"Imaginative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said that the German witnesses are imaginative and enthusiastic, and their confidence ought to be distrusted. That kind of enthusiasm is at least of a quiet sort, evidently the result of profound conviction and certainly free from any taint of worldly interest, and is by no means ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... is studded with the most poetical imagery, and marked in every part with the happiest graces of expression, while it is calm, chaste, and flowing, and transparent as water. There is a habit among nearly all the writers of imaginative literature, of adulterating the conversations of the poor with barbarisms and grammatical blunders which have no more fidelity than elegance. Hawthorne's integrity as well as his exquisite—taste prevented him from falling into this error. There ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... this conception of a former existence is embodied in one of the Myths in which Plato's imaginative powers are seen at their highest. In it the soul is compared to a charioteer driving two winged steeds, one mortal, the other immortal; the one ever tending towards the earth, the other seeking ever to soar into ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... of an aetherial atom in the rough, based not upon any imaginative hypothesis, but rather upon that strict conformity to observation and experience, which is the very groundwork of all ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... intensity of passion, is a splendid imaginative quality. Few writers of English prose have such command of figurative expression. It must be said, however, that Burke was not entirely free from the faults which generally accompany an excessive use of figures. Like other great masters of a decorative style, he frequently becomes pompous ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... know now, was Bruce Cummings) never went to France, for he was dying, though he did not know it, when he presented himself for medical examination. But it is clear that though secluded from the turmoil in a country cottage, paralyzed, and his trunk already dead, Barbellion's sensitive mind and imaginative sympathy knew more of what was happening to his fellows in France, and what it meant for us all, than the combined Cabinet in Downing Street. That spark of dying light was aware when the luminaries on whom we depended were blind and ignorant. In his ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... vegetation, grassy plains, and deserts). The effect produced by this small volume has doubtlessly been more powerfully manifested in the influence it has exercised on the sensitive minds of the young, whose imaginative faculties are so strongly manifested, than by means of any thing which it could itself impart. In the work on the Cosmos on which I am now engaged, I have endeavored to show, as in that entitled 'Ansichten der Natur', that ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... down to imagination, arises mainly from their want of it. You writers of novels supply that defect for them by a pictorial style, by an infinity of minute details, and petty aids to realizing, all which an imaginative reader can do for himself on reading a bare narrative of sterling facts ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... mind, rather thoughtful than imaginative, found no idol like "Divine Philosophy." It delighted to plunge itself into the mazes of metaphysical investigation; to trace the springs of the intellect; to connect the arcana of the universe; to descend into the darkest caverns, or ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... been efficiently worked, maintained or developed. I will not harrow my readers with a description of its condition. One little quotation from the summing up in my report will suffice to indicate the state of affairs, and, to the imaginative mind, present a picture of the whole. "Everything has for years past been allowed to run down; the direction and management have been characterised by extreme parsimony; and the disabled condition of the engines is undoubtedly due to lack of proper upkeep, ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... is none the less unnatural. The characters are comparatively commonplace, the women especially being mere shadows; the motion is slow; and the inevitable passages of fine writing are, as the extolled soliloquy of Lioni, rather rhetorical than imaginative. The speeches of the Doge are solemn, but prolix, if not ostentatious, and—perhaps the vital defect—his cause fails to enlist our sympathies. Artistically, this play was Byron's most elaborate attempt to revive the unities and other restrictions of the severe ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... interesting story of Alexander Alane, or Alesius. Principal Lorimer, in his 'Scottish Reformation,' has thrown further light on him. And Dr Merle D'Aubigne, who appears to have minutely examined most of his tracts and commentaries, has wrought into his graphic but imaginative narrative much of the information which they have been the chief means of handing down to us. It was after his expatriation that he received from Melanchthon the name of Alesius, ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... Scotch painter, born in Edinburgh; he was an artist of great imaginative power, and excelled in the weird; his best picture, exhibited in 1828, was "The Hopes of Early Genius Dispelled by Death," though his first achievements in art were his illustrations of the "Ancient ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... had during the above conversation lighted a short pipe, and devoted himself with considerable assiduity to a pewter pot—which he looked at with a technical eye, as if mentally casting it into crown pieces,—now nodded assent. He was not of an imaginative or philosophic turn, like Mr. Blinks. He saw none of the sentiment of his business, but pursued it on a system of matter of fact, because he profited by it. This difference between the producer and the middle-man may be ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... indefatigable social observer, an unwearied philanthropist, and the most powerful describer of nature that perhaps ever undertook to portray her great and glorious features. It is this extraordinary combination of qualities that render his works so surprising and valuable. The intellectual and imaginative powers rarely coexist in remarkable vigour in the same individual; but when they do, they produce the utmost triumphs of the human mind. Leonardo da Vinci, Johnson, Burke, and Humboldt, do not resemble single men, how great soever, but rather clusters of separate ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... place his qualities thus:—Love of approbation sixteen. Benevolence fourteen. Combativeness fourteen. Adhesiveness two. Amativeness is not yet of course fully developed, but I expect will be prodeegiously strong. The imaginative and reflective organs are very large—those, of calculation weak. He may make a poet or a painter, or you may make a sojer of him, though worse men than him's good enough for that—but a bad merchant, a lazy lawyer, and a miserable mathematician. He has wit and conscientiousness, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... still a mere student, and not recovered from that fine intoxication in which classical literature drenches a young imaginative soul, and that at last we find him 'resting in the hopes of an eternal day.' 'Lochleven' is the spent echo of the 'Seasons,' although, as we said before, its descriptions possess considerable merit. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Oh, I should say most imaginative and cultivated young women feel like that. I wouldnt give a rap for one who didnt. Shakespear pointed out long ago that a woman wanted a Sunday husband as well as a weekday one. But, as usual, he didnt follow ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... as easy to play with dollars as with dimes—just as easy to write an order for a thousand as for ten. And it's easier to do business with big men. They're more imaginative, quicker to grasp." ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... more suitable in this sense for the visionary than that of life in other worlds. It has always had an attraction for imaginative minds, simply because it is enwrapped in so profound a mystery; and there has been little to restrain the fancy, because so little is certainly known of the physical condition of other worlds. Recently, indeed, a somewhat sudden and severe check has been placed on the ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... had almost forgotten him. Even his old colleagues at the hospital scarcely recognized him, and when they did stop to chat after the meeting, they examined him indifferently, as if they were making notes. Lindsay had probably spread his story, with some imaginative details. According to the popular tale Sommers had been "thrown down" by Miss Hitchcock because he had mixed himself up with a married woman. Then he had been discharged by Lindsay for the same reason, and had sunk, had run away with the woman, and had come ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... sign was sufficient to chase away the imaginative notions that had beset Pen's awakening. His hand went at once to the water-bottle slung to his side, and, as he held the mouth to his comrade's lips and forgot the pain he suffered in his strained and stiffening joints, ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... formed disguised allegorical poems. Here the instructive function of the first poets is related to the enlarging of the reader's imagination, so that Ogilvie's rather shrewd defense of lyric poetry is based upon the civilizing effects of imaginative appeal. ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... that are not only delightful to dwell upon, but are also elevating and refining in their influence upon character. The fairy tale, the folk tale, and the fable, owe their popularity with young children to the predominance of the imaginative element. The traditionary fairy tales and folk stories are usually more suitable than those that appear in teachers' magazines and modern holiday books for children. The hardest thing for the educated mind to do is to ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... which included a few portraits and some imaginative subjects, the greater number were painted in oils, and the largest canvas would not have seemed out of place on the walls of ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... urgent for the reliefs and contrasts of a finer humanity. These last are not wanting; yet it must be said that we hardly escape, even with them, into the old freedom and freshness of the author's imaginative worlds, and that the too conscious unconsciousness of Esther flings something of a shade on the radiant goodness of John Jarndyce himself. Nevertheless there are very fine delineations in the story. The crazed little Chancery lunatic, Miss Flite; the loud-voiced tender-souled Chancery ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... with the complexity of present problems always before them, tend to depreciate. He had the first quality which is necessary for popularity: he was readily intelligible. In addition he was prompt, combative, and magnanimous; shrewd, but never subtle; sensible, but not imaginative. He had no ideas which he wished to carry out; he did not like ideas. He wanted England to dominate in Europe and to use her power good-naturedly afterwards; to be, in fact, what a nobleman may be in his ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... size in America has been the subject of and focus for as much good literature as Santa Fe. Pittsburgh and dozens of other big cities all put together have not inspired one tenth of the imaginative play that Santa Fe has inspired. Some of the transcontinental railroads probably carry as much freight in a day as went over the Santa Fe Trail in all the wagons in all the years they pulled over the Santa ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... mathematics, fencing, and music. Mathematics he found hard dull work, as have so many men of like temperament, before and since, but music and fencing and geography were more to his liking. He was an ardent, imaginative youth, and chafed under all drudgery and routine. His foster-mother, in the absence of his father, suffered him to do much as he pleased, and he pleased to "play hookey" most of the time, joining boys of his own age and disposition, ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... He voiced other expletives, too, even more forcefully indicative of surprise. He was not an imaginative man; it did not occur to him to doubt his sanity or to wonder if he were awake, nevertheless he opened one of the pokes and incredulously examined its contents. "I'm dam' if it ain't!" he said, finally. "I should reckon they was ready to quit. Argentine! Why, Jack'll bust the bottom out of a ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... power had undergone any sensible alteration. Nay, further, if we look at the case in the concrete, then we must say that in a whole class of cases, the idea of a complete defeat of the enemy would be a mere imaginative flight, especially when ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... brought up in the belief of the miracle, and who fancy that the prosperity of their city and all that it contains is somehow connected with its due performance. The priests could not discontinue it but by acknowledging the imposture, and by an imaginative people, who are the slaves of prejudice, and attached to it by force of inveterate habit, the acknowledgment would not be believed, and they would only incur odium by it; there it is, and (for some time at ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... about the Opera ghost in which, since we first took over the duties of MM. Poligny and Debienne, we had been so nicely steeped"—Moncharmin's style is not always irreproachable—"had no doubt ended by blinding my imaginative and also my visual faculties. It may be that the exceptional surroundings in which we found ourselves, in the midst of an incredible silence, impressed us to an unusual extent. It may be that we were the sport of a kind of hallucination brought about by the semi-darkness of the theater and the ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... watching Woburn's approach with the unexpectant eye of one who has full confidence in his capacity for digesting surprises. Not that there was anything surprising in Woburn's appearance; but the night-clerk's callers were given to such imaginative flights in explaining their luggageless arrival in the small hours of the morning, that he fared habitually on fictions which would have staggered a less experienced stomach. The night-clerk, whose unwrinkled bloom showed that he throve on this high-seasoned diet, had a fancy for classifying ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... very kind to the poor little better-nurtured outcast, once, in a sudden attack of illness, applying hot blacking-bottles to his side with much tenderness. But, of course, they were rough and quite uncultured, and the sensitive, bookish, imaginative child felt that there was something uncongenial and degrading in being compelled to associate with them. Nor, though he had already sufficient strength of character to learn to do his work well, did ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... morning, a human being with a fixed idea, an unquestioned faith in his destiny. His star shone clear. He was born to great things. In those early years that followed it was not a matter of an imaginative child's vanity, but the unalterable, serene conviction of a child's soul. The prince and princess were realities, his future greatness a magnificent certitude. You must remember this, if you would understand Paul's after-life. It was built on this radiant ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the 'hundred tongues,' which the old Poets often clamour for, were of supreme service! In defect of any such organ on our part, let the Reader stir up his own imaginative organ: let us snatch for him this or the other significant glimpse of things, in the fittest sequence ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... not, however, intend to weary or to entertain the reader, as may be, by a long description of the Yangtze gorges. Time and time again have they fallen to the imaginative pens of travelers—mostly bad or indifferent descriptions, few good; none better, perhaps, than Mrs. Bishop's. But at best they are imaginative—they lack reality. It has been said that the world of imagination ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... poet's endowment of genius as blank verse, and hence the secret of Marlowe's improvements over his predecessors is his superior poetic gift. He seems to have felt and thought and written with an enormous imaginative power; by making his verse an organic expression of this power he achieved an almost new medium, ranging in variety from ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... The imaginative Greeks did not worship the statues of the gods per se, but only admired them as the fitting representations of those mysterious forces that hold sway over earth, air, fire, and water, or reverenced them as the symbols of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the coarsest interpretation, as a wild desire for adventure and intention of joining herself to the roving troopers, the soldiers always hated and dreaded in rural life. He suddenly appears in the narrative in a fever of apprehension, with no imaginative alarm or anxiety about his girl, but the fiercest suspicion of her, and dread of disgrace to ensue. We do not know what passed when she returned, further than that her father had a dream, no doubt after the first astounding explanation of the purpose ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... intellectual part, the practical intellect is compared to the speculative, as the estimative is to the imaginative power in the sensitive part. But the estimative differs from the imaginative, as power form power, as we have said above (Q. 78, A. 4). Therefore also the speculative intellect differs from ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... dismissed him from the conversation and her thoughts with a few careless words of contempt. Such minds as that of Miss Delafield were quite outside the field of De Chauxville's influence, while that Frenchman had considerable power over highly strung and imaginative natures. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... poets declare their inheritance. But they do not stop there. To the indomitable power of the Puritan conscience they have added a wealth of imaginative sympathy. They have made sweetness to be the issue of strength, and beauty to be the halo of power. They have seen the vision of the rainbow round the throne. They have touched with divine light the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Landor's personal animosity towards Byron, he considered him a "great poet,"—"the keenest and most imaginative of poets"; nor should we attribute this dislike to the bitter attacks made by Byron upon the "deep-mouthed Boeotian," though surely such would be sufficient to excite indignation in more amiable breasts. It was Byron's furious assaults upon Landor's beloved friend, Southey, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... in the same way modesty cripples the force of an upright mind, while unblushing confidence is a source of strength to a man without conscience. Regulus is a case in point. He has weak lungs, he never looks you straight in the face, he stammers, he has no imaginative power, absolutely no memory, no quality at all, in short, except a wild, frantic genius, and yet, thanks to his effrontery, and even just to this frenzy of his, he has got people to regard him as an orator. Herennius Senecio very neatly ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... Burns's treatment of nature there is imaginative beauty as well as humble truth. His language in description, though not mystical or highly idealized, is often rich in feeling, and his personality was potent enough to pervade his most objective writing. Thus he ranks among those who have put lovers of poetry under obligation for a fresh glimpse ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... history, and the supposition is nothing more than a speculative fancy. Still, there is a limbo of curious evidence bearing on the subject of pre-natal influences sufficient to form the starting-point of an imaginative composition. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the hands of the critics. Already the Browning library is large. Some of the criticism is good; much of it, regarding the author as philosopher and symbolist, is totally askew. Reams have been written in interpretation of Childe Roland, an imaginative fantasy composed in one day. Abstruse ideas have been wrested from the simple story of My Last Duchess. His poetry has been the stamping-ground of theologians and the centre of prattling literary circles. In this tortuous ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... an imaginative person, luckily. She got up and made her toilet, and splashed herself briskly in a basin of cold water. The effect of these ablutions was singular—they effected a total cure ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... fashion, this child, in whom the simplicity of practical life and the poetry of imaginative life were curiously blended, she had a fashion of going to her window every night when the moon or stars were shining, to look out for a minute or two before she went to bed; and sometimes the minutes were more than any good grandmother or aunt would have considered wholesome ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the more imaginative and impatient reformers find out when they come to themselves, if that calming change ever comes to them. Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them to themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That will reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... of Sienkiewicz in this volume is perhaps the most interesting and fascinating he has yet produced. It is in the very first rank of imaginative and historical romance. The time and scene of the noble story are laid in the middle ages during the conquest of Pagan Lithuania by the military and priestly order of the "Krzyzacy" Knights of the Cross. And the story exhibits with splendid force the collision of race passions and fierce, violent ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... who does not remember in childhood some white or black or yellow Scheherzarade, who, by that talent of telling endless feats of fairies and magicians, and kings and queens, was more dear and wonderful to a circle of children than any orator of England or America is now? The more indolent and imaginative complexion of the Eastern nations makes them much more impressible by these ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, no less than in other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely knit interdependence of ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... were set diagonally, whereas the American Indians had theirs parallel. In other respects, he saw great resemblances. He expressed himself as greatly interested in the discovery of an oral literature among the Indians, in the form of imaginative legends. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... fundamental differences. They are important enough to have led so great a critic as Professor Jebb to argue that Milton's drama is too Hebrew to be Hellenic at all. His point is that Greek tragedy aims at producing an imaginative pleasure by arousing a "sense, on the one hand, of the heroic in man; on the other hand, of a superhuman controlling power"; and he asserts that this is not the method adopted by Milton in Samson. Samson is throughout a free man; his misfortunes are the fruit of his own folly. ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... successful at the mouth of the harbor), to rig the dangerous and productive archipelago off Squid Beach and Nolan's Cove with similar contrivances. There was not another man in Chance Along capable of conceiving such ideas; but Dennis was ambitious (in his crude way), imaginative, daring, unscrupulous and full of ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... has been combined with that suffering which is inseparable from extensive changes in the condition of the people, men of speculative or imaginative genius have sought in the contemplation of an ideal society a remedy, or at least a consolation, for evils which they were practically unable to remove. Poetry has always preserved the idea, that at some distant time or place, in the Western islands or the Arcadian region, an innocent and contented ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... my mind whether some particulars do not need explanation. Doubtless the nimble wits of the sagacious have fathomed to their satisfaction all that seemed mysterious; but there may be others who, either less imaginative or more indolent, would like an elaborate elucidation. These latter I invite to accompany me across the blue Atlantic to the pleasant town of Exeter, in the lovely county of Devon, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... made himself very useful by acting as waiter, and hopped about with pots and pans, leading the steaming food on the skinners' plates. Jo watched him with interest, but still was unable to consider him anything but an imaginative failure—a man who perhaps had seen ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... open to doubt. If he left Sitka before the completion of the Avos, Russia would go unavenged for the present. Or himself? Rezanov, sanguine and imaginative as he was, even to the point of creating premises to rhyme with ends, was very honest fundamentally. He turned abruptly on his heel, and calling to the officers that he would announce his decision on the morrow, ordered ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... were studies of certain medico-psychological problems. They preached Dr. Holmes's favorite doctrines of heredity and of the modified nature of moral responsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit the freedom of the will. In Elsie Venner, in particular, the weirdly imaginative and speculative character of the leading motive suggests Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the background and the subsidiary figures have a realism that is in abrupt contrast with this, and gives a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole. The Yankee characters, in particular, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... that his thought must come to that practical solution of a yes or no which would make an end of his delightful doubts and yearnings. The positive and the known are, after all, so much less, under imaginative measure, than the uncertain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... than knitting or quilting a comfortable—and are just about as exciting. Each dance is supposed to be a poem expressed by gesture and posturing—the poetry of motion—a sentimental pantomime, and imaginative Hindus claim to be able to follow the story. The orchestra, playing several queer looking fiddles, drums, clarinets and other instruments, is employed to assist in the interpretation, and produces the most dreary and monotonous ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... universal suffrage, plunged headlong into the snare set for them by the President, and combined with his open or secret partisans to reject the proposition of the Questors. Changarnier had blindly vouched for the fidelity of the army; one Republican deputy, more imaginative than his colleagues, bade the Assembly confide in their invisible sentinel, the people. Thus the majority of the Chamber, with the clearest warning of danger, insisted on giving the aggressor every possible advantage. If the imbecility of opponents is the best augury of success in a ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... which has been too popular, especially in anthologies of mildly entertaining rhymes, is sickly at its best, and fails to retain the interest of a child. Possibly, in pleading for imaginative art, one has forgotten that everywhere is Wonderland to a child, who would be no more astonished to find a real elephant dropping in to tea, or a real miniature railway across the lawn, than in finding a toy elephant or a toy engine awaiting him. Children are so accustomed to novelty ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... seems a very commonplace object; but how interesting the veritable slipper of Empedocles, who flung himself into Etna, whose slipper was disgorged by the volcano, and as a link, connecting the seen with the unseen, the grassy earth with the burning entrails of the eternal furnace, became intensely imaginative! A feather in a cap (even though it were an eagle's) seems, from its position, an object sufficiently artificial; but how affecting the black plume of Ravenswood floating on the waves which had engulphed the proud head that once ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... have to face a candidate representing a united party; one whose power of analysis is as great as Hughes', and to this will be added this feature of strength in the Democratic candidate—the power of appeal to the emotional or imaginative side of the American people. Added to this will be the strength of conviction in urging his cause that comes to a man who has passed through a world crisis amid great dangers and who has brought to consummation substantial ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blow down than his neighbors. With us descendants of the Puritans especially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value thermometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The other day (5th July) I marked 98o in the shade, my high water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen it before. I happened to meet a neighbor; as we mopped ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... varieties of tartan which their woollen clothes present, and even the features of the people (which are of an Aryan rather than a Tartar type), strongly reminded me of the Scotch Highlanders." He had the support, too, of one of those imaginative savants who delight in Welsh, Erse and Gaelic philology, who insisted "that the names of innumerable places in Tibet and Tartary are identical with the local names of the Gaelic language." Add to this the fact ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... to our story we may quote from that curious old tome, "Purchas his Pilgrimage," the following quaintly imaginative passage,— ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... consciousness than our consciousness? Is our whole instinctive belief in higher presences, our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship, to count for nothing? Is it but the pathetic illusion of beings with incorrigibly social and imaginative minds? ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... that we may have made in Fleet Street an atmosphere in which a man can be so passionate as Sir Lancelot and as pure as Sir Galahad. But, after all, we have in the modern world erected many such atmospheres. We have, for instance, a new and imaginative appreciation of children." ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... of mortals of all times and opens the door for imaginative activity, causing us to wonder why life should be a fitful fever, followed by an incommunicable sleep. Much of what we call literature would not survive the test of Shakespeare's definition; but true literature must appeal to imagination and feeling as well as to intellect. No mere definition can ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... sensitive than Lamartine but more imaginative, began with lyrical poems which were somewhat reminiscent of the classical manner, then went on to pictures of the East, thence to meditations on what happened to himself, and on all subjects (Autumn Leaves, Lights and Shades); ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... thankfulness as she kissed him, and his sisters sprang at him and devoured him, while all the time he bemoaned his piece of the stump of an aralia, and a bit of cone of a pinus, and other treasures to which imaginative regret lent such an aid, that no doubt he would believe the lost contents of his bag to have been the most precious articles that he had ever collected; his father, however, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... womanhood does not perish; but, in these present confusions of change, women of the more emotional and imaginative type are less potent than they have been and will be again. They appear equally inimical and heretical to the opposing camps of hausfrau and of suffragist. Their intellectual forces, liberated and ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... what his aunt taught him, poor as was her teaching. Then his heart and imagination were more in the ascendency. Now he had begun to admire the intellectual qualities of that literature more, and its imaginative less; for he had begun to think truth attainable through the forces of the brain, sole ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... fully illumined passages to the surrounding transparent darks are so gradual and so subtle that one scarcely notices that the effect has been arranged—the concentration is an integral part of the imaginative apprehension of the subject. It is otherwise with Raeburn, in his earlier work at least. Later he attained much the same results by less arbitrary and apparent means, by swathing the hands and arms—the high tone of which ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... were employed in the mode Dehrasin-Karabharna, which corresponds to our own major scale, it would have a pronounced Scotch tinge so long as the melody ascended; but let it descend and the Scotch element is deserted for a decided North American Indian, notably Sioux tinge. The Hindus are an imaginative race, and invest all these ragas and modes with mysterious attributes, such as anger, love, fear, and so on. They were even personified as supernatural beings; each had his or her special name and history. It was proper to use some of them only at midday, some in the morning, and ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming. If mind and body were both healthy, and had food enough and fair play, I doubt whether any men would be more temperate than the imaginative classes. But body and mind often flag,—perhaps they are ill-made to begin with, underfed with bread or ideas, over-worked, or abused in some way. The automatic action, by which genius wrought its wonders, fails. There is only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... in its whirling eddies the debris of submarine mountains heaped up in rugged confusion or scattered over its sandy bottom. Porphyry and black granite bowlders, in every conceivable form and size, lay strewn over the plain. Sometimes so fantastic did their shapes become that the least imaginative of our party could picture the gigantic ruins of some mighty citadel, with its ramparts, bastions and towering castle. For many hours we were traversing this weird and desolate valley, and when the sun cast long shadows across our track as he sank to rest, his ruddy light falling upon the dark ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... course," he confessed. "It just was my way of testing what your Professor Michael told about you—that you are extraordinarily intelligent, virile, and imaginative. Had you sent the wallet to me, I should have sought elsewhere for my man. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... the gray old trunk formed a second thrilling midnight picture, but at this moment young Farrar was in no mood for studying effects. He felt rather unstrung by his recent emotions; and, though he was by no means an imaginative youth, he actually took it into his head half seriously that the whooping, hooting thing was taunting him with making a failure of the jacking business. Without pausing to consider whether the owl would furnish meat for the camp or not, he let fly at him ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... had a powerful grip on life and good things. He was young, just twenty-six, strong and healthy, though slim-built in body, alert and vigorous in mind, unperturbed in soul, buoyant and warmly imaginative. Just at that moment the joy of life was almost at full flood in him, for he had recently been reveling in a new and glorious experience, and now carried it with him, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... historian (whose duty it is to apply all known tests of genuineness to papers purporting to shed new light on the past). This borrowing from the newspaper has its evident advantages, but it has its dangers also, even in the hands of a poet as adroit as Daudet and as imaginative. Perhaps the story of his which is most artistic in its telling, most shapely, most harmonious in its modulations of a single theme to the inevitable end, developed without haste and without rest, is "Sapho;" and "Sapho" is the novel of Daudet's in which ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... as he stood over him and saw the upturned eye, was sure it was so. No doubt indeed Ben thought so too, but poor imaginative Ben had somehow fancied it would be with his brother as with the King who guarded that other sacred Cup, and when all was over, was quite disappointed that Stead needed his strong arm as much as ever, ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Now all the imaginative dreads and nightmare terrors were faded away, and she felt beneath her feet the solid sanity of Hugo's self. She had seen the Works on an exceptionally bad day; she had gone there, overdrawn and ignorant, looking for horrors; what she had actually seen and felt had been mysteriously ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... how these lines and passages were taken from his own previous work and turned to better account in later poems, and to note the gradual improvement of his style. In his last book, 'Songs from the Mountains', there are fewer echoes; the touch is surer, and the imaginative level at his highest. The shining wonder is that, under the conditions of Australian life between 1860 and 1880, he should have written so much ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... his 'gran seggio,' though described with solemn pomp of phrase, cannot be compared with the Mystic Rose of Paradise (ix. 55-60). What Tasso lacks is authenticity of vision; and his heightened style only renders this imaginative poverty, this want ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Clem as a weigher and disburser of moneys. I noticed that she chose to accept Miss Caroline's earliest letters about their good fortune with a sort of half-tolerant attention, as an elder listens to the wonder-tales of an imaginative child, or as I had long listened to Clem's own dreamy-eyed recital of the profits already his from "brillions" of chickens not yet come even to ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... clustering islands, intersected by a bewildering maze of channels winding hither and thither, with the thin sickle of the young moon, gleaming softly silver-white, hanging just above the whole. It was one of those skies that set the imaginative dreamer's fancy free to wander afar into the realms of fairyland and to picture all sorts of strange, unreal happenings; the sort of sky that probably suggested to the simple mind of the Indian the poetic idea that when gazing upon it he was vouchsafed a vision ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... period, and is interesting from the piquant style in which it is written. I fancy that these two are the only efforts of the kind which he made,—and in both he dealt with the two great caricaturists of his time, he himself being, in the imaginative part of a caricaturist's work, equal in power ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... inspired this composition History of the text Various accounts of the design of Rameau's Nephew Juvenal's Parasite Lucian Diderot's picture of his original Not without imaginative strokes More than a literary diversion Sarcasms on Palissot ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... certain voices. I cannot translate it into words,—only into feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world or on the very threshold of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... best calculated to foster the poetic temperament. "He has got," wrote Professor Wilson, "a poet's education: he has lived the greater part of his days amidst pastoral scenes, and tended sheep among the green and beautiful solitudes of nature." Sufficiently imaginative, he does not, like his minstrel predecessor the Ettrick Shepherd, soar into the regions of the supernatural, or roam among the scenes of the viewless world. He sings of the mountain wilds and picturesque valleys of Caledonia, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... flaming figure. He has named his book fittingly "Stories of the Prophets," and interesting stories has he told. He has brought to his task not only a sympathetic appreciation of his subject, but an imaginative faculty that has enabled him to supply links in the narrative suggested if not actually given in the incidents preserved in ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... from it to examine that organization of human labor and that control of the wills of the masses of Egypt which made it possible, and then again looks up at it, one marks great fissures that rend the whole mass and one hears the foundations groan. To speak thus is only an imaginative way of saying, what all the anthropologists and archaeologists tell us, that to the building of any one of the great pyramids went the enforced labor of upwards of a million men for many years, who were literally driven by the lash of the whip. There is no ground for supposing that ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... look fell on the massive mirror on the wall opposite, and I cried out, for I saw the two of us in its golden frame as in a picture. The picture was so marvellously beautiful, so strange, so imaginative, that I was filled with deep sorrow at the thought that its lines and colors would ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... was at the other end of the huge building that there dwelt the solitary offspring of this unnatural union, a boy now in the eleventh year of childhood, companionless, physically inactive, mentally over-quick, perceptive, and quaintly imaginative. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... whales; educational sort of games that will aid them in acquiring knowledge of natural history. We will show them how to play Pirates and Red Indians and Ogres—sensible play that will help them to develop their imaginative faculties. That is why grown-up people are so dull; they are never made to think. But now and then," I continued, "we will let them play their own games, say on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. We will invite other grown-ups to come to tea with them, and let ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... and Fernan Caballero, whose earliest novel dates from 1849, was at their head. The Revolution of September, 1868, marked an advance in Spanish fiction, and Valera came forward as the leader of a more national and more healthily vitalised species of imaginative work. The pure and exquisite style of Valera is, doubtless, only to be appreciated by a Castilian. Something of its charm may be divined, however, even in the English translation of his masterpiece, Pepita Jimenez. The mystical and aristocratic genius of Valera appealed to a small audience; ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... of all, but also greatest, has to be considered the immensity of his imaginative achievement, the huge space that he has filled for us with vivid creation, the range of amusement, of instruction, of (after a fashion) edification which he has thrown open for us all to walk in. It is possible that he himself and others more or less well-meaningly, though ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... made some mistake. Probably Professor Hobkin was a gynaecologist. A scholar is a very different sort of man. A scholar is overflowing with humour and invention—perhaps addicted to wine, but what of that?—a delightful companion, generous, subtle, imaginative—as stands to reason. For he spends his life in company with the finest human beings that have ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... you, a prisoner to the desk. I have been chained to that gally thirty years, a long shot. I have almost grown to the wood. If no imaginative poet, I am sure I am a figurative one. Do "Friends" allow puns? verbal equivocations?—they are unjustly accused of it, and I did my little best in the "imperfect Sympathies" ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... one man of genius who has done much for this philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated:—I mean Emanuel Swedenborg.[91] The most imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an attempt of course must have difficulty which no genius could ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson |
