"Figment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... after his fall. There is certainly no ground for presenting the evil one as having horns, tail, and hoofs. This is only to bring into ridicule what is an exceedingly serious fact. A careful consideration of all the scriptures here given will assure the student that Satan is not a figment of the imagination, ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... everything else in the life of Windy McPherson. For years he had wondered why some sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did not rise, and in a matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing as the Civil War had ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in the minds of pompous old men demanding unearned glory of their fellows. Now hurrying along the street with burning cheeks, he decided that after all there must have been such a war. He had had the same feeling about birthplaces and ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... thou, too, flutterest an impatient wing, Thou presence yet more fugitive and frail, Thou most unbodied thing, Whose very being is thy going hence, And passage and departure all thy theme; Whose life doth still a splendid dying seem, And thou at height of thy magnificence A figment and a dream. ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... good luck, but it was impossible it could strand him in worse case. For the sentimental side of it—separation, long absence—well, the droop of the cynical corners of the mouth became more emphasized at the recollection of that faded old figment, "home, sweet home," and glowing aspirations after the so-called holy and pure joys of the family circle; whereas the reality, a sort of Punch and Judy show at best. No, there was no sentimental side ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... fame of that Mahmud of Ghazna (998-1030), the first to bear the proud title of "Sultan," the first to carry Mohammed and the prophets into India. The Round Table of Mahmud cannot be altogether a figment of the imagination. With such poets as Farruchi, Unsuri, Minutsheri, with such scientists as Biruni and Avicenna as intimates, what wonder that Firdusi was lured by the splendors of a court life! But before he left his native place he must have finished ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... Greek who flew before Nero in the circus; but he, I admit, had a bad fall, as Seutonius recounts. That character of Lucian's, who employed an eagle's wing and a vulture's in his flight, I take to be a mere figment of the satirist's imagination. But what do you make of Simon Magus? He, I cannot doubt, had invented a machine in which, like myself, he made use of steam or naphtha. This may be gathered from Arnobius, our earliest authority. ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... for their existence. On the other hand, there was this strange, wonderful, realistic world of the Homeric poems, no longer existing, it is true, even at the earliest stage of Greek history, but almost absolutely refusing to be dismissed as a mere figment of the imagination. Was it, then, impossible to believe that in the bosom of the great gulf which separated the Hellas of legend from the Hellas of history there lay a civilization, real, and once living, of which the legends and the Homeric ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... this organisation, the idea that there is a certain Natural Order, conformity to which in all social arrangements is the essential condition of their being advantageous to the members of the social union. Natural Order in the minds of this school was no metaphysical figment evolved from uninstructed consciousness, but a set of circumstances to be discovered by continuous and methodical observation. It consisted of physical law and moral law. Physical law is the regulated course of every physical circumstance ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... the evolution of the stars let us keep two points clearly in mind. The starting-point, the nebula, is no figment of the scientific imagination. Hundreds of thousands of nebulae, besides even vaster irregular stretches of nebulous matter, exist in the heavens. But the stages of the evolution of this stuff into stars are very largely a matter of speculation. Possibly there is more than one line of ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... this at San Gervasio is the actual fountain hymned by Horace—ah, that is quite another affair! Few poets, to be sure, have clung more tenaciously to the memories of their childhood than did he and Virgil. And yet, the whole scene may be a figment of his imagination—the very word Bandusia may have been coined by him. Who can tell? Then there is the Digentia hypothesis. I know it, I know it! I have read some of its defenders, and consider (entre nous) that they have made out a pretty strong ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... that, according to some authorities, La Salle, some time between the years 1669 and 1671, descended the Mississippi, as far as the Arkansas, by the river Ohio. There can be no doubt that the story is a mere figment.] ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... pleased look at a woman; fighting—only the One above could know with what desperate valour—against the warm-hearted girl with the gray eyes and the red lips, who laughed in her knowledge that she drew him—fighting her away for a sentimental figment, until she had ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... by which so many are overwhelmed. It is man, it is woman, who bears the agony; the crushing burden of wrong-doing falls on them. Look no more then, we urge, to a phantom deity, to an idol-god in the skies, a figment of a disordered imagination, but think on your brother man before you dare to set mischief in motion. When you apprehend the nearness of danger, think of the future, think of consequences, think only of the irremissibleness of sin, which not all the waters ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... was arrested by a portent so remarkable that had there been only a single witness one would suppose it to be a figment of his imagination. Fortunately, however, both the Baron and Mr. Gallosh can corroborate each detail. About the middle, apparently, of the wall opposite, an oblong of light appeared in the ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... and feeble, both in body and mind, from the exhausting and wasting illness that had followed the severe winter's campaign, Wendot knew not if this vision was but the figment of his own brain, or whether the passionate love he felt rising up in his heart was lavished upon a mere phantom. But so long as she flitted about him he was content to lie and watch her, with the light of a great happiness in his eyes; and once when he had called ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... not only an English gentleman and an officer in name, he was also what these implied—a brave man; but when he realized that the sweet picture he had looked upon was but the figment of a dream, and that in reality he still lay where he had fallen at the foot of the grating with a lion standing over him licking his face, the tears sprang to his eyes and ran down his cheeks. Never, he thought, had an unkind fate played so cruel ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... these or none. And first—the man's own firm conviction rests That he was dead (in fact they buried him) —That he was dead and then restored to life By a Nazarene physician of his tribe: —'Sayeth, the same bade "Rise," and he did rise. "Such cases are diurnal," thou wilt cry. Not so this figment!—not, that such a fume, Instead of giving way to time and health, Should eat itself into the life of life, As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones and all! For see, how he takes up the after-life. The man—it is one Lazarus a Jew, Sanguine, proportioned, ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... declining the cardinalate, if indeed the offer were not a figment of his own brain, Laud would have been diplomatic enough not to allow his reasons to transpire, and probably the Pope never knew them. The importance of the statement lies for posterity entirely in the anti-Roman tendency which he expressed in his diary. For the archbishop ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... outlook was cheerless enough. During his absence his married sister, the elder one, had taken the other to live with her, relieving Theodore of the charge of contribution to her support. But suddenly, behold the husband, the brother-in-law, dies, leaving a mere figment of property; and the two ladies, with their two little girls, are afloat in the wide world. Theodore finds himself at twenty-six without an income, without a profession, and with a family of four females to support. Well, in his quiet way he draws on his courage. The history of the two years ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... no princess—no child of the exiled Theodomir. The paper stuffed in the candle-stick in a reckless moment had been but the ingenious figment of a man's brain for the entertainment of an hour. The old chief and Sho-caw with their broken tale to Philip had but tangled the net the more. As the blood of the Indian mother had driven Diane forth to the forest, so had the blood of the artist father driven Keela forth ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... romantic friendships with boys. The "romantic idea," according to Benecke, is "the idea that a woman is a worthy object for a man's love and that such love may well be the chief, if not the only, aim of a man's life." But that Antimachus knew anything of such love is a pure figment of Benecke's imagination. The works of Antimachus are lost, and all that we know about them or him is that he lamented the loss of his wife—a feeling very much older than the poet of Colophon—and consoled himself by writing an elegy named [Greek: Ludae], in which he brought together from ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... time? A mere figment of the imagination!" exclaimed Dick suddenly. "Was it day before yesterday that I came home? Forty-eight hours have put a gulf between the old and the new me. Condensed time,—just add hot water and it swells to six times ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... clever. I wonder if the missing book is a figment of her imagination," he thought; but in this he wronged her, for that little red-edged copy of Keble's Christian Year was ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... mountains. Soon even its vague light would encroach no more upon the darkness. The great hotel would be invisible, annihilated as it were in the gloom, and not even thus dimly exist, glimmering, alone, forlorn, so incongruous to the wilderness that it seemed even now some mere figment of the brain, as the two horsemen came with a freshened burst of speed along the deserted avenue and reined up beside a small gate at ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... hand lingered once more near the bandage. It was ridiculous, that tentative, almost sympathetic touch. Then, she—a figment of disordered imagination—receded; there was no ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... figment. No jury and no judge can be impartial. The other day a man was charged with striking a Socialist orator with an ice-pick. The judge lectured the orator on his Bolshevism, and then gave the accused imprisonment for a short term in the second division. Suppose that the ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... I felt that we were even denied what consolation there might have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees. Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, say, a gray autumn day before a fire?—I don't ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... he be in a distant land and short of necessary bread. Does he think he is not loved?—he may have the woman at his beck, and there is not a joy for him in all the world. Indeed, if we are to make any account of this figment of reason, the distinction between material and immaterial, we shall conclude that the life of each man as an individual is immaterial, although the continuation and prospects of mankind as a race turn upon material conditions. The physical business ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not murder. What treacherous lying is all the heroic poetry of battle! Men will now creep up after dark, ambushed in safety behind the celestial curtains, and drop bombs on sleepers beneath for the greater glory of some fine figment or other. It filled me, not with wrath at the work of Kaisers and Kings, for we know what is possible with them, but with dismay at the discovery that one's fellows are so docile and credulous that they will obey any order, however ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... life, then we shall go on in a truly moral process of growth, availing ourselves always of the teachings of experience and working toward the true well-being of our souls, and if the mercy and justice of God be not the figment of our imagination those who have been hardly dealt with here will be given new opportunity, the deficient and the handicapped released from what weighed them down will find a new departure, and the justices of eternity ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... not even one of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which they ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... circumstantial; who may or may not even have existed, a point unworthy of disputation. As for Miss Reid, we will take an affidavit that neither in miniature nor at large did she excel the celebrated Rosalba; and with regard to Mrs. Lennox, we consider her to be a mere figment, like Narcissa, Miss Tabitha Bramble, or any hero or heroine depicted by the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... epitaph which he says appeared near the place where lay the body of Columbus in Seville, but pretty Latin epitaphs were Castellanos' weakness, and it is to be feared that this one, like others which he dedicated to American explorers, was nothing more than a figment of his poetic imagination. Two writers, Coleti and Alcedo, who almost two centuries later mentioned the same epitaph as marking the grave in Santo Domingo, ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... an illusion, Dulaq reminded himself, a clever man-made hallucination. A figment of my own imagination ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... were born within it, and had grown used to it and fond of it, and were attached to it by all the associations of blood ties, friendships, and what not, you were therefore entitled to take part in it, and could be called on to give it service? If citizenship is a mere legal figment, by what right do States send their citizens to war? Yet women are theoretically transferred, body and bone, heart, memory, and soul, to whatever country or nation their husbands happen to give allegiance to. Isadora Duncan, born in California, of generations of Californians, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... neither clearly understood nor easily defined is the nature of this union, the manner in which the antique and the modern did thus amalgamate. It is easy to speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated the modern; but all this explains but little: art is not a metaphysical figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... released, and that whose Nescience is not destroyed will remain in Bondage!—You now argue on the assumption of a special avidy for each soul. But what about the distinction of souls implied therein? Is that distinction essential to the nature of the soul, or is it the figment of Nescience? The former alternative is excluded, as it is admitted that the soul essentially is pure, non-differenced intelligence; and because on that alternative the assumption of avidy to account ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... fastidious and exacting in these matters as, by your own confession, it appears you are, then Mr. Lewes must necessarily inform you that he does not deal in the article; probably he will add that therefore it must be non-essential. I should fear he might even stigmatise imagination as a figment, and delicacy as ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... small parcel of news drifts out to us across the ocean, reads with slender interest here. Yucatan is another world, my dear Tatho, as you in the course of your government will learn, with new interests, new people, new everything. To us here, Atlantis is only a figment, a shadow, far away across the waters. It is for this new world of Yucatan that I have ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... appraising glance at her. He had been inclined to regard Dean's suspicion that she was in love with the younger Hoff as the mere figment of jealousy, but where two young persons of the opposite sex are thrown together, there is always the possibility of romance. Jane colored a little under his searching glance, yet what he read in her face seemed to satisfy his doubts, and he made up his mind to take ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... comprehend, is master of their theory. They are puzzled and panic-stricken; they strike in the dark. In all controversy, the strong man's position is unassailed. His adversary does not see where he is, but attacks a man of straw, some figment of his own, to the amusement of intelligent spectators. Always our combatant is talking quite wide of the whole question. So the wise man can never have an opponent; for whoever is able to face and find him has already gone over to his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... poet, however much he reads poetry. If you want virtue, in the ancient sense, the sense of honour, of courage, of self-reliance, of the instinct to command, you must have a class of gentlemen. Otherwise virtue will be at best a mere conception in the head, a figment of the brain, not a character and a force. Why is the teaching of the classics now discredited among you? Not because it is not as valuable as ever it was, but because there is no one left to understand its value. ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... saith, Deliver me, for thou art my god'—even he has at last found more than his match in irrationality. For he has at least before him a visible tangible block of wood, not the mere memory of one that has long ago rotted, nor the dream of one that is yet to grow, whereas that mental figment, Consecrated Humanity, is not even a real shadow, but only a fancied one, a shadow cast by no substance. And it is to Comtists of all people—intellectual salt of the earth as they are—that this figment is recommended for adoration—yes, to those ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... resounded. There was something rather ghastly to me in the general unconsciousness that Soames had existed, and more than once I caught myself wondering whether Nupton, that babe unborn, were going to be right in thinking him a figment ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... than from dread of actual danger. I was in a fog of uncertainty. Things were happening around me which I could only dimly guess at, and I had no power to take one step in defence. That Wardlaw should have felt the same without any hint from me was the final proof that the mystery was no figment of my nerves. I had written to Colles and got no answer. Now the letter with Japp's resignation in it had gone to Durban. Surely some notice would be taken of that. If I was given the post, Colles was bound to consider what I had said in my earlier letter ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... battling for his manhood. It seemed to Peter that his gasp was almost one of relief at discovering that his eyes had not deceived him, that the face he had seen was that of a real person, instead of the figment ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... any one else, that he is not moving at all. If he can find no one of his neighbors advancing toward fortune, with longer strides than he, he will imagine some successful "speculator," to whom he will compare himself, and chafe at his inferiority to a figment of his own fancy. If he possessed "a million a minute," he would cast about for some profitable employment, in which he might engage, "to pay expenses." He will abandon a silver-mine, of slow, but certain gains, for the gambling chances of a gold "placer;" and if any ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... Spiritual Environment, which alone can bring us into sympathy with the Great Reality. Without this "Knowledge of God," we can see by analogy on the Organic Plane that Everlasting Life is impossible—we are as weeds and shall be rooted out. This is no figment of the imagination, it seems to be the only conclusion we can come to if Nature is the work of Nature's God, and Man is made in the image (spiritual) of that God. Herbert Spencer came to the same conclusion when ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... all have been a figment of the woman's imagination and vanity?—for Noreen now realised how colossally vain she was. Had she misunderstood or, worse still, misrepresented him? But that thought was almost more painful to the girl than the certainty of his guilt. For if it were true, how cruelly, how vilely unjust she ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... We know her slavish thrall To the strange sway despotical Of that strong figment, Fashion; But is there nought in this to move The being born for grace and love To shamed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... "agreeably surprised" to find that, as an unconvicted prisoner, he could order in his own meals and receive newspapers and periodicals. But he was hurt at an unfriendly suggestion on the part of the authorities that Pitezel had not died by his own hand, and that Edward Hatch was but a figment of his rich imagination. He would like to have been released on bail, but in the same unfriendly spirit was informed that, if he were, he would be detained on a charge of murder. And so the months dragged on. Holmes, studious, patient, ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... as in what preceded we made a sort of waxen figment in the mind, so let us now suppose that in the mind of each man there is an aviary of all sorts of birds—some flocking together apart from the rest, others in small groups, others ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... authorities of his time executed for stirring up the people. In short, the divinity of Jesus must stand or fall with the divinity of the God of Moses, and this in turn rests upon the historical truth of Genesis. If the Fall of man be successfully disputed, the God of Moses becomes a figment of the Jewish imagination—Jesus becomes man. And this is what Science asserts, while we of the outer churches, through cowardice or indolence—too often, alas! through our own skepticism—have allowed Science thus to obscure ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... new world; it suggests universe beyond universe; sinking into the infinite abysses of space; we see worlds forming or decaying and raising at every moment problems of a strange fascination. The prosaic truth is really more poetical than the old figment of the childish imagination. The first great discovery of the real nature of the stars did, in fact, logically or not, break up more effectually than perhaps any other cause, the old narrow and stifling conception of ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... quite sane Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of wisdom; there was nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment of a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and not less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen romantic, tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... it is that it is no longer pure matter. Aristotle's answer is that it is true that pure matter is never found as an objective existence. Point to any real object and it is composed of matter and form. And yet it is not true that matter is a pure figment of the imagination; it has an existence of its own, a potential existence. And this leads us to another important ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... Prince," written by Machiavelli. That book has often been called the treatise on the art of lying. Never was such cunning exhibited. Never was the father of lies invoked with such skill as by the German leaders. In their sight truth is contemptible, kindness is weakness, honour is a figment. ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Leon, is the author of an epic, Shebach Nashim ("Praise of Women"), in which occurs an interesting reference to Petrarch's Laura, whom, in opposition to the consensus of opinion among his contemporaries, he considers, not a figment of the imagination, but a woman of flesh and blood. Praise and criticism of women are favorite themes in the poetic polemics of the sixteenth century. For instance, Jacob ben Elias, of Fano, in his "Shields of Heroes," a small collection of songs in stanzas of three verses, ventures to attack the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... shining directly upon my face. Another thing I thought I perceived, but endeavored to assure myself that it represented the aftermath of an unpleasant nightmare. This was a lithe shape streaking through my open window—a figment of the imagination, as I concluded at the time, the tail-end of a dream visibly retreating in the moment ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... neology, while Metelill asked what was become of loyalty. "That depends on what you mean by it," returned our girl graduate. "LOI- AUTE, steadfastness to principle, is noble, but personal loyalty, to some mere puppet or the bush the crown hangs on, is a pernicious figment." Charley shouted that this was the No. 1 letter A point in Pie's prize essay, and there the discussion ended, Isa only sighing to herself, "Ah, if I had any ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... usually called "matter," then, at that very moment, the complex vision's revelation would be falsified. Then, at that very moment, the integrity of the soul would dissolve away, and we should be reduced to a stream of sensations with nothing to give them coherence and unity, or to that figment of abstract self-consciousness, "thought-in-itself," apart from both the thing "thinking" and the thing "thought." The soul, therefore, must be conceived if we are to be true to the original revelation of the complex vision, as having an indefinable "something" ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... first impression would prove to be a mere figment of his imagination; but now there was no doubting. There, sprawled in an ugly, inhuman heap on the floor, head resting against the cushioned seat of the cab, was the figure of a man. There was no doubt that he was dead. Even Spike, young, optimistic, and unversed in the ways of death ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... this year, when an unusually beautiful cloud attracted my attention, and as I watched its rapidly changing forms, there was slowly evolved from it the kindly loving face of my mother. It was no fancy, no distorted figment of a dream. The dear face smiled upon me with angelic sweetness, glanced upward, and was gone; then I knew that I had ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... one when it might have covered the shame of a friend! And I—what am I, that I should, in my secret mind, wish that such a gross insult to me and my child had been glossed over? Yet such was my opinion of Henry, that I would have willingly believed the grossest figment the swaggering ass could have invented. Well, it skills not thinking of it. Our honest name must be maintained, though everything else ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... and success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged itself in awful order—and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari—no figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love, dissipated by heavy sorrow—a boyish resolution, made in a moment of feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say, in Dante's case, laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, gave the idea ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Are you, now? I died years ago. What you see before you is a figment of the reporter's brain—a monster manufactured out of newspaper paragraphs, with ink in its veins. A keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... ground. There is nothing in the world, he says, except our own sensations and ideas. In order to exist for us, things have to be perceived by the mind; therefore, everything, in order to exist, must exist in the mind of God. But when Berkeley had proved that matter was figment, David Hume, born in 1711, came forward and showed that mind was also an illusion. You know nothing of matter, said Berkeley; you have only perceptions and the ideas based thereon. You know nothing of mind, replied Hume; you have only a succession ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... and protagonist of slavery argument, had contested; here had arisen "Joe" Smith, propagator of that strange American dogma of the Latter-Day Saints. What a state, Cowperwood sometimes thought; what a figment of the brain, and yet how wonderful! He had crossed it often on his way to St. Louis, to Memphis, to Denver, and had been touched by its very simplicity—the small, new wooden towns, so redolent of American tradition, prejudice, force, and illusion. The white-steepled church, the lawn-faced, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the nature of all the trio. There is, moreover, something curious in his character. His love of wine and woman is a singular trait, and is quite incompatible with the nature of an ideal saint. It smells of reality, and strongly suggests that he was not a figment of the religious imagination but an actual man; and this is supported by the tradition of his association with Kartavirya Arjuna, who, in spite of all the mythical tales that are related of him, really seems to have been a king of flesh and blood. Thus we may venture ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... is a series of pictures of the lives of women wage-workers in New York, based on the minutest personal inquiry and observation. No work of fiction has ever presented more startling pictures, and, indeed, if they occurred in a novel would at once be stamped as a figment of the brain.... Altogether, Mrs. Campbell's book is a notable contribution to the labor literature of the day, and will undoubtedly enlist sympathy for the cause of the oppressed working-women whose stories do ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... learned to distinguish the seasons, and to divide the day into parts. But the term Ouran the Greeks by a strange misconception changed to [Greek: ourein]; of which mistake they have afforded other instances: and from this abuse of terms the silly figment took ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... of the facts of the case, as had been maliciously reported, and that he wishes to show how well and clearly it was all known beforehand. So he says the dialogue on the Copernican side takes up the question purely as a mathematical hypothesis or speculative figment, and gives it every artificial advantage of which the theory ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... dead generally, fortify themselves with Psalm 139:8, and also Psalm 16:10; and yet the first passage may only imply the omnipresence of God, and the second, the resurrection of the incorruptible body of Christ from the grave. The descent of Christ into the place of torment is a figment, a monkish fable, in which Bible incidents and heathen myths are woven together to delude a credulous and ignorant laity. The formulary designated the Apostles' creed, has, beyond question, a high claim to antiquity, but none whatever ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... he can accomplish all of them without attempting to produce a work of art. It is also clear that his artistic success is not his success in winning an audience. Those "great masses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life" are a figment of Tolstoy's mind. No conditions are natural in the sense in which he uses the word; nor do any existing conditions make one man a better judge of art than another. There is no multitude of simple, normal, unspoilt men able and willing to ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... ending of this strange mystery that had wrecked two lives. It seemed to her as she sat down among madame's troop of noisy, chattering girls, as though last night and its events were a long way off and a figment of some strange dream. That she had stood face to face with Sir Victor Catheron, spent a night under the same roof, actually spoken to him, actually felt sorry for him, was too unreal to be true. They had said rightly ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... the soul may be deposited for a longer or shorter time in some place of security outside the body, or at all events in the hair, is found in the popular tales of many races. It remains to show that the idea is not a mere figment devised to adorn a tale, but is a real article of primitive faith, which has given rise to a ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Kado the Striver, but it is most unlikely that he is a mere figment of popular imagination. What history does record, however, is that the wicked Duchess and her host of mercenary Normans were forced to flee, and that her place was taken by a ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... what can the circle have to do with the numbers alive at the end of a given time?"—"I cannot demonstrate it to you; but it is demonstrated."—"Oh! stuff! I think you can prove anything with your differential calculus: figment, {286} depend upon it." I said no more; but, a few days afterwards, I went to him and very gravely told him that I had discovered the law of human mortality in the Carlisle Table, of which he thought very highly. I ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... thrilled by the message of love which this man sent out to her through the pressure of his hand on hers which he held so closely. Should she be the one to disturb the supreme serenity of his thoughts at this moment by a suggestion of something which perhaps was only the figment of an over-anxious brain? Inside the battle waged, but he could not see her face, so was ignorant of the conflict. If her hand trembled within his own he did not notice it. She looked down at the profile so clearly outlined. What strength, ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... yonder in the sky!" shouted Mr. Waples, with much firmness, "if thou art not mere nightmare, mere figment of the sciences, let me feel thy strength unequally, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... gifted with the instincts of a poet and denied the verbal formulation. And it was the most painfully realistic, aggressively material thing, that conflict in my brain, that mortal ever experienced. That, however, may have been a mere figment of my excited imagination. But what excited my imagination? That is the question. If I remember aright, I was mentally discoursing with some enthusiasm upon Miss Penrhyn's charms, but in strict impartiality ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... jealousy, a jealousy which seems to be clairvoyant, full of supernatural intuitions, turning everything to suspicion, a jealousy which blights and kills. Could the memory of those weeks of anguish fade from Helene's soul? This dying of a broken heart is not merely the figment of a poet's fancy. It has happened in real life. The coming of death, save in the case of the very aged, seems, nearly always, brutally cruel, at least to those friends who survive. Parents know what it is to sit ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... and subtle spiritual wistfulness that is to be seen in the Madonnas of Raphael. Each of these men loved a woman—and each pictured her again and again. Whether this woman had an existence outside the figment of the brain matters not: both painted her as they saw her— tender, gentle ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... appearance and character differed considerably from that of the medium, and that it was impossible to regard the materialized form as but a phantasm of the living. A stupendous discovery or a pitiful figment of a lunatic brain! But no flash of lightning rent the halls of learning; Sir William Crookes' researches into radiant matter could safely be accepted as workable intellectual ground, but not his researches into ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... not now occur to us, might be applied in just though ungentle retort by Mahometan doctors. Yet the most direct rejoinder would probably not occur to them: the Alexandrian Library was NOT destroyed by the orders of Omar, and the whole story is a figment! ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... of reason can teach nothing, of any value concerning the true way of salvation. (93) People who lay no claims to reason for themselves, are not able to prove by reason this their assertion; and if they hawk about something superior to reason, it is a mere figment, and far below reason, as their general method of life sufficiently shows. (94) But there is no need to dwell upon such persons. (95) I will merely add that we can only judge of a man by his works. (96) If a man abounds in the fruits of the Spirit , charity, joy, peace, ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... millions had taken shape in the Bay Park, the newest and finest of metropolitan courses. Hilary's father, a power alike on the turf and in the street, had built it, and controlled it absolutely—of course through the figment of an obedient jockey club. A trace of sentiment, conjoined to a deal of pride, had made him revive an old-time stake—the Far and Near. It dated back to that limbo of racing things—"before the war." Banker Hilary's grandfather, a leader among gentlemen horsemen of that good day, had been ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... universe. It has not been proved otherwise to me, for all that I have peered over his shoulder and read his malicious statement to the contrary. He gives me credit for no less than average stupidity. He thinks I think he is real. How silly. I know he is a brain-figment, nothing more. ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... not heard that it was a mere figment, and that I could scarce have wedded Lucy safely, even had this matter gone as you wish? This is the luckiest chance that could ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at all? Perhaps you're just a figment of the overstrained ear. And if I undertook to look, there wouldn't be anything there ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... introduction. The northern Peel, a castle, as in the Isle of Man, was originally applied to a stockade, Old Fr. pel (pieu), a stake, Lat. Palos. Hence also Peall, Peile. Keep comes from the central tower of the castle, where the baron and his family kept, i.e. lived. A moated Grange is a poetic figment, for the word comes from Fr, grange, a barn (to Lat. granum); ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... this were denied as too wild an hypothesis—and, confounded as I was, I did deny it—there remained but to conclude that I had myself passed into an abnormal state of mind; in short, that I was very ill and delirious: and even then, mine was the strangest figment with which delirium had ever harassed ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... garden, looking behind at every third step to make sure that the gentleman was still following, that he was not merely a figment of his own sleepy senses. Their direction was straight toward the parapet where, on an historic wash-day, the signorina had sat beside a row of dangling stockings. She was sitting there now, dressed in white, the oleander tree above her head enveloping ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... moment Judge Buller had spoken of the picture, how all three of them had changed, Clara and Kerr and Harry. Everything that had seemed so phantasmal then, everything she had put down as a figment of her own imagination, had meant just this plain fact. All three of them had wanted the picture. For his own reason Kerr had turned aside from the chase, but Harry had stood with it to the last, and now, when finally the prize had been assured ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... for the originality of his discovery. This mysterious and occult connection between Adwaita philosophy and Arabian commerce is pointed out in p. 212 of his book, and it may have some bearing on the present question, if it is anything more than a figment of his fancy. The only reason given by him in support of his theory is, however, in my humble opinion, worthless. The Hindus had a Prominent example of a grand religious movement under the guidance of a ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... appalling. There seems no substance to this solid globe on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3 and H2O.[2] Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies;[3] science carries us into zones of ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which would probably be the fruit-trees that had restored Barber to life—and big clumps of bamboo and scrub. I anticipated that it would be among those clumps of scrub that we should eventually find the treasure hulk, if indeed the craft actually existed and was not the figment of a madman's imagination; and I also foresaw that our search for the hulk might easily be a very much more arduous and protracted affair than I had anticipated, for it appeared to me that every one of those clumps ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... presumably effecting it. What I inferred (if so) was that Coleridge had intended the line as in first ed.: "And she is to sleep with Christabel!" as leading up too nearly to what he meant to keep back for the present. But the whole thing was a figment. ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... was very well content with the state of affairs at Hilton House in all but one respect. The fulfilment of his purpose was not approaching with sufficient rapidity. The rich marriage which he had talked about for Reginald was a pure figment; the virtuous ironmonger, with the richly dowered daughter, existed only in his prolific brain—the need of money was growing pressing. He had done much, but there was still much to do, and he must make haste to do it. He had also been mistaken on one point of much importance ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... amiably around. Right at the back of the room—before a back-window that gave on the whitewashed wall—a man was rapidly putting his signature to a number of papers. But Mr. Slosson had ignored the existence of this man, treating him apparently as a figment of the disordered brain or ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... intricately blended in the world that discrimination is impossible. Still the man who argues thus is bound to assign some grounds for his melancholy scepticism; and to show further that the destruction of the figment is too dearly bought by the assertion of the truth. Therefore, I might be content to say that, in such cases, the innocence of the plain speaker ought to be assumed until his guilt is demonstrated. If we had always waited to clear away shams till we were certain that ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... fifth book Plato introduces the figment of contingent matter, which has exercised so great an influence both on the Ethics and Theology of the modern world, and which occurs here for the first time in the history of philosophy. He did not remark that the degrees of knowledge ...
— The Republic • Plato
... as my resolute benefactress, got the habit (I am sure) of looking upon me as under nameless obligations to her. This raised my wrath. It was not that to my feelings the obligations were really a mere figment of pretence. On the contrary, according to my pains endured, they towered up to the clouds. But I felt that nobody had any right to load me with favours that I had never asked for, and without leave even ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... himself for days together by pulling to pieces art, science, philosophy, to find their hidden wheels: so he came by a sort of Pyrrhonism, in which everything that was became only a figment of the mind, a castle in the air, which had not even the excuse of the geometric symbols, of being necessary to the mind. Christophe would rage against his pulling ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... reason of its non-differentiation in itself, must needs become to each of us exactly what we take it to be, then it follows that in order to realize it on our own plane of Personality we must see it through the medium of Personality, and it is therefore not a theological figment, but the Supreme Psychological Truth that no man can come to "the Father"—that is, to the Parent Spirit—except through the Son ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... us to solitary confinement, and to ignorance of the world in which we live. We see and know the world through our eyes and our intelligence, in visual and in intellectual terms: how else should a world be seen or known which is not the figment of a dream, but a collateral power, pressing and alien? In the cognisance which an animal may take of his surroundings—and surely all animals take such cognisance—the subjective and moral character of his feelings, on finding himself so surrounded, does not destroy ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... generalizations for which they were seeking a basis were trivial in comparison with those which our author hurtles out after a glance at M. Quetelet. "A continuous average of so many murders a year; then so many must happen; then somebody must commit them; then free-will is a figment, and society is the source of all action ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... long after dark, and with the most primitive facilities one can imagine. Only on calendars do we see a beauteous Indian maiden draped in velvet, reclining on a mossy bank, and gazing at her own image in a placid pool. That Indian is the figment of a fevered artist brain in a New York studio. Should a real Indian woman try that stunt she'd search a long way for the water. Then she'd likely recline in a cactus bed and gaze at a medley of hoofs and horns of deceased cows bogged down in a mud hole. Such are the surroundings ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... "Then you see a figment of your own imagination; there is nothing else to see. There! I've packed everything that belongs to me, while you've been smoking and gazing at that railway guide. When ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Luniac and poor old Ormonde and people talk when they're 'in love'. Love! It's just sentimental idealizing and the worship of what does not exist and therefore cannot last. You love me, don't you, Dammy, not an impossible figment of a heated imagination? This will last, dear.... If you'd idealized me into something unearthly and impossible you'd have tired of me in six months or less. You'd have hated me when you saw the reality, and found yourself tied ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... society, as at once a folly and an insult; and as she was of age and paid half the bills, all means of suasion were conspicuously lacking. Mrs. Welman was in a position exactly the reverse of the pleasant one; she had responsibility without power. It is true her responsibility was mainly a figment of her own brain, but its burden upon her was none the ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... way into the houses and laid violent hands on any objects which seemed suitable for the bonfire. As it happened that they were sometimes sent away with a beating, they were afterwards attended, in order to keep up the figment of a pious 'rising generation,' by a ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... place of worship, or to join any already established body of Christians, anathemas are hurled at their heads, and they are told that they are guilty of the heinous crime of schism—schism, in the sense they give it, a figment of sacerdotalism, priestcraft, and imposture. But does the crime of schism not exist? Ay, it does; but it is schism from the true Church of Christ, the Church of which He is the head corner-stone, the beautified in Heaven, the sanctified ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... down town in the morning the very freshness of the air inspired him with the hope that he should come out of his father's office with every phantom reduced to a figment of imagination springing from the abnormality of his life-story; with a message that should allay Mary's fears and soften her harshness toward him; with the certainty that the next time he and his father sat together at dinner it would be in a permanent understanding, craved ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... dream of woman vexed me—and when I dreamed at all it was but a tinselled figment that I saw—the echo, doubtless, of some tale I read concerning raven hair and rosy lips, and of a vague but wondrous fairness adorned most suitably ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... there it was. He appealed to my pity, too. He told me that if I did not go with him abroad he would have to go alone, a sick man among strangers. I soon found out, too, that even my belief in my own property was largely a figment of my own imagination. It is true some little money had been left to me, and had been lost in the way I have indicated, but without him I could never have gone to Oxford, without him I should have been practically a waif. Besides, he was a man of ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... don't see Tayoga. You merely see an idle figment of a brain that does not yet fully know my friend, the great young Onondaga. But I see him, and I see him clearly. I behold a tall, strong figure, head slightly bent against the rain, eyes that see in the ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a figment of her fancy and prejudice, and I repeated it to Colonel Walton the next time I went to the hotel where he was then living—I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was then three score and ten—and ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... parent of a future. Even so the species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms shade off one into another until, if we only observe the marginal cases, we are inclined to doubt whether the species is more than a figment of the mind. Yet the biologist is prepared to defend the idea of species; and in like manner the historian holds that the distinction between one phase of culture and another is real enough to justify, and, indeed, to demand, the use of distinguishing names. In the development ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... from philosophy by a single victory. It retreats slowly, defends every inch of ground, and often, after it has been driven from the open country, retains a footing in some remote fastness. The essences of individuals were an unmeaning figment arising from a misapprehension of the essences of classes, yet even Locke, when he extirpated the parent error, could not shake himself free from that which was its fruit. He distinguished two sorts of essences, Real and Nominal. His nominal essences ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... night I was some chilly in the ankles. I'd called for J. Bayard at his hotel, and he'd shown up with the Major. No figment of the imagination, either, the Major. He's a big, husky, rich-colored party that's some imposin' and decorative in open-faced togs; quiet and shy actin', though, just as Steele had said. I sort of took to him, ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... can realise the motive power to be found in a love of what is right, nor the inner strength which results from a genuine love of virtue. There are men who think that all greatness is a figment of the brain, men who with their vile and degraded reason will never recognise the power over human passions which is wielded by the very madness of virtue. You can only teach such men by examples; if they ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... hung it in the temple of Jupiter. Be just, swallow both stories or neither. The 'Bocca della Verita' passes for a statue of the Virgin, and convicted a woman of perjury the other day; it is in reality an image of the goddess Rhea, and the modern figment is one of its ancient traditions; swallow ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... experiences of the presence of supernatural powers. In the middle of the night he was conscious of some presence walking about the room. It sat down beside him, and at the same time a loud noise arose from a chest which stood near. This phenomenon, he admits, might well have been the figment of a brain overburdened with thought; but suddenly his memory flies back to an experience of his twentieth year, upon which he proceeds to build a story, wild and fanciful even for his powers of imagination. "What ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... that the writer has not been honest with himself or with us in his views of human life. There may be just as much lying in novels as anywhere else. The novelist who offers us what he declares to be a figment of his own brain may be just as untrue as the reporter who sets forth a figment of his own brain which he declares to be a real occurrence. That is, just as much faithfulness to life is required of the novelist as of the reporter, and in a much higher degree. The novelist ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... which to-day is not so generally intelligible as once it was, had great weight in 1861. This was the sense of honor in politics. Those historians who brush it aside as a figment lack historical psychology. It is possible that both Governor Pickens and the Confederate Cabinet were animated first of all by the belief that the honor of South Carolina required them to withstand the attempt of what they held to be ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... What a figment of the imagination this boasted impregnability of the Bank of England was the sequel will show. And as for those masters of finance, those earthly Joves of the financial world who sat serene above the clouds, "the Governor and Company of the Bank of England," they soon had the whole ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... herself that the student life in London was a substantial reality, and not a mere figment of the imagination, she hummed a few bars of a song, and as she listened to the deep, rich notes of her voice, poised with that sureness which only comes of first-class training, she smiled a little, reflecting that if nothing else had changed, here at ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... the Sutrakara says[140] 'no, on account of the difference.' In spite of their unity, fruition on the part of the soul does not involve fruition on the part of Brahman; because there is a difference. For there is a difference between false knowledge and perfect knowledge, fruition being the figment of false knowledge while the unity (of the Self) is revealed by perfect knowledge. Now, as the substance revealed by perfect knowledge cannot be affected by fruition which is nothing but the figment of false knowledge, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... negative; it does oppose the good; although its opposition is finally overcome. If it did not, if evil were unreal, there would be no possibility of calling forth the moral potency of man, and the moral life would be a figment. But these two conditions of the moral life—on the one hand, that the evil of the world must be capable of being overcome and is there for the purpose of being overcome, and that it is unreal except as a means ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... be an impossible figment, but the antagonistic tendencies which the fable adumbrates have existed in every society which was ever established, and, to all appearance, must strive for the victory in all that will be. Historians point to the greed and ambition of rulers, to the reckless turbulence of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... more surprised than to hear this of the mother whom she only knew as calm, majestic, and impassible. With a sudden impulse, she hastened to her room. She was with Mrs. Nesbit, and Theodora following, found her reading aloud, without a trace of emotion. No doubt it was a figment of Miss Standaloft, and there was a sidelong glance of satisfaction in her aunt's eyes, which made Theodora so indignant, that she was obliged ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to treat is this, "The Ideal Teacher." And I may as well start out by saying that the ideal teacher is and always must be a figment of the imagination. This is the essential feature of any ideal. The ideal man, for example, must possess an infinite number of superlative characteristics. We take this virtue from one, and that from another, and so on indefinitely until we have constructed in imagination a paragon, ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... worse is a contract that should not be tolerated. As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by the Roman Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be dissolved, if not by the temporal Courts, by the Pope. Indissoluble marriage is an academic figment, advocated only by celibates and by comfortably married people who imagine that if other couples are uncomfortable it must be their own fault, just as rich people are apt to imagine that if other people are poor it serves them right. There ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... accuse, or whether we think that the word "accuse" over-dignifies an attitude toward a quasi-astronomer, or mere figment in a super-dream, our acceptance is that Leverrier ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... shall have read Iola's letter you will see it is more than a figment of my imagination that has made me so loth to have our children know the paralyzing power ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... the pair together, followed by the horrors of flight, to end in the misery of exile without her, the return when the emperor passes again by the fatal spot, home where everything reminds him of her, and finally spirit-land. This last is a figment of the poet's imagination. He pictures the disconsolate emperor sending a magician to discover Yang Kuei-fei's whereabouts in the next world, and to bear to her a message of uninterrupted love. The magician, after a long search, finds her in one of the ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... of the kingdom of God grew the Romish figment of the "power of the keys." According to this idea, Christ constituted his ministers a sort of clerical, close corporation invested with direct authority over souls so that without their priestly ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... Asher gulped. "And how—how did you get down here? Tell me!" He took a step toward Lee Wong, intending to lay his hand on the Chinaman, to make sure he was live flesh and blood, and not a figment of his disordered brain. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... the European community, which had to be assimilated to the old; and the genius of the Italian people never displayed itself more luminously than in the ability with which the Bishops of Rome availed themselves of this occasion. They separated the Latin from the Greek Church, and, by the figment of the Holy Roman Empire, cemented Southern and Northern Europe into an apparently cohesive whole. After the year A.D. 800, Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, acknowledged a dual headship; Papacy and Empire ranking as ideals under which the unity of Christendom ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... own cheek and the light in her own eyes no less than in the inward sparkle that provoked it—an honest delight, she would not have minded confessing it. Her height, her symmetry, her perfect abounding health were separate joys to her; she found absorbing and critical interest in the very figment of her being. It was entirely preposterous that a young woman should kneel at an attic window in a flood of spring moonlight, with, her hair about the shoulders of her nightgown, repeating Rossetti ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... shadow had brooded over him. Sometimes it seemed to lift and dissolve into unsubstantiality, only to come back more baleful than before. And the moment when he had about persuaded himself that it was but a figment of the imagination, it had sprung into being and crushed him. But he was now stern, remorseless, ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... can take care of itself if left to the genius of the nation, and freed from foreign control. The Prince of Wales has never affected any artistic sympathies. For this we are thankful: we have nothing to reproach him with except the unfortunate "Roll-call" incident. Royalty is to-day but a social figment—it has long ago ceased to control our politics. Would that Royalty would take another step and ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... ghostly lips among the attic glooms. And now a heron, now a kingfisher, Flits in the willows where the riffle seems At each faint fall to hesitate to leap, Fluttering the silence with a little stir. Here Summer seems a placid face asleep, And the near world a figment of ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... resumed the throne thrice in twenty-four hours, so as to leave three hours supernumerary; and yet this fiction produced the division of the week,[5] a thing so ancient and so universally received. Thus likewise we reject as an idle figment the doctrine of horoscopes, and the distribution of the houses, though these are the darling inventions of astrology, which have kept revel, as it were, in the heavens. And lastly, for the calculation of ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... musician," says the writer in Ecclesiasticus. The message may scarcely be a thought, or emotion, or even an idea: it may simply be a mood. Words so often become our masters instead of our servants, and we are apt to think that if a thing cannot be reduced to a verbal formula it is an airy nothing, a figment of the imagination. So it may be, but it is none the less real. We have thought of ourselves as material individuals for so long that it is difficult for us to use other than material standards in our estimate of immaterial things: hence our confusion. We ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises from one fundamental mistake—the idea that romance is in some way a plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life but absolutely in the centre of it. The centre of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... justified in claiming for anyone else in this household. There is Li Ho, for instance. Well, I'm not certain about Li Ho. He may be Chinese-sane. My nurse says he is. But I have no doubts at all about my host. He is so queer that I sometimes wonder if he is not a figment. Perhaps I imagine him. If so, my imagination is going strong. What I seem to see is a little old man in a frock coat so long that his legs (like those of the Queen of Spain) are negligible. He has a putty colored face (so blurred that I keep expecting him to rub it out altogether), ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... beloved of Christmas-tide. Nay, more, you tell us you have actually invited inspection of the overnight process of filling the stockings, (you brute!) and you appropriately label each gift, "From Papa," "From Uncle Edward," "From Sister Kate," "From dear Mamma," lest a figment of the supernatural untruth should linger in the infantile brain. The "Arabian Nights'" (and "Arabian Days'") "Entertainments" are on your Index Expurgatorius. You have banned Bluebeard, and treated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Spain, which was beginning to decline, was not the way to maintain the balance of power in Europe, is once more reproduced as though it had not been often brought forward and answered. Cromwell was not bound to trouble his head about such a figment of a special diplomacy as the balance of power any more than Shakespeare was bound to trouble his head about Voltaire's rules for the drama. He was the chief and the defender of Protestantism, and as such he was naturally led to ally himself with France, which was comparatively ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... practise—secretly compelling suspects to sign a request to be transferred to some other island—was by no means a figment of the author's imagination, but was extensively practised to anticipate any legal difficulties ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... that it is not only invisible, but non-existent? This is not to see the facts clearly, but to pour the fumes of obscuration round them. When he comforts us by saying 'Love, and you shall be loved,' who does not recall cases which make the Jean Valjean of Victor Hugo's noble romance not a figment of the theatre, but an all too actual type? The believer who looks to another world to redress the wrongs and horrors of this; the sage who warns us that the law of life is resignation, renunciation, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... depressed and make them smile. After a good workout, especially one done outside, everything seems brighter, more positive; whatever was bothering you somehow just doesn't seem like that big of a deal now. I am not making pro-exercise propaganda. This is not a figment of the imagination. An exercising body really does make antidepressant neurochemicals called endorphins, but only after about 45 minutes to ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon |
