"Real world" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and as it brightens you fade away. Oh, I should be loth to lose my treasure of past happiness and become once more what I was then—a hermit in the depths of my own mind, sometimes yawning over drowsy volumes and anon a scribbler of wearier trash than what I read; a man who had wandered out of the real world and got into its shadow, where his troubles, joys and vicissitudes were of such slight stuff that he hardly knew whether he lived or only dreamed of living. Thank Heaven I am an old man now and have done ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he had crowned it. Little fanciful, feathery amateur! could nothing suit him so well as Goethe's coat of arms? I could fancy the little thing to be the poet's soul come back to have a kind of breezy hovering existence in this real world of ours—to sing, and perch, and soar; for I think you told me that his principal grace and characteristic was an exquisite perception and expression of physical beauty. Goethe's house was a very grand one for the times, was it not? Now a sign in the window ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... vision, we are again among the shadows, with some general impressions more or less blurred, but the vivid vision of the Poet which made us feel in the manifestations he created, the very Idea of Life itself—has faded from us, we are no longer in the Ideal world which is the real world. ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... a real world, he pondered as he rode slowly along; and Paula, and Dick, and he were real persons in it, were themselves conscious realists who looked the facts of life squarely in the face. This was no affair of priest and code, of other wisdoms and decisions. Of themselves must it ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... began to mend. His account of the change, like his account of the vision, was oddly convincing. Over patches of his field of vision, the phantom world grew fainter, grew transparent, as it were, and through these translucent gaps he began to see dimly the real world about him. The patches grew in size and number, ran together and spread until only here and there were blind spots left upon his eyes. He was able to get up and steer himself about, feed himself once more, read, smoke, ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... daughter one wasn't altogether free; nor yet again as a member of organized society. All day the claims of the familiar encroached upon the real world within, and thoughts, the radiant aliens, had to range themselves in as ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... right way. Only a fool must personally seize the red iron to see if it will burn. . . But most of us are fools." And as he sat among this company of the best minds of the town he felt that a new and very real world was opening before him. His good clothes seemed to work up in some way through his sub-consciousness and give him a sense of capability. He was in the mental atmosphere of men who did things, and by conforming to their customs he had brought his mind into harmony with theirs, ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... tide rises the active levels of the mind are overflowed; thought is released from its task of serving our conscious aims in the real world of matter, and moves among the more primal wishes and desires which people the Unconscious, like a diver walking the strange world beneath the sea. But the laws by which thought is governed on this sub-surface level are not those of our ordinary waking consciousness. During outcropping ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... liable to illusion. Hardly anybody is always consistently sober and rational in his perceptions and beliefs. A momentary fatigue of the nerves, a little mental excitement, a relaxation of the effort of attention by which we continually take our bearings with respect to the real world about us, will produce just the same kind of confusion of reality and phantasm, which we observe in the insane. To give but an example: the play of fancy which leads to a detection of animal and other forms in clouds, ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... do not laugh! I lived forever under the terror of two separate wars in two separate worlds: one against the factory boys, in a real world of flesh and blood, of stones and brickbats, of flight and pursuit, that were any thing but figurative; the other in a world purely aerial, where all the combats and the sufferings were absolute moonshine. And yet the simple truth is, that, for anxiety and distress of mind, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... quite enough to make the memory of that moment immortal. He saw it applied to the human heart and human life. The water pouring over the Horse-shoe Fall ceased for the moment to be the falling water of this real world, and became some weird stream falling thunderously and in white glory through the land of dreams. The dark misty gulf into which it poured below was not the physical abyss over which the natural man must stand with a shudder, but the unfathomed pit of woe and sorrow into which, in nightmare dreams, ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... that she had come to the threshold of her house of toys and stood looking out, trembling and frightened before the bigness of the real world. He was staggered by that. She had come to the door too late; for if she fared forth, she must go alone and untaught through a country whose loneliness he had known. He must save her from that. He could not give ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... of the important books in the history of the development of literature for children, was published in six small volumes, from 1792 to 1796. It was a result of a newly awakened interest in the real world round about us and represented the profound reaction against the "fantastic visions" and "sweetmeats" of popular literature. The main purpose was to give instruction by showing things as they really are. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... contact with the world. The psychiatrists referred to them in worried tones as "unavailable for therapy," and spent most of their time brooding over possible ways of bringing them back into the real world for a while, at least far enough so that ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of life at Newnham College. After the tripos excitements, some of the students leave their dream-world of study and talk of "cocoas" and debates and athletics to begin their work in the real world. Men students play their part in the story, and in the closing chapters it is suggested that marriage has its place in a girl ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... of the furniture of this world was drawn directly from the past, and even from the England of the Elizabethan age. However the embellishment of this imaginary world might change, two qualities were constant in it. It was a place where feelings were liberated from the constraint which the real world puts upon them; and the process of awakenment was always marked by resignation and a kind of stoical acceptance of facts. She met no acquaintance there, as Denham did, miraculously transfigured; she played no heroic part. But there certainly she loved some magnanimous hero, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... of this life demands that, right here and now, we should begin to know and understand how we are to establish our individual relationship to the invisible, the real world—the world of causes, the world of law—so as to bring to us a sufficient knowledge of the hidden mysteries of the future life to give us some certain grounds for faith in the unseen. This can only be accomplished by the development of our own occult powers, or by learning of ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... his sister tells us, to a great extent in a world of his own, peopled by the imaginary characters in his books, and he would gravely discuss its news, as others do that of the real world. Sometimes he was delighted at the grand match he had planned for his hero; but often affairs did not go so well, and perhaps it would give him much anxious thought to marry his heroine suitably, as it was necessary ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... a fairyland and no real world which Spenser opens to us is the great difference between Chaucer and him. Chaucer gives us real men and women who love and hate, who sin and sorrow. He is humorous, he is coarse, and he is real. Spenser has humor too, but we seldom see him smile. There are, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... nurse," Robinette remarked as Lavendar dipped his oars gently into the stream and began to row. "I went to see her feeling quite grown up, and she seemed to consider me still a child; I was feeling about four years old at the moment when you appeared and woke me to the real world again." ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... perhaps be at hand so opportunely to save the life of the advocate who had saved his; but one consents to this, as one consents to a great deal besides in the story, which is imaginably the survival of a former method. The artist's affair is to report the appearance, the effect; and in the real world, the appearance, the effect, is that of law and not of miracle. Nature employs the miracle so very sparingly that most of us go through life without seeing one, and some of us contract such a prejudice against miracles that when they are performed for us we ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to every special thing. Everything we know is "what" it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... at the end of the Green Park. There was no one there. They kissed and clung together and Maggie's hand was warm inside his coat. Then they turned back and entered the real world once more ... ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... their ill fortune at first, for their hearts were gladdened by the sight of a ray of sunshine coming through a small crack in the roof of the cave, far overhead. That meant that their world—the real world—was not very far away, and that the succession of perilous adventures they had encountered had at last brought them near the earth's surface, which meant home to them. But when the adventurers looked more carefully around them they ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... of a Paradise, and such a recollection, even if it brought out the contrast between the dream-world and the real world, would often set children musing on what ought and what ought not to be. They did not long believe in Dornroeschen and Schneewittchen, they learnt but too soon that Dornroeschen and Schneewittchen belonged to another world. They may even have come to learn that Dornroeschen ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... which, by the simple disposition of articles of this kind, have been made to have an air so poetical and attractive that they seemed more like a nymph's cave than any thing in the real world. ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... tale, he draws no curtain around it; it stands in the midst of a real world, set in the white and composite light of day. M. Zola sees life in sections and by one or another of those colors into which daylight can be decomposed by the prism. He is like a man standing at the wings with a limelight apparatus. The rays fall now here, ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "azure-grey eyes that lighted up like the windows of Solomon's Temple," was from his childhood possessed of a most acutely sensitive and suggestible psychical disposition. He always felt that the real world was deeper than the one which he saw with his senses, and he was frequently swept from within by mighty currents which he could not trace to any well-mapped region of the domain of Nature. His vivid and ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... till the hour of deliverance shall strike; a limbo, lovely but phantasmal, unearthly, over-earthly—that is the kind of impression India left on my mind. I reach China, awake, and rub my eyes. This, of course, is the real world. This is every-day. Good temper, industry, intelligence. Nothing abnormal or overstrained. The natural man, working, marrying, begetting and rearing children, growing middle-aged, growing old, dying—and that is all. Here it is broad daylight; but in ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... able to do something really important in it, he would not have been there. As he sat down, he felt himself a silly clodhopper, filled with the east wind of his own conceit, out of touch with the real world of men. He knew himself a dreamer. The nodding board of directors, the secretary, actually snoring, and the bored audience restored the field-hand to a ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... power of Satan may be seen in the matter of Christian giving. Millions are given without solicitation for education, culture, and humanity's physical comfort, but real world-wide evangelization must ever drag on with its shameful limitations and debts. This warfare of Satan is even more noticeable in the believer's prayer life; this being his place of greatest usefulness and power, is subject to the greatest conflict. In this connection it may be ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... on end across his shoulders and up his neck, till he whimpered low and suppressedly, or growled softly, and the half-breed cook shouted at him, "Hey, you Buck, wake up!" Whereupon the other world would vanish and the real world come into his eyes, and he would get up and yawn and stretch as though he had ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... points to the introduction to "Sebaldus Nothanker" as exhibiting the characteristic of this epoch of fiction. Speculation was the hero's world, and in speculation lay for him the important things of life; he knew not the real world, hence speculation concerning it was his occupation. Consequential connection of events with character makes the English novel the mirror of English life. Failure to achieve such a union makes the German novel a mirror ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... is, the philosophical means which were used in early times for the purpose of making the Gospel intelligible have been fused with the contents of the Gospel and raised to dogma. This dogma, next to the Church, has become a real world power, the pivot in the history of the Christian religion. The transformation of the Christian faith into dogma is indeed no accident, but has its reason in the spiritual character of the Christian religion, which at all times will feel the need of a scientific ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... just the real world for which we were made, and which we enter through the door of love.'—RUFUS ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... out of sight, you must love the bird to be attentive to the song, so in this highest flight of the Comic Muse, you must love pure Comedy warmly to understand the Misanthrope: you must be receptive of the idea of Comedy. And to love Comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... reason?" she asked, remembering with a sort of shock that this world of glittering snow and still pine-trees was not their real world at all. ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... an existing order that could not possibly measure up to his ardent specifications. Shelley is possibly the supreme example of the type; against his incorrigible construction of perfect worlds in imagination he set the real world in which men live, and found ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... The real world is far more subtle than we as yet understand. When we dive down into the deep, sky and air and houses disappear. We enter a new world—the under-world of water, and things that glide and swim; of sea-grasses and currents; of flowing waves that lap about the body with a cool chill; of ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... loose tears upon its unnaturally bright cheeks, stirred its hanging hands to clasp them in a crude gesture of dull fury. The youth started as at a corpse showing suddenly the pangs of life. His movement shot Cuckoo like a bullet into her real world. Through her tears she saw a man regarding her. In a flash, old habit brought to her a smile, a turned head of coquetry, an entreating hand, a hackneyed phrase that reiteration rendered parrot-like in intonation. The youth shrank back and fled away in the darkness. Long afterwards that incident ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... nurse was herself stricken down, as she had already been twice before. They carried her away to another room, and Gretchen devoted herself to her care. Delirium came on, and all the past lived again in the fever-tossed mind of the sufferer. Unconscious of the real world in which she lay, she wandered in a world of phantoms, where the well-remembered forms of her past life surrounded her. Some deliriums are pleasant. All depend upon the ruling feelings of the one upon ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... movement as something superadded to the motionless. This is quite legitimate in the world of affairs; but when we bring this habit into the world of speculation, we misconceive reality, we create lightheartedly insoluble problems, and close our eyes to what is most alive in the real world. For us movement is one position, then another position, and so on indefinitely. It is true that we say there must be something else, viz., the actual passing across the interval which separates those positions. But such a conception of Change is quite false. All true change ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... Chester that she could neither see nor hear all this—that the fever had grown strong enough to shut out all the real world to her heated senses! As it was, the sight of these miserable objects did create some new and more harrowing pain. She began to murmur of the torment to which she had been consigned—of the strange, heavy fiends so unwieldy and coarse that had taken her in charge. ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... out thus vividly figures, devices, words, forgotten since his boyish days. Though of an imaginative tendency, the stranger was nevertheless strongly tenacious of the actual, and had a natural horror at the idea of being seriously at odds, in beliefs, perceptions, conclusions, with the real world about him; so that a tremor ran through him, as if he felt the substance of the world shimmering before his eyes like a ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... There is something I must do, and I don't know what it is. A command is laid on me by the dead—there is some wrong for which I must atone. When I first awoke, I thought it was a dream, but it isn't, it's real. It seems as though that was the real world, and this—all our love and happiness, and you, were just dreams. I can't ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... breeze, and modified by every sunbeam. He talked in the course of an hour of beginning three works; he recited the poem of 'Christabel' unfinished, and as I had before heard it. What talent does he not waste in forming visions, sublime, but unconnected with the real world! I have looked to his efforts, as to the efforts of a creating being; but as yet he has not laid the foundation for the new world of intellectual ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... Western world of fifty years ago—even of twenty years ago—where are they now? What the country really celebrated at Philadelphia in 1876, however unconsciously, as the ending of its minority and the assumption of full manhood with all its perplexities and cares. The broad life of the real world began for ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... by all this?" cried Syme. "They can't be running the real world in that way. Surely not many working men are anarchists, and surely if they were, mere mobs could not beat modern ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... that London of the third decade of the century passed into the mind of the inquisitive, roving, loose-living printer's apprentice from Philadelphia! It taught him that the tangible world is the real world, and that nothing succeeds like success; but it never even whispered to him that ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... awaited placidly the last call. Helen was struck by this peace, this seeming confidence in what was to come. The passage, then, had not been so hard! Here, when she stood in the centre of it all, the old feelings of awe returned, and the real world, the world that she had known before this day, swung farther ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... at you. There aren't twelve hundred people in the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and don't care. Remember, I've seen twelve hundred men dead in toadstool-beds. It's only the voice of the tiniest little fraction of people that makes success. The real world doesn't care a tinker's—doesn't care a bit. For aught you or I know, every man in the world may be arguing with a Maisie of ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Homer's artistic descriptions, though enlarged by fancy, are not wholly imaginary, and the extant remains of monuments of the earliest historical age are like lingering relics of that dream in a tamer but real world. ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... when Penloe came into the room. He seemed to her to be all peace. This delightful condition put her mind in a state of equipoise, such as she had never felt before; for it was a peace that was tinged with a Divine quality; and it was about to awaken her more than ever to the possibilities of the real world, the Divine world, the spiritual world, the world whose realization so far she had not a knowledge of. For her supreme life was in her intellectual tastes and in her deep, loving, true nature, which loved to see what was fitting, right, and ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... fancies so. They followed her still. She lived yet in an ideal world. The real world—that is, the best good of it—had not come close enough to her, even in this, her widely amended condition, to displace the other. Remember—this child of eighteen had missed her childhood; had known neither father nor ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... are hardly removed from nonsense. Gradually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his poetry becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward significance, without ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness from the real world of the senses. It was a part of Poe's literary creed—formed upon his own practice and his own limitations, but set forth with a great display of a priori reasoning in his essay on the Poetic Principle and elsewhere—that ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... have been one of peace. His countrymen would have recognised that, if blind to the rights of nations, Castlereagh had set to foreign rulers the example of truth and good faith. But the burden of his life was too heavy to bear. Mists of despondency obscured the outlines of the real world, and struck chill into his heart. Death, self-invoked, brought relief to the over-wrought brain, and laid Castlereagh, with all ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... a real world that we have for one we know not of? Why should we enslave ourselves? Why should we forge fetters for our own hands? Why should we be the slaves of phantoms—phantoms that we create ourselves? The darkness of barbarism was the womb of these shadows. In the light of science they cannot cloud the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the dream of it," is a saying we all know to be true. Yet we go on forever giving all the big prizes to the doers. But the man who can only dream lives in a very hostile world. His real world is his thoughts but whenever he steps out of them into human society he feels a ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... years had passed away, when both the revolutionists had become calm and resigned liberal conservatives, who understood and taught that liberty is possible only under the empire of law; that the real world with all its limits had a right as well as the inner world, which knows no frontiers; that to be completely free man must fly into the ideal sphere of art, science, or formless religion. Not that they abjured "the dreams of their youth." The nucleus of their new ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... sadder also. In stories, good people are generally rewarded with uninterrupted prosperity, just as some very judicious parents give their children plum-cake and sweetmeats when they say their lessons well and do not scratch each others' eyes out. But it is not so in the real world: the all-wise Father above, acts on other principles. He knows that his children require evil, as well as good, and that the best soil will become dry, hard, and sterile, if the sun always shines upon it;—therefore ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... what Taine would have said of television, that system which allows its producers to make all mankind believe that the lies and figments of the imaginations put in front of them show the true and real world ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... are no subjects for this real world of ours; are they not rather swains in my poor Philip Sidney's Arcadia? Ho, no; 'twere pity to meddle with them. Leave them to their Dutch household and their carracks. Let them keep their own secret; I'll meddle ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a power active it is impossible that my thought should be vague, indistinct. It must needs be potent, definite. This is really a corollary of the philosophical truth that the real world exists only for the mind. That is to say, I can never touch the world in its entirety; indeed, I touch less of it than the portion that others see or hear. But all creatures, all objects, pass into my brain ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... questions and to tell us of the thirty-six battles and skirmishes which Old Abe had passed unscathed, the crowning moment of the impressive journey came to me later, illustrating once more that children are as quick to catch the meaning of a symbol as they are unaccountably slow to understand the real world ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... did not seem as if a prop were withdrawn, but rather as if a motive were gone: it was not the power to be tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for tranquillity was no more. My world had for some years been in Lowood: my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the following statement: 'To sum up. The Platonic doctrine of immortality rests on the independence of the spiritual world. The spiritual world is not a world of unrealised ideals, over against a real world of unspiritual fact. It is, on the contrary, the real world, of which we have a true though very incomplete knowledge, over against a world of common experience which, as a complete whole, is not real, since it is compacted out ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... the illusory and mendacious forms of this coarse, imperfect world, and clothes it in a nobler, purer form created by the mind itself. Thus the forms of art, far from being mere appearances, perfectly illusory, contain more reality and truth than the phenomenal existences of the real world. The world of art is truer than that of history ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... I have mused and asked for what I was born; and my soul answered my heart and said, 'THOU WERT BORN TO WORSHIP!' Yes; I know why the real world has ever seemed to me so false and cold. I know why the world of the stage charmed and dazzled me. I know why it was so sweet to sit apart and gaze my whole being into the distant heavens. My nature is not formed for this life, happy though that life seem to others. It is its very want to ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... when these hobbies have hit me. I have had moments when I have sympathised with your humours. I have had moments, though you may not easily believe it, when I have sympathised with the madness of Adam Wayne. But the world, Auberon, the real world, is not run on these hobbies. It goes on great brutal wheels of facts—wheels on which you are the butterfly; and Wayne is ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of a Mediator, his offices, incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension into heaven, and session on the right hand of the Father. O, how wonderful is the process of redeeming love!" Living in a real world and deeply impressed with the needs of the people, he had no time to devote to any literary work, though he might have rendered some service by his pen to the cause of Christ, but modesty barred the way, and he was above everything else a pioneer ...
— William Black - The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritime Provinces of Canada • John Maclean
... receives a shock, because the incongruity, which before was latent, is forced upon our attention. We are threatened with being transported out of the conventional world of Heaven, Hell, Chaos, and Paradise, to which we had well adapted ourselves, into the real world in which we know that such beings ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... compelled to feel the weight of the estate and to share understandingly the anxieties of your wonderful business. Your girls would have been happier had they been cast forcibly out of the magic world into the real world for a few hours every day during a few years in order to learn its geography, and its customs, and the terms on which food and raiment and respect can be obtained in it, and the ability to obtain them. And so would you have been happier, fool! You sent your girls on the grand tour, but you ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... a real world-contest. Austria and Spain drew after them all the powers of reaction; all the powers of liberty and progress were arrayed on the other side. The half-barbarous races that lay between civilized Europe and ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... as though she had been discovered indulging in gross and inexcusable sentimentality. She looked down at Split with a puzzled, sheepish smile, wondering how long it had been since her sister had come into the real world out of that fantastic one where marvelous things ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... man had lived so long among his musty books that the real world had become as it were a kind of dream to him, wherein people came like shadows and people went like shadows, and where still the battered battalions of his books ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... dare you taunt me with being a pensioner on your brother's bounty? I'll go up to town again and take lodgings there. I need not be beholden to any aristocrat of them all. I have my own station in the real world,—the world of intellect; I have my own friends; I have made myself a name without his help; and I can live without ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... have been actually taken by the Wollunqua, the mythical water-snake, who is the totem of one of the Warramunga clans. Unlike all the other totems he is supposed to exist only in his invisible and animal form and never to be reincarnated in a man.[145] Hence, withdrawn as he is from the real world of sense, the imagination is free to play about him and to invest him more and more with those supernatural attributes which men ascribe to their deities. And what has actually happened to this particular totemic ancestor might under favourable circumstances ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... appear to men illumined by fantastic light and representing a drama which is nothing but a projection of the soul itself, influenced by some intoxication—I was going to say hallucination—or other. Those who are widest awake still see the real world across the dominant illusion of their race or time. And the reason is that the deceiving light starts from our own mind: the light is our religion. Everything changes with it. It is religion which ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to have a book with you in all places and at all times. Most likely you will carry it many a day and never give it a single look, but, even so, a book in the hand is always a companionable reminder of that happier world of fancy, which, alas! most of us can only visit by playing truant from the real world. As some men wear boutonnieres, so a reader carries a book, and sometimes, when he is feeling the need of beauty, or the solace of a friend, he opens it, and finds both. Probably he will count among ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... charity," he said. "You may read all about it there in that Bible, but—the world takes it out in reading about it. . . . I do not mean to speak bitterly. . . . There is nothing wrong with me as far as the world goes—I mean my world. . . . Only—in the other and real world there is—you. . . . You, who did not pass by on the other side; and to whom the Scriptures there are merely the manual which you practice—for the ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... wretched were my rambles. I had full leisure to compare my then disturbed state of mind with the comparative peace I had enjoyed in my own country. Immured within the palace of Villanow, watching the declining health of my mother, I knew nothing of the real world, the little I had learned of society being drawn from books; and, uncorrected by experience, I was taught to believe a perfection in man which, to my affliction, I since found to be but a poet's dream. When my father took me to Italy, I continued averse to public company. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... a real world, both pure and good, Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... their hearts, of Irish politics, of Munster and of the legends of their own family, to all of which Stephen lent an avid ear. Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about them. The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... led to a supra-sensible world, more real than the common world of sense, the unchangeable world of ideas, which alone gives to the world of sense whatever pale reflection of reality may belong to it. The truly real world, for Plato, is the world of ideas; for whatever we may attempt to say about things in the world of sense, we can only succeed in saying that they participate in such and such ideas, which, therefore, constitute ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... to create an artificial world which when confronted with the real world appears strange and remote is due to the fact that philosophers, instead of using as their instrument of research the entire complex vision, use first one and then another of its isolated attributes. But there must come moments when, in the analysis of so intricate ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... respect to it is the lax power they have to see in it the truth, as contradistinguished from the fact, the continuous reality of the things of the mind in opposition to the accidental and partial reality of the things of actuality. They think of it as an imagined, instead of as the real world, the model of that which is in the evolution of that which ought to be. In history the climaxes of art have always outrun human realization; its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of the never-attained; but they still ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... force and accuracy of his descriptions and the beauty of their reality."[58] They were memories made true by long dreaming, by endless brooding. The painter lived with these scenes ever present to the inner eye. They were his real world, of which the tamer world of meadow and woodland actually around him only gave suggestion. He thought of the green steeps, the rocks, the mountain pines, the waters of the lake, "the populous solitude of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... as tall, fantastic trees, moved by soft zephyrs. And because of the bright flowers ever springing in the green turf that carpeted the valley, they named it the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. And to the three the dream-valley, with its peace and its beauty and its sweet seclusion, was the real world, while all the wilderness outside of it, where other men ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... fever that never broke. The joy of creation that is supposed to belong to the gods was his. All the life about him—the odors of stale vegetables and soapsuds, the slatternly form of his sister, and the jeering face of Mr. Higginbotham—was a dream. The real world was in his mind, and the stories he wrote were so many pieces of ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... of existence say and do, if and when it was known that she was no longer a young woman of enormous wealth? Would Dauphin have sought to compel her to enter his studio had he been aware that her fortune had gone tip in smoke? She was not in a real world. She was in a world of shams. And she was a sham in the world of shams. She wanted to be back again in the honest realities of Moze, where in the churchyard she could see the tombs of her great-great-grandfathers. Only one extraneous interest ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... the direct words of the author. The child realizes that the forest scenes which furnish the background for so many of his favorite fairy tales have a subtle beauty which has never been seen by him. Gradually through such pictures he is led to seek an ideal beauty in the real world. He also becomes able not only to appreciate the poetic rendering of this expression of the ideal but is capable of forming more varied mental images of things about which he reads; to put more of his own individuality, his own conceptions, into ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... your country furnishes—good, homely, commonplace creatures—than I should have thought of asking you to adopt French cookery to feed them. I spoke of such men as one meets in what I may call the real world: as for the others, if they feel life to be a stage, they are always going about in slipshod fashion, as if at rehearsal. Men like your brother and young O'Shea, for instance—tossed here and there ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... made good all right, or you couldn't go forward; but this is a government job, and fellows like us aren't big enough to get through on our own merits. One has to be a real world-beater to do that. If the Cortlandts hadn't backed us, some other chaps with influence would have stepped in above us. Take Blakeley, for instance. He is nothing extra, and he doesn't know half as much about this business as I do; but he's the brother-in- law of ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... without being at all afraid. If the beetle spoke truly, and there really was an invisible line that divided the common, real world from an enchanted country, she was very eager to cross it, as any little girl might well be. And then it occurred to her that she must have crossed the enchanted line before she met the beetle, for otherwise she ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... not put exactly side by side with nature; and he is allowed a license with regard to everyday probability, in view of the improved effects he is bound to produce thereby. Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as yet no Faery Land, so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness, we cannot well tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own. This atmosphere is what the American romancer ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... apprenticeship, by our boarding-school system, by artificial training and mechanical cramming, by overwork, without thought for the time that is to follow, for the adult age and the functions of the man, without regard for the real world on which the young man will shortly be thrown, for the society in which we move and to which he must be adapted or be taught to resign himself in advance, for the struggle in which humanity is engaged, and in which to defend himself and to keep his footing he ought previously to have been equipped, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... safety, and from safety to danger; his dependence is on the ever-varying winds, his abode on the unstable waters. And the mind takes a peculiar tone from what is peculiar in the circumstances. With nothing stable in the real world around it on which it may rest, it forms a resting-place for itself in some wild code of belief. It peoples the elements with strange occult powers of good and evil, and does them homage—addressing its prayers to the genius of the winds, and the spirits of the waters. And thus ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... the pipe as he answered: "That's what I can't seem to make out. You know old Emerson says a man doesn't amount to much as a thinker until he has doubted the existence of matter. And I just got to thinking about it, and wondering if this was a real world after all—or just my idea of one." The two men smiled at the notion, and Ward went on: "All right, laugh if you want to, but if this is a real world, whose world is it, your world or my world? Here is John ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... to construct from physical materials, a space of one of the kinds enumerated by the logical treatment of geometry. This problem derives its difficulty from the attempt to accommodate to the roughness and vagueness of the real world some system possessing the logical clearness and exactitude of pure mathematics. That this can be done with a certain degree of approximation is fairly evident If I see three people A, B, and C sitting in a row, I become aware of the fact which may be expressed ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... of vibration, each differentiated from the other as in our physics prakriti is differentiated from ether. The material universe, the ancient physics teach, was originally pure thought, Manasa, the product of the spiritual planes above. This manasic world was differentiated, a real world. That is to say it was given elementary substances by the union of its atoms in different sized molecules. Some of its elements combined and formed Prana. The prana gathered and formed other worlds, pranic worlds. Then in the pranic world etheric worlds were formed; and finally ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... out the real world and he forgot it—until the fit was past. And then he pushed away his paper, he laid down his pen, he stretched himself, and he knew that his great effort had tired ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... the imperial epoch have resumed the theme with better means of judging, and yet with no harsher judgment. Hartwig sums up his penetrating and severe analysis by confessing that the world as Machiavelli saw it, without a conscience, is the real world of history as it is: "Die Thatsachen selbst scheinen uns das Geheimniss ihrer Existenz zu verrathen; wir glauben vor uns die Faeden sich verknuepfen und verschlingen zu sehen, deren Gewebe die Weltgeschichte ist." Gaspary thinks that he hated iniquity, but that he knew of no righteousness ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... they teach what I want. Mr. Clifden, I shall not come this way again. If I remember—I'll write to you, and tell you what the real world ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... knowledge and duty, loftily elevated above that of sense and appetite. Into this ideal world man absorbs the universe as in a transfiguration. It is here that he shapes the programme of his existence; and to that programme he makes the real world conform. It is here he forms his highest rules of conduct. It is here he plants his hopes and joys. It is here he finds his dignity and power. The ideal world becomes to him the supreme reality." Lewes said that what a man thinks "is the necessary product of his organism and external conditions." ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... life which animated Holland was revealed and developed in a new way. The little country, which had suddenly become so glorious and formidable, felt that it must tell its greatness. Its faculties, which had been strengthened and stimulated in the grand enterprise of creating a native land, a real world,—now that this enterprise was achieved, expanded, and created an imaginary world. The conditions of the people were favorable to a revival of art. They had overcome the supreme perils which threatened them: security, prosperity, a splendid future, were theirs: their ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... am not brave at all; I am newly very timid. I am frightened of the real world now, and feel only at my ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... dreamer,' said the boy, with his former petulance. 'It was all very well when we sat before the fire—when we looked into the hollow down by the flare—but we are looking into the real world, now.' ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... richly humorous, as inexhaustibly diverting as the dramatic counterfeit who is now a citizen and chief personage in that world of literature which outlasts all the fleeting shows of the so-called real world. It seems to me to be possible for a good reader to notice not only Shakespeare's lapses and faults in the drawing of this character, but also to make a very fair guess at his heightening touches, and so arrive at last at ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... of their being is in him, and the illusory world of the senses cannot dim their vision of the real world which is eternal. By self-analysis the mind is sublimated until it becomes a shadow in a shadowy universe; and the criticism of the reason drives us to doubt and inaction, from which we are redeemed by our necessary faith in our own freedom, in our ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... When the real world took shape for Gadabout that morning on the James, she was some distance above Shirley and the river was a smaller river than we had seen at any time before. By the chart, we observed that it was a comparatively narrow stream all the rest of the ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins |
