"Ideal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it yields no profitable instruction and contains no element of usefulness for the generation to whom our labors are addressed. Is it wholly unnecessary to place at this moment before the bar of England so noble a model for imitation so sublime an ideal for serious contemplation as that offered in the person of the Earl of Mansfield? Is it impertinent to warn our lawyers, that, without confirmed habits of industry, temperance, self-subjugation, unsullied honor, vast knowledge, enlightened ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... upon everything in the universe as one's own. Soul is the highest aspiration of a righteous person. It is yoga that enables one to attain to this highest ideal of existence. One who realises this is said to be a true Brahmana, a really regenerate person, in fact, a god on Earth. Adhiyajna and Adhidaivata are words that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... change be tolerated if Man must rise above himself to desire it? It would, through his misconception of its nature. Man does desire an ideal Superman with such energy as he can spare from his nutrition, and has in every age magnified the best living substitute for it he can find. His least incompetent general is set up as an Alexander; his ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... mused a good deal over his pike and its savoury stuffing. He was not by any means an ideal monk, but he was equally far from being a scandal. He was the shrewd man of business and manager of his fraternity, conducting the farming operations and making all the bargains, following his rule respectably according to the ordinary standard of his time, but not rising to any ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and made the suspicion shudder its way out of her. Lou Macon, she decided, was just the sort of girl who would think Jack Landis an ideal. Besides, she had never had an opportunity to see Donnegan in his full glory at Milligan's. And as for Donnegan? He was wearied out; his nerves relaxed; and for the deeds with which he had startled The Corner and won her own heart he was now paying the penalty in the shape of ruined nerves. ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... had shared his brother's veneration of the Madonna, and though, when he grew up, his natural romanticism had not led him his brother's way, the boyish ideal had remained, and unconsciously all his later attitude towards women was tinged with it. Joanna was certainly not the Madonna type, and all Martin's soul revolted from her broad, bustling ways—everywhere he went he heard ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... the United Empire loyalists made almost sacred the soil of Upper Canada, now Ontario. Men who had already braved the anger of their fellow-citizens in the American Colonies, and abandoned their homes to witness to the ideal of a united empire, were not likely at the last to throw away their crown of service and stultify ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... been lost in the duties of his calling, in the other had died out for want of requital. For the present, in spite of herself, her feeling towards Robert verged more on distant rather piqued admiration than on affection, although he nearly approached the ideal of her own first love, and Owen Sandbrook's teaching was, through her, bearing good fruit in him, even while recoiling on her woman's heart through ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... different stations in England entertain different ideas of what is genteel, {314} but it must be something gorgeous, glittering, or tawdry, to be considered genteel by any of them. The beau-ideal of the English aristocracy, of course with some exceptions, is some young fellow with an imperial title, a military personage of course, for what is military is so particularly genteel, with flaming epaulets, a cocked hat and a plume, a prancing charger, and a band of fellows ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... 430:1 fined to spiritual life, but includes all the phenomena of existence. Jesus demonstrated this, healing the dying 430:3 and raising the dead. Mortal mind must part with error, must put off itself with its deeds, and immortal manhood, the Christ ideal, will appear. 430:6 Faith should enlarge its borders and strengthen its base by resting upon Spirit instead of matter. When man gives up his belief in death, he will advance more rapidly 430:9 towards God, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... popular operas, often by three or four different composers, strung together regardless of rhyme or reason. Even in Handel's lifetime the older school of opera was tottering to its fall. Only the man was needed who should sweep the mass of insincerity from the stage and replace it by the purer ideal which had been the guiding spirit ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... questions of ceremony and church government to questions of morals. The Puritans always stood for greater earnestness and for the abolition of abuses in the church, but as time passed on they brought into greater prominence the ascetic ideal of life; the strict keeping of the Sabbath borrowed from the Jewish ritual became customary; [Footnote: Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation, 123-132.] prevailing immoralities and extravagances were more bitterly reprobated ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... have been poets and died young, it is hard to think of one who, both in life and death, has so typified the ideal ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... clinical laboratory and hydro- and electro-therapeutic equipment, and accommodations for from twelve to fifteen guests. Two bungalows under the trees of the apple orchard close at hand, one containing two separate suites with baths, and the other two living-rooms with hall and bath-room, were ideal places for quiet and repose. Situated at the entrance to the grounds was a club-house, with a big sitting-room and an open fireplace; it also contained a solarium, billiard-room, bowling alleys, ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... man, did you ever have in your life an ideal, or what stands for it, that you would work for, and ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... limits of our being plunge ... into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' {93} world.... So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account) we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... hears the voice of a roving minstrel who is approaching. She conceals herself. He comes near, and not venturing to enter the hotel, lies down to sleep on a bench. He is soon asleep; and Silvia comes near to see him. She recognizes in him her ideal; and at once loves him. She wakes him up, and he sees in her the madonna ...
— Zanetto and Cavalleria Rusticana • Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, Guido Menasci, and Pietro Mascagni
... not, as the great Dr. Pitcairn of his hero—ultimus atque optitmis. Alas! even the giddiness attendant on a journey on this Manchester rail-road is not so perilous to the nerves, as that too frequent exercise in the merry-go- round of the ideal world, whereof the tendency to render the fancy confused, and the judgment inert, hath in all ages been noted, not only by the erudite of the earth, but even by many of the thick-witted Ofelli themselves; whether the rapid pace at which the fancy moveth in ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the two champions started from opposite points:—one from the ultimate substance, God,—the universal, the ideal, the type;—the other from the individual, Socrates, the concrete, the observed fact of experience, the object of sensual perception. The first champion—William in this instance— assumed that the universal was a real thing; and for that reason he was ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... that the age thought his works worthy of posterity, nor that this great poet himself levied any ideal tribute on future times, or had any further prospect than of present popularity and present profit. So careless was he, indeed, of fame, that, when he retired to ease and plenty, while he was yet little declined into the vale of years, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the nature of the places and things spoken of. No other writer and traveller of the period possessed to a more marked degree that sense of generous pity which makes the unfortunate appear to us in an illusive, almost ideal aspect. Nevertheless, he asserts that the negresses were, as a general rule, revoltingly ugly,— and, although he had seen many strange sides of human nature (having been a soldier before becoming a monk), was astonished to find that miscegenation had already begun. ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... Lord....... is neither better nor worse, than it was of Mr. .... Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal; but Gold and Silver will pass all the world over without any other recommendation than their ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... the deep were on the same tack, headed northwest, driven by a slight wind which veered to the westward. The sea was smooth, the sky was clear, the full moon was rising—the conditions for a night struggle were ideal. ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... elevate." Suppose she has no home, and is old and ugly; what then? I know nothing more cheering and elevating than intelligence and efficiency; and I have never heard that either was detrimental to beauty. Is your ideal a woman ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... bodies of troops come past the Mission compound in Yerandawana village on their way to the hilly country beyond, which provides an ideal area for military tactics. The boys of the Mission, through education and drill, and contact with Englishmen, are filled with military ardour, and are worked up to a pitch of intense excitement by the sight of guns, and mules, and baggage-waggons, ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... American opinion have been supported by Mr. Carnegie in the interests of realizing this idea of a precipitate peace, of a German peace. All manner of adventurers and seekers of easy fortunes have gathered around this strange deviation of the pacifist ideal represented by the multi-millionaire and the men ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... moral purpose is to be strong enough to overcome, as a political force, the advancing art of political exploitation, the conception of control from within must be formed into an ideal entity which, like 'Science,' can appeal to popular imagination, and be spread by an organised system of education. The difficulties in this are great (owing in part to our ignorance of the varied reactions of self-consciousness on instinct), but a wide extension of the idea of causation ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... beneficent Power that discriminated for him having vanished utterly, he was, like a bankrupt gentleman, obliged to do all the work for himself. This is nothing more than the tendency of the generations downward from the ideal. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and scarcely in the ordinary sense inhabitable—a thing more like a toolhouse than a house of any other kind. Made idle by the heat, I paused, and, taking a piece of red chalk out of my pocket, began drawing aimlessly on the back door—drawing goblins and Mr. Chamberlain, and finally the ideal Nationalist with the Kruger beard. The materials did not permit of any delicate rendering of his noble and national expansion of countenance (stoical and yet hopeful, full of tears for man, and yet of an element of humour); but the hat was finely handled. ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... stronghold which was staked upon the issue of the strife stood close at hand. For miles and miles around, the prospect extended over as fair a land as ever rejoiced the sight of man; mountain and valley, forest and waters, city and solitude, grouped together in forms of almost ideal beauty. ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... It illustrates the fact that one may have most ideal laws, but laws never operate automatically, and in the absence of any desire to "let the oppressed go free," but rather an eager desire to hold them in subjection to the base propensities of profligate men, as all the State documents representing ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... ideal for a circus performance. However, the showmen uttered no protest, going about their business as methodically as if the air were warm and balmy, the moon and stars shining down over ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... country (after Suriname); most of the low-lying landscape (three-quarters of the country) is grassland, ideal for cattle ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... by the phrase, "the physical basis or matter of life," that there is some one kind of matter which is common to all living beings, and that their endless diversities are bound together by a physical, as well as an ideal, unity. In fact, when first apprehended, such a doctrine as this appears almost shocking ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and shadow. The height of this rock is sufficient in this stormy country frequently to arrest the passage of the clouds, so as to be further productive of the most brilliant effects in landscape. Often they may be seen hovering on its summit, and adding ideal dimensions to the lofty face, or, when it is viewed on the extremity, conveying the impression of a tower, the height of which is such as to lie in the regions of the clouds. Occasionally they sweep along the base, leaving its huge and black mass involved ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... conceive. The god of the bees is the future. When we, in our study of human history, endeavour to gauge the moral force or greatness of a people or race, we have but one standard of measurement—the dignity and permanence of their ideal, and the abnegation wherewith they pursue it. Have we often encountered an ideal more conformable to the desires of the universe, more widely manifest, more disinterested or sublime; have we often discovered an abnegation more ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... by Saxo, the ideal king should be (as in "Beowulf's Lay") generous, brave and just. He should be a man of accomplishments, of unblemished body, presumably of royal kin (peasant-birth is considered a bar to the kingship), usually a son or a nephew, or brother of his foregoer (though no strict ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... man's son was going about his business with a leisurely savoir-faire which few could rival. Jack Meredith was the beau-ideal of the society man in the best acceptation of the word. One met him wherever the best people congregated, and he invariably seemed to know what to do and how to do it better than his compeers. If it was dancing in the season, Jack Meredith danced, and no man rivalled him. If it was grouse shooting, ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... The ideal teacher must have real personality, and this is a thing of slow growth, but which can be developed under expert guidance. There must be sympathy, tact, and humour. In adopting the attitude of the ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... marry? Do you think he deliberately selects? Does he fall in love, in the strict sense of the phrase, with that one particular girl? No; it comes about by chance—by the drifting force of circumstances. Not one man in ten thousand, when he thinks of marriage, waits for the ideal wife—for the woman who makes capture of his soul or even of his senses. Men marry without passion. Most of us have a very small circle for choice; the hazard of everyday life throws us into contact with this girl or that, and presently ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... does the fallacy hold in a magazine office that "a big name counts for everything and an unknown name for nothing." There can be no denial of the fact that where a name of repute is attached to a meritorious story or article the combination is ideal. But as between an indifferent story and a well-known name and a good story with an unknown name the editor may be depended upon to accept the latter. Editors are very careful nowadays to avoid the public impatience that invariably follows ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... vulgarise, his style and diction for the proper expression of some particular character, in whose mouth exquisite turns of phrase and delicate felicities of rhythm would be inappropriate. He will not let himself go in the way of easy floridity, as writers may whose themes are more "ideal." And where many writers would attempt merely to simplify and sweeten verse, he endeavours to give it fuller expressiveness, to give it strength and newness. It follows that Browning's verse is not so uniformly ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... circumstances, so far as we can see, does he assign to any one his place on political grounds—that is, merely for having belonged to one or other of the great parties which then divided Italy. He himself, as we know, belonged to neither. His political ideal was a united world submitting to the general direction of the Emperor in temporal matters, of the Pope in spiritual. On the other hand, he would have had national forms of government retained. Brought up as he had been, the ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... distinction in behalf of the mechanic by profession, I say that no man should be a mere mechanic in soul. In other words, no man should be bound up in a routine of material ends and uses. He should not be a mechanic, working exclusively in a dead system, but always the architect of a living ideal. And surrounded, astonished, served and enriched as we are by these splendid legions of mechanism, the danger is that material achievement will seem to us the supreme achievement; that all life will become machinery; and the higher interests ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... All this tommy-rot about Bobby and me wouldn't exist if that wretched Chase man had been a little more affable. He never noticed us until you came. No wife to snoop after him and—why, my dear, he would have been ideal." ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... that had consumed the remembrances of the past more apparent. There was little of the treasure of heaven there,—it had mostly been nonsense or vanity or worse. He wanted, oh, how he wanted, to be able just for once to surrender himself to what was absolutely ideal; to have a memory when he was an old man, of something that had no ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the erection of Libraries as in literary compositions, the task is difficult, and will generally meet with opposition from some fastidious quarter,[468] which is always betraying a fretful anxiety to bring every thing to its own ideal standard of perfection. To counteract the unpleasant effect which such an impression must necessarily produce, be diligent and faithful, to your utmost ability, in whatsoever you undertake. You need not evince ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... stands out so strongly in all the undertakings of life that the ideal is often lowered or lost, the artistic suffers, the soul's wings are weighted down with gold. The commercial spirit tends to drag everything down to its dead, sordid level. It is the subtle menace which threatens ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... indulgence of glorious hopes and beautiful dreams, forming to himself some type of the Heroic, which he will keep before his eyes as a standard when he goes into the world as man. There are two schools of thought for the formation of character,—the Real and the Ideal. I would form the character in the Ideal school, in order to make it bolder and grander and lovelier when it takes its place in that every-day life which is called Real. And therefore I am not for placing the descendant of Sir Kenelm ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in life he possessed a really antique spirit, so in his studies he was faithful to the same ideal. In the treatment of science in general the ancients were in a rather unfortunate position, since for the comprehension of the varied objects of nature a division of powers and capabilities, a disintegration of unity (so to speak) is almost unavoidable. In a like case the modern scholar ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... times, with the head in a close cropt wig, resembling the bishop's peruke of the present day. The countenance is youthful and well-looking, very unlike the expression of foreboding melancholy. I have so far taken advantage of this criticism, as to bring my ideal portrait in the present edition, nearer to the complexion at least ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... his apartments. But now—the thought came to him as the happiest of inspirations—he need expose himself to none of these humiliations. Fortune had provided a better way. Shunning direct approaches with all their dangers, he would use an intermediary. By Heaven's kindness the ideal ambassador was ready to his hand—a man of affairs, accustomed to delicate negotiations, yet (the Count added) honourable, true, faithful, and tender-hearted. "My friend Dieppe will rejoice to serve me," he said to ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... a magical and quite ideal site, is the finest pleasure-house that ever yet the sun shone on. The park and the gardens are in the form of an amphitheatre, and are, in my opinion, sublime, in a far different way from those of Vaux. M. Fouquet, condemned to death, in punishment for his superb chateau, died ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... just thinking, sir, how jolly this life is, and for that matter, how jolly everything connected with the Army is. I was wondering why so many young fellows let their earlier manhood slip by without finding out what an ideal place ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... ideal boy's hobby, but it is not limited to youth. Nevertheless it offers a wonderful scope for the unquenchable enthusiasm that always accompanies the application of youthful endeavor, and it is a fact that the majority of the wonderful inventions and improvements ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... following features constitute, I trow, The beau ideal of a short-horn cow:— Frame massive, round, deep-barrell'd, and straight-back'd; Hind quarters level, lengthy, and well pack'd; Thighs wide, flesh'd inwards, plumb almost to hock; Twist deep, conjoining thighs in one square block; Loin broad ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... our paltry stir and strife, Glows down the wished ideal, And longing molds in clay what life Carves on the marble real; To let the new life in, we know, Desire must ope the portal; Perhaps the longing to be so ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... scenes and places and the persons who add the living touches to the pictures are described from the viewpoint of one who knows them well, for Mr. Smith holds the world of Paris in the hollow of his hand. This is an ideal book ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... events of a time later than that which concerns our tale. Deserted by all of his color, Hawkeye returned to the spot where his sympathies led him, with a force that no ideal bond of union could destroy. He was just in time to catch a parting look of the features of Uncas, whom the Delawares were already inclosing in his last vestment of skins. They paused to permit the longing and lingering gaze of the sturdy woodsman, and when it was ended, ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... period of literary activity which followed Bacon's political fall. None of Bacon's writings gives in short apace so vivid a picture of his tastes and aspirations as this fragment of the plan of an ideal commonwealth. The generosity and enlightenment, the dignity and splendor, the piety and public spirit, of the inhabitants of Bensalem represent the ideal qualities which Bacon the statesman desired rather than hoped to see characteristic of his ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... fascination, and month by month grew thinner and more strained. Tristan felt her stress deeply; but was making money so fast that we all felt that in a short time, if not able to finance the discovery of a cure, at least he could retire and live a safer life. And he found his ideal haven of rest—in a Pennsylvania coal mine! Thus, the project grew in his mind, of buying an abandoned mine and fitting it with comfortable and spacious inverted quarters, environed with fungus gardens, air ferns and the like, plants which could be trained to grow upside down; he emerging ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... laboriously learned to label the animals and birds of his acquaintance with an authoritative Latin name, was perpetually obliged to unlearn what he had acquired, as a new classifier brought new resources of hair-splitting pursuit of a supposed type or ideal to bear on the subject. Where, for example, our great ornithologists of the early part of the century, such as Wilson and Audubon, had classed all our numerous hawks in a genus falco, later students split the group up into numerous genera—just how many ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... had but too keenly noticed the impression she had produced. To be sure, Malgat was very far from that ideal of a millionaire husband of whom these adventurers dreamed; but, after all, he held the keys of a safe in which lay millions. One might always get something out of him wherewith to wait for better things to come. Their plan was ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... animated yarn. It was too bad that there was no painter at hand to transfer to canvas so lovely a picture as this girl in her white frock made, sitting by the firelight in this mellow old room, playing with a white imp of a kitten. It would have made an ideal study in white ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... up your mind?" he cried. "Very well! An usher you shall be, since that is your ideal; but I warn you that I decline all responsibility for the future and that I wash my ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... from those who governed the machine, who ran it and oiled it, and turned it to their own pleasures. He had chosen to be of the multitude whom the machine ground. The brutal axioms of the economists urged men to climb, to dominate, and held out as the noblest ideal of the great commonwealth the right of every man to triumph over his brother. If the world could not be run on any less brutal plan than this creed of success, success, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... different from this. It went on independently of Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself from him. He was good-humoured towards them, but contemptuous. She had always taken it for granted that his point of view was just, and founded upon an ideal scale of things where the life of one person was absolutely more important than the life of another, and that in that scale they were much less importance than he was. But did she really believe that? Hewet's words made her think. She always submitted to her father, just ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... supernatural promises or threats, no supernatural heavens or hells to give it force and life. Subjects who are governed by the threats and promises of a king are merely slaves. They are not governed by the ideal, by noble views of right and wrong. They are obedient cowards, controlled by fear, or beggars governed by rewards, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... accurate and final classification of this particular genus a labor beyond his powers. What shall we say of this habit of variability? Is it a mark of strength or of weakness? Which is nobler,—to be true to one's ideal in spite of circumstances, or to conquer circumstances by suiting one's self to them? Who shall decide? Enough that the twin-flower and the star-flower each obeys its own law, and in so doing contributes each its own part toward making this world the place of diversified beauty which ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... soft ideal scene The work of Fancy, or some happy tone Of meditation, slipping in between The beauty coming ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... on the march; simple to operate. Loads in daylight with Kodak Film Cartridges. Ideal for the equipment of every detachment of Boy Scouts. Negatives can be easily developed ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... for the first twenty miles of their journey by trolley, since that would take them out into the real country and beyond the suburbs, where there were many paved streets, which were anything but ideal for tramping. ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland
... figure, the old master attracts the spectator's attention and keeps it directed towards the more sublime parts of the human figure, and in particular the eyes, which we ordinarily describe as the spiritual organs. In this picture, colouring and design conspire to produce an ideal and mystical impression. The vermilion of the cheeks does not recall the natural appearance of the skin; it rather seems as if the old master has applied the roses of Paradise to the faces of the Mother ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modem novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. The Blue-Book is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner. He has his tedious document humain, his miserable little coin de la creation, into which he peers with his microscope. He is to be found at the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... practical. I may say, in passing, that I deplore the entrance of women into the world of struggle. Women are the natural and only custodians of the ideals. We men are compelled to wander, often to wander far, from the ideal. Unless our women remain aloof from action, how are the ideals to be preserved? Man for action; woman to purify man, when he returns stained with the blood ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... and single-hearted nature change or infidelity was an unimaginable crime, something impossible to conceive. Had she not met Edgar she would never have loved any one, she thought: having met him, it was impossible that she should not have loved him, the ideal to her as he was of all manly nobleness and grace, given to her to love by a Power higher ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... black restless eye, and young, silken, brown beard. Also there was an air of certainty and universal comprehension, and though assertion and vanity were apparent, there was no self-consciousness. The girl's dead and gone conspirator had not the same honesty of face, the same curve of the ideal in the broad forehead, the same poetry of rich wavy brown hair, the same goodness of mind and body so characteristic of Jean Jacques—he was but Jean Jacques gone wrong at the start; but the girl was of a nature that could see little difference ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... gift, abstract beauty, the sort of beauty that recalls vaguely some ideal or antique memory. Hence, at various times various people had remarked on her striking resemblance to Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Dante's Beatrice, the Venus of the Luxembourg, one of Botticelli's angels, ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... Bible-illustrations to a comic almanac, but whatever his brain or his fancy could conceive as possible for artist to achieve. Inspiration seized him at each new idea, bold and striking images, fantastic fancies, all the splendors of a magnificent or grotesque ideal. His work was a delirium; in a single morning he has been known to throw off twenty blocks which brought him ten thousand francs. He was, however, perpetually discontented, disgusted with his vocation, and envious of successful painters. He had almost a convulsion one day on hearing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... lamentable conclusion of old Anthony a Wood in his life of George Peele. 'For so it is and always hath been, that most poets die poor, and consequently obscurely, and a hard matter it is to trace them to their graves.' Amid all these miseries, Gissing upheld his ideal. During 1886-7 he began really to write and the first great advance is shown in Isabel Clarendon.[5] No book, perhaps, that he ever wrote is so rich as this in autobiographical indices. In the melancholy Kingcote ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... first set of factors which are the more important. For the cause, as distinguished from the occasions, of our present religious scale of values is, like all major causes, not practical but ideal, and its roots are found far beneath the soil of the present in the beginnings of the modern age in the fourteenth century. It was then that our world was born; it is of the essence of that world that it arose out of indifference toward speculative ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... a child, of robberies and murders committed on travellers in inns, were now revived in her memory:—every little noise she heard made her fall into tremblings; and the very whistling of the wind, which at another time would have lulled her to sleep, now kept her waking: but these ideal terrors had not long possessed her, before she had an occasion of real ones, more shocking than her most ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... representations of the human body, to an attempt to paint the invisible, the spiritual side of man's nature. The work of these artists was great because it was not imitative and because it stretched toward an unending and ideal future. But the idealistic and aspiring temper of early Tuscan art had the defects of its qualities. Its spiritual ecstasy once conventionalized and reduced to a formula led to unreality, and, if not to untruth, at least to an unwholesome ignoring of a part ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... sun was pleasantly warm and the air, it seemed to Cooper, was the freshest he had ever smelled. It was, altogether, a very pleasant place, an Indian-summer sort of land, ideal for a Sunday ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... in brain at six-and-twenty as he is green in soul at sixty. With all the ardour of his youth and temperament he had longed for his mate, dreamed of a life of exalted companionship on the most poetic of isles; and one woman, cleverer than many he had met, had read his dreams, simulated his ideal, and amused herself until the game ceased to amuse her; and the richest nabob of the moment returned from India with a brown skull like a mummy had offered his rupees in exchange for the social state that only the daughter of a great lord could give him. She had laughed good naturedly as Warner flung ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... are going a-fishing in the morning, secure your bait to-night. Worms are nocturnal, and they come out of their holes at night, provided it is not too dry on top. The ideal time for scooping them in is about dusk, after a long warm rain. Get a lantern and with it carry your bait can half filled with wet moss or soft moist earth. You will find, if the conditions are right, swarms of worms along the edges of beaten paths, or in ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... expressions of his personal appreciation of the several books of Paradise Lost), we may note here that Milton would have been quite ready to have his work tried by the test Addison has been applying. In his letter to Samuel Hartlib, sketching his ideal of a good Education, he assigns to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... and dormant affections roused; the husband, the father, the exile, each has a train of though laden with bright anticipations. Fancy and hope hasten to wave their magic wings over the elated heart, and contribute the balm of ideal charms to make even one moment of mortal life ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... into vigorous and well-ordered communities, such as Theodoric and Cassiodorus longed to behold, combining the Teutonic strength with the Roman reverence for law. Religious discord made it impossible to realise this ideal The orthodox clergy loathed and dreaded the invaders "infected", as they said, "with the Arian pravity". The barbarian kings, unaccustomed to have their will opposed by men who never wielded a broadsword, were masterful and high-handed in their demand for absolute ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... story discloses a growing imagination. The passionate hero worship of a boy's heart reveals the fact of a budding ideal. The interest in clubs and desire for companionship tell of awakening social feelings. Life is always the exponent of its own need to one who cares to know, and it further reveals what should ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... desert soon began to break and lift. As they went on the dunes grew to be hills and heights, growing, looming, closing in upon them. Now and again a clump of trees or a shoulder of rock or a stretch of foliage stepped out in relief against the brown of the landscape, revealing more than once ideal grazing-land. Also, as they penetrated deeper into this broken country, the sky overhead showed change. From a spotless blue it revealed tiny splotches of gray-white cloud scudding before upper currents. With the passing hours these clouds became heavy, sullen, and threatening, until the sun, ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... added my interlocutress graciously, "it's quite the same. I suppose you are a specimen, a favourable specimen," she went on, "of young America. Tell me, now, what is young America thinking of in these days of ours? What are its feelings, its opinions, its aspirations? What is its IDEAL?" I had seated myself near Mrs. Church, and she had pointed this interrogation with the gaze of her bright little eyes. I felt it embarrassing to be treated as a favourable specimen of young America, and to be expected to answer for the great republic. Observing my hesitation, Mrs. Church clasped ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... son to become an ideal young man, preach to him that the most valuable time lost, is, when he is neglecting to build up his storage ...
— Plain Facts • G. A. Bauman
... grape-vine, in garden, by roadway, or on hillside, with its vine-stock, branches, blossom, and fruit, tells of the Father's ideal for men, a unity of life with Himself, and with each other. And every bunch of grapes hanging on one stem, with its many in one, tells of that same ideal, the concord of love with the Father and with ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... so eloquently to his fellow-countrymen of the immense superiority of Jesus and so modestly withheld his own name, strikes this note five times with strong, clear touch.[8] He quotes that Eighth Psalm, which so wonderfully gives God's own ideal for man's mastery over all creation. And then he tells us that in Jesus the ideal will yet be fully realized. And that while the whole plan has not yet fully worked out as it will, yet even now we see the Jesus ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... that were ascending the side of the mountain beneath her. The distance, however, was too great to distinguish with precision. After looking at it a moment in breathless wonder, Frances had just come to the conclusion that it was ideal, and that what she saw was a part of the rock itself, when the object moved swiftly from its position, and glided into the hut, at once removing every doubt as to the nature of either. Whether it was owing to the recent conversation that she had been holding with Katy, or to some fancied ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... sermon on patience one day in Christmastide, telling his fellows that a man's life, and still less a monk's, consisted not in the abundance of things that he possessed; and that corporate, as well as individual, poverty, had been the ideal of the monastic houses in earlier days. He was no great preacher, but the people loved to hear his homely remarks, and there was a murmur of sympathy as he pointed with a clumsy gesture to the lighted Crib that had been erected at the foot of one ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... of course the "Parson" himself, of which most significant character hereafter, but—the "Parson's" brother, the "Ploughman". He is a true labourer and a good, religious and charitable in his life,—and always ready to pay his tithes. In short, he is a true Christian, but at the same time the ideal rather than the prototype, if one may so say, of the ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... spread his hair out on his shoulders, and to walk through the streets, picking his teeth with his knife, or once in a while throwing it in such a way that it would stick up in a tree or a board. He presented an eye-filling spectacle, and was indeed the ideal imitation bad man. This being the case, there may be interest in following out his life to its close, and in noting how the bearing of the bad man's title sometimes exacted a very high price of ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... their flight, and the evening shadows are on the water before I come back to myself and the world. O hallowed day! O hallowed spot! foretaste and prophecy to the weary and burden-bowed soul of the new heavens and the new earth where its blessed ideal shall ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... said Harley. "And let me add that the atmosphere of her home was hardly conducive to ideal conduct!" ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the ford near the Lazette trail; along a ridge, the crest of which was hard and barren, making an ideal speedway; they sank into a depression with sickening suddenness, went out of it with a clatter, and then went careening over a level until they reached a broken stretch where speed would ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... was embalming in immortal verse all that it contained of noble and Christian elements, Cervantes sat, perhaps, in his dungeon, writing with his left hand Don Quixote, saddest of books, in spite of all its wit; the story of a pure and noble soul, who mistakes this actual life for that ideal one which he fancies (and not so wrongly either) eternal in the heavens: and finding instead of a battlefield for heroes in God's cause, nothing but frivolity, heartlessness, and godlessness, becomes a laughing-stock,—and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... mythology of Greece and Rome. The sylphs, more especially, have been the favourites of the bards, and have become so familiar to the popular mind as to be, in a manner, confounded with that other race of ideal beings, the fairies, who can boast of an antiquity much more venerable in the annals of superstition. Having these obligations to the Rosicrucians, no lover of poetry can wish, however absurd they were, that such a sect of philosophers ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... consequence at all beside the pain it would give her to know the truth. You don't know mother—nobody does but me—and you can't appreciate in the least what Felix, or, rather, her ideal of Felix, means to her. Mother is, and always has been, a romantic sort of woman, as you might guess"—and she smiled faintly at him—"by the names she gave her children. Her own life has been hard and monotonous, with little pleasure, little beauty—and she has such a beauty-loving ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... pulse-beats, and reacted upon by millions of lateral impulses which bandy it about through the mental spaces as a reflection is sent back and forward in a saloon lined with mirrors. With this altered image of the woman before him, his preexisting ideal becomes blended. The object of his love is in part the offspring of her legal parents, but more of her lover's brain. The difference between the real and the ideal objects of love must not exceed a fixed maximum. The heart's vision cannot unite them stereoscopically into a single ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... early memories, or makes one of the best tangible mementoes of parental care and love. For the young especially, the only ark of safety in the dark and rapidly rising flood of printer's ink is to turn resolutely away from the ideal of quantity to that of quality. While literature rescues youth from individual limitations and enables it to act and think more as spectators of all time, and sharers of all existence, the passion for reading may be excessive, and books which ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... from Schiller as "models of their kind." Schiller had written a severe criticism of Buerger's poems, which had inflamed party strife and embittered the last years of Buerger himself; but even Schiller admits that Buerger is as much superior to all his rivals as he is inferior to the ideal he should have ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... common basis, on which in these respects also the two peoples rested, has been so overgrown as to be almost concealed from our view. That Hellenic character, which sacrificed the whole to its individual elements, the nation to the township, and the township to the citizen; which sought its ideal of life in the beautiful and the good, and, but too often, in the enjoyment of idleness; which attained its political development by intensifying the original individuality of the several cantons, and at length produced the internal dissolution of even local authority; ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... presence of a woman) F. looked shocked, and his partner looked prussic acid. To him (the partner, I mean; he hadn't been out of the mines for years) the "office" was a thing sacred, and set apart for an almost admiring worship. It was a beautiful architectural ideal embodied in pine shingles and cotton cloth. Here he literally "lived, and moved, and had his being," his bed and his board. With an admiration of the fine arts truly praiseworthy, he had fondly decorated the walls thereof with sundry pictures from Godey's, Graham's, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... representative lady of fashion, her husband was quite as much the typical country lord. Tom Jones was still the ideal hero of fiction, and Squire Westerns had not disappeared from real life. Lord Kingsborough was good-natured and kind, but, like the rest of the species, coarse. "His countenance does not promise more than good humor and a little fun, not ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... painting an ideal heroine, gifted with all the virtues which Christian traditions of female perfection throw around such characters, Cornelia would have resigned herself quietly to the inevitable, and exhibited a seraphic serenity amid tribulation. But she was only ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... desired by their superiors or wished by themselves; in the board were to be found former secretaries of prefectures and other relics of the French administration. The personnel did not all correspond to the ideal which floated unwarrantably enough before my eyes at twenty-one, and still less was this the case with the details of the current business. I recollect that, what with the many differences of opinion between officials and governed, or with internal differences of opinion ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... Republic is engaged with the King of Sardinia progresses also favourably, and Savoy and Nice are added to the French territory. Europe may arm, but a people fighting for an ideal is not to be crushed. France has faith in her ideal of liberty and fraternity, questionable or worse though some of the methods are by which she endeavours to realise it. But Danton is right: "il nous faut de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace;" and with superb ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... author to be realistic, and yet nature appears under very different aspects in the pages of the two novelists. But the partisans of Thackeray and those of Zola would probably unite in the opinion that Sir Walter Scott was not realistic; they would call him romantic, and claim that he painted ideal scenes and ideal characters. But among those who read and re-read the novels of Scott, by far the greater number believe that "The Wizard of the North" was true to nature, that Jeanie Deans and Rob Roy and Meg Merrilies were not impossible characters. There ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... their property confiscated, but they should have been compelled to make restitution to the last penny to the poor slaves whom they had systematically robbed. But perhaps this would have been carrying justice too near the ideal. For the great debt to the slave, who was robbed of his honest wage, we go behind the slave-holder, who had been invited by the government to invest his money in blood; we go to the head of the firm for the payment ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... discovery worked upon him so that he spent three days without consummated prayer at all, occupied in the effort to find out whether he could yet indeed worship in purity of spirit, or how far the paralysis of the ideal of mere beauty had crept upon his devotions. In the end he cast the artistic bias, the aesthetic point of view, as far from him as his will would carry, and walked away in another direction, from which, if he turned ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... interest, that half an hour sufficed the party to become perfectly acquainted with it; but they were repaid for their trouble by the discovery of a long, shallow, saucer-like depression, with a smooth bottom, that offered perfectly ideal facilities for the deposit of the oysters while undergoing the process of decomposition, which is the preliminary to the finding of such pearls as they may contain. There was no doubt that this would render the island and its immediate vicinity ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Church, so directly the child of the Roman, was, for that very reason, less dependent on her parent. She was a free colony, not a conquered province. The English Church too was most distinctly national; no land came so near to that ideal state of things in which the Church is the nation on its religious side. Papal authority therefore was weaker in England than elsewhere, and a less careful line was drawn between spiritual and temporal things and jurisdictions. Two friendly powers could take liberties with each other. The national ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... to be the sort of person who always wants his own way, it would be disastrous. Yes—I see. And I comprehend your ideal. I saw such a man once. It was in a railway station. He stood at one side holding all the luggage, and his wife bought the tickets. She was larger than he—I should say about one hundred and fifty pounds larger. To take and hold such an enviable ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various |
