"Imagination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said Mister. "Let him play here if he wants to. He's developing his imagination, and he may be finding more stimuli in this front room than he could in all of outdoors. We should never cripple the fine gift of imagination in the young. Imagination, fancy, fantasy—or whatever you call it—is the essence and mainspring of those ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... revolutionary phrases,"[17] and the description is very apt. He possesses all the usual characteristics of the revolutionary Jewish Socialists of Russia. To a high-strung, passionate, nervous temperament and an exceedingly active imagination he unites a keen intellect which finds its highest satisfaction in theoretical abstractions and subtleties, and which accepts, phrases ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... he saw Him not, but he understood Him, without need of the thunder and the burning bush of Moses, of the revealing tempest of Job, of the oracle of the old Greek sages, of the familiar genius of Socrates, or of the angel Gabriel of Mahomet. The imagination and the hallucination of a St. Theresa, for example, are useless here. The intoxication of the Soufi proclaiming himself identical with God is also quite another thing. Jesus never once gave utterance ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... of a courtroom. She wondered what penalty would be inflicted on Bill, whether he would be fined or sent to prison. Surely it was a dreadful thing to batter men like Brooks and Lorimer and Parkinson. They might even make it appear that Bill had tried to murder them. Her imagination magnified and distorted the incident ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... set the children's imagination roving. Their first charges were not so unreasonable. Why, the vagrant Sarah Good, a social outcast, wandering about without any settled habitation; and Sarah Osburn, a bed-ridden woman, half distracted by family troubles who had seen better days. There the truth was out. Tituba, Sarah Good ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... terror of snakes, had brought on a burning fever. I had just dropped asleep, when they came and told me it was time to go back to that horrid swamp. I could scarcely summon courage to rise. But even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized. This time Peter took a quantity of tobacco to burn, to keep off the mosquitos. It produced the desired effect on them, but gave me nausea and severe headache. At dark we returned ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... Howard, the philanthropist, visited the Bedford prison, that which was dignified as the county jail about 1788, and thus describes it:—'The men and women felons associate together; their night-rooms are two dungeons. Only one court for debtors and felons; and no apartment for the jailer.'[220] Imagination can hardly realize the miseries of fifty or sixty pious men and women, taken from a place of public worship and incarcerated in such dens or dungeons with felons, as was the case while Bunyan was a prisoner. Twelve feet square was about the extent of the walls; ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Whatever people Deschamps might have employed to carry messages, she had doubtless dismissed them. She and Rosa had been alone in the building. I can understand now that there was something peculiarly attractive to the diseased imagination of Deschamps in the prospect of inviting her victim to the snare, and working vengeance upon a rival unaided, unseen, solitary in that echoing and deserted mansion. I was horribly perplexed. It struck me that ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... him. For hours upon hours he would fill his mind with castles in the air, dreaming of wonderful successes in the midst of which Lily Dale always reigned as a queen. He would carry on the same story in his imagination from month to month, almost contenting himself with such ideal happiness. Had it not been for the possession of that power, what comfort could there have been to him in his life? There are lads of seventeen who can find happiness ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... to know how he squared matters with his warriors. It would have required a vivid imagination and a genius in the way of invention to explain how it was his horse was just vanishing in the distance; how the chief was in the act of recovering his weapon, and more than all, how it came about that the youthful ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... fiction, in any language, was ever better supported than the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. While it is carried on with that appearance of truth and simplicity, which takes a strong hold of the imagination of all readers, it suggests, at the same time, very useful instruction; by shewing how much the native powers of man may be exerted for surmounting the difficulties of any external situation." It has been pretended, that De Foe surreptitiously appropriated the papers ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... mutual dependence of man on man grows ever greater, but by which, at the same time, the eye of the uncultured man becomes less and less able to perceive the connection existing between merit and reward, or service and remuneration. Let us betake ourselves in imagination to Crusoe's island. There, when one man, after the labor of many months, has hollowed out a tree into a canoe, with no tools but an animal's tooth, it does not occur to another who, in the meantime was, it may be, sleeping on his bear-skin, to contest the right ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... in the year 1848. Even in the wildest months of that year, when the German minority were left entirely to their own resources, this spirit of order and mutual confidence continued undisturbed. Our patriotic author has never needed to draw upon his imagination for facts, though he has depicted with consummate skill the actual reality. We feel that it has been to him a labor of love to console himself and his fellow-countrymen under so many disappointments and shattered hopes, to cherish and to strengthen that sense of independence, without ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... acquisition of them with his Eastern expedition,[351] we may conclude that credit for possessing magical secrets was a part of the reputation which that expedition conferred. A foreign appearance, singularity of manners, a life of travel, and pretences to superior knowledge, excite the imagination of beholders;[352] and, as in the case of a wandering people among ourselves, appear to invite the persons who are thus distinguished, to fraudulent practices. Apollonius is represented as making converts as soon as seen.[353] ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... 'is disappointed at seeing so little of the penguins, but to me and to everyone [Page 305] who has remained here the result of this effort is the appeal it makes to our imagination as one of the most gallant stories of Polar history. That men should wander forth in the depth of a Polar night to face the most dismal cold and the fiercest gales in darkness is something new; that they should have persisted in this effort in spite of every adversity ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... of youth, and joy, and love—worn by the Graces and the Naiads, Oreads and Dryads;—the color of the sea-shell, and the autumn leaves and flowers—something like it at least," Jacques added, finding himself mounting into the realms of imagination. ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... between two "cherubim" that looked one towards the other: and over the ark was a table, called the "propitiatory," raised above the wings of the cherubim, as though it were held up by them; and appearing, to the imagination, to be the very seat of God. For this reason it was called the "propitiatory," as though the people received propitiation thence at the prayers of the high-priest. And so it was held up, so to speak, by the cherubim, in obedience, as it were, to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... one object, and sullenly, upon regrets and dreams, and vain anger and idle scorn, it had exhausted those sentiments which make the sum of true love. And so, like Petrarch, whom his taste and fancy worshipped, and many another votary of the gentil Dieu, while his imagination devoted itself to the chaste and distant ideal—the spiritual Laura—his senses, ever vagrant and disengaged, settled without scruple upon the thousand Cynthias of the minute. But then those Cynthias were, for the most part, and especially of late years, easy and light-won nymphs; ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and say "The Self is not here." Where the Self is—and He is everywhere—there is existence, there is consciousness, and there is bliss. The Self, being consciousness, imagines limitation, division. From that imagination of limitation arises form, diversity, manyness. From that thought of the Self, from that thought of limitation, all diversity of the many is born. Matter is the limitation imposed upon the Self by His own will to limit Himself. "Eko'ham, bahu ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... people, and is clearly one of the ablest leaders of men in the history of the Empire State, his fame does not rest on so sure a foundation. Clinton was a man of great achievement. He was not a dreamer; nor merely a statesman with imagination, grasping the idea in its bolder outlines; but, like a captain of industry, he combined the statesman and the practical man of affairs, turning great possibilities into greater realities. It may be fairly ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... incursion that drifted past me like the spirit of some sweet, shabby fairy. What possible bell could be appropriate to that air? I began, stupidly, to recall the names of such flowers as bluebell, hare-bell, Canterbury-bell. In imagination I heard their chime as the distant ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... which he looked with chattering teeth, but without surprise. The door of the inner room was open, and upon the threshold stood Toquet, small, dark, and saturnine—Toquet, with something which glittered in his hand, so that Monsieur Louis, already the prey of a diseased and ghastly imagination, felt the pain of the bullet in his heart. On an easy-chair by the fireside Henri de Bergillac was lounging, with a queer ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Oracles, concerning the successe, and euent of things, I found it to be a very fable. [Sidenotes: A fable. The Sea.] Onely in the Prouince of Obdoria vpon the sea side, neare to the mouth of the great riuer Obba, there is a rocke, which naturally (being somewhat helped by imagination) may seeme to beare the shape of a ragged woman, with a child in her armes (as the rocke by the North Cape the shape of a Frier) where the Obdorian Samoites vse much to resort, by reason of the commoditie of the place ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... children's joy. They have the power of using any and every trivial thing to create their world of interest, and the ugliest doll is made beautiful with their imagination and lives with their life. He who can retain this faculty of enjoyment after he has grown up, is indeed the true Idealist. For him things are not merely visible to the eye or audible to the ear, but they are also sensible ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... counting his chickens before they were hatched, and building magnificent castles in the air; but even the most brilliant success, as well as the most decided failure, is generally preceded by a vast amount of ground and lofty tumbling in the imagination. If the man in Court Street could sell a pair of white mice for fifty cents, and a beggarly tin box with a whirligig for a dollar, making the establishment and its occupants cost a dollar and a half, why would not one of his splendid palaces, with ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... tempting feeling of unlimited possibilities in life makes waking up in the morning a small adventure in itself. It isn't necessary to point out the dangers of an unlimited "Why not?" cult—they are too obvious. "Why not?" is a question that one's imagination asks, and imagination is one of the best spurs to action. I will give an example of what I mean: When war was declared J—— suggested putting contribution boxes with red crosses on the collars of "Rags" and "Tags," the boys' ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... therefore, tell more of this matter, but will steal away from the wedding, as Ariosto from that of Angelica, leaving it to whom it may please to add farther particulars, after the fashion of their own imagination. ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... of religion and of honor. The golden eagle, which glittered in the front of the legion, was the object of their fondest devotion; nor was it esteemed less impious than it was ignominious, to abandon that sacred ensign in the hour of danger. [34] These motives, which derived their strength from the imagination, were enforced by fears and hopes of a more substantial kind. Regular pay, occasional donatives, and a stated recompense, after the appointed time of service, alleviated the hardships of the military life, [35] whilst, on the other hand, it was impossible for cowardice or disobedience ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... replied the boatswain ironically, "and so far as land goes there was never any except in that rascal Dirk Peters' imagination." ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... appearance of men, whose mechanical inventions, whose superior knowledge of the arts of life—nay, whose exterior advantages of garb and mien [18] indicate intellectual eminence, till then neither known nor imagined, presents a something preternatural and divine. The imagination of the wild inhabitants is seduced, their superstitions aroused, and they yield to a teacher—not succumb to an invader. It was probably thus, then, that Cecrops with his colonists would have occupied the Attic plain—conciliated ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... were so. Nevertheless, I'll travel en grand seigneur—thats more agreeable even in imagination, than ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... cudgels. I must bear it for awhile as quietly as possible. It will not be long. She at least is suspicionless. Never did creature so happily delude herself. Yet what a judgment in some things! What keen discrimination! What a wild, governless imagination! She would be a prize, if it were only to exhibit. How she would startle the dull, insipid, tea-table simperers on our Helicon—nay, with what scorn she would traverse the Helicon itself. The devil is that she would have a will in spite of her ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... village (one Koari), who informed us that we were virtually his prisoners, and that the dog-sleds which, during the presence of the Government vessel, he had glibly promised to furnish, existed only in this old rascal's fertile imagination. The situation was, to say the least, unpleasant, for the summer was far advanced and the ice already gathering in Bering Straits. Most of the whalers had left the Arctic for the southward, and our rescue seemed almost impossible until the following year. When a month here had passed away, harsh ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... visionary. It was to the benefit of his fellow Europeans and to the detriment of the South American tribes that to his dreams he joined the practical side of his nature. Certainly the value of imagination in a human being has never been more strikingly proved than ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... approaches men, arouses their passions, but does not permit a satisfaction of them. Great importance being attached by the Babylonians to dreams, the belief in a 'maid of the night' was probably due to the unchecked play of the imagination during the hours of sleep. Bad dreams came at the instigation of the demons, and such a demon as the rabisu or the labartu appears to have been especially associated with the horrible sensations aroused by a 'nightmare.'[347] Again the utukku is ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... his speech the crowd commenced reciting the virtues of their deceased Chief, calling for revenge, and insulting the prisoners with every epithet their wild imagination could suggest. A dissatisfied "hugh" from the old Sachem caused the first Chief again to rise, when in an instant all again became quiet, such were the peculiar customs of these people and the great influence of their Chiefs and Rulers. In a calm ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... men. Women were in primitive times the first story-tellers. They are still so at the cradle side. The original college woman was the witch, with her incantations and her prophecies and the glow of her bright imagination, and if brutal men of duller brains had not burned it out of her, she would be incanting still. To my thinking, we need more witches in ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... the imperfections of human nature or is incident to all governments, however perfect, which human wisdom can devise. Such subjects of political agitation as occupy the public mind consist to a great extent of exaggeration of inevitable evils, or over zeal in social improvement, or mere imagination of grievance, having but remote connection with any of the constitutional functions or duties of the Federal Government. To whatever extent these questions exhibit a tendency menacing to the stability of the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... In his imagination rang, Through generations challenging His peal on simple men, Who, as the heart within him sang, In daily townfaring should sing By ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... gained perhaps two inches. After that his growth stopped completely, and he remained for the rest of his life a pigmy of three feet and four inches. His father, who had built the most extravagant hopes upon his son, planning for him in his imagination a military career equal to that of Marlborough, found himself a disappointed man. 'I have brought an abortion into the world,' he would say, and he took so violent a dislike to his son that the boy dared scarcely come into his presence. His temper, which had been serene, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... in the reverence which belongs to the Queen of Heaven,—virgo fidelis; regina angelorum. Woman assumed among kings and barons the importance which she was supposed to have in the celestial hierarchy. And besides the religious influence, the poetic imagination of the time seized upon this pure and lovely element, which passed into the songs, the tales, the talk, the thought, and the aspirations of all ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... nature, Uncle Geoffrey only did her justice in attributing the change to her unconscious power. Miss Henrietta was also the friend of the poor women, the teacher and guide of the school children, and in their eyes and imagination second to no one but Mr. Franklin. And withal she did not cease to be all that she had ever been to her brother, if not still more. His heart and soul were for her, and scarce a joy and sorrow but was shared between them. She was his home, his everything, and she well fulfilled her mother's ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... once in the year; it may be because we cannot, try as we may, crush out utterly and entirely the divinity that is in us that makes for God. The stories and tales for Christmas which have for their theme the hard heart softened are not mere fictions of the imagination. They rest upon an instinctive consciousness of a profound ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... but as to their very selves; the fearful crises of a fifty years' revolution, the instinctive feeling that the civil war was still far from being at an end, increased the anxious suspense, the gloomy perplexity of the multitude. Restlessly the wandering imagination climbed every height and fathomed every abyss, where it fancied that it might discover new prospects or new light amidst the fatalities impending, might gain fresh hopes in the desperate struggle against destiny, or perhaps might ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in a groan. "'Tis a vision of terrible death. One that the poets never dreamed. To be eaten by rats, or boiled in oil, or pulled apart by wild horses—that would be unpleasant. But to be beaten to death with a dead pig!" He shuddered at the awfulness of it. "Sure it transcends the human imagination." ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... notes Gambara's intoxication appeared to clear away and make way for the feverish excitement which sometimes brought his judgment and his imagination into perfect harmony; for it was their habitual disagreement, no doubt, that caused his madness. The ruling idea of that great musical drama appeared to him, no doubt, in its noble simplicity, like a lightning flash, illuminating the ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... alluded to in one of his early poems ("Margaret," vol. i.), "the tender amber." I asked his opinion of Sydney Dobell—he agrees with me in liking "Grass from the Battlefield," and thinks him a writer of genius and imagination, but extravagant. ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... Alarming as the news was, he had a faint hope while he was telling it that David might not think it so bad as he did. David always took things calmly, and his matter-of-fact way of looking at them was often a support to Ambrose, whose imagination made him full of fears. So now when he had finished he looked wistfully at his brother and said, in a ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... few mature touches to show the lapse of time. Dark-eyed beauty wears well, hers particularly. But now, here is the fifth: Berenice seated lonely on the ruins of Jerusalem. That is pure imagination. That is what ought to have been—perhaps was. Now, see how I tell a pathetic negative. Nobody knows what became of her—that is finely indicated by the series coming to a close. There is no sixth picture." Here Hans pretended to speak ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... of a Rousseau, going on with a very enthusiasm of iniquity, with fiery imagination seizing upon all the impulsive natures of his day? or David Hume, who employed his life as a spider employs its summer, in spinning out silken webs to trap the unwary? or Voltaire, the most learned man of his day, marshaling ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... canopy of London smoke. It might have looked ghastly to a resident in the country, unused to the light London calls day, but to one immured in a prison cell it was an irradiation of glory. The mind expanded under the lustre; imagination preened its wings, and sped beyond the ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... all of them. "But without large hills and ravines in one's breast (liberal capacities), how could one attain such imagination!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... In effect, however, I admitted the existence of the "monster." My article was warmly discussed, which procured it a high reputation. It rallied round it a certain number of partisans. The solution it proposed gave, at least, full liberty to the imagination. The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings. And the sea is precisely their best vehicle, the only medium through which these giants (against which terrestrial animals, such as elephants or rhinoceroses, are as nothing) can ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... century. A more intimate view of its life at this period is suggested by a package of faded letters, some of which are here printed, not as supplying historical data, for in this they are quite lacking, but because whoever reads them with imagination begins to breathe the atmosphere of the time of their writing, and in the charm of their feminine confidences discovers a side of frontier life that is not ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... and visions; I knew a lady once who was continually thinking that she saw an armed man threaten her, but it was only an imagination, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... four young men, whose real names are clothed with the charitable mantle of fiction, deliberately perpetrated the deed for which they suffered and to-day are inmates of a prison. No tint or coloring of the imagination has given a deeper touch to the action of the story, and the process of detection is detailed with all the frankness and truthfulness of an active participant. As a revelation of the certain consequences which follow the perpetration of crime, I send this volume forth, in the fervent ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... blankets. He used practically the same amount of covering about him in winter and summer; and now, as usual, he had retired practically without removing his daily clothing. His face, stubbled and unshaven, swollen with sleep and surmounted by a tangled fringe of hair, might not by any flight of imagination have been called admirable or inviting, as he now looked ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... man has only one wife, to whom he is usually faithful. The social group is decidedly democratic; there are no slaves. The people are neither drunkards, gamblers, nor "sportsmen." There is little "color" in the life of the Igorot; he is not very inventive and seems to have little imagination. His chief recreation — certainly his most-enjoyed and highly prized recreation — is head-hunting. But head-hunting is not the passion with him that it ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... gaily bore through the sea upon the hallowed site, were those of one who awaits the rise of a curtain upon a famous drama. I sprang my imagination to the alert position, that I might not miss one thrill, when we should enter the bay whose waters played on W Beach. Conceive it: there would meet my gaze a stretch of lapping water, a width of beach, and a bluff hill; and I must say: "Here were confused battle, and blood filtering ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... endeavor to clip the wings of imagination, and to keep not only on the earth, but to burrow, like a mole or a sub-soiler, in it, with a painful apprehension lest some technical term in Chemistry or Philosophy should falsely indicate that ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... characteristic of English scenery—of what I should call density of feature. There are no waste details; everything in the landscape is something particular—has a history, has played a part, has a value to the imagination. It is a country of hills and blue undulations, and, though none of the hills are high, all of them are interesting—interesting as such things are interesting in an old, small country, by a kind of exquisite ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... laughed "Slim." "You see," he said, turning to the boys, "the trouble with Mel is that he hasn't imagination enough to understand anything he hasn't seen himself. Now that ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... blast of wind, which reveals an almost bottomless abyss. I look from the brink of a great precipice of more than 2,000 feet; but through the mist the forms are half obscured and all reckoning of distance is lost, and it seems 10,000 feet, ten miles—any distance the imagination desires ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... seated round a winter's fire, listening to the storm and tempest raging without, were not only struck with amazement at the courage and endurance of sailors in exposing themselves to the elements, but, influenced by their imagination, magnified the energy and bravery that overcame them. Peasants gazed with wild astonishment on the village lad returned, after a few years absence, a veritable 'Jack tar.' The credulity of these ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... earth, earthy. This we say, not as anything against him intellectually or spiritually, but simply as indicating the material ballast, which in this man is grosser and heavier than in most men, pulling forever against his sails, and absolutely forbidding that freer movement of the imagination which usually belongs to minds of a power equal in degree to his. Not that this freedom flows necessarily out of a great degree of mental power, or by any organic law is associated with what we term genius. Every one would admit that Luther was a man of genius; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... unintelligible words; for truth to tell, he did not quite comprehend the vagaries of his imperial mistress. He was a man of deeds, fit for action and strife; but there was neither imagination nor poetry in his nature. He saw, however, that Catharine smiled and beckoned. He hastened forward, and bending the ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... another order is the Cardinal's description of a gentleman. Here there is no flight of poetical imagination, but a manifestation of felicitous intuition and penetrating insight as rare as it is convincing, and the generous wide vision of a man of the world, undimmed by the ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... to the Countess Astaride there flashed between the woman of audacious imagination and the master of intrigue a message of kinship. The Frenchman bent low ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... the rest. Mutual fear is the principal link in the chain of mutual love, and woe be to that state that breaks the compact. Howe is mercifully inviting you to barbarous destruction, and men must be either rogues or fools that will not see it. I dwell not upon the vapors of imagination; I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... augur some result from it, though his own dejected spirit did not prompt him to deduce a very encouraging one. He thought of all the impostures that are practised upon the credulous, and his imagination suggested some brilliant figures to his mind. He thought at first of declaring to them that the Great Spirit was pleased with the expedition, and was lighting the band on its way with spirit lamps; or that the meteors were the spirits of departed braves, coming ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... two, and rest for four, days is written by drawing a man with two bars on the stomach and four across the legs. We are told even of war-songs and love-songs composed in this primitive alphabet; but it would seem as if, in these cases, the reader required even greater poetical imagination than the writer. There is one war-song ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... Ladies, when they were pretty, appealed to Lawson as part of the appropriate decoration of a table; but, much as he loved their charming society, he loved his dinner more. He loved it with a certain pure extravagance, illuminated by thought and imagination. Mrs. Hannay was one with him in this affection. Her heart shared it; her fancy ministered to it, rising higher and higher in unwearying flights. It was a link between them; almost (so fine was the passion) an intellectual tie. But reticence was not in ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... That's why you should flirt with me ... Henry ... to cultivate them. I'm afraid you lack imagination. ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... level, well-metalled avenue, then along the uneven country road, and finally through the sand of the beach in which hoofs and tyres sank noiselessly, inches deep, Molly gave herself up, with almost childish zest to the leaven of imagination.... Here, in this dark carriage, was reclining, not Lady Landale (whose fate deed had already been signed, sealed and delivered to bring her nothing but disappointment), but her happier sister, still confronted with the fascinating unknown, hurrying under ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... least the women of today. Formerly, upon exciting occasions, we had a good nervous attack and all was over; the crisis passed, we became amiable again, put on rouge and went to a ball. Now it is languor, ennui, stomach troubles—all imagination and humbug! The men are just as bad, and they call it spleen! Spleen! a new discovery, an English importation! Fine things come to us from England; to begin with, the constitutional government! All this is perfectly ridiculous. As for you, Clemence, you ought to put an end ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that the receipt of its composition was to be found in Plutarch (De Tuenda Sanitate, t. vi. p. 487.), but apparently it was only imagination. That [Greek: zomos] signified not broth, as it has been usually translated, but sauce, is apparent from the connection in which Athenaeus used the word. To judge from Hesychius, it appears to have borne the name [Greek: bapha] among the Spartans. How little it pleased the Sicilian Dionysius is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... power of discerning truth from falsehood. Yet such is the fact. Government is to Mr. Southey one of the fine arts. He judges of a theory, of a public measure, of a religion or a political party, of a peace or a war, as men judge of a picture or a statue, by the effect produced on his imagination. A chain of associations is to him what a chain of reasoning is to other men; and what he calls his opinions are in fact ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Mrs. A. it stands, in my mind thus: either it is all a reality, i. e. that her husband did absolutely appear to her; that he did give her the account which she has stated; and that that account is in fact true; or else, it was nothing more than the power of imagination, which a certain train of ideas and reflections had produced in her mind, which, like a kind of reverie, seemed to her like a reality. And although I should not have made the same conclusion once, ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... "As imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the journey, just as in imagination Mr. Sponge was putting his foot on the wheel and hallooing to the driver to hand him the strap to help him on to ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... casas y travesea, causando en ellas ruidos y estruendos"—LEMURES, LARVAE. "To appear like a duende," "to move like a duende" are modes of speaking by which it is meant that persons appear in places where they are least expected. "To have a duende" signifies that a person's imagination is disturbed. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Dr Johnson sat silent and patient. Once he said, as he looked on the black coast of Sky—black, as being composed of rocks seen in the dusk—'This is very solemn.' Our boatmen were rude singers, and seemed so like wild Indians, that a very little imagination was necessary to give one an impression of being upon an American river. We landed at Strolimus, from whence we got a guide to walk before us, for two miles, to Corrichatachin. Not being able to procure a horse for our baggage, I took one portmanteau before me, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... how much I was to blame, and that he had a right to be vexed with me. Nevertheless, by dint of caresses and endearments, I cajoled him into returning to his studio and trying to finish the statue—how do they say it? out of his head, from imagination, in short, by mama's process. To me, this seemed quite feasible; but it gave the poor fellow endless trouble. Every evening he came in, with irritated nerves and more and more discouraged; almost ill, indeed. To cheer him up, I used ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... quality of a college is determined largely by the character and traditions of undergraduate life. If that life has generous ideals, sound impulses, and traditions which appeal to the imagination, the atmosphere will do as much for many men as the formal instruction they receive. It will inspire self-respect, firm ambitions, and general dignity and nobleness of nature. Men will be drawn together by the ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... sporadic illustration of the looseness of national sentiment, here and there, throughout the country; but of no great significance, because it was in no sense a popular movement, and had its origin in the fantastic imagination of a single man. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... vision that would have shown you that God did not create men equals. Well, you are in case to-night to judge which of us was right, which wrong. You see what is happening here in Paris. You see the foul spectre of Anarchy stalking through a land fallen into confusion. Probably you have enough imagination to conceive something of what must follow. And do you deceive yourself that out of this filth and ruin there will rise up an ideal form of society? Don't you understand that society must re-order itself presently out of ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... term applied in the Bible to the national god of the Ammonites, under the forms Moloch, Molech, Mikom, Milkam, and especially with the article, Ham-molek; the real name hidden beneath this epithet was probably Amnon or Amman, and, strictly speaking, the God Moloch only exists in the imagination of scholars. The epithet was used among the Oanaanites in the name Melchizedek, a similar form to Adonizedek, Abimelech, Ahimelech; it was in current use among the Phoenicians, in reference to the god of Tyre, Melek-Karta or Melkarth, and in many proper names, such as Melekiathon, Baalmelek, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... held by no conditions, modified by no circumstances; and miracle is all around her, the most credible, the most real of powers, the very air she breathers. Jeanne of France is the very flower of this passion of the imagination. She is altogether impossible from beginning to end of her, inexplicable, alone, with neither rival nor even second in the one sole ineffable path: yet all true as one of the oaks in her wood, as one of the flowers in her garden, simple, actual, made of the flesh and blood which ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... err who imagine that Levitical sacrifices merited the remission of sins before God, and, by this example in addition to the death of Christ, require in the New Testament sacrifices that are to be applied on behalf of others. This imagination absolutely destroys the merit of Christ's passion and the righteousness of faith, and corrupts the doctrine of the Old and New Testaments, and instead of Christ makes for us other mediators and propitiators out of the priests and sacrificers, who daily sell ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... that if any of the children developed an imagination he needn't think he had anything ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... in the theological distinctions which once were deemed supremely important and all strong belief in great parts of dogmatic systems, and such men naturally prefer services which by music and ornament gratify their tastes and exercise a soothing or stimulating influence over the imagination. ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... of the Sagas to the older poetry may be expressed in this way, perhaps, that they are the last stage in a progress from the earliest mythical imagination, and the earliest dirges and encomiums of the great men of a tribe, to a consistent and orderly form of narrative literature, attained by the direction of a critical faculty which kept out absurdities, without impairing the dramatic energy of the story. The Sagas are the great ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... as she had conceived a very indifferent opinion of my intellects from my former silence. I should have had cause to be equally satisfied with the sprightliness of her genius, could she have curbed her imagination with judgment; but she laboured under such a profusion of talk, that I dreaded her unruly tongue, and felt by anticipation the horrors of an eternal clack! However, when I considered, on the other hand, the joys attending the possession of twenty thousand pounds, I forgot her imperfections, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... grew bewildered. She who had lived in light and luxury, who had loved the vision of all bright and glorious things, was pleading for her sight to the man whom she had robbed of sight that he might never more behold the young beauty of her rival. She who had imagination to know the greatness of her sins was pleading to be spared the death she dared not face. She was pleading to me, who for years had been her faithful soldier, the captain of her own guard, sworn to protect ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... revolting a character that he wondered how any human mind could conceive it in the first instance, and how, after it had been conceived, human hands could bring themselves to perpetrate it. And then the man's guilty conscience awakened from its long torpor, and, acting upon his excited imagination, conjured up a thousand frightful punishments awaiting him. He writhed, he groaned, he uttered the most frightful curses, and then, in the same breath shrieked for forgiveness and mercy. It was perfectly appalling; even his comrades—those who had shared with ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... in question was a stolid, rather dull-minded Styrian peasant, who was possessed of but little power of imagination or of education, and who was entirely ignorant, therefore, of the tradition according to which a woman in white makes her appearance by night in the Hofburg at Vienna, either in the chapel or in the adjoining corridors and halls, whenever ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... but on opening the grim pages, it was long before I could again call them cheap. To be sure the pleasure of a bright well-printed page ought to be quite lost sight of in the glowing, galloping, bewitching course that the imagination sets out upon with a new Waverley novel; and so it was with me till I felt the want of it; and then I am almost ashamed to confess how often, in turning the thin dusky pages, my poor earth-born spirit paused in its pleasure, to ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... small statuettes, a few inches high, in bronze, wood, or faience. And even if sculptors had been encouraged to do their best in bodying forth the forms of gods, they would hardly have achieved high success. The exalted imagination was lacking. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... Fairy Tales. To my childish mind, they seemed very wonderful indeed. There were fairies, goblins, mysterious figures, castles which floated in the air, wonderful lands which shifted in a night, at the touch of a magic wand or the sound of a magic word. Things which fired my youthful imagination and set me longing to share in their adventures. But never in my wildest dreams did I think I should live to do the same thing, to go where I listed; to fly like a bird, high above the clouds. It was like an adventure in fairyland to take this weird ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... in childhood very imaginative. It is sometimes pretty difficult to distinguish between playful imagination and lying. Let us give Darwin the benefit of the ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... confirmation of the deplorable truth which Sartorius had foreseen. She was, almost without doubt, unhinged: her whole appearance and manner went to prove it. In an agony of mind Roger took in the details of her sodden clothing, her wet, tangled hair, her dreadful pallor. His imagination flashed a swift vision of the poor girl wandering alone in the streets of Cannes for two days and nights. What was this terrible idea that obsessed her? how had she come by it? He spoke to her as to a child, with ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell |
