"Idealised" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... failure—'but I cannot!' Shelley's weakness was a much finer thing than Hogg's strength. I don't say that Shelley was perfect: his imagination ran away with him to an extent that may be called untruthful; he idealised people, and then threw them over when he discovered them to be futile; but that is the right kind of mistake to make: the wrong kind of mistake is to see people too clearly, and to take for granted that they are not as delightful as ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... devices have served to expose it in its reality and its intensity. This is presumably what Dumas pere meant in the lines which Henley quotes from him: "All he wanted was 'four trestles, four boards, two actors, and a passion.'" The passionate hero either strains towards an idealised object, or he still proclaims his yearning after the ideal by the lamentations with which he curses his ill-fate. Throughout Greek tragedy there is an undercurrent of protest against inexorable Fate which is set against ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... are but two whose pedigree stretches back into the seventeenth century, and is lost in obscurity there. The origin of the vast majority of the claimants is only too well known, or shrewdly suspected: these are (1) copies, more or less unfaithful, of older pictures; (2) idealised portraits, based upon such older ones, or upon the Bust; (3) genuine portraits of unknown persons, valued for some slight or imaginary resemblance to the Bust, or to such older portraits, or for having passed as Shakespeare's, ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... different points of view, record little delicacies of detail, tiny whims and irregularities; and thus one learns more of the variety and humours of the place, its gestures and irritabilities, its failures of purpose or design. The question is whether you like a thing idealised or realised. As to the different methods of interpretation, they can hardly be compared or subordinated. An artist does not choose his method, because ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... information rather bewildering. At Merriston her own situation had far too deeply absorbed her to leave her much attention for other people's. She had only noticed that Helen had been kind to Franklin. She suspected that it was now his ingenuousness that idealised Helen's tolerant kindness. But though her superior sophistication made a little touch of irony unavoidable, it was overwhelmed in the ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... our Hero's tomb was just such a block of spotless marble seen against a background of black, with just such a fair figure recumbent upon it, whose palms and lids and draping the chisel of an artist seemed to have folded and closed and hung,—all idealised again by the magic of the magnesium-light. As the crimson curtain was drawn apart, an organ sounded, and a far-away choir sent into the hush the Ave Verum of ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... He translated the sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti with greater freedom and elegance than Hayley, and wrote a short copy of verses on the Hunger Tower at Pisa, the scene of Ugolino's sufferings. In the preface to "Epipsychidion" he cites the "Vita Nuova" as the utterance of an idealised and spiritualised love like that which his own poem records. In the "Defence of Poetry" he pays a glowing tribute to Dante as the second of epic poets and "the first awakener of entranced Europe." His poetry is the bridge ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... order to develop this gift, but he became a scholar notwithstanding, although he never entirely gave up composing, and playing the piano. While still in his teens, he became acquainted with Wagner's music and grew passionately fond of it. Long before he met Wagner he must have idealised him in his mind to an extent which only a profoundly artistic nature could have been capable of. Nietzsche always had high ideals for humanity. If one were asked whether, throughout his many changes, there was yet one aim, one ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... idle to carry on this comparison, already tedious. The life of Goldoni was one long scene of shifts and jests, of frequent triumphs and some failures, of lessons hard at times, but kindly. Passions and ennui, flashes of heroic patriotism, constant suffering and stoical endurance, art and love idealised, fill up the life of Alfieri. Goldoni clung much to his fellow-men, and shared their pains and pleasures. Alfieri spent many of his years in almost absolute solitude. On the whole character and deeds of the one man was stamped Comedy: the other ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... an artist,—keepsakes, and treasures of every sort. One day she came upon something that made her start back as if stung by an adder. It was a little portrait in an oval frame, a man's face, highly idealised by the artist, and yet strikingly true to life. Evidently the hand of love had depicted those lineaments. The eyes were bright, the lips wore a proud smile, the whole expression was one to charm the beholder. ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... butchery and that romantic love is only lust. But Tolstoy objects to these things because they are real; he really wishes to abolish them. Shaw only objects to them in so far as they are ideal; that is in so far as they are idealised. Shaw objects not so much to war as to the attractiveness of war. He does not so much dislike love as the love of love. Before the temple of Mars, Tolstoy stands and thunders, "There shall be no wars"; Bernard Shaw merely murmurs, "Wars ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... revival was not in England that which the catholic counter-revolution had been on the continent of Europe, primarily a political movement. Its workings were inward, in the sphere of the mind, in thought and faith, in idealised ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... occupied by no other images than those of rivalry, turbulence, and strife. Scenes called into being by Antonina's lightest and hastiest expressions, now rose vague and shadowy before his brooding spirit. Lovely places of earth that he had visited and forgotten now returned to his recollection, idealised and refined as he thought of her. She appeared to his mind in every allurement of action, fulfilling all the duties and enjoying all the pleasures that she had proposed to him. He imagined her happy and healthful, journeying gaily by his side in the fresh morning, with rosy ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... the sculptor and stifled his originality. The great statue of King Khaf-Ra of the Fourth dynasty, seated on his throne with the imperial hawk behind his head, is carved out of diorite, and nevertheless the sculptor has thrown an idealised divinity over the face, which we yet feel to be a speaking likeness of the man. The seated scribe in the Museum of Cairo, with his high forehead, sparkling eyes, and long straight hair divided in the middle, ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... more valuable to us, because it is just this side of the ancient world of which the mass of Greek literature affords a very imperfect view. In Homer indeed this is not the case; but in the Athenian period the dramatists and historians give little information, if we accept the highly idealised burlesque of the Aristophanic Comedy. Of the New Comedy too little is preserved to be of much use, and even in it the whole atmosphere was very conventional. The Greek novel did not come into existence till too late; and, when it came, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... execution of Brown and his captured companions ended the episode, but its influence was destined to be far-reaching. John Brown became idealised. His bearing as he stood between his dead and dying sons, his truth-telling answers, and the evidence of his absolute unselfishness filled many people in the North with a profound respect for the passion that had driven him ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... journeymen of journalism would have left the truth naked. You yourself could have done that—for there is no man to beat you at cold, lucid, scientific statement. But I idealised the bare facts and lifted them into the realm of poetry and literature. The twenty-fourth edition of the book attests ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... first warned that monarch of the Dutch Government's intention to send a fleet up the Thames. She died on April 16, 1689, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. It was while in Dutch Guiana that she met Oroonoko, in the circumstances described in the story. No doubt she has idealised her hero somewhat, but she does not seem to have exaggerated the extraordinary adventures of the young African chief. In the licentious age of the Restoration, when she had become famous—or, rather, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... Yet Walter so idealised the pretty child whom he had found wandering in the rough streets, and so identified her with her innocent gratitude of that night and the simplicity and truth of its expression, that he blushed for himself as a ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... closing. He noticed that almost all of them were full of articles labelled "Dedication." There was Dedication gingerbread, stamped with a moulded representation of the new temple; there were Dedication syrups, Dedication pocket-handkerchiefs, also shewing the temple, and in one corner giving a highly idealised portrait of my father himself. The chariot and the horses figured largely, and in the confectioners' shops there were models of the newly discovered relic—made, so my father thought, with a little heap of cherries or strawberries, smothered in chocolate. Outside one tailor's ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... instincts and give them shape and definiteness. In the Oresteaen trilogy of Aeschylus we have an ever-memorable assertion of the supreme claims of human morality to human allegiance, of the eternal truth that humanity can know no object of reverence and worship except itself idealised, its own virtues victorious over its own vices, and existing in the greatest perfection which it can at any given time conceive. Somewhat the same lesson as that of the Oresteia is taught later, with more of sweetness and harmony, but not with more force, in the Oedipus Coloneus ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar |
