"Visionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... alone. William Pressley did not speak to the boy at all or notice him in any way. He did not dislike him, for he never disliked anything that was not of some importance. He disapproved of his impractical, visionary character, and thought that it might have rather an undesirable influence over Ruth. For this reason he tacitly discouraged all intimacy between them, but he did not take the trouble to express it and merely ignored the lad. And David, seeing how it was, felt instantly and strongly, ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... this man's impractical nature to help to persuade him to do for himself that which is practicable. Such a man ought to have life insurance, for example, and to have it so protected that he can do nothing visionary and impracticable with it. Make him think of himself, if you can, conferring ideal benefits upon his wife and family. You could never interest him in the bare, trite facts in the case, but when you have gained his interest, see to it that ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... hand. He looked pleased, yet doubtful too for a moment. Then he seemed to banish his hesitation and, with a deprecating smile, said something which she could not understand. She nodded intelligently to get rid of him. Already, from the roof, she caught sight of a great visionary panorama glowing with colour and magic. She was impatient to climb still higher into the sky, to look down on the world as an eagle does. So she turned away decisively and mounted the dark, winding stair till she reached a door. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... less remarkable than these missionaries were those who labored in other spheres. Loyola himself, though visionary and monastic, had no higher wish than to infuse piety into the Catholic Church, and to strengthen the hands of him whom he regarded as God's vicegerent. Somehow or other he succeeded in securing the absolute veneration of his companions, so much so that the sainted Xavier always ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... the train and strode across the park, his imagination playing happy, visionary tunes. He would drop in to-morrow at St. Isidore's on his way back from White and Einstein's. He must see more of those fellows at Henry's clinic; they seemed a good set. And he was not sure that he should answer the Baltimore man so flatly. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... while after. And it was natural that men who captained or accompanied the exodus from existing forms and associations into the doubtful wilderness that led to the promised land, should find more to their purpose in the Old Testament than in the New. As respects the New England settlers, however visionary some of their religious tenets may have been, their political ideas savored of the realty, and it was no Nephelococcygia of which they drew the plan, but of a commonwealth whose foundation was to rest on solid and familiar earth. If what they did was done in a corner, the results ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... bounded by the horizon of the town where they live, some by the particular church to which they belong, some the denomination, some the state, or even the nation. Jesus fixes the horizon of His follower as that of the world. Jesus was visionary. He talked about all nations, a race, ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... Rome, for instance, had for him a sort of talismanic fascination, not unlike that possessed by Jerusalem for the mediaeval Christian. When he spoke of the people or the republic he frequently used those terms in an ideal and visionary sense (as theologians use the Church) rather than in one strictly corresponding with the case of any existing nation, or any hitherto tried form of government. This does not alter the fact that his theories, which have been briefly ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... movements of sympathy for these congregated thousands. A voice, almost unbroken, has sounded out; 'Peculiar and insuperable difficulties prevent a general revival in cities: such are the occupations, such the habits, such the temptations, and such the superabounding iniquity, that it were visionary to hope for any general and powerful work of mercy.' Well, then, had we not better give all up; and let human nature here sink into its natural channels; and let multitudes before our eyes continue ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton
... from our own experience in order to show what has actually been accomplished in the way of fostering the love of music in one Public School. We are aware that this standard would appear entirely visionary to the authorities of some other schools: there are some to whom the idea of one choir singing in two parts seems more than is practicable. But when music is recognised as an integral part of education, ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... have sounded the key-note of Schumann's deepest nature. But these feelings could only find their fullest outlet in the musical form expressly suited to subjective emotion. Accordingly, the "Sturm and Drang" epoch of his life, when all his thoughts and conceptions were most unsettled and visionary, was most fruitful in lyric song. In Heinrich Heine he found a fitting poetical co-worker, in whose moods he seemed to see a perfect reflection of his own—Heine, in whom the bitterest irony was wedded to the deepest pathos, "the spoiled ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... would rather stay with Doris, and she was captivated with the Royall House and Eudora. The children never seemed in the way of the grown people there, and if elderly men talked politics and city improvements,—quite visionary, some thought them,—the young people with Alice and Helen had the garden walks and the wide porch, and discussed the enjoyments of the time with the zest of enthusiastic inexperience but ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... for the first time Bienville the man, Bienville the visionary, Bienville the enthusiast, the dreamer of dreams and the builder of castles. ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... many years. But he was also active in the lumber industry in the Saginaw district and several other things. It was difficult for a man of such mercurial, restless temperament to stay constant to any one occupation; in fact, had he been less visionary he would have been more prosperous, but might not have had a son so gifted with insight and imagination. One instance of the optimistic vagaries which led him incessantly to spend time and money on projects that would not have appealed to a man ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... of abject pauperism,' put in Herbert blandly; 'a reductio ad absurdum of all your visionary Schurzian philosophy, my dear Ernest. Look at it another way, now, and just consider. Which really and truly matters most to you and me, a great work of art or a highly respectable horny-handed son of ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... visionary!" snaps J. Q. "You and your potential grandfather rubbish! What about the grandsons of good Americans? Do you not reckon them in ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... of brilliant and rather mystifying speeches, that there were now three "religions" in Germany—the Lutheran, the Reformed and the Moravian; but that their duty and mission in the world was, not to restore the old Church of the Brethren, but rather to gather the children of God into a mystical, visionary, ideal fellowship which he called the "Community of Jesus." For the present, he said, the home of this ideal "Gemeine" would be the Moravian Church. At Herrnhut and other places in Saxony it would be a home for Lutherans; at Herrnhaag ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... to make him happy. To be sure, I don't say that instead of a poet I would not rather have married a notary or a lawyer, something rather more serious, rather less vague as a profession; nevertheless, such as he was he took my fancy. I thought him a trifle visionary, but charming all the same, and well-mannered; besides he had some fortune, and I thought that once married poetizing would not prevent him from seeking out some good appointment which would set us ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... turbulent reign forced to face great political agitators. However, the King had behind his throne, always, that conservative class (found in every country) that clings tenaciously to the past and dreads the future. The watchword of all William's enemies was "Liberty!" The cry, visionary as it was, served as a rallying point for those who favored some form of French constitutionalism; and while, as a whole, the so-called friends of Liberty were very impracticable, had no definite ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... a hearty laugh at the expense of the visionary, although they did him the justice to believe that his theoretical improvements on the policy of majesty were the ebullition of a generous heart, warm in fraternal regard for the whole ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... But this unfortunate failing in her nephew's wife, developed under her roof and during his absence, had been a severe blow. No one directly blamed her for it, except the late curate, Mr. Warden, and a few extravagant, visionary persons, who deemed it best to abstain totally from the source of so much misery and poverty among their fellow-beings, and to take care, as far as in them lay, to place no stumbling-block in the way of feeble feet. But, strange to say, all the estimable ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... lying in the sunshine with the beauties of Nature around him, whose silent teaching works upon him till the true SPIRIT OF POETRY speaks within his soul, and combats the misanthropy and weakness of the sensuous MAN, showing him that Action is the end of Life, not mere indulgence in abstract and visionary rhapsodies. ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... hand, these long fingers were smooth jointed, he would, while having the same desire for ideality and for everything intellectual, be impulsive and inspirational, would lack a sense of detail and a love for detail in his own work, would be visionary, artistic, emotional. Such a person would be suited to artistic work, such as painting, making designs, models, etc., but could not be trusted to perform anything requiring detail, research or science, and would be utterly useless in any position where discipline or control ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... to shoot in the patches of forest, to fish in the river, and find he knew not what in those wondrous solitudes where man had probably never yet trod, he heard a call, and, brought back to himself from his visionary expedition, he ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... lined with scholarly and costly volumes in glazed cases. The house must have been taken furnished; for it had no congruity with this man of the shirt sleeves and the mean supper. As for the earl's daughter, the earl and the visionary consulships in foreign cities, they had long ago begun to fade in Challoner's imagination. Like Doctor Grierson and the Mormon angels, they were plainly woven of the stuff of dreams. Not an illusion remained to the ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... current of feeling is also recognizable in the 'Dittamondo' of Fazio degli Uberti, composed about the year 1360—a description of visionary travels, in which the author is accompanied by the old geographer Solinus, as Dante was by Virgil. They visit Bari in memory of St. Nicholas, and Monte Gargano of the archangel Michael, and in Rome the legends ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... something visionary in her eyes, which made them look for a moment like the eyes of a woman whom he had not seen till now. Then ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... a heavy sigh answered him, a grunt from the cook, and a moan from Neddie. Our spirits were too low to be stirred even by Blodgett's visionary tales. It was hard to believe that the moon above the mountains was the same that had shone down upon us long before off ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... had not been a cheerful one, subjected to the ever-changing whims of a visionary father, with whom one of her practical cast of mind could have no point of sympathy. And since she came to Lindsleyville it was harder than ever, for there was no neighbor nearer than Gager's, ten miles away, and there was not a woman within fifty miles. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... The introduction of coal meant destruction for this local business of wood cutting, and wiped out the value of many a farm. Coal had to win its way against prejudice and local interest, and it only won out by showing power. I am sure that 75 years ago, if some visionary Yankee had said that coal would be so freely used in New England that cord wood would be almost unsaleable, the public would surely have given him that honorary title which goes with prospective ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... whether (said I to our cordial Friend, Who in the hey-day of astonishment Smiled in my face) this were in simple truth A work accomplished by the brotherhood Of ancient mountains, or my ear was touched 70 With dreams and visionary impulses To me alone imparted, sure I am [7] That there was a loud uproar in the hills. And, while we both were listening, to my side The fair Joanna drew, as if she wished 75 To shelter from some object of her fear. —And hence, long afterwards, when eighteen moons Were wasted, as I chanced ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... them, while the extremists care rather to preach discontent and agitation than to achieve solid results. As a matter of fact, our position is as remote from that of the Bourbon reactionary as from that of the impracticable or sinister visionary. We hold that the Government should not conduct the business of the nation, but that it should exercise such supervision as will insure its being conducted in the interest of the nation. Our aim is, so far as may be, to secure, for all decent, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... agitation on his own part, and that while she thought him so sedulous only to avoid her, he was simply occupied in seeking another. This painful suggestion, which every thing seemed to confirm, again overset all her schemes, and destroyed all her visionary happiness. Yet how to reconcile it with what had passed at their last meeting she knew not; she had then every reason to believe that his heart was in her power, and that courage, or an opportunity more seasonable, was all he wanted to make known his devotion to ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... by no means the least interesting feature of the demonstration. He has none of the look of the visionary, this man who has gone to war with time and space; neither had George Stephenson. He is short and thick-set, with a full face, a heavy moustache hiding his mouth, and heavy eyebrows. He is troubled a little with asthma, which makes him somewhat staccato and breathless in speech, and perhaps ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... people, of his own state, must be for every man the highest objects of his efforts; then only, starting from his own nation, may his wishes have a higher aim. I cannot respect anyone who abandons the soil of patriotism in order to waste his time on visionary schemes in the domain of politics, to wax enthusiastic over universal peace and to call ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... had a very meritorious command of myself, and was the only man in the town fit for a magistrate; for in everything I was seen to be most cautious and considerate. I could not, however, when I saw the turn the affair took to my advantage, but reflect on what small and visionary grounds the popularity of public men ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... opposition-course, or rather I built a castle in the air, on a tolerably solid foundation; and it seemed to me quite romantically honorable to mark out my own path of life, which appeared the less visionary, as Griesbach had already made great progress in a similar way, and was commended for it by every one. The secret joy of a prisoner, when he has unbound the fetters, and rapidly filed through the bars of his jail- window, cannot be greater than was mine as I saw ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... greatness had to endure its price and its counterpoise. Dante was alone—except in his visionary world, solitary and companionless. The blind Greek had his throng of listeners; the blind Englishman his home and the voices of his daughters; Shakespeare had his free associates of the stage; Goethe, his correspondents, a court, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... oppose himself directly to the strong current of popular feeling. With rare dexterity he took the tone, not of an advocate, but of a judge. The danger which seemed so terrible to many honest friends of liberty he did not venture to pronounce altogether visionary. But he reminded his countrymen that a choice between dangers was sometimes all that was left to the wisest of mankind. No lawgiver had ever been able to devise a perfect and immortal form of government. Perils lay thick on the right and on the left; and to keep far from one evil ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... impetuous, ill-balanced friends that surrounded her? Not the noble-minded geographer, Elisee Reclus; not the fiery citizen-count, Rochefort; not the handsome, cultivated Gustave Flourens, already "fey" with the doom to which he had been born; not that kindly visionary, the Vicomte de Coursay-Delmont, now discarding his ancient title to be known only among his grateful, penniless patients as Doctor Delmont; and surely not Professor Tavernier, nor yet that militant hermit, ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... Vegetable Kingdom; no class, nor order, nor genus of more than a few species claims absolute exemption from it, whilst the grand total of unstable forms, generally assumed to be species, probably exceeds that of the stable." Yet he contends that species are neither visionary, nor even arbitrary creations of the naturalist, but realities, though they may not remain true for ever. The majority of them, he remarks, are so far constant, "within the range of our experience," and their forms and characters so faithfully handed down through ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... cherished the hope of some time regaining a complete independence such as that of the Free State. Some ardent spirits dreamt of a Dutch South African Republic with Pretoria for its future capital; and there were probably a few men of the same visionary type in the Colony and the Free State who talked in the same wild way, especially after the Jameson invasion had stirred Dutch feeling to its depths. But from such dreams and such talk it is a long step to a "conspiracy of the Dutch over all South Africa." The ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... traces is good or ill. He knows that society regards him as an outcast, but society's point of view is not the only one, that he knows too, and also, though he be a lecher, a crapulous and bestial fellow at times, at other times he is a poet, a visionary, the only poet that Catholicism has produced since Dante. Huysmans, the apologist of Gilles de Rais,—there he is over yonder, talking to the impressionist painter, that small thin man with hair growing thickly, low down on his forehead—Huysmans ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... assumption is still true, and of the utmost consequence. But ancient theory was compelled to assume, not only that men could give little attention to public questions, but that the attention available would have to be confined to matters close at hand. It would have been visionary to suppose that a time would come when distant and complicated events could conceivably be reported, analyzed, and presented in such a form that a really valuable choice could be made by an amateur. That time is now in sight. There is no longer any doubt that the continuous reporting of an ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... yellow, white, and brown, whirling past, beneath other tarpaulin hoods, or at carriage windows, or shielded by enormous dripping wicker hats, or bared to the pelting rain. Curious odors greeted him, as of sour vegetables and of unknown rank substances burning. He stared like a visionary at the ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... increasing everywhere. So generally is this true, that a person who refuses to eat hot bread, or cake, or biscuit, is deemed singular. He who ventures to lift his voice against it is deemed an ascetic or a visionary. But such a voice must be raised, and heard, too, whether its monitions are ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... It never stirred but at a signal from good sense. It stopped at the first check from good sense. Yet, though disciplined to such obedience, it gave noble proofs of its vigour. In truth, much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world, amidst things as strange as any that are described in the Arabian Tales, or in those romances on which the curate and barber of Don Quixote's village performed so cruel an auto-de-fe, amidst buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin, fountains more wonderful than ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of which pay their stockholders 15 per cent. or more. It can relieve the stagnation and make profitable investment by an active campaign for public and private contracts and for sound and fair concessions, not visionary or get-rich-too-quick schemes. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... projects of setting worlds in order, which are bound to fail. We consider too little plans for putting our own households in order, which might easily be made to succeed. A large part of our seeming ills would be dispelled if we could but turn from the visionary to the practical. We need the influence of vision, we need the inspiring power of ideals, but all these are worthless unless they can ...
— Better Homes in America • Mrs W.B. Meloney
... And yet I am far from sure. What about Dante? Haven't you sometimes stumbled over his grave assurances that this and that did really befall him? Putting aside the feeble notion that he was a deluded visionary, how does one reconcile the artist's management of his poem with the Christian's stem faith? In any case, he was more poet than Christian when he wrote. Milton makes no such claims; he merely prays for the ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... in the rear of the warm sunny shower The visionary boy from shelter fly; For now the storm of summer rain is o'er, And cool, and fresh, and fragrant is the sky. And, lo! in the dark east, expanded high, The rainbow brightens to the setting Sun! Fond fool, that deem'st the streaming glory nigh, How vain the chase ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... derived in part from tribal practices and is supposed to be implemented by the Libyan people themselves in a unique form of "direct democracy." QADHAFI has always seen himself as a revolutionary and visionary leader. He used oil funds during the 1970s and 1980s to promote his ideology outside Libya, supporting subversives and terrorists abroad to hasten the end of Marxism and capitalism. In addition, beginning in 1973, he engaged in military operations ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Jean-Marie is the proud possessor of a fashionable kepi. Besides, we had a glass of Hermitage last night; the glow still suffuses my memory. I was growing positively niggardly with that Hermitage, positively niggardly. Let me take the hint: we had one bottle to celebrate the appearance of our visionary fortune; let us have a second to console us for its occultation. The third I hereby ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... expedition as the opportunity he would have to write an epoch-making book and confound his scientific rivals. In their enthusiasm, the adventurers did not take into consideration the fact that the map might be wrong, or that the strange metals be just visionary deposits. The boys' enthusiasm drowned all doubts in their minds; Zeb and the ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... anything just at the moment. He would merely wonder why, in all these two thousand years, we had not arranged to do anything about what He had said before. He would wonder how we could keep on so, making his great faith for us so poetic, visionary, and inefficient. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to Kitty's side. As he approached her his eyes fastened on the loveliness of her attitude, her fair head. In his own expression there was a visionary, fantastic joy; it was the look of the dreamer who, for once, finds in circumstance and the ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ass thyself! Is it not well to bring away the most we can," returned the visionary, sore dismayed; when, seeing how their talk apart made the Frank suspicious, he relapsed into English with a ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... boys to live without meat or practical jokes, to love truth, honesty, and hard lessons; he would teach girls to forego jewelry and cucumber-pickles, to study physiology, and to abhor flirtations. Visionary, was he? You can not help smiling at a man who has a "vocation," and who wants to give the world a good send-off toward its "goal." But there is something noble about it after all. Something to make ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... these words of my text we must try to listen to them with the ears of a Roman. Here was a poor little insignificant Jew, like hundreds of his countrymen down in the Ghetto, one who had his head full of some fantastic nonsense about a young visionary whom the procurator of Syria had very wisely put an end to a while ago in order to quiet down the turbulent province; and he was going into Rome with the notion that his word would shake the throne ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... there have been visionary theorists or 'cranks' in all ages, and there must have been some basis for this almost universal erroneous opinion in the South that the people of the North advocated social equality or social intercourse between the white and colored races; and yet nothing could be farther from the truth. In ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... sometimes by another, according to occasion and circumstance. He was constructing what seemed to be some kind of a frail mechanical toy; and was apparently very much interested in his work. He was a white-headed man, now, but otherwise he was as young, alert, buoyant, visionary and enterprising as ever. His loving old wife sat near by, contentedly knitting and thinking, with a cat asleep in her lap. The room was large, light, and had a comfortable look, in fact a home-like look, though the furniture was of a humble sort and not over abundant, and the knickknacks ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... result, it is not easy to secure practical foresight on the part of a city council elected for the current year. Its members are afraid of making taxes too heavy this year, and considerations of ten years hence are apt to be dismissed as "visionary." It is always hard for us to realize how terribly soon ten years hence will be here. The habit of doing things by halves has been often commented on (and, perhaps, even more by our own writers than by foreigners) as especially ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... pretensions in right of their conception than I shall venture to do, under the peril of being supposed to characterize their execution. Two remarks only I shall address to the equity of my reader. First, I desire to remind him of the perilous difficulty besieging all attempts to clothe in words the visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams, where a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music; and, secondly, I desire him to consider the utter sterility of universal literature in this ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Italy; and the voluminous tales of Sir Lancelot and Sir Tristram were devoutly studied by the princes and nobles, who disregarded the genuine heroes and historians of antiquity. At length the light of science and reason was rekindled; the talisman was broken; the visionary fabric melted into air; and by a natural, though unjust, reverse of the public opinion, the severity of the present age is inclined to question the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... as you say when you can't," he replied. "But I will come down a little nearer earth, if you prefer. Short of those visionary distances there are features of the prospect either way in which I differently rejoice. One thing is the shining black roofs of the cabs, moving and pausing like processions of huge turtles up and down the street; obeying the gesture of the mid-stream policemen ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... hardened. She was further of peculiar service in keeping all safe and smooth between the ward and guardian. All Beauclerc's romance the general would have called by the German word "Schwaermerey,"—not fudge—not humbug—literally "sky-rocketing"— visionary enthusiasm; and when it came to arguments, they might have turned to quarrels, but for Lady Davenant's superior influence, while Lady Cecilia's gentleness and gaiety usually succeeded in putting all serious dangerous ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... other people think of you, of your plans, or of your aims. No matter if they call you a visionary, a crank, or a dreamer; you must believe in yourself. You forsake yourself when you lose your confidence. Never allow anybody or any misfortune to shake your belief in yourself. You may lose your property, your health, your reputation, other people's confidence, even; but there ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... but right drap-o'-my-heart's-blood stuff, that would waken a body out of their last linen. I wonder where the cummers will anchor their craft?'—'And I'll vow,' said another rustic, 'the wine they quaff is none of your visionary drink, such as a drouthie body has dished out to his lips in a dream; nor is it shadowy and unsubstantial, like the vessels they sail in, which are made out of a cockleshell or a cast-off slipper, or the paring of a seaman's right thumb-nail. I ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... close with the last. He who begins life too cold a reasoner may end it a calculating egotist; and he who is ruled solely by his imagination is in danger of having his mind so ripened as to bring forth the fruits of a visionary. Had it pleased heaven to have left me the dear son I possessed for so short a period, I would rather have seen him leaning to the side of exaggeration in his estimate of men, before experience came to chill his hopes, than to see him scan his fellows with a too philosophical eye in boyhood. ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... taken possession of your visionary mind now?" she queried. "Just when I thought you were quite contented to stay with me, you start off to teach a score or more of ignorant little savages in some obscure part of some obscure region, not yet blessed with the ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... under his blankets unable to sleep, and listened to the north wind. Sometimes Rea mumbled in his slumbers; once his giant form started up, and he muttered a woman's name. Shadows from the fire flickered on the walls, visionary, spectral shadows, cold and gray, fitting the north. At such times he longed with all the power of his soul to be among those scenes far southward, which he called home. For days Rea never spoke a word, only gazed into the fire, ate and slept. Jones, drifting ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... visionary and a poet to be an impartial historian, it is hardly astonishing to note the judgment he passes on his own work, during that same year, 1834: "My history of Little Russia's past is an extraordinarily made thing, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... follow England, especially when she knows the contents of that packet. As for America, she came into this after the great sacrifices had been made. She demands nothing more than is to be yielded up. It is not for the sake of visionary ideas, not for diplomatic precedence that the humanitarians of the world are going to hesitate about ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... though it trod upon a rock! Such a miracle, contrary to all reason, is worthy of acceptance only by the blind, childish, credulity of infidelity. Whatever the object before him, then, it is real; his convictions are soberly and well founded; he runs his race to no visionary, misty goal; but some actual reality is the lode-star of his life. Let us listen to his own explanation: "forgetting those things that are being, reaching forth unto those that are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... know a bit about such things. A big surgery journal, back in the '40s, had published a visionary article on grafting a whole limb, with colored plates as if for a real procedure[A]. Then they'd developed techniques for acclimating a graft to the host's serum, so it would not react as a foreign body. First, they'd transplanted hunks of ear and such; then, in the '60s, fingers, ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... finances of this unhappy country better than they are at present conducted," he added, laughing. "I have great hopes of you as a financier, Ned, since that affair of the Holland loans, and as for myself, Luxembourg has urged me seriously to enter the ministry. 'Tis a curious proposition, but these visionary philosophers, who are trying to pilot the ship of state into a safe harbor, know nothing of their business, and will fetch up on some hidden reef pretty soon, if I mistake not. The Assembly is already held in utter contempt—their sittings are tumultuous ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... I think, fairly produce this as a proof that the progress of civilization over the earth has been directed, set bounds to, and regulated by certain laws framed by Infinite wisdom; and, although such views may by some be deemed visionary, I feel some confidence that these laws are as certain and definite as those which control the movements of the heavenly bodies. I believe moreover, that they are capable in some degree of being studied and reduced to order, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... invasion of Paris. We crawled into a stifling crib of a dark coffee-house, and sucked thick brown sediment out of liliputian cups; we smoked hemp from small-bowled pipes until we fell off into a state of visionary stupor known as "kiff;" we paid our respects to the Kadi, exchanged our boots for slippers, and settled down cross-legged on mats as if we were the three tailors of Tooley Street; we almost consented to have ourselves bled by a Moorish barber—Mahomet Lamarty's ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... The visionary fiction of Walter Pater keeps as nearly to a method of that kind, I suppose, as fiction could. In Marius probably, if it is to be called a novel, the art of drama is renounced as thoroughly as it has ever occurred to a novelist ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... we come to the funny part. To describe the high visionary and mystic Jew like Spinoza or Zangwill is a great and delicate task in which even Dickens might have failed. But most of us know something of the make and manners of the low Jew, who is generally the successful one. Most of us know the Jew who calls himself ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... old stone structure that has stood there for nearly a century. For years I have tried in vain to rent or sell it. I have left no stone unturned, Quinby. I know I am regarded as a visionary, a ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... turn often, although without any hope of ease, or when he is pursued to leap down a precipice, to avoid an enemy just at his back; so, men in the extremest degree of misery, and want, will naturally fly to the first appearance of relief, let it be ever so vain, or visionary. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... et multiple, lugubre et rayonnante, faible et sacree, L'Homme.' The poet thus dreamt of a vast epic, of which the central figure should be no mythical or legendary hero, but Man himself, conceived as struggling upwards from the darkness of barbarism to the light of a visionary golden age. Every epoch was to be painted in its dominant characteristic, every aspect of human thought was to find its fitting expression. The first series could pretend to no such completeness, but the poet promised that the gaps should be filled up in succeeding ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... rural people, remains what it always has been in Sicily and in the isles of Greece. The habits and the passions of his countryfolk have not altered, the echoes of their old love-songs still sound among the pines, or by the sea-banks, where Theocritus 'watched the visionary flocks.' ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... economy, of incorruptible integrity, passed from the earth two years ago; but to those who knew him his memory is as fresh as the verdure above his grave at Greenwood. More lately, one who had been from the outset associated with what to many appeared this visionary plan, to whose capacity and experience, his legal skill, his legislative influence, his social distinction, the work has been always largely indebted, and who was for years the President of the Board, has followed into the silent ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... of the least visionary men of the age, was persuaded that science could put a living being to sleep and wake him up again at the end of an infinite number of years—arrest all the functions of the system, suspend life itself, protect an individual against the action of time for a ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... He lifted his starry eyes with their mystic, visionary rapture fully on the young physician. "And yet I remember how George Eliot prayed that when her troubles came she might get along without being drugged by that stuff—meaning the Christian religion, sir—and I guess I'd kind o' like that me ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... been employed in saving Ghent and in the protection of the English shores against the threat of invasion were squandered by John of Gaunt in a war which he was carrying on alone the Spanish frontier in pursuit of the visionary crown which he claimed in his wife's right. The enterprise showed that the Duke had now abandoned the hope of directing affairs at home and was seeking a new sphere of activity abroad. To drive him from the realm had been from the close ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... cheek, as he thought of the inconsistency of human nature, and reflected how many brave men, whom the yell of the pibroch would have sent headlong against fixed bayonets, as the wild bull rushes on his enemy, might have yet feared to encounter those visionary terrors, which he himself, a man of peace, and in ordinary perils no way remarkable for the firmness of his nerves, was now risking ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... supported by James in the attempt to divert the fur trade from Montreal to Albany by bringing the Iroquois Indians under English control. The scheme, which involved nothing less than the ruin of Canada, was by no means a visionary one. The Five Nations, lying south of the chain of lakes, could profit but little by the fur trade while it remained in French hands. But let Albany replace Montreal as the chief market, and they would become the indispensable middle carriers between the northern tribes and the English. ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... of dogmas founded on the Western Paradise, we must not forget that both of them preached a new Buddha—not the real figure in history, but an unhistoric and unreal phantom, the creation and dream of the speculator and visionary. Amida, the personification of boundless light, is one of the luxuriant growths of a sickly scholasticism—a hollow abstraction without life or reality. Amidaism is utterly repudiated by many Japanese Buddhists, who give no place to his idol on their altars, and reject utterly the teaching ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... into the vault, he observed it began slowly to fill with water. Bailing and pumping were resorted to, and when he had exhausted his own and his wife's strength, they summoned the assistance of the neighborhood. But the vengeance of the visionary lady was perfect; the waters of the lake had forced their way into the vault, and John, after a year or two spent in draining and so forth, died broken-hearted, the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... mystics "are all but unanimous in their refusal to attribute importance to any kind of visionary experience" (Underhill, Mysticism, p. 335). St John of the Cross, Madame Guyon and Walter Hilton are cited as severe ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... ears like the highly coloured visionary dream of some over-enthusiastic Hebrew. Yet this is a calm statement of what is found here. And be it keenly marked, it is a picture which the godly Hebrew of the old time never lost sight of. This is the first thing that stands ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... corrupts a people, and destroys the spirit of liberty. JOHNSON. 'Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual[502]. Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private man. What Frenchman ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... threshold and asking careless questions of Andrews, without coming in and risking the freshness of her draperies by contact with London top-floor grubbiness. The child was, in fact, too full of the reality of her happiness with Donal and Donal's mother to be more than faintly bewildered by a sort of visionary conundrum. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Love, for which the god has taken ample vengeance on him, by perverting his taste and feelings. The grossest of all the absurdities in this dialogue is, attributing to Aristophanes, so much of a scoffer and so little of a visionary, the silly notion of male and female having been originally complete in one person, and walking circuitously. He may be ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... politics, but he was careful to consult the character and prejudices of the late king, Kalakaua. That amiable, far from unaccomplished, but too convivial sovereign, had a continued use for money: Gibson was observant to keep him well supplied. Kalakaua (one of the most theoretical of men) was filled with visionary schemes for the protection and development of the Polynesian race: Gibson fell in step with him; it is even thought he may have shared in his illusions. The king and minister at least conceived between them a scheme of island confederation—the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have enjoyed the friendly status of a partner as a wholesome complement to the ardors of marriage. She knew that her husband differed from the legendary bohemian in having a strictly upright code in money matters, but she wished it could be less visionary. He mentally oscillated between pauperism and riches. Let him fail to sell a picture and he offered to pawn his coat; but the picture sold, he aspired to hire a mansion. In a word, she began to see that he was incapable either of foresight or moderation. Could she ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... Gates. If there was any real danger of those results following from the Persian occupation of Lazica which both nations anticipated, the sum must be considered to have been one of the best investments ever made by a State. Even if we believe the dangers apprehended to have been visionary, yet it cannot be viewed as an exorbitant price to have paid for a considerable tract of fertile country, a number of strong fortresses, and the redemption of an obligation which could not with honor ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... they competent as men? that is, were they men of sober judgment, able correctly to see and record the facts that came under their observation, and not visionary enthusiasts who mistook dreams for realities? This question admits of a short and satisfactory answer. No proof whatever exists that they were visionary men, but abundant proof to the contrary. Their narratives are calm, unimpassioned, and straightforward, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... a being Within me—a strange load my heart did bear, As if some living thing had made its lair Even in the fountains of my life:—a long 2970 And wondrous vision wrought from my despair, Then grew, like sweet reality among Dim visionary ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... there is necessarily neither the same amount of personal knowledge on the part of the electorate, nor do the consequences of a mistaken policy recoil so directly and so unmistakably upon them. These subjects, therefore, are the happy hunting-ground of the visionary and the phrase-maker. I have seen the people of this country talked into a policy with regard to South Africa at once so injurious to their own interests, and so base towards those who had thrown in their lot with ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... Whereat the King smiled, and bid him return to Ireland." The saving was questionable; for to prevent an insurrection by timely concessions, is incomparably less expensive than to suppress it when it has arisen. The "purchase of peace" was equally visionary; for the Irish never appear to have been able to sit down quietly under unjust oppression, however hopeless resistance ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... thought over all manner of plans for removing both children from the influence of their wretched home and drunken parents; but most of these were pronounced by the more experienced to be visionary and not feasible. So they still continued to return to them at night, although, "weather fair or weather foul, weather wet or weather dry," they never failed to be present at their post as early as ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... temperamentally a democrat, he had a great yearning for the reorganization of society in the general interest. His championship in this direction earned him the reputation in some quarters of being full of "fads," a visionary. But his neighbors, who had toiled and suffered beside him through the years, knew "Ed." Partridge, man to man, and held him in high regard; they admired him for his human qualities, respected him for his abilities, and wondered at his theories. ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... life more fully present to her than it had ever been before; and the vision for the time excluded all realities,—all except the returning sun-gleams which broke out on the waters as the evening approached, and mingled with the visionary sunlight of promised happiness; all except the hand that pressed hers, and the voice that spoke to her, and the eyes that looked at her with grave, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... women of the family this sense of unrealized importance grew tenfold in their consciousness, because they had few opportunities of encountering reality in their narrow lives and because as women they were apt to dream of wealth, even of visionary wealth. It cannot be said that Clark's Field had much to do with John's marriage which had taken place in 'sixty-seven, because at that early date it was not considered a large expectation even by the Clarks. But John had a younger sister, Ada or ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... but dress like their fathers, in the skins and furs of animals; they must not drink ardent spirits; and I do not remember whether he extended his inhibitions to the gun and gunpowder, in favor of the bow and arrow. I concluded, from all this, that he was a visionary, enveloped in their antiquities, and vainly endeavoring to lead back his brethren to the fancied beatitudes of their golden age. I thought there was little danger of his making many proselytes from the habits and comforts they had learned from the whites, ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... old chiefs. Cheschapah turned his impudent yet somewhat visionary face upon his father. "What do you know of medicine?" said he. "Two sorts of Indians are among the Crows to-day," he continued to the chiefs. "One sort are the fathers, and the sons are the other. The young warriors are not afraid of the white man. The old plant corn with the squaws. ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... his living with some approach to certainty, he had stopped, thinking it good to be poor, and retrenching time from his work to give to thought; that is to say, he sometimes passed entire days in meditation, absorbed, engulfed, like a visionary, in the mute voluptuousness of ecstasy and inward radiance. He had thus propounded the problem of his life: to toil as little as possible at material labor, in order to toil as much as possible at the labor which is impalpable; in ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... receive also this lesson. In both examples, childish though it be, this Heathen and Christian art is alike sincere, and alike vividly imaginative: the actual work is that of infancy; the thoughts, in their visionary simplicity, are also the thoughts of infancy, but in their solemn virtue they are the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... emblem of fire and sword; the blackness of the other betokened the mourning that attends them. In his train were wild figures in the Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model, giving the whole march a visionary air, as if a dream had broken forth from some feverish brain, and were sweeping visibly through the midnight streets. A mass of people, inactive, except as applauding spectators, hemmed the procession in; and several women ran along the sidewalk, piercing the confusion ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... by the reformers, and which were necessary to a just exercise of power in the people, whose representatives should share in the administration of the government. And many of the leaders in the revolution, even in its incipient stage, on the other hand, had such ambitious views, or visionary projects, that nothing would satisfy them, but an entire relinquishment of power long claimed and exercised by the Kings of this ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... himself to indicating the smallest evolutions of a soul, and all the most secret motives of our every action, giving but a quite secondary importance to the act and fact in itself. It is but the goal, a simple milestone, the excuse for the book. According to them, these works, at once exact and visionary, in which imagination merges into observation, are to be written after the fashion in which a philosopher composes a treatise on psychology, seeking out causes in their remotest origin, telling the why and wherefore of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant |
