"Imaginary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which it contained, might have endangered the author, and as it was he had no small difficulty, when it was known he was the writer, in escaping from its effects. It consists in a series of letters from an imaginary character, Usbeck, a Persian traveller, detailing the vices, manners, and customs of the French metropolis. The ingenuity, sarcasm, and truth, which that once celebrated production contains, must not make us shut our eyes to its glaring defects; the vices of the age, as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... cordial to the high-born Aelius Lamia (III, 17), whose statue stands to-day amid the pale immortalities of the Capitoline Museum. We have a note of tonic banter to Tibullus, "jilted by a fickle Glycera," and "droning piteous elegies" (I, xxxiii); a merry riotous impersonation of an imaginary symposium in honour of the newly-made augur Murena (III, 19), with toasts and tipsiness and noisy Bacchanalian songs and rose-wreaths flung about the board; a delicious mockery of reassurance to one Xanthias (II, iv), who has married a maidservant and is ashamed of it. He may yet ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... refuse Stanley Baird and cut herself off from him, even after her hopes of Donald Keith died through lack of food, real or imaginary? It would be gratifying to offer this as a case of pure courage and high principle, untainted of the motives which govern ordinary human actions. But unluckily this is a biography, not a romance, a history and not a eulogy. And Mildred ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... of mind, what subtlety, what truth in His replies! How great the command over His passions! Where is the man, where the philosopher, who could so live, and so die, without weakness, and without ostentation? When Plato described his imaginary good man loaded with all the shame of guilt, yet meriting the highest rewards of virtue, he describes exactly the character of Jesus Christ: the resemblance was so striking that all ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... public, it is necessary to deceive them. To deceive them, it is necessary to persuade them that they are robbed for their own advantage, and to induce them to accept in exchange for their property, imaginary services, and often worse. Hence spring Sophisms in all their varieties. Then, since Force is held in check, Sophistry is no longer only an evil; it is the genius of evil, and requires a check in its turn. This ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... and shrieked in correct fashion, while the Indians danced about her, brandishing imaginary tomahawks, and ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... attachment to John Colonna and his love of Laura:" a whimsical junction of detaining causes, in which the fascination of the Cardinal may easily be supposed to have been weaker than that of Laura. In writing to our poet, at Avignon, the Bishop rallied Petrarch on the imaginary existence of the object of his passion. Some stupid readers of the Bishop's letter, in subsequent times, took it into their heads that there was a literal proof in the prelate's jesting epistle of our poet's passion for Laura being a phantom and a fiction. ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Alpinus, murders Memnon in his Poem, and bemires himself in his description of the Rhine, I divert my self in these Satires. 'Tis plain from hence, that Alpinus liv'd in the time when Horace writ these Satires: and suppose Alpinus was an imaginary Name, cou'd the Author of the Poem of Memnon be taken for another? Horace, they may say, liv'd under the reign of the most Polite of all the Emperors; but do we live under a Reign less polite? and would they have a Prince who has so many Qualities in ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... the hero of the Italian snapshots, and Miss Ashwell's face was sufficient confirmation. How thrilling, how wonderful! He was home again, Miss Ashwell would be happy, everybody would be happy! Probably they would be married right away—she had forgotten the imaginary German bride—and maybe Miss Ashwell would let her help her in her shopping. She could go down on Saturday mornings. Aunt Nell knew an awfully good shop for ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... worst you know about him, Thomas! What are his faults?" he snapped, and settled back to squint at his imaginary stage again. ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... stealing into the hearts of Aliena and Oliver, he was no less busy with Ganymede, who, hearing of the danger Orlando had been in, and that he was wounded by the lioness, fainted; and when he recovered he pretended that he had counterfeited the swoon in the imaginary character of Rosalind, and Ganymede said ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... jealously, and had come to regard her daughter as one who had supplanted her in her husband's affections, and her husband as robbing her of the love of her daughter. In truth, Mrs. Samuel Anderson had come to stand so perpetually on guard against imaginary encroachments on her rights, that she saw enemies everywhere. She hated Wehle because he was a Dutchman; she would have hated him on a dozen other scores if he had been an American. It was offense enough that ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... this rumour must have reached them, through women who came to and fro, as some entirely faithful to them were allowed to do, we sent Captain Simon Carfax, the father of little Gwenny, to demand an interview with the Counsellor, by night, and as it were secretly. Then he was to set forth a list of imaginary grievances against the owners of the mine; and to offer partly through resentment, partly through the hope of gain, to betray into their hands, upon the Friday night, by far the greatest weight of gold as yet sent up for refining. He was to have one quarter ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... gentlemen," he said, "I trust you will excuse the gentleman who is playing the part of Marks. He has not been well for several days, and he is somewhat troubled with hallucinations. Of course we know his troubles are all imaginary, ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... expression 'the Soul' has become overfamiliar by constant repetition, and conveys little more than the suggestion of a myth, or the hint of an Imaginary Existence. Now there is nothing in the whole Universe so REAL as the Vital Germ of the actual Form and Being of the living, radiant, active Creature within each one of us,—the creature who, impressed and guided by our Free Will, works out its own delight or doom. The WILL of each man or woman is ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... to make an effort to bring about, if not a union, at least a better understanding and more fraternal intercourse between the Lutherans themselves. We all deplore the divisions that separate us; we believe that the reasons for these divisions are more imaginary than real, and we are persuaded that a free and frank interchange of opinions will materially help to remove whatever obstacles may ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... that the old fellow had not been in London, and I had not formed his acquaintance about the time I was thinking of writing the life of the said Abershaw, not doubting that with his assistance I could have produced a book at least as remarkable as the life and adventures of that entirely imaginary personage, Joseph Sell; perhaps, however, I was mistaken; and whenever Abershaw's life shall appear before the public—and my publisher credibly informs me that it has not yet appeared—I beg and entreat the public to state which it likes best, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... tete-a-tete; she would seek in a thousand ways to tell her love—but she could never quite arrange her avowal in a satisfactory manner. Long before she came to the decisive words which were to kindle his heart to flame in the imaginary dialogue, he would himself take fire by spontaneous combustion, and, falling on his knees, would offer his hand, his heart, and his fortune to her in words taken from "The Earl's Daughter" or ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... tell you," said Bryce, who had no intention of informing her that one person was himself and the other imaginary. "But I can assure you that I am certain—absolutely certain!—that their story is true. The fact ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... know Marmion himself very intimately, the interest gradually deepening as the real character of the Palmer and his relations to the hero are steadily developed. These two take prominent rank with the imaginary characters of literature. James IV, that 'champion of the dames,' and likewise undoubted military leader, is faithfully delineated in accordance with historical records and contemporary estimates. Those desirous of seeing him as he struck the imagination of a poet ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... sneered the prisoner, "to our imaginary encounter on the Champs Elysees, when M. Coquenil claims to have used his teeth ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... hand, those in whom the interior faculties predominate too greatly vividly realize their psychic life, but have more vague and feeble conceptions of material objects, including their own bodies, and attach undue importance to the imaginary and subjective in preference to the objective. The materialists and the illusionists, however, are not entirely composed of these two classes of subjective and objective thinkers. The majority consists ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... window in Magdalen College, Oxford, we behold the work of a worthy pupil of Michael Angelo; we see the great style of painting in its proper place, and applied to its appropriate object. But when we compare his portraits, or imaginary pieces in oil, with those of Titian, Velasquez, or Vandyke, the inferiority is manifest. It is not in the design but the finishing; not in the conception but the execution. The colours are frequently ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... relief at escaping the other fate that awaited him, with scarcely a thought of the dangers which his acceptance might entail. He was not easily frightened and had welcomed the new adventure, dismissing the fears of Jonathan K. McGuire as imaginary, the emanations of age or an ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... encountered her as little as possible, accepted gratefully her interesting, easy billet, and consigned the imaginary young children to a Hades peopled with ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... form, in a way, a separate order with high ideals of the conduct befitting their class. Knighthood was not, however, membership in an association with officers and a written constitution. It was an ideal, half-imaginary society,—a society to which even those who enjoyed the title of king or duke were proud to belong. One was not born a knight as he might be born a duke or count, and could become one only through the ceremony mentioned above. One might be a noble and still not belong ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... most other countries. Something might happen—who could tell? Changes might occur. Possibly a crown would even yet be set upon those pretty, fair curls—which she began to think prettier than ever when she saw the imaginary coronet ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... know how far the sectarians are politically disaffected. Some people imagine that in the event of an insurrection or a foreign invasion they might rise against the Government, whilst others believe that this supposed danger is purely imaginary. For my own part I agree with the latter opinion, which is strongly supported by the history of many important events, such as the French invasion in 1812, the Crimean War, and the last Polish insurrection. The great majority of the Schismatics and heretics are, I believe, loyal ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... matter," replied the spy. "I informed the camp commander—he was a simple sort of leutnant—that I was going to overtake the column, the column, by the bye, having been sent by me on a fool's errand to capture an imaginary laager on Gwelba kopje. According to previous arrangements I fell in with Hauptmann Schmidt's company, and he obligingly set a squad of his Askaris to work to stage the last stand of Scout MacGregor. We trampled the grass, left a few cartridge cases lying about and sent my ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... headlong thoroughfare reaches into the Park,) and retreats suddenly down towards the East River, as if it were disgusted with the smell of old clothes, and had determined to wash itself clean. This excellent intention it has, however, evidently contributed towards the making of that imaginary pavement mentioned in the old adage; for it is still emphatically a dirty street. It has never been able to shake off the Hebraic taint of filth which it inherits from the ancestral thoroughfare. It is slushy and greasy, as if it were twin brother ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... marge Traced by convention stay him from his bent: He had a habitude of mountain air; He brought wide outlook where he went, And could on sunny uplands dwell Of prospect sweeter than the pastures fair High-hung of viny Neufchatel; Nor, surely, did he miss Some pale, imaginary bliss Of earlier sights whose inner landscape still was ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... will, other things being alike, enable it to choke them out altogether. I have shown you that there is no particular in which plants will not vary from each other; it is quite possible that one of our imaginary plants may vary in such a character as the thickness of the integument of its seeds; it might happen that one of the plants might produce seeds having a thinner integument, and that would enable the ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... peasantry; the men dressed in women's clothing, blackened their faces, and fell in armed crowds upon the toll-gates, destroyed them amidst great rejoicing and firing of guns, demolished the toll-keepers' houses, wrote threatening letters in the name of the imaginary "Rebecca," and once went so far as to storm the workhouse of Carmarthen. Later, when the militia was called out and the police strengthened, the peasants drew them off with wonderful skill upon false ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... aunt had gone to the village for ice-cream, and L. and I were left alone in the dining-room. I took her on my lap and had a powerful erection. I almost asked her to play sexually with me in the barn, but instead I spoke of an imaginary girl, the first letters of whose successive names spelled an indecent word for coitus—a word known to almost every Anglo-Saxon child, I fear. L. laughed, but gave no sign of assent. For a neighboring girl of 15 I felt such a drawing that early in the morning I would roll on the floor with my erect ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was fireman, fiercely shovelling imaginary coal; still another at the side of the box grasped the handle of the brake as one ready to die at his post if need be. The last Sullivan paced the length of the wagon-box, being thrown from side to side with fine artistry by the train's jolting. He arrogantly demanded tickets from ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... quitted my own story, and employed myself in imaginary adventures. I figured to myself every situation in which I could be placed, and conceived the conduct to be observed in each. Thus scenes of insult and danger, of tenderness and oppression, became familiar to me. In fancy I often passed the ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... contain strong marks of an exaggerated anticipation of their resources and capabilities, has not, though evidently under the influence of feelings quite incompatible with a correct and disinterested judgment, ventured to rate his imaginary maximum of the profit to be derived from farming in the Illinois, (which appears to be the principal magnet of attraction possessed by the United States,) so high as I have proved by a calculation, to which I defy any one to attach the character of hyperbolical, that the investment ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... I vacated my position at fine leg and merged myself with the slips, who, together with point and cover, were bearing a course towards the labyrinthine ways of the kitchen-garden. After vainly searching for an imaginary ball and finding that we were not actually attacked from the rear, we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... only show how rude and erroneous were their ideas on the structure of the animal body. It may indeed, without injustice, be said that the anatomy of the Hippocratic school is not only erroneous, but fanciful and imaginary in often substituting mere supposition and assertion for what ought to be matter of fact. From this censure it is impossible to exempt even the name of Plato himself, for whom some notices in the Timaeus ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... within. The mind of the vile jester, the tongue that had pursued Duncan Jopp with unmanly insults, the unbeloved countenance that he had known and feared for so long, were all forgotten; and he hastened home, impatient to confess his misdeeds, impatient to throw himself on the mercy of this imaginary character. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... There soon gathered about his standard a sufficient number of powerful peers to enable him to depose the Earl of Angus from the regency and to banish him and all his family to England. The Douglas who figures in the poem is an imaginary uncle of the banished regent, and himself under the ban, compelled to hide away in the shelter provided for him by Roderick Dhu on the lonely island in Loch Katrine. He is represented as having been loved and trusted by King James during the boyhood of the latter, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... warning the kindred of the wild, bade them be quiet till the dawn should bring the mother badger to the lair once more. So, huddled close, they were for a time satisfied with a strangely deliberate game of "King of the Castle," the castle being an imaginary place in the middle of their bed. Towards that spot each player pushed quietly, but vigorously, one or other gaining a slight advantage now and again by grunting an unexpected threat into the ear of a near companion, or by bestowing an unexpected nip on the flank of the cub that held for the moment ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... He had the gift of imagination, psychological insight, the artist's shaping hand. His early romantic plays were put forth as those of Clara Gazul, a Spanish comedienne. His Illyrian poems, La Guzla, were the work of an imaginary Hyacinthe Maglanovich, and Merimee could smile gently at the credulity of a learned public. He took up the short story where Xavier de Maistre, who had known how to be both pathetic and amiably humorous, and ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... not fatigued, their fears that the day would be too warm for him. Mrs. Boultby, who held an opinion that when her lord dropped asleep after a good dinner his face became as the face of an angel, was bending over him, tenderly wiping some perspiration, real or imaginary, from his brow. Boultby, in short, was in his glory, and in a round, sound voix de poitrine he rumbled out thanks for attentions and assurances of his tolerable health. Of Caroline he took no manner of notice as she came near, save to accept what she offered. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... in a single file. An imaginary line to the left of the column designated as the Bank and an imaginary line to the right of the column designated as the Pond. These lines are about three feet apart. Teacher facing column calls out "On the Bank," the players jumping onto the Bank. He then calls out, "In the Pond," the ...
— Games and Play for School Morale - A Course of Graded Games for School and Community Recreation • Various
... insignia expressive of the British armies, and inscribed on the four tablets the number of each regiment who shared in the glories of that day, and by the four tablets be placed the statues of distinguished generals. Thus I have presented you with the external appearance of my imaginary building in honour of the victory of Waterloo; and the interior of this building to be considered as the place of deposit for preserving the powers of the pen, the pencil, and other gems from perishing by water or by fire: to be built of stone, and ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... excellent scholar. He was especially good in figures. When he came to study bookkeeping, he seemed as happy as if he were reading a romance. He mastered with ease the science of single and double entry. He soon became fascinated with the beauties of his imaginary business. For his instructor had prepared for him a regular set of books, and gave him problems, from day to day, in mercantile dealings, which opened up to the youth all the mysteries of 'Dr.' and 'Cr.' Out of these ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... sober and benevolent plans of Mrs. Margaret; for this lady's principal delight was, to assist the needy, and her only earthly or worldly caprice, that of restoring the Tower and its environs, and furnishing, to what she conceived had been its state, in the, perhaps, imaginary days of the exaltation of ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... and the cook received sharp words, which, fortunately for themselves, they were powerful enough to return with interest. Poor old Mrs. Bell cowered lonely and sad by her fireside. Now and then she asked querulously for Mercy, but no Mercy, real or imaginary, ever came near her; and then her old mind would wander off from the land of Beulah, where she really lived, right across to the Celestial City at the other side of the river. Mrs. Bell was too old and too serene to be rendered really unhappy ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... poor devil of an attorney with a large family, and five hundred a year to keep them on, than live the life I do between you and that vulgar beast Caresfoot. It's a dog's life, not a man's;" and poor Bellamy was so overcome at his real or imaginary wrongs that the tears actually rolled down ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... was a three-masted schooner, sleek of line, painted—at one time—a dazzling white. Now with dust dulling the green sides of the bottle, its sails looked loose, its sides grimed. But the name still showed at the prow, and many a time Chris, safe at home in bed, had sailed imaginary voyages in the Mirabelle. It lay there snug and captured, as if at the bottom of a tropical sea, seen through the glass sides of the bottle, and Chris never ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... particular genius of Spenser, than any of his other writings; and having observed that Spenser in a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh calls it, a continued allegory, or dark conceit, he gives us some remarks on allegorical poetry in general, defining allegory to be a fable or story, in which, under imaginary persons or things, is shadowed some real action or instructive moral, or as I think, says he, it is somewhere very shortly defined by. Plutarch; it is that, in which one thing is, related, and another thing understood; it is a kind of poetical ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... lady—that I am wholly unacquainted even with the person of your friend—that the idea of intentional injury on my part, therefore, is ridiculous; and let me add, for the benefit of your friend, that to expect an apology for imaginary injuries, would be the most ridiculous part ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... false name—a step that might go far to invalidate the marriage, by the way—and then leave me to piece-out the broken story, syllable by syllable, to suffer all the torture of a prolonged suspense, all the wasted passion of anger and revenge against an imaginary enemy, to find at last that the man I had loved and trusted, honoured and admired beyond all other men throughout the best years of my life, was the man who had struck this secret blow—it was the conduct of a villain and a coward, John ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the grosser elements of man's nature might be refined away and immortality attained, seems to have suggested an immortality, not merely in an unseen world, but even in this one, to be secured by an imaginary elixir of life. Certain at any rate it is, that so far back as a century or so before the Christian era, the desire to discover this elixir had become a ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... to be a man of twenty-one.' I gave a party on the occasion. She was there. It is unnecessary to name Her, more particularly; She was older than I, and had pervaded every chink and crevice of my mind for three or four years. I had held volumes of Imaginary Conversations with her mother on the subject of our union, and I had written letters more in number than Horace Walpole's, to that discreet woman, soliciting her daughter's hand in marriage. I had never had the remotest intention of sending any ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... some much-persecuted, much-battered Candide, "cultivating his garden" after a thousand disillusions; and holding fast, in spite of all, to the doctrines of some amazing Pangloss. Such encounters with such invincible derelicts must put us most wholesomely to shame. Our neurotic peevishness, our imaginary grievances, our vanity and our pride, are shown up at such moments ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... betraying the Engineer officer unused to handling large bodies of men, and unfamiliar with the military unities, rearranged his command with a straight edge, and distributed it in one way for tactical, and in another for administrative purposes. All the troops lying west of an imaginary line became the left attack under Clery, while those east of it became the right attack. The latter, under Talbot Coke, were ordered to seize the Spion Kop position by night, and entrench it before daybreak, the actual assault being made by Woodgate ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... After all, you are lamenting imaginary misfortunes which I have so imprudently imagined.... They don't exist, and never could exist, for it is a fact that Susy d'Orsel is no longer a rival to be feared. Think rather of the future which smiles upon you. You love and you have ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... face and stooped over to flick an imaginary particle of dust from his trousers' leg. There was but one object in their going and he had not dreamed of being asked what it was. He could not be employed forever in brushing away that speck, and yet he could not, to save his life, construct an answer to Veath's ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... the wide doors and saving themselves, the maddened people, with the cruelty of frenzied beasts, cry and roar, crush one another and perish—not from the fire (for it is only imaginary), but from their own madness. It is enough sometimes when one sensible, firm word is uttered to this crowd—the crowd calms down and imminent death is thus averted. Let, then, a hundred calm, rational voices be raised to mankind, showing them where ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... that Charles Dickens helped to throw the door still wider. Discovering that the child possessed the right to be amused, the imagination of poets and artists addressed itself at last to the most appreciative of all audiences, a world of newcomers, with insatiable appetites for wonders real and imaginary. ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... cheap in those days—it is now if you know how to do it, or else have to. Johnson used to maintain that for thirty pounds a year one could live like a gentleman, and as proof would quote an imaginary acquaintance who argued that ten pounds a year for clothes would keep a man in good appearance; a garret could be hired for eighteen pence a week, and if any one asked your address you could reply, "I am to be found in such a place," Threepence ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... considered sufficient evidence in a court of law; they admitted the necessity of proving that urgent reasons existed for the grant of the dispensation, and the only (p. 284) urgent reason they put forward was an entirely imaginary imminence of war between Henry VII. and Ferdinand in 1503. Cardinal Du Bellay, in 1534, asserted that no one would be so bold as to maintain in Consistory that the dispensation ever was valid;[786] and the papalists were driven to the ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... doctor gave her a week at the utmost. She would like, she said, to have seen the dear Queen ride through the streets amidst the plaudits of the populace, but she supposed it was not to be. So with a lace cap on her head and her nose sharp and shiny she sat up in bed, flicked imaginary bread pellets along the counterpane, talked happily to the boarding-house and made ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... life is, to keep in constant employment that restless active principle within us, which, if not directed right, will be eternally drawing us from real to imaginary happiness. ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... SAVAGE—A living English writer of considerable celebrity, author of "Imaginary Conversations," contributor to several leading periodicals. Mr. Landor is now advanced in years. His humorous verses are few, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... for me, she hardly belonged to the world of reality at all. But when I was sixteen and I met her again, once more at a young people's ball, the glamour suddenly departed. Her appearance had altered and corresponded no longer to my imaginary picture of her. When we met in the dance she pressed my hand, which made me indignant, as though it were an immodest thing. She was no longer a fairy. She had broad shoulders, a budding bust, warm hands; there was youthful coquetry about her—something ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... and imaginary,—none of which however appear to have taken strong hold of the cheerful and courageous temper of the queen,—her attention and that of her council was for some time diverted by the expectation of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... am ready to put forth my hand to find yours. Oh! Anna, you must be everything that is pure and good, through to the very depths of your heart, that mine may not ache in finding it has loved only an imaginary being. Not that I expect you to be perfect—for I shouldn't love you if you were immaculate—but pure in aim and intention and desire, which I believe you ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... may laugh like the rest, and call us the mane, dirty set of Irish vagabonds?" asked the girl, her small eyes kindling with a sense of imaginary insult. ...
— Live to be Useful - or, The Story of Annie Lee and her Irish Nurse • Anonymous
... you couldn't! You are too intensely absorbent, you are too rigidly individual. The flame in you would never consent even for an instant to be the flame in anybody else—any of those people who, for the purpose of the state, are called imaginary. Never!" ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... painters would rather do their pictures under and for a given physical condition, to support and be supported by architecture; but with the unfortunate present-day elimination of paintings from most architectural problems, most artists have to paint their pictures for an imaginary condition. The present production of paintings has become absolutely unmindful of the true, function of a painting, which is to decorate in collaboration with the other ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... but the heaps of snow were a terrible hindrance to his erratic progression. The cold air and the shock of a fall lessened his inebriety, but the imperative impulse of his imaginary mission still hypnotized him. It was past one before he reached the tall house. He did not think it at all curious that the great outer portals should be open; nor, though he saw the milk-cart at the door, and noted Cohen's uncomfortable look, did he remember that he had ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of our religion. I want to do what little I can to put another one in God's name, so that we will worship a supreme human god, so that we will worship mercy, justice, love and truth, and not have the idea that we must sacrifice our brother upon the altar of fear to please some imaginary phantom. See what Christianity has done for the world! It has reduced Spain to a guitar, Italy to a hand organ and Ireland to exile. That is what religion has done. Take every country in the whole world, and the country that has got the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... should ever feel his pulse, or hers, at night. Gwen was none the better for doing it. Nor did she benefit by an operation which her mind called looking matters calmly in the face. It consisted in imaginary forecasts of a status quo that was to come about. She had to skip some years as too horrible even to dream of; years needed to live down the worst raw sense of guilt, and become hardened to inevitable life. Then she filled in her scenario ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Canning, in the mock report of an imaginary speech, represented Erskine as addressing the 'Whig Club' thus:—"For his part he should only say that, having been, as he had been, both a soldier and a sailor, if it had been his fortune to have stood in either of these relations to the Directory—as a man and ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... decorate their palaces with gold and ivory and Minton tiles and mother-o'-pearl, I do not see why Jukes's tale should not be true. He is a Civil Engineer, with a head for plans and distances and things of that kind, and he certainly would not take the trouble to invent imaginary traps. He could earn more by doing his legitimate work. He never varies the tale in the telling, and grows very hot and indignant when he thinks of the disrespectful treatment he received. He wrote this quite straightforwardly at first, but he has since touched ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... is only joking, George; you may sit still. I can guess what you are going to say, papa. 'Is not our voyage imaginary, and should we not be ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... and, opening her window very gently, she flung the shining tresses upon the running water, and watched them for a few moments as they floated down the stream. Then she dressed herself in the character of her imaginary brother, took up the carpet-bag in which she had placed what she chose to carry with her, stole softly down-stairs, and let herself out of a window on the lower floor, shutting it very carefully so as to be sure that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the Thursday following Miss Kreitmann's resignation, while Abe was flicking an imaginary grain of dust from the spotless array of samples, the store door burst open and a short, stout person entered. Abe looked up and, emitting an exclamation, rushed forward with both arms extended in ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... for the whole journey, and you received an advance of wages to provide for your families during your absence. You have lately filled yourselves with meat, and you have become lazy; you have been frightened by the footprints of the Bas-e; thus you wish to leave the country. To save yourselves from imaginary danger, you would forsake my wife and myself, and leave us to a fate which you yourselves would avoid. This is your gratitude for kindness; this is the return for my confidence, when without hesitation I advanced you money. Go! Return to Katariff ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... own. I no longer had any doubt that he was a Christian. I longed to ask him about Jerry, but I found that he did not understand a word of English. It was so dark, also, that he could scarcely see my gestures. I tried every expedient to make him comprehend my meaning. I ran on, and then seized an imaginary person, and conducted him back to the fort. I raised my hands in a supplicating attitude. I shook his hands warmly, to show how grateful I should be if he granted my request. At last I began to hope that he understood me. He shook my hands and nodded, and then, assisting me to carry ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... reformations, which their heresies had rendered necessary. I became of course the butt of every thing which reason, ridicule, malice, and falsehood could supply. They have concentrated all their hatred on me, till they have really persuaded themselves, that I am the sole source of all their imaginary evils. I hope, therefore, that my retirement will abate some of their disaffection to the government of their country, and that my successor will enter on a calmer sea than I did. He will at least find the vessel of state in the hands of his friends, and not of his foes. Federalism ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... circumstances, would have hurt him if he bad known of it, but only through his sympathy and his affection—he was unacquainted with the jealousy of a father. But in Janet's eyes they made their little world together, indispensable to each other as its imaginary hemispheres. She had a quiet pain, in the infrequent moments when she allowed herself the full realization of her love for Kendal, in the knowledge that she, of her own motion, had disturbed its unities ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... listen to our self-love, we shall estimate our lot less by what it is, than by what it is not; shall dwell on its hindrances, and be blind to its possibilities; and, comparing it only with imaginary lives, shall indulge in flattering dreams of what we should do, if we had but power; and give, if we had but wealth; and be, if we had no temptations. We shall be forever querulously pleading our difficulties ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... is also a subject for the inquiries of psychology. At the moment the poor man's imaginary sufferings were positively frightful, and he awoke with a gasp. He had always secretly dreaded growing fat, he had always felt a horror of anything like singing or speaking in public, and the only thing in the world he really feared was the possibility of being ridiculous in Margaret's eyes. ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... a raging thirst for the slaughter of the sons of Kings. But come now, I will tell thee a better way: and that is, to kill me: for so wilt thou effectually circumvent and cheat all these love-sick and imaginary Kings, at a single blow: if, as it seems, I am to be a cause of strife and bloodshed, as ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... your collar to it. Once more now. Don't lie down on the job. All together now." The stranger clucked to an imaginary horse and made a motion of lifting ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... in his stall, hailing him (Israel) with his shod fore-foot clattering against the planks—his customary trick when hungry—and so, down goes Israel's hook, and with a tuft of white clover, impulsively snatched, he hurries away a few paces in obedience to the imaginary summons. But soon stopping midway, and forlornly gazing round at the enclosure, he bethought him that a far different oval, the great oval of the ocean, must be crossed ere his crazy errand could be done; and even then, Old Huckleberry would be found long surfeited ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... sister, he wished to discover, to claim, and restore to the household; but Salome, his wife,—was a monstrous imaginary incubus that ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... not imaginary. The acquiescence in indefinite ideas for the sake of comforted emotions, and the abnegation of strong convictions in order to make room for free and plenteous effusion, have for us all the marks of a too familiar reality. Such a doctrine is an everyday plea for self-deception, ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... third only wanted to coin money under the cloak of marriage; another was not of a nature to make a woman happy; here she suspected hereditary gout; there certain immoral antecedents alarmed her. Like the Church, she required a noble priest at her altar; she even wanted to be married for imaginary ugliness and pretended defects, just as other women wish to be loved for the good qualities they have not, and for imaginary beauties. Mademoiselle Cormon's ambition took its rise in the most delicate ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... Captain Tuck, at the other end of the table, whether that gentleman had ever met the deceased Major-General Scully, and being answered in the negative, he descanted fluently upon the merits of that imaginary warrior. After this unscrupulous manoeuvre the major proceeded to do justice to the wine and to indulge in sporting reminiscences, and military reminiscences, and travelling reminiscences, and social reminiscences, all of which he treated in a manner which called ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... are familiar with those passages and chambers will observe while reading the next chapter that no imaginary attractions are added to the existing facts, but many interesting minor ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... gruff and impossible to make terms with; and then Norton, who was the rich man he had come to see and who wanted the land, coaxed him so skilfully, and ordered all sorts of good things to be brought to him, when he found he had come a good way and was hungry; and the imaginary banquet was very funny, David making inquiries and comments over the dishes he did not know and Norton supplying him with others, till he was satisfied. Then, in soothed good humour, David was easy to deal with, and let his land go a bargain. The acting was really extremely good; ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... novel Mr. Scott returns to modern times, where he is as much at home as when writing of imaginary kingdoms or the days of powder and patches. Mr. Scott's last novel, "The Impostor," had Annapolis in 1776 as its locale, but he shows his versatility by centering the important events of this romance in and ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... sense, for the preservation of body and soul" (as Scaliger [990]defines it); for when the common sense resteth, the outward senses rest also. The phantasy alone is free, and his commander reason: as appears by those imaginary dreams, which are of divers kinds, natural, divine, demoniacal, &c., which vary according to humours, diet, actions, objects, &c., of which Artemidorus, Cardanus, and Sambucus, with their several interpretators, have written great volumes. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... wrote Mrs. Schuyler Van Rennselaer in an article in the "Century Magazine" many years ago, "that I dreamily remember a canvas hippodrome where the Fifth Avenue Hotel stands? Kids curvetting in idiotic pride over imaginary mountain peaks on the rough ground of what is Madison Square? Can it be true that when we looked from our nursery windows towards Sixteenth Street we saw, on a lot foolishly called vacant, the most interesting of possible houses, an abandoned street-car, fitted with a front door and a chimney ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... Catholics and Protestants. Even more inflexible was Remigius, criminal judge in Lorraine. On the title-page of his manual he boasts that within fifteen years he had sent nine hundred persons to death for this imaginary crime.(256) ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... this a custom among Hellenes? It reveals a curious state of society, real or imaginary; but I suppose that at Rome in imperial days (cf. panem et circenses) the theory of meat and drink largesses being ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... Romancing freely, he was hardly conscious when he was lying either on a small scale or on a large, being equally delighted with his own conceits and with the pleasure he was giving to his auditors. While thus recounting real and imaginary incidents, he could almost delude himself into the belief that he was still the bold, radiant Casanova, the favorite of fortune and of beautiful women, the honored guest of secular and spiritual princes, the man whose spendings and gamblings and gifts must be reckoned ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... All of them change)—Ver. 369. This must have been imaginary, as they were not likely to be acquainted with the reason ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Benshie, sometimes called the Shrieking Woman, is an imaginary being, supposed by the Irish to predict, by her shrieks and wails, the death of some member in the family over which she exercises a kind of supervision. To this fable Moore alludes in one ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... one by one," laughed his host, "and prove them imaginary. I see a great good-fortune ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... the people who assumed management of the affair considered it only fair to Sylvia (and to Harboro) to keep him in the background. Sylvia had never permitted Harboro to come to the house to see her. She had drawn a somewhat imaginary figure in lieu of a father to present to Harboro's mind's eye. Her father (she said) was not very well and was inclined to be disagreeable. He did not like the idea of his daughter getting married. She was all he had, and he was ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... and glittering knife as he spoke, with which he made two or three savage cuts and thrusts at imaginary tigers before ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... find it helpful to practice these offensive and defensive weapons when you are alone, standing before your mirror and "playing" that your reflection in the glass is the other person. Send this imaginary other person the psychic vibrations, accompanied by the mental picture suitable for it. Act the part out seriously and earnestly, just as if the reflected image were really another person. This will give you confidence ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... he, with Trelawney and Williams, watched for that fatal plaything, the little boat Ariel, which Trelawney had drawn in her actual dimensions for him on the sands of Arno, while he, with a map of the Mediterranean spread before him, sitting in this imaginary ship, had already made wonderful voyages. And one day as he paced the terrace with Williams, they saw her round the headland of Porto Venere. Twenty-eight feet long by eight she was: built in Genoa from an English model ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... was becoming more arrogant and more irascible in proportion as his right to be so diminished. Secretly disgusted with himself, and deeply humiliated by the shameful intrigue to which he had stooped, he took a secret satisfaction in crushing his accomplice with his imaginary superiority and lordly disdain. According as his humor was good or bad, he called him "my dear extortioner," "Mons. Fortunat," or "Master Twenty-per-cent." But though these sneers and insults drove the obsequious smile from M. Fortunat's lips, he was quite capable of including ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... said, 'if you will take me to see one of my patients—one that will make Miss Alden contented till she has some imaginary trouble of her own. My horse is nearly used up from the long drive I've had ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... "reminds me of an old lady who always insisted on her daughter taking a dose of the medicine her doctor prescribed for her own imaginary complaints. 'How can you hope to be well,' she used to say, 'if you ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... your imaginary customer (I hope so, at least, for the sake of your till), prudence gets the better of me; unless," added Ardworth, irresolutely, and glancing at Helen,—"unless, indeed, you ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sphere into Space, and to the Assembly Hall in our Metropolis, and then to Space again, and of my return home, and of everything that I had seen and heard in fact or vision. At first, indeed, I pretended that I was describing the imaginary experiences of a fictitious person; but my enthusiasm soon forced me to throw off all disguise, and finally, in a fervent peroration, I exhorted all my hearers to divest themselves of prejudice and to become believers in ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... early astronomers, because the revolving earth is rocking like a top, with the result that the pole does not always keep pointing at the same spot in the heavens. Each year the meeting-place of the imaginary lines of the ecliptic and equator is moving westward at the rate of about fifty seconds. In time—ages hence—the pole will circle round to the point it spun at when the constellations were named by the Babylonians. It is by calculating ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... that its loss enfeebles the constitution, and results in impotency, premature decline, St. Vitus's dance, paralysis, epilepsy, consumption, softening of the brain, and insanity. No wonder that conscience and fear become tormenting inquisitors, and that the symptoms are changed into imaginary specters of stealthily ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... monasteries burned their invaluable libraries, and invaded the nunneries. The streets were filled with monks and nuns, running this way and that, shrieking and fluttering, to escape the claws of fiendish Calvinists. The terror was imaginary, for not the least remarkable feature in these transactions was that neither insult nor injury was offered to man or woman, and that not a farthing's value of the immense amount of property was appropriated. Similar scenes were enacted in all the other provinces, with the exception of Limburg, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... colony which made the Bostonian critical of the New Yorker, or gave to the true Virginian a feeling of superiority to the "zealots" of New, England. To the Scotch-Irish or German dweller in the Shenandoah Valley it mattered little whether he lived north or south of an imaginary and disputed line that divided Maryland from Pennsylvania. Political subjection to Virginia could not remove the Blue Ridge Mountains which isolated him far more effectively from Williamsburg than from ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... saying, "fell close outside there," waving a hand up the cellar steps. "Bang! crash! we feel the building shake—so." His hands left their task of counting notes, seized an imaginary person by the lapels of an imaginary coat and ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... a league and a half of terrestrial crust. The weight of it seemed to be crushing down upon my shoulders. I felt weighed down, and I exhausted myself with imaginary violent exertions to turn ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... author in this note is imaginary. The question of title to the lands in the case put, must depend upon the constitution, treaties, and laws of the United States; and a decision in the state court adverse to the claim or title set up under those laws, must, by the very words of the constitution and of the judiciary act, be ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... sufficient to keep body and soul together. We were living on our Red Cross parcels, and we ate none of the German food except the bread. It's the only time I ever worked for nothing and boarded myself. We were punished for every offence, real and imaginary, and when a man is driven harder than he can bear, and refuses to work any more, the methods used to force him to work would put any slave-driver to shame; and we were ready to do anything to try and even up the score. This is ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... An imaginary blossom that never fades has been the dream of poets from Milton's day; but seeing one, who loves it? Our amaranth has the aspect of an artificial flower - stiff, dry, soulless, quite in keeping with the decorations on the average ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... for her does not offend her. What am I saying? It enchants her. She is so much flattered by it, that her sole fear is that it may not be true. Dissipate her alarms, show her that the happiness you offer her and of which she knows the price, is not an imaginary happiness. Go farther; persuade her that she will enjoy it forever, and her resistance will disappear, her doubts will vanish, and she will seize upon everything that will destroy her suspicions and uncertainty. She would have already believed you; already she would have resolved to yield ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... without going to it. But Fiske's range-finder makes no mathematical calculations, nor requires them to be made, and is automatic. A base line permanently fixed on the ship is the one side of a triangle required. The distance of the object to be hit is determined by its being the apex of an imaginary triangle, and at each of the other angles, at the two ends of the base line, is fixed a spyglass. These are directed ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... every meeting with prayers for the death of an old Fellow of College who disliked their movement, or as they certainly do when patriots are telling how short a time the prayers took to the killing of him. I have seen a crowd, when certain Dublin papers had wrought themselves into an imaginary loyalty, so possessed by what seemed the very genius of satiric fantasy, that one all but looked to find some feathered heel among the cobble stones. Part of the delight of crowd or individual is always that ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... Jew, and of the two Apologies addressed to the Emperors, [366:2] Though the meeting with Trypho is said to have occurred at Ephesus, it is now perhaps impossible to determine whether it ever actually took place, or whether the Dialogue is only the report of an imaginary discussion. It serves, however, to illustrate the mode of argument then adopted in the controversy between the Jews and the disciples, and throws much light upon the state of Christian theology. Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius appear to have ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... northern shores of Siberia has been accomplished by the Swedish explorer, Nordenskjoeld. The early attempts made by Willoughby, Chancellor, and Burrough failed even to reach the Siberian coast. Hoping later on to reach China by ascending the Ob to the imaginary Lake Kitai—that is, Kathay, or China—the English renewed their efforts to discover the "north-east passage," and in 1580 two vessels, commanded by Arthur Ket and Charles Jackman, sailed for the Arctic Ocean; but they never ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... know why he did not tell the little woman that he had lied to Ole and Joe and let it go at that. But he seemed to dread having her discover that he had lied at all, and so he kept on lying about those three imaginary men. Perhaps he had a chivalrous instinct that she would feel safer, more at ease, if she thought that others were somewhere near. At any rate he did not tell her that his only partners were two burros ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... Nevertheless in moments of expansion, such as the present, she felt the parallel between her own case and that of Jane did, in certain directions, romantically hold. Fortified by thought of the Miss Minetts' agitated interest in all which might befall her, she indulged in imaginary conversations with that great proconsul, her employer—the theme of which, purged of lyrical redundancies, reduced itself to the somewhat crude announcement that "your daughter, yes, may, alas, not impossibly be taken from you; but I, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... had talks with the sub-manager, and, on various pretexts to get information, I interviewed bankers and money men in the city. Finally, after many conferences, we came to the conclusion that the boasted impregnability of the bank was imaginary, and that the vanity and self-sufficiency of the officials would some day prove a snare to ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell |
