"Chimerical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that it exalted our conceptions of human nature. Shaftesbury's views were entitled to this advantage; but, observes Mandeville, 'the ideas he had formed of the goodness and excellency of our nature, were as romantic and chimerical, as they are beautiful and amiable.' Mandeville examined not what human nature ought to be, but what it really is. In contrast, therefore, to the moralists that distinguish between a higher and a lower in our nature, attributing to the higher everything good and noble, while the lower ought ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... and the Great Britain, the original ocean screw steamer. Flushed with these successes, Brunel procured pecuniary support from speculative fools, who, dazzled by the glittering statistical array that can be adduced in support of any chimerical venture, the inventor's repute, and their unbaked experience, imagined that the alluring Orient was ready to yield, like over-ripe fruit, to their shadowy grasp; and tainted as he evidently was with hereditary mania, Brunel resolved ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... edition to be suspended. Fenelon has sometimes been regarded as a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement; but he would rather, by ideas in which, as events proved, there may have been something chimerical, have rendered revolution impossible. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... find them empty and deeply unsatisfying. Well, the former class, who naturally figure prominently in the public press, because the press is the more or less flattering mirror of the prevailing doctrines of the day, think that Mr. Mill's views of a better social future are chimerical, utopian, and sentimental. The latter class compensate themselves for the pinchedness of the real world about them by certain rapturous ideals, centring in God, a future life, and the long companionship ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... Leon was so delighted with the beauty and fertility of the island that he imagined he could find there the fountain of perpetual youth for which he so long sought in vain. In this chimerical idea, however, as in Florida, he was ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... every stone corresponds to a species of malady, and also to a class of sins; and he affirms that when we have chemically got possession of the active principle of gems we shall have not only antidotes but preventatives. While waiting for this chimerical dream to be realized and for our medicine to become the mock of lapidary chemists, he uses precious stones to formulate diagnoses ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... at this point of his studies that the student commences a steady course of imaginary dissection: that is to say, he keeps a chimerical account of extremities whose minute structure he has deeply investigated (in his head), and received in return various sums of money from home for the avowed purpose of paying for them. If he really has put ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the circumstances under which the planet had been detected. His influence had been felt for many years before astronomers thought of looking for him, and even when the idea had occurred to one or two, it was considered, and that, too, by an astronomer as deservedly eminent as Sir G. Airy, too chimerical to be reasonably entertained. All the world now knows how Leverrier, the greatest living master of physical astronomy, and Adams, then scarce known outside Cambridge, both conceived the idea of finding the planet, not by the simple method of looking for it with a telescope, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... with the coincidence, but denied that the wishes or expectations of the letter-writer were to be regarded as proofs of a charge otherwise chimerical. ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... Don Quixote, but the imitation is handled with freedom, and so particularly applied to Spenser's Fairy Queen, that it may pass for a second invention. But the peculiarly ingenious novelty of the piece consists in the combination of the irony of a chimerical abuse of poetry with another irony exactly the contrary, of the incapacity to comprehend any fable, and the dramatic form more particularly. A grocer and his wife come as spectators to the theatre: they are discontented with the piece which has just been announced; they demand a play ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... eternal institution, there existed no motive to prompt men to subject it to a closer critical investigation; and in the absence of such an investigation its influence upon the nature and extent of demand could not be discovered. The old economists were therefore compelled to believe it chimerical to think of demand as falling short of production; for they said, quite correctly, that man produces only to consume. Here, with them, the question of demand was done with, and every possibility of the discovery ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... suggested. That the spirit which triumphed in that nation and deluged it with the blood of its revolutionary champions might cross the Atlantic, and desolate the hitherto safe and peaceful dwellings of the American people, was an apprehension not so entirely unsupported by appearances as to be pronounced chimerical. With a blind infatuation, which treated reason as a criminal, immense numbers applauded a furious despotism, trampling on every right, and sporting with life as the essence of liberty; and the few who conceived freedom ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... hope that the people may be cajoled into giving their sanctions to such institutions is still more chimerical. A people so enlightened and so diversified as the people of this country can surely never be brought to it but from convulsions and disorders, in consequence of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... night hangs his watch upon it, at the head of his bed, with the infatuated notion that thereby, through some "most fine spirit of sense," the tick of a death-watch will disturb the political dreams of our Massachusetts rulers, we hereby declare that this is most chimerical and visionary, and that the great party of freedom in Massachusetts need not feel the slightest apprehension that our rulers have the least misgivings as to the morality of their conduct in the removal of said officer, nor ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... of truth is chimerical. That is why it is so hard to say what truth is. There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... can understand, these ideas, as applied to the present state of the country, are absolutely chimerical. The Pretender is no more remembered in the Highlands than if the poor gentleman were gathered to his hundred and eight fathers, whose portraits adorn the ancient walls of Holyrood; the broadswords have passed into other hands; the targets are used ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... companions, the few young people my mother forced me to mix with, so much pleasure, I despised; I wished more to be loved than admired, for I could love. I adored virtue; and my imagination, chasing a chimerical object, overlooked the common pleasures of life; they were not sufficient for my happiness. A latent fire made me burn to rise superior to my contemporaries in wisdom and virtue; and tears of joy and emulation filled my eyes ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... matters, they found their match; yes, yes,' said I, 'but I am in their power, perhaps'—but I instantly dismissed the apprehension which came into my mind, with a pooh, nonsense! in a little time, however, a far more foolish and chimerical idea began to disturb me—the idea of being flung from my horse? was I not disgraced for ever as a horseman by being flung from my horse? Assuredly, I thought; and the idea of being disgraced as a horseman, operating on ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... assimilating Algeria to France. Important efforts were made to attract French colonists to the country, the colonization of Algeria appearing as a means towards the extinction of pauperism in the mother-country. This point of view suggested numerous projects, as chimerical as they were generous; two millions sterling (50 million francs) were expended with a view to installing Parisian unemployed workmen as colonists, but this attempt failed miserably. The most remarkable military events of this period ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the allegorical web which a cunning priesthood had devised as symbolical of those mysteries of creation that it was beyond their power to comprehend. But Sarmiento happily confines himself to the mere statement of traditional fables, without the chimerical ambition to ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... ourselves, without injuring them, as their population must always so far exceed any black population which can ever exist in that country, as to render the idea of danger from that source chimerical." ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... storm of frenzy and faction must inevitably dash itself in vain against the unshaken rock of the Constitution. I shall never doubt it. I know that the Union is stronger a thousand times than all the wild and chimerical schemes of social change which are generated one after another in the unstable minds of visionary sophists and interested agitators. I rely confidently on the patriotism of the people, on the dignity and self-respect of the States, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of Leibniz's ideas is anyhow unmistakable. If metaphysical thinking is nonsensical, its empire over the human imagination must still be confessed; if it is as chimerical a science as alchemy, it is no less fertile in by-products of importance. And if we are to consider Leibniz historically, we cannot do better than take up his Theodicy, for two reasons. It was the only one of his main philosophical works to be published in his lifetime, so that it was a principal ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... open at last! We are no longer dazzled by the chimerical hopes we nourished for a moment, of obtaining, through you communal liberties. You did but adopt those opinions for the sake of misleading us, as a thief assumes the livery of a house to enter his master's room and lay hands on his money. We see you now as you are. We had hoped that you ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... moral or political science enlists a host of feelings in zealous support or implacable hostility; and the same system, according to the creed and prepossessions of the speaker, is put forward as self-evident, or stigmatized as chimerical. One set of people throw corn into the river and burn mills, in order to cheapen bread—another vote that sixteen shillings are equal to twenty-one, in order to support public credit—proceedings in no degree more reasonable than a denial that two and two make ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... major part of mankind, my temperament, instead of being invigorated and enlivened by the sparkling juice of the grape, loses its wonted nerve and elasticity; a sombre gloominess pervades the system, the pulse becomes nervous and languid, the spirits flagging and depressed, and the mind full of chimerical apprehensions and ennui. It was in this mood that Eglantine found me ruminating on the noble works before me, while resting against a part of the pile of Radcliffe library, contemplating 249the elegant crocketed pinnacles of All Souls, the delicately taper spire of St. Mary's, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... optimistic doctrines of Lord Shaftesbury, that human nature is good and all is for the best in this harmonious world. "The ideas he had formed," wrote Mandeville, "of the goodness and excellency of our nature were as romantic and chimerical as they are beautiful and amiable; he laboured hard to unite two contraries that can never be reconciled together, innocence of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... She ruled imaginatively, transcendentally; the solid glory of Chatham had been transmuted into the phantasy of an Arabian Night. No doubt she herself believed that she was something more than a chimerical Empress. When a French traveller was murdered in the desert, she issued orders for the punishment of the offenders; punished they were, and Lady Hester actually received the solemn thanks of the French Chamber. It seems probable, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... on to read a magic papyrus, our first impression is that we have stepped from one end of the intellectual world to the other. Here we find no trace of the systematic order or severe method that distinguish the work of the scholar of Alexandria. Of course, the doctrines of astrology are just as chimerical as those of magic, but they are deduced with an amount of logic, entirely wanting in works of sorcery, that compels reasoning intellects to accept them. Recipes borrowed from medicine and popular superstition, primitive practices ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... he would say, as he tapped his snuff-box and looked up wistfully to the ceiling—"si j'avais seulement une specialite!" He felt himself humiliated by the necessity for accepting his little pension, and still entertained a chimerical hope that if the Emperor did not restore the millions that were due, he might at least bestow upon him enough for independence in his last years. There had been some slight indications of a favorable turn in the Emperor's mind, but they came to nothing. Meanwhile M. Victor Ouvrard ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... incapable of supporting a Government of its own out of its own resources? Let nobody be tempted by the fallacy that, given time, Ireland will regain financial stability under the fiscal Union, and at a later stage, perhaps, be more fitted to bear the burden of fiscal independence. The supposition is chimerical. The present system, besides being radically vicious in a purely scientific sense, undermines the moral power of Ireland ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... imagination, as well as his reasoning faculties, always worked together. He was incessantly prompted by the most extraordinary speculations. The great majority of them were in a high degree wild and chimerical, but every now and then one of his fancies struck right to the heart of nature, and an immortal truth ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... have laid down are correct, and if experience confirms the picture I have traced of the present time, it would be necessary to qualify as unseasonable every attempt to effect a similar change in the state, and all hope as chimerical that would be based on such an attempt, until the division of the inner man ceases, and nature has been sufficiently developed to become herself the instrument of this great change and secure the reality of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... every being that is real there is something external to, and sacred from, the grasp of every other. God's being is sacred from ours. To co-operate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems all he wants of us. In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinking of him up, must lie the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... old machinery, which he thought might be rebuilt for our purposes. But this turned out to be hardly practicable. I dared not, at that stage of the proceedings, bring into the board of trustees a proposal to buy machinery and establish a machine-shop; the whole would have a chimerical look, and was sure to repel them. Therefore it was that, at my own expense, I bought a power-lathe and other pieces of machinery; and, through the active efforts of Professor John L. Morris, my steadfast supporter in the whole matter, these were set up ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... of the journey. I was wet and uncomfortable. Around me, with Cresson as a center, stretched an irregular circumference of mountain, with possibly a ten-mile radius, and in it I was to find the residence of a woman whose first name I did not know, and a man who, so far, had been a purely chimerical person. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... these things are but as dreams; they are chimerical. But one thing is certain: the history of the Church and Providence in the future are appallingly grand. Providence was grand in leading forth His people of old from Egypt. But He will be no less grand when He shall set His hand a second time to recover ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... 18th of Fructidor, will they put the ultras under lock and key? If one or the other of these blows is struck, will it succeed? And if it succeeds will a stable government be at last established? Sieyes well knows that it will not; he is farseeing in his acts, although chimerical in his theories. In power himself, titular Director, counselor and guardian of the intelligent republic against the stupid republic, he well knows that all of them, so long as they are republicans of both bands, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of fitness—none of the judgment about them which society has. He will go through a mighty host of discoveries every hour. The very eccentricity of his imaginations will only appeal to him for the greater admiration. He will bring his most chimerical schemes out and air them with the same assurance with which the real inventor exhibits his. But such a man is not pronounced a genius. If his ravings about this and that are harmless, we smile and let him ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... improvement, leaving behind him the expectation of his returning in a few years. Meanwhile, my father was anxious that we should regard each other and maintain a correspondence as persons betrothed. In persons at our age, this scheme was chimerical. As soon as I acquired the power of reflection, I perceived the folly of such premature bonds, and, though I did not openly oppose my father's wishes, held myself entirely free to obey any new impulse which circumstances ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... from the summer of 1737 to that of 1740 has dissipated in some measure the otherwise total darkness which had gathered around the youth of our philosopher. Mirabeau (who was to be the father of the famous orator) was a man of talent, but violent, chimerical and lawless, "farouche," as he himself put it. Later he was the author of the redoubtable "Ami des Hommes." This prodigal uncle of the Revolution, this dangerous and violent "physiocrate" as he called himself, would seem divided, as pole from pole, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... mercenary ends. The doctrine, to say the best of it, can only serve to favour the indolence of man, while professing to furnish him with a compendious method of becoming wise and good, it supersedes the necessity of his own personal labours. Quitting therefore all these slothful and chimerical speculations, it is true wisdom to attach ourselves to what is more solid and practical; to the work which you will not yourself deny to be sufficiently difficult to find us of itself full employment: the work of rectifying the disorders of the ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... may be chimerical. I have advanced them with no little diffidence, but I felt called upon to state them in the discharge of a duty I owe to a people who love and will make great sacrifices to save the Constitution ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... called "The Clouds," in which piece Socrates was represented hanging up in a basket in the air, uttering numberless chimerical absurdities, and blaspheming, as it was then reputed, the gods of his country. At the performance of this piece Socrates was present himself; and "notwithstanding," says his biographer, "the gross abuse that was offered to his character, he did not show the least signs of ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... far otherwise as respected relations between McCulloch and the Missouri leaders. McCulloch had little or no tolerance for the rough-and-ready methods of men like Claiborne Jackson and Sterling Price. He regarded their plans as impractical, chimerical, and their warfare as after the guerrilla order, too ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... tragedy of the same kind, as Shakespeare wrote it: but as it is reformed according to the chimerical notion of POETICAL JUSTICE, in my humble opinion it has ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... dual form it would have worked just as well. It is scarcely necessary to say that the disparity in population, resources, and power between Ireland and Great Britain render a dual Federation, which, of course, involves three Legislatures, chimerical. What I want to insist on is that, whatever subdivisions are adopted, it is absolutely essential to every Federation that there should be a division of powers between a central and at least two local Legislatures—three altogether. That is the ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... for solo speaking Members still feel an avidity; If they burn to make orations of most uncommon zest, Let them just take our precaution against intense stupidity! Let them study PUNCHINELLO and learn how to make a jest; But away with dreams chimerical and projects vain, though clever! The power of tongue's proportionate to wondrous length of ear; The beast that carried BALAAM is as garrulous as ever, And still the lobby listener must be content to hear Rap! rap! rap! To quell the rising clamor; Order! order! ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... little ornament of the relief repeating the two dates. Mantle clasps of solid silver ornamented with precious stones, and known in the Middle Ages as fermillets, are pretty presents, and these ornaments can be also enriched with gold and enamel without losing their silver character. Chimerical animals and floral ornaments are often used ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... intelligent woman," he would add. "I should never have thought her capable of inducing her husband to join a party whose hopes are simply chimerical. They are taking the right course to end their lives in poverty. But then women know ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... all was the same. Ernestine's words had come true—he was already a man of note. A few months had changed his life in the most amazing way—when he looked back upon it now it was with a sense of unreality—surely all these things which had happened were part of a chimerical dream. It was barely possible for him to believe that it was he, Scarlett Trent, who had developed day by day into what he was at that moment. For the man was changed in a hundred ways. His grey flannel clothes was cut by the Saville Row tailor ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... affirmation, that whatever has been is true, absolutely, and which, instead of confining itself to the explanation of transitory phenomena, invests them with all the dignity of principles. We shall endeavor to avoid the peril pointed out by Mallebranche. "Learned men study rather to acquire a chimerical greatness in the imagination of other men, than to acquire greater breadth and strength of mind themselves. They make their heads a kind of store-room, into which they gather, without order or discrimination, everything which has a look of erudition,—I mean to say everything which may seem ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Court of the United States with reference to the several states. The fact that the several states of our Union, though each a distinct sovereignty, yet agree in this arrangement, is held up as an instance of its practicability. These ideas are not to be considered entirely chimerical, if we reflect that commerce and trade are as essentially opposed to war as is Christianity. War is the death of commerce, manufactures, agriculture, and the fine arts. Its evil results are always certain and definite, its good results scattered and accidental. The whole ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... little, indeed, that the Territories of the extreme West had no definite outline, but were measured from the crest of the Rocky Mountains,—the audacity of the proposition might justly have inspired suspicions of the sanity of its author. But if Dr. Carver was chimerical, he was at least courageous in his persistence. Ten years later, this lineal descendant of old John Carver transferred the question from the arena of newspaper discussion, and boldly memorialized Congress. Here he found a rival advocate in Asa Whitney, whose ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... influence declared the conditions published by the directors of the railway chimerical in the extreme. One gentleman of some eminence in Liverpool, Mr. P. Ewart, who afterward filled the office of Government Inspector of Post-office Steam Packets, declared that only a parcel of charlatans would ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... brains. The 'constancy' of women—that gets me! Why, sir, I once loved three women at the same time, and not one of the three was true to me—yet Bainbridge talks of a woman's constancy, single-heartedness, and such chimerical stuff—the kind of stuff, that, with youth, takes the place of the recently discarded nursery fiction. I think of the hundreds of women that I have loved, beginning in my early boyhood, passing through my adolescence to the acme of my powers, and even now as ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... ships to Hudson's Bay; but their project was rejected. Des Groseilliers then went to France in hopes of a more favorable hearing at Court; but after presenting several memorials and spending a great deal of time and money, he was answered as he had been at Quebec, and the project looked upon as chimerical." [Footnote: Oldmixon, Vol. I. p. 548.] This voyage to Hudson's Straits proved unremunerative. "Wee had knowledge and conversation with the people of those parts, but wee did see and know that there was nothing to be done unlesse wee ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... was on the 30th of November, 1744, that this minister thus expressed himself with regard to the chimerical systems of credit, which have never been more in vogue ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... he was not destined to remain permanently inconsolable. "I love you, unknown, and this strange thing is the natural effect of an empty and unhappy life, only filled with ideas, and the misfortunes of which I have diminished by chimerical pleasures."[*] ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... of the Jesuits and the active zeal of the Bavarian minister, represented this dreaded alliance between the Huguenots and the Swedes as an undoubted fact, and filled the timid mind of Louis with the most alarming fears. Not merely chimerical politicians, but many of the best informed Roman Catholics, fully believed that the king was on the point of breaking into the heart of France, to make common cause with the Huguenots, and to overturn ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... no limit to what can be done. The idea of our present trip would have seemed more chimerical to people a hundred years ago than this new scheme ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... conception of one who without any such advantages, on the contrary with positive disadvantages, poor, sickly, and a slave perhaps, or even in prison or on the rack, should nevertheless retain unimpaired the dignity of manhood and the freedom of his own soul—, such a conception if it is not chimerical, is at any rate so remote from common experience, that it is not capable of serving as a really practical ideal for ordinary life. But an ideal so remote that its realisation is despaired of, is as good as none. And the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... a man busies himself with natural causes (e.g. in scientific research) the greater does this slavery to custom become, till at last he seems positively unable to perceive the real state of the case—regarding any rational thinking thereon as chimerical, so that the term 'meta-physical,' even in its etymological sense as super-sensuous or beyond physical causation, becomes a term of rational reproach. Obviously such a man has written himself down, if not an ass, at all events a creature wholly incapable of rationally treating ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... might have gone flying over the windmill. The tam was very safe. There was no incentive and, though there was no moral corset either, she was temperamentally unable to go poaching on another's preserves. Barring the chimerical, that any girl may consider and most girls do, she was straight as a string. A shabby old man had no need ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... an equally high grade of efficiency. Now, if Negro labor is the best for its climate and needs, the South must seek earnestly, constantly, by every means in its power, to raise that labor to the highest state of economic efficiency of which it is capable. That section must do so in spite of its chimerical fears of Negro domination, in spite of its rooted race prejudices. It must educate and emancipate this labor, all hostile sentiment of whatever nature to the contrary notwithstanding, if it will hold its own in that great cosmic struggle for existence in which it is now engaged ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... treasure of mine, if all the while no least thought of liberty has risen in your mind, if my love is no burden on you, if my fears are chimerical, if I am still your Eve—the one woman in the world for you—come to me as soon as you have read this letter, come quickly! Ah, in one moment I will love you more than I have ever loved you, I think, in these nine years. After enduring the needless ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... its being founded upon acts of justice and humanity. It is upon these principles that I have based the few suggestions I am going to offer for the improvement of our policy towards the natives. I know that by many they will be looked upon as chimerical or impracticable, and I fear that more will begrudge the means necessary to carry them into effect; but unless something of the kind be done—unless some great and radical change be effected, and some little compensation ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... wrestling with the barbarous vices of the lower orders. No movement of the kind has ever been exempt from drawbacks and follies, from extravagance, exaggeration, breaches of good taste in religious matters, unctuousness, and cant—from chimerical attempts to get rid of the flesh and live an angelic life on earth—from delusions about special providences and miracles—from a tendency to over-value doctrine and undervalue duty—from arrogant assumption of spiritual authority by ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... application of the laws of natural science to society is misleading. In his Opposition Universelle he has directly combatted all forms of sociological Darwinism. According to him the idea that the evolution of society can be traced on the same plan as the evolution of species is chimerical. Social evolution is at the mercy of all kinds of inventions, which by virtue of the laws of imitation modify, through individual to individual, through neighbourhood to neighbourhood, the general state of those beliefs and desires which are the only "quantities" ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... full of these chimerical visions, that he acted with his foot as if she had been really before him, and unfortunately gave such a push to his basket and glasses, that they were thrown down, and ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... serviceable as examples—proofs of the practicability in a certain degree of that which the conception of virtue demands—but certainly not as archetypes. That the actions of man will never be in perfect accordance with all the requirements of the pure ideas of reason, does not prove the thought to be chimerical. For only through this idea are all judgements as to moral merit or demerit possible; it consequently lies at the foundation of every approach to moral perfection, however far removed from it the obstacles in human nature- indeterminable as to ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... young Italy's sorrows, of extraneous Austrian Emperors in Milan, or poor old chimerical Popes in Bologna, I know nothing, and desire to know nothing; but this other thing I do know, and can here declare publicly to be a fact, which fact all of us that have occasion to comment on Mr. Mazzini and his affairs ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... Bonaparte listened to these representations with impatience and ill-humour. He replied peremptorily, "Admiral, we have no time to lose. Fortune gives me but three days; if I do not profit by them we are lost." He relied much on fortune; this chimerical idea constantly ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... or receiving of it as of much consequence. Upon further reflection, and a consideration of the manner in which his father had lived for so many years, the idea which yet seemed shadowed forth by his language, that he was possessed of property, appeared utterly chimerical. He was therefore disposed to attach to his father's words some mystical sense, or to suppose that he imagined himself in possession of a secret, by means of which he could command the wealth he scorned. Of course the young man ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... Panama Canal, now opened to the world, was for years deemed a chimerical dream and an impossibility, by the world as well as ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... affair like this of the Nabob makes it possible for me to recoup my losses, I will not wait a moment, I will take myself off in hot haste to look after my little vineyard near Monbars, cured forever of my speculative ideas. But alas! that is a very chimerical hope,—played out, discredited, well known as we are on 'Change, with our shares no longer quoted at the Bourse, our obligations fast becoming waste paper, such a wilderness of falsehood and debts, and the hole that is being dug deeper ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... people for the end of preserving and perpetuating the power of the Junkers. We have no quarrel with the duped and oppressed, but we war against the agents of oppression. To the conservative mind such an aspiration appears chimerical. But America, youngest of the nations, was born when modern science was gathering the momentum which since has enabled it to overcome, with a bewildering rapidity, many evils previously held by superstition to be ineradicable. As a corollary ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... left a lady before she had finished speaking to him, and now he continued to speak to another who wished to get away. With his head bent, and his big feet spread apart, he began explaining his reasons for thinking the abbe's plan chimerical. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... then did seems for the present to be overlooked and forgotten. I am confident, however, as much as I can be of anything, that notwithstanding the almost universal reception of the new theory, which is the cause of it, it is purely chimerical, and cannot keep its ground after a sufficient scrutiny, which may be deferred, but which must take place in time. I am glad to find that Mr. Cruikshank in England, as well as chemists in France, begin to attend to my objections, ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... down to breakfast. She was in high feather, and her cheery conversation lifted, to some extent, the gloom which had settled on her young friends. While exhorting to patience she was full of hope, and dismissed as chimerical all the darker explanations which the disconsolate lovers invented to account for the silence their communications had met with. Under her influence the breakfast-table became positively cheerful, and at last all the three burst into ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... then, we saw that the theoretical attack on interest, on the ground that it is income which is not earned by the recipients, but is virtually taken by the few from the products of the labour of the many, is chimerical in its moral and false in ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... have replaced the worn-out vision of this chimerical phantom with the likeness of some young girl, with sweet look and smile, full ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... paid no attention to this remark. He was already deep in thought. It was characteristic of his mind to leap forward, seize a suggestion that often appeared chimerical to a man like Fowndes and turn it into an accomplished Fact. "I believe you've hit it, Hugh," he said. "We needn't bother about the powers of the courts in other states. We'll put into this bill an appeal to our court ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... passing at Sydney, the little colony at Norfolk Island had been threatened with an insurrection. The Supply returned from thence the 24th, after an absence of five weeks, and brought from Lieutenant King, the commandant, information of the following chimerical scheme. The capture of the island, and the subsequent escape of the captors, was to commence by the seizure of Mr. King's person, which was intended to be effected on the first Saturday after the arrival of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... considered chimerical and theorizing to talk of a time when there will be no such persons among dairymen as what are known to the cheese-maker as a skimmer or stripper, but we hope such a ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... inadequate to satisfy the rapidly increasing demand for newspapers. The time was therefore evidently ripe for the adoption of such a machine as that of Koenig. Attempts had been made by many inventors, but every one of them had failed. Printers generally regarded the steam-press as altogether chimerical. ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... parliament for supplies; and that he might be sure not to meet with opposition, he sent no writs to the more refractory barons: but even those who were summoned, sensible of the ridiculous cheat imposed by the pope, determined not to lavish their money on such chimerical projects; and making a pretext of the absence of their brethren, they refused to take the king's demands into consideration.[*] In this extremity the clergy were his only resource; and as both their temporal and spiritual sovereign concurred in loading them, they were ill able to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... conquering kings, but by the voice of nature, by the clamor of justice and by the genius of wisdom." ... "Humankind cries against the thoughtless and blind legislators who have thought that they might with impunity try chimerical institutions. All the peoples of the world have attempted to gain freedom, some by deeds of arms, others by laws passing alternately from anarchy to despotism, from despotism to anarchy. Very few have contented themselves with moderate ambitions constituting themselves in conformity with their ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... him enough to account, not only for the origin of animal life, but for its progress through all its stages. He had thus involved himself in the grossest materialism; but, being endued with an active fancy, he engendered on it theories so wild and chimerical, that they might be regarded with the same kind of wonder as the fictions of romance, if our pleasure were not continually checked by remembering the error in which they originate. What more prodigious transformation ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... labour and difficulty, to attain the most distant and most improbable event in this world, will not surely deny us a little flattering prospect of those beautiful mansions which, if they could be thought chimerical, must be allowed the loveliest which can entertain the eye of man; and to which the road, if we understand it rightly, appears to have so few thorns and briars in it, and to require so little labour and fatigue from those who shall ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... Interest or deputation, are too cruel and negligent. The Negroes are not only encreased by fresh supplies from Africa and the West India Islands, but also are very prolific among themselves; and they that are born here talk good English and affect our Language, Habits and Customs.... Their work or Chimerical (hard Slavery) is not very laborious; their greatest Hardship consisting in that they and their Posterity are not at their own Liberty or Disposal, but are the Property of their Owners; and when they are free they know not how to provide so well for themselves generally; neither ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... twenty-mile run. The batteries must then either be replaced, or a delay of some three hours must occur while they are being recharged. The idea of establishing charging stations at almost every conceivable terminus of a run is quite chimerical; and, even if hundreds of such stations were provided for the convenience of the users of electric traction, the limitation imposed by being forced to follow the established routes would always give to the non-electric motor an ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... back into the consulting-room, to compose himself upon the couch for his evening sleep, which he took according to custom, and from which he awoke refreshed and ready to work for hours, late into the night, at his wearisome chimerical task, with which he grew more infatuated the more his reason suggested ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... at my advice that Sir Charles was about to go to London. His heart was, I knew, affected, and the constant anxiety in which he lived, however chimerical the cause of it might be, was evidently having a serious effect upon his health. I thought that a few months among the distractions of town would send him back a new man. Mr. Stapleton, a mutual friend who was much concerned at his state of health, ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... possible haste, fearing that Madame de Fondege and Madame Leon might return at any moment. But this was truly a chimerical apprehension. It was nearly six o'clock when the two shoppers made their appearance, wearied with the labors of the day, but in fine spirits. Besides purchasing every requisite for that wonderful costume of hers, the General's wife had found some laces of rare beauty, ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... part of Germany's future programme. And the altruistic professions of the Entente which claims to be fighting for the rights of little States, whose idyllic existence it would fain perpetuate, is scoffed at by the Teutons as chimerical or hypocritical. When this war is over, whatever its upshot, Central Europe with or without the non-German elements will have become a single unit, against whose combined industrial, commercial and military strivings ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... a folly.[267] And as it has been proposed to treat of subjects of gallantry in the article from hence, and no one point of nature is more proper to be considered by the company who frequent this place, than that of duels, it is worth our consideration to examine into this chimerical groundless humour, and to lay every other thought aside, till we have stripped it of all its false pretences to credit and reputation amongst men. But I must confess, when I consider what I am going about, and run over in my imagination all the endless ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... to persuade myself that this was chimerical; that my brain was confused by the fumes of mine host's good cheer, and, in some measure, by the odd stories about paintings which had been told at supper. I determined to shake off these vapors of the mind; rose from my chair, and walked ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... spring which shows the stones of its bed through its limpid waters. Through the arched grotto we see a rocky landscape dotted with slender trees and traversed by a stream, on the banks of which is a village; the colour of all this is as indefinable as those chimerical countries that we pass through in dreams and is marvellously appropriate ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... the operations of the armies in the Milanese, persuaded Lannoy to disregard Albany's motions, and to bend his whole force against the King himself; so that Francis not only weakened his army very unseasonably by this great detachment, but incurred the reproach of engaging too rashly in chimerical ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... quehacer m. business, duty. queja lament. quejar vr. to complain. quemar to burn. querellante plaintiff. querer to wish, love. quien, quien who, whom, which. quijotesco Quixotic. quimerico chimerical, extravagant. quince fifteen. quinientos, -as five hundred. quinta conscription. quinto conscript. quitar to take away, remove. quiza, ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... who turn to profit their deformities, you manufacture literature out of your own deformities and those of your public. Lovingly do you cultivate the diseases of your people, their fear of effort, their love of pleasure, their sensual minds, their chimerical humanitarianism, everything in them that drugs the will, everything in them that saps their power for action. You deaden their minds with the fumes of opium. Behind it all is death: you know it: but you will not admit it. Well, I tell you: Where death ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... in this awakening of his feelings he often thought that his reason was giving way, he seemed to be retracing his steps towards childhood, to that need of universal love which his mother had implanted in him, and dreamt of chimerical solutions, awaiting help from the unknown powers. Then his fears, his hatred of the brutality of facts at last brought him an increasing desire to work salvation by love. No time should be lost in seeking ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the groundless and chimerical assumption of those expositors who view these epistles as prophetical of seven successive periods of the destiny of the church general, the last estate would be worse than the first,—Laodicea being the worst of all. But this ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... cared for, he is not a care-taker. In short, he is an indefinable anomaly, an authority which participates in all, and yet is nothing,—an authority placed, like the dead on whom it is based, outside of all. Nevertheless, this exceptional man grows out of the city of Paris,—that chimerical creation like the ship which is its emblem, that creature of reason moving on a thousand paws which ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... I had attempted in Anjou foolish and chimerical—he could look at the matter with the eyes of an English lord of the manor, accustomed not to view the peasant as a sponge to be squeezed for the benefit of the master, but to regard the landlord as accountable for the welfare, bodily and spiritual, of his people. He thought I had ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reflections night had fallen; and rising, he walked speedily back by the dark wood-paths. But before he reached the meadows, from which he could see lights blinking in the scattered villas, his steps had lagged again. His discouragement had nothing chimerical in it at this moment; it was part and parcel of himself.—The night was both chilly and misty, and it was late. But a painful impression of the previous evening lingered in his mind. Louise would be annoyed with him for keeping her waiting; and he shrank, in advance, from ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... and avoid the necessity of going to prison. The state in which he passed his time, and the treatment which he received, are very justly expressed by him in a letter which he wrote to a friend: "The whole day," says he, "has been employed in various people's filling my head with their foolish chimerical systems, which has obliged me coolly (as far as nature will admit) to digest, and accommodate myself to, every different person's way of thinking; hurried from one wild system to another, till it has quite made ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... common life; those who aim at perfection will come infinitely nearer it than those desponding or indolent spirits, who foolishly say to themselves: Nobody is perfect; perfection is unattainable; to attempt it is chimerical; I shall do as well as others; why then should I give myself trouble to be what I never can, and what, according to the common course of things, I ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... is not good for man to live alone," perhaps it is not well for him to manage his City Hall alone. After all, is it "chimerical?" ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... headed, I shall respect his age so far as to suppress his name. He was of a class now annually declining (and I hope rapidly) to extinction. Thanks be to God, in this point at least, for the dignity of human nature, that, amongst the many, many cases of reform destined eventually to turn out chimerical, this one, at least, never can be defeated, injured, or eclipsed. As man grows more intellectual, the power of managing him by his intellect and his moral nature, in utter contempt of all appeals to his mere animal instincts of pain, must go on pari passu. And, if ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... gradually acquired them in her initiation into the sentimental character. To maintain that character with dignity and propriety, it is necessary she should entertain the most elevated ideas of disproportionate alliances, and disinterested love; and consider fortune, rank, and reputation, as mere chimerical distinctions and vulgar prejudices. ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... select those parts of Nature, and those only, which conduce to that end, avoiding with most religious exactness the intermixture of anything which would contradict it. Else the whole idea of propriety, that is, the only distinction between the just and chimerical in the arts, would be utterly lost. An hero eats, drinks, and sleeps, like other men; but to introduce such scenes on the stage, because they are natural, would be ridiculous. And why? Because they have nothing to do with ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... represented. Brought up in an Italian university, he was distinguished for his learning and his eccentricities. There too, I suppose, brooding over old wives' tales about freedom, and so forth, he contracted his carbonaro, chimerical notions for the independence of Italy. Suddenly, by three deaths, he was elevated, while yet young, to a station and honours which might have satisfied any man in his senses. Que diable! what could the independence of Italy do for him? He and I were cousins; we had played together ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it; I saw dangers, gulfs under my feet. Now, Jeanne, these dangers seem to me chimerical, these gulfs as if a child could cross them. I was cowardly, I tell you; oh, I had no time ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... and literal narrative, will see how little he has been seduced from historic accuracy by the poetical aspect of his subject. The fictitious and romantic dress of his work has enabled him to make it the medium for reflecting more vividly the floating opinions and chimerical fancies of the age, while he has illuminated the picture with the dramatic brilliancy of ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... ascribe this translation to Thomas Wilcox, a certain 'very painful minister of God's word,' I am not sure. The mistake has, however, been constantly repeated, and led Underhill, in his able monograph on Spanish Literature in England, to give a detailed account of Wilcox and his wholly chimerical connexion with the spread of Spanish influence in this country. The translation is preserved in the British Museum, Addit. MS. 18,638, and contains the translator's name perfectly clearly written, both on the title-page and at the end of the dedicatory epistle to Fulke Greville. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... "glorious"; and other Revolutions not yet called glorious; and somewhat has been gained for poor Mankind. Men's ears are not now slit-off by rash Officiality; Officiality will, for long henceforth, be more cautious about men's ears. The tyrannous Star-chambers, branding-irons, chimerical Kings and Surplices at All-hallowtide, they are gone, or with immense velocity going. Oliver's works do follow him!—The works of a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and obscene owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish. What of Heroism, what of Eternal Light was in a Man and his ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... slander, cowardice, murder, and other crimes, and to them they give the name of abatements of honour; others have called them blots in the escutcheon: but as no instance can be produced of such dishonourable marks having been borne in a coat of arms, they may justly be considered as chimerical, or at any rate obsolete, and unworthy of consideration at the present time. Porney pithily observes, "that arms being marks of honour, they cannot admit of any note of infamy, nor would any one bear them if they were so branded. It is true, a man may be degraded ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... extraordinary than that of the interest of the unfunded debt. The increase is great, undoubtedly. However, the author finds no fault with it, and urges it only as a matter of argument to support the strange chimerical proposals he is to make us in the close of his work for the increase of revenue. The greater he made that establishment, the stronger he expected to stand in argument: but, whatever he expected or proposed, he should have stated the matter fairly. He tells us that this ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... strange indeed that an invitation to court should have caused a fluttering in the bosom of an inexperienced young woman. But it was the duty of the parent to watch over the child, and to show her that on one side were only infantine vanities and chimerical hopes, on the other liberty, peace of mind, affluence, social enjoyments, honorable distinctions. Strange to say, the only hesitation was on the part of Frances. Dr. Burney was transported out of himself with delight. Not such are the raptures of a Circassian father who has sold his ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Sleep does "not weigh our eyelids down." We stare upon the vacancy. We conjure up a thousand restless, disheartening images. We abandon projects we have formed, and which, viewed through this medium, appear fantastical, chimerical, absurd. We want ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... provisions failing, the marching through defiles exposed to the constant attacks of foes whom they could not reach, the sorely thinned ranks, the hopeless situation of the stragglers and the wounded, the object which appeared chimerical to all save the enthusiastic leader and his immediate staff—all these things began to tell even on the African and Spanish veterans. But the confidence of the general remained ever the same; numerous stragglers rejoined the ranks; the friendly ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... reality chimerical. At the moment France was at peace with her European foes, and could send her ships of war and her transports across the ocean without fear of the British navy. It would therefore have been possible for Napoleon without molestation to throw a large body of French soldiers into New Orleans. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... occasion I am in some doubt, whether the political spreaders of those chimerical invasions, made a judicious choice in fixing the northern parts of Ireland for that romantic enterprize. Nor, can I well understand the wisdom of the Presbyterians in countenancing and confirming those reports. Because it seems to cast a most infamous reflection upon ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... whatever Prynne may have been in his own age, and remains to posterity, he was fated to endure all the calamities of an author who has strained learning into absurdity, and abused zealous industry by chimerical speculation. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... complained of their quarters to follow my example. I dare say a dozen of others agreed to do so, and I thought we should have been quite a party. Yet, when I brought up my rug about seven bells, there was no one to be seen but the watch. That chimerical terror of good night-air, which makes men close their windows, list their doors, and seal themselves up with their own poisonous exhalations, had sent all these healthy workmen down below. One would think we had been brought up in a fever country; yet in England the most malarious districts are ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Belgium to Hungary be completed, and Belgrade may again become a stage in the high road to the East. A line by the valleys of the Morava and the Maritsa, with its large towns, Philippopoli and Adrianople, is certainly not more chimerical and absurd than many that are now projected. Who can doubt of its ultimate accomplishment, in spite of the alternate precipitancy and prostration of enterprise? Meanwhile imagination loses itself in attempting to picture the altered face of affairs in these secluded regions, when subjected ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... engaged in practical and useful employments. The convent became the house of industry as well as the temple of prayer. The forest glades echoed to the stroke of the axe as well as to hymns of praise. Yes, as Carlyle writes of the twelfth century, "these years were no chimerical vacuity and dreamland peopled with mere vaporous phantasms, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The sun shone on it, the vicissitudes of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowed fields ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... the question as to the mythological import of these poems. Mr. Nash seems to me to have dealt with this, too, rather in the spirit of a sturdy enemy of the Celts and their pretensions,— often enough chimerical,—than in the spirit of a disinterested man of science. 'We find in the oldest compositions in the Welsh language no traces,' he says, 'of the Druids, or of a pagan mythology.' He will not hear of there being, for instance, in these compositions, traces ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... of the first months, with its illusions and optimisms, now appeared to Argensola somewhat chimerical. Those not actually engaged in the war were returning gradually to their habitual occupations. Life had recovered its regular rhythm. "One must live!" said the people, and the struggle for existence filled ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... they have ceased to exist.[237] It is impossible for the sovereign to act, except when the people are assembled. Besides such extraordinary assemblies as unforeseen events may call for, there must be fixed periodical meetings that nothing can interrupt or postpone. Do you call this chimerical? Then you have forgotten the Roman comitia, as well as such gatherings of the people as those of the Macedonians and the Franks and most other nations in their primitive times. What has existed is ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... see or hear more. I had already descried what a peaceful family life—upright, pure, and devoted—my friend Meurtrier hid under his chimerical gasconades. But the spectacle with which chance had favored me was at once so droll and so touching that I could not resist the temptation to watch for some moments longer. That indiscretion sufficed to ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee |
