"Iconoclast" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... life would have been wrecked; nor could you, who would lay down your life for her happiness, have spared or saved her,—her young affections, her young faith and joy in life, all shattered, and Life the iconoclast! That is the saddest part of it. It is women who suffer most and always. In making this appeal to you, I have had continually in mind his mother, and you, the father of a woman. I know how your pride must have suffered in the knowledge that his name, even, has been ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... a weekly journal ($3 a year) established by the late D. M. Bennett, still carries on with undiminished ability the honest agnostic work for which it has been famous. It is a vigorous iconoclast but does ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... air were rigorously excluded from interiors. The two windows told the history of The Hollies at a glance. The little one had served the needs of a "best" room for several generations of Sussex yeomen. Then had come some iconoclast who hewed a big rectangle through the solid stone-work, converted the oak-panelled apartment into a most comfortable dining-room, built a new wing with a gable, changed a farm-yard into a flower-bordered lawn, and generally played havoc with Georgian utility while carrying ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... reaches manhood. Under Miss Hester's tutelage too many things became sacred to Fred Brent. It was wicked to cough in church, as it was a sacrilege to play with a hymn-book. His training was the apotheosis of the non-essential. But, after all, there is no rebel like Nature. She is an iconoclast. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the custom of Sahara caravans to travel not more than five miles the first day. Abdullah, the iconoclast, made thirty-three. Ali came to him at ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... brilliant, provocating, suggestive things that have ever been written on the subject. What a breath of fresh air this iconoclast brings in with him, what masses of mouldy snobbism he sweeps into the dust-heap, how salutary even for the idols themselves is such a thorough turning out! It will be seen that this is a book that all who care for art must read; ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... to obtain real money. Real money could be obtained in one way only,—by a foreign loan. He then elaborately disposed of the proposed insane methods of applying this projected loan which were agitating the Congress. But he was an architect and builder as well as an iconoclast, and having shown the futility of every financial idea ever conceived by Congress, he proceeded to the remedy. His scheme, then as ever, was a National Bank, to be called The Bank of the United States; the capital to be a foreign ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... their flocks which served to lessen the advertising expenses of the lecture. Many of those warned not to go, of course went, just to see how bad it was. Then occasionally halls were closed against Bradlaugh on account of local pressure, and lawsuits followed, for the "Iconoclast," while not believing much in law, was yet so inconsistent as to invoke it. So all through life, when he did not have a lawsuit on hand, existence seemed tasteless and insipid. After he had lectured in a town, there was the usual theological and oratorical pyrotechnics ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Buddhist temple. The course of thought and action in the Orient is in many respects similar to that in the Occident. In western lands, with the ebb and flow of religious sentiment, the iconolater has been followed by the iconoclast, and the overcrowded cathedrals have been purged by the hammer and fire of the Protestant and Puritan. So in Japan we find analogous, though not exactly similar, reactions. The rise and prosperity of the believers in the Zen dogmas, which in their ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... national sins by national calamities." The Virginian romancer pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict which he saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming woes of Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the very year when the curtain should rise ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... result of superstition, not of any hostility to popular faith or custom: it was prompted by the same childish feeling which moves Italian fishermen sometimes to curse St. Antony or to give his image a ducking in bad weather. This Martinique iconoclast was a negro cattle-driver who one day, feeling badly in need of a glass of tafia, perhaps, left the animals intrusted to him in care of a plaster image of the Virgin, with this menace (the phrase ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... to his wife. He then went to his assay office and drew down the blinds and sat in the shadows like a cunning old spider in hiding waiting for the unwary fly for which he had wove his web. His life had been that of the iconoclast who creates nothing to adorn the world's great gallery of gods. But he was not philosophical enough to evolve an idea that would ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... underlay shrines and woman-worship and bead-counting wherever a true heart sought its God through the sole formulas it knew, but spurs forward to the end, a mighty power to destroy, to do away with old corruptions and break down idols on their altars,—saint and iconoclast! Did the heart of stone within him know its ancestry,—track its hard, loveless descent from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... is against this whole theory, however beautifully or piously expressed, that the protest has come. The Spirit of Democracy is a bold iconoclast, and goes about smashing our idols. He laughs at the pretensions of the Strong and the Wise and the Rich to have created the things they possess. They are not the masters of the feast. They are only those of us who have got at the head of the line, sometimes by unmannerly pushing, and have ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest absurdities; they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair images they have set up for your willing worship with the pitiless ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast! But still I love the Old Travelers. I love them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability to bore, for their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant fertility of imagination, for their startling, their ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... true, because he had not yet set himself to know the truth. To oppose, to refuse, to deny, is not to know the truth, is not to be true any more than it is to be false. Whatever good may lie in the destroying of the false, the best hammer of the iconoclast will not serve withal to carve the celestial form of the Real; and when the iconoclast becomes the bigot of negation, and declares the non-existence of any form worthy of worship, because he has destroyed so many unworthy, he passes into a fool. That ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... home, and snatched thence the sacred emblems which adorned private residences. He caused statues of bronze, silver and gold to be melted down and conveniently converted them into coins, upon which his own image was stamped. Like Henry VIII. and Cromwell, this royal Iconoclast affected to be moved by a zeal for purity of worship, while avarice was the real motive of ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... a divinity), effigy, graven image; Juggernaut. Associated Words: idolater, idolatrous, idolatry, idolize, iconoplast, iconoclast, iconodule, idolomania, iconography, iconology, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... innovators, was considered by his contemporaries as a revolutionary and iconoclast, he only strove to develop and perfect an art that had already existed in a primitive form. This was the art of animating a poetic idea by means of melopoeia; which Wagner ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... supposed never to have touched the pencil. When he resumed it Savonarola had been burned for heresy, and Fra Bartolommeo was a brother in his convent of S. Marco. Savonarola has sometimes been described as an iconoclast, obstinately hostile to the fine arts. This is by no means a true account of the crusade he carried on against the pagan sensuality of his contemporaries. He desired that art should remain the submissive handmaid of the Church and the willing servant ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... when various ideas adverse to the representation of animal, and especially of human, form, originating with the Arabs and iconoclast Greeks, had begun at any rate to direct the builders' minds to seek for decorative materials in inferior types, and when diminished practice in solid sculpture had rendered it more difficult to find artists capable of satisfactorily reducing the ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... brought to an end. Had it lasted but a few years longer, of all the ancient monuments with which Germany was filled, not a single vestige would have remained. Karlstadt might then have sat upon their ruins, and sung, with his Bible in his hand, the downfall of the images. The iconoclast's theories, all drawn from the Word of God, held their ground in spite of Luther, and dealt a fatal ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... Seeing a Huguenot soldier who had climbed aloft, and was preparing to hurl from its elevated niche one of the saints that graced the wall of the church, the prince, in the first ebullition of his anger, snatched an arquebuse from the hands of one of his followers, and aimed it at the adventurous iconoclast. The latter had seen the act, but was in no wise daunted. Not desisting an instant from his pious enterprise, "Sir," he cried to Conde, "have patience until I shall have overthrown this idol; and then let me die, if that ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... as a portion of the natural accomplishment of a gentleman, he prided himself upon it, and THEREFORE would often go dead against the things presumed to be held by THE CLOTH, long before he had begun to take his position as an iconoclast. ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... have had reason to assert publicly this fact on former occasions, and so far as it relates to the university and the penitentiary, my statement was questioned by Minnesota's greatest historian, Rev. Edward D. Neill, in a published article, signed "Iconoclast;" but I sustained my position by letters from surviving members of the convention, which I published, and to which no answer was ever made. The same statement can be found in Williams' "History of St. Paul," published in 1876, at ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... now developed. Our two prize members, fortunately for us, sat at our table. The first was the Swedish professor aforementioned. He was large, benign, paternal, broad in mind, thoroughly human and beloved, and yet profoundly erudite. He was our iconoclast in the way of food; for he performed small but illuminating dissections on his plate, and announced triumphantly results that were not a bit in accordance with the menu. A single bone was sufficient to take the pretension out of any fish. Our other particular friend was C., with whom later we travelled ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... true or not, it is a fact that a prayer occurs in four of the operas which Rossini composed for the Paris Grand Opera and that the formula is become so common that it may be set down as an operatic convention, a convention, moreover, which even the iconoclast Wagner left undisturbed. One might think that the propriety of prayer in a religious drama would have been enforced upon the mind of a classicist like Goethe by his admiration for the antique, but it was the fact that Rossini's opera showed the Israelites ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the Fathers, was shown to be Protestant in its character and Parliamentary in its constitution. The Oxford Movement seemed to be discredited, and that by a man who had once been enlisted in its service. It was necessary that the presumptuous iconoclast should be put down, and taught not to meddle with ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... typically English kitchen is the bacon and egg breakfast to which the average Briton clings with wonderful tenacity. The mere possibility of infidelity to that national dish is enough to make one shudder. No one could be such an iconoclast as to suggest a variant from the traditional breakfast; it would be table-treason of the ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... whereof are imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he unbuildeth but doth not reedify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up. For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: "Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... solicitor's clerk on a miserably small pay, and took to lecturing as 'Iconoclast.' In 1855 he was married at St. Philip's Church, Stepney. His lectures and discussions began to assume great proportions, and covered more than twenty years of his life. Terribly hard work they were. Profits there were none, or next to none. ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... men—men who could strike, and who knew enough to hold their hands when the sudden blow had told—just men, who could keep their plighted word. No border thief pretended that the British could not rule him; to a man, they laughed because the possible was not imposed. And to the last bold, ruffianly iconoclast they stole when, where, and ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... ceiling was covered with white and glistening stalactites; underfoot, the floor was strewn with bits of carbonate and the broken bases of stalagmites, which had been shattered to make a path for the ruthless iconoclast who had made his home in this pearly-white ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... to look more closely at these performances, to analyse the peculiarities of the diction, to dwell at some length on the sublime wisdom of the Areopagitica and the nervous rhetoric of the Iconoclast, and to point out some of those magnificent passages which occur in the Treatise of Reformation, and the Animadversions on the Remonstrant. But the length to which our remarks have ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... scathing denunciation of the liquor traffic. He was fierce in his wrath against "the horrible and detestable damnation of whuskie and every kind of strong drink." In this strain the thin and weird looking old Iconoclast went on for an hour until he wound up with declaring, "England has joost gane clear doon into an abominable cesspool of lies, shoddies and shams—down to a bottomless damnation. Ye may gie whatever meaning to that word that ye like." He could not refrain from laughing heartily himself ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... attitude from Mr. Lytton Strachey, delicately "laying bare the facts of some cases." The only real difference consists in the finer tact, the greater knowledge of history—in short, the superior equipment of the English iconoclast. Each of them—and all the troop of opponents who grumble and mutter between their extremes—each of them is roused by an intense desire to throw off the shackles of a dying age, in which they have ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... were six bells in the original church. These were sold by the said churchwarden, who would appear to have been a zealous iconoclast. According to one tradition they went to Billinghay, but as the church there has only three bells, this is probably an error. Another version is that they were transferred to Tetford church; had the removal occurred in the time of the Thimblebys, this might not ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... was even carried beyond the bounds of propriety by his opposition to the Whig chief. The Cavalier was his political ancestor, the Covenanter the ancestor of his political enemy. The idols which the Covenanting iconoclast broke were his. He would have fought against the first revolution under Montrose, and against the second under Dundee. Yet he is perfectly, serenely just to the opposite party. Not only is he just, he is sympathetic. He brings out their worth, their valour, such grandeur ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... not woman seek to be a reformer? If she is to shrink from being such an iconoclast as shall "break the image of man's lower worship," as so long held up to view; if she is to fear to exercise her reason, and her noblest powers, lest she should be thought to "attempt to act the man," and not "acknowledge his supremacy"; if she is to be satisfied ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... thought a trick to catch their attention. But trick or not, he did catch their attention, and he held it; he ceased to be the utterer of pompous platitudes; dropping his paper to show that he had done with it, he leaned across the pulpit and brought his long arms into action. He became the caustic iconoclast of the valley. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... working-class; and I think everybody will admit that in Mr. Odger, as in Lord Elcho, there is manifestly, with all his good points, some insufficiency of light. The excess of the working-class, in its present state of development, is perhaps best shown in Mr. Bradlaugh, the iconoclast, who seems to be almost for baptizing us all in blood and fire into his new social dispensation, and to whose [87] reflections, now that I have once been set going on Bishop Wilson's track, I cannot forbear commending this maxim of the good old man: "Intemperance in talk makes a dreadful havoc ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... and the cowboy, and with them the new vocabulary. Monte San Mateo slinks in unmerited shame to hide its heralded deformity as Baldhead Butte. What devilish inspiration impelled the Forty-Niners to damn Monte San Pablo to go down to eternity as Bill Williams' Mountain? Who but an iconoclast would rend the sensitive ear with such barbarities as the Loss Angglees of to-day for the deep-vowelled Los Angeles of the last century? Who but a Yankee would swap the murky "Purgatoire" for Picketwire, and ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... mark of his own nation than the man who says that there ought to be no nations. Somebody called Cobden the International Man; but no man could be more English than Cobden. Everybody recognises Tolstoy as the iconoclast of all patriotism; but nobody could be more Russian than Tolstoy. In the old countries where there are these national types, the types may be allowed to hold any theories. Even if they hold certain theories, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... day the Stoics underwent a complete change. The whole nature of the society was altered. Ferrers was so absolutely different from anything that a master had appeared to be from time immemorial. He was essentially of the new generation, an iconoclast, a follower of Brooke and Gilbert Cannan, heedless of tradition, probing the root of everything. At the end of the term Christy resigned his presidency. He could not keep pace with ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Apocalypse, practically saying, "Worlds! worlds! worlds! Get ready for them!" We have a nice little world here that we stick to, as though losing that we lose all. We are afraid of falling off this little raft of a world. We are afraid that some meteoric iconoclast will some night smash it, and we want everything to revolve around it, and are disappointed when we find that it revolves around the sun instead of the sun revolving around it. What a fuss we make about this little ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... This iconoclast was Charles Lyell, the Scotchman, who was soon to be famous as the greatest geologist of his time. As a young man he had become imbued with the force of the Huttonian proposition, that present causes are one ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... conversational, and the characters represented as contributing their opinions to the symposium of discussion were modeled on actual personages. He himself was personified under the dual form of Florestan and Eusebius, the "two souls in his breast"—the former, the fiery iconoclast, impulsive in his judgments and reckless in attacking prejudices; the latter, the mild, genial, receptive dreamer. Master Raro, who stood for Wieck, also typified the calm, speculative side of Schumann's nature. Chiara represented ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... influenced by any general hatred of Napoleon. Considering how many hundreds of statues of the great Emperor must exist in London, it is too much to suppose such a coincidence as that a promiscuous iconoclast should chance to begin upon three specimens of ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Apple," "Bruce and the Spider," "Tell and the Apple," "Galvani and the Frog," "Volta and the Damp Cloth," "Washington and His Little Hatchet," a string of gems, amongst the most precious of our legendary possessions. Let no rude iconoclast attempt to undermine one of them. Even if they never occurred, it matters little. They should have occurred, for they are too good to lose. We could part with many of the actual characters of the flesh in history without much loss; banish the imaginary ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... basis. Bentham's voice had been crying ineffectually in the wilderness; and he now set about laying with his own hands the foundations of his beliefs upon primary scientific principles, always with unswerving aim and application to concrete facts. He was a thorough-going iconoclast, wielding, like Mohammed, a single formula, to the destruction of idols of the market or tribe, and to the confusion of those who fattened upon antique superstitions. 'All government is one vast evil,' and can only be kept from mischief by minute regulations and constant ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... peculiar ironies of history that in this land of the Buddha, who was the greatest iconoclast, and who not only abhorred idolatry but also ignored deity, there should exist to-day numberless images of him in every town and hamlet. These are of all sizes, from the immense reclining Buddha of Pegu, ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... reverence. Such an attitude was a testimony to his own capacity for culture, since he knew not the meaning of vulgar adulation, and did in truth perceive the beauty of those qualities to which the uneducated Iconoclast is wholly blind. It was a joyous day for him when he saw his daughter the wife of Godfrey Eldon. The loss which so soon followed was correspondingly hard to bear, and but for Mrs. Eldon's gentle sympathy he would scarcely have survived the blow. We know already how his character ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... Irishwoman, seated on the steps of the platform as these words were uttered, clapped her hands to her ears and ran from the place screaming. I must confess that my sympathies were with her rather than with the iconoclast, despite his gifts ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... on. Meanwhile, the scientific mind, here agreeing with the practical mind, will ask, "Will the beliefs thus said to be capable of being shown to be illusory ever cease to exercise their hold on men's minds, including that of the iconoclast himself? Is the mode of demonstration of such a kind as to be likely ever to materially ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... the chief was Leo III., surnamed the Isaurian, born in Isauria; raised to the imperial throne by the army, defeated by sea and land the Saracens who threatened Constantinople; ruled peacefully for nine years, when he headed the ICONOCLAST MOVEMENT (Q. V.), which provoked hostility and led to the revolt of Italy from the Greek ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... instant he threw the saint into the water, before the astonished devotees had time to interfere. Had not some one just then opportunely raised the shout, "The saint is drowning," it might have gone hard with the fearless iconoclast.[253] ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... beginning of his career, while yet a very young man, though a professor of mathematics at Pisa, he had begun that onslaught upon the old Aristotelian ideas which he was to continue throughout his life. At the famous leaning tower in Pisa, the young iconoclast performed, in the year 1590, one of the most theatrical demonstrations in the history of science. Assembling a multitude of champions of the old ideas, he proposed to demonstrate the falsity of the Aristotelian doctrine that the velocity of falling bodies ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of them he adhered closely to the style of the Dusseldorf school. The best known of his works during this portion of his career are "The Landing of the Norsemen in America;" "Cromwell and his Daughter;" "The Court of Queen Elizabeth;" "Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn;" "The Iconoclast," and his famous and brilliant series of pictures illustrative of the events of the American War of Independence. The most prominent of these were, "Washington Crossing the Delaware;" "Washington at Monmouth;" "Washington at the Battle of Monongahela;" "News from Lexington;" ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... of the gentle iconoclast steal upon the ear, and how they must have hushed the questioning audience into pleased attention! The "Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," could not have wooed the listener more sweetly. "Thy lips drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... good in so far as it makes us more humane and sympathetic. In this regard, the radicalism of George Eliot was a great advance on much of the free-thinking of our century. She desired to build, not to destroy. She was no iconoclast, no hater of what other men love and venerate. Her tendencies were all on the side of progress, good ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke |
