"Idealism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... true. One had to talk to them on the lines of leading articles in The Morning Post. Their patriotism, their knowledge of human nature, their idealism, and their imagination were restricted to the traditional views of English country gentlemen of the Tory school. Anything outside that range of thought was to them heresy, treason, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... and noise and discord, produce the real results that feed and clothe and shelter us. The real accomplishments of life are not on the mountain-top, but in the monotonous, soul-trying daily grind of business. If you imagine that you are to live in the idealism of a mountain-top experience you will find yourself coming short of it most of the time. You will be continually lamenting over your failure to make your experience measure to your ideal. So long as you are reaching toward this ideal and are conscious of your failure to reach it, your attention ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... and powerful had come into her life. Not merely the play and her determination to do it moved her—the man himself profoundly impressed her. His seriousness, his decision and directness of utterance, and the idealism which shone from his rugged, boyish face remained with her to the verge of sleep. He was very handsome, and his voice singularly beautiful, but his power to charm lay over and beyond these. His sincere eyes, his freedom from flippant slang, these ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... continuity of mind, and, until yesterday, of speech and song, that connect the half of Europe with its ancestral past. For early Europe was very largely Celtic Europe, and nowhere can we trace the continuous influence of Celtic culture and idealism, coming down to us from a remote past, save ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... up for wild animals impossible mental and moral standards. The student must not deceive himself by overestimating mental values. If an estimate must be made, make it under the mark of truth rather than above it. While avoiding the folly of idealism, we also must shun the ways of the narrow mind, and the eyes that refuse to see the truth. Wild animals are not superhuman demigods of wisdom; but neither are they idiots, unable to reason from cause to effect along the simple lines ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... by chance escaped destruction show very plainly a transition from pure idealism to the most ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... Christianity and with a dozen similar platitudes none of which had any authentic contact with the life of the nation, thus confronted, the proletaire was forced to lift itself up by its boot straps and rise to the defence of a Frankenstein idealism of which it was the parent-victim. Disillusionment with the causes of the war has, however, served no high purpose. The Frankenstein God, the Frankenstein virtue is still enshrined in the Heaven of the Copy Books. And we find the proletaire still worshipping, albeit with ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... contrary, commenced their system from the reality of ideas, and thence argued on the reality of external objects; experience with them was but a show and an appearance; knowledge was not in things without, but in the mind; they were the founders of idealism. With respect to the Deity, they imagined the whole universe filled with it—God was ALL IN ALL. Such, though each philosopher varied the system in detail, were the main metaphysical dogmas of the Eleatic school. Its masters ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... imagination is most tasked when it has to paint pictures which shall withstand the silent criticism of general experience, and to frame hypotheses which shall withstand the confrontation with facts. I cannot here enter into the interesting question of Realism and Idealism in Art, which must be debated in a future chapter; but I wish to call special attention to the psychological fact, that fairies and demons, remote as they are from experience, are not created by a more vigorous effort of imagination than milk ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... conventionalized as much as university education. Here, just where a superficial theorist would expect to find enthusiasm, emancipated minds, and hope, is found fear, convention, a mean instinct-life, no spirit of adventure, little curiosity, in general no promise of preparedness. No wonder philosophical idealism flourishes ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Already he is half a hero-worshipper. Already he half believes in the beauty of sacrifice and in the life immortal. Already he is predisposed to value exceedingly all that savours of clean, wholesome home life. On that foundation it should be possible to build a strong idealism which shall prevail against the flesh. And this is my last word—it is by building up, and not by casting down, that the soldier can be saved from degradation. The devil that possesses so many can only be cast out by an angel that is stronger ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... and worthy ends, and by strengthening the appeal of duty where this conflicts with present interests. The one method stakes all on human nature as it is; the other challenges man's capacity to listen to new appeals and respond to better motives. It is, if you please, idealism; but before it is dismissed as worthless, consider what has been achieved in substituting social motives in the field of political action. There was a time when the aim in political life was undisguisedly selfish. The state, in distinction ...
— The Ethics of Coperation • James Hayden Tufts
... profound but bewildered interest. Till now he had worshipped Watts and Burne-Jones. The pretty colour of the first, the affected drawing of the second, had entirely satisfied his aesthetic sensibilities. Their vague idealism, the suspicion of a philosophical idea which underlay the titles they gave their pictures, accorded very well with the functions of art as from his diligent perusal of Ruskin he understood it; but here was something ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... on the part of people who meant no harm, but who believed what they wished to believe. They are the story of a great mistake, but a mistake proceeding simply, in the most natural way in the world, from excess of "idealism" and attachment. Unaffected by the circumstance that there never were narratives less ideal, and more straightforwardly real—that they seem purposely framed to be a contrast to professed accounts of visions, and to exclude the possibility of their being confounded ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... is singular in its construction; scenes detached, though not wholly disconnected, are strung pendant-wise upon the gold thread, slender but sufficiently strong, of an idea; realism in art, as we now call it, hangs from a fine idealism; this substantial globe of earth with its griefs, its grossnesses, its heroism, swings suspended from the seat of God. The idea which gives unity to the whole is not a mere fantasy. The magic practised by the unconscious Pippa through her songs is of that genuine ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... boundary was traced over the high seas beyond the three-mile limit, which of course was a proposition entirely at variance with international law. We should not forget, says the Spectator,[90] the whole Italian record of idealism and liberal thought. And Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, an Italian exponent,[91] remarks that the terms of the Treaty of London were unknown to the people who paraded the streets of Rome impatient for their country to enter the War, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... common-place acceptation is not so dreadful as you have pronounced it—wait a while—a little practical experience will serve to persuade you, that there are a few redeeming traits in the big, nasty world after all, and will force you to give up these wild theories of idealism that are strangely out of place in a ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... laborious and continuous study of history and science, and therefore tacitly repudiates all connection with philosophy. For the Philistine captain and his "We," Kantian philosophy does not exist. He does not dream of the fundamental antinomy of idealism and of the highly relative sense of all science and reason. And it is precisely reason that ought to tell him how little it is possible to know of things in themselves. It is true, however, that people of a certain age ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... idealism had been thrust aside. The solid, easily accessible fare of the materialists was especially relished by those educated in the natural sciences, and Vogt's maxim, that thought stands in a similar ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... heritage of boyhood and the heart of youth. He could not find there the old dreams and hopes that had made life sweet. He understood that he could not bring back to the old valley what he had taken from it. He had lost that intangible, all-real wealth of faith and idealism and zest; he had bartered it away for the hard, yellow gold of the marketplace, and he realized at last how much poorer he was than when he had left that home valley. His was a name that stood for millions, but he was ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... has been the seed-plot of our moral code. To it we are indebted for the first germs of the sexual inhibitions which, sanctified, by religion and supported by custom, have, under the unreasoned idealism of the common mind, filled life with cruelties and jealous exclusions, with suicides, ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... happy on this ground only, much as Socrates' friends in the opening of the Phaedo are described as regarding him; or as was said of another, 'they looked upon his face as upon the face of an angel.' We are not concerned to justify this idealism by the standard of utility or public opinion, but merely to point out the existence of such a sentiment in the better part of ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... to this state that Mejnour sought to bring the Neophyte, and in this elementary initiation the mystic was like every more ordinary sage. For he who seeks to discover must first reduce himself into a kind of abstract idealism, and be rendered up; in solemn and sweet bondage, to the ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... subdued, almost obliterated by their repressive measures. Yet again and again it arose responsive to the actual needs of the time, and became toward the end of the century one of the most impressive movements the world has ever known. Filled with idealism for a new social order, and determined to change fundamentally existing conditions, the working class has fought onward and upward toward a world State and a socialized industrial life. There can be no doubt that the amazing growth of the modern socialist movement has terrified the powers of ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... "Physical Basis of Life," but with more detail, he explains how far materialism is legitimate, is, in fact, a sort of shorthand idealism. This essay, too, contains the often-quoted passage, apropos of the] "introduction of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... "The bigness of it, the wonder of it. Underneath all the horror, underlying all the vileness—the splendour of it all. The glory of human endurance. . . . People wondered that I could stand it—I with my idealism. But it seems to me that out of the sordid brutality an ideal has been born which is almost the greatest the world has ever known. Oh! Derek, we've just got to try to keep ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... days had passed away, and civilization and prosperity were rampant in the land. There were those, too, who thought that perhaps the country had lost something in all its gaining; that perhaps there was less idealism and less unreckoning hospitality in the brick house on the hill than there once had been in the sod ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... Tegnr the vigor and idealism of the Swedish people find their completest and most brilliant incarnation. A deep love of the grandeurs of nature, keen delight in adventure and daring deeds, a charming juvenility of spirit that at least in the prime of his life caused him to battle bravely and hopefully for great ideas, a ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... he was slow to recognize her. He felt a certain strangeness in seeing in full reality the countenance which had occupied his imagination for three months, each time more spirituelle and shadowy with the idealism of absence. But his doubts were of short duration. Then it seemed as though time and space were eliminated, that he had not made any voyage, and but a few hours had intervened since ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... find the following works useful. Kallen (a pupil of James): William James and Henri Bergson: a study in contrasting theories of life. Stebbing: Pragmatism and French Voluntarism. Caldwell: Pragmatism and Idealism (last chap). Perry: Present Philosophical Tendencies. Boutroux: William James (Eng. Tr.). Flournoy: La philosophie de James (Eng. Tr.). And J. E. Turner: An Examination of William James' Philosophy.] Both have succeeded in appealing ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... design was to overthrow scepticism and idealism. In furtherance of this intention, he proposed to himself the accomplishment of two subsidiary ends,—the refutation of what is called the ideal or representative theory of perception, and the substitution of a doctrine of intuitive perception in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... revived old memories of their student days, when they had become accustomed to it. Though to the average student the carousals, now taboo, may be an evil, physically and intellectually, they are the time and place, nevertheless, at which the phoenix of German idealism soars up from tobacco smoke and beer froth to wing its ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... another while volleying abuse at one another like Homer's heroes. We, at least, claim the right of doing justice even to our adversaries, even to the champions of the war which we loath. We know how much idealism, how much intense moral feeling, have been poured out on behalf of this sinister cause. We are aware that in this respect the United States has been no less spendthrift than Britain and France. But we wish people to give respectful ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... had been immense, men began to see the limit of what they could reasonably expect from retrenchment and Free Trade. The work of Mr. Henry George awakened new interest in problems of poverty, and the idealism of William Morris gave new inspiration to Socialist propaganda. Meanwhile, the teaching of Green and the enthusiasm of Toynbee were setting Liberalism free from the shackles of an individualist conception of liberty and paving the way for the legislation of our own time. Lastly, ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... breaks his head; least of all, can you induce a man to believe that the scolding of his wife is nothing but the buzzing of his own waspish thoughts, and her too free use of his purse only the loss of some golden fancies from his memory. We are all safe against such idealism as Bishop Berkeley reasoned out so logically. Byron's refutation of it is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... fought, and that it was an unworthy thing for a great nation to continue an unjust war for the sake of a military revenge. Such was the motive of the British public when it acquiesced in the action of the Government. It was the height of idealism, and the result has not been such ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Fields? A Salvationised "Dancing Girl," without bonnet and tambourine? Nay, not so; but rather the very spirit of classic grace and elegance, moving rhythmically to melodious measure. In such a Scene as this ought to be, we want as much idealism as your graceful art can lend, otherwise we are only among our old friends, "the ladies and gentlemen of the Chorus"—bless em!—representing most substantially the "Shades of the Blessed," who appear ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... and cleverness, has inherited from his ancestress, Queen Louise, and one might almost say from his grand-uncle, King Frederick William IV., a very strongly developed tendency towards idealism. It was to this phase of his nature that the recommendation of Professor Hintzpeter particularly appealed, and the more he considered the matter, the more he discussed it with his old tutor, the more convinced he became that it was in his power to solve ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... insentient embryo of some gigantic Presence whose form is still unimaginable and whose birth must wait for Eons and Eons. Again, he turns to something not easily distinguishable from philosophical idealism, whether out of Berkeley or Fichte it is hard to make out—that is, he would interpret the whole phenomenon of life as no more than an appearance, a nightmare of some unseen sleeper or of men themselves, an "uncanny blur ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... regarded in the light of a serious human being who ought to have a vote; and he did not mind Miss Arrowpoint's addiction to music any more than her probable expenses in antique lace. He was consequently a little amazed at an after-dinner outburst of Klesmer's on the lack of idealism in English politics, which left all mutuality between distant races to be determined simply by the need of a market; the crusades, to his mind, had at least this excuse, that they had a banner of sentiment ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... is that she is to do. If she asks if she is expected to be a model woman, the reply must be that the world does not much hanker after what—is called the "model woman." It seems to be more a matter of tendency than anything else. Is she sagging towards Realism or rising towards Idealism? Is she content to be the woman that some of the novelists, and some of the painters also, say she is, or would she prefer to approach that ideal which all the world loves? It is a question ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... as described in Chapter 2 of this book, is chiefly interested in books, in beauty, ideas and ideals, elegance, and luxuries. His favorable attention is caught by that which is beautiful. If the thing offered him has in it or about it any elements of beauty, elegance, luxury, or idealism, this should first be presented, even if the true value of the article lies in its utility. In the same way, this individual will respond most quickly with his favorable attention to that which is intellectual, educational, literary, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... slowly, for he could not see far ahead, and travel by water was still treacherous by reason of belated floes of ice. Over to the eastward the sun winked down on him with a dissipated bloodshot eye, knowingly, with the cruel misanthropic humour of a tired man of the world who, regarding idealism as a jest, had guessed at the purpose of his errand and was eager to declare ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... of idealism running through our country that would hold the American people to the thought that the United States has a world wide mission. It is the dream of this class that shackles, whether physical, political or spiritual, shall fall from every man ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... gratitude for the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her the confirmation ticket. Free as she is from fancies, her conception of the daily life of her clergyman shows amusingly enough that she can attain a very fair pitch of idealism. We remember the story of a certain parson of our acquaintance who owned to a meek little buttercup his habit of carrying a book in his pocket for reading in leisure hours. "Ah, yes," replied the eager little auditor, with a hush of real awe in her voice—"the Bible, of course! Unluckily," it was ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... children with adult religious penances, long prayers, and homilies, thinking thereby to give them religious training. The good man comes out of the good home, the home that is good in character, aim, and organization, not sporadically but permanently, the home where the religious spirit, the spirit of idealism, and the sense of the infinite and divine are diffused rather than injected. The inhuman, antisocial vampires, who suck their brothers' blood, whether they be called magnates or mob-leaders, grafters or gutter thieves, often learned to take life in ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... I said, "boys and girls walk together, and the only idealism that comes into the lives of peasants is between the ages of eighteen and twenty, when young people meet in the lanes and linger by the stiles. Afterwards hard work ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... found joining the Line of Heart (1-1, Plate XII.), it foretells a happy and prosperous marriage, but one in which idealism, romance, and some fortunate circumstances play their role, and one which results more from the caprice or fancy of the person ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... however, an idea which was not quite realized. Appearing upon the literary stage at a period when Naturalism was triumphant, it was for a moment believed that he would restore Idealism in the manner ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... 25. Pantheism identifies Man with God, 29. The contemporary tendency is towards Pantheism, 30. Legitimacy of our demand to be essential in the Universe, 33. Pluralism versus Monism: The 'each- form' and the 'all-form' of representing the world, 34. Professor Jacks quoted, 35. Absolute Idealism characterized, 36. Peculiarities of the finite consciousness which the Absolute cannot share, 38. The finite still remains outside ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... of our history. Initiative, self-reliance, boldness in conception, fertility in resource, readiness in execution, acquisitiveness, inventive genius, appreciation of material advantages—these, shot through with a certain fine idealism, genial human sympathy, and a high romantic strain—are the traits of the American national type as it emerged from the ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... already broken down the barriers of time and space. Who should set a limit to its future encroachments? And hence, with a kind of sanguine pedantry, he pursued his design of 'keeping up with the day' and posting himself and his family on every mortal subject. Of this unpractical idealism we shall meet with many instances; there was not a trade, and scarce an accomplishment, but he thought it should form part of the outfit of an engineer; and not content with keeping an encyclopaedic diary himself, he would fain have set all ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that Mr. Dobie's talent is not essentially that of a novel-writer, but certainly at least four of the short stories which he has published during the past year are notable artistic achievements in widely different moods. If tragedy prevails, it is purified by a fine spiritual idealism, which takes symbols and makes of them something more human than a mere allegory. If an American publisher were courageous enough to start publishing a series of volumes of short stories by contemporary American ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of benefits, I shall not now speak," he proceeded. "You have something in you of the spirit of men who aim at the greater things. There is, indeed, in your attitude towards life something of the idealism, the ever-stretching heavenward culture of my own people. I recognise that spirit in you, and I will not give a lower tone to our talk this afternoon by speaking of money. Yet what you wish for you may have. When the time comes, what further reward you may desire, whether it be ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... day had run into grotesque extremes. Emerson bore about the same relation to the absurder outcroppings of transcendentalism that Milton bore to the New Lights, Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc., of his time. There is in him that mingling of idealism with an abiding sanity, and even a Yankee shrewdness, which characterizes the race. The practical, inventive, calculating, money-getting side of the Yankee has been made sufficiently obvious. But the deep heart of New England is full ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... steeped she had been in the childish, idiotic American tradition of entire disinterestedness in the relations of men and women. It was another instance of how betrayed she constantly was, in any manoeuver in the actual world, by the fatuous idealism which had so colored her youth—she vented her emotion in despising that idealism and thinking of hard ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the Oriental Philosophy; and notwithstanding its forged name Christian, it is truly subversive of the doctrine of Christ. Her grand central doctrine of the "allness" of mind and the unreality of matter is a true copy of the "fantastic idealism" of the Gnostics. Gnosticism was based on "speculative knowledge." So is Mrs. Eddy's theory. Gnosticism denied the "true humanity of the Redeemer, and made his person a mere phantom, and his work a mere illusion." So does Christian Science. Although Mrs. Eddy clamours loudly ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... tolling for the death of all that remained of good in him. In losing Evelyn, whom he had loved with all the idealism and reverence of a reckless man for a good woman, he believed, in the bitterness of his spirit, that he had lost all; that he had been cut adrift from the last mooring to a better future, that nothing could hold him back now. And for a time it had been so, and he had drowned his trouble in ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... can't turn back," he exclaimed, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. "The work is at hand and its success will justify me! If I had conducted myself as you did, I should have succumbed. Nothing of idealism, nothing of fallacious theories! Fire and steel to the cancer, chastisement to vice, and afterwards destroy the instrument, if it be bad! No, I have planned well, but now I feel feverish, my reason wavers, it is natural—If I have done ill, it has been ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... England and Campoamor in Spain, like many before them, have given metrical form to the expression of their philosophical views. And other poets, who had an intuitive aversion to science, have taken refuge in pure idealism and have created worlds after their own liking. To-day prose is recognized as the best medium for the promulgation of scientific or political teachings, and those who are by nature poets are turning to art for art's sake. Poetry is less didactic than formerly, and it is ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... shedding henceforth an unfading glory about the ideal of Duty and Virtue, and elevating it in the strictest sense to the supreme height of Religion. What these men—the prophet and philosopher of the New Idealism—thought and did has borne fruit in the foundation in America, Great Britain and Ireland, in France, Germany, Austria and Italy, of Centres or Societies of Ethical Culture which assume as axiomatic that there is, there can be, no Religion but that which ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... "puffessor" of such a club can play them. Of course, the place was a social cesspool, generating a poisonous miasma and reeking with the stench of decayed and rotten moralities. There is no defence to be made for it. But what do you expect when false idealism and fevered ambition come face ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... this world to fairyland: what would have happened, he asks, if the woman whom I believed false, had been true? This, the theme of "Much Ado," is the theme also of "The Winter's Tale" and of "Cymbeline." The idealism of the man is inveterate: he will not see that it was his own sensuality which gave him up to suffering, and not Mary Fitton's faithlessness. "The Tempest" is the story of "As you Like it." We have again the two dukes, the exiled good Duke, who is Shakespeare, and the bad usurping Duke, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... system shall be held satisfactory which does not find a place for it: and that only in so far as we at least apprehend and respond to the world's spiritual aspect, do we approach the full stature of humanity. Psychologists at present are much concerned to entreat us to "face reality," discarding idealism along with the other phantasies that haunt the race. Yet this facing of reality can hardly be complete if we do not face the facts of the spiritual life. Certainly we shall find it most difficult to interpret these facts; they are confused, and more than ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... century later when the world was agonizing in a death grapple with the mad gods of a crass materialism, mankind saw rising from the wood and stone and iron that had seemed to epitomize this Nation, a spirit which had lain hidden yet dormant in the Nation's life—a beautiful spirit of idealism strong, brave and humbly wise; the child of the dreams and visions and the love of humanity that dwelled in the hearts of the pioneers of that ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... glory of America that our laws do not intend to recognize class differences. The conditions of life on a raw continent and the principles embodied in religious and political idealism fortunately cooperated. Will this last, or are the great differences in wealth once more resulting in definite class lines and in class pride and contempt? What does the phrase "of good family" imply by contrast? What evidence does college fraternity life offer as to the existence of social classes? ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... and shape to his own creative purposes. It has been said that d'Annunzio had a philosophy and Nietzsche and Tolstoy were invoked as influences, but there is as little of Tolstoy's moralizing in "The Intruder" as of Nietzsche's pessimistic idealism in "The Child of Pleasure" or "The Triumph of Death." Whatever conclusions may be drawn from the problem of the Eternal Feminine as postulated in all his novels—and that is the only problem which he confronts—it is hardly to be dignified by the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... resort for valitudinarians and invalids. Among the patrons of the place was Madame Charles, whose memory Lamartine has immortalized as "Julie" in Raphael and as "Elvire" in the beautiful lines of the Meditations. In drawing the character "Julie," idealism and sentimentalism have full play. The whole story is romantic in the extreme. The influence of Byron is clearly to be seen. The beautiful hills of Savoy, tinged with the melancholy tints of autumn, were a fit setting for the meeting with the fair invalid. Besides ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... The inevitableness, the idealism, the blessing of war as an indispensable and stimulating law of development must be repeatedly ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... the Ideal. Idealism of motive determines the character of etheric vibrations, and idealism of magnetic activities determines the ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... doctrine of natural rights, whose transcendental glory faded often into the light of common day during the discussions but still enhaloes a very practical and matter-of-fact statute. Economic reasons, both of eastern and western motive, were gathered under the banner of its idealism, till finally it came to be an ensign not only of free soil for the landless but of free soil for the slaves. The "homestead" movement put an end to slavery, even if within a half century it has exhausted ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... shrewd forecast of the actual event. The Federalists, destitute of idealism, proved to have been overawed by the prestige of England and to have underestimated the might which freedom would impart to the French people. After Napoleon's great campaign of 1796-97, Pitt seeks peace, which the French ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... everything in its practical essence. Idealism only means that we should consider a poker in reference to poking before we discuss its suitability for wife-beating; that we should ask if an egg is good enough for practical poultry-rearing before we decide that the egg is bad enough for practical politics. But I know ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... material weapons for carving their way, and have had no help from other quarters. A suicidal delusion! The spiritual weapon has done most, and always does. They are sons of an idea. They deny their parentage when they scoff at idealism. It's a tendency we shall have to guard against; it leads back to the old order of things, if we do not trim our light. She is waiting for you! Go. You will find me here. And don't forget my instructions. Appoint for the afternoon—not late. Too near night will ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fidelity to the pledged word of Britain, combined with a chivalric desire to champion the cause of weak, unoffending Belgium against the Teutonic bully—there was released in this country a flood of noble idealism and pure emotion, the memory of which those who lived during that spiritual awakening will never forget. No section of the community rose more finely to the height of the occasion than the athletes and scholars from ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... of this idealistic impatience with existing conditions among the many Russian subjects found in the foreign quarters of every American city. The idealism of these young people might be utilized to a modification of our general culture and point of view, somewhat as the influence of the young Germans who came to America in the early fifties, bringing with them the hopes and aspirations embodied ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... and sympathetic student of the propagandist literature of rationalism. I have the greatest admiration for the moral and social idealism which is advocated. I agree that the atheological moral idea is superior to the mere performance of religious ceremonial. But I cannot admire the reasoning or the intelligence of those who use a smattering of science as evidence of the decay of religion. There is something almost ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... ghosts has been still further introduced also into the realm of mathematics in an amusing manner. Bishop Berkeley, bantered on his idealism by Halley, retorted that he too was an idealist; for his ultimate ratios ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... if Doukhobor communistic practices or religious frenzy had their drawbacks, they served to balance the unrestrained individualism and the materialism of other sections of the community, and to add vast potentialities of idealism to the nation's store. ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... all the trivial jokes and tasks that have always surrounded such occasions as these. The object of the jovial customs was not to make everything artificially easy: on the contrary, it was rather to make everything artificially difficult. Idealism is not only expressed by shooting an arrow at the stars; the fundamental principle of idealism is also expressed by putting a leg of mutton at the top of a greasy pole. There is in all such observances a ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... who has caught the inconsequent, yet perfectly sincere spirit of the Village better than John Reed. In reckless, scholarly rhyme he has imprisoned something of the reckless idealism of the Artists' Quarter—that ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... the University Presidency. His constant liberality and labors. His previous life; growth of his fortune; his noble use of it; sundry original ways of his; his enjoyment of the university in its early days; his mixture of idealism and common sense. First celebration of Founder's Day. His resistance to unreason. Bitter attacks upon him in sundry newspapers and in the Legislature; the investigation; his triumph. His minor characteristics; the motto ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... liberty to entrust it to a committee. He was interested in the experiment, but not enough to visit the experimenters. Emerson looked in on them, remained one night, and went back home to continue his essay on Idealism. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Hassim, who for the twentieth time perhaps had related the story of his wrongs and his struggle, he lifted his big arm and shaking his fist above his head, shouted: "We will stir them up. We will wake up the country!" he was, without knowing it in the least, making a complete confession of the idealism hidden under the simplicity of his strength. He would wake up the country! That was the fundamental and unconscious emotion on which were engrafted his need of action, the primitive sense of what was due to justice, to gratitude, ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world—in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death—the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals, the ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... multiplication table has escaped the reformer. There is a general feeling that nothing is exactly right. This may be the operation of the law of progress, doubtless it is, but it occasions a mighty unrest, and keeps the world wondering what will happen next. This law of progress is but another name for idealism to which the world owes everything. Idealism is that which sees a better condition than the one which now obtains. The process of realizing this better condition is in ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... a man of peace and brotherly love—oh, yes, of course! We know these wolves in sheeps' clothing, these pacifists and lovers of man with the gold of the Red International in their pockets, and slavering from their tongues the fine phrases of idealism which conveniently protect them from the strong hand of the law! We have seen their bloody work for four years in Russia, and we tell them that if they expect to prepare the confiscation of property and the nationalization ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... emerald zone," encloses a region of marvel and mystery, where Imagination, the fairy with the magic mirror, helps to interpret and reveal the secrets of Beauty and Truth, which transfigure material form and colour with the halo of idealism. The tale of the mysterious ages when "the threads of families" were first "woven into the ropes of nations," still sways mind and fancy, but the romance of the world continues, though the progress of Humanity varies the pictured page. In the warm heart of the tropical Archipelago, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the war. At a time of the deepest darkness and despair, he had raised aloft a light to which all eyes had turned. He had spoken divine words of healing and consolation to a broken humanity. His lofty moral idealism seemed for a moment to dominate the brutal passions which had torn the Old World asunder. And he was supposed to possess the secret which would remake the world on fairer lines. The peace which Wilson was bringing to the ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... concerned that there should be strong, capable men to take up the burden of church leadership in the future let him create such leadership in his own spiritual image from the plastic idealism of boyhood. Let the hero-worship age, without a word of compulsion or advice, make its choice with him present as a sample of what the minister can be, and tomorrow there will be no lack of virile high-class men in pulpit ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... atmosphere as well as the body, and living in a land where dreams are realities, and all things are credible, and history is only a fairy tale: the land of the moon and the lotus and the snake, old gods and old ruins, former births, second sight, and idealism: it falls back, unconsciously mesmerised, under the spell ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... mission that all the inhibiting diffidencies of his modest nature will henceforth seem to him like the whisperings of temptation. He must cease to watch the shifts of public opinion. He must cease merely to recommend the probable advantage of rather more idealism in the politics of Europe. He must act. He must learn to know that a man cannot give a great idea to the world without giving himself along with it. The cause must consume the person. Individual peace must be sacrificed for ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... system makes experience necessary in order to understand the laws of the universe, but Wang's idealism dispenses with it altogether ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the process of translation which is, except in very rare instances, a purely mechanical art. How much more so must be the case in regard to an Oriental language with its depths of hyperbole and replete with imagery, idealism, and flowery illustrations. ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... Antonines, when a "cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning," so Gibbon tells us, and "the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste." It is the spirit of nationality which will help to supply needful idealism. It will allow a man of letters to frequent the past without becoming archaic and to travel abroad without becoming exotic, because it will supply him always with a good reason for remaining a citizen of his ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... activity, he recognised the source of absolute truth; in the first act of consciousness are disclosed the finite, the infinite, and their mutual relations. In the history of philosophy, in its four great systems of sensationalism, idealism, scepticism, mysticism, he recognised the substance of philosophy itself undergoing the process of evolution; each system is true in what it affirms, false in what it denies. With psychology as a starting-point, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Thus defined, modesty not only repudiates that cold and dissolving criticism which deprives love of all poetry, and prepares the way for a brutal realism; it also excludes that light and detached imagination which floats above love, the mere idealism of heroic sentiments, which cherishes poetic illusions, and passes, without seeing it, the love that is real and alive. True modesty implies a love not addressed to the heroes of vain romances, but to living people, with their feet on the earth. But ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of a girl's idealism is considered by the priest with a sympathetic, yet at the same time a cautious, interest. When, turning from the priest, she opens her mind to the hero, he regards some of her ideas as exaggerated; but the affection which he feels for her as a lover makes their appeal deeper. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Metaphysical and moral idealism, 242. The inherent difficulty in metaphysical idealism, 242. The swing from formalism to materialism. Pessimism, other-worldliness, mysticism, panlogism and aesthetic idealism, 243. Aesthetic idealism falsifies experience and discredits ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... first World War we tried to achieve a formula for permanent peace, based on a magnificent idealism. We failed. But, by our failure, we have learned that we cannot maintain peace at this stage of human development ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... interior nature. If we have failed to transmute the life-energy into a love that is deeper than mere animal instinct; if we have missed the beautiful and the pure and the lofty idealism of Love, we will find ourselves as age-worn after death as before the change. But again we may note a wise provision of the Cosmic Law, for it is almost impossible for a human being to live through many years of life without having loved some person or some thing with at least a spark ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... all! It should be changed, to give some adequate expression of our ideals. The City Church, the People's Church, the Community Church, the Church of the People, the Church of the New Democracy, the Fellowship, the Free Fellowship, the Fellowship of Social Idealism, the Fellowship of the Kingdom, the Fellowship of Spiritual Democracy, the Liberal Centre, the Community Centre,—think of what we might call ourselves, if we but had the courage. And after all, what courage would it take, save ...
— A Statement: On the Future of This Church • John Haynes Holmes
... development, so far as modern Europe is concerned. It was most in accordance with the Sensational Philosophy which prevailed in the school of Condillac,[127] and which continued to maintain its ascendancy until it was assailed by the reviving spirit of Idealism. It was the characteristic feature of the Atheism of the last century, and was fully exhibited in the "Systeme de la Nature." The recent revival of Idealism has done much to check its progress, but it has not effected ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... tide of destruction is ebbing, and the tide of conservation is coming in. Americans are practical. Like all other northern peoples, they love money and will sacrifice much for it, but they are also full of idealism, as well as of moral and spiritual energy. The influence of the splendid body of Americans and Canadians who have turned their best forces of mind and language into literature and into political power for ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... now come to the wonder-worker. There is this difference between the miracle and the myth—a myth is an idealism of a fact, and a miracle is a counterfeit of a fact. There is some difference between a myth and a miracle. There is the difference that there is between fiction and falsehood and poetry and perjury. Miracles are probably only in the far ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various |
