"Visionary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Delivered," who bewitched Rinaldo, one of the Crusaders, by her charms, as Circe did Ulysses, and who in turn, when the spell was broken, overpowered her by his love and persuaded her to become a Christian. The Almida Palace, in which she enchanted Rinaldo, has become a synonym for any merely visionary but ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... visionary, for I am so fast in prison that I cannot get forth. The thought is bitterness. When I recollect where and what I am, and compare it with where and how I ought to be employed, it is misery; but when to this the recollection of my family and the present derangement of their ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... The dreams of the visionary have "come to pass!" the unseen El Dorado of the "fathers" looms, in all its virgin freshness and beauty, before the eyes of their children! The "set time" for the Golden age, the advent of which has been looked for and longed ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... elements, attaining the most satisfactory results at the least possible cost to the student. This project, for a youth without capital, dependent upon his abilities for his personal support, was regarded even by sympathetic friends as visionary. But nothing progressive is accepted as a mere optimistic vision by the predestined reformer. Remote Huguenot and immediate Yankee ancestry is perhaps a good combination for pioneer material. However this may be, his efforts were crystallized, shaped, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... some great iron-tongued funeral bell. Then came the rain, introduced swiftly by the deafening clatter of another thunder crash that made one stagger like a ship in a wild sea, and we strained our eyes to gaze into a visionary chasm cleaved in twain by the furious lightning. Playing upon the face of the unruffled river, with a brilliancy at once awful and enchanting, this singular flitting and wavering of the heavenly electricity, as it flashed haphazardly around all things, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... a Chartist, a Communist, all that is commonly called wild and visionary. Ay! but being visionary is something. It shows a soul, a being not altogether sensual; a creature who looks forward for ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the age to cultivate the spirit of peace, and looked forward with benevolent hope to the ultimate institution of a General Congress of nations for the adjustment of their controversies. But he was no visionary and no enthusiast. He knew that as yet war was often inevitable—that pusillanimity provoked it, and that national honor was national property of the highest value; because it was the best national defence. He admitted only defensive war—but he did not narrowly define it. He held that to be ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... against the Greeks, whom he spoke of as ungrateful wretches. Themistokles refused utterly to join Pausanias, but nevertheless told no one of his treasonable practices, either because he hoped that he would desist, or that his visionary and impossible projects would be disclosed by other means. And thus it was that when Pausanias was put to death, certain letters and writings on this subject were found, which threw suspicion upon Themistokles. The Lacedaemonians loudly condemned him, and many of his own countrymen, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... there it has a sheen like velvet; little blue flames start up and flicker and play about in the glowing depths of the brasier. A mysterious artist comes and adapts that flame to his own ends; by a secret of his own he draws a visionary face in the midst of those flaming violet and crimson hues, a face with unimaginable delicate outlines, a fleeting apparition which no chance will ever bring back again. It is a woman's face, her ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... p. 281. There is doubt as to whether Boisy's tale does not refer to Jeanne la Feronne, a visionary. Varlet de Vireville, Charles VII., ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... uneasiness. "Do you?" she said, making an effort to stay balanced under the visionary gaze of the shining grey eyes. ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... "It seemed not too visionary a hope, for Nat's designs grew prettier and prettier, and the agent bought all I carried him. One week I remember he paid me thirty dollars; and as he handed it to me, seeing how pleased I looked, ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... being so likely to be befooled as the other form of tribunal. This arbitrator, especially, knew the elasticity of an expert's opinion, and therefore I was not alarmed for my client. The amount was soon arrived at by reducing the sum claimed by no less than L90,000. Thus vanished the visionary claim and the expert. He evidently had not been trained by the cunning old surveyor whose experience taught him to be moderate, and ask only twice as much as you ought ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... wain which had borne the sacred body unto Dunum; and they stayed not to follow its track, believing that it carried the precious burden, until it came within the borders of Ardmachia, unto a certain river which is named Caucune. Then the visionary wain disappeared; and the people, frustrated of their hope, unsatisfied and sad, returned ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... "Great expecter," says Thoreau; "great feller," says Sam Staples, "for talkin' big ... but his daughters is the gals though—always DOIN' somethin'." Old Man Alcott, however, was usually "doin' somethin'" within. An internal grandiloquence made him melodious without; an exuberant, irrepressible, visionary absorbed with philosophy AS such; to him it was a kind of transcendental business, the profits of which supported his inner man rather than his family. Apparently his deep interest in spiritual physics, rather than metaphysics, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... gentleness and sweetness of disposition, he was more like Shakespeare than any other Englishman whom I can think of; but in Coleridge the poet soon disappeared, and a little later the philosopher in him faded into the visionary and sophist; he became an upholder of the English Church and found reasons in the immutable constitution of the universe for aprons and shovel-hats. Shakespeare, on the other hand, though similarly endowed, was far more richly ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Demand seems an unreal power because it is intangible; but it is the mightiest power in the world. It is a power that is free for you to use. No one can use it for you. The Mental Demand is not a visionary one. It is a potent force, which you can use freely without cost. When you are in doubt it will counsel you. It will guide you when you are uncertain. When you are in fear it will give you courage. It is the motive power which supplies the energies necessary to the achievement of the ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... Stafford House manifesto, and the received impression, which no force of fact can alter, is, that slave-owners are divided into but two classes—brutalised depraved "Legrees," or enthusiastic, visionary "St. Clairs"—the former, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... retribution, they yet agree with Benjamin Whichcote, the Cambridge Platonist, that "heaven is first a temper, then a place"; while of hell there is much to recall the noble sentence of Juliana of Norwich, the fourteenth-century visionary, "to me was showed no harder hell than sin." "Nothing burneth in hell but self-will," is a saying in the "Theologia Germanica."[24] They insist that the difference between heaven and hell is not that one is a place of enjoyment, the other of torment; ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... Philosophers (a trifle visionary, perhaps) has been speculating as to certain possible (or, perhaps, impossible) results flowing from the practice among publishers of ante-dating their monthly issues. Thus, supposing that the world should be destroyed by fire (and why not? ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... intellect, with studious tastes and habits, but there is too much reason to believe that his genius did not lie in the management of practical life. Details of business were apparently out of his sphere. "It was like cutting stones with a razor," says one who knew him. "He was a visionary," says another, "who always saw a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow." This was a kind of defect which, though it cost her dear, Mrs. Child, of all persons, could most easily forgive. One great success he achieved: that was in winning and keeping ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... was introduced on the state railways of Hungary by M. Barosz, the Hungarian Minister of Commerce, on the 1st of August, 1889. The adoption of the new tariff was ridiculed and condemned as visionary by road experts, who even went so far as to prove to the satisfaction of practical railroad men that the innovation was destined to be a failure. For a month or two it almost seemed as if their prediction ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... An idle signal, for the brittle fleet (I thought I could have died to save it) near'd, Touch'd, clink'd, and clash'd, and vanish'd, and I woke, I heard the clash so clearly. Now I see My dream was Life; the woman honest Work; And my poor venture but a fleet of glass Wreck'd on a reef of visionary gold.' ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... Arthur himself, the cause of it. Since the night when the "ghost," as he called it, first entered his heart, and since the dream of home hovered over his pillow, he had felt as if it might be possibly a visionary counterpart of one of those events which "cast their shadows before," and he had striven right manfully against every impulse which might in any way tend to make himself the fulfiller of it. Often, when the stern reproof, or the sly sneer, had awakened ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... I have lived to wander through fields of six hundred acres north of the Saskatchewan. Thirty years ago any one suggesting settlement on Peace River, or at Athabasca, would have been regarded as a visionary fool. Yet wheat is ground into flour on Peace River, and the settler is at Athabasca; and soft Kansas fall wheat sent to Peace River has by a few years' transplanting been transformed into Number One Hard spring wheat. Canada's arctic belt has shrunk a little each ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... in metaphysical disquisition. But while we condemn his speculative notions as degrading to human nature, and subversive of the most important interests of mankind, we must admit that he has prosecuted his visionary hypothesis with uncommon ingenuity. Abstracting from it the rhapsodical nature of this production, and its obscurity in some parts, it has great merit as a poem. The style is elevated, and the versification in general harmonious. By the mixture of obsolete ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... outgrowth of a project, formed by Hawthorne during his residence in England, of writing a romance, the scene of which should be laid in that country; but this project was afterwards abandoned, giving place to a new conception in which the visionary search for means to secure an earthly immortality was to form the principal interest. The new conception took shape in the uncompleted "Dolliver Romance." The two themes, of course, were distinct, but, by a curious process of thought, one grew directly ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... would have little more effect than a common waggon on the highway; yet those subjects are so poetically treated throughout, the parts have such a correspondence with each other, and the whole and every part of the scene is so visionary, that it is impossible to look at them without feeling in some measure the enthusiasm which seems to have inspired ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... the people handling such things. Much could be said for either type of establishment. The thing must come; it is as logical as one, two, three. There are some, perhaps, who remember the roars of derision which went up when the first automobile garage was established in their town. Such a thing was visionary-there would never be enough machines ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... I think of the heavier stroke which was first to fall. A few days after this dream I was charging myself with being visionary; yet a few of these most impressive dreams, I believe, have been designed for our instruction. My husband was seized with a heavy cold, accompanied by a severe cough, that was increasing; yet he was able to be about the house and barn, giving directions, as to outdoor work, but nothing appeared ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... enable him to purchase a better boat than Prince's old tub. But he did not think much about this matter; in fact, he was gazing at Miss Grace and Miss Emily, as they walked so gracefully on the deck. He was not sentimental, romantic, or very visionary; but these two young ladies were so pretty, and so elegant, and so finely dressed, that he could not help looking at them; besides, they were as sociable now as he could wish. Bobtail joined them in their promenade on the deck, and was admitted to the privilege ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... "You're a scatterbrained visionary!" snaps J. Q. "You and your potential grandfather rubbish! What about the grandsons of good Americans? Do you not reckon them in at ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... in amazement. Mrs. Mowbray almost felt inclined to believe she was a dreamer, so visionary did the whole scene appear. A dense crowd of witnesses stood at the entrance. Foremost amongst them was the sexton. Suddenly a shriek was heard, and the crowd opening to allow ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... impossible: where the contrary is the case, there is nothing too hard to be credited. Something like this was done by the priests of ancient Greece and Rome; and a few centuries ago, tricks of the same nature were practiced by the monks, and other libertines, upon some of the visionary and enthusiastic women of Europe. Hence we need not think it strange, if the Fakiers generally succeed in attempts of this nature; when we consider that they only have to deceive a people brought up in the most consummate ignorance; and that nothing can ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... imaginary pupil, to assume on my own part the age, health, knowledge, and talents required for the work of his education, to guide him from birth to manhood, when he needs no guide but himself. This method seems to me useful for an author who fears lest he may stray from the practical to the visionary; for as soon as he departs from common practice he has only to try his method on his pupil; he will soon know, or the reader will know for him, whether he is following the development of the child and the natural growth ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... not altogether visionary. He had made it his business to find out about what it would cost to get to the Border, and he realized he must have money for other expenses ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... civilization, the air is thick with detritus; here—if only because a long pralaya and fallow time have made the land new,—the detritus is negligible; perhaps it is not even forming, but consumed as we go; because at least we have glimpses of the Way. Result: the mental outlook that extended there, in visionary moments, to some six inches, before one's nose, here has broadened out to take in some seas and mountains; in comparison, it runs to far horizons. I take it that this is the experience of us all. So this is what that wise Solomon meant: ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the world, I have occasionally built castles in the air, and equally of course they have invariably tumbled down in due time with a crash This particular castle however, not only attained to a great elevation in the visionary builder's eyes, but it covered so vast an area of land, that the story of its rise and fall deserves to be placed on record, as a warning to aerial architects and also as a beacon-light to ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... cherished journey to the Holy Land. In Palestine he was treated with coldness as an ignorant enthusiast, capable of subverting the existing order of things, but too feeble to be counted on for permanent support. His motive ideas were still visionary; he could not cope with conservatism and frigidity established in comfortable places of emolument. It was necessary that he should learn the wisdom of compromise. Accordingly he returned to Spain, and put himself to school. Two years spent in preparatory studies at Barcelona, another period ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... was visionary, when Lake explained, as he did in his effort to enlist capital with which to build his first submarine boat, that he could safely submerge his invention and steer it about on the bed of the ocean as readily as a man can steer an automobile about the streets of a city, that while submerged he could ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... to prevent her downward drop from beginning again she searched all the occupations open to her. She could not find one that would not have meant only the most visionary prospect of some slight remote advancement, and the certain and speedy destruction of what she now realized was her chief asset and hope—her personal appearance. And she resolved that she would not even endanger it ever again. The largest part of the little capital ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... I 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 ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... of Sierra Leone. Dr. Vincent justly remarks, that Henry had stood alone for almost forty years, and had he fallen before these few ounces of gold reached his country, the spirit of discovery might have perished with him, and his designs might have been condemned as the dreams of a visionary. The importation of this gold, and the establishment of the African company in Portugal, to continue the remark of the same author, is the primary date, to which we may refer that turn for adventure which sprung up in Europe, which pervaded all the ardent spirits in every country for ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... for telling it to you, it's what brought me to Lunnon Bridge was a quare dhrame I had at home in Ireland, that tould me just to come here, and I'd find a pot of goold." For such was the interpretation given by Shamus to the vague admonition of his visionary counsellor. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... thought myself.... T. Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the greatest man he ever knew; I coincide." Wordsworth's influence is evident in a letter from Coleridge to his brother George in April, 1798: "I love fields and woods and mountains with almost a visionary fondness. And because I have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as that fondness has increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of implanting it in others, and to destroy the bad passions not by combating them but by keeping them in inaction." Under the ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... literature as a profession; Dennie was the second. When inaugurating the Port Folio he wrote of himself: "He has long been urged by a sober wish, or, if the sneering reader will have it so, he has long been deluded by the visionary whim, of making literature the handmaid of fortune, or at least of securing something like independence, by exertion, ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... political events indulge too much in sycophantic flattery, while others have their brains addled by brooding on some fancied wrong, or their minds have lost their even poise by dwelling on insane reforms or visionary projects. All this may have its use, but the subscriber has preferred to look at things in a more cheerful way, to pluck roses rather than nettles, and neither to throw ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... quays, past the Place de la Concorde. The road was so smooth, the day so fine, that as terraces, trees, and fountains went by, it would have needed but a little imagination on his part to believe himself carried away on the wings of Fortune. But the young man was no visionary, and as he bowled along he examined the new leather and straps, and put questions about the hay-merchant to his groom, a young fellow perched at his side looking as cool and as sharp as a stable terrier. The hay-merchant, it ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... opinion, as to the conduct of other Princes and States, has greatly injured us by relaxing our exertions. But the opinion as to pecuniary aid has been still more pernicious. People have flattered themselves with a visionary idea, that nothing more was necessary, than for Congress to send a Minister abroad, and that immediately he would obtain as much money as he chose to ask for. That, when he opened a loan, hundreds would run to see who should have the honor of subscribing to it, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... new husband and new home, her new title indeed, made her seem another woman, and if she thought of Chris at all it was to imagine what he would think of these changes, and to fancy what he would say of them, when they met. No purely visionary meeting can hold the element of passion, and so it was a remote and spiritualized Chris of whom Norma came to think, far removed from the actual man of ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... at the thirtieth of April. On the fifth day from this the Visionary Nun is expected to appear. In my last visit to the Convent I provided myself with a dress proper for the character: A Friend, whom I have left there and to whom I made no scruple to confide my secret, readily consented to supply me with a religious habit. Provide a carriage, ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the Author of All Good still continues to call for our warmest gratitude. Especially have we reason to rejoice in the exuberant harvests which have lavishly recompensed well-directed industry and given to it that sure reward which is vainly sought in visionary speculations. I can not, indeed, view without peculiar satisfaction the evidences afforded by the past season of the benefits that spring from the steady devotion of the husbandman to his honorable pursuit. No means of individual comfort is more certain and no source of national ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... Mysticism. It leads to the heartless doctrine, quite unworthy of the man, that public calamities are to the wise man only stage tragedies—or even stage comedies.[145] The moral results of this self-centred individualism are exemplified by the mediaeval saint and visionary, Angela of Foligno, who congratulates herself on the deaths of her mother, husband, and children, "who were great obstacles in the ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... homes, I hope, from houses divided against themselves into parlors and kitchens," said mother, earnestly. "If I should tell you all I think about it, you would say it was visionary, I am afraid. But I believe we have got to go back to first principles; and then the ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... cottage with thatched roof and square leaded panes—a setting for romance, for dreams of visionary splendor. ...
— Futurist Stories • Margery Verner Reed
... the hope of the dawn. Trial is good for any one, but hopeless suffering for none. Philip had not been without hope, but it was a visionary indulgence, against all evidence. It was the hope of youth, not of reason. He stuck to his business doggedly, he stuck to his writing doggedly, but over all his mind was a cloud, an oppression not favorable to creative effort—that is, creative effort sweet and not cynical, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Mrs. King was to go home with her and make a little visit. Bessy thought she 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 ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... church, school, or parsonage, rum was the grand master of ceremonies, the indispensable celebrant at the various stages of its completion. The party who dug the parson out after a snow-storm, verily got their reward, a sort of prelibation of the visionary sweets of that land, flowing not, according to the Jewish notion, with milk and honey, but according to the revised version of Yankeedom, with milk and rum. Rum was, forsooth, a very decent devil, if judged by the exalted character of the company it kept. It stood high on the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... in your mind too?" said Edith, in a still lower tone than he; for it was high treason to be sad at Merry Mount. "Therefore do I sigh amid this festive music. And besides, dear Edgar, I struggle as with a dream, and fancy that these shapes of our jovial friends are visionary and their mirth unreal, and that we are no true lord and lady of the May. What is the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 to dispense with it. I scarcely ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... in the same manner, or that the Cutchery court and the grand jury of Salem could be regulated on a similar plan. I was persuaded that government was a practical thing, made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians. Our business was to rule, not to wrangle; and it would have been a poor compensation that we had triumphed in a dispute, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... brothers who were equal," said Carvel, in reflective tones. "I do not know why the ideal freedom and equality, attaching to the ideal brothers, should not be as good as any other visionary aim for tangible earthly government; but it certainly does not seem so easy of realization, nor so sound in the working, as our good English principle that exceptions prove the rule, and that the more exceptions there are the better the rule ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... her some very beautiful thing indeed,' cried Ella, with emphasis, and eyes dilating at some visionary magnificence. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deceptive, and creates a false impression with the community. Had not the through time of steamers this season been suppressed, the governor of the State would not have imagined five-day trips from Buffalo to New York, as per his message, and our city editors would not have ventilated such visionary pretensions. There are a multitude of horse-boat captains that can reduce their net canal time of movement below the Baxter's, which has been so extensively commented upon; but their so doing would not expedite the transfer of grain ...
— History of Steam on the Erie Canal • Anonymous
... the sustained accompaniment and the melody in one of the middle parts, the entrance of the bright A major, after the gloom of the preceding bars, is very effective. The third movement has the character of a nocturne, and as such cannot fail to be admired. In the visionary dreaming of the long middle section we imagine the composer with dilated eyes and rapture in his look—it is rather a reverie than a composition. The finale surrounds us with an emotional atmosphere somewhat akin to that of the first ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Sir Justin grimly. "Julia, you asked this person to my house under the impression that he was the nephew of that particularly obnoxious fanatic, Count Herbrand Bunker, and still engaged upon furthering his relative's philanthropic and other visionary schemes." ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... Hazlitt's criticism, but the point of it would be misunderstood if it were construed as depreciation of Scott. What may be considered merely memory in contrast to Shakespeare's imagination is regarded by Hazlitt as a limitless source of visionary life when compared with the ideas of self-centred authors like Byron. This is what Hazlitt says in another essay ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... 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
... central point of exchange, the heart of trade, the force of whose contraction and expansion will be felt throughout every artery of the commercial world; and San Francisco will then stand the second city of America. Is this visionary? Twenty ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... somehow, after a few weeks, there did not seem to be quite as many bees; a few days later, I was quite sure there was not. I examined the combs, and behold there was not a cell containing a young bee of any age, not even an egg in any one of these old stocks. My visionary anticipations of future success speedily retrograded about ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... that I care for this intimate association with Mr. Edwardes," he curtly announced. "I am not enamored of the vaporings of visionary and self-ordained preachers." ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... advantage of any circumstances that may disturb the ordinary life of a city, or throw discredit on its magistrates, we were accosted by Paul Lecamus, a man whom I have always considered as something of a visionary, though his conduct is irreproachable, and his life honourable and industrious. He entertains religious convictions of a curious kind; but, as the man is quite free from revolutionary sentiments, I have never considered it to be my duty to interfere with him, or ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... sterilisation of the bearers of certain superior qualities, intellectual or physical. In a more general way he attacks the democratic movement, a movement, as P. Bourget says, which is "anti-physical" and contrary to the natural laws of progress; though it has been inspired "by the dreams of that most visionary of all centuries, the eighteenth." (V. de Lapouge, "Les Selections sociales", page 259, Paris, 1896.) The "Equality" which levels down and mixes (justly condemned, he holds, by the Comte de Gobineau), ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... then," said his companion, pursuing the idea, "might we also believe in that wondrous and wild influence which the stars have been fabled to exercise over our fate; hence might we shape a visionary clew to their imagined power over our birth, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... doubt the truth of her statements, besides Mr. Hayden himself confessed to having heard of the wonderful works, though he had never mentioned it before, strangely enough. At the time it probably appeared so vague and visionary, that he had thought best not to excite her curiosity and ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... be done. His Handbook to the library of the British Museum is a very comprehensive and instructive volume. It is a triumphant refutation of the opinions of those who, to the vast injury of literature, and serious inconvenience of men of letters, slight common sense and real utility in favour of visionary schemes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various
... use every honest exertion to turn out of power those weak and wicked men whose wild and visionary theories have been tested and found wanting. Above all, we ought to drive from our shores foreign influence, and cherish American feeling. Foreign influence has been in every age the curse of republics—its jaundiced eye sees every thing in false colors—the thick atmosphere of prejudice by ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... to her two executors, Dr. Berkley the late lord bishop of Cloyne, and Mr. Marshal one of the king's Serjeants at law. Thus perished under all the agonies of despair, Mrs. Esther Vanhomrich; a miserable example of an ill-spent life, fantastic wit, visionary schemes, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... he engaged in this Visionary Dissection, told us, that there was nothing in his Art more difficult than to lay open the Heart of a Coquet, by reason of the many Labyrinths and Recesses which are to be found in it, and which do not appear in the Heart of any ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the Third Universal Theory. The system is a combination of socialism and Islam 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 in northern Chad's Aozou Strip - to gain access ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... naturally fiery and exalted with the vivid poetry of Homer. While yet a boy, and probably about the time when Phrynichus first elevated the Thespian drama, he is said to have been inspired by a dream with the ambition to excel in the dramatic art. But in Homer he found no visionary revelation to assure him of those ends, august and undeveloped, which the actor and the chorus might be made the instruments to effect. For when the idea of scenic representation was once familiar, the epics of Homer suggested ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... packed with hay; to make it more attractive, we were told it had been the scene of an abominable murder, and was now haunted. But the day was beginning to break, and our fatigue was too extreme for visionary terrors. The second or third, we alighted on a barren heath about midnight, built a fire to warm us under the shelter of some thorns, supped like beggars on bread and a piece of cold bacon, and slept like gipsies with our feet to the fire. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... while he explained some system. This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf. Men are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No one remembers after a really good talk who has said the good things. Every man speaks to a visionary multitude; a mystical cloud, that is called ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... And not rank with thee! (A knock.) Oh death! I know it—'tis my famulus— My fairest fortune now escapes! That all these visionary shapes A soulless groveller should banish thus! (WAGNER in his dressing gown and night-cap, a lamp in his ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... years ago a small group of photographers in New York City and vicinity formed a nucleus for the institution of a society. Its name was ambitious—The Pictorial Photographers of America; its aims and objects sounded visionary, almost fantastic. Already many times printed, they bear repetition and have been incorporated in a separate page in this book. In one sense these aims were visionary, because they were thought out and formulated by men of vision, ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1922 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... occasion, when I may be better able to perform it; for I am just now particularly hungry, and am always better able to resist temptation with a full stomach than an empty one. As I find it displeasing to Sir Ralph, I will not insist upon my visionary partner in the dance, at least until I am better able to substantiate the fact; and I shall listen to your lectures, worthy sir, with great delight, and, I doubt not, with equal benefit; but in the meantime, as carnal wants ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... rocks like the rest of the neighbourhood of the Trossachs—a secluded farm, a plot of verdant ground with a single cottage and its company of out-houses. We turned back, and went to the very point from which we had first looked upon Loch Achray when we were here with Coleridge. It was no longer a visionary scene: the sun shone into every crevice of the hills, and the mountain-tops were clear. After some time we went into the pass from the Trossachs, and were delighted to behold the forms of objects fully revealed, and even surpassing in loveliness and variety ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... tenderly, "it is time I came home to relieve you; you have grown a visionary, unsubstantial Esther, with large eyes and a thin face; but somehow I never liked the ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Empress, accompanied by the high officers of her court and the ladies of her household, came in sight of the chair of state which she was about to occupy, she suddenly stopped, and to the horror and astonished awe of her courtiers, she pointed to a visionary being seated on the imperial throne. The occupant of the chair was an exact counterpart of herself. All saw it and trembled, but none dared to move towards the mysterious presentment ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... cried M'Nicholl stoutly; "I deny the existence of anything of the kind, and I denounce every one that maintains any such whim as a visionary, ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... satisfied that the seeds of belief were deeply sown in the human heart. It was on that principle that he permitted and justified, though he did not dare to authorize the revival of La Trappe and other austere orders. He contended that they might operate as a safety-valve for the fanatical and visionary ferment which would otherwise burst forth and disturb society. In his remarks on the death of Duroc and in the reasons he alleged against suicide, both in calm and speculative discussion and in moments of strong emotion (such as occurred ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... fancied myself in a dream—I could scarcely credit the reality of what passed. For instance, when I walked into the room and put my hand into Miss Martineau's, the action of saluting her and the fact of her presence seemed visionary. Again, when Mr. Thackeray was announced, and I saw him enter, looked up at his tall figure, heard his voice, the whole incident was truly dream-like, I was only certain it was true because I became miserably destitute of self-possession. Amour propre suffers terribly under such circumstances: ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... boyhood's visionary mood, When glowing Fancy, innocently gay, Flings forth, like motes, her bright aerial brood, To dance and shine in Hope's prolific ray; 'Tis sweet, unweeting how the flight of years May darkling roll in trials and in tears, To dress the future in what garb we list, And ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... miles of oranges, unmeasured fields of cane, colossal sugar-house—they were all there, and all the rest of it, with the slaves, slaves, slaves everywhere, whole villages of negro cabins. And there were also, most noticeable to the natural, as well as visionary eye—there were the ease, idleness, extravagance, self-indulgence, pomp, pride, arrogance, in short the whole enumeration, the moral sine qua non, as some people considered it, of the wealthy slaveholder ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... he did not hear the clock when it struck again. The story was absorbing. It was as if through that narrow, shut-up chamber a gust of mountain air were sweeping like a breath of fresh life. Mr. Gresley was vaguely stirred in spite of himself, until he remembered that it was all fantastic, visionary. He had never felt like that, and his own experience was his measure of the utmost that is possible in human nature. He would have called a kettle visionary if he had never seen one himself. It was ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... comfortably dispense. I had nearly forgotten to warn you against the capricious works of BEUGHEM; a man, nevertheless, of wonderful mental elasticity; but for ever planning schemes too vast and too visionary for the human powers ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... This idea of travel in Africa and lion-hunting made him shudder beforehand; and when the house was re-entered, and whilst the complimentary concert was sounding under the windows, he had a dreadful "row" with Quixote-Tartarin, calling him a cracked head, a visionary, imprudent, and thrice an idiot, and detailing by the card all the catastrophes awaiting him on such an expedition—shipwreck, rheumatism, yellow fever, dysentery, the black plague, elephantiasis, and the rest ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... connected with these appeals against him. It is clear that all his dreams of Faerie did not make him neglectful of his earthly estate. Like Shakspere, like Scott, Spenser did not cease to be a man of the world—we use the phrase in no unkindly sense—because he was a poet. He was no mere visionary, helpless in the ordinary affairs of life. In the present case it would appear that he was even too keen in looking after his own interests. Professor Craik charitably suggests that his poverty 'rather than ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... the same visionary optimism in regarding her daughters' futures. The girls were all to marry, of course, and marry well, far above their ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... in this error in Parleyings with Certain People, in which book, with the exception of the visionary landscapes in Gerard de Lairesse, and some few passages in Francis Furini and Charles Avison, imagination, such as belongs to a poet, has deserted Browning. He feels himself as if this might be said of him; and he asks in Gerard de ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... exemplary I know they are; and those among them with whom I am acquainted are especially lovers of the true faith, and are persons in whom I have unbounded confidence." The inquisitors, on hearing this, were so fully convinced that the poor widow's representations had no other foundation than the visionary workings of a disordered brain, that they allowed the learned doctor to depart with her under his charge. Thus was the danger to the infant Church at Seville for the time mercifully removed, and while it gained strength to endure the coming persecutions, the number of Christ's true ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... primarily concern truth or falsehood. They relate to good or evil. What in the result is likely to produce evil is politically false, that which is productive of good politically is true." Assuming thus the visionary's right to decide before the result what was "likely to produce evil," Burke vigorously sought to kindle war against the French Republic which might have developed itself peacefully, while Paine was striving for an international Congress ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... from that of ordinary talk. The poets of Italy, Spain, and France began to rain influence and to modify and refine not only style but vocabulary. Men were discovering new worlds in more senses than one, and the visionary finger of expectation still pointed forward. There was, as we learn from contemporary pamphlets, very much the same demand for a national literature that we have heard in America. This demand was nobly answered in the next generation. But no man contributed so much to the transformation ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... every morning when he was a boy going to work: "Ever remember, my dear Dan, that you should look forward to being some day manager of that concern!"—this fruitful maxim is perfectly fitted to shine forth in the heart of the Hyde Park rough also, and to be his guiding-star through life. He has no visionary schemes of revolution and transformation, though of course he would like his class to rule, as the aristocratic [65] class like their class to rule, and the middle-class theirs. Meanwhile, our social machine ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... from Spain, as evidence of a false nature. He is charged with ambition, cupidity, and arrogance, in demanding titles, dignities, and money as fruits of his discoveries. He was, we are told, a fanatic, a visionary, a tyrant, a buccaneer, a liar, and a slave-trader. He was ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... 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
... there would flow for his happy constitution interest and delight. "All fables have their morals," says Thoreau, "but the innocent enjoy the story." There is a truth represented for the imagination in those lines of a noble poem, where we are told that in our highest hours of visionary clearness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pleasing in harmony: let me add, also, that it awakens some passions which we perceive not in ordinary life. Particularly the most elevated sensation of music arises from a confused perception of ideal or visionary beauty and rapture, which is sufficiently perceivable to fire the imagination, but not clear enough to become an object of knowledge. This shadowy beauty the mind attempts, with a languishing curiosity, to collect into a distinct object of view and comprehension; but it sinks and escapes, like ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the austerity of his puritanism. Doubtless Governor John Winthrop in his hasty and harsh dictum respecting the Nashaway planters, classed John Prescott among those "corrupt in judgment." But it must be remembered that in Winthrop's visionary commonwealth there was no room for liberty of conscience. All were esteemed corrupt in judgment or even profane whose religious beliefs, when tested all about by the ecclesiastic callipers, proved not to have been cast in the doctrinal mould prescribed by the self-sanctified founders of the Massachusetts ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... to the voice of her triumphs; and the poor Doctor Brown, in the midst of all this hubbub, cut his own throat with his own razor. Whether this dismal catastrophe were exactly due to his mortification as a baffled visionary, whose favorite conceit had suddenly exploded like a rocket into smoke and stench, is more than we know. But, at all events, the sole memorial of his hypothesis which now reminds the English reader that it ever existed is one solitary notice of good-humored satire pointed at it by ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... an early age, I found that I had not the heart for the fray. Stamped on my narrow forehead, on my whole being, perhaps, so clearly that every unsympathetic boss could understand at once, was the mark of the visionary. My pitiable willingness to ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Adelphian Society of Greenfield. "In my dreamy way," he afterward said, "I did a little of a number of things fairly well—sang, played the guitar and violin, acted, painted signs and wrote poetry. My father did not encourage my verse-making for he thought it too visionary, and being a visionary himself, he believed he understood the dangers of following the promptings of the poetic temperament. I doubted if anything would come of the verse-writing myself. At this time it is easy to picture my father, a lawyer of ability, regarding ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... China and Japan. An adventurous, erratic line, whose stages were now the capitals of the world, and now some unknown halting-place in the immeasurable waste. And what on earth did it mean? Was it the record of an actual journey, or some yet untraveled visionary route? ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... referred to moral, causes; while an exercise of the phantasy, almost as degrading as the spiritualism of the present day, took the place of scientific speculation. Then came the mysticism of the Middle Ages, Magic, Alchemy, the Neoplatonic philosophy, with its visionary though sublime abstractions, which caused men to look with shame upon their own bodies, as hindrances to the absorption of the creature in the blessedness of the Creator. Finally came the scholastic philosophy, a fusion, according to Lange, of the least mature notions of Aristotle with ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... might slowly decompose the decayed age; he had the time to combat against time, and when he fell he was the conqueror. His disciples filled courts, academies, and saloons; those of Rousseau grew splenetic and visionary amongst the lower orders of society. The one had been the fortunate and elegant advocate of the aristocracy, the other was the secret consoler and beloved avenger of the democracy. His book was the book of all oppressed and tender souls. Unhappy and devotee himself, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... intelligible, I appear to degrade art by bringing her down from her visionary situation in the clouds, it is only to give her a more solid mansion upon the earth. It is necessary that at some time or other we should see things as they really are, and not impose on ourselves by that false magnitude ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... life and every meter a black one. Only the graves of the whites are marked. You can see the unending procession of headstones along the right of way. During its construction the project was bitterly assailed. The wiseacres contended that it was visionary, impracticable, and impossible. In this respect it suffered the same experience as all the other pioneering African railways and especially those of Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... to be a redeemer, and a King; [189:4] but they did not understand how their lowly Master was to establish His title to such high offices. [189:5] Though they "looked for redemption," and "waited for the kingdom of God," [189:6] there was much that was vague, as well as much that was visionary, in their notions of the Redemption and the Kingdom. We may well suppose that the views of the multitude were still less correct and perspicuous. Some, perhaps, expected that Christ, as a prophet, would decide the ecclesiastical controversies of the age; [189:7] others, probably, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... years waiting in vain for encouragement at the court of Spain. He applied unsuccessfully to the governments of Venice, Portugal, Genoa, France, England. Practical men said, "It can't be done. He is a visionary." Doctors of divinity said, "He is a heretic; he contradicts the Bible." Isabella, being a woman, and a woman of sentiment, wished to help him; but her confessor said no. We all know how he was compelled to put down mutiny in his crew, and how, after ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... the other 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 ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... and the academy of sciences decided to provide with a lavish profusion that would dazzle the world with the brilliancy of Russian exploits. Russia was in the mood to do things. The young savants who thronged her capital were heady with visionary theories that were to astonish the rest of mortals. Scientists, artisans, physicians, monks, Cossacks, historians, made up the motley roll of conflicting influences under Bering's command; but because Bering was a Dane, this command was not ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... was as wild as wind; just as one need not be a strategist to keep out of the way of a motor-bus. Well, that is the first mystery; what had become of the English general's head? The second riddle is, what had become of the Brazilian general's heart? President Olivier might be called a visionary or a nuisance; but even his enemies admitted that he was magnanimous to the point of knight errantry. Almost every other prisoner he had ever captured had been set free or even loaded with benefits. Men who had really wronged him came away touched by his simplicity and sweetness. ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... lawn and flower-garden; the pattering of the rain against the glass; the stretching out of the Shadow's arm, and the fall of the statue in fragments on the floor—these objects and events of the visionary scene, so vividly present to his memory once, were all superseded by later remembrances now, were all left to fade as they might in the dim background of time. He could pass the room again and again, alone and anxious, and never once think ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... else to do between crops. We should have stuck to a white man's land, north into Arizona where the Three Hills of Gold are waiting, to say nothing of the Lost Stone Cabin mine, lost not twenty miles from Quartzite, and in plain sight of Castle Dome. Now there is nothing visionary about that, Kit! Why, I knew an old-timer who freighted rich ore out of that mine thirty years ago, and even the road to it has been lost for years! We know things once did exist up in that country, Kit, and down here we are all tangled up with Mexican-Indian stories of ghosts and ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... function of nature was free, that which furnished the nursery could not be restrained. Nature has required the powerful to be just; but she has not otherwise intrusted the preservation of her works to their visionary plans. What fuel can the statesman add to the fires of youth? Let him only not smother it, and the effect is secure. Where we oppress or degrade mankind with one hand, it is vain, like Octavius, to hold out in the other, the baits of marriage, or the ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... (1658-1743), a churchman without vocation, was a Norman of noble family, and first published his Memoires pour rendre la Paix Perpetuelle a l'Europe in 1722. As Siegler-Pascal well shows (Les Projets de l'Abbe de Saint-Pierre, 1900) he was not a mere visionary Utopian, but an acute and far-seeing thinker, practical in his methods, a close observer, an experimentalist, and one of the first to attempt the employment of statistics. He was secretary to the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the little china dog, and looked down earnestly at her, as she sat on the chintz-covered sofa behind the tea-table. At her back was the long casement window, and the last gleams of the wintry sun caught her hair. To the man's visionary fancy they ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... inhabitants of Fitchburg drew up a spirited remonstrance, in which they were joined by the people in those portions of the three adjoining towns not included in the proposed new township. In this remonstrance every statement of the petitioners was denied, and the whole thing denounced as visionary. This matter engrossed the attention of both parties during 1790, and the result was that the General Court refused to incorporate ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... can. All's fair in war, you know, but Ledwith is the worst kind of patriot, a visionary one, exalted, as ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... not political. I have had report of him. He is a visionary. There is no sedition in him. He ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... left my shop. I cannot understand it. They seem to object to me on such curious and inconsistent sort of grounds, these scientific men, and these innovators. They say that I give people superstitions and make them too visionary; they say I give people sausages and make them too coarse. They say my heavenly parts are too heavenly; they say my earthly parts are too earthly; I don't know what they want, I'm sure. How can heavenly things be too heavenly, or earthly things too earthly? How can one be ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... the two poles, the extremes,—both of them remote and chilly,—of good and evil, from which the writer withdrew, after exploring them, into more temperate regions. The movement of these persons is visionary, and their personality faint. But I have marked a few characteristic portions of the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... thou art an 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 |
