"Idealist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was the doctrine which he inherited from his great master Lao Tzu. To resolve action into thought, and thought into abstraction, was his wicked transcendental aim. Like the obscure philosopher of early Greek speculation, he believed in the identity of contraries; like Plato, he was an idealist, and had all the idealist's contempt for utilitarian systems; he was a mystic like Dionysius, and Scotus Erigena, and Jacob Bohme, and held, with them and with Philo, that the object of life was to get rid of self-consciousness, and to become the unconscious vehicle ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... injured the prospects of her boy by the way—the romantic, idealist way—in which she had brought him up. Her Harry!—with whom she had read poetry, and talked of heroes, into whose ears she had poured Ruskin and Carlyle from his youth up; who was the friend and comrade of all the country folk, because of a certain irrepressible interest in his kind, a ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... liberal idealist the thought of a possible Swiss system or group of Swiss systems comes readily to mind. One thinks of a grouping of groups of Republics, building up a United States of Eastern Europe. But neither Hohenzollerns nor Tsar would welcome that. The arm of ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... his attitude towards the world and life, become manifest through the things which he laughs at. Only a man of a certain kind, with a certain sympathy and antipathy, could laugh as he laughs. The comic writer, however much of a scoffer and a skeptic, and however much he may deny it, is always an idealist. And it is for the revelation of themselves as much as for the revelation of the people whom they portray that we value the work of a Swift, a Voltaire, or ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... be strictly kept out of the way. It takes all sorts to make a world; and it is not in the least necessary that everybody should have that love of subtle and unobtrusive perfections in the matter of manners or literature which does often go with the type of the ethical idealist. It is not in the least desirable that everybody should be earnest. It is highly desirable that everybody should be honest, but that is a thing that can go quite easily with a coarse and cheerful character. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... out. It was better so—better to live his own life than the one into which he was being ground by the inexorable facts of his environment. He was a young man and ambitious, but his hopes were not selfish. At bottom he was an idealist, though a practical one. He had had to shut his eyes to many things which he deplored, had been driven to compromises which he despised. Essentially clean-handed, the soul of him had begun to wither at the contact of that which he saw about him ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... in the war of Independence, and their worthy successors in the war of Freedom; lawyers and statesmen like Samuel Hoar and his descendants; ministers like Peter Bulkeley, Daniel Bliss, and William Emerson; and men of genius such as the idealist and poet whose inspiration has kindled so many souls; as the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our stern New England; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and half Algonquin, the Robinson ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... could not complain of his looks. He was ugly, but it was a grandiose ugliness, to adopt the expression of a woman who had exercised a peculiar influence over his life. This ugliness had yielded him some satisfactory adventures. Miss Mary Gordon, a blonde-haired idealist, daughter of the governor of an English archipelago in Oceanica, traveling through Europe accompanied only by a maid, had met him one summer in a hotel at Munich. She it was who first became impressed, and it was she who took ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the Colonial idealist (who commonly speaks and always thinks with a Yankee accent) will say, "I've been right away from these little muddy islands, and seen God's great seas and prairies." The sound philosopher will reply, "You have never been in these ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... but the ray only illumined the bewilderment of his dispossession. "I don't pretend to be an idealist," he said, stopping still before her; "I don't pretend that it's not because I suddenly find you beautiful; that's one reason; and a very essential one, I think; but there are other reasons, lots of them. Amabel—you must see that my love for you ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... him, and a little later as he drove over the frosted roads, he could still feel, as in a dream, the soft clinging touch of her fingers. Essentially an idealist, his character was the result of a veneering of insufficient culture on a groundwork of raw impulse. People and objects appeared to him less through forms of thought than through colours of the emotions; and he saw them out of relation because he saw them under different conditions from ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... the place dreamily in the wonderful light, that light fell also, upon him and his habitation. He was apparently intellectual, and had in him something of the idealist. For the rest, he was a good-sized, good-looking man, between thirty and forty years of age, and even by the moonlight one might see, from the form of his clothes, that he was dressed with fastidious care. The walls and verandah, of his house, ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... the author's idea of bringing him by means of the discipline of war-training and war itself to a better understanding of the ordinary spontaneous fighting types, and of bringing these by the same discipline to a readier appreciation of the intellectual and idealist position, is well enough worked out. The character-drawing impressed me less favourably. The author, I should say, finds it rather difficult to understand the ordinary good or indifferent fellow with his qualities and their defects. I doubt the possibility of such a snake in the grass as Lieutenant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... mind—such are the limitations of even clergymen's wives—was now absorbed by her own misfortune. Her very cap-strings seemed to hang limp with depression, as she followed Sarah dejectedly into the kitchen, and gave what attention she could to those second-best arrangements so depressing to the idealist temper. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is true—if not the whole truth, in the apophthegm for instance, 'You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame.' Biffen, it is true, is a somewhat fantastic figure of an idealist, but Gissing cherished this grotesque exfoliation from a headline by Dickens—and later in his career we shall find him reproducing one of Biffen's ideals with a ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... a dreamer—was Charming Billy Boyle; perhaps an idealist—possibly a sentimentalist. He had never tried to find a name for the side of his life that struck deepest. He knew that the ripple of a meadow-lark swinging on a weed against the sunrise, with diamond-sparkles all on the grass around, gripped ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... are very slow to realise the fact of their dissolution, and remain, therefore, chained to the earth by earthly affections and interests, haunting the places or persons they have most affected. But the young artist was not of this order. Idealist and genius, he was already highly spiritualised and vitalised even upon earth, and when death rent the bond between him and his body, he passed at once from the atmosphere of carnal things into a loftier sphere. But at the moment of his death, the phantom father was watching beside the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... compares this passage with Wordsworth's 'Joanna' will see the difference between the elaborate fancy of a topographical narrator, and the vivid imagination of a poetical idealist. A somewhat similar instance of indebtedness—in which the debt is repaid by additional insight—is seen when we compare a passage from Sir John Davies's 'Orchestra, or a poem on Dancing' (stanza 49), with one from 'The Ancient Mariner', Part VI. stanzas 2 and 3—although there was more ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... concerning force and matter, the hypothetical ether and molecules, atoms and vortices, which are as purely metaphysical as any assumptions concerning the soul. The distinction between the realist and the idealist is a matter of temperament. All that separated Huxley from Gladstone was a word; each argued from the unknowable, but disputed over the name and attributes of the inconceivable. Huxley said he did not know, which was equivalent to the dogmatic ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... military conquest involves the ancient practices of serfdom. The conquered nations become slaves of the invader; by obedience they live, by disobedience they die. The persistence of slavery seems, then, to be a demonstration of the unchangeability of human nature and of the ultimate hopelessness of idealist causes. In every reform accomplished the practical application is local, transitory, dependent on racial and geographical conditions. There is obviously a great change in our penal methods. We do not mutilate our criminals or scalp them for the preservation ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... in their attitude after the briefest enjoyment of this illusory power. Men are elected during some wave of reform, let us say, elected to legislate into practical working existence some great ideal. They want to do big things; but a short time in office is enough to show the political idealist that he can accomplish nothing, that his reform must be debased and dragged into the dust, so that even if it becomes enacted, it may be not merely of no benefit, but a positive evil. It is scarcely necessary to emphasize this point. It is an accepted commonplace of American politics. ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... God's creatures have been created as a mockery, that they will never be capable of using their freedom, that these poor rebels can never turn into giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist dreamt his dream of harmony. Seeing all that he turned back and joined—the clever people. Surely that could ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Hassan dream was still upon her, but, womanlike, she wondered if she liked the would-be tyrant of all North Africa as well as she had once liked the easy-going American idealist, Homer Crawford. ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... 'A very idealist, just so,' returned Harry. 'Well, the way I've been a martyr to that man's caprice is perfectly heart-rending. He came of some gorgeous family in the middle of Pennsylvania, where all the tribes, like leaning towers, incline toward Germany. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... idealistic Civaism, as we have shown, and there was once a dualistic Vishnuism; but in general the Vishnuite is an idealist. To comprehend the quarrels among the sects of this religion, however, it will be necessary to examine the radical philosophical differences of their founders, for one passes, in going from modern Civaism ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... solid proof has ever been advanced of the existence of ideas: they are a mere fiction and hypothesis. Nay, sir, 'hence arises that scepticism which disgraces our philosophy of the mind.' Ideas!—Findlater, you are a sceptic and an idealist." ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lares at Rottingdean, in Surrey. There he has remained, averaging a book a year, until now he has over twenty-five large volumes to his credit. In 1907 Kipling was given the Nobel prize "for the best work of an idealist tendency." ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... answered, "If it gives him half as much pleasure to spend my half million as it has given me to make it, I don't grudge it him." That is not the spirit of the real miser or Mammon-worshipper. It is the spirit of a natural idealist who from want of education has no rational standard of good. When such a man intervenes in educational matters, he is sure to take the standpoint of the so-called practical man, because he is blind to the higher values of life. He will ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... on other things. He gazed at the care-worn, rugged face—face of a worker and a dreamer, reading in those lines the story of that life, seeing more clearly than he had ever seen before the beauty and futility of it. Here was the idealist, the man who would give his whole lifetime to a dream he had dreamed. He loved his father very tenderly as he looked at him, read ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... of them he expresses a sharp dissatisfaction with the very nature of his actual experience. A painter like Rubens is entranced with his own actual vision of things; but Poussin tells us that he has never even seen anything as he wanted to see it. He is not a vague idealist dissatisfied with reality because of the weakness of his own senses or understanding. Rather he seems to cry, like Poe, of everything ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... found herself analyzing the editor again, just as she had done when she had walked away from his office. She rebelled against him in her every fibre, yet at the same time she felt a reluctant liking for him. He was a man with big dreams, a rough-and-ready idealist, an idealist with sharply marked limitations, some areas of his mind very broad, some dogmatically narrow. Opinionated, obstinate, impulsive, of not very sound judgment, yet dictatorial because supremely certain of his rightness—courageous, unselfish, ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... only concern is with the cut of his coat and the smile of his mistress. The world for once is in error. I am nothing of the sort. Appearances are against me, I admit. Even you I fancy were deceived. No, my dear sir, while every one judges me to be a mere butterfly of fashion, I am an idealist at heart. And the worst of it is that no one will believe me. All that I want is a chance, an opportunity to prove I am that which I claim; but nobody will give it to me. If I venture to suggest that I am in earnest, the statement ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... ideas and principles betrayed by Stephens's successor, Terence V. Powderly, who became Grand Master in 1879 and served during the years when the order attained its greatest power. Powderly, also, was a conservative idealist. His career may be regarded as a good example of the rise of many an American labor leader. He had been a poor boy. At thirteen he began work as a switch-tender; at seventeen he was apprenticed as machinist; at nineteen he was active in a machinists' ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... mourning American professor has discovered it. I did not want to be an idealist living up a back street. I wanted to live in the biggest house in the best street of the town. I wanted to ride a horse, wear a fur coat, and have as much to eat and drink as ever I liked. I wanted to marry the most beautiful woman in the world, to have my name in ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... through a refining atmosphere in which all baser substances were eliminated, and no fact had ever penetrated this medium except in the flattering disguise of a sentiment. Having married at twenty an idealist only less ignorant of the world than himself, he had, inspired by her example, immediately directed his energies towards the whitewashing of the actuality. Both cherished the naive conviction that to acknowledge an evil is in a manner to countenance ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... distant Paradise Lost, he had foregathered with the angels of the earth. But Fate had hurled him headlong down to the tropics, where flamed in his bosom a fire that was seldom quenched. In Coralio they called him a beachcomber; but he was, in reality, a categorical idealist who strove to anamorphosize the dull verities of life by the means of brandy and rum. As Beelzebub, himself, might have held in his clutch with unwitting tenacity his harp or crown during his tremendous fall, so his namesake had clung to his gold-rimmed ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... Vaughan realized that the passing of the period of rapid enlargement laid upon him the responsibility of fostering the slow and unostentatious work of profiting by the past and of seeing that the reputation of the School was maintained and increased. He was essentially an idealist, a dreamer of dreams, a visionary, but he never lost sight of the practicable. Organization ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... her fastidiousness in regard to the man of her desire, however, Cleopatra was not to be confused with the romantic idealist who craves for that which never has been and never can be possible on earth. To have misunderstood her to this extent would have been a gross injustice. She had built up her picture of her mate, not with the help of feverish and morbid fancy, but ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... centres in this appeal. In itself, the appeal is perfectly competent and legitimate. But it may be met, on the part of the sceptic and idealist, by two modes of tactic. The one tactic is weak, and gives an easy triumph to Dr Reid: the other is more formidable, and, in our opinion, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... except in straight noses and curled hair. Paul Veronese opposes the dwarf to the soldier, and the negress to the queen; Shakspeare places Caliban beside Miranda, and Autolycus beside Perdita; but the vulgar idealist withdraws his beauty to the safety of the saloon, and his innocence to the seclusion of the cloister; he pretends that he does this in delicacy of choice and purity of sentiment, while in truth he has neither courage to front the monster nor wit enough ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... and between that time and 1840 came a considerable awakening among the laboring classes which was part of a general humanitarian movement throughout the country. Robert Owen, an English industrial idealist, had visited this country about 1825 and provided the initiative for a short-lived communistic settlement at New Harmony, Indiana. Similar enterprises were established at other points; the most famous of these was that at Brook Farm ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... nobility than these Histoires Souveraines in which a regal pomp of speech drapes a more than regal sovereignty of soul. The Villiers who mocked mean things and attacked base things is no longer there; the idealist is at home in his own world, among ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... acquiring land in Palestine by many pithy remarks. Then spoke the Rabbis: Joseph Ha-levi, Shneiur Lenskin, Joseph Arwatz and Joseph Rabbi. All these testified to the great qualities of their host, who besides being a great idealist was also a ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager
... accordance with the principle of nationality or the wishes of the peoples of Europe but according to what was called "legitimacy," that is to say, the interests of the princes. There was only one idealist at the Conference, the Russian Emperor Alexander, and he was put ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... must be granted, the sureness and directness of the primitive mind. The very simplicity of his reasoning was its strength, and his materialism was far more compelling than the subtly complex materialism of Charley Furuseth. Not that I—a confirmed and, as Furuseth phrased it, a temperamental idealist—was to be compelled; but that Wolf Larsen stormed the last strongholds of my faith with a vigour that received respect, while not ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... hemisphere of my life was rounded into completeness, and its feverish unrest changed to deep tranquillity, as if a faint, tremulous star were transmuted into a calm, full-orbed planet. Do you remember that story of Plato's—I recall the air-woven subtilties of the delightful idealist, to illustrate, not to prove—that story of the banquet where the ripe wines of the Aegean Isles unchained the tongues of such talkers as Pausanias and Socrates and others as witty and wise, until they fell into a discourse on the origin of Love, and, whirling away on the sparkling eddies of fancy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... flowers, have a perfume of their own which never deceives. One look had sufficed for Francis to go down into the depths of this heart; he was too kind to submit Clara to useless tests, too much an idealist to prudently confine himself to custom or arbitrary decorum; as when he founded the Order of Friars, he took counsel only of himself and God. In this was his strength; if he had hesitated, or even if he had ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... idealist movement in its beginnings a predominantly ethical tone. It was really started in the interest of moral ideals as well as of intellectual thoroughness; and its contribution of greatest value to English thought was a work on ethics. The 'Prolegomena to Ethics' of ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... accept Goethe in all his many-sidedness. We ordinary mortals are incapable of such Protean versatility and are sure to find points, often many and important points, where we are strongly repelled by his teachings and his personality. The idealist is scandalized by his vigorous realism, the realist and materialist by his idealism, the dogmatist by his free thought, the free-thinker by his reverence towards religion, while the scientific expert is apt to regard ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... the first of the Maskilim, an idealist from beginning to end. Persecution did not embitter, nor poverty depress him. And when he passed away quietly (February 12, 1860) in the obscure little town in which he had been born, and which ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... James might have given him—he was only too pleased to retire, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot," while he was yet on the sunny side of fifty. Man of affairs sufficiently to seek the law-courts on the smallest provocation, idealist to the extent of preferring a simple country life to all the glamour of London, a man seemingly endowed with all the ambitions of the most sober and unimaginative middle class—truly he presents strange ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... the great political idealist of the Italian struggle for independence, was born at Genoa, June 22, 1805. His faith in democracy and his enthusiasm for a free Italy he inherited from his parents; and while still a student in the University of Genoa he gathered round him a circle of youths ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... the law of the order; and that the attributes inhere in this external cause or substratum, viz. matter. But at last it was seen that the existence of matter could not be proved by extrinsic evidence; consequently, now the answer to the idealist argument simply is, that the belief in an external cause of sensations is universal, and as intuitive as our knowledge of sensations themselves. Even Kant allows this (notwithstanding his belief in the existence of a universe of things in themselves, ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... days later, they left with Sal Karone directing them to the Idealist center. They discovered that the term, at the edge of the city, was a mere euphemism. It was a long two-hour trip at the high speed of which the ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... always the Negro has been interested rather in expression than in action; interested in life itself rather than in its reconstruction or reformation. The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intellectual nor an idealist like the Jew, nor a brooding introspective like the East Indian, nor a pioneer and frontiersman like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake. His metier is expression ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... analytic, Aristotle synthetic. The philosophy of Plato arises from the decomposition of a primitive idea into particulars, that of Aristotle from the union of particulars into a general conception. The former is essentially an idealist, the latter ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... been still further introduced also into the realm of mathematics in an amusing manner. Bishop Berkeley, bantered on his idealism by Halley, retorted that he too was an idealist; for his ultimate ratios ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... She was tall, had a fine physique, good intellect, warm affections, and generous sympathies, but it would have astonished her to have been told that she was bringing to the marriage altar more than she received; and however much it may have cost her to be the wife of an unworldly idealist, it was precisely his unworldly idealism that first won her admiration and then ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... the state of his mind. So long as the usual conception of causal dependence is retained, this state of affairs can be used by the materialist to urge that the state of our brain causes our thoughts, and by the idealist to urge that our thoughts cause the state of our brain. Either contention is equally valid or equally invalid. The fact seems to be that there are many correlations of the sort which may be called ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... those who speak of these high conceptions—"They are the dreams of sentimentalists, the will-'o-the-wisp lights that beguile men away from the terra firma; to be trusted and followed by no practical man." "Idealist" is a term of reproach. And justly, from any other point of view than that which the Bible, true to the most penetrating discernment of humanity, opens to us. These ideal forms are not the empty conceits of man's brain, bred from the fumes of his boundless egotism. ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... spite of her worldly common sense, was an idealist at heart. Love matches she believed in thoroughly. If the man had not been a Regular minister, or if he had been a minister in any other town than narrow, gossiping, squabbling Trumet, where families were divided on "religious" grounds, neighbors did not speak because their creeds ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... a number of fragments indicating trouble of mind and hesitation; the sensitiveness of the artist, the delicate, self-tormenting scruples of the lonely idealist, the morbid pride of the young poor man, contending with an impetuous passion and forcing it to surrender, or ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... is its diet, and I will tell you what is its literature, its religious belief, and so forth. Solid, practical John Bull is a mutton, beef, and pudding eater. He drinks strong ale or beer, and thinks beer. He drives fat oxen, and is himself fat. He is no idealist in philosophy. He hates generalization and abstract thought. He is for the real and concrete. Plain, unadorned Protestantism is most to the taste of the middle classes of Great Britain. Music, sculpture, and painting add not their charms ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... that the more "worldly" the writer, the better can he (as a general rule and other things being equal) display this type. It may be that such a writer can regard it analytically, can see what are the elements which make it up; it may be that the deeper reverence felt for it by the idealist is precisely that which draws him toward exaggeration—that his fancy, brooding with closed eyes upon the "thing enskied and sainted," thus becomes inclined to mawkishness . . . it may be, I say, but at the bottom of my heart I do not feel that that is the explanation. One with which I ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Scoffingly he asks Jan: 'Art thou a king?' Simple, yet endlessly deep the reply: 'Art thou a bishop?' Both alike false to their callings—as father of men and shepherd of souls. Yet the one cold, self-seeking sceptic, the other ignorant, passionate, fanatic idealist. 'Why hast thou destroyed the town and my folk?' 'Priest, I have not destroyed one little maid of thine. Thou hast again thy town, and I can repay thee a hundredfold.' The bishop demands with much curiosity how this miserable captive can possibly repay him. 'I know we must die, ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... sparkling as champagne, in which she lives, persuades her to take a too serious and favourable view of her own character. And let it be remembered that with her optimism she still treasures the sentimentality of her Puritan ancestors. She is a true idealist, who loves nothing so dearly as "great thoughts." She delights in the phrases and aspirations which touch the heart more nearly than the head. Though her practice does not always square with her theory, especially in the field of politics, she is indefatigable in the praise of freedom, ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... the men who have done the most for North America did not intend to do so. They set out on the far quest of a crack-brained idealist's dream. They pulled up at a foreshortened purpose; but the unaccomplished aim did more for humanity than ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... A young idealist, aetat four, was selling stars to put in the sky. She had cut them with her own scissors out of red tissue paper, so that she was ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... Mr. Skimpole, in his brilliant study of Bernard Shaw, is quite correct when he says 'the whole case against Chesterton, of course, is that he is a Romantic.' Why is it a something against him that he chooses to be an idealist? Because, says Mr. Skimpole, 'he does not seem to have grasped the fact that the most important difference between the Real and the Ideal aspects of anything is that while the Ideal is permanent and unchangeable as an angel, the Real requires an everlasting circle of changes.' I am rather ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... any transcendental idealist who reads this article ought to discern in the fragmentary utterances which I have quoted thus far, the note of what he considers the truer dialectic profundity. He ought to extend the glad hand of fellowship to Mr. Blood; and if ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... quotation: the fine furniture and the fine company faded, and he saw only the soul of a fellow-idealist to which these things ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... given her the child. But Waythorn knew how many ambiguities such a verdict might cover. The mere fact that Haskett retained a right over his daughter implied an unsuspected compromise. Waythorn was an idealist. He always refused to recognize unpleasant contingencies till he found himself confronted with them, and then he saw them followed by a special train of consequences. His next days were thus haunted, and he ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... the matter of this difference before us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a fine intemperance, will ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... doctrine of the Idealist metaphysicians, that objects are nothing but our sensations and the laws which connect them, has not been generally adopted by subsequent thinkers; the point of most real importance is one on which those metaphysicians are now very generally considered ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... him; another reasons it all out. And contrary to many of our current beliefs, the former is often the man of action; he sees at a flash to the heart of the matter, and gets things done. His thought, his activity, is vivid; and his words are likely to be so as well. The idealist, if he be broadminded, and not merely sentimental, is indeed likely to be the practical man. And the type of mind that is made manifest to us by these great non-Aryan languages and their forms, is the former. Of course idealism in its decadence becomes negative, inactive, self-consuming and no ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... his moral judgments always in prospect, why should Bradley, or any idealist, have pursued ethical studies at all? Since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite consciousness, which must know both good and evil in order to merge and to transcend them, he could hardly nurse any intense enthusiasm for a different complexion to be given to ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Englishwoman in France had its humour. But David did not see that point of it. He flushed hotly, and with difficulty held an angry tongue. However, he was possessed with an inward dread—the dread of the idealist who sees his pleasure as a beautiful whole—lest they should so quarrel as to spoil the visit and the new experience. Under this curb he controlled himself, and presently, with more savoir vivre than he ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... idealist, his mind held spellbound by the great social problems which were causing the upheaval of a whole country, he had not yet had the time to learn the sweet lesson which Nature teaches to her elect—the lesson of a great, a true, human and passionate love. To him, at present, Juliette ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... commission has been held by various kinds of author since the beginning of history, and manifold are the lessons that have been recommended to the world by their authority; now epic, now courtly and idealist lyric, romantic drama, pedantic tragedy, funeral orations, analytical novels. They are not all amusing, and not all their prices are more than the rate of an old song. But they all have a value as trophies, as monuments ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... had the makings of a dangerous flirt, he decided, though, at present, she was only feeling her way. Time would develop her powers and then, God help the young idiots who would lose their heads! Most of all, God help her fool-husband—the besotted idealist! In a few years, Joyce Meredith would be no better than most lovely women in the East—notably such as flourished in the hill ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... kind," said the Princess. "I would not think of delaying the happy event to which Mile. Moriaz so eagerly looks forward. What a beautiful girl she is! I dare not ask you what is her fortune. You are, I can see, an idealist. You do not trouble yourself with matters of money. But oh, you poor idealists," she whispered, leaning over him with a friendly air, "you always come to grief ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... indifference to brains without beauty, with all the diverted passion of her nature), Aimee von Erkel, who was persistent, incisive, and so alarmed at the prospect of all the men in the world being killed, that she would have hastened peace on any terms; Princess Starnwoerth, a Socialist and idealist, a brilliant and persuasive speaker, to whom war was the ultimate horror; Johanna Stueck, whose revolt had been deep and bitter long before the war and who was one of Gisela's fervent disciples and aides—these and six others were sent on one pretense or another into ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... maintenance of the strong government of the Norman kings; and from his loyalty to them he never swerved, serving them with wise counsel and with all the resources at his command. Less of a theologian and idealist than his successor Anselm, more of a lawyer and statesman, he could never have found himself, for another thing, in that attitude of opposition to the king which fills so much of ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... not know how to place him, nor what to say of him. If there was an idealist among the men concerned in this insurrection it was he, and if there was any person in the world less fitted to head an insurrection it was he also. I never could "touch" or sense in him the qualities which other ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... well. For, while the Intelligence that Socrates preached differed as much from the volage and voluptuous Zeus as the God of Christendom differs from the Jahveh of Job, yet, in a divergence so wide, an idealist, very poor except in ideas; a teacher killed by those who knew not what they did; a philosopher that drained the cup without even asking that it pass from him; a mere reformer, though dangerous perhaps ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... original: but the substance of them, seen through Mdme. Dacier's version, acted powerfully on the poet's sympathetic intellect. In fact, although at the time he had adopted the conclusions of materialism, he was at heart all through his life an idealist. Therefore the mixture of the poet and the sage in Plato fascinated him. The doctrine of anamnesis, which offers so strange a vista to speculative reverie, by its suggestion of an earlier existence in which our knowledge ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... had the sense of lifting a tangible veil, of gaining a glimpse of the hidden personality—not the half-sceptical, pleasant, friendly Blake of the boy's acquaintance, but Blake the dreamer, the idealist who sought some grail of infinite holiness figured in his own imagination, zealously guarded from the scoffer and the worldling. A swift desire pulsed in her to share the knowledge of this quest—to see the face of the knight illumined for his adventure—to ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... bulkier if less important than that which it receives; and only the closest analysis will enable us to separate these two elements. Yet this machinery of apperception—humbling though its realization must be to the eager idealist—does not merely confuse the issue for us; or compel us to agnosticism as to the true content of religious intuition. On the contrary, its comprehension gives us the clue to many theological puzzles; whilst its existence enables us to lay hold of supersensual ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... consideration, unmentionable by the recruiting sergeants and war orators, which must nevertheless have helped them powerfully in procuring soldiers by voluntary enlistment. The happy home of the idealist may become common under millennial conditions. It is not common at present. No one will ever know how many men joined the army in 1914 and 1915 to escape from tyrants and taskmasters, termagants and shrews, none of whom are any the less irksome when they happen by ill-luck ...
— O'Flaherty V. C. • George Bernard Shaw
... fill up the gaps in his knowledge. His familiar stream of talk was very different: it discarded affectation, and had a directness, a vigour, which never left one in doubt as to his actual views of life. How melody of any kind could issue from a nature so manifestly ignoble might puzzle the idealist. Alma, who had known a good many musical people, was not troubled by this difficulty; in her present mood, she submitted to the arrogance of success, and felt a pleasure, an encouragement, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... truth and of virtue, their perpetual aspiring to the loftiest height of knowledge and of excellence, much more than in their positive doctrines, lies the secret of their charm and of their unfailing power. Plato is often styled an idealist. But this is true of the spirit rather than of the form of his doctrine; for strictly he is an intense realist, and differs from his great pupil, Aristotle, far less in his mere philosophical method than in his lofty ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... poet and idealist, and thus akin to the Romanticists—though he lacks their perfection of diction—in his feeling for the beauty of atmospheric effects, and also in his enthusiasm for music, which he loved passionately. The description of Montriveau's emotions when the cloistered ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... and to give it a higher meaning, just as the more thoughtful of the poets doubtless assisted the idealising tendency of fifth-century art. And it might well seem that, for example, Plato's theory of ideas supplies a more satisfactory basis for an idealist art than any other system, since it might be maintained that the true artist represents not the material object which he sees before him, but the ideal prototype of which it is but a faint and inadequate ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... freedom more than escape from it—these pioneers of the greatest political reform which history recounts. Year after year the task has been carried forward until the time has come when "new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth," and the idealist and the reformer are supplanted in our movement by the politician. Our cause has passed beyond the stage of academic discussion and has entered the realm of practical politics. The time has come when our organized machinery must be political in its character and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... and their yellow metal are the raw material, which Genius may as well use to pave its way through life," said Zegota. "Lotys, you are too much of an idealist!" ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... with one hand. "Your name makes little difference. You've used many. But you are an idealist. Your killings were necessary to bring justice to the places you visited. By now you're almost a legend among the human worlds. I'd like to talk more with ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... be still bound by the limits of thought, still unable to refute the arguments of pure idealism. The more completely the materialistic position is admitted, the easier is it to show that the idealistic position is unassailable, if the idealist confines himself within the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... for some mind of deep integrity, of real spirituality, to do something for this chaotic, vulgar mass of humanity that is grabbing, feeding, trying to foment war with Mexico. I am sure of it. Why this contempt of his for the idealist, the reformer? He classes all sorts of grotesque, half-insane people with the high-minded thinkers of the East. And now that he is in Congress, and will have to face some of them, Adams for example, I expect him ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... wildest aspects of womanhood only deepened his conviction of the sanctity of the sex. Some called him old-fashioned or quixotic, because he was not altogether in sympathy with modern feministic movements; they called him an idealist, because he had preserved his belief in the sacred mission of women upon earth—his childlike faith in the purity of their souls. They were a humanizing influence, the guardian angels of mankind, the inspirers, the mothers, the protectors of innocence. It pleased him to think ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... to us again one of those ragged ones, one of 'the poor in spirit,' the idealist Punin, a character whose portrait challenges Dostoievsky's skill on the latter's own ground. That delicious Punin! and that terrible grandmother's scene with Baburin! How absolutely Slav is the blending of irony and kindness in the treatment of Punin, Cucumber, and Pyetushkov, few ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... labor union is not the impractical dream of an idealist is to be found in the fact that some of the greatest and most successful of the labor organizations have always adhered to the principle of the open shop. In the Pennsylvania coal-mines union and non-union miners labored ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... when he founded, started, this colony, was a true idealist. But success has turned his head, worsened him, since,—as it has done with many a good man before. Now he goes about the country lecturing, on Shakespeare, God, the Devil, or anything else ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... between capital and labor showed plainly in the reception of the news. Capital berated Bonbright; labor was inclined to fulsomeness. Capital called him on the telephone to remonstrate and to state its opinion of him as a half-baked idiot of a young idealist who was upsetting business. Labor put on its hat and stormed the gates of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, seeking for five-dollar jobs. Not hundreds of them came, but thousands. The streets were blocked with applicants, every one eager for that minimum wage. The police ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... for instance at the siege of Scutari, as an artillery officer, and after some years found himself inside the town as Yugoslav Envoy. He is now Minister at Tirana, a delicate post which could not be in better hands. Ljuba Yovanovi['c] was the idealist whose work was to arouse his fellow-countrymen by articles and poems. In the war against Bulgaria he was wounded and in hospital contracted cholera. On the day of his death he wrote to a brother of Ne[vs]i['c], now one of Belgrade's leading lawyers; he was utterly grieved, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... thoughtful. "That depends on what you mean by 'success.' Wealth, for instance, does not necessarily stand for success. You, if I may say so, are a practical idealist, for you have faith in your dream. You have achieved a vision revealed to few men's ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... to devote that streak to Lake," she said. "I did my best for him. But Lake was much too much of a gentleman or an idealist about women, or what you will, to know his business as a lover. And that side of me fell in love, the rest of me protesting, with a man named Caston. It was a notorious affair. Everybody in New York couples my name with Caston. Except when my father ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... the picture we have so far drawn of the author of the Journal. For Amiel is full of contradictions and surprises, which, are indeed one great source of his attractiveness. Had he only been the thinker, the critic, the idealist we have been describing, he would never have touched our feeling as he now does; what makes him so interesting is that there was in him a fond of heredity, a temperament and disposition, which were perpetually reacting against the oppression of the intellect and its accumulations. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... endeavors of the great mass of these earnest people we may speak only with honor and gratitude. Much good work done in that distant year of grace remains with us to-day. Who is more practical than the idealist? If I read history aright, it is only the white-heat of fanaticism which brands a true word into the tough hide of society. A supreme pursuit of one virtue by the few can alone neutralize a supreme devotion by the many to the opposite vice. Let us rejoice that some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... Here the idealist created his elysium and came as close to making one as the curious animal he sought to benefit would permit. The King set forth in writing the Grant that it was due "the memory and merits of Sir William Penn in divers services, ...
— The Tryal of William Penn and William Mead • various
... of life to fight. Society, summoning all her children to one banquet, arouses ambition in the very morning of life. Youth is robbed of its charm, and generous thoughts are corrupted by mercenary scheming. The idealist would fain have it otherwise, but intrusive fact too often gives the lie to the fiction which we should like to believe, making it impossible to paint the young man of the nineteenth century other than he is. Lucien imagined that his scheming was entirely prompted by good feeling, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... face, slightly older than when he was an employee of Job Doane of the hardware shop, was still that of the idealist, the lover of men. Yet there was a something added. Perhaps his well-fitting clothes gave him the new ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... higher ones, from the sensuous to the spiritual, from enjoyment to work, from creed to deed, from self to humanity—this is the moving thought of Goethe's completed Faust. The keynote is struck in the "Prologue in Heaven." Faust, so we hear, the daring idealist, the servant of God, is to be tempted by Mephisto, the despiser of reason, the materialistic scoffer. But we also hear, and we hear it from God's own lips, that the tempter will not succeed. God allows the devil free play, because he knows that he will frustrate his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... idealism. He preferred frank brutality to such lying. But at heart he was more of an idealist than the rest, and he had not—he could not have—any more real enemies than the brutal realists whom he thought ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... let the woman be her own worst enemy; I was big enough to overlook her unfortunate attitudes and see through the cranky exterior to the worthy idealist and true woman beneath. I was interrupted in my thoughts by Miss Francis ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... upon "The Heather Field" it cannot be denied that it was a popular success and that it was praised by critics whose judgment is discerning. It is perhaps because it is a variant of the old theme of the war between man the idealist and woman the materialist that it so appealed to young men, troubled themselves as to whether to follow their star or to accept the chains that; wife and children impose. It was enough for the audience that witnessed ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... pseudo-philosophy arises from my having read Arnold Bennett's article in to-day's Daily News, and also from a perusal of Hudson's "Herbert Spencer." Bennett is just an idealist, but in dealing with those cruel realities of which I have spoken, he seems to me a child. Any attempt to dissociate the acts of the German Government from the views of the German people—in other words to assume that a great part of the latter want peace—is absurd. Look at France in ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... motions may be transmuted into thought; or, as in effort, outgoing thought may be transmuted into motion. But alike in both cases, on the nature of that transmutation, the very thing we most desire to know, we get no light. In regard to this crucial point no one, materialist or idealist, can offer a suggestion. We may of course, in fault of explanation, restate the facts in clumsy circumlocution. Calling thought a kind of motion, we may say that in action it propagates itself from the mind through the brain into the outer world; while in the ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... An impractical idealist lives in the silence with beautiful pictures of "how he desires to be when married." When he gets married there isn't a single detail of his daily experience which is like his mental picture. He is sadly disappointed and ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... fashions have been put away and taken out a thousand times. Most people have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions, but such people, least of all, are fitted to find in them that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist when the old moods and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... still was the appearance on the scene of Germany's most transcendent genius, who came to lay the homage of his intellect at the feet of him whom he considered at the moment, and long after, not only to be the greatest power, but the greatest idealist, in the world. Goethe and Napoleon met twice—once in Erfurt, once in Weimar. On both occasions it was the man of arms who sought out the man of letters—par nobile fratrum. They talked of Werther and his sorrows; the Emperor appreciatively, and with a knowledge ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... represented his own creed; though this was often accentuated in the sense of a more personal privilege, and a perhaps less poetic mystery, than the poem conveys. The Evangelical Christian and the subjective idealist philosopher were curiously blended in ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... to keep his roots deep in the past, and he tempers all his creative insights with a judicious mixture of the experience of the past and the ideas which time has made sacred. He will not satisfy the idealist who wants leaps, and he will not please the radical in any period; but if he is brave, wise, and sincere, and, withal, possessed of rare gifts of interpretation and unusual powers of leadership, he may be able to shape the course of history no less effectively, perhaps more surely, than ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... says, "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so," he confesses himself an idealist—that is, one to whom ideas are not images or opinions, but the avenues of life. They garner up happiness and they store the harvest of pain; they make the "majestical roof fretted with golden fire" and the "pestilential cloud." The basis on which Hamlet's happiness had rested had ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... indifferent as to his private character. Nor could he politically have made a wiser choice; for it was Talleyrand who made the Concordat with the Pope, the Treaty of Luneville, and the Peace of Amiens. Napoleon wanted a practical man in the diplomatic post,—neither a pedant nor an idealist; and that was just what Talleyrand was,—a man to meet emergencies, a man to build up a throne. But even Napoleon got tired of him at last, and Talleyrand retired with the dignity of vice-grand elector of the empire, grand chamberlain, and Prince of Benevento, together with ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... returned a few minutes later, however, the idealist seemed to have simmered down into the materialist, the extraordinary to have become merged in the ordinary, for he found his famous ally no longer studying the beauties of Nature, but giving his whole attention to the sordid commonplaces of man. He was ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... year of 1852—worked, studied and dreamed by himself under the direction, first of his mother, recently of his tutor, Monsieur Ludmillo, the son of a Polish exile, educated in France, and only permitted to re-enter Russia upon the death of his father, in 1847. This man, a gentle, melancholy idealist, like so many of his race, had early taken a sincere liking for his young pupil, nor found, as the years passed, anything special to complain of in Ivan's performance of his tasks or his obedience during their many hours together. Of all, in short, who had to do with the young Prince, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... long wondered, why I've not yet been put into a madhouse—why I'm still wearing this coat instead of a strait-waistcoat? I still have faith in justice, in goodness. I am a fool, an idealist, and nowadays that's insanity, isn't it? And how do they repay me for my honesty? They almost throw stones at me and ride rough-shod over me. And even my nearest kith and kin do nothing but try to get the ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... who set the torch to the powder. This young lawyer and pamphleteer, a brilliant writer, a generous {65} idealist, almost the only reasoned republican in Paris at that day, was one of the most popular figures in the Palais Royal crowds. On the 12th of July, standing on a cafe table, he announced the news of the dismissal of Necker, the movement of the troops on Paris, and with passion ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... mother and child to-day is practically never parental. It is personal—which means, it is critical and deliberate, and adult in provocation. The mother, in her new role of idealist and life-manager never, practically for one single moment, gives her child the unthinking response from the deep dynamic centers. No, she gives it what is good for it. She shoves milk in its mouth as the clock strikes, she shoves it to sleep when the milk is swallowed, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... the blind to look out. The moon would be full upon the lake, and the calm breath, pure light, and the deep voice, harmonized well with the thought of the Flemish hero. When will this country have such a man? It is what she needs—no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens while his feet step firmly on the ground, and his hands are strong and dexterous in the use of human instruments. A man, religious, virtuous, and—sagacious; a man ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... case was even more curious than the three I have given. A very bad but beautiful woman had married a man younger than herself, an idealist, chivalrous, and quite unusually moral. After a few years of hell the marriage had to be ended. In kindness, and because she was a woman, the man said she had better divorce him. Desertion was proved, though it had not taken place. Trouble arose from the necessary ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... screaming blasphemies which my Great Example failed to convince anybody that she had discovered in Huxley. In brief, he did not conform to the unscientific idea of what a scientific man must be like. He was a cultured idealist. I will try to recall a few of the marvellous things he said ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... instead of by the special act and favour of God. As beauty, again, he shows forth the enthusiasm evoked by the ideal in the image of the charioteer of the white and black horses mastering them to the goal of love. In these various ways the first idealist thought out these distinctions of truth and beauty as having a real community, though a divided life in the mind and heart; and, as he developed,—and this is the significant matter,—the poet in him controlling his speech told ever more eloquently of the charm with which beauty draws the soul ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... type—a strange and modern type—of the feminine fanatic who allows political difference to interfere not only with private friendship but with the nearest and most sacred ties; and his philosopher's soul revolted. Let a woman talk politics, if she must, like this eager idealist girl—not with the venom and gall of the half-educated politician. "As if we ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fiery, implacable. He loved Poland, he hated her oppressors. There is no doubt he idealized his country and her wrongs until the theme grew out of all proportion. Politically the Poles and Celts rub shoulders. Niecks points out that if Chopin was "a flattering idealist as a national poet, as a personal poet he was an uncompromising realist." So in the polonaises we find two distinct groups: in one the objective, martial side predominates, in the other is Chopin the moody, mournful and morose. But in all the Polish element pervades. Barring the mazurkas, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker |
