"Idealistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The contrast between the Greeks and the Romans is marked in almost every particular. The Greeks were an imaginative, subjective, artistic, and idealistic people, with little administrative ability and few practical tendencies. The Romans, on the other hand, were an unimaginative, concrete, practical, and constructive nation. Greece made its great contribution to world civilization ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Self is there. The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view of their ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... that is to say, that the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the purpose itself. A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of the end. It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper. It never sufficiently realizes that in the transition from theoretic purpose to practical realization a significant transformation may occur. We do not come to grips with the facts. What we are ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... think is the real and important application of the scientific spirit to the solution of educational problems. You will readily see that it does not do away necessarily with our ideals. It is not necessarily materialistic. It is not necessarily idealistic. Either side may utilize it. It is a quite impersonal factor. But it does promise to take some of our educational problems out of the field of useless and wasteful controversy, and it does promise to get men of conflicting ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... 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 represented the perfect embodiment of his most idealistic dreams. She stood in his mind so far above him that if she proved unattainable, he would scarce have suffered. It ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... ignorance, leads to impatience with the natural order, to a demand for impossible conditions of existence, and to an inaptitude not only for the arbitrary bondage of law but even for the wholesome and necessary bonds of human social life. It is always a hard lesson for the young and idealistic that in order to command Nature we must obey her; it can only be learnt through contact with life and by the attainment ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was more or less like that of the other boys of his city and station, except that he gave evidence of a certain precocity and nervousness of action and speech which distinguished him as an enthusiastic and somewhat idealistic boy. ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... base, and now in this hospital—an intermediate stage—waiting for the draft with which he would be going into Palestine, all had been very nice to him, friendly, and as it were indulgent; so might schoolboys have treated some well-intentioned dreamy master, or business men a harmless idealistic inventor who came visiting their offices. He had even the feeling that they were glad to have him about, just as they were glad to have their mascots and their regimental colours; but of heart-to-heart simple comradeship—it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... or Love, almost invariably attracts opposites, and for their own good. A visionary, idealistic woman is drawn to a practical man, where, kick and fuss and despise each other as they will, she is bound to become more practical and he more idealistic. They exchange qualities in spite of themselves; each is an unconscious agent in rounding out the ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... who looks for no more in a book than that it should satisfy the natural tendencies of his own mind, wants the writer to respond to his predominant taste, and he invariably praises a work or a passage which appeals to his imagination, whether idealistic, gay, licentious, melancholy, dreamy, or positive, as "striking" or ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... philosophy, it has brought about changes in our attitude to ethics, to social study, to religion, to law, and to life in general. Psychiatric work has undoubtedly intensified the hunger for a more objective and yet melioristic and really idealistic philosophical conception of reality, such as has been formulated in the ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... felt a thrill of commingled apprehension and satisfaction at the fact that Kate Barrington, late of Silvertree and its gossiping, hectoring, wistful circles, was in the foreground. She had had an Idea which could be utilized in the high service of the world, and the most utilitarian and idealistic public in the world had seized ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... hours of labor. With the physical man thus properly nourished and developed; the intellectual and spiritual man, will for the first time in history, have the necessary conditions in which to expand, blossom and bear fruit. Under such circumstances, life in the country will be both altruistic and idealistic. By comparison, life in cities will become a hardship which few will care to choose. The few, it may be taken for granted, will be so bound to the wheels of Mammon that they cannot ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... Francis down with an ironclad contract. Agents; dealerships; distributors and a general salesmanager, Albert Weener, at the top. Incorporate. Get it all down in black and white and signed by Miss Francis right away. For her own good. An idealistic scientist, a frail woman, protect her from the vultures who'd try to rob her as soon as they saw what the Metamorphizer would do. Such a woman wouldnt have any business sense. I'd see she got a comfortable living out of it and free her from responsibility. Then she ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... himself legally in the wrong, as Anselm did, and he would have considered carefully whether the good to be gained for the cause of the Church from a quarrel with the king would outweigh the evil. Anselm, however, was a man of the idealistic type of mind, who believed that if he accepted as the conditions of his work the evils with which he was surrounded, and consented to use the tools that he found ready to his hand, he had made, as another reformer of somewhat the same type once said of the constitution of the United States ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... we reckon accurately on women's loyalty to women, but we likewise realized that our appeal touched a certain spiritual, idealistic quality in the western woman voter, a quality which is yearning to find expression in political life. At the idealism of the Woman's Party her whole nature flames into enthusiasm and her response is immediate. She gladly transforms a narrow partisan ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... that the evolution was to be brought about which has led the Hegelian system, severely idealistic in its commencement, to favor at length the revolts of matter run mad. And this evolution is only natural after all. If the universe is the development of an idea, and not the work of an intelligent ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... are evidently a disciple of Des Cartes. Your theory is based on the idealistic principle, 'I think, therefore I am.' I confess that I could never be satisfied with mere subjective consciousness on a point which involves the cooperation of another mind. Nothing less than the most positive and luminous testimony ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... twenty dollars per column and mebbe a 'boost.' I can't wait, you can't wait! It's up to us to strike now! If these men knew you have their names they'd hike for Texas or the high seas. Come now! Everybody tells me you're one of these idealistic highbrow rangers who care more for the future of the West than most natural-born Westerners. What's your plan? If you'll yoke up with me we'll run these devils into the earth and win great fame, and you'll be doing the ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... one feels certain enough that amid the jolts and jars and shocks of actual life even the most idealistic of philosophers leave their logic to shift for itself and just drift on as they may in the groove of traditional usages or the track ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... her nature. Already in her twelfth or thirteenth year she looked after the father's household, to the admiration of all who beheld her. A divine blessing seemed to accompany everything which she undertook; everything increased under her hands. She could in passing enjoy herself well in the idealistic dreams of the poets and of her acquaintances, but her own peculiar ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... "sensational" philosophy, which had degenerated in the school of Priestley at home, and in that of Condillac abroad, into a system of gross and revolting Materialism. For the same reason, we may now, I think, anticipate a speedy reaction the other way,—a reaction against the extravagances of "idealistic" and "transcendental" speculation, and a tendency towards a more practical and matter-of-fact philosophy. This tendency, if guided by the true spirit of the Baconian method, may give a powerful impulse to Inductive Science in all its departments; ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... the Typical American was troubled about his soul. Rooted firmly in the church-going past, he carried the banner of the Lord, Democracy, idealistic, bent on perfecting that old incorrigible Man, he cuts off the right hand that offends him and votes for prohibition and woman suffrage, a Round Head ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... an ideal of the man he would have wished to be. The poet in "Alastor", Laon in the "Revolt of Islam", Lionel in "Rosalind and Helen", and Prince Athanase, are in fact a remarkable row of self-portraits, varying in the tone and scale of idealistic treatment bestowed upon them. Later on in life, Shelley outgrew this preoccupation with his idealized self, and directed his genius to more objective themes. Yet the autobiographic tendency, as befitted a poet of the highest lyric type, remained ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... are several kinds of logic. This is the enlightened kind. America is all right. It is this country that is dangerous, with her idealistic conception of legality. The social spirit of this people is wrapped up in scrupulous prejudices, and that is fatal to our work. You talk of England being our only refuge! So much the worse. Capua! ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... we plunge into that Serbonian bog—the controversy between the Realistic and the Idealistic academicians—I think the first thing to decide is what you want Kenelm to be hereafter. When I order a pair of shoes, I decide beforehand what kind of shoes they are to be,—court pumps or strong walking shoes; and I don't ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... They revised the Grange circulars to appeal to the farmer's pocketbook, emphasizing the fact that the order offered a means of protection against corporations and opportunities for cooperative buying and selling. This practical appeal was more effective than the previous idealistic propaganda: two additional Granges were established before the end of the year; a state Grange was constituted early in the next year; and by the end of 1869 there were in Minnesota thirty-seven active Granges. ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... mistrust of masculine idealism, ever prevents them from speaking in its entirety. And their tact is unerring. We could not stand women speaking the truth. We could not bear it. It would cause infinite misery and bring about most awful disturbances in this rather mediocre, but still idealistic fool's paradise in which each of us lives his own little life—the unit in the great sum of existence. And they know it. They are merciful. This generalisation does not apply exactly to Mrs Fyne's outburst of sincerity in a matter in which neither my affections nor my vanity ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... romantically, or go off on theories because they sound large and subversive. Think of practical points, as well as of ultimate principles. Both, to my mind, are on the same side. I'm not asking you to sacrifice right for expediency, or expediency for right. I don't say 'Be sensible,' or 'Be idealistic.' We've ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... war, whenever it comes, will find them more inclined for true friendship, for frank understanding, than they have ever been yet, less critical of national failings, less clearsighted for national faults. The brotherhood of man, which the idealistic Russian sighs for, may only be a far away dream, but the brotherhood of those who speak one language, have one great aim, and fight side by side for freedom against force, law against lawlessness, justice against ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... MacDowell was singularly impressionable, imaginative, idealistic and romantic. He loved the beauty, grandeur and solemnity of Nature not only for its outward aspect, but for what he thought it symbolised. His sensitive character made him extremely sympathetic towards human nature, although he never used his ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... painted peasants and little else. One was the artist of whom we shall speak, and the other was Jules Breton. One was realistic, the other idealistic. Both did wonderful work, but Millet painted the peasant, worn, patient steadfast, overwhelmed with toil; Breton, a peasant full of energy, ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... in a tone of good-fellowship, which was not without its sting to the idealistic republican, "you must take up a better business than selling yesterday's 'Tribune.' That won't pay here, you know. Come along to our office and I will see if something can't ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... exaggerate the prevailing fashion of exactly reproducing what any one can see and hear, may find themselves outbid and overpowered on this ground by illustration in line and colour. In this direction, indeed, lies the danger of extreme Realism. It wages war against Romance, which subsists upon idealistic conceptions of noble thought and action; it pretends to hold up a true mirror to society, because it reflects faithfully and without discrimination, like a photograph, the street, the club, or the drawing-room, and arranges dramatically the commonplace talk of everyday ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... 'must be based on the objectivity of the values revealed in his experience, and brokenly realised there. Man does not make values any more than he makes reality.' Our contention is that the world of values, which forms the content of idealistic thought and aspiration, is the real world; and in this world we find our ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... to find bitter criticism of this policy from the outside, and depressing to find the enemies of watchful waiting "boring from within" through his own Cabinet officers. Lindley Garrison, his own Secretary of War, had no sympathy for this idealistic policy. His only antidote for what was happening in Mexico was force and intervention and he honourably urged this view upon the President, but without succeeding in bringing about the consummation ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... in that the marriage of Lord and Lady Baltimore had been an almost idealistic one. They had been very much in love with each other. All the hosts of friends and relations that belonged to either side had been delighted with the engagement. So many imprudent marriages were made, so many disastrous ones; but here was a marriage ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... such points, yet do so advisedly, in order to emphasise and make clearer the essential thesis of this portion of my paper—that every scientific survey involves a geographic and historic exploration of origins, but that of the still unwritten chapter, that the far-reaching forelook, idealistic yet also critical, which is needful to any true and enduring contribution to social service, is prepared for by habitually imaging the course of evolution in ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... this great building there stands the majestic figure of a woman representing Liberty. It was no idealistic thought or accident of vision which gave us Liberty prefigured by a woman. It is the great soul of the universe pointing the final revelation yet to come to humanity, the prophecy of the ages—the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... on this scale does it stand? Coordinately with the idea of toil, does it violate the laws of the universe; do the surfaces thereof reflect the light of day; is the color probable; is the action possible? If under this scrutiny the work fails, its acceptable idealistic expression cannot ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... thunders of the war certainly cannot make the Russian manufacturers and merchants more idealistic than they were in time of peace. In the filling of the numerous orders, inevitable during the mobilization of industry for war needs, the capitalists will, as they are accustomed to, take great care of the interests ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... starts with an assumption of some kind, and without an assumption thought is impossible. This is just as true of the strictest scientific processes as it is of deductive reasoning, and indeed it is interesting to watch the way in which within recent years idealistic philosophy and empirical science have joined hands. Does physical science, then, imply the doctrine of the Trinity? Yes, unquestionably it does, after a fashion, for it starts with an assumption which takes it for ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... same reason that we dress for dinner. It's the system." "The system?" "Yes. What I call Anglicanism. It's a form of idealism. It consists in doing the proper thing." "But why should the proper thing be done?" "That question ought not to be asked. Anglicanism is an idealistic creed. It is anti-utilitarian and anti-rational. It does not ask questions; it has faith. The proper thing is the proper thing, and because it is the proper thing it is done." "At least," he said, "you do not pretend that this is religion?" "No. It has nothing to do with religion. ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... scientific sense) are similarly impotent because they are, in the life of man, subordinate to ends. Consequently, Spinoza was able to write upon Human Freedom with a truth and clarity and force excelling by far all theological, teleological, "free-will," idealistic philosophers from Plato to Josiah Royce. Spinoza was able to write thus because, not in spite of the fact that he placed at the heart of his philosophy the doctrine of necessity; because, not in spite of the fact ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... here and now, in the drab world in which fate has set us. If we cannot hope to turn it into Utopia, let us at least make it as much like Utopia as we can. This, after all, is Plato's message, even in the most idealistic and visionary of his books. The famous passage is ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... middle of the nineteenth century this old austerity and actuality in the Puritan vision had fallen away into two principal lower forms. The first is a sort of idealistic garrulity upon which Bernard Shaw has made fierce and on the whole fruitful war. Perpetual talk about righteousness and unselfishness, about things that should elevate and things which cannot but degrade, about social purity and true Christian ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Germany to accept the principles for which the Allies had fought the war and upon which they were determined that the future government of the world should rest. They were, indeed, not so much a pact of peace as a punishment of war; and an idealistic scheme of government by consent started by imposing on the weaker party conditions with which it could not but violently disagree. Millions of Germans in Alsace-Lorraine, Bohemia, Poland, and East Prussia were transferred to alien domination; ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... am not in the market for that Valley of the Giants, as your idealistic father prefers to call it. Once I would have purchased it for double its value, but at present I am ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... out of Kant's distinction of two worlds and two orders of reason. That distinction issued in a new theory of knowledge. It laid a new foundation for an idealistic construing of the universe. In one way it was the answer of a profoundly religious nature to the triviality and effrontery into which the great rationalistic movement had run out. By it the philosopher gave standing forever to much that prophets and mystics in every age had felt to be true, yet ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... now launched as a profitable and successful star. Like many other conscientious and idealistic interpreters of the drama, she had a great reverence for Shakespeare, and she burned with a desire to play in one of the great bard's plays. Charles Frohman knew this. Then, as always, one of his supreme ambitions in ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... him as an extremely practical person, but no American that I ever met was solely practical. If you watch him closely you will always find that he is doing practical things for an idealistic end. The American who accumulates a fortune to himself, whether it be through corralling railroads, controlling industries, developing mines or establishing a chain of dry-goods stores, doesn't do it for the money only, but because he finds in business the poetry of creating, manipulating, ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... people in the family of an uncle, from whom he received the Spartan training of an Indian youth of that day. The knowledge thus gained of life's realities and the secrets of nature, as well as of the idealistic philosophy of the Indian, he has always regarded as a most ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... My poor idealistic father never realized, oh, my Karl, that when one wants a thing one must fight—to the death. Alex was the apple of his eye, but I was much loved by my mother; perhaps she dreamed a dream about me—I know not, but she determined that I should have all that was ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... side that you're taking up now; I should have everything to gain, and nothing to lose by it. But your mistake is just this, that when you might identify your own interests with the side of the "haves," as I do, you go out of your way to identify them with the side of the "have-nots," out of pure idealistic Utopian philanthropy. You belong by birth to the small and intrinsically weak minority of persons specially gifted by nature and by fortune; and why do you lay yourself out with all your might to hound on the mass of your inferiors ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... been theoretically correct in selecting as they first did the watchword which they had first placed on their banners—"blot out the Manchus and all foreign things." Both had sapped the old civilization to its foundations. But the program they had proposed was idealistic, not practical. One element could be cleared away— the other had to be endured. Had the Boxers been sensible they would have modified their program to the extent of protecting the foreigners, whilst they assailed the Dynasty which had brought them so low. The Court Party, as we have said, seduced ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... of Heraclianus. The methods of the contemporary school of philosophy fascinated him; and, in his endeavour to bring Medicine out of the chaotic welter in which he found it, he attempted—unhappily for the future of science—to use the hyper-idealistic Platonism then dominant in Alexandria, rather than the gradual and orderly induction of Hippocrates, as a bond of union between professional and scientific medicine; a false step for which not even his great services to anatomy and physiology can altogether ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... for the University of Virginia, had attained the rank of captain, had become General Forrest's private secretary, and had written—or largely helped to write—General Forrest's autobiography. He was idealistic, enthusiastic, of an inventive genius, with a really remarkable command of English, and an absorbing love of books. My mother's father was a Barr, from the north of Ireland, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, her mother was a Woodfalk of Jackson County, Tennessee, a Methodist. The members of the ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... on a national scale. Now, brought face to face with the world struggle, many of them revolt against it. They deplore the necessities that lead nations to make war on one another. They supported the late war "to end war." They gave, suffered and sacrificed with a keen, idealistic desire to "make the world safe for democracy." They might as well have sought to scatter light and sunshine ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... see her in my mind's eye, as I used to see the women I read about by my camp fire. You'd never believe either what a queer idealistic chap I can be when I'm mooning about the Bush. Don't you know, Joan'—and his voice got suddenly grave and deep-toned—'you ought to, for you were a bush girl and you've had men-kind out in the Back Blocks—Don't you know that when a man has ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... and adorned the tale with a moral on which Dan set about laying the greatest emphasis. He enjoyed writing, and in the interview he attributed ideas to Bassett that would have been creditable to the most idealistic of statesmen. He based the editorial Bassett had suggested upon the interview; and he wrote half a dozen editorial paragraphs in a vein of caustic humor that the "Courier" affected. In the afternoon he copied his articles ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... given. It is too simple to imagine that the bodily heat is, like the body itself and all its functions, the effect of the life-force that inhabits the body and builds up the body so that the body shall be a fit dwelling-place for itself—this explanation is too simple and too idealistic for modern science, which is less and less disposed, we are told, to invoke the aid of a force of life to account for vital phenomena, although it assumes an attracting force to account for gravitating phenomena, and an electric and chemic force to account for electric and chemic phenomena. Modern ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... that marvellous woman? The Americans puzzle me," he continued. "You are the most practical people on the globe and yet the most idealistic. When I hear of a new religion, I am morally certain that it is ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... enthusiasm, pointed by a slight flavour of irony, made her talk of the mine absolutely fascinating to her visitors, and provoked them to grave and indulgent smiles in which there was a good deal of deference. Perhaps had they known how much she was inspired by an idealistic view of success they would have been amazed at the state of her mind as the Spanish-American ladies had been amazed at the tireless activity of her body. She would—in her own words—have been for them "something of a monster." ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... is idealistic. Everything is as we think it. The world is my idea.... Beyond our faith is naught. Hold the Buddhist to his creed and insist that such logic destroys itself, and he triumphs smilingly, 'Self-destructive! Of course it is. All logic is. That is ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... present administration has sought to respond to modern ideas of commercial intercourse. This policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets. It is one that appeals alike to idealistic humanitarian sentiments, to the dictates of sound policy and strategy, and to legitimate commercial aims. It I is an effort frankly directed to the increase of American trade upon the axiomatic principle that the Government of the United States shall ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... advantage in power and prosperity for the State; commercial, resulting, primarily, from the interchange of goods and the business opportunities of either nation in the other's territory, or from their rivalry in foreign trade; idealistic, the result of comparative development especially in those ideals of political structure which determine the nature of the State and the form of its government. The more obvious of these contacts is the governmental, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... if the old division of more highly developed minds was the true one; if one was either Aristotelian or Platonist, that is to say, if one's tendencies were either scientific or idealistic, there was no doubt on which side of the fight he was arrayed; not that he thought of the two tendencies as antagonistic; and if indeed the scientific mind tended to contemn the idealistic mind, as concerning itself ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... be a woman, engenders devils; the man, trying to be a God, loses paradise and his innocence, for the element of the supernatural intruded upon him and abstracted his thoughts from this earth. These were the half idealistic and half realistic elements from which the three greatest spiritual incarnations of the Evil Spirit sprung up. Luther took the Evil Spirit as a bodily entity, with big horns, fiery eyes, a reddish, protruding ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... judgments in silence, each one by himself, with a little surprise and a great deal of irony. Through a disdainful reaction against the mental condition of the herd they fell back into a kind of egotism, intellectual and artistic egotism, an idealistic sensualism, where the tracked and hunted ego vindicated its rights against human fellowship. Laughable fellowship, which made itself manifest to these adolescents only in the shape of finished murder, one undergone in common! A precocious experience had shriveled their illusions: they had ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... by another, but continuing what is best in the preceding until nothing except what is good remains and universal peace results, thus portraying the displacement of national civilizations by universal ones, from which ultimately an idealistic world policy will result, and the federation ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... the narrow limits of the commonplace, and to whom a cabbage is but a vulgar vegetable, are surprised if they see a beautiful picture painted of one, and say that the artist has idealised it, meaning that he has consciously altered its appearance on some idealistic formula; whereas he has probably only honestly given expression to a truer, deeper vision than they had been aware of. The commonplace is not the true, but only the shallow, view ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... present day in Germany is tending more and more in the direction of Eucken's. Writers such as the late Class and Dilthey, Siebeck, Windelband, Muensterberg, Rickert, Volkelt, Troeltsch —naming but a small number of the idealistic thinkers of the present —are tending in the direction of the new Metaphysic presented by Eucken in the book already referred to as well as in the Kampf ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... directions, he's flowing out over this section of the galaxy without plan, without rhyme or reason. I take that last back, he has reasons all right—some of the screwiest. Religious reasons, racial reasons, idealistic reasons, political reasons, altruistic reasons and ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... of gravest import? Failing to accomplish this are we, for the second time, dogged by a sense of lost opportunity, of needless waste and perplexity, when we too, as adults, see again the dreams of youth in conflict with the efforts of our own contemporaries? We see idealistic endeavor on the one hand lost in ugly friction; the heat and burden of the day borne by mature men and women on the other hand, increased by their consciousness of youth's misunderstanding and high scorn. It may relieve the mind to break forth in moments ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... secondarily. Primarily, he is as alive today as he was when he sauntered through the streets of Rome, because he was so absolutely the type of the well-bred man of the world in all countries and times. He lived seriously in the social world as he found it, and felt no idealistic craving to have it remoulded nearer to the heart's desire. He was satisfied with its pleasures, and at one with its philosophy. Thus he is as much at home in modern Paris or London or New York as in ancient Rome, and ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... philosophers had sought to find the first principle of all things in the elements, and the Pythagoreans in number, or harmony and law, implying an intelligent creator. The Eleatics, who now arose, went beyond the realm of physics to pure metaphysical inquiries, to an idealistic pantheism, which disregarded the sensible, maintaining that the source of truth is independent of the senses. Here they were ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... among the largest I ever saw, of a deep clear grey, rather deeply set, and changing in expression with every impression that passed over her mind. The forehead was wide, and largely developed both in those parts of it which are deemed to indicate imaginative and idealistic power, and those that denote strongly marked perceptive and artistic faculties. The latter perhaps were the more prominently marked. The Indian strain showed itself in the perfect gracefulness of a very slender and elastic figure, and in the exquisite elegance ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... admitted Penelope, "though a trifle idealistic for the twentieth century. Most men," she added drily, "Regard coaling up the fire as a damned nuisance rather ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... them often towards the light. Then they began to fear me, or rather my principles. It was out of my principles, although I was not nominally one of them, that Dartrey admits freely to-day he built up the Democratic Party. He had been working on the same lines for years, a little too much from the idealistic point of view. He needed the formula. I gave it to him. Horlock came into office again and I worked with him for a time. Gradually, however, my position became more and more difficult. In the end he offered me a post in the Cabinet, induced me to resign my own seat, which I admit was a doubtful ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... read Walt twenty-five years ago and although he has drawn upon his intellectual store constantly for more than a quarter of a century the fountain of his genius still is flowing with undiminished volume and the waters are as pure as in the idealistic ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... easier for a man to have doubts upon this subject when he has fallen into the idealistic error of regarding the material world, which seems to be revealed to him, as nothing else than his "ideas" or "sensations" or "impressions." If we will draw the whole "telephone exchange" into the clerk, there seems little ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... mind; according to his bias of class, birth, or training; according to whether he has been formed or deformed by some strong personality whose disciple he has become; according to whether he is a radical or a conservative; according to whether he is the dreamy, idealistic type or whether he hankers after concrete facts; according to whether sociology is a primary interest or only an incidental, more ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... should abandon all her overseas bases. It also turned down the suggestion of an American senator that Russia and the United States should toss for Soviet withdrawal from all Eastern Europe. It denied the appeal of an idealistic Dane who wanted a toss to decide whether Germany should be all Communist or all-Western. It likewise rejected a Swiss proposal that Chiang Kai Shek and Chou En-Lai should toss again, this ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... some immediate influence in checking the activity of the more extreme anti-slavery group and in strengthening the conservative side of the new organisation. Lincoln disapproved entirely of the purpose of Brown and his associates, while ready to give due respect to the idealistic courage of ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... out first in 1878, made millions out of it. Then, apparently alarmed at the possible consequences of his invention, he bequeathed the fortune he had made by it to found international prizes for medical, chemical and physical discoveries, idealistic literature and the promotion of peace. But his posthumous efforts for the advancement of civilization and the abolition of war did not amount to much and his high explosives were later employed to blow into pieces the doctors, chemists, ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... that her latest constructions should inherit this relation to the will; and we shall see that the moral tone and affinity of metaphysical systems corresponds exactly with the primary function belonging to that type of idea on which they are based. Idealistic systems, still cultivating concretions in discourse, study the first conditions of knowledge and the last interests of life; materialistic systems, still emphasising concretions in existence, describe causal relations, and the habits of nature. Thus ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... your most intimate feelings called out from the housetops and discussed in the streets. And remember, please, that Robert is a dreamer—a poet. Of course, in every active expedition there must be some few idealistic, Quixotic souls who have to suffer vicariously for the rest. He is such an one. But that sort of feeling of soreness which comes from the sense of martyrdom is not quite the same as a raw wound on one's own personal score. I do hope I am clear. I try to ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... essential form of any representation, whether time be the father of space or space the father of time, one thing is certain, which is that the efforts of the Kantian or neo-Kantian apriorists and of the pure empiricists and the idealistic empiricists all end in the same darkness; that all the philosophers who have grappled with the formidable dual problem, among whom one may mention indiscriminately the names of the greatest thinkers of yesterday and to-day—Herbert Spencer, Helmholtz, Renouvier, James Sully, Stumpf, James ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... impossible to establish a parallel. The only things these two might have claimed in common were a slackness of trade and a liking for the aromatic Virginia leaf, though Dame Trippew had taken hers in a dainty idealistic powder, and the sergeant took his in realistic plug through the medium of an ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... attempts to say anything along the line of practical advice, since anything that any man can say is nothing more than a very weak dilution of the concentrated thought of the most acute minds of the greatest business people, the most successful material people—yes, and the most idealistic people—who ever lived, the ancient, the mysterious, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... until recently I have only had contempt. I have a delicately constituted nature, loving solitude, and only associating with a few select persons. I have a decided taste for fiction, poetry and music; my temperament is idealistic and religious, with strict conceptions of duty and morality, and aspirations towards the good and beautiful. I detest all that is common and coarse, and yet I can think and act in the way you will learn from the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... taste have until recently been left to the tribunal of public opinion as expressed in social usage; and here, as we have seen, women are generally the judges and executioners. In this, her own field of moral judgment, woman is idealistic and uncompromising. If one of her sisters falls from virtue she will often pursue her unmercifully. If a man, on the other hand, commits a burglary or forgery her sympathy and mercy may make her a very ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... Professor Piccoli. Babbitt had always supposed that Doane associated only with the I. W. W., but now he nodded gravely, as one who knew Lord Wycombes by the score, and he got in two references to Sir Gerald Doak. He felt daring and idealistic and cosmopolitan. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... pages of Gotthelf's writings is no doubt more wholesome for a greater length of time. Auerbach has often been charged with idealizing his peasants too much. It must be admitted that his method and style are idealistic, but, at least in his best works, no more so than is compatible with the demands of artistic presentation. He does not, like Gotthelf, delight in painting a face with all its wrinkles, warts, and freckles, but works more like the portrait painter ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... ignore the absence of their representatives from Washington.(14) This marginal policy did not seem to him a policy of coercion; and though he was beginning to see that the situation from the Southern point of view turned on the right of a State to resist coercion, he was yet to learn that idealistic elements of emotion and of political dogma were the larger part of ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... later someone, probably with very idealistic motives, would force the whole thing into the open. So we're keeping hidden the very fact that our most important equations exist—which is why we didn't ask for help when Meade's detectives finally ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... characteristic example of a singular watchfulness for the minute fact and expression of natural scenery pervading all he wrote—a closeness to the exact physiognomy of nature, having something to do with that idealistic philosophy which sees in the external world no mere concurrence of mechanical agencies, but an animated body, informed and made expressive, like the body of man, by an indwelling intelligence. It was a tendency, doubtless, in the air, for Shelley too is affected by it, and Turner, with the school ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... eagerness, once he has decided a course of action, to carry it into practical effect. The President of the Czecho-Slovak Republic, Thomas G. Masaryk, said that of all the men he had met, "your visionary, idealistic President is by far and away the most intensely practical." One of the Big Four at Paris remarked: "Wilson works. The rest of us play, comparatively speaking. We Europeans can't keep up with a man who travels a straight path with such a swift stride, never looking to right ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... that piously satirised the types and the eccentrics of his day. Malebranche, reconsidering what Descartes had thought and revitalising his conclusions, arranged in his Research after Truth a complete system of spiritualist and idealistic philosophy which he rendered clear, in spite of its depth, and extremely attractive owing to the merits of his powerful and facile imagination and of his rich, copious, and elastic style, that attained the ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... more and more impressed with my companion's remarkable singleness of purpose. Everything was a pretext for some wildly idealistic rhapsody or reverie. Nothing could be seen or said that did not lead him sooner or later to a glowing discourse on the true, the beautiful, and the good. If my friend was not a genius, he was certainly a monomaniac; and I found as great ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... hung in the kiosks or was scanned by scowling men. It became the muttered cry of the street. I am not simple enough to believe that the sinking of the Lusitania of itself "drove Italy into the war." Nations no more than individuals, alas, are idealistic enough to sacrifice themselves simply for their moral resentments. But this fresh example of cynical indifference to the opinion of civilization, just at the critical point of decision for the Italian people, had much to do with the rousing of that war ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... has found many earnest and capable Japanese students. The Imperial University has a strong corps of philosophical instructors. Occidental metaphysical thought, both materialistic and idealistic, has found many congenial minds. Indeed, it is not rash to say that in the thought of New Japan the distinguishing Oriental metaphysical conceptions of the universe have been entirely displaced by those of the West. Christians, in particular, have entirely abandoned the old polytheistic, pantheistic, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... who both before and for several years after Krasinski's marriage was his Egeria, and to whom he inscribed a series of love lyrics and the mystical poem 'Dawn,' in which two exiles on the Lake of Como dream of the resurrection of their nation. The idealistic nature of Krasinski's love for Delphina Potocka, as compared with his infatuation for Mme. Bobrowa, is emphasized by his latest biographer. She was his Beatrice, and the figure of the woman he loved constantly merges in that of his eternal mistress, ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... Idealistic dreamer, say you? In your youth you once felt so? Well, I only pray life's sunset, bowing down my head with snow, Shall not swerve me from my purpose, though the victor-laurels twine In my reach, and if forsaking ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... the news? It seems he's the fellow who has been writing those articles on Socialism and Labour, signing them 'Paul Fiske.' Idealistic rubbish, but of course the Bishop and his ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... York Minster, and various other noble architectural fanes is no longer with us; it has gone, and, apparently, inspiration with it. We can now only construct walls, and put roofs on them—admirable edifices, no doubt, to keep out the rain, but signifying nothing from an artistic or idealistic point of view. And so it is in regard to Japan. Architecture there, considered as an art, is dead. It may be imitated or reproduced, but the reproduction will impose on no person of artistic sensibilities or knowledge, ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... one of those idealistic heads set on broad shoulders characteristic of certain circles in the "nation of poets and philosophers." His ancestors had been scholars, statesmen, and soldiers. The general, his father, was in externals wholly the soldier; but beneath ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... capitals, and relegates equally useful words like senses, experience, fact, logic to lower-case type, one may do it because he is a Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that he is neither. Transcendentalism, like all idealistic movements, had its "lunatic fringe," its camp-followers of excitable, unstable visionaries. The very name, like the name Methodist, was probably bestowed upon it in mockery, and this whole perturbation of staid New England had ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Slinkard was all of these. His observation of himself, and his understanding of himself, were uncommonly genuine in this young and so poetic painter. He had learned early for so young a man what were his special idealistic fervors. He had the true romanticist's gift for refinements, and was working continually toward the rarer states of being out from the emotional into the intellectual, through spiritual application into the proper ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Germany. His party is the "party of humanity," that is the honest and warmhearted enthusiasts who champion middle-class interests under the disguise of "human" objects, without being clear as to the connection of the idealistic phrase ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... idea as an indispensable and determining element of beauty. Beauty, he says, is truth, but it is not historical truth, nor scientific nor reflective truth: it is metaphysical and ideal. "Beauty is the prophet of idealistic truth in an age without faith, hating Metaphysic, and acknowledging only realistic truth." Aesthetic truth is without method and without control: it leaps at once from the subjective appearance to the essence of the ideal. But in compensation for this, it possesses the fascination of conviction, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... century than it was in the nineteenth century. But the republican enthusiasm was also much more alive. If their scepticism was cold, and their faith even colder, their practical politics were wildly idealistic; and if they doubted the kingdom of heaven, they were gloriously credulous about the chances of it coming on earth. In the same way the old pagan republican feeling was much more dead in the feudal darkness of the eleventh or twelfth centuries, than it was even ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Aliotta, The Idealistic Reaction against Science. English translation. Macmillan, 1914, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... interesting one, on the work and character of Origen, the great Alexandrian of the third century A.D., with whom Augustine is contrasted, as in an earlier age we might contrast Seneca with Philo; the Latin writers rhetorical, practical, realistic; the Greek authors idealistic and fervent, apt to see deep moral significance in all human life. And this is really the manner and mental attitude of all the famous Latin fathers: of Lactantius, the clear, precise Ciceronian, whose every page shows the perennial value of the Latin tongue; of Tertullian, the subtle ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... sensations in that moment was pride: sheer pride. He thought, what ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have thought in such circumstances: "She's taken a fancy to me!" Useless to call him a conceited coxcomb, from disgust that he did not conform to a sentimentally idealistic standard! He thought: "She's taken a fancy to me!" And he was not a conceited coxcomb. He exulted in the thought. Nothing had ever before so startled and uplifted him. It constituted the supreme experience of his career as a human being. The delightful and stimulating ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... but the unorthodoxy of his opinions rendered this impossible; and he also studied law only to abandon it. One of the most important forces in this period of his slow preparation was his study of German and his absorption of the idealistic philosophy of Kant, Schelling, and Fichte, of the broad philosophic influence of Goethe, and the subtile influence of Richter. A direct result was his later very fruitful continuation of Coleridge's work in turning the attention of Englishmen ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... * An idealistic monist who long puzzled the philosophers of that time with his denial of the existence of matter, but whose clever argument was finally demolished when the new empiric facts ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... and L., 147 bis, The Waves, a most powerful and original interpretation of the sombre majesty of the sea. For in truth the creed of Realism, whether in literature or in art, involves a fallacy, and the creations of the imaginative and idealistic faculty in man are as real as those which result from the faculty of seeing mean things meanly and coarse things coarsely. Courbet's violent revolutionary nature nearly cost him his life in 1848 and involved him in the Commune in 1871, during which he presided over ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey |
