"Unpractical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to think that there was a time when I thought the teaching of Christ unpractical! Do you mind ringing the bell for me; the others will be in directly, and will be glad of tea after ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... in the country; other things, that make up for the stir of the city," said Michael thoughtfully. This was the first unpractical conversation he had tried to hold with Sam. He had been leading him up, through the various stages from dirt and degradation, by means of soap and water, then paper and paint, and now they had reached the doorway of Nature's school. Michael wanted to introduce Sam to the great ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... congenial society. Gordon was abnormally proud, independent and sensitive: an unfortunate disposition for anyone who has his way to make in an imperfect world. Such a man constantly misunderstands himself and is misunderstood. He takes severe, unpractical views of his own character and of life generally. Not necessarily morose or ungenial, he is always apt to be thought so. Gordon's conclusion that he had lost caste is a proof of supersensitiveness, and the ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... began wondering if, after all, the girl would not have been better than Jim Whaley. In a dim way it struck him that people for ever interfering with destiny do not always succeed in their intentions. It was an unusual and unpractical vein of thought for James Lorimer, and he put it uneasily away. Still over and over came back the question, "What if Lulu's influence would have been sufficient to have kept David from the wild reckless men with whom he was now consorting?" ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... up with, "are what Mr. Briscoe calls the vague, half-baked ideas of an unpractical inventor. He's an expert, Mr. Briscoe is! I'm not. I wouldn't know a supersaturated solution of methylcalcites from a stein of Hoboken beer; but I'm willin' to believe there's big money in handling either, providing ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... Babar had been immortal he might possibly have beaten back Sher Shah. But that admission serves to prove my argument. Babar was a very able general. So likewise was Sher Khan. Humayun was flighty, versatile, and unpractical; as a general of but small account. It is possible that the Sher Khan who triumphed over Humayun might have been beaten by Babar. But that only proves that the system introduced by Babar was the system to which he had been accustomed all his life—the system which had alternately ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... abstention from society, and his two years of solitary exile, the fresh beauty of this young Western wife, in whom the frank artlessness of girlhood still lingered, appeared to him like a superior creation. He forgot his vague longings in the inception of a more tangible but equally unpractical passion. He remembered her unconscious and spontaneous admiration of him; he dared to connect it with her forgiving silence. If she had withheld her confidences from her husband, he could hope—he ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... the fact that the mere word "missionary" aroused suspicion in the average English unconventional mind—such as those of these clean, natural-minded boys—would be a great mistake. Unquestionably, as in the case of Dickens, a missionary was unpractical if not hypocritical, and mildly incompetent if not secretly vicious. I found myself always fighting against the idea that I was termed a missionary. The men I loved and admired, especially such ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... the point of being able to take a dead head, and, by knowledge of its living anatomy, to model it in clay so truthfully as to far surpass any other process whatever. I can, unfortunately, give no directions for doing this. I can merely say, in the words of many unpractical "guide books" to art: "Take a board, some tools, a well-kneaded lump of clay; place the head before you in strong light, and turn out a lifelike representation of it; wrinkles, muscles, and all—in clay." To me, this is now far the easiest ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... home he found Adelaide about to set out for the Whitneys. As she expected to walk with Mrs. Whitney for an hour before lunch she was in walking costume—hat, dress, gloves, shoes, stockings, sunshade, all the simplest, most expensive-looking, most unpractical-looking white. From hat to heels she was the embodiment of luxurious, "ladylike" idleness, the kind that not only is idle itself, but also, being beautiful, attractive, and compelling, is the cause of idleness in others. She breathed upon Arthur the delicious perfume of the ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... convention, argument, activity, these means and matters of satisfaction are matters of utility and labor. Feuerbach's system of morality either predicates that these means and matters of satisfaction are given to every man per se, or, since it gives him only unpractical advice, is not worth a jot to the people who are without these means. And this Feuerbach himself shows clearly in forcible words, "One thinks differently in a palace than in a hut." "Where owing to misery and hunger you have ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... that would be about all. He expected to have to economize on spending money the first year, but the second year his wages would be raised, and then it would come easier. All this shows how very verdant and unpractical our young adventurer was, and what disappointment he was ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... permit Germany to extend her domain over Russia or any large part of it. Their position became embodied in the phrase, "Victory by the Allies on the west and Russia's defeat on the east." This was, of course, utterly unpractical theorizing and bore no ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... home and both went to the Bar, but with different results. Young Drayton was learned and unpractical. Oliver Hampden was clever, able, and successful, and soon had a thriving practice; while his neighbor's learning was hardly known outside ...
— The Christmas Peace - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... thing, indeed, which in a way refounds or even founds the whole conception—it establishes the heroine. There are certainly feminine persons, sometimes not disagreeable, who play conspicuous and by no means mute or unpractical parts in both Greek and Latin versions of the Ass-Legend; but one can hardly call them heroines. There need be no chicane about the application of that title to Chloe or to Chariclea, to Leucippe or to her very remarkable rival, to Anthia or to Hysmine. Without ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... and unpractical, if nothing worse. What other means of imparting spiritual knowledge could a young girl like Sophie have, than to exhibit to her pupil the structure and workings of her own soul? But this could not be done with impunity; ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... so good a leader of the House of Commons in opposition as he was when he was in office. He is too aggressive and not dignified enough. I fear that he will lose weight. He had better not coquette with the foolish and unpractical thing "Bimetallism," or write books on "Philosophic Doubt"; for there are many things which we must certainly believe, are there not? Quite enough either for the highest idealism or for ordinary life. He will probably, like Sir R. Peel, have to change many of his opinions in the course ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... human malady. He had ("as anyone might have had with such a daughter," declared the neighbours), harboured a great contempt for women, and though, being uninclined to tread the heights himself, he feared his daughter's uprightness of character, he had never lost an occasion of pouring scorn on her unpractical ways. ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... mass of rent, interest, and profit, every penny of which is bound up with crime, drink, prostitution, disease, and all the evil fruits of poverty, as inextricably as with enterprise, wealth, commercial probity, and national prosperity. The notion that you can earmark certain coins as tainted is an unpractical individualist superstition. None the less the fact that all our money is tainted gives a very severe shock to earnest young souls when some dramatic instance of the taint first makes them conscious of it. When an enthusiastic young clergyman of the Established Church first realizes ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... 'Not to mention loss of time, the tone of their feelings is lowered: they become less in earnest about those of their opinions respecting which they must remain silent in the society they frequent: they come to look on their most elevated objects as unpractical, or at least too remote from realisation to be more than a vision or a theory: and if, more fortunate than most, they retain their higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the persons and affairs of their own day, they insensibly adopt ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... ago and which is yet alive to-day. When I was a girl, scarcely more than a child, I came to live with an aunt in Bessacre village. My mother was dead, and my father, who was one of those delightful but utterly unpractical people that the world calls rolling stones, was seldom ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... seemed a good thing to do. Thereupon they quickened their pace, avoiding high roads, and following obscure paths tending more or less northward. But there was an unpractical vagueness in their movements throughout the day; neither one of them seemed to consider any question of effectual escape, disguise, or long concealment. Their every idea was temporary and unforefending, like the plans ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... dreamy, unpractical man whom the world knew as Mark Twain ever have persisted against discouragement like that to acquire the vast, the absolute, limitless store of information necessary to Mississippi piloting? The answer is that he loved the river, the picturesqueness ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... unmelodious vocalist to respect us by permitting him to believe us surveyors in another sense than as we were. One would not be despised as an unpractical citizen, a mere looker at Nature with no immediate view to profit, even by a freckled calf-driver of the Upper Connecticut. While we parleyed, the sketch was done, and the pageant had faded quick before ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... of State Agricultural Reports for seventeen cents; and what I read in them of the Advantages of Rural Pursuits, The Dignity of Labor, The Relation of Agriculture to Longevity and to Nations, and, above all, of the Golden Egg, seem decidedly florid, unpractical, misleading, and very little permanent popularity can be gained by such self-interested buncombe from ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... cases, on the other hand, such relationships, especially when formed after school-life, are fairly permanent. An energetic emotional woman, not usually beautiful, will perhaps be devoted to another who may have found some rather specialized lifework, but who may be very unpractical, and who has probably a very feeble sexual instinct; she is grateful for her friends's devotion, but may not actively reciprocate it. The actual specific sexual phenomena generated in such cases vary very greatly. The emotion may be latent or unconscious; it may be all on one side; it is often ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... "religious" life. It has seemed expedient, because supplementary, then, to put next to it his work on Our Daily Life, which was meant for those who are "in the world"; and which may give pause to some who might otherwise criticise the first hastily, perhaps condemning it as unpractical, or even objectionable in a world where, after all, men must eat and drink and live, and where some, therefore must provide the necessary means. Most intensely practical is this second treatise, and perhaps nowhere ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... objective life, we must work upon them from the objective stand-point. This is where many fall short of completed work. They realize the subjective or creative process, but do not see that it must be followed by an objective or constructive process, and consequently they are unpractical dreamers and never reach the stage of completed work. The creative process brings the materials and conditions for the work to our hands; then we must make use of them with diligence and common-sense—God will provide the food, but He will ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... matter to me who you are, so long as you're you? Men are so unpractical. You can be the Shah of Persia if ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... doubt of his earnestness about this. But the Republican leaders, honourably enough, regarded this as an unpractical line to take, and indeed to the political historian this is the most crucial question in American history. Nobody can say that civil war would or would not have occurred if this or that had been done a little ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... in perfect agreement with all the rest, with the exception of the parenthesis marked *—"without thereby, as has often been the case hitherto, falling into the unpractical mistake of conceding to the public things which they do not want, and diminishing the revenues." For, by the way, let me also say parenthetically that, if I had not done this with most resolute intention for many years, Wagner could not truly have said ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... will only laugh and call me unpractical,' said Hazel smiling; 'but the first thing I should do, Mr. Rollo, would be to beautify the places where they live. I believe it does people good to bejust a littlesmothered ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... Dennis, who had not quite recovered from the rebuke as to the warmth of the room, 'are often most unpractical and injudicious. Nothing can be more unwise than to mix up politics and religion. If you DO,' Dennis waved his hand, 'you will have all the religious people against you. My friend Marshall, Miss Hopgood, is under ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... preference was given to Bognor was the fact that Blake’s cottage at Felpham was close by, for businesslike and unbusiness-like qualities were strangely mingled in Rossetti’s temperament, and it was generally some sentiment or unpractical fancy of this kind that brought about Rossetti’s final decision upon anything. Blake’s name was with him still a word to charm with, and he was surprised to find, on the first pilgrimage of himself and his friends to the cottage, that scarcely a person in the neighbourhood ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... except those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek to excite to action of evil or of good. For action of every kind belongs to the sphere of ethics. The aim of art is simply to create a mood. Is such a mode of life unpractical? Ah! it is not so easy to be unpractical as the ignorant Philistine imagines. It were well for England if it were so. There is no country in the world so much in need of unpractical people as this country of ours. With us, Thought is degraded ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... mother agreed; "but I am afraid she will be very difficult to manage. She is only just out of the schoolroom, you know, and girls are so unpractical. She doesn't care to talk to any one but the subalterns and boys of her own age—and it is so important she should settle this year. You know we ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... undoubted imperative need of such acquisitions in those who have to deal with problems of ship construction or other mechanical questions connected with naval material. His position was really as little practical as that of the men who opposed the Academy plan in general as unpractical; as little practical as it would be to maintain that it is essential that every naval officer to-day should be skilled to handle a ship under sail, because the habit of the sailing-ship educated, brought out, faculties and habits of the first value to the military man. Still, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... be maintained. Unfortunately for such hopes, France had never been consulted in the matter, nor was there ever any idea of coercing France into neutrality, and even the original proposal had to be abandoned on consideration as unpractical.[118] ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... to be imported from abroad at a high rate of duty, as the present demand for the presses does not make it advisable for our domestic press builders to invest in their construction, especially after an isolated attempt in that line, misguided by inexperienced and unpractical men, which turned out to be ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... man is unequal to himself, so is man to his neighbour, and period to period. The entire method of action, the theories of human life which in one era prevail universally, to the next are unpractical and insane, as those of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the first, if the first could have anticipated them. One epoch, we may suppose, holds some 'greatest nobleness principle,' the other some 'greatest happiness principle;' and then ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... was brought to my house years ago by a friend when he happened to be stationary for an hour, and he is certainly a unique and interesting character, a marvellous talker, reciter of Scotch ballads, a maker of epigrams, and a most unpractical, now-you-see-him and now-he's-a-far-away-fellow. I remember his remark, "Breakfast is a fatal habit." It was not the breakfast to which he referred but to the gathering round a table at a stated hour, far too early, when not in ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... white blood corpuscles into one class, and to regard the different forms as different stages merely of the same kind of cells. The following sections will show that this tendency is unwarranted and unpractical. ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... in her husband's affairs, but that this was a matter which concerned herself as well. His notion that to quit the service now would make him feel like a deserter and a scoundrel seemed to her utter unpractical nonsense. He would be sacrificing a couple of years to a ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... we are able to collect, from every part of this proposal for a practical and progressive human learning, based on the defects of the unpractical and stationary learning which the world has hitherto been contented with, the author's opinion as to the form of delivery and inculcation best adapted to effect the proposed object under the given conditions. This question of form runs naturally through the whole work, and comes out ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... business capacity, now dismissed in disgrace as an irresponsible loafer. His head was always full of immense nebulous schemes for the enlargement and development of any business he happened to be employed in. Sometimes his suggestions interested his employers, but proved unpractical and inapplicable; sometimes he wore out their patience or was thought to be a dangerous dreamer. Whenever he found there was no hope of his ideas being adopted he lost interest in his work, came late and left early, or disappeared ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... one's hand, one has at least some good court cards in the other suits; we've got neither trumps nor court cards." "Et le General Trochu?" some one suggested. "My opinion of General Trochu," said a General, who was sitting reading a newspaper, "is that he is a man of theory, but unpractical. I know him well; he has utterly failed to organise the forces which he has under his command." The general opinion about Trochu seemed to be that he is a kind of M'Clellan. "Will the Garde Nationale fight?" some one asked. A Garde ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... explain on the ground that she was one of those natures—mature in some respects, but strangely childlike in others—whom most of us love to stigmatize as unpractical, and who in fact never become quite accustomed to this world ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... taught by gathering illustrations of selfishness and tracing it in its countless disguises and ramifications through every stage of life. Selfishness is opposed to a sense of the infinite and is inversely as real religion, and the study of it is not, like systematic ethics, apt to be confused and made unpractical by conflicting theories. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... his children occupied his entire time now, so that his work, in seeking that which was required to support them, had to be entirely neglected. He had fifty dollars between him and starvation for his children. Nor could he see his way to earning more. The struggles of his unpractical mind were painful. It was a problem quite beyond him. He struggled nobly with it, but he saw no light ahead, and, with that curious singleness of purpose that was his, he eventually abandoned the riddle, and devoted ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... preached by the average clergyman of the Church of England. This was, usually, he said, either a theological essay founded upon an obsolete system of theology, or a series of platitudes of morality delivered by an unpractical man. The first was an insult to the intelligence of an average man; the second was an insult to the ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... twenty years older than I, with great business responsibilities that filled every hour of his life, and caring for nothing else—he must have felt that there was a risk of great unhappiness in marrying the sort of girl I was, brought up to music and books and unpractical ideas, always enjoying myself in my own way. But he had really reckoned on me as a wife who would do the honors of his position in the world; ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious—such people as the Irish—are weak, unpractical, and behind the times. I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts. Instead ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... that to make me cry," she snorted. "I wonder what fool wanted to leave Jean money. Such an unpractical creature! She'll simply make ducks and drakes of it, give it away to all and sundry, ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... with an incision, and then cut away the background, leaving the simple elevated flat value, the shape of the proposed design. The modelling was then added by degrees, until the figure looked like half of a rounded object. While it is often unpractical to refer one's readers to examples of work in far and various countries, and advise them instantly to examine them, it is frequently possible to call attention to well-produced plates in certain modern art books which are in nearly ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... this next particular thing our new President and a hundred million people and forty nations are all together going to try to do, as if it were rather unpractical and inefficient at just this time for our President to have ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... consented to leave the matter, as for some further appeal. Do we not know how impossible it is for a man to abide strictly by the right, when the strict right is so much in advance of all around him as to appear to other eyes than his own as straitlaced, unpractical, fantastic, and almost inhuman? Brutus wanted his money sorely, and Brutus was becoming a great political power on the same side with Pompey, and Cato, and the other "optimates." Even Atticus was interfering for Brutus. What other Roman governor of whom we have heard ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... how I felt,' said Mrs. Tyrrell. 'But Mr. Egremont will never be persuaded of that. He is so wholehearted in his desire to help these poor people, yet, I'm afraid, so very, very unpractical.' ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... spoken in earnest. Such milk-and-water, unpractical scruples were disgusting to his very soul. In thinking of them to himself, he would call them unmanly. What! was such a fellow as Bertram, a boy just fresh from college, to animadvert upon and condemn ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... treated by his elder brother as the dashing, heedless boy, needing to be looked after, while his sister Jane remained the ready helper and counsellor, and Lady Merrifield was still in his eyes the unpractical, fanciful Lily with an unfortunately suggestive rhyme ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for the first time what a mad thing it was in me to have come at all—at least, to have come in the way I had come; I, so unpractical, so wofully lacking in that sterling common sense, that potent weapon with which women battled successfully with the stern realities of life; and thinking, too, with a dull pain at my heart, that doubtless my darling would suffer by reason of my ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... reasonable and practical. Here is a case where words cannot be taken literally. "Reasonable" in America certainly never even pretended to mean in accordance with a rational ideal, and "practical,"—well one thinks of "practical politics," "practical business men," and "unpractical reformers." Boiled down these words amount to something like this: the proposals must not be new or startling; must not involve any radical disturbance of any respectable person's selfishness; must not call forth any great opposition; must look definite and ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... that the whole trend of typically English thought, not only in natural science, but also in mental, moral and political philosophy, is the logical fulfilment of Baconian principles. He argued against the tyranny of authority, the vagaries of unfettered imagination and the academic aims of unpractical dialectic; the vital energy and the reasoned optimism of his language entirely outweigh the fact that his contributions to the stock of actual scientific knowledge were practically inconsiderable. It may be freely ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... order, but for the partisan jealousies which prevailed in high places between the advocates of the different routes. Slavery, that enfant gate of our old-school and now happily obsolete statecraft, insisted on the expensive toy of a southern and unpractical line, until our representatives, harassed by the problem how to gratify her without incurring the contempt of the financial world, gave over to the drift of events the settlement of their country's chief commercial ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere contemned; ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Edgeworth. The variety of her accomplishment in the kind was extraordinary: and in more than one of its species she went very near perfection. One is never quite certain whether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father Richard—one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists and clever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by the Revolutionary period—did her more harm than good. It certainly loaded her work with superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism: but it might be contended that, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... book. And I should say more on this matter, and protest as energetically as I could against the plague of cheap literature, with which we are just now afflicted, but that I fear your calling me to order, as being unpractical, because I don't quite see my way at present to making everybody fast for their books. But one may see that a thing is desirable and possible, even though one may not at once know the best way to it,—and in my island of Barataria, ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... love you very much, but my love does not blind me to the fact that, no matter, what your talents at sorcery, you are in everyday matters a hopelessly unpractical person. Do you leave this affair to me, and I will manage it with every regard ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... Metellus. He was, like the whole powerful family to which he belonged, in principle a rigid and unscrupulous aristocrat; as a magistrate, he, no doubt, reckoned it honourable to hire assassins for the good of the state and would presumably have ridiculed the act of Fabricius towards Pyrrhus as unpractical knight errantry, but he was an inflexible administrator accessible neither to fear nor to corruption, and a judicious and experienced warrior. In this respect he was so far free from the prejudices of his order that ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... affectionate zeal resolve upon washing Phineas Finn white as snow in reference to the charge now made against him. But no man would so resolve who did not believe in his innocence,—as Madame Goesler believed herself. She herself knew that her own belief was romantic and unpractical. Nevertheless, the conviction of the guilt of that other man, towards which she still thought that much could be done if that coat were found and the making of a secret key were proved, was so strong upon her that she would not allow herself to drop ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... think of her; I kept thinking and thinking of my dear, never-to-be-forgotten Pasinkov—the last of the idealists; and emotions, mournful and tender, pierced with sweet anguish into my soul, rousing echoes on the strings of a heart not yet quite grown old.... Peace to your ashes, unpractical man, simple-hearted idealist! and God grant to all practical men—to whom you were always incomprehensible, and who, perhaps, will laugh even now over you in the grave—God grant to them to experience even a hundredth part of those ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... incompatibles; and, though Doggrel is not Poetry, yet it has a lumbering proclivity that way, and so forfeits the confidence of grave sensible people. This versification, and this impalpable and unprecedented prescription she had waited for so long, seemed all of a piece to poor mamma: wild, unpractical, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... she walked on, the picture she had formed of Kennedy Square. She thought of his mother's imperious nature absorbing all the love of his heart and inspiring and guiding his every action and emotion; of the unpractical father—a dreamer and an enthusiast, the worst possible example he could have; of the false standards and class distinctions which had warped his early life and which were still dominating him. With an abrupt gesture of impatience she stood still in the path and looked down upon the ground. ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... exaggerated importance the text seemed to accredit those relatives she did not esteem, and mentally to annotate each page with unprintable events "which everybody knew about"; and fourthly, to reflect, as with a gush of steadily augmenting love, how dear and how unpractical it was of Olaf to have concocted these date-bristling pages—so staunch and blind in his misguided gratitude toward those otherwise uninteresting people who had rendered possible the existence of ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... accidents enough and illness enough, in all conscience. Cassall proposed to hang somebody for permitting the cabins of the smacks to remain in such a wildly unsanitary state; but beyond propounding this totally unpractical suggestion he said little, and contented himself with steady observation. One day he remarked to Sir James, "A lazy humbug would have a fine time in our cruiser if he liked. Who, among us landsmen, durst face ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... have it thought that because of this devotion to high things my friend is stubborn, dogmatic, or hard to work with. He is unpractical as dogs, children, or Dr. Johnson; in absent-minded simplicity he has issued forth upon the highway only half-clad, and been haled back to his boudoir by indignant bluecoats; but in all matters where absolute devotion to truth and honour are concerned I would not find him lacking. ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... that failure was possible, or that, with the amount of capital which he believed was still at his disposal, the plan was unpractical. Young, highly optimistic, and somewhat visionary, his dreams assumed ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... the present Christmas Day produced came in the shape of a pot of flaming poinsettias bearing the card of Ned Stillman. These were the first flowers that Claire ever remembered having received. It pleased her also to realize that Stillman had been delicate to the point of this thoroughly unpractical gift, especially as he had every reason to assume that something more substantial would have been acceptable. She was confident that by this time he had heard through Mrs. Condor of her mother's illness and her loss of position. Claire was still ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... strictly untrue, but he had never formulated it, and he had never thought consecutively of such a project, which did indeed appear too wild and unpractical ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... me rather interesting from a psychological point of view. It is extremely business-like, but perfectly unpractical. Frank states what he wants, but he wants an absurd impossibility. I like Jack Kirkby very much, but I cannot picture him as likely to be successful in helping to restore a strayed girl to her people. I suppose Frank's only excuse is that ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... Lawrence, his hands in his pockets, and falling unawares into the tone of the orderly room. "You'll do nothing while your father's alive: I'm glad you've sense enough for that: but what about your brother and sister? You're suffering under some unpractical attack of remorse, Val, and like most penitent souls you think of ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... the refusal of all unpractical knowledge in favor of what is useful. I affirm, on the contrary, that there is no country in Europe in which there has been so wide a diffusion of speculation, theory, or what other unpractical word the reader pleases. In our country, the scientific society is always formed and maintained by the people; in every other, the scientific academy—most aptly named—has been the creation of the government, of which it has never ceased ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... who would deter us from inquiring into anything beyond the range of sensible experience, and especially from any inquiry into the future existence of the soul, which they denounce as utterly unpractical, and compare with obsolete and fruitless inquiries into the state of the soul before birth. We have already challenged the exclusive claim of the five bodily senses to be the final sources of knowledge; and we may surely add that it is at least as practical to inquire into the destiny as it is ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... class now represented by the O'Briens and the McCarthys he is exquisite, and it is small wonder that Young Ireland has never loved Moore much. But I do not think that Thomas Brown the Younger meant it, or at least wholly meant it, as satire, and this is perhaps the best proof of his unpractical way of looking at politics. For Phelim Connor is a much more damning sketch than any of the Fudges. Vanity, gluttony, the scheming intrigues of eld, may not be nice things, but they are common to the whole human ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... experiments, and a woman hates experiments. Last year it was bare feet. I daresay it is healthier. But children who have been about in bare feet all the morning—well, it isn't pleasant when they sit down to lunch; I don't care what you say. You can't be always washing. He is so unpractical. He was quite angry with mother and myself because we wouldn't. And a man in bare feet looks so ridiculous. This summer it is short hair and no hats; and Sally had such pretty hair. Next year it will be sabots or turbans— ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... say good-bye. He took refuge by anticipation, as it were, in this reflection, whenever, for the next three or four days, he foresaw himself stopping short, as he had done before, and asking himself whether he had done an injury to Angela Vivian. This was an idle and unpractical question, inasmuch as the answer was not forthcoming; whereas it was quite simple and conclusive to say, without the note of interrogation, that she was, in spite of many attractive points, an abrupt and capricious young woman. During the three or four days in question, Bernard lingered ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... among them Mr. Candish. Their remarks were in accord with the views expressed by the Father, yet they somehow lessened the effect of his words. Put into their plain and sometimes even awkward language his position seemed unpractical and hopelessly far from daily life; so that even Ashe, warm partisan as he was, could not but feel his enthusiasm somewhat chilled. Again he intercepted a glance between Thurston and his superior. Philip sat with the two men directly in his ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... devoid of superstition as he thinks, and yet eaten up with natural superstition. You see also the emotional turbulent soul developing abnormality and mania on absurd stakes for money, the mad, unpractical Russian staking on zero or on the slenderest chance for the greatest of gains. The Russians and the Jews and the Americans are ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... How unpractical and how absurd is Virchow's demand—that only ascertained facts and no problematic theories shall be admitted in teaching—will be still more strikingly shown by a glance over the remaining provinces of human knowledge. What, indeed, will be left of history, of philology, ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... unpractical a talker should be a sample of the most practical people upon earth. The Americans have their engineers, their geographers, their astronomers, their scientific chemists; few indeed, but such as bid fair to rival those of any nation upon earth. But these, like other true workers, ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... there. I wish, from my soul, he had DISimprisoned it in this instance! But he only says, in magniloquent language, how grand it would be if disimprisoned;—and hurls out, accidentally striking on this subject, the following rough sentences, suggestive though unpractical, with ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without. A sudden recollection had flashed on her this moment: she had not money enough for undertaking a long journey. Amid the fluctuating sentiments of the day her unpractical mind had not dwelt on the necessity of being well-provided, and now that she thoroughly realized the condition she sighed bitterly and ceased to stand erect, gradually crouching down under the umbrella as if she were drawn into the Barrow by a hand from beneath. Could it be that she was to ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... it good enough for her?" cried little Lizzie Acton, who was always asking unpractical questions that required, in strictness, no answer, and to which indeed she expected no other answer than such as she herself invariably furnished in ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... brother, and for his own happy disposition; but, none the less, there had always been a certain jealousy of their father's evident preference for him, a jealousy mingled with surprise, or even resentment, Jimmy being essentially unpractical, and almost unconventional. Moreover, they had never liked the idea of his going to Sandhurst. None of the family had been in the Service before; and it was a matter of common knowledge that no man could make financial headway in the Army. So, when, through Mr. Marlow's influence, ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... its celebrations. He had besides some levelling catchwords, justly dreaded in the family circle; and when he could not go so far as to declare a step un-English, he might still (and with hardly less effect) denounce it as unpractical. It was under the ban of this lesser excommunication that Gideon had fallen. His views on the study of law had been pronounced unpractical; and it had been intimated to him, in a vociferous interview punctuated with the oaken ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... miraculous account, while we are indignant if any one demands an equally literal rendering of the precepts concerning human conduct? He that hath two coats is not to give to him that hath none: this would be 'visionary,' 'utopian,' 'wholly unpractical,' and so forth. Or, again, he that is smitten on the one cheek is not to turn the other to the smiter, but to hand the offender over to the law; nor are the commands relative to indifference as to the morrow and a neglect of ordinary prudence to be taken as ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... certain conditions lying outside of mankind and yet created by human society, but will rather organize all the conditions of human existence upon the basis of social freedom. In Germany, on the other hand, where practical life is as unintellectual as intellectual life is unpractical, no class of bourgeois society either feels the need or possesses the capacity for emancipation, unless driven thereto by its immediate position, by material necessity, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... does not hold that the earth is God-forsaken. With his Lord (Ps. civ.), he "rejoices in the works" of that Lord's hands; and, with the heavenly Wisdom (Prov. viii.), "his delights are with the sons of men." But on the other hand, he does not banish from his thoughts as if it were unpractical the dear prospect of another world. He is not foolish enough to talk of "other-worldliness," as if it were a selfish thing to "lay up treasure in heaven," and so to have "his heart there also." For him the present could not possibly be what it is in its interests, affections, ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... men—attracted them, amused them, and influenced them, even obsessed them. The way he could make them do things just out of sheer liking for him almost amounted to mesmerism. It must be added that, though they were often unpractical, crazy, unwise, even dangerous things he influenced others to do, they were never shameful or in any way shady. There wasn't a shameful instinct or thought in the whole of Lundi Druro's composition. Gay, however, ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... I said it at the time, and I've been saying it to myself ever since. It doesn't mean anything; that is, it is not binding legally, of course. It's absolutely unbusinesslike and unpractical. Simply a letter, asking them, as old friends, to do this thing. Whether they will or not the Almighty ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and votaries nothing that is impracticable. It does not demand that they should undertake to climb to those lofty and sublime peaks of a theoretical and imaginary unpractical virtue, high and cold and remote as the eternal snows that wrap the shoulders of Chimborazo, and at least as inaccessible as they. It asks that alone to be done which is easy to be done. It overtasks no one's strength, and asks no one to go beyond ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Liberalism, and even Republicanism, but, as will be seen in another place, the real welfare of the people, and not the success of a mere political party, is the underlying motive of all, however wild and unpractical may be some of the dreams for the carrying out of these ideas of universal progress. It is impossible for a Spaniard to conceive of maligning or belittling his own country for merely party purposes; and, therefore, when he finds an English newspaper calling itself "Liberal" he imagines the word ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... him from being great. He was vacillating in his policy, and his judgment was easily warped by fanciful ideas. "His life was worn out between devotion to certain systems and disappointment as to their results. He was fitful, uncertain, and unpractical. Hence he made continual mistakes. He meant well, but did evil, and the discovery of his errors broke his heart. He died of weariness of life, deceived in all his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... healing for the wound his abnormally fiery and sensitive nature had taken from the first woman. She pulled together an intellect rather easily subdued. I only knew him after her death (his reason for travelling to this country), and a dazed, utterly unpractical and uninterested habit of mind, which alternated with his brilliance of speech and to a less degree of thought, was probably a reversion to the psychic state which his marriage ...
— The Garden of Bright Waters - One Hundred and Twenty Asiatic Love Poems • Translated by Edward Powys Mathers
... the next morning came and he could go at his modelling again. His brain, whirling with the rattle and clatter of New York, could spend itself in his passionate occupation, which employed both his eyes and his hands. He deemed himself fortunate for being genuinely unpractical and not having to take part in that gruesome horse-racing and sack-racing and target-shooting, that crawling and dancing and jumping for the sacrosanct dollar. The very breath of that frenzied life tore the garments of his soul into shreds, as it were, while this simple occupation of modelling the ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... all a mistake. We are not visionaries. We are not "unpractical," as men pronounce us, when we worship. To try to follow Christ is not to be "righteous overmuch." True men are not rhapsodizing when they preach; nor do those waste their lives who waste themselves in striving to extend ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... thing was that it was frequently being lost. Suspecting herself, maybe, as an unpractical dreamer in a world filled with robbers, she would cart it about with her for safety, sit down behind a coil of rope and fall into a fit of abstraction; be recalled to life by the evolutions of the crew reefing or furling or what ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the house of a highly respected family in Copenhagen, that of a prominent scientist, a good-natured, unpractical savant, very unsuited to be the mentor of such an unconventional young man. He was conspicuous among the native Danish freshmen for his elegant dress and cosmopolitan education, and was so quick at learning that before very many weeks he spoke Danish almost without a mistake, though with a marked ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... The spirit to be wished for is sympathy; and that will not be produced by needless reproaches. Besides, it is such foolish injustice to lay the blame of the present state of things on any one class. It is unpractical, unphilosophical, and inconsistent with history. If we must select any class, do not let us turn to the wealthy, whom, perhaps, we think of first. They have, in no time that I am aware of, been the pre-eminent rulers of the world. The thinkers and writers, they are ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... unhappily into partizan contention, the generation is yet unborn that will see them abandoned to the possession of any other Power. The Nation that scatters principalities as a prodigal does his inheritance is too sentimental and moon-shiny for the Nineteenth Century or the Twentieth, and too unpractical for Americans of any period. It may flourish in Arcadia or Altruria, but it does not among the sons of the Pilgrims, or on the continent they subdued by stern struggle to the uses ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... to adopt it; but the manner of New York could not be acquired by precept, and example, somehow, was not in this case contagious. He wondered whether he were stupid and unskilled, and he was finally obliged to confess to himself that he was unpractical. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... escapade of this most unpractical man, as they called him. Since his fortune was rapidly melting away, he had to look to his works as an ultimate resource: they eventually became his only means of livelihood. One might suppose that he would be ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... very old story, not original with him. That the English were a nation of brutes was a commonplace generally admitted by Englishmen and universally accepted by foreigners; while the matter of their extermination could be treated only as unpractical, on their deserts, because they were probably not very much worse than their neighbors. Had Bright said that the French, Spaniards, Germans, or Russians were a nation of brutes and ought to be exterminated, no one would have found fault; the whole human race, according to the highest ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... artistic and emotional side—he must crush it out of sight, if not out of existence, as I do." He looked up with a sudden return of his old tranquil humor. "You must not count it as anything if the beauty of these surroundings for a moment lifted the unpractical side of me uppermost," he said, laughing. "It was purely pro tem., and I am once more my normal, hard-headed self, ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... the interior of Brazil (Minas Geraes, Goyaz and Matto Grosso) were the most impracticable, torturing arrangements I have ever had to use on my travels. The natives swore by them—it was sufficient for anything to be absurdly unpractical for them to do so. It only led, as it did with me at first, to continuous unpleasantness, wearying discussions and eventual failure if one tried to diverge from the local habits, or attempted to ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The man of culture is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him. But the active exercise of politics requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution and enthusiasm, qualities which your man of culture has carefully rooted up, lest they damage the delicacy of his critical olfactories. Perhaps they are the only ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... in any department, is described by the contemptuous prefix of chimney-corner, as if shrinking from the cold which he would meet on coming out into the open air amongst his fellow-men. Thus, a chimney-corner politician, for a mere speculator or unpractical dreamer. But the very same indolent habit of aerial speculation, which courts no test of real life and practice, is described by the ancients under the term umbraticus, or seeking the cool shade, and shrinking from the heat. Thus, an umbraticus doctor is one ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... husband, and seeing Sylvy in the square corner pew with the rest, was mightily struck by her lovely face, and offered to take her home with her the next week, for the better advantages of schooling. Hannah could not have spared Dolly; but Sylvia was a dreamy, unpractical child, and though all the dearer for being the solitary lamb of the flock by virtue of her essential difference from the rest, still, for that very reason, it became easier to let her go. Parson Everett was childless, ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... have been spared to secure the most scientific and perfect appliances. The whole work is made, in a degree, a matter of sentiment—exalted and humane sentiment, but, like all other emotional service, apt to be gusty and at times unpractical. The man who saves human life is rewarded with silver or gold medals: the individual lifeboats are themes of essays and song, and when one wears out a tablet is raised with the record of its services. It is the beautiful ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various |
