"Imagination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would not convey the full idea of his condition. It is useless to say that he glared; that his knees smote, or that lemon-yellow supplanted brown-ochre on his visage. Words can do much, but they cannot describe the state of that savage on that occasion. The reader's imagination is much more likely to do justice to the situation. To that we ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... Pizzini was the famous restauranteur who was able to keep up a wonderful eating house all through the war, even when the rest of Richmond was nearly starving. Well—in reality, now, we were all seated on the ground around that fire, and very hungry. In imagination we were all gathered 'round Pizzini's with unlimited credit and free to call for just what we wished. One fellow tied a towel on him, and acted as the waiter—with pencil and paper in hand going from guest to guest taking orders—all ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... creatures have derived their lives, to take pleasure in their deaths, or the offering up their blood. They burn incense and other sweet odours, and have a great number of wax lights during their worship; not out of any imagination that such oblations can add anything to the divine Nature, which even prayers cannot do; but as it is a harmless and pure way of worshipping God, so they think those sweet savours and lights, together with some other ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... constraint, and that constraint he thought could be alone effected in an asylum. Dr. Fox, who presided over an establishment of this description in the neighborhood of Bristol, appeared to Mr. C. the individual to whose subjection he would most like to submit. This idea still impressing his imagination, he addressed ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... nothing, but as we listened to the cries for help, and the shouting and splashing of the water, it was evident that an accident had occurred, and it needed very little imagination to picture the men of an overset boat struggling in the water, and being helped ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... stirred the stagnant waters. The first was War. The Baron, or Feudal Lord, carried off the young men of the village to fight: those of them who returned had things to tell of the outside world. They fired the imagination and awakened the enterprise of the lads. The second was Trade at the trading ports: the lads saw, and continued to talk with, the foreign sailors—the Fleming, the German, the man of Rouen or Bordeaux: some of them went on board the ships of the merchant ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... minister sat thinking. Near him on the desk lay a few loose sheets of paper—his sermon notes. Under the suspended pencil in his fingers lay other sheets of paper, blank—his sermon to be. But the minister was not thinking either of what he had written, or of what he intended to write. In his imagination he was far away in a little Western town with a missionary minister who was poor, sick, worried, and almost alone in the world—but who was poring over the Bible to find how many times his Lord and Master had told him to "rejoice and ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... Independence.—The modern Colonial policy of England has, or is thought to have, achieved two results which impress popular imagination:—it has relieved English statesmanship from an unbearable burden of worry and anxiety; it has (as most people believe) changed Colonial unfriendliness or discontent into enthusiastic or ostentatious loyalty. Some politicians, therefore, who are anxious to terminate the secular ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... bricks. [FOOTNOTE 668:1]. An analogous case is presented by the so-called mental cup. On the tenth, so-called avivakya, day of the Soma sacrifice extending over twelve days, there takes place the mental offering of a Soma cup, all the rites connected with which are rehearsed in imagination only; the offering of that cup is thus really of the nature of thought only, but as it forms an auxiliary element in an actual outward sacrificial performance it itself assumes the character of ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... covered with moss or earth, and earth with vegetation, that untravelled Englishmen and Americans are not very familiar with naked rock as a conspicuous element of landscape. Hence, in their conception of a bare cliff or precipice, they hardly ascribe definite color to it, but depict it to their imagination as wearing a neutral tint not assimilable to any of the hues with which nature tinges her atmospheric or paints her organic creations. There are certainly extensive desert ranges, chiefly limestone formations, where the surface is either white, or has weathered down to a dull uniformity of tone which ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... princess kept her room, with the curtains drawn to shut out the dying lake. But she could not shut it out of her mind for a moment. It haunted her imagination so that she felt as if the lake were her soul, drying up within her, first to mud, then to madness and death. She thus brooded over the change, with all its dreadful accompaniments, till she was nearly distracted. As for the prince, she had forgotten him. However ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... dimensions and the serious character of historical paintings. The old academical subjects had disappeared with the cooked juices of tradition, as if the condemned doctrine had carried its people of shadows away with it; rare were the works of pure imagination, the cadaverous nudities of mythology and catholicism, the legendary subjects painted without faith, the anecdotic bits destitute of life—in fact, all the bric-a-brac of the School of Arts used up by generations of tricksters and fools; and the influence of the new principle was evident ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... this feature of minstrelsy perhaps its greatest traditions. Wearing shining silk hats, frock-coats, and lavender trousers, and headed by "the world's greatest minstrel band," the "Forty—Count 'Em—Forty" swayed the heart and moved the imagination of admiring multitudes wherever ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... three hours, they found that the path was descending into a deep and narrow valley. On the way they passed many of the fetish signs, so terrible to the negro's imagination. Pieces of blue string, with feathers and rags attached to them, were stretched across the path. Clumps of feathers hung suspended from the trees. Flat stones, with berries, shells, and crooked pieces of wood, were nailed against the ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... as all the music that ever has been, or ever shall be, composed. When I further consider that these sounds, placed by the interval of a third one above another, do constitute one entire harmony, which governs and comprises all the sounds that by art or imagination can be joined together in musical concordance, that, I cannot but think a significant emblem of that Supreme and Incomprehensible Three in One, governing, comprising, and disposing the whole machine of the world, with ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... story has developed new necessities, and I now find it convenient to quote from that book passages which it could not have contained if cast into the sea at the time stated; for if thrown upon the resources of my imagination I might find the temptation to exaggerate ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... could not see. Blunt scissors, clumsy hands, bad material.... It was a nightmare to Sally. She did not go far enough to imagine the despairs, the aching hands, the tears, which attended the realisation of an evening's botch. She was not really a very humane person. She had both too much imagination for that infirmity of the will, and not enough. She passed from ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... them passed, looked back, stopped and returned. "Gen'lemen, sirs, to you. Mr. Mahch, escuse me by pyo accident earwhilin' yo' colloquial terms. I know e'zacly what cause yo' sick transit. Yass, seh. Thass the imagination. I've had ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... days in the mountains except our party, and he naturally concluded the man had made his ascent from the Crawford House. My eye seemed spell-bound to the glass. I mentally speculated upon the character and destiny of the pilgrim who, at this season, and alone, could climb up those steeps. My imagination invested him with a strange interest. He had wandered far away from the world, and above it. There was something in his mind—perhaps in his destiny—akin to the severity of this barren solitude. The spell was broken ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... wake up mentally. His face took on an alert look and the glow of the born inventor enveloped his whole being. "You see, Miss Douglas, the field of electricity is in one sense limitless. We know so little about it. And I suppose it is true that new things are possible to an extent beyond our imagination." ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... such a jumble of marvels and horrors as were hardly fitting to appear in a sober book like ours, pledged to confine itself to possibilities, if not to facts. Where the narrative should have been truest, if truly told, there the narrator was wildest, drawing freely upon his imagination to fill up the wide gaps between the few conspicuous incidents marking its setting out and winding up. Gap number one was made interesting with bears; gap number two, lively with panthers; gap number three, thrilling with wolves; and where the war-path led into the shades of night, there the woods ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... how far the beliefs of the understanding, the perceptions of the senses, and the delusions of the imagination, may be confounded, the subject belongs not only to theology and moral and political science, but to physiology, in its original and proper use, as embracing our whole nature; and the facts presented may help to conclusions relating to what is justly regarded as the great mystery ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... coming dawn. Through the shadows, the mountain masses loomed formidable and mysterious, vaguely outlined against the deeper gloom of valleys. The melancholy of the scene seemed a fit setting for the cottage that rested invisible within the forest, a half-mile distant from him. In imagination, he saw the withered old woman, his mother, still standing on the threshold, looking toward him, even as he looked toward her, her heart warm with love, her every thought a prayer for his happiness. It ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... never afterwards clouded, the tactics that meant victory: "Make the party policy suit the campaign in the other provinces; leave Quebec to Laurier and me." He foresaw that the issue in Quebec would not be made by the government nor by the bishops; it would be whether the French-Canadians, whose imagination and affections had already been captured by Laurier, would or would not vote to put their great man in the chair of the prime minister of Canada. All through the winter and spring of 1895 Tarte was sinking test ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... had always loved him more as a sister loves a dear brother than as a maiden loves her betrothed husband. She had not seen him for three years. And she had seen so much since they had parted! In truth, his image had grown dim in her imagination. ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Dublin such as it appeared to her soon after the Union; Lord Clonbrony had painted it with convivial enthusiasm, such as he saw it long and long before the Union, when first he drank claret at the fashionable clubs. This picture, unchanged in his memory, and unchangeable by his imagination, had remained, and ever would remain, the same. The hospitality of which the father boasted, the son found in all its warmth, but meliorated and refined; less convivial, more social; the fashion of hospitality had improved. To ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... existed in the trade. Of these he had also been an eye-witness. It was on this account that he felt contrition for not having attended the House on this subject; for there were some cruelties in this traffic which the human imagination could not aggravate. He had witnessed such scenes over the whole coast of Africa: and he could say, that, if their lordships could only have a sudden glimpse of them, they would be struck with horror; and would be astonished, that they could ever have been permitted to exist. ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... looked around the room. "My dear friends are badly fooled," he chuckled with glee. "They believe the chief is with you, and he is not here. Why, they have already spent, in imagination, the money that they are going to derive from the sale of his plumes. What a shock it will be to them when they learn that the bird has flown. I wish I could see their faces when they ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... member wherewith he preserved order in his domestic kingdom, and therefore generally associated Government with the Police. In his view these were to clear away evil-doers and leave every one else alone. The higher objects of Government were, if at all, outlined in the shadowiest form in his imagination. Government imposed taxes—that he was obliged to know. Government maintained the parks; for that he thanked it. Government made laws, but what they were, or with what aim or effects made, he knew not, save only that ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... agitation from the parents to Bertalda, and from Bertalda to the parents; suddenly cast down from that heaven of happiness of which she had dreamed, and overwhelmed with a fear and a terror such as she had never known even in imagination. "Have you a soul? Have you really a soul, Bertalda?" she cried again and again to her angry friend, as if forcibly to rouse her to consciousness from some sudden delirium or maddening nightmare. But when Bertalda only became more and more enraged, when the repulsed parents ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... which the vague and superstitious accounts of the trappers had thrown a delightful obscurity, which we anticipated pleasure in dispelling, but which, in the meantime, left a crowded field for the exercise of our imagination. ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... a joker, and his statements were apt to be somewhat embellished by his vivid imagination, so that we accepted them with caution; but now he looked exultant, and we believed him, especially as he took his hat and stick and ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... repeat the cry of wild birds as a signal when making an attack. Perhaps a whole band was preparing to come in upon her through the windows she had forgotten to examine. There is no knowing to what desperate fancies her fevered imagination might have tortured her, if a whole chorus of hoots had not commenced. So, concluding that if they were not real owls, but men with evil intentions so stupid as to make so much noise, they were not worth lying ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... I awoke with a start: unusual sounds were on the air; and the sinister visage of the past evening's visitor presented itself to my disturbed imagination. I stilled my heart, and listened. The sounds seemed to come from the negro village. I sprang from my bed, and, approaching the window, unclosed the jalousie, and saw a number of negroes pouring down the mountain-side—some bearing large torches, and all yelling ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... her hands down, shudderingly, over her averted face, as though to shut something even from her imagination. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Imagination cannot rise above thee; Near and afar I see thee, and I love thee; My misery away from me I thrust it, For thy perfection I behold, and ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... were not known until the end of the thirteenth century, and were not common for two centuries after that. There was little knowledge that could not pass from mouth to mouth. Such little vernacular literature as did exist was transmitted orally, and no great issue which appealed to the imagination of the masses had as yet come to the front to create any strong desire for the ability to read. As a result, the education of the masses was in hand labor, the trades, and religion, and not in books, and the need for book education ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... native of the city, indicated by his surname, and was born there most likely about the year 1105. His was one of those proud and ambitious natures, in which imagination and enthusiasm are mixed up in far greater proportions, than judgment and sobriety. From his childhood he developed shining parts and an ardor for study, calculated to elicit their full force. To ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... of the sites left something to be desired in particularity. But that, I reasoned, rather made for Tobias's veracity than otherwise. Were the document merely a hoax, as John continued to suspect, its author would have indulged his imagination in greater elaboration. The very simplicity of the directions argued their authenticity. Charlie Webster was inclined to back me in this view, but neither of my friends showed any optimism in regard to the possible ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... of the evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then as he wended his way by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farm-house where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination,—the moan of the whippoorwill from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm, the dreary hooting of the screech-owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fire-flies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... to discern anything in it; to make sure, however, I sang out to the look-out men on the forecastle to keep their eyes wide open, and their answer came so sharp and prompt as to convince me that they were fully on the alert, and that I had allowed my imagination to deceive me. I therefore turned to Saunders with some remark upon my lips in reply to his, when I saw the corposant suddenly leave the gaff- end and go driving away to leeward on the wings of the gale. I naturally expected that it would almost immediately vanish, but it did not; on the contrary, ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... down the steps and away from the village. She knew that the postman, having passed through Olmeta, must now be on the high-road on his way to Perucca, and she felt sure that he must have in his bag the letter of which she had followed, in imagination, the progress ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... took hold on their imagination; the sermon on the stones and the hammer was not soon forgotten. Many years afterwards, some of the older natives when leading in prayer in the church would offer the petition, "O Lord, thy word is like a hammer, take it and with it break ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... may be by the philosophic generalities with which it is filled, he has long inspected manufactures in this country; the name of every place is familiar to him; objects and forms are this time clearly defined to his arid imagination, and he begins to see things through ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... strength and of wealth, it is impossible not to consider every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea as a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the grace of wit, the glow of imagination, the depth of thought, and all the gifts which are bestowed by Providence with an equal hand, turned to the advantage of the democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... exclusively reasoners (of such I cannot judge), nor mere poets (of whom, so far as concerns the union of words with music, I ought to be able to judge), but the few who unite reason and poetry, and appeal at once to the common-sense of the multitude and the imagination of the few. The highest type of this union to me is Shakspeare; and I can comprehend the justice of no criticism on him which does not allow this sense of incomplete satisfaction augmenting in proportion as the poet soars to his highest. I ask again, In ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rivals the most splendid edifices of modern times, while another could perceive nothing but filth and ruins, surmounted by a gaudy mosque and a few glittering minarets. The greater number, it must be acknowledged, have drawn from their own imagination the tints in which they have been pleased to exhibit the metropolis of Judea; trusting more to the impressions conveyed by the brilliant delineations of poetry, than to a minute inspection of what they might have seen with ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... myself to go and get one of the chairs that stood, at a distance, against the wall (she had given herself no concern as to whether I should sit or stand); and while I placed it near her I began, gaily, "Oh, dear madam, what an imagination you have, what an intellectual sweep! I am a poor devil of a man of letters who lives from day to day. How can I take palaces by the year? My existence is precarious. I don't know whether six months hence I shall have bread to put in my mouth. ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... mind imagine the sun-rising itself (as now while I speak of it), I could not foretell it. But neither is that day-break which I discern in the sky, the sun-rising, although it goes before it; nor that imagination of my mind; which two are seen now present, that the other which is to be may be foretold. Future things then are not yet: and if they be not yet, they are not: and if they are not, they cannot be seen; yet foretold ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... the being dissuaded from his plans if he communicated them, he not only formed them in private, but he kept them secretly; and, his imagination filled with the kindness, the tenderness, the excess of fondness he had experienced from his father, beyond any other person in the world, he had thought with delight on the separation from all his other kindred, ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... Zarathustra's habit of designating a whole class of men or a whole school of thought by a single fitting nickname may perhaps lead to a little confusion at first; but, as a rule, when the general drift of his arguments is grasped, it requires but a slight effort of the imagination to discover whom he is referring to. In the ninth paragraph of the Prologue, for instance, it is quite obvious that "Herdsmen" in the verse "Herdsmen, I say, etc., etc.," stands for all those to-day who are the advocates ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... through evolution is a kind of cosmic or biologic legerdemain that baffles and bewilders us. It so far transcends all our earthly knowledge and experience and all the flights of our philosophy that we stand speechless before it. It opens a gulf that the imagination cannot clear; it opens vistas from which we instinctively shrink; it opens up abysms of time in which our whole historic period would be but a day; it opens up a world of struggle, delay, waste, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... self-abnegation, that this or that question as to the estate should be settled in the interest, not of the setting, but of the rising sun. "It is your affair rather than mine, my boy;—do as you like." He could picture to himself in his imagination a pleasant, half-mock melancholy in saying such things, and in sharing the reins of government between his own hands and those of his heir. As the sun is falling in the heavens and the evening lights come on, this world's wealth and prosperity afford no pleasure equal to this. It is this delight ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... sounds began, as she heard the mill-wheel creak and turn and the rush and roar of the water below, common sense came to her aid, and she was able to tell herself that her night alarm might have been due to nothing more than her own startled imagination. ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... curious thing about Katrin Texel was that though her corporeal part might be a direct inheritance from her Burgomeister father and his substantial brewery, her spirit had been designed for an artful fairy of half her size, in order that it might go pirouetting into airy realms of the imagination. For she was gay enough and lightsome enough in her demeanor. She came in with a skip which would have been entrancing in some elfish mignonne who could dance light-foot on spring flowers without crushing them. But when this our solid Burgomagisterial Katrin tripped in, it ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Hessian and British accounts, as well as those of our own local historians, the battle-field on Long Island was a scene of carnage, a pen in which our men were slaughtered without mercy. The confused strife, says one writer, "is too terrible for the imagination to dwell upon." "An appalling massacre," says another, "thus closed the combat." "The forest," writes a Hessian officer, "was a scene of horror; there were certainly two thousand killed and wounded lying about." Lord Howe himself, as we have seen, "computed" that the American ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... were looking at him with intent faces, their interest thoroughly aroused. Wellesly decided to draw on his imagination for any necessary or interesting details that the prospector had not ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... ways as fastidious as Tennyson's versification. The scenes on the desert island are some of them commonplace. The shipwreck and the like remind one of other photoplays, but the rest of the production has a mood of its own. Seen several months ago it fills my eye-imagination and eye-memory more than that particular piece of Tennyson's fills word-imagination and word-memory. Perhaps this is because it is pleasing to me as a theorist. It is a sound example of the type of film to which this chapter is devoted. If you cannot get your local manager to ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... ardent student of character and life; he has wit of the swiftest, the most comprehensive, the most luminous, and humour that can be fantastic or ironical or human at his pleasure; he has passion and he has imagination; he has considered sex—the great subject, the leaven of imaginative art—with notable audacity and insight. He is as capable of handling a vice or an emotion as he is of managing an affectation. He can be trivial, or grotesque, or satirical, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... has made stronger appeal to the imagination of Christendom than even Ancient Egypt, because of its association with the captivity of the Hebrews, whose sorrows are enshrined in the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... anticipated an unpleasant five minutes in Master Bean's company. Imagination boggled at the thought of an ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Felix, but I was so moved by her kindness and generosity that I could not speak. I had received money for services performed, and I had obtained it from Nanny as a loan, to be repaid with interest; but so much money, as a gift, had never entered into my imagination. I could not restrain my feelings; I dropped my face on the counter, to conceal the tears ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... which are described appear all the more dreadful, as is natural, the nearer they are brought to the imagination, but it seems only too probable that the final reckoning in loss of life and material wealth will prove far more stupendous than has even yet ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... dissolve away, And bring me Surrey's fields to take their place: This floor be grass, and draughts as breezes play; Yon curtains trees, to wave in summer's face; My ceiling, sky; my water-jug a stream; My bed, a bank, on which to muse and dream. The spell is wrought: imagination swells My sleeping-room to hills, and woods, and dells! I walk abroad, for naught my footsteps hinder, And fling my arms. Oh! mi! ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... finest descriptive passages seem often languid or diffuse, and not to present to their eyes any distinct picture. Perhaps sometimes this objection may be just; but to paint to the eye is easier than to the imagination—and Wordsworth, taking it for granted that people can now see and hear, desires to make them feel and understand; of his pupil it must not ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... of the priests, and the magnificence of the altar, and the images and vessels of silver and gold, reflecting their splendor, by the light of wax candles, on the sombre pillars, roofs, and windows of the Gothic church, and the effect heightened by exciting music, and other appeals to the taste or imagination, rather than to the reason and the heart. The sermons of the clergy were frivolous, and ill adapted to the spiritual wants of the people. "Men went to the Vatican," says the learned and philosophical Ranke, "not to pray, but to contemplate the Belvidere ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... help laughing outright, in spite of her depression, at the idea of Margaret as an angel; it was so difficult (even to her dressmaking imagination) to fancy where, and how, the wings would be fastened to the brown stuff gown, or the blue ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... sober as an orthodox, theological treatise, though the poem is essentially a work of the most fertile imagination, a drama with all the rich accessories that tradition offered in the matter of colouring and effect. And it is withal exquisitely simple, devout, and noble, breathing a spirituality strangely at variance with the semi-barbaric people with whom ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... in one ear then in the other, picturing to my imagination favours done me, real or imagined, until, to hear them, they might have been my guardian angels; while I went between them silent and mighty sullen, casting about in my mind as to what all ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... Fabien, my friend, whither away? You are letting your imagination run away with you again. A hint from it, and off you go. Come, do use your reason a little. You have seen this young lady again, that is true. You admired her; that was for the second time. But she, whom you so calmly speak of as "Jeanne," ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... in agitation. "Why don't you go to a doctor? Why don't you take care of your health? My dear, darling Sasha," she said, and tears gushed from her eyes and for some reason there rose before her imagination Andrey Andreitch and the naked lady with the vase, and all her past which seemed now as far away as her childhood; and she began crying because Sasha no longer seemed to her so novel, so cultured, and so interesting as the year before. ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... very bitter and a very surprising thing for me to hear her speak in this way. Trouble I knew she must have suffered on Ken's Island; but this was a story beyond all imagination. And what could I say to her, what comfort give her—I, a rough-hearted sailor, who, nevertheless, would have cut off my own right hand if that could have served her? Indeed, to be truthful, I had nothing to say, and there we were ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... half-hour which succeeded. For the moment, all present dangers were lost sight of, in the glow of future hopes. Maud's imagination portrayed scenes of happiness, in which domestic duties, Bob beloved, almost worshipped, and her father and mother happy in the felicity of their children, were the prominent features; while Beulah and little ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... there also in his uncommunicating company. Here, I felt, was perhaps the answer to my question, the secret of the enigma that puzzled me; and as I went over my memories of that time, and revived its sombre and almost sinister fascination, I seemed to see an answer looming before my imagination. But it was an answer, an hypothesis or supposition, so fantastic, that my common sense ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... have to avoid, then, even while we carry on our own old process of education, is this development of the powers of so-called self-expression in a child. Let us beware of artificially stimulating his self-consciousness and his so-called imagination. All that we do is to pervert the child into a ghastly state of self-consciousness, making him affectedly try to show off as we wish him to show off. The moment the least little trace of self-consciousness enters in a child, good-by ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... exclaimed Christine in surprise. "I thought it was my imagination. Those four girls you folks ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... armistice first. General Lee won his spurs in Mexico. The plan might fire his imagination—as it would have fired the soul of Caesar or Napoleon. If he refuses to go over the head of Davis, you can then announce the vote of Congress ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... He knows that pine will kindle his fire readily and that one of the hard woods will hold it longest. He knows that out of the leaping flames, whether they be composed of phlogiston or incandescent hydrogen, loved fancies flashed into the minds of the elder race, born of the flicker of flame on the imagination of a primitive people, backed by dark forests, night and wind-riding storms. If he have the hardihood let him light his Yule log in the winter twilight of the snowy woods. He will do well to pick a spot where ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... homage bestowed by their descendants. Such a system could not fail to establish a belief in good and evil genii, and of tutelar spirits presiding over families, towns, cities, houses, mountains, and other particular places. It afterwards required no great stretch of the imagination to give to these "airy nothings a ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... more congenial theme than this of bravery and beauty, youth and fame, immortal honour and untimely death; nor could any sculptor of death have poetised the theme more thoroughly than Agostino Busti, whose simple instinct, unlike that of Michelangelo, led him to subordinate his own imagination to the pathos ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... irrevocably, from without. She had thought herself prepared for this ending of hope. She had even, imagining herself hardened and indifferent, gone in advance of it and had sought to put the past under her feet and to build up a new life. But she had not been prepared; that she now knew. The imagination of the fact was not its realisation in her very blood and bones, nor the standing ready, armed for the blow, this feel of the blade between her ribs. And looking down at the only home she had ever had, ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Generation, they are to be husbanded by another kind of seed, even so it is with Wit which if not applied to some certain study that may fix and restrain it, runs into a thousand Extravagancies, and is eternally roving here and there in the inextricable labyrinth of restless Imagination. ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... shaggy, but perfectly white eyebrows; a snow-white beard of great thickness descended below the middle of his breast. He wore a large white turban, and a white cashmere abbai, or long robe, from the throat to the ankles. As a desert patriarch he was superb, the very perfection of all that the imagination could paint, if we would personify Abraham at the head of his people. This grand old Arab with the greatest politeness insisted upon our immediately accompanying him to his camp, as he could not allow us to remain in his country as strangers. He would ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... Mrs. Shaw was as good-tempered as could be; and Edith had inherited this charming domestic quality; Margaret herself had probably the worst temper of the three, for her quick perceptions, and over-lively imagination made her hasty, and her early isolation from sympathy had made her proud; but she had an indescribable childlike sweetness of heart, which made her manners, even in her rarely wilful moods, irresistible of old; and now, chastened even by what the world called her good fortune, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... settled around the deserts of Karmania and Drangaria—the then natural boundaries of India. And unless history regards as colonists the many thousands of dead men and those who settled for ever under the hot sands of Gedrosia, there were no other, save in the fertile imagination of the Greek historians. The boasted "invasion of India" was confined to the regions between Karmania and Attock, east and west; and Beloochistan and the Hindu Kush, south and north: countries which were all India ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... prophecies of happiness upon the bride and groom, proceeding to particulars which greatly delight the young men, but which cause Ona to blush more furiously than ever. Jokubas possesses what his wife complacently describes as "poetiszka vaidintuve"—a poetical imagination. ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... health was far from being established; and my strength, as may be presumed, was now much reduced by the fatigue of travelling. I shall be able to give but a faint idea of the feelings with which I passed that night, but must leave it to the imagination of my readers. Now once more in the neighborhood of the Convent, and surrounded by the nuns and priests, of whose conduct I had made the first disclosures ever made, surrounded by thousands of persons devoted to them, and ready to proceed to any outrage, as I feared, whenever their interference ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... was larger than he had dared to hope; was ample for the realization of all his plans for the new life in Mexico. From the hour that this was determined, and the time for their sailing fixed, a new expression came into Ramona's face. Her imagination was kindled. An untried future beckoned,—a future which she would embrace and conquer for her daughter. Felipe saw the look, felt the change, and for the first time hoped. It would be a new world, a new life; why not a new love? She could not always be blind to his devotion; and when she saw it, ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... do with Jack? In imagination she saw him in a prison cell, perhaps doomed to drag out all the after years of his life there, and the thought seemed ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... seemed to him that it was not this alone that had decided his fate. He felt as though a grey veil had descended over his whole future; even over all that in his imagination had elevated him above the more ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... centuries of our era two other forms of satire took their rise, viz.:—the Milesian or "Satiric Tale" of Petronius and Apuleius, and the "Satiric Dialogue" of Lucian. Both are admirable pictures of their respective periods. The Tales of the two first are conceived with great force of imagination, and executed with a happy blending of humour, wit, and cynical irony that suggests Gil Blas or Barry Lyndon. The Supper of Trimalchio, by Petronius, reproduces with unsparing hand the gluttony and the blatant vice of the Neronic epoch. The Golden Ass of Apuleius is a clever sketch of contemporary ...
— English Satires • Various
... monotonous surroundings furnish them with little to work upon. The mind, finding scant material for sustained logical deduction, falls back upon contemplation. Intellectual activity is therefore restricted, narrow, unproductive; while the imagination is unfettered but also unfed. First and last, these shepherd folk receive from the immense monotony of their environment the impression of unity.[1182] Therefore all of them, upon outgrowing their primitive fetish and nature worship, gravitate ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... frequently from her work to drive them away, saying, as she did so, "Good bees, make our honey from something else; we gain nothing if you drain our grapes for it; we want these grapes for the winter;" and as she spoke, her imagination sped fleetly forward to the winter, The Virgin must have forgiven her, to give her again the joy of a child in her arms. Ay, a joy! Spite of poverty, spite of danger, spite of all that cruelty and oppression could do, it would still be a joy ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... indicate that such environment was: how a lively soul, acted on by it, did not fail to react, chameleon-like taking color from it, and contrariwise taking color against it, must be left to the reader's imagination—One thing we have gathered and will not forget, That the Old Dessauer is out, and Grumkow in, that the rugged Son of Gunpowder, drilling men henceforth at Halle, and in a dumb way meditating tactics as few ever did, has no share in the foul enchantments ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... who boasts of his modesty will feel no shame at producing nothing. He hides his ineptitude behind this convenient veil whose thickness allows him to hint of the existence of things which are nothing but figments of his imagination. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... that a new idea to you? Ability never asserts itself to its utmost unless fed by the imagination, and I don't know yet whether Allen possesses either. Success in any line depends upon the extent of ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... It was the threat material in the great game of bluff he was playing, and it had taken even me by surprise. He was one of those incredibly stupid energetic people who seem sent by heaven to create disasters. His energy to the first glance seemed so wonderfully like capacity! But he had no imagination, no invention, only a stupid, vast, driving force of will, and a mad faith in his stupid idiot 'luck' to pull him through. I remember how we stood out upon the headland watching the squadron circling far away, and how I weighed the full meaning of the sight, seeing clearly ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... one least expects it, on all the gaieties and busy interests of existence (for at this hour the Corso and the Caffes are most crowded)—all this, without any reference to the intrinsic solemnity of such a scene, is calculated, as mere stage effect, powerfully to stir up the sympathies and imagination of a stranger. On the inhabitants, as might be apprehended, such pageants have long since lost all their influence; and I have seen a line extending down a whole street, without deranging a single lounger from his seat, or interrupting for an instant the pleasures ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... Griffeth stood next, owing to his likeness to his eldest brother, the twins soon won her favour also. They were in some respects more interesting, as they were less easily understood, wilder and stranger in their ways, and always full of stories of adventure and warfare, which fascinated her imagination even when she knew that they spoke of the strife between England and Wales. She had a high spirit and a love of adventure, which association with ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... terrible. In "Soul-Examination," a number of boys during the day plant some flags in different parts of a graveyard, under a lonely tree, or by a haunted hill-side. At night they meet together and tell stories about ghosts, goblins, devils, etc., and at the conclusion of each tale, when the imagination is wrought up, the boys, one at a time, must go out in the dark and bring back the flags, until ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... casually heard a former master recite or read aloud from Hebrew and Greek books. This legend do psychologists accept on no evidence at all, because it illustrates a theory which is, doubtless, a very good theory, though, in this case, carried to an extent 'imagination ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... frightened had Manuel, upsetting tradition, declined the offering. With the morbid contrariness of the human imagination, the boy's avid ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... earth a little about the roots of this science, as we have done of the rest, the duty and office of rhetoric is to apply reason to imagination for the better moving of the will. For we see reason is disturbed in the administration thereof by three means—by illaqueation or sophism, which pertains to logic; by imagination or impression, which pertains to rhetoric; and by passion or ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... under the names of Christian parties but savages at heart, put the whole people to ransom and to sack. Indeed, the Wars of Religion were like hell; the tongue can describe them better than the imagination can conceive them. The whole sweet and pleasant land of France, from the Burgundian to the Spanish frontier, was widowed and desolated, her pride humbled by her own sons and her Golden Lilies trampled in the bloody mire. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Bud, without words, how tenuous was his hold upon Eddie. He possessed sufficient imagination to know that his own carefully discipline past, sheltered from actual contact with evil, had given him little enough by which to measure the soul of a ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... live in any climate, least of any his own. As for his mind, that follows his wasted body; it's hectic. He affects a detachment which he will never have. It's a pose. He is exceedingly sentimental, has an imagination which—if you could follow it—might alarm you. I have no doubt at all but that, in imagination, he has you safe in some island of Cythera or another, and has slain every other male inhabitant of it lest some one of them should ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... so, you know. Every bright young imagination is apt to find greater glories in the misty past, or grander possibilities in a still more misty future than in the too practical and prosaic present in which both duty and destiny lie. And so Helena ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... Chandos liked her more and more. He enjoyed her society. She was not witty, she could not amuse a whole room full of people, she could not create laughter, she was not the cause of wit in others, nor did talking to her awake the imagination and arouse all the faculties of ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... things bowed Fleda to the ground and made her bury her face in her hands. But there was one item of happiness from which her thoughts never even in imagination dissevered themselves, and round it they gathered now in their weakness. A strong mind and heart to uphold hers,—a strong hand for here to rest in,—that was a blessing; and Fleda would have cried heartily but that her feelings were too high wrought. They made her deaf ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... repeat nearly the same arguments, which he had formerly used, respecting necessity, the uniform, and Lady Diana Sweepstakes. To all this Mr. Gresham made no reply, and longer had the young gentleman expatiated upon the subject, which had so strongly seized upon his imagination, had not his senses been forcibly assailed at this instant by the delicious odours and tempting sight of certain cakes and jellies in a pastrycook's shop. "Oh, uncle," said he, as his uncle was going to turn the corner to pursue the road to Bristol, "look at those jellies!" pointing ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... perceptual and conceptual forms as class notions with particular characteristics. Bhik@su who supposes that the determinate character of things is directly perceived by the senses has necessarily to assign a subordinate position to manas as being only the faculty of desire, doubt, and imagination. ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... extremely warm. This was the usual evening seat of the family, especially its elder and more honourable members. How they contrived to stand the very close quarters to the blazing logs, and how they managed never to set themselves on fire, must be left to the imagination. ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... he has completed his grisly task; but it was obviously impossible for anyone in the book to live happily ever after so long as he remained alive. Just how Mr. HARRIS BURLAND and the villainous figment of his lively imagination perform these deeds of dastard-do is not for me to reveal. The publishers modestly claim that in the school of WILKIE COLLINS this author has few rivals. As regards complexity of plot the claim is scarcely substantiated by the volume before me; but if bloodshed be the food of fiction Mr. ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... wretched resorted; mounted a gloomy dirty staircase, and, befriended by the fog, still growing thicker and thicker, and by the early hour of the morning, reached a house previously hired, which, if shocking to the eye and the imagination from its squalid appearance and its gloom, still was a home—a sanctuary—an asylum from treachery, from captivity, from persecution. Here Pierpoint for the present quitted us: and once more Agnes, Hannah, and I, the shattered members of a shattered family, were thus gathered ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... in arms; and at the same time employed his gifts, his riches, and his friends above all things, to increase his power in the city. And now Cato's old admonitions began to rouse Pompey out of the negligent security in which he lay, into a sort of imagination of danger at hand; but seeing him slow and unwilling, and timorous to undertake any measures of prevention against Caesar, Cato resolved himself to stand for the consulship, and presently force Caesar either to lay down his arms or discover his intentions. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Freddy's dignity, and extremely distasteful to him besides. His prospects consisted of a hope that if he kept up appearances somebody would do something for him. The something appeared vaguely to his imagination as a private secretaryship or a sinecure of some sort. To his mother it perhaps appeared as a marriage to some lady of means who could not resist her boy's niceness. Fancy her feelings when he married a flower girl who had become declassee under extraordinary ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... to press, our last extract must be short: it relates to words often enough employed indiscriminately—imagination, conception, fancy. '"Imagination" and "fancy" are frequently confounded together, but are, nevertheless, very distinct in their signification. In the first place, "imagination" implies more of a creative power than "fancy;" it requires a greater ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... made himself as conspicuous by his character and his intellect as by his victories; and the imagination of the French began to be touched by him [1797]. His proclamations to the Cisalpine and Ligurian republics were talked of.... A tone of moderation and of dignity pervaded his style, which contrasted with the revolutionary ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... imagination, high and noble, And the brave heat of a true Florentine: For Spain trumpets abroad her interest In the King's heart, and with a black coal draws On every wall your scoffed at injuries, As one that has the refuse of her sheets, And the sick Autumn of ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... Irish imagination that has devised this dreadful picture of the artful Jenny and Mrs. Poynsett spinning their toils to entrap the whole five brothers. Come, Cecil, take my advice and put it out of your head. Suppose it were true, small blame to ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "you are letting your imagination run away with you; she cannot be the same person; her features are entirely different, and she is ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... have gone unnoticed by the other man. Or best of all, he may try to relate the incident with similar events occurring recently, as in the case of a number of fires, burglaries, or explosions coming close upon each other. Whatever course he chooses, he should use his imagination to good advantage, taking care always to make his rewrite truthful. Here is the way a few rewrite men have ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... with you, the imagination Of partnership in legislation Could only enter in the noddles Of dull and ledger-keeping twaddles, Whose heads on firms are running so, They even must have a King and Co., And hence most eloquently show forth On checks and ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... and patience of the people, in that long sorrowful march through the wilderness, held out as long as it did. Whether fact or fiction, it is one of the most melancholy records in human history. Whether as a mere work of the imagination, or the real experience of an afflicted people, our finer sentiments of pity and sympathy find relief only in ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... happened that Kenneth clattered down the road on the sorrel mare just a moment before the girls emerged from the house, and while he was riding off his indignation at their presence at Elmhurst, they were doing just what his horrified imagination had depicted—that is, penetrating to all parts of the grounds, to every nook in the spacious old gardens and even to the stables, where Beth endeavored to make a friend ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... moral teachers? CRITICISM opens to us the poetry we possess; and, like a magnanimous kingly protector, shelters and fosters all its springing growths. What is criticism as a science? Essentially this—FEELING KNOWN—that is, affections of the heart and imagination become understood subject-matter to the self-conscious intelligence. Must feeling perish because intelligence sounds its depths? Quite the reverse. Greatest minds are those in which, in and out of poetry, the understanding contemplates the will. Then first the soul has its proper strength. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... this battered black hat or compressed within the forlorn squirrel-trimmed gray suit. The dragging movement, the hint of dropping on the seat not from fatigue but from desperation, completed the picture his imagination had already painted of some world-worn, knocked-about creature who had come to the point at which, in his own phrase, ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... six o'clock to the clipped shriek of a whistle. Shortly after, a key turned in his door. There followed the sound of scores of bare feet pattering up and down the hall. Was it imagination or did these muffled footfalls have an inhuman softness?... Suddenly his door flew open. He shrank beneath the bedclothes, peering out with one ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... countenance was visible. What must be the state of Martial brides in general, when the signature of the contract immediately places them at the disposal of an utter stranger, it was beyond the power of my imagination to conceive, if their feelings were at all to be measured by Eveena's under conditions sufficiently trying, but certainly far better than theirs. Nothing was so likely to quiet her as perfect calmness on my ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... thunder and lightning so in my ears and eyes, that I believe, while my blood runs cold. I would not be practised upon—no, not for one of Flushie's ears, and I hate the whole theory. It is hideous to my imagination, especially what is called phrenological mesmerism. After all, however, truth is to be accepted; and testimony, when so various and decisive, is an ascertainer of truth. Now do not tell Mr. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... quickness she so happily discovered in herself, was not so much an honour to her, as what she owed to her sex; which, as I had observed in many instances, had great advantages over the other, in all the powers that related to imagination. And hence, Mrs. Betty, you'll take notice, as I have of late had opportunity to do, that your own talent at repartee and smartness, when it has something to work upon, displays itself to more advantage, than could ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson |
