"Quixotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scotched by the refusal of the Russian Government to grant him the necessary authorization and passports. But Borrow's energies were transferred to a project which scarcely, if at all, less deserves the epithet Quixotic. It was to disseminate a Castilian translation of the Vulgate (made by Father Scio at Valencia between 1790 and 1793) in Spain and Portugal. To disperse Bibles in Papua or in Park-lane were, it might be argued, an enterprise fully as hopeful as to ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... Chrzanowski, 'because you landed 10,000 men, and occupied the isthmus which connects Kinburn with the main land. The garrison saw that they were invested, and had no hope of relief. They were not Quixotic enough, or heroic enough, to prolong a hopeless resistance. Scarcely any garrison ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... lighted only by a single candle set upon the floor. The mountebank lay on his back upon a pallet; a large man, with a Quixotic nose inflamed with drinking. Madame Tentaillon stooped over him, applying a hot water and mustard embrocation to his feet; and on a chair close by sat a little fellow of eleven or twelve, with his feet dangling. ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... work, and at least see the city, which I had never seen, and get my cyclopaedia and magazine. It was the least offer the Public ever made to me; but just then the Public was in a collapse, and the least was better than nothing. The plan of so long a journey was Quixotic enough, and I hesitated about it a good deal. Finally I came to this resolve: I would start in the morning to walk to the lock-station at Brockport on the canal. If a boat passed that night where they would give me my fare for any work I could do for them, I would go to Albany. ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... warmly—"this is all very well, very Quixotic, very—well, what you call noble, chivalrous—but what about the moral side of the affair? Justice should be tempered with mercy, certainly; but it doesn't do to defraud justice altogether of her dues. The woman has committed a crime—I ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Quixotic sentiment he was sick with horror. He knew that what Krevin Crood had told at last was true. He knew, too, that it would never have come out if Krevin himself had not been in danger. A feeling of almost physical ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... how. quebrantar to break. quedar(se) to stay, remain; —— en algo to abide by something. quehacer m. business, duty. queja lament. quejar vr. to complain. quemar to burn. querellante plaintiff. querer to wish, love. quien, quien who, whom, which. quijotesco Quixotic. quimerico chimerical, extravagant. quince fifteen. quinientos, -as five hundred. quinta conscription. quinto conscript. quitar to take ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... thought you were satisfied about that. Look here; go ahead, pull whatever stunt is up your sleeve. I give you my word that if you see Leyden and feel as you do about him then, we'll hold back our own vessel until he's under weigh, no matter what we lose by it. Does that soothe your blessed Quixotic scruples?" ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... replied. "Of course I am very much obliged to you; but you must have been terribly imprudent. Could you not have managed without being discovered in that suspicious attitude? I was so grievously distressed. You are too quixotic—you seek ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... you, he should have taken more care than to leave you on such a Quixotic search ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... thought of taming some hyenas, and training them to the hunt. This idea was by no means quixotic. The hyena is often used for such a purpose, and performs even better than many kinds ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... almost nothing to remedy led to the organization of the United States Sanitary Commission. Strangely enough the founder of this most necessary and timely organization, Rev. H. W. Bellows, of New York, encountered the opposition of high officials who deemed the whole plan quixotic. Even President Lincoln at first regarded the Commission unnecessary and called it "a fifth wheel to the coach." Brief experience, however, demonstrated that the government could not provide all that was necessary ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... little matter, my dear Ormond, which I wish you to lay to heart very seriously. Now do take an old man's advice and do not get up upon your Quixotic hobby-horse the moment you sniff what it is—for I suppose you have guessed it already. Yes, it is what you feared: I want to urge you to follow your mother's ardent wish and add commission business to ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... Mr. Bomford demanded, impressively, "whether you have a right to treat your other self in this fashion? Your other self will assuredly resent it, if you retain your memory. Your other self would hate your present self for its short-sighted, quixotic folly. I tell you frankly that you have not the right to treat your coming self in this way. Consider! Wealth does not inevitably vulgarize. On the contrary, it takes you away from the necessity of associating with people calculated ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to one of her Philadelphia friends who was visiting her—she was too politic to talk openly to the neighbors. "You have, of course, met that Miss Cobden who lives at Yardley—not the pretty one—the plain one. Well, she is the most quixotic creature in the world. Only a few weeks ago she wanted to become a nurse in the public hospital here, and now she proposes to close her house and go abroad for nobody knows how long, simply because her younger sister wants to study music, as if a school-girl couldn't get all the instruction ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... they should see him struggling against the hosts of France, would send troops to his aid. With five hundred horse, and about a thousand foot soldiers, he crossed the Alps. Here he learned that for some unknown reason Charles had postponed his expedition. Recoiling from the ridicule attending a quixotic and useless adventure, he hunted around for some time to find some heroic achievement which would redeem his name from reproach, when, thwarted in every thing, he returned ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... seen the "wahoo," or winged elm of the South, and there are several other native elms, as well as a number of introductions from the Eastern Hemisphere, with which acquaintance is yet to be made. All of them together, I will maintain with the quixotic enthusiasm of lack of knowledge, are not worth as much as one-half hour spent in looking up under the leafy canopy of our own preeminent American elm—a tree surely among those given by the Creator for ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... with a recoil that carried him at first to inconsiderate negation. His passionate love of liberty, his loathing for intolerance, his impatience of control for self and others, and his vivid logical sincerity, combined to make him the Quixotic champion of extreme opinions. He was too fearless to be wise, too precipitate to suspend his judgment, too convinced of the paramount importance of iconoclasm, to mature his views in silence. With the unbounded audacity of youth, he hoped to take the fortresses of "Anarch Custom" ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... for us, as truly as for Joshua and his host, a revelation of who is our true leader, surely all of us in our various degrees, and especially any of us who have any 'Quixotic crusade' for the world's good on our consciences and on our hands, may take the lessons and the encouragements that are here. Own your Leader; that is one plain duty. And recognise this fact, that by no other power than by His, and with no other weapons ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to tell him that if the ladies had forced his hand his accepting full responsibility was simply quixotic. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... understood his business and suggested I should attend strictly to mine. I told him I understood mine and that it included some personal honor. I was hot. I suggested that wildcat development was not my business. He called me a quixotic young fool among other things, and I may have called him a robber. I'm not sure. Anyway, ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... Fortunately, the interesting barouche had passed before the catastrophe, and covered as I was with dust, and my hat blocked, you may be sure I did not care to present myself before the object of my Quixotic devotion. ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... fence, and take no heed, of them, but clearly it was not to be attempted, for the ground fell considerably on the other side. My next thought was to ride away and leave them. My third was one which some of my readers will judge Quixotic, but I have a profound reverence for the Don—and that not merely because I have so often acted as foolishly as he. This last I proceeded to carry out, and lifting-my hat, rode to meet them. Taking no notice whatever of Brotherton, I addressed Clara—in what I fancied a distant and dignified ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... is too old with me, and has become too strong, to be immediately laid aside. I shall do my best to procure a settlement of your proprietyas much of it as possibleupon yourself; and I mention this now simply to beg of you that you will not interpose any sentimental or quixotic objection on your own part. I shall endeavour to get Dr. Maryland to back me; he must see the propriety of the step. I only ask you ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... therefore, the thing is of the best. But it is also something much better than Shaw. The writer touches certain realities commonly outside his scope; especially the reality of the normal wife's attitude to the normal husband, an attitude which is not romantic but which is yet quite quixotic; which is insanely unselfish and yet quite cynically clear-sighted. It involves human sacrifice without in the ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... should simply declare we will defend the neutrality of Belgium by arms in case it should be attacked. Now, the sole or single-handed defense of Belgium would be an enterprise which we incline to think quixotic; if these two great military powers [France and Prussia] combined against it—that combination is the only serious danger; and this it is which by our proposed engagements we should, I hope, render improbable ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... And I think Forbes would have won, had not Hopkins forced this unfortunate issue upon him. As it is, our young friend cannot avoid the consequences of his quixotic action." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... the girl was, she managed to win Vandervelde's interest and sympathy. That she had won young Peter Champneys's didn't surprise him. He was glad that she had had that one disinterested and kindly deed to look back to. The boy's quixotic behavior brought a smile to the lawyer's lips. Fancy his wishing to send such a girl to his uncle and being sure that old Chadwick wouldn't misunderstand! Gracie cast a new light upon Peter Champneys, and a very likable one. Vandervelde had seen in the uncle ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... already been proposed, they neglected to inquire whether these other methods were possible or practicable, and they were ready and willing to oppose with ignorant ridicule or brutal force any man who was foolish or quixotic enough to try to explain to them the details of what he thought was a better way. They accepted the present system in the same way as they accepted the alternating seasons. They knew that there was spring and summer and autumn and winter. As to how ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... And even in her Garden of Paradise she had heard it. And even from her Garden of Paradise she had obeyed it. For the first time she saw that act of renunciation as the average man or woman would probably see it; as an extraordinary, quixotic act, to be wondered at blankly, or, perhaps, to be almost angrily condemned. She stood away from her own impulsive, enthusiastic nature, and stared at it critically—as even her friends had often stared—and realized that it was unusual, perhaps extravagant, perhaps sometimes preposterous. This readiness ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... wrong-headed. This intended invasion of Italy by the Orientals was simply ridiculous, and nothing but a product of the impotent imagination of despair. Through the prudent coolness of their leader the Romans were prevented from Quixotically pursuing their Quixotic antagonist and warding off in the distant Crimea an attack, which, if it were not nipped of itself in the bud, would still have been soon enough met at the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... avalanche. Recalling their course since leaving the village, the brothers understood better than before the cause of more than one tortuous winding by their guide, when they had been unable to guess the reason for such quixotic turns that did not lessen ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... Japan as the rising Asiatic power. Even the Grand Vizier of Persia has paid a state visit to Japan. Any hopes of India and Persia are likely to be vain, for Britain has a hold upon the former and Russia upon the latter which it would be Quixotic in the Japanese to attempt to break. The Islanders are not fools. But the Siamese, helplessly exasperated by the encroachments of the French, would doubtless be glad enough to enter into an alliance with Japan and China. In 1902, the Crown Prince ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... Quixotic madness has made you more than once speak to me of Quixotism as the new religion. And I tell you that this new religion you propose to me, if it hatched, would have two singular merits. One that its founder, its prophet, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... encountered an Egyptian pasha, returning with a booty of slaves from a recent razzia. She besought him to release the unhappy creatures, and when he refused, purchased eight of them, immediately setting them at liberty, and supplying them also with provisions. This has been ridiculed as a quixotic act; but to our thinking it was an act of generous womanly enthusiasm, which may be accepted as redeeming many of the faults and failings of Miss Tinne's character, and compensating for the frivolities which overclouded the ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... seemed a bit unfair," he remarked. "There were three of us, you know. If he were not what he is, I'd feel somewhat ashamed of my part in the affair." Donnelly showed his contempt for such quixotic views by an expressive grunt. "You can take the next one single-handed, if you prefer. Perhaps it may be ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... tenants.... A superior kind of young woman in some ways, I've heard; and a friend of the youngest Jervaise girl ... you wouldn't remember her ... she went with her friend to Australia or somewhere ... some quixotic idea of protecting her, I believe ... and married out there. The farmer's name was Baggs. The whole family were a trifle queer, and emigrated afterwards ... yes, it was a pity about Melhuish, in a way. He was considered quite a promising young dramatist. This thing of his was a distinct ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... the Swedish republican novelist, had scarcely reached his own country after several years exile in America, before he was again imprisoned for some quixotic attack upon institutions which he has neither the ability nor the character, even if let alone by the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... log under a palm-tree in Batavia, on that momentous morning of the 27th, was a sailor who had been left behind sick by Captain Roy when he went on his rather Quixotic trip to the Keeling Islands. He was a somewhat delicate son of the sea. Want of self-restraint was his complaint—leading to a surfeit of fruit and other things, which terminated in a severe fit of indigestion and indisposition to life in general. ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... ancient Quaker laws, or count up the nefarious gains their slave-trading fathers made, while enjoying the twenty years lease of the African slave trade, granted by the Federal Constitution. Ridicule as we may the family pride or State pride of Virginia, or the sometimes Quixotic chivalry of her sons, they have reason to be proud of their noble mother, for her great names belong to American fame, and her history is our nation's glory. In view of all the past, I hope that day may never come ...
— The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery - Delivered at Fort Wayne, Ind., October 30th 1860 • Joseph Ketchum Edgerton
... And Valmai Powell following every step you take with her loving and longing thoughts. No, no, Cardo; you have nothing to pull such a long face about. On the contrary, as I have said before, you are a lucky dog." (Cardo grunted.) "Besides, you are not obliged to go. It seems to me rather a quixotic affair altogether, and yet, by Jove! there is something in it that appeals to the poetic side of my nature. You will earn your father's undying gratitude, and in the first gush of his happiness you will gain his consent to your marriage ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... devil of a don Andres! How cunningly he had slashed him, and then plunged his fingers into the bleeding gash to make the wound deeper! The old man's plain common-sense had shattered his dream. That man had been the rustic, cunning Sancho at the side of the quixotic don Ramon; and he was playing the same ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... made their appearance, and Elvira Wilkins went away weeping as a widow should. Why did she abuse Newcome ever after at Calcutta, Bath, Cheltenham, and wherever she went, calling him selfish, pompous, Quixotic, and a Bahawder? I could mention half a dozen other names of ladies of most respectable families connected with Leadenhall Street, who, according to Colonel Newcome's chum—that wicked Mr. Binnie—had all conspired more or less to give ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... money which Richard Brithwood will not pay, and John Halifax will not go to law to make him. Nay, father dear, I am not going to quarrel with any one of your crotchets." She spoke with a fond pride, as she did always, even when arguing against the too Quixotic carrying out of the said crotchets. "Perhaps, as the reward of forbearance, the money will come some day when we least expect it; then John shall have his heart's desire, and start the cloth-mills ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... to draw you away from all your friends at a moment's warning! I would remonstrate—I would not go; I would exert a proper spirit, and force him to abandon this Quixotic expedition." ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... "Well, my quixotic one, you shall tell me anything—say, as soon as we are settled in our lodging; not now. I, too, will tell you my faults then. But do not let us spoil the day with them; they will be excellent matter ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... "but I trust that I may be allowed to congratulate you upon the abandonment of principles which I have considered a clog to your career. They did you honor, sir, but they were Quixotic. I, sir, am for saving our glorious Union at any cost. And we have no right to deprive our brethren of their property of their ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... themselves shun the wiles of the interviewer, or are at all shy and retiring, as a matter of delicacy, about their family affairs; on the contrary, they display a striking lack of reticence in their native element, and are so far from pushing parental affection to a quixotic extreme that many of them, like the common rabbit immortalised by Mr. Squeers, 'frequently devour their own offspring.' But nature herself opposes certain obvious obstacles to the pursuit of knowledge in the great deep, which render it difficult for the ardent naturalist, however much he may be ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... phrase. "I suppose Grexon thinks I am very Quixotic," he thought, "coming to London to tilt with the windmills of the Press. But Don Quixote was wise in spite of his apparent madness, and Grexon will recognize my wisdom when he sees my Dulcinea, bless her! Humph! I wonder if Hay could pacify my father and ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... country foreign statesmen have more than once made Spanish policy ridiculous by taking that one step which separates that quality from the sublime. What in the person of a Castilian is at the worst but Quixotic becomes in the foreigner, or man of foreign descent, the merest burlesque ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... letters was published, of which the reader will wish there were more. Less than a month before her death, she wrote to a friend a list of benevolent enterprises she has in mind and says, "Oh, it is such a luxury to be able to give without being afraid. I try not to be Quixotic, but I want to rain down blessings on all the world, in token of thankfulness for the blessings that have ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... absurd!" exclaimed the prince. "It is Quixotic. San Giacinto has plenty of money without ruining us. Even if he finds it out I will fight the case to the end. I am master here, as my father and my father's father were before me, and I will not give up what is mine without a struggle. Besides, who assures us that he is really what he represents ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... from the embrace as soon as I could. I didn't feel like the best man in the world. I felt like a Quixotic fool. ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... boy was anything but foolish," she added hastily. "I'll do him the justice to admit that he's more of a fool than a villain—and I hardly know whether it's a compliment that I'm paying him or not. He got some quixotic notion into his head that Harry Maupin insulted the girl in his presence, and he called him to account for it. As if the honour of a barkeeper's daughter was the concern of ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... showed a spreading sentiment. The honour of the first victory in the practical application must be given to Granville Sharp[121] (1735-1813), one of the most charming and, in the best sense, 'Quixotic' of men. In 1772 his exertions had led to the famous decision by Lord Mansfield in the case of the negro Somerset.[122] Sharp in 1787 became chairman of the committee formed to attack the slave-trade by collecting the evidence of which Wilberforce ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... the black eyes sunken in their orbits. Straight black hair fell slantwise off a high but narrow forehead, and swept part of a hollow cheek. A long black mustache followed the perpendicular curves of his mouth. It was on the whole a serious, even Quixotic face, but at times it was relieved by a rare smile of such tender and even pathetic sweetness, that Miss Jo is reported to have said that, if it would only last through the ceremony, she would have married its possessor on the spot. "I once told him so," added that shameless young woman; "but the ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... said things that you and I couldn't say, and she did things. I felt the catastrophe in the air long before it came. But I couldn't warn Roger. I just had to let him find out. I wasn't there when the blow fell; but I'll tell you this, that Roger may have been a quixotic idiot in the eyes of the world, but if he failed it was because he was a dreamer, and an idealist, not a coward and a shirk." Her eyes were blazing. "Oh, if you could hear what some people said ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... that women should be very susceptible to such impressions; that they should view life with almost a poetic eye; and that they should be peculiarly sensitive to its vicissitudes. And though a Quixotic quest after adventures is as silly as it is vain, and to invest every trifle with importance, or to see something marvelous in every incident, is equally absurd; there is no reason why the imagination ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... end of whispering among those in the know before the court met; and it was discussed whether or not March would bring into his defence the state of feeling between Vandyke and himself. Some thought he would be justified in doing so, and quixotic not to, as the bad blood between them, and the cause of it (I hope you don't mind my saying this?) was already a sort of open secret. Others argued that if the ill-feeling were once lugged in, the name of the lady concerned and other details would certainly ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the ordinary civilized white man would not do, even if his legitimate wife and all his outside concubines were to have twins or triplets every nine months; so that, even as strange as it may appear, civilization must need go to the wild Bushmen in search of that grand old Quixotic chivalry that was in ancient times always ready to sacrifice itself for ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... long before Floyd began to be known more widely. He had schemes for the amelioration of the condition of the poor. They were pronounced quixotic; but he kept on. He said he got good out of them if no ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... to take this quite seriously, considering that he had only 12,000 men available for these adventures; and with anyone but Bonaparte they might be dismissed as utterly Quixotic. But in his case we must seek for some practical purpose; for he never divorced fancy from fact, and in his best days imagination was the hand-maid of politics and strategy rather than the mistress. Probably these gorgeous visions were bodied forth so as to inspirit the soldiery and ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... do as we please; and on the next we are sharply upbraided for not having done as the author pleases. We are first assured that we are the finest fellows in the world in our own right; and then it appears that we are only fine fellows in so far as we practise a most quixotic code of morals. The disciple who saw himself in clear ether a moment before is plunged down again among the fogs and complications of duty. And this is all the more overwhelming because Whitman insists not only on love between sex and sex, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mistakes which, possibly, I had committed. She had behaved so unreasonably as to release me from any obligation. As to Marie Delhasse, I had had enough (so I declared in the hasty disgust my temper engendered) of Quixotic endeavors to rescue people who, had they any moral resolution, could well rescue themselves. There was only one thing left which I might with dignity undertake—and that was to put as many miles as I could between the scene of my unappreciated labors and myself. This ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... another. Professing to hold the most outrageous maxims, incessantly invoking Brutus and old Rome, and intermingling gallant with political intrigues, they suffered themselves to be hurried beyond the bounds of reason through a Quixotic idea of always pleasing the ladies. They had all been more or less fellow-sufferers with Anne of Austria during the period of her affliction and persecution by Richelieu, and from the commencement of her Regency, these returning ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Oscarovitch, flushing in spite of his effort to keep the blood back from his face. "You have solved the problem, and won't make use of the greatest invention of all the ages! Surely, Professor, that is a little quixotic, is ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... major had empty hands after the loss of his prize, the student had the quixotic delicacy to make the offer in dumbshow to lay aside his cane and undertake to chastise the insulter of womanhood with the naked fist. But this is a weapon almost unknown in the sword-bearing class which Von Sendlingen adorned, and, infuriated by the civilian intervening at the culmination ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... man of her blood above ground to earn it for her. Nor could there be any disgrace so lasting, even to the third and fourth generation, as the stigma an outraged community would place upon the renegade who refused her aid and comfort. An unprogressive, quixotic life if you will—a life without growth and dominant personalities and lofty responsibilities and God-given rights—but oh! the sweet mothers that it gave us, and the wholesomeness, the cleanliness, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... hundred thousand pounds sterling, or to make it seem more prodigious, nearly eighteen million francs, were consumed in its building. An army of skilled artisans had come out from France and Austria to make this quixotic dream a reality before the two old men should go into their dreamless sleep; to say nothing of the slaving, faithful islanders who laboured for love in the great undertaking. Specially chartered ships had carried material ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... home on a quixotic and more or less unbusinesslike mission. It had long been the belief of Consolidated Pemmican's chemists that the Grass might possibly furnish raw material for food concentrates and we had come to modify our opinion about the necessity for a processing plant ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... opening sketch of the French Revolution, written to refute Burke's narrative of the same events, will not deny Paine's complete success. He will even meet with sentences that Burke might have composed. For instance: Paine ridicules, as Quixotic, the fine passage in the "Reflections on the Decay of Chivalry"; and adds, "Mr. Burke's mind is above the homely sorrows of the vulgar. He can only feel for a king or for a queen. The countless victims of tyranny have no place in his sympathies. He is not affected by the reality of distress ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Browning's generosity kept Landor from actual want. At Rugby, and at Oxford, his extreme Republicanism brought him into constant trouble; and his fitting out a band of volunteers to assist the Spaniards against Napoleon, in 1808, allies him with Byron and his Quixotic followers. The resemblance to Byron is even more strikingly shown in the poem Gebir, published in 1798, a year made famous by the Lyrical ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... seemed suddenly to be ringing. His head was awhirl, his pulses fairly pounding with the weird, quixotic purport of his impulse. ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Well, I'm ready to meet these fellows, thanks to the forethought that caused me to arm myself before starting on this quixotic ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... silly, foolish, quixotic to hope that here, in this little world of workaday people, he might be brought to see that personal acquisition and advance is not enough to give life meaning, to justify what it exacts. I was foolish. We are more ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... on them, and rubbed them, while he regarded my father with a bewildered air. "You'll excuse me . . . but I must own myself entirely puzzled. Even for a friend's sake, as I was about to protest, your conduct, sir, would be Quixotic; yes, yes, Quixotic in the highest degree, the amount being (as you might say) princely, and the security—" Mr. Knox paused and expressed his opinion of the security by a pitying smile. "But if," he resumed, "this man ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... moment of quixotic generosity at Enkhuisen, I promised Phyllis, as a newly adopted, if reluctant, brother, that I would make everything right for her. Afterwards, I was inclined to repent of the plan which had sprung, Minerva-like full-grown ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... read "The Children of the Abbey," and this opened a new field of thought. My dreams, instead of being peopled with fairies and genii, were now filled with distressed damsels who met with all sorts of persecutions and Quixotic adventures, and finally ended where they ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... statesman, whose prospects would be irremediably injured by abruptly quitting a Government that seemed likely to be in power for the next quarter of a century; a zealous Whig, who shrank from the very appearance of disaffection to his party; a man of sense, with no ambition to be called Quixotic; a member for a large constituency, possessed of only seven hundred pounds in the world when his purse was at its fullest; above all, an affectionate son and brother, now, more than ever, the main hope and reliance of those whom he held ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... to be exerted on his life by a series of love-episodes. Some of these were of slight and ephemeral character; some were a source of unalloyed happiness, all the more so if there was an element of extravagance to appeal to his Quixotic nature. He always longed to give a dramatic and romantic character to his life, his wife says, and he spent some blissful days on an occasion when he ran away to Florence with a Russian princess as her private secretary. Most often ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... have been only a gesture, for we were unable to transport armies to the theatre of war in time to check the outrage. Such action would have pleased some people in the East, but the President knew that this quixotic knight errantry would not appeal to the country at large, particularly the West, still strongly grounded in the Washingtonian tradition of non-interference ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... of financial independence should be properly checked; and so it happened that although L5,000,000 was secured after an intense struggle it was soon plain that the large requirements of a derelict government could not be satisfied in this Quixotic manner. Two important points had, however, been attained; first, China was kept financially afloat during the year 1912 by the independence of a single member of the London Stock Exchange; secondly, using this coup as a lever the Peking Government secured better ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... garden path below them. The stiff, glazed, broad-brimmed black hat, surmounting a dark face of Quixotic gravity and romantic rectitude, indicated Don Juan Briones. His companion, lazy, specious, and red-faced, was ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... What are we making ourselves miserable about? We care for each other a great deal, much more than I had any idea of this morning. Why should we say good-bye? I don't believe it's at all necessary, after all. You have got some silly, quixotic idea into your head, I'm sure. Tell me what it is, and ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... discovered quite a large collection of manuscripts, of very great interest to me of course, but to which I had no right, nor was I the proper person with whom to leave them. To have argued would have been useless. Expostulation with Landor when in the white heat of a new idea was Quixotic, so I expressed my very grateful thanks, and determined to watch for a favorable opportunity to return the gift. I had not long to wait, as it was not more than a month after that Landor bore them off, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... looks quixotic, does it not? But one thing you may be sure of; he might have worse associates. There are grades of intellect—we will call it intellect, for it comes very near, so near that we never can know just where the fine shading off begins between a horse's brain ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... other of the French officers went to the battlefields of their prostrate country, and thus it came to pass that the Pope's defenders were found fighting side by side with Garibaldi; they, indeed, only doing their simple duty, but he, acting on an impulse of Quixotic generosity which was ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... relief. Indeed, there was but one substitute possible, and that came like a gift straight from the God whom he denied. Love came, and Grayson's ideals of love, as of everything else, were morbid and quixotic. He believed that he owed it to the woman he should marry never to have loved another. He had loved but one woman, he said, and he should love but one. I believed him then literally when he said that his love for the Kentucky ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... Bethune, "you will not let such Quixotic ideals stand between us and happiness! You have your right to happiness, and so have I, and in the end 'twill be the same, your father's name will be cleared ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... at all in her enthusiasm. "The people over at Danby are all crazy about him, I think," said Stephen. "He is a very good man no doubt, and does no end of things for the college boys, that none of the other professors do. But I think he is quixotic and sentimental; and all this stuff about those niggers at the Cedars is moonshine. They'd pick his very pocket, I daresay, any day; and he'd never suspect them. I know that lot too well. The Lord ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... credit of Sir Robert Mainwaring was preserved with the secret of his disaster, Bradley was a frequent and welcome visitor to Oldenhurst. Apart from his strange and chivalrous friendship for the Mainwarings—which was as incomprehensible to Sir Robert as Sir Robert's equally eccentric and Quixotic speculations had been to Bradley—he began to feel a singular and weird fascination for the place. A patient martyr in the vast London house he had taken for his wife and cousin's amusement, he loved ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... in his person, is above the middle size, with marked features, and an air somewhat stately and Quixotic. He reminds one of some of Holbein's heads, grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour, kept under by the manners of the age or by the pretensions of the person. He has a peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth and manliness and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... possible not to despair of that untamable nature which age and reason, which so much attention and affection had left unmoved in her prejudices and her hatred? How was it possible to understand, and, above all, ever to overcome the quixotic sentiment, or rather the mania which had taken possession of that concentrated soul, and which was smoldering in it, ever ready to ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... subtle enough for that, or for anything else, and I have this only grudge against him, that he intrigued me to the point of feverishly "skipping," out of sheer excitement to know if and how the deplorable misunderstanding between Flora and her quixotic Captain Anthony was to be cleared up, just like any ordinary decent library-subscriber, instead of the case-hardened critical fellow I naturally take ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... it had, and you had had a mad daughter—because Gwen is a mad girl, if ever there was one—who got a Quixotic idea like this in her head, you would have felt exactly as my ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... existed, has never come to light; nor have we the testimony of a single person who pretends to have seen it, or to be acquainted with its contents. Indeed, the circumstances of the case seem to render such a united effort as the conjectural treaty supposes either Quixotic or superfluous—Quixotic, if the two monarchs, without the concurrence of the empire, whose crown had passed from Charles, not to his son Philip, but to his brother Ferdinand, should institute a scheme for a general crusade against the professors of the doctrines that had ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... began he had really had some thoughts of owning, somewhere about this point, that he had lost his head; but when it came to the point he saw that this admission was unnecessarily quixotic, and that he would be far safer if he suggested that Elise had lost hers. In fact, it was Fanny who had suggested it in the first place. It might not be altogether a fair imputation, but, hang it all, it was the only one that would really appease ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... overreached in his bargain, however much he might repent of it; and when Mr. Gregory pointed across the road and said, "The 'Little England' farm lies over there, but produces less and less every year. The land is exhausted," Sir Robert thought, "The fellow is either quixotic or doesn't wish to sell. I rather think the first: there has certainly been no shuffling and pretending." Aloud he said, "The soil can't be exhausted. It is virgin still compared to that of England, and all that it needs is careful cultivation. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... the sort," he admitted. "Mannering is quixotic, of course, and that hermit life of his down in Norfolk has made him more so. Now he has come back again into the world it is just possible that he may see things differently. I flatter myself that I am a man of common sense. I know how ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the Australians in France I always think of a windmill. This is not implying that they were in any sense Quixotic or that they tilted at a windmill, there being nothing left of the windmill to tilt at when their capture of its ruins became the crowning labor of their first tour on the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... complex maze, And Nature's laws are most despotic. Vice is not killed by kindly craze. Nor suffering quelled by zeal Quixotic. Big questions the Big Scheme beset. Bid Pity think, and do not ask it Too blindly all its eggs to get In one ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various
... "Notely has quixotic ideas in many ways: if he had given any ground for a foolish confidence in his boyhood he would hold to it now, against all his life's advancement, filial duty—yes, even against ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... with a blue riband. The Italian sang well; many young ladies were grouped round him, amongst others Florence Lascelles. Maltravers, fond as he was of music, looked upon Castruccio's performance as a disagreeable exhibition. He had a Quixotic idea of the dignity of talent; and though himself of a musical science, and a melody of voice that would have thrown the room into ecstasies, he would as soon have turned juggler or tumbler for polite amusement, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... replied coldly, "that is not it. You have missed it about as far as you could. I have no such picturesque notion. I am doing no such quixotic thing. I value my training too highly for that. It should be worth too much to them. I don't even scorn personal ambition, or the use of personal pull, so you see I'm a long way from a heroic figure. I know I've a brain that ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... you're mad,' she said, quietly. 'I only think you're too quixotic. You're sorry for me and you are letting a kind impulse carry you away, as you did last night at ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the squire know? He pictured the interview with him, divining, with the same abnormal clearness of inward vision, Mr. Wendover's start of mingled triumph and impatience—triumph in the new recruit, impatience with the Quixotic folly which could lead a man to look upon orthodox dogma as a thing real enough to be publicly renounced, or clerical pledges as more than a form of words. So henceforth he was on the same side with the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... expectation altogether Quixotic. In the train of many Polynesian princes roving whites are frequently found: gentleman pensioners of state, basking in the tropical sunshine of the court, and leading the pleasantest lives in the world. Upon islands little visited by foreigners the first ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... to me asking what I had done or was going to do about it. I replied that Fan was my father's daughter, and as much to me as if we had been born of one mother as well, and that I had nothing more to say. Then I got letter after letter, reasoning with me about my quixotic ideas, and trying to convince me that my action would only result in spoiling the girl, and in creating a coldness between myself and relations. It was rather hard, because I am really fond of my aunt and my cousins. My only answer to all her letters was to give her an account of ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... face was congested. Nevertheless the space, which was not longer than a few seconds by the clock, gave him time to remember that as his mother's and his sisters' incomes were inalienable he was by so much the more free. He was by so much the more free to do the mad, romantic, quixotic thing, which might seem to be a contradiction of his past, but was not so much a contradiction of himself as people who knew him imperfectly might suppose. He was taken to be ambitious, calculating, shrewd; when ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... to the momentary impulse that bade him hasten to the booking office and secure a ticket for St. Moritz forthwith. He dismissed the notion as quixotic and unnecessary. Bower's attitude in not pressing his company on Miss Wynton at this initial stage of the journey revealed a subtlety that demanded equal restraint on Spencer's part. Helen herself was so far from suspecting the truth that Bower would be compelled ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... his whole life into an adventure, a kind of quixotic pursuit of the lost loved one, Pleasure. In the mean time, his heart was dead to all the better and nobler feelings. But, at one time, it seemed as if a higher and more serious inclination promised permanently to enchain this dreaded rival of ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... a lonely battle always. Once before, in college, we had both laid ourselves and our callow devotions at the feet of the same girl. Her name was Dorothy—I had forgotten the rest—but I remembered the sequel. In a spirit of quixotic youth I had relinquished my claim in favor of Richey and had gone cheerfully on my way, elevated by my heroic sacrifice to a somber, white-hot martyrdom. As is often the case, McKnight's first words showed our parallel lines ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... required it; had not unfrequently tacked a worldly wise moral to the end of one; and yet, and yet, such had been the tone of her telling, such the allotment of laughter and lamentation, such the acceptance of things as necessary, and such the repudiation of things as Quixotic, puritanical, impossible, that the girl's natural notions of the lovely and the clean had ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... by you with a fidelity that was nothing short of Quixotic. If, woman-like, you must recall the past, I insist on ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... like this ought to be looked at first and foremost from the man's point of view. The truth is, Theo, that you have simply appealed to me in the hope of having your own Quixotic notion confirmed. You want me to say, 'Yes, go; you will be doing quite right.' And—think what you will of me—I flatly refuse ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... agree on that point, mamma," she said, quickly, "I have what you call a Quixotic notion, perhaps, and that is that we are attracted toward those whom Heaven intended for us, and if this be so he would not have been attracted toward Faynie if ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... similarly to the first. Upon reaching the town, news had just been received that a detachment of troops from another post had intercepted the ladrones and fought a skirmish with them. The ladrones had escaped and we set out in pursuit of them on a chase wilder than a Quixotic dream. We wound our way into the mountains behind the town, inquiring at every grass hut we passed whether the band of ladrones had passed that way, but only once was even a trace of them found. Then it was learned that at a certain ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... of freedom and mutiny from taking the place of law. He left Caracas, his native city, and here again he was taking a last farewell. In July he was in Cartagena, where the people received him with genuine affection. He recalled that it was from here he had begun his first quixotic expedition to his country in 1812. Fifteen years had elapsed since then, and he was again in Cartagena, his great work of redemption fulfilled but now in ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... smiling; 'but no doubt they will bring that about for themselves in the fulness of time, and if we step in to forestall them, it seems to me that we shall be performing a very Quixotic act, in direct opposition to our own interest—or at least to Oliver's, which is ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... measures that will do him no injury. The venal politician is always at his call, and assumes the form of saint or sinner, as the service may demand. Nor does he overlook the enthusiast, engaged in Quixotic endeavors for the relief of suffering humanity, but influences him to advocate measures which tend to tighten, instead of loosing the bands of slavery. Or, if he can not be seduced into the support of such schemes, he is beguiled into efforts that waste his strength on objects the most impracticable; ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... tongue-tied. I may tell you, however, that I am a secret agent of the government, to which I have volunteered my services solely because I love peace and hate war, and am desirous of doing all I can to promote the first and abate the last. The idea may appear to you Quixotic, but—" ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... are mistaken, my young friend," said the other quietly. "His Majesty is more sure of getting the money now than he was when M. le Comte de Cambray with his family and yourself started on that quixotic if ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... in the mind of the writer, while aiding in the developement and education of superior female minds, in the wealthier circles. Not because there are not noble objects for interest and effort, abundant, and within reach of such minds; but because long-established custom has made it seem so Quixotic, to the majority, even of the professed followers of Christ, for a woman of wealth to practise any great self-denial, that few have independence of mind and Christian principle sufficient to overcome such an influence. The more a mind has its powers developed, the more does it aspire and pine ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... my going to make somebody else act after my views; but when a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. Therefore all public ends look vague and quixotic beside private ones. For any laws but those which men make for themselves, are laughable. If I put myself in the place of my child, and we stand in one thought and see that things are thus or thus, that perception is law for ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... do you think it was? The most astounding, impossible, quixotic, unlanguageable thing in the world! He wants to send Katrine Dulany abroad to study. He wants it to be done in my name, however, so that it will in nowise compromise her, and wishes to have all the credit of the kindness given ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane |
