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Dreamer   /drˈimər/   Listen
Dreamer

noun
1.
Someone who is dreaming.
2.
Someone guided more by ideals than by practical considerations.  Synonym: idealist.
3.
A person who escapes into a world of fantasy.  Synonyms: escapist, wishful thinker.



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"Dreamer" Quotes from Famous Books



... reports of school-life always showed the dreamer at the foot of her class, and Miss Gordon grew apprehensive. Mrs. Jarvis might arrive any day, ready to repeat the glorious offer she had already made to that improvident child. But if she found her dull and far behind her classmates, how could she be ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... looked upon that instrument as a treaty, and at a time when the conception of a national power which should receive that of the States into its stream as tributary was something which had entered the head of only here and there a dreamer. The theorists of the Virginia school would have dammed up and diverted the force of each State into a narrow channel of its own, with its little saw-mill and its little grist-mill for local needs, instead of letting it follow the slopes of the continental water-shed to swell the volume of one ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... are sending out each year their quota of educated women, ready to find their place in the world's work. It gives one pause, and the desire to look into the future—and dream. Ten years hence, twenty, fifty, one hundred! What can the dreamer and the prophet foretell? When those whom we now count by fives and tens are multiplied by the hundred, what will it mean for the future of India and the world? What of the gladness of America through whose hand, outstretched ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren

... which it at first deprived me, I screamed aloud—the casement of the apartment was thrown open with a loud noise,—and—But what signifies my telling all this to thee, Rose, who show so plainly, by the movement of eye and lip, that you consider me as a silly and childish dreamer?" ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... been said, bit. The letters, written in a fine scholarly handwriting, excited his interest extraordinarily. He imagined some dreamer-priest possessed by a singular hobby, searching for things of the spirit by those devious ways he had heard about from time to time, a little mad probably into the bargain. The name Skale sounded ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... opposite. He was an easy-going, happy-go-lucky individual, who worked only when occasion demanded and inclination and the weather permitted. The weather was usually more acquiescent than inclination. He was sanguine of temperament, highly imaginative and a dreamer of dreams. Indeed, he just missed being a poet. A man who dreams takes either to poetry or policy. Not being able quite to reach the former, Sam had declined upon the latter, and, instead of meter, feet and rhyme, his mind was taken up ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... do something really important in it, he would not have been there. As he sat down, he felt himself a silly clodhopper, filled with the east wind of his own conceit, out of touch with the real world of men. He knew himself a dreamer. The nodding board of directors, the secretary, actually snoring, and the bored audience restored the field-hand to a sense ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick

... violent revulsion of feeling. I remember I flung away the cigar with a certain wasteful symbolism. My folly came to me with glaring exaggeration. I seemed a traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was filled with remorse. I resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on into London. There, it seemed to me, I had the best chance of learning what the Martians and my fellowmen were doing. I was still upon the roof when ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... grasp on art and life. Such a mentality, ever seeking for truth and the sincerest expression of it, must continually progress, until—as now—the greatest heights are reached. Mme. Zeisler is no keyboard dreamer, no rhapsodist on Art. She is a thoroughly practical musician, able to explain as well as demonstrate, able to talk as well as play. Out of the fulness of a rich experience, out of the depth of deepest sincerity and conviction ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower

... the midst of that greater one, seen by us only as shadows—the negatives of some positives, perhaps, witnessed by eyes on the other side. I have always been tinged by something of the spirit of old Bruno, that dreamer, whose most real realities were no other than umbery forms—flakes of shadow—cast off by a central light from the real objects, of which we are the mere shadowy representatives. All the breathing, throbbing, active beings, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... cents in his pocket. The glimpses we get of him during his wanderings, from the recollections of certain men with whom he made acquaintance in stages and on river steamboats, make a curious and striking picture of American character. The feverish, high-strung boy was never dismayed and never a dreamer, but always confident, ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown

... granaries! Showing now defiled His hireling hands, a better help's achieved Than if they blessed us shepherd-like and mild. False doctrine, strangled by its own amen, Dies in the throat of all this nation. Who Will speak a pope's name as they rise again? What woman or what child will count him true? What dreamer praise him with the voice or pen? What man fight for him?—Pius takes ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... course of the next day or so, as he witnessed Captain Kettle's method of spreading his faith, Clay's forebodings began to pass away. There was nothing of the hypocrite about this preaching sailor; but, at the same time, there was nothing of the dreamer. He exhorted vast audiences daily to enter into the narrow path (as defined by the Tyneside chapel), but, at the same time, he impressed on them that the privilege of treading this thorny way in no manner exempted them from the business of gathering ivory, ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... upon an anarchist as a cooing dove compared to the man who would advocate Confiscation. They have nothing to fear from the anarchist, except a stray bomb now and then, for they know full well that the "plain" people will always stand between them and that wild-eyed dreamer of ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood

... "Marching Through Georgia" that always drew forth applause. Then, as the night advanced, a gradual hush fell, a slow sinking down into silence, broken by a child's querulous cry, a groan of pain, the smothered mutterings of a dreamer. Like the slain on a battlefield, they lay on the roadside, dotted over the slopes, thick as fallen leaves under the trees, their faces buried in arms or wrappings against the fall of cinders ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... he answered. "Luck, so called I it, when I escaped the militar' service. Ho ho! Luck, to pass into the Ersatz!—I do not care, now. I cannot believe, even cannot I fight. Worthless—dreamer! My deserts. It's a ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout

... was extremely thin, but his striking features, quick, searching eye, abrupt, animated gestures and rapid speech, incorrect as it was, made a deep impression upon those who came in contact with him. He possessed in a supreme degree two qualities that are ordinarily incompatible. He was a dreamer, and at the same time a man whose practical skill and mastery of detail amounted to genius. He once told a friend that he was wont, when a poor lieutenant, to allow his imagination full play and fancy things just as he would have them. ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... had probably taken place in the like circumstances that night in London, and the maddest dreamer of fantastic dreams would not have heard the fluttering wings of the spirit of romance in connection with any one of them. It was by no means marvelous, therefore, but rather in obedience to the accepted law of things as they are when ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... waked out of it. In the house where they were presently received and established in sufficient comfort, there was such a little specimen of masculine humanity as never shewed his face in dream land yet; a little bit of reality enough to bring any dreamer to his senses. He seemed to have been brought up on stove heat, for he was ail glowing yet from a very warm bed he had just tumbled out of somewhere, and he looked at the pale thin stranger by his mother's fireplace as if she were an anomaly ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... the hunters when an enemy was at hand, and was continually preaching up caution. He was a little prone to play the prophet, and to deal in signs and portents, which occasionally excited the merriment of his white comrades. He was a great dreamer, and believed in charms and talismans, or medicines, and could foretell the approach of strangers by the howling or barking of the small prairie wolf. This animal, being driven by the larger wolves from the carcasses left on the hunting grounds by the hunters, ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving

... forest, and meadow, and slope of hill, Around thee, are lonely, lovely, and still. Lonely—save when, by thy rippling tides, From thicket to thicket the angler glides; Or the simpler comes with basket and book, For herbs of power on thy banks to look; Or haply, some idle dreamer, like me, To wander, and muse, and gaze on thee. Still—save the chirp of birds that feed On the river cherry and seedy reed, And thy own wild music gushing out With mellow murmur and fairy shout, From dawn to the blush of another day, Like traveller ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant

... erection his vanity had heaped up lay shattered around him. Poor boy! shall we not pity him? From very childhood, though so silent and undemonstrative, he had fed himself with extravagant visions and wild speculations. All this had been merely an amusement, though an unhealthy one. The dreamer had scarcely entertained the idea of his dreams possibly proving true. But the train was laid for a future explosion—the imagination was diseased, and so when the watchmaker's letter came, all the ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare

... rugged, but men reach the summits. Why should I fail? The road to power may be closed against me, but the road to love—" And he gazed into the eyes of the portrait, finding an answer in them. This man of action was a dreamer too. ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner

... him to hit me in the eye or else to land on my nose with his fist, and I slipped off and went home. I lost my morale as a bully then and there. Although I was a fighter from infancy, I was also something of a dreamer, and the two strains ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... persons of ardent imagination. It was not even, as might be at first supposed, an extreme condition, or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and different. In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... kingdom, declaring that it consisted entirely in the possession and proclamation of truth. Pilate understood nothing of this grand idealism.[3] Jesus doubtless impressed him as being an inoffensive dreamer. The total absence of religious and philosophical proselytism among the Romans of this epoch made them regard devotion to truth as a chimera. Such discussions annoyed them, and appeared to them devoid of meaning. Not perceiving ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... the case, and Willa gazed through renewed tears at the two young faces vibrant with life which smiled back at her: the man's thin and intellectual with the eyes of a dreamer and the chiseled lips of a poet; the woman's stronger and more practical, her gaze sweet and level, her dark hair in a soft cloud about her ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant

... The dreamer was aroused at last by the musical tinkle of a bell. He turned his face toward the sound, but could see nothing. The bell was coming nearer; it came nearer still. Then he saw here and there through the trees small, moving patches of white; an ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright

... the first few pages of this book. So far is Mr Kipling from being an author inspired and driven to claim a share in the active life of the present, an author who unloads upon us a store of memories and experience, that he is only able to do his finest work as an unchecked and fantastic dreamer. The stories in which he imposes upon his readers the illusion that he would never have written books if he had stayed at home, that his stories are the carelessly flung reminiscences of a full life—these ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer

... of a scholar and a dreamer; everything else was a duty, however pleasurable or bountiful the experience might become in his gentle acceptation. He was seldom stimulated to external expression by others. Such excitement as he could express again was always self-excitement; ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields

... do not want to leave the hill country," she said, quite calmly. "I shall never leave it until I have vindicated my father's course in the eyes of the people back home—the men who scoffed at him, and called him a ne'er-do-well, and a dreamer—who refused to back his judgment with their miserable dollars—who killed him with their cruelty, and ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx

... future for the world, are so remote from hard facts of daily life and of ordinary politics that I am not very sure that they will bring any useful or effective influence to bear upon the immediate course of events. To the revolutionary Socialist, whether dreamer or politician, I do not appeal as the Liberal candidate for Dundee. I recognise that they are perfectly right in voting against me and voting against the Liberals, because Liberalism is not Socialism, and never will be. There is a great gulf fixed. It is not ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... apparent that their professional pride had been touched by the poetic babble to which they had listened. One of them took upon himself the task of interjecting what the practical opinion of himself and friends was by addressing the aesthetic dreamer in accents of stern reproof: "You," said he, "may call it grandeur and picturesque and magnificent and curtseying, but we call it a damned dirty business. If you were aboard of one of them, you wouldn't talk about rustling through the cloven sea ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman

... conceived myself to be an angel," said Mark, "I might say 'for our whole lives,' and you would be justified. That gray-headed dreamer, Raisky, also thinks that women are created for ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov

... all, the Torrent Prophet, An inspired Demosthenes, To the Doubter's soul appealing, Louder than the preacher-seas: Dreamer! wouldst have nature spurn thee For a dumb, insensate clod? Dare to doubt! and these shall teach thee Of a truth there lives ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster

... are doing: they embody ideas; they put thoughts into facts. A quiet, contemplative age is not an artistic one; art has ever flourished in stirring times: Grecian wars and Guelphic strife have been its fostering influences. An artist is very far from being an idle dreamer; he works as hard as the merchant or the mechanic,—works, too, physically as well as mentally, with his hand as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... the forms of Life that breathe to-day have ascended. We struggled up, obedient to the Law around us and we still struggle. That is the Past, or part of it. What is the Future, as yet no man knows. We do more than know—we feel and dream, and struggle on to our dreaming. And Life itself to the dreamer is as ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... the hero of a sensational novel—not straight to the bottom like a stone—but like a dreamer carried off by pixies in a wood, with one name ever upon my lips! And the world would have ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... have for their tune-mates The gold languorous lilies of the glade; And the whippoorwill, that plaintive dreamer, Some dark purple ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman

... one who is awoke By a distant organ, doubting if he be Not yet a dreamer, till the spell is broke By the watchman, or some such reality, Or by one's early valet's cursed knock; At least it is a heavy sound to me, Who like a morning slumber—for the night Shows stars and women ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... the fire, the whizzing of the spinning-wheel, and the maiden's song seemed to the dreamer fairer than a thousand Edens. An ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various

... doubtful if he had ever even sailed: it was possible, nay probable, indeed it soon was received as a certainty, that the fleet which was talked of had no existence but in the crazed imagination of a profuse dreamer, who fancied argosies and made the world believe he possessed them. It was enough that the drama was ended, and no one cared now, after so long a time, to ask what was become of ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... paid to what went on about him still further contracted them. Philippe flattered his mother's vanity, but Joseph won no compliments. Philippe sparkled with the clever sayings and lively answers that lead parents to believe their boys will turn out remarkable men; Joseph was taciturn, and a dreamer. The mother hoped great things of Philippe, and ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... swing, there occurs a series of letters written by one of the heroes from Palestine. The enthusiasm of the author for the Holy Land cannot deny itself, and this unexpected Zionist note, in a purely modern work, reveals his soul as it really is, the soul of a great dreamer. ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... "Fond dreamer, pause! why floats the silvery breath Of thin, light smoke from yonder bank of heath? What forms are those beneath the shaggy trees, In tattered tent, scarce sheltered from the breeze; The hoary father and the ancient dame, The squalid children, cowering o'er ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... of general social relaxation usually known as the Dark Ages was superceded by the multiple innovations of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific-technical developments of the 1750-1970 Revolution, man the dreamer, inventor, designer, planner, architect and engineer has modified many aspects of nature and transformed the ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... of the Southern Seas Our northern dreamer sleeps, Strange stars above him, and above his grave Strange leaves and wings their tropic splendours wave, While, far beneath, mile after shimmering mile, The great Pacific, with its faery deeps, Smiles all day long its silken ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne

... is going to make her feel," said Betty. "Just as it made me feel when I got here from the Cuckoo's Nest, and found this 'House Beautiful' of my dreams. And if she is the little dreamer that I was the best time will not be the arrival, but early candle-lighting time, when you are playing on your harp. I used to sit on a foot-stool at godmother's feet, so unutterably happy, that I would have to put out my hand to feel her dress. I was so afraid ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston

... long seemed to me as fine a statement of the condition which will prevail, when this prophecy is a reality, as could be phrased,—"The Lamb is the light thereof." Light is the medium in which objects are visible, and the Lamb is the symbol of sacrificial love. The great dreamer, in his vision, beheld a time when spirits would see in sacrificial love as now we see physical objects in the medium of light. To those who have studied the expansion of individual souls, and who then have contrasted the selfishness of ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... to the personality of the author of this epoch-making statement. Joyce-Armstrong, according to the few friends who really knew something of the man, was a poet and a dreamer, as well as a mechanic and an inventor. He was a man of considerable wealth, much of which he had spent in the pursuit of his aeronautical hobby. He had four private aeroplanes in his hangars near Devizes, and is said to have made no fewer than one hundred and seventy ascents in the course of last ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Meryl, as became the dreamer, had been profoundly touched by the event which had called forth that swift grief; and whereas Diana could not refrain from bemoaning all she must necessarily lose through the season of mourning, Meryl thought chiefly of how they could get away quickly ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page

... sun much work is done By clown and kaiser, by serf and sage; All sow and some reap, and few gather the heap Of the garner'd grain of a by-gone age. By sea or by soil man is bound to toil, And the dreamer, waiting for time and tide, For awhile may shirk his share of the work, But he grows with his dream dissatisfied; He may climb to the edge of the beetling ledge, Where the loose crag topples and well-nigh reels 'Neath the lashing gale, but the tonic will fail— What does it ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon

... came up in a cloud of dust with the key, and ran off again with a shilling in his pocket, while Henry Rogers, budding philanthropist and re-awakening dreamer, went down the hill of memories at high speed that a doctor would have said was dangerous, a philosopher morbid, and the City decreed ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... teach this little dreamer what is life!" they said. "She will not know what life is if we ...
— The Strange Little Girl - A Story for Children • V. M.

... slowly round the place As if that wind had breathed it! From no star Streams that soft lustre on the dreamer's face. Again a hushing calm! while faint and far The breeze goes calling onward through the night. Dear God! what vision chains ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod

... every lucky silver pieces of money. I believe in lucky pieces of silver. I is a dreamer, always been dat way. I have seen my bright days ahead of me, in dreams and visions. If I hears a woman's voice calling me, a calling me in my sleep I is bound to move outa dat house. I dont keer wher I goes, I is got to ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration

... actions which are both for and against human interests, such as narrow patriotism and prejudiced love. Thirdly, neither good nor bad actions are such actions as are neither for nor against human interests—for example, an unconscious act of a dreamer. Lastly, purely bad actions, which are absolutely against human interests, cannot be possible for man except suicide, because every action promotes more or less the interests, material or spiritual, of the individual agent or of someone else. Even such horrible crimes as homicide and parricide ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... submitted for twenty years to the supremacy of a cretin, working only for himself. One would then have to give her up in despair for ever and ever. The truth is that she mistook a meteor for a star, a silent dreamer for a man of depth. Then seeing him sink under disasters he ought to have foreseen, she ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... "O dreamer of dreams, interpret your own dream. Who is she about my throne of whom I should beware, and who is the magician with whom she ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard

... he did bestir himself and he did speak, and he did not leave the black men to God while he looked after the white; he helped God all he could in his own peculiar, irresolute way. At the same time no passage from the journals throws more light on the pure soul of the great dreamer. He was opposed to slavery and he felt for the negroes, but their physical degradation did not appeal to him so much as the intellectual degradation of those about him. To him it was a loftier ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... all, because there is nothing modern about her. She has walked straight out of the Middle Ages, with the face of a saint and a dreamer and a beautiful woman, all in one. I am an old witch, and I am never deceived in a woman. Men, I am sorry to say, no longer take the trouble to deceive me. Now our business is over, ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture

... should it be at the uttermost ends of the earth. It so happens that the damsel also dreams of him, and, when they do meet, they need no introduction to each other. The Indian romance of Vasayadatta has a similar plot. But the royal dreamer and lover in the following story, told by the Parrot on the 39th Night, according to the India Office MS. No. 2573, adopted a plan for the discovery of the beauteous object of his vision more conformable to his ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... for some time, is suddenly moved to feel along his own back. He dreams that BUMSTEAD thereupon finds his own lantern, and exclaims, after half an hour's analytical reflection, "It musht'ave slid round while JOHN MCLAUGHLIN was intosh'cated." Then, or soon after, the dreamer awakes, and can discern two Mr. BUMSTEADS seated upon the step-ladders, with a lantern, baby-like, on ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various

... he had sought Bullion in vain; that substantial person seemed to have become a new Proteus, and to escape, when nearly overtaken, by taking refuge in some unexpected transformation. Sometimes the scene changed, and it was the dreamer that was flying, while Sandford, shod with swiftness, pursued him, swinging a lasso; and as often as the fierce hunter whirled the deadly coil, Fletcher awoke with a suffocating sensation, and a cold sweat ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... of the darkness the place looked vast and inspiring. The shadowy Terrace, the silent river, the rows of lighted windows, each was significant. Slowly and comprehensively his glance passed from one to the other. He was no sentimentalist and no dreamer; his act was simply the act of a man whose interests, robbed of their natural outlet, turn instinctively towards the forms and symbols of the work that is denied them. His scrutiny was steady—even cold. He was raised to no exaltation by the vastness of the building, nor was he chilled by any ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... discontent. The tones of his voice, his gestures, his steps were all in tranquil unison. His conduct was characterised by a certain forbearance and humility, which secured the esteem of those to whom his tenets were most obnoxious. They might call him a fanatic and a dreamer, but they could not deny their veneration to his invincible candour and invariable integrity. His own belief of rectitude was the foundation of his happiness. This, however, was destined to ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown

... either he should be driven into precipitate retreat, or else there should escape him, instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror, and flung up the chance of pension and patronage. We perceive the born dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in just proportion and true relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror of unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of moral cowardice, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... N. madman, lunatic, maniac, bedlamite[obs3], candidate for Bedlam, raver[obs3], madcap, crazy; energumen[obs3]; automaniac[obs3], monomaniac, dipsomaniac, kleptomaniac; hypochondriac &c. (low spirits); crank, Tom o'Bedlam. dreamer &c. 515; rhapsodist, seer, highflier[obs3], enthusiast, fanatic, fanatico[Sp]; exalte[French]; knight errant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... every dreamer has his own subjects of interest. Saint-Aignan, on leaving Guiche, found himself at the extremity of the grove,—at the very spot where the outbuildings of the servants begin, and where, behind the thickets of acacias and chestnut-trees interlacing their branches, which were hidden by masses of clematis ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... man, a dreamer in the good sense of the term, and religiously minded. At the height of seeming ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston

... and was only roused from his dreamy mood by the sudden apparition of a traveller on horseback standing before him; for so long and so soft was the grass of the street that his approach had been unheard by the dreamer, whose mind was wandering after the departed glories of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... seemed to take undisputed precedence—related some very remarkable experiences. She at first manifested some reluctance to speak of conjuration, in the lore of which she was said to be well versed; but by listening patiently to her religious experiences—she was a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions—I was able now and then to draw a little upon her reserves of superstition, if indeed her religion itself was ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt

... dreamer," whispered Desiree, with a quick pinch on his arm, "take the Grafin upstairs to the drawing-room and give her wine. You are ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman

... readers may imagine that my young man was a sickly, ecstatic, poorly developed creature, a pale, consumptive dreamer. On the contrary, Alyosha was at this time a well-grown, red-cheeked, clear-eyed lad of nineteen, radiant with health. He was very handsome, too, graceful, moderately tall, with hair of a dark brown, with a regular, rather long, oval-shaped face, and wide-set dark gray, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... magical pinions spread wide, And bade the young dreamer in ecstacy rise; Now far, far behind him the green waters glide, And the cot of his ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... hardly get over it: it nearly broke our friendship. But I suppose he was very like her, except that, in my opinion, his nature was sweeter. He was a fatalist—saw leadings of Providence in every little thing. And such a dreamer! When he came to live up here just before his death, and all his active life was taken off him, I believe half his time he was seeing visions. He used to wander over the fells and meet you with ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... a sentimental dreamer, a hair-brained enthusiast. It is the foolish utterances of men like him that place the bomb and the knife in the hand of ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London

... to the right of us, falling into the center of the town with a rumble, like a train of cars heard in the night, when one is half asleep. That was the sense of things to me, as I stood in the street, waiting for hell to blow off its lid. It was a dream world, and I was the dreamer, in the center of the strange unfolding sight, seeing it all out of ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason

... "Dreamer, fantastic, hopeless dreamer!" cried Pollnitz, laughing. "Well, God grant that you do not embrace death on the battle-field, or on the other side find a prison, to either of which you have a better claim than to a prince's title. Make use, therefore, of your time, and enjoy ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach

... and wonder why he does not get ahead; a man may have vision and still remain only a dreamer; but when integrity and vision are combined with hard work, the man prospers. It is the ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson

... the words of a song, "Dreamland." The air was dreamed by his friend, the late Rev. C. E. Hutchinson, of Chichester. The history of the dream is here given in the words of the dreamer:— ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

... father's strong body and his mother's face of a dreamer; his eyes were brooding like Beryl's but his mouth was wide and tender and might have seemed weak but for the strength ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott

... of Christ was authorized of heaven—no man who believes this only, that his doctrine has obtained and preserved its heavenly character from the successful, unanswerable, appeal which it makes to the human heart—can dispute this fact. Is he an idler, then, or a dreamer in the land, who comes forth, and on the high-road of our popular literature, insists on it that men should assume their full moral strength, and declares that herein lies the salvation of the world? But what can he do if the external circumstances of life are against ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... dreamer of dreams chance to stray along the roads full of deep ruts, or over the heavy land which secures the place against intrusion, he will wonder how it happened that this romantic old place was set down in a savanna of corn-land, a desert of chalk, and sand, and marl, where gaiety dies ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac

... myself to the old dreamer's whim with a keen perception of the humor of the thing; but by and by I found that I was talking and thinking of Miss Mehetabel's son as though he were a veritable personage. Mr. Jafifrey spoke of the ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... in his crib at Tottington, dreamed that he saw the Arch Enemy in person, just alighted in front of some grand building, with outspread bat-wings, and stretching forth detestable clawed hands to grip him, little Samson, and fly-off with him: whereupon the little dreamer shrieked desperate to St. Edmund for help, shrieked and again shrieked; and St. Edmund, a reverend heavenly figure, did come,—and indeed poor little Samson's mother, awakened by his shrieking, did come; and the Devil and the Dream both fled away fruitless. ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... addressed to the Ghost, when the latter demanded a hearing, "Don't be flowery, Jacob, pray!" was only less laughable, for example, than the expression of the old dreamer's visage when Marley informed him that he had often sat beside him invisibly! Promised a chance and hope in the fixture—a chance and hope of his dead partner's procuring—Scrooge's "Thank 'ee!"—full of doubt—was a ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... strong," I said. "I will be an idler and a dreamer no longer. Books have been my world. I have taken all, and given nothing. Now I too will work, and work to prove that I was ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... If I had been there you would have seen me before this, for if ever anyone was walking in the clouds, it was you just this minute. Come along, I want you, dreamer. Can you do me ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown

... in Germany," answered Cleveland; "and Ernest cannot well unlearn what he knows already. My dear Maltravers, the boy is not like most clever young men. He must either go through action, and adventure, and excitement in his own way, or he will be an idle dreamer, or an impracticable enthusiast all his life. Let him alone.—So Cuthbert is gone ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... brown figure huddled in the great chair, not looking at Philip but out over the wide green valley, began to speak in a low, measured tone, as a dreamer might tell his dream, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... transgressors. Copple in his immense loquaciousness was not transgressing much, for he really was no greater dreamer than I, but the way he put things made us want to see the mighty hunter have ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... yield his own soul refreshment also. All dreams are not false; some dreams are truer than the plainest facts. Fact at best is but a garment of truth, which has ten thousand changes of raiment woven in the same loom. Let the dreamer only do the truth of his dream, and one day he will realize all that was worth realizing in it—and a great deal more and better than it contained. Alister had no far-reaching visions of anything to come out of his; he had, like the true man he was, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... imagination. That is the point. He has imagination. Many are the engineers who are accurate, who are trustworthy, but imagination, creative ability, no! You observe the shape of his head, his jaw, his hands—the dreamer, urged into action. And the impudence of his sand-cement idea! In my country we dare make our concrete only very rich. He shows me this afternoon that diluted rightly with sand, cement can be made stronger." Herr Gluck ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow

... Southerner of his epoch—impulsive, sentimental, ardent in all that he espoused, without the slightest notion of humor, though imaginative as a dreamer; love, war, and his State, Virginia, were passions that he thought it a duty to uphold at any and all times. He colored under the girl's satiric sally. If she had been a man he would have bid her to battle on the spot. Her sly fun and gentle malice ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... part of the "formalists" themselves, who (I refer to unimpassioned theorists and advocates of rigid old scholastic rules) place too narrow a construction upon Form, and define it with such rigor as to leave no margin whatever for the exercise of free fancy and emotional sway. Both the dreamer, with his indifference to (or downright scorn of) Form; and the pedant, with his narrow conception of it; as well as the ordinary music lover, with his endeavor to discover some less debatable view to adopt for his own everyday ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius

... Mother I had none, for she was gathered to Osiris while I was still very little. So life went on from year to year, but in my heart I hated my lot. While I was still a boy there rose up in me a desire—not to copy what others had written, but to write what others should copy. I became a dreamer of dreams. Walking at night beneath the palm-trees upon the banks of the Nile I watched the moon shining upon the waters, and in its rays I seemed to see many beautiful things. Pictures appeared there which were different from any ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard

... eloquence, those radiant thoughts and startling truths which warrant his claim to genius, if not to greatness. It is curious to observe how at this early period of Carlyle's life, when all the talent and learning of England bowed at these levees before the gigantic speculator and dreamer, he, perhaps alone, stood aloof from the motley throng of worshippers,—with them, but not of them,—coolly analyzing every sentence delivered by the oracle, and sufficiently learned in the divine lore to separate the gold from the dross. What was good ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... was but one man living whom the country could so ill afford to lose as this strange, wayward, fitful, unreasonable poet and dreamer, who sneered at the war, and at the great nation that waged it, with the pettishness ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various

... no more why he left the government than before he began.' 'I could not but know,' Mr. Gladstone wrote on this incident long years after, 'that I should inevitably be regarded as fastidious and fanciful, fitter for a dreamer or possibly a schoolman, than for the active purposes of public life in ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... together might do great things in the South Seas, and found a colony of our own. She had white blood in her veins—of that I felt certain—and where Ben Boyd, of the old colonial days, failed to achieve, I, with a woman like Niabon for my wife, could succeed. Ben Boyd was a dreamer, a man of wealth and of flocks and herds, in the newly-founded convict settlement of New South Wales, and his dream was the founding of a new state in the Solomon Islands, where he, an autocratic, but beneficent ruler, would reign supreme, and the English Government recognise ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke

... this moment, the sun, sympathizing with these thoughts of love and of the future, had cast an ardent glow upon the savage flanks of the rock; a few wild mountain flowers were visible; the stillness and the silence magnified that rugged pile,—really sombre, though tinted by the dreamer, and beautiful beneath its scanty vegetation, the warm chamomile, the Venus' tresses with their velvet leaves. Oh, lingering festival; oh, glorious decorations; oh, happy exaltation of human forces! Once already the lake of Brienne had spoken to me thus. The rock of Croisic may be perhaps ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac

... twisting threats of an octopus, touching him now, only faintly, here for a second, there for a second, but fascinating, holding him so that he could not run away? Granted that Thurston was a charlatan, Miss Avies a humbug, his sister a fool, his father a dreamer, Crashaw a fanatic, did that mean that the power behind them all was sham? Was that force that he had felt when he was a child simply eager superstition? What was behind this street, this moon, these hurrying figures, his own daily life and thoughts? Was there really a vast conspiracy, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... tears, and the death-rattle of the conquered? YES, IT MUST! [There follows an image too grotesquely indecent to be quoted.] Either one denies altogether the beneficent effect of Kultur upon humanity, and confesses oneself an Arcadian dreamer, or one allows to one's people the right of domination—in which case the might of the conqueror is the highest law of morality, before which the conquered must bow. Vae victis!—K.A. KUHN, ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various

... flatters himself that he can walk in the Footsteps of that Immortal Dreamer, but because, like Jules Verne, he believes that the World of Imagination is as legitimate a Domain of the Human Mind as the World ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss

... again I endeavoured to lull myself to sleep. The same expressions proceeded from the lips of the travellers, and they were growing more and more indistinct and shadowy, when I was startled all on a sudden by one of the most palpable sounds that had ever disturbed and confounded a dreamer. I sat up and listened, coughed to convince myself that I was certainly awake, and the sounds were repeated as clear and as audible as before. I would have sworn that Mr Clayton was the gentleman whom we had last picked up—that he was now in the coach with me—and was now talking, if the words ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... went on Aymer slowly, "was extraordinarily beautiful, with the beauty of grace rather than of feature. She was as distinct from the rest of her clamorous family as a pearl from pebbles. She was an enthusiast, a dreamer, passionately sincere, passionately pitiful. She recognised truth as a water diviner finds water. She was brought up in a labyrinth of theories, creeds of equality, in hatred for the rich, and out of all the jargon she gathered some eternal truths ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... enemy of the Encyclopaedic group, the gaiety, the irreverence, the hardihood of speculation and audacity of discourse, were all as gall and wormwood. Rousseau found their atheistic sallies offensive beyond endurance. Their hard rationalism was odious to the great emotional dreamer, and after he had quarrelled with them all, he transformed his own impressions of the dreariness of atheism into the passionate complaint of Julie. "Conceive the torment of living in retirement with the man who shares our existence, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... many other similar thoughts passed through my mind, but I did not follow them up, because I do not like to dwell upon abstract ideas—for what do they lead to? In my early youth I was a dreamer; I loved to hug to my bosom the images—now gloomy, now rainbowhued—which my restless and eager imagination drew for me. And what is there left to me of all these? Only such weariness as might be felt after a battle by night ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov

... a waste place in the troubled land of dreams—a spot so waste that the dreamer struggles to rouse himself from his dream, finding it too dreary to dream on. I have heard it likened to 'the ill place, wi' the fire oot;' but it did not so impress me when first, after long desire, I saw it. There was nothing to suggest the silence ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald

... an impressionist, I can only say that La Debacle stifles me. And this is the effect produced by all his later books. Each has the exclusiveness of a dream; its subject—be it drink or war or money—possesses the reader as a nightmare possesses the dreamer. For the time this place of wide prospect, the world, puts up its shutters; and life becomes all drink, all war, all money, while M. Zola (adaptable Bacchanal!) surrenders his brain to the intoxication of his latest theme. He will drench himself ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... life of the prairies and the ultra-civilization of English aristocratic society. In the excitement and adventure of the one, he hoped to forget the other. He sought to forget—not to be resigned, to acquiesce. His inner life was unchanged. He had been a dreamer—a pleasure-seeker—and a dreamer and pleasure-seeker he continued, though the dreams and the pleasures must be wrought from new materials. To sketch the progress of such a character through the ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh

... was but a crazy dreamer lying captive, wounded and weak in a pirate cave. Oh, yes, I know very well what my fine gentlemen dabblers in the new sciences will say—the fellow was daft and delirious—he had lost grip on reality and his fevered wits mixed a mumble-jumble of ancient symbolism with his own adventures. ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... lazy dreamer, are you never going to learn wisdom? Only a blockhead like you could be so foolish. A ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini

... having been uttered by my mother, in some such connection, forty or fifty years before. I was probably engaged in trying to make those people believe that now and then, by some accident, or otherwise, a dream which was prophetic turned up in the dreamer's mind. The date of my memorable dream was about the beginning of May, 1858. It was a remarkable dream, and I had been telling it several times every year for more than fifteen years—and now I was telling it again, here ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain

... bed. Michael felt a mixture of fear and rapture in his breast. "You will lie down beside me; oh, how I love you, but I tremble for you!" and then the figure prepared a bed on the shelf and lay down. The dreamer in the bed longed to bend over her, to embrace and kiss her, and would have called again to her, "Go, hasten away from here, you will be seen;" but he could move neither limbs nor tongue, they were heavy as lead; and ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, Telling a tale not too importunate To those who in the sleepy region stay, Lulled by the singer of an empty ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... fires; now he was to meet and make or be broken by a great moment. An electricity of conflict filled the air, a foreboding of disaster. His theories at last were to meet the crucial test of reality, and he realized that up to that moment he had been hardly more than a dreamer. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim

... invitations. Then, after the supper, pipes alight, we sauntered down the street, a vast leisure expanding our horizons. At the street corner stood a tall, poetic-looking man, with dreamer's eyes, a violin clasped under his chin. He was looking straight past us all out into the dusk of the piney mountains beyond, his soul in the music he was producing. They were simple melodies, full of sentiment, and he played as though he loved them. Within the sound of his bow ...
— Gold • Stewart White

... nothing more than the customary small talk of the dance, but they sank deep into the soul of the young dreamer. The portrait, sketched by Tomsky, coincided with the picture she had formed within her own mind, and, thanks to the latest romances, the ordinary countenance of her admirer became invested with attributes capable of alarming her and ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various

... living on when all the light was gone out of the sun, when oceans were as if they had never been, a name, a building, living when the story of all the worlds and all the generations would be held written upon a scroll in the lap of God.... The face of the dreamer as he abandoned himself to his thoughts was pallid ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly

... may as well give up all hope of winning the prize!" sneered Larson. "You are a very foolish young man. Vardon is a dreamer, a visionary inventor who will never amount to anything. His gyroscope ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis

... 'A glorious dreamer! Though our moods are different, I ever loved him. And thyself? Thou art not what thou seemest. Tell me all. Jabaster's friend can be no common mind. Thy form has heralded ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... painter whose enthusiasm for his art knew no bounds—craved to produce a masterpiece. This dreamer could be seen daily ferreting around the Quarter for a studio always bigger than the one he had. At last he found one that exactly fitted the requirements of his vivid imagination—a studio with a ceiling thirty feet high, ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith

... The dreamer took the hand that was laid upon hers between her own palms, bowed her head, and gave them ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable

... ultra-Utopian dreamer claims that sex-education can solve all the sexual problems of civilized life, but even the most pessimistic disbeliever in the new movement admits that knowledge of sexual life will be helpful to the great majority of people. Hence, it is worth while to organize the educational ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow

... Nineveh, there would be found the history of the wars between Hezekiah and Sennacherib, written at the very time when they took place by Sennacherib himself and confirming even in minute details the Biblical record? He who would have ventured to predict such a discovery would have been treated as a dreamer or an impostor. Had it been known that such a monument really existed, what sum would have been considered too great for the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... my blood flows calm as a purling river, When my heart is asleep and my brain has sway, It is then that I vow we must part forever, That I will forget you, and put you away Out of my life, as a dream is banished Out of the mind when the dreamer awakes; That I know it will be, when the spell has vanished, Better for both of ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... socks!" said Thompson. "Our young friend is right, you know. You are not practical. You are booky. You are a dreamer. Get into the game. Get busy! Get into business. Get a wad. Get! Found ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... and the suave courtesy of well-bred men and women, is an instructive study in the evolution of ethics. The youngest boy or girl in class or college is the weakest wolf in the pack, the under dog in the fight. I had all of a little girl's natural desire for new playfellows and the dreamer's passion for more material for castle-building. The prospect of "the school" was ravishing. I constructed scenes and rehearsed conversations, with the cast of coming actors, until the quartette must have been super-or sub-human, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... seemed in his proper element: he exhibited an unhealthy pallor, and it was obvious that no razor had touched his chin for at least three days. His dark blue eyes the eyes of a dreamer—were heavy and dull, with shadows pooled below them. A biscuit-jar, a decanter and a syphon stood half buried in papers ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer



Words linked to "Dreamer" :   visionary, romantic, Don Quixote, sleeper, wishful thinker, woolgatherer, dream, slumberer



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