: ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... experiments to the utmost, and explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes, 'tis still certain we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypothesis that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical.... ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... instituted by the families of two little martyrs of Bethlehem against the founders of the Society; and, on top of all, the complications of the Territorial Bank. There was one solitary hope, the mission of Paul de Gery to the Bey, but so vague, so chimerical, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... in Harrington Surtaine a streak of the romantic. His inner world was partly made up of such chimerical notions as are bred in a lively mind, not in very close touch with the world of actualities, by a long course of novel-reading and theater-going. Deep within him stirred a conviction that there was a proper and suitable, nay, an almost obligatory, method made and provided for just such crises ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... stream is encountered, the current of which can be conducted to the city. More visionary projectors have gone further, and imagined that advantage might be taken of the natural tunnels under the Karst for the passage of roads, railways, and even navigable canals. But however chimerical these latter schemes may seem, there is every reason to believe that art might avail itself of these galleries for improving the imperfect drainage of the champaign country bounded by the Karst, and that stopping or opening ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... you begin," warned the engineer with the severe professional authority common to the quite young. Already, however, he was trying to grow regulation engineer's whiskers; also he immediately planned to get married upon the proceeds of this big job, which, after years of chimerical dreaming, had become too real, almost, to be believed. "Perhaps you could get the owner to stand his proportionate share of ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... to keep Half the World locked up in embargo were entirely chimerical; plainly contradictory to the Laws of Nature; and no amount of Pope's Donation Acts, or Ceremonial in Rota or Propaganda, could redeem them from untenability, in the modern days. To lie like a dog in the manger over ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... charged with forming the mind and the heart of the young princes destined to govern the nations. What enlightenment can teachers of this stamp give? Filled themselves with prejudices, they will hold up to their pupil superstition as the most important and the most sacred thing, its chimerical duties as the most holy obligations, intolerance, and the spirit of persecution, as the true foundations of his future authority; they will try to make him a chief of party, a turbulent fanatic, and a tyrant; they will suppress at an early period his reason; they ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... not good for man to live alone," perhaps it is not well for him to manage his City Hall alone. After all, is it "chimerical?" ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... thread had broken. Often, when considering the possibility of such a catastrophe, he had asked himself how he should avert it? He had formed and rejected many plans: he had deluded himself, like all men of imagination, with innumerable chimerical projects, and now ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... imagination, as well as his reasoning faculties, always worked together. He was incessantly prompted by the most extraordinary speculations. The great majority of them were in a high degree wild and chimerical, but every now and then one of his fancies struck right to the heart of nature, and an immortal truth was brought ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... old times, nor by conquering kings, but by the voice of nature, by the clamor of justice and by the genius of wisdom." ... "Humankind cries against the thoughtless and blind legislators who have thought that they might with impunity try chimerical institutions. All the peoples of the world have attempted to gain freedom, some by deeds of arms, others by laws passing alternately from anarchy to despotism, from despotism to anarchy. Very few have contented themselves with moderate ambitions constituting ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... open between me and the secret place of her entombment. And though it was but an optical delusion, the panel being really closed, it might as well have been the truth, for I have never been able to rid myself of the sight of that chimerical strip of darkness, with its suggestions of guilt and death. It haunted my vision; it ruined my life; it destroyed my peace. If I shut my eyes at night, it opened before me. If I arrayed myself in ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... struck with the coincidence, but denied that the wishes or expectations of the letter-writer were to be regarded as proofs of a charge otherwise chimerical. ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... had fallen; and rising, he walked speedily back by the dark wood-paths. But before he reached the meadows, from which he could see lights blinking in the scattered villas, his steps had lagged again. His discouragement had nothing chimerical in it at this moment; it was part and parcel of himself.—The night was both chilly and misty, and it was late. But a painful impression of the previous evening lingered in his mind. Louise would ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the thought occurred to them whether they might not yet strike a blow for the recovery of their valleys! The idea seemed chimerical in the extreme. A few hundred destitute men, however valiant, to think of recovering a country defended by the combined armies of France and Savoy! Javanel, the old Vaudois hero, disabled by age and wounds, was still alive—an exile at Geneva—and he was consulted on ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... groundless and chimerical assumption of those expositors who view these epistles as prophetical of seven successive periods of the destiny of the church general, the last estate would be worse than the first,—Laodicea being the worst of all. But this is obviously contrary to the ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... he was so anxious to release. We had no precise information as to the steps that were taken at home for our rescue; and, until certain that troops had landed, we felt very anxious lest some contretemps should, at the last instant, occur, and the expedition be abandoned, or some more or less chimerical plan adopted in its stead. We had received a little money of late, but as everything was scarce and dear, we had to be very careful, and refuse many a "friend's" request—rather a ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc |
