"Imaginary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I attached too great a value to what may have been a delusion; perhaps my theory rested upon no more solid foundation than the belief that I had seen Karamaneh in the shop of the curio dealer. If her appearance there should prove to have been imaginary, the structure of my theory would be shattered at its base. To-night I should test my premises, and upon the result of my investigations determine ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... south end is Theology, while between them are personifications of Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Music, etc. On the walls, forming a gigantic frieze, are various historical scenes, and figures of celebrated persons real and imaginary, as for instance, the first Nicene Council, the School of Athens, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Cicero, David, Orpheus, etc. The general appearance of this splendid room will be understood from the view (fig. 117). It is lighted by five windows on the east side and seven on the west side, ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... therefore, among men do not exist, it may be properly established and enforced by any neighboring organization that has power to do it, just as wherever there is a group of children they may be justly controlled and governed by their father. It seems equally unnecessary to invent a fictitious and wholly imaginary compact to justify the jurisdiction in the one case as in ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... all the things she would buy and do if she were rich. This was not at all a new employment, for she and her brothers often did it at home, though they always differed widely as to the best way of spending the imaginary fortune. "I would buy mother a light green satin dress and pearls," she thought, "and give father a whole lot of books all bound in scarlet ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... of Howard's immediate left, had been advanced nearly two miles through the thickets to the south to attack an imaginary enemy. Whipple had followed him. Of Slocum's corps, Williams had been sent out "two or three miles," to sweep the ground in his front, and Geary despatched down the plank road "for the purpose of cutting off the train of the enemy, who was supposed to be in retreat ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... my father's study," and with these she wove the most wonderful tales, one story often going on, at every possible interval, for months together. Her lively imagination "filled every region of the wild woods at Stanford with imaginary people. Wherever I saw a few ashes in a glade, left by those who burnt sticks to sell the ashes to assist in the coarse washings in farmhouses, I fixed a hoard of gipsies and made long stories. If I could discern fairy ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... the act of worshiping the mastodon head; but I doubt if this can be said to be idol worship. Can and his family were probably monotheists. The masses of the people, however, may have placed the different natural phenomena under the direct supervision of special imaginary beings, prescribing to them the same duties that among the Catholics are prescribed, or rather attributed, to some of the saints; and may have tributed to them the sort of worship of dulia, tributed to ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... who touched no imaginary hat while he stood in the presence of his mistress, neither swore at her in the stable yard. He looked her straight in the face, and would upon occasion speak—not his mind—but the truth to her. Even his slight mistress ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... truthfulness far to seek. Secretary Hay, indeed, stated in the following words: "The principles which have guided us have been of limpid simplicity. We have set no traps; we have wasted no time in evading the imaginary traps of others. There might be worse reputations for a country to acquire than that of always speaking the truth, and always expecting it from others. In bargaining we have tried not to get the worst of the deal, alway remembering, however, that the best ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... gave life to his adored one? Your hero can always hit a man just where he pleases—vide every novel in Mr C's collection. The hero becomes misanthropical, the heroine maniacal. The former marries an antiquated and toothless dowager, as an escape from the imaginary disgust he took at a sight of a matchless woman; and the latter marries an old brute, who threatens her life every night, and puts her in bodily fear every morning, as an indemnity in full for the loss of the man of her affections. They are ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... excursions and nourishing pemmican high in protein quickly replaced the cloying and messy candybar. We made no profit, but we suffered no loss and the factory was in actual operation so that no snoopers could ever accuse us of selling stock in an enterprise with a purely imaginary existence. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... a most modest, intelligent, compact, hopeful-looking man, who will not revisit you without conquests from his expedition hither. We expect to see much more of him; to instruct him, to learn of him: especially about that real-imaginary locality of "Concord," where a kindly-speaking voice lives incarnated, there is much ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... safe, being commanded on all sides by our guns, and the enemy could make no opposition except with artillery. Moreover, the army would get on its line of railway and could 'advance along the railroad.' This last was a purely imaginary advantage, to be sure, because the railway had no rolling-stock, and was disconnected from the rest of the line by the destruction of the Tugela bridge. But what weighed with the Commander-in-Chief much more than the ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... in—without slamming the door behind him, you may be sure—and drew his small notebook from his inside pocket. With that to consult frequently, he sat down by the window where the failing light was strongest, and proceeded to jot down imaginary figures on the paper he pulled from his coat pocket and unfolded as if it were of no value whatever to him. The piano playing ordered by Jerry ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... internationalism which under the name of brotherhood was nothing but a raid on private property, a scheme of pillage and arson. They allied with themselves imported laborers from Europe, men with everything to gain and nothing to lose, and by magnifying real grievances and inflaming them with imaginary ones, were building out of this material the rank and file ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... superior right to her throne and kingdom: that though her ambassadors and those of her husband, the French king, had signed a treaty, in which they renounced that claim, and promised satisfaction for so great an indignity, she was so intoxicated with this imaginary right, that she had rejected the most earnest solicitations, and even, as some endeavored to persuade her, had incurred some danger, in crossing the seas, rather than ratify that equitable treaty: that her partisans every where had still the assurance ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... "if I may say so without offense, the age (real or imaginary) of the speakers may make a difference in Albuquerque, but with our committee ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... behind and below all these imaginary causes, a real cause for the degeneracy of the race. It may be traced to the long continued disregard of the laws of God in relation to woman, and the retribution is worked out physiologically upon the whole nature of man, reaching every tissue of his body and every ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... so that we will worship a supreme human god, so that we will worship mercy, justice, love and truth, and not have the idea that we must sacrifice our brother upon the altar of fear to please some imaginary phantom. See what Christianity has done for the world! It has reduced Spain to a guitar, Italy to a hand organ and Ireland to exile. That is what religion has done. Take every country in the whole world, and the country that has got the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... when the French Foreign Minister was practically driven out of office by Prussian interference. Why? What had he done? He had done nothing which a minister of an independent state had not the most absolute right to do. He had crossed the imaginary line drawn in French territory by Prussian despotism, and he had to leave. Europe, after enduring this for generations, made up its mind at last that the Hindenburg line must be drawn along the legitimate frontiers of Germany ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... commemorate were said to have happened. The Bacchanalia, for example, and other festivals, were established long after the fabulous events to which they refer. The priests of Juno and Venus were not appointed by those imaginary deities, but arose in some after-age, and are therefore no evidence whatever to the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... a French critic said, that part at least of the Convito must almost certainly have been written after the date in which Dante's conversion is represented as having taken place. Nor is it an answer to say that, the action of the Commedia being purely imaginary, we need pay no attention to dates. For one thing, Dante is extremely careful, and with more success than any one without his marvellous "visualising" power could hope for, to avoid anything like an anachronism in ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... junction with the line to Pierrefitte. The great Roman Catholic Pilgrimage, having now quite eclipsed Betharram, much visited formerly as a shrine. The grotto where the Virgin is supposed to have appeared is by the riverside. An admirable panorama represents the scene at one of these imaginary apparitions of the Virgin—known as Notre Dame de Lourdes, and always represented in that connection with a blue sash. Five and twenty years and superstition have transformed Lourdes from a little village into a fair-sized town, overloaded with hotels, of which the traveller ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Pompeian house as a model of something that might be done in the way of a seaside cottage in our own country, and we talked up a little paper that might be done for Every Other Week, with pretty architectural drawings, giving an account of our imaginary realisation ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of their cruelty is recorded of a bailie named Landenburg, who publicly reproved a peasant for living in a house above his station. On another occasion, having fined an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of Melchi, a yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's messenger jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if he lost his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, that if he wanted to use a plough he had better draw it himself, being only a vile peasant. To this insult Henry's son Arnold responded ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... life, the use of fire, of the bow and arrow, the barbing of hooks, and so forth, we understand them at once. Nothing can be more natural than that man should believe in an original inventor of the arts, and should tell tales about the imaginary discoverers if the real heroes be forgotten. So far all is plain sailing. But when the savage goes on to say that he who taught the use of fire or who gave the first marriage laws was a rabbit or a crow, or a dog, or a beaver, or a spider, then we are at once face to face with ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... tell you," she answered. "I wish I could say that I knew. Half the night the three of us have talked and wondered. I have heard plenty of theories as to a second life on some imaginary planet, but I never heard of the dead who lived ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... carefully negativing every date and fact printed in it, they were sure to hit the truth somewhere. A ready pen was the thing, and he begged the committee to be allowed to present specimens of criticisms of imaginary concerts, written by the graduating ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... of a succession of these imaginary potentates, from the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the Jews have ever been strenuous in maintaining, partly to aggrandize their nation, and partly to deprive Christians of the benefit of an argument furnished by the prophecy of Jacob, concerning the termination ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... old song-books, either under real or imaginary names. Captain Cuttle gives 'Stanfell's Budget' as the authority for one of his songs, and this was probably the song-book that formed one of the ornaments which he placed in the room he was preparing for Florence Dombey. Other common titles are the 'Prentice's Warbler,' which Simon Tappertit ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... her," she answered. "She has such brilliant prospects—it is so unlikely. You think me unsympathetic—oh, I'm not!" Again she let her fingers rest on his arm. "I feel so much with you that I daren't offer imaginary hopes. She belongs to such a different world, try, try to ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... is no imaginary character. He is a real flesh-and-blood Chinese boy, living in San Francisco, and much interested in the new and many sided life going on about him. So we are glad to give you, in his own words, a few of his observations on ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 06, June, 1884 • Various
... he answered, promptly. "And so far as I can see, that is the principal reason why your friends, Aurora W. Chime and the Reverend Wilbur Short, and the rest of them, condemn it. They object to the evident pleasure of the fisherman more than to the imaginary suffering ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... conspiracy grew more exaggerated and wild. Informers sprang up on every hand, each with a more terrifying story than the preceding. One of these witnesses, Titus Oates by name, a most infamous person, gained an extraordinary notoriety in exposing the imaginary plot. Many Catholics, convicted solely on the testimony of perjured witnesses, became victims of the delusion ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... else to delight the sight in heaven but the great beauty of the glorified bodies, that would be an excessive bliss, particularly the vision of the Humanity of Jesus Christ our Lord...." "This vision," she continues, "though imaginary, I did never see with my bodily eyes, nor, indeed, any other, but only with the eyes of the soul." And thus it is that in heaven the soul does not see God only, but everything in God, or rather it sees that everything ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... which are not proportional, it is best to take some imaginary examples, and then to apply the lesson to an actual one. A series of titrations of a copper solution by means of a solution of potassic cyanide ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... UTOPIA.—The most prominent literary figure of this period is Sir Thomas More. The work upon which his fame as a writer mainly rests is his Utopia, or "Nowhere," a political romance like Plato's Republic or Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. It pictures an imaginary kingdom away on an island beneath the equinoctial in the New World, then just discovered, where the laws, manners, and customs of the people were represented as being ideally perfect. In this wise way More suggested ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... quite indispensable elements of his performance; he must be really a more complete actor than a great tragedian need be. The expression of passion and emotion appears to be an interpretation of nature, and may be forcibly rendered sometimes with but little beyond the excitement of its imaginary experience on the actor's own sensibility; while a highly educated perfection is requisite for the actor who, in a brilliant and polished representation of the follies of society, produces by fine and delicate ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Jims and Bills were taken too suddenly to laugh, and the laugh having been lost, as Bland Holt, the Australian actor would put it in a professional sense, the audience had time to think, with the result that the joker swung his hand down through an imaginary table and exclaimed— ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... Beaumont felt was mixed with a strange and rapid confusion of other sentiments, regret for having wasted such a quantity of contrivance and manoeuvring against an imaginary difficulty. All this arose from her too easy ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... the Imaginary Conversation of Leofric and Godiva for the exquisite first verses extant from the ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the soul are to understand and to imagine. Now the devil can do nothing in connection with either of these, because, as stated in the First Part (Q. 111, AA. 2, 3, ad 2), the devil cannot impress species on the human intellect, nor does it seem possible for him to produce imaginary species, since imaginary forms, being more spiritual, are more excellent than those which are in sensible matter, which, nevertheless, the devil is unable to produce, as is clear from what we have said in the First Part (Q. 110, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... and leaped along his way toward the right. In a flash the tempting little by-path had curled up like a scroll and disappeared from view; and then Lionel knew that it had not been real at all, but only imaginary, and he was more grateful than ever that he had not followed ...
— Dreamland • Julie M. Lippmann
... me, as he had given it. He had given it without reason; he had taken it away without cause. He had praised me for discretion and prudence when I did not merit it, and he suspected my fidelity on grounds wholly imaginary and fictitious. I concluded with assuring her that I should never forget my brother's behaviour ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... also called the d'Orleans side; and sometimes derisively, the Palais Royal. And yet, so confused, real-imaginary seems everything, 'it is doubtful,' as Mirabeau said, 'whether d'Orleans himself belong to that same d'Orleans Party.' What can be known and seen is, that his moon-visage does beam forth from that point of space. There ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... side of the giant; and then—what is this? The devotees all turned to cowering wretches! They put forth their elbows to ward off imaginary blows. They slunk back ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... internationalism that now is before us. As social consciousness widens and social relations become more intricate and more practical, national lines are not lost, but indeed become clearer. These national boundaries are not temporary or artificial or imaginary lines, for they represent and define activities and interests that engage the most fundamental and the most ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... seated in the smoking-room of an English hotel when a dog entered. He became violently agitated, so that a waiter had to bend over and whisper to him, "It's a real dog." The poor fellow was subject to a form of delirium tremens which caused him to see imaginary dogs. I fear the disease is epidemic and is on the increase. I would kindly recall the public mind to the real dog. At least, I would suggest that the other side be heard; for those who have had most to say on the subject seem to me to exhibit a one-sided habit of mind, analogous ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... called Lingua, there is a circumstance which Chetwood mentions, too curious, to be omitted here. When this play was acted at Cambridge, Oliver Cromwel performed the part of Tactus, which he felt so warmly, that it first fired his ambition, and, from the possession of an imaginary crown, he stretched his views to a real one; to accomplish which, he was content to wade through a sea of blood, and, as Mr. Gray beautifully expresses it, shut the Gates of Mercy on Mankind; the speech with which he is said to have been so ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... old navigator not to go on; every body had heard that old story; he might fall ill with the vomito pietro, and would require pills; or else there might be found a mistake in his pay account, and he would like, perhaps, to draw for the imaginary balance not due to him, and to drink his grog and scratch the remains of his old ear, or turn his attention to the load of clams waiting for him at Sandy Hook! But, for mercy's sake, don't repeat ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... Panurge than Louis XII. is Gargantua or Francis I. Pantagruel. Rabelais says what he wants, all he wants, and in the way he wants. There are no mysteries below the surface, and it is a waste of time to look for knots in a bulrush. All the historical explanations are purely imaginary, utterly without proof, and should the more emphatically be looked on as baseless and dismissed. They are radically false, and therefore ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to fly to Spain. The afterpiece is what might have been expected; an insensate desire for vengeance got hold of Ferdinand, and the last years of his life were spent in hunting down his enemies, real or imaginary. Morelli and Silvati were hung, the fugitives, Pepe and Rossaroll, were condemned to death, but this was only the beginning. The Austrian commander counselled mercy, but in this respect the King showed ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... the 25th degree of latitude, and more particularly Glasshouse and Harvey's Bays. The English government at length resolved that they would wipe off the reproach, which, as Captain Flinders observes, was not without some reason attributed to them, "that an imaginary line of more than 250 leagues of extent, in the vicinity of one of their colonies, should have been so long suffered to remain traced upon the charts, under the title of UNKNOWN COAST," and they accordingly appointed him to the command of ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... uncovered.[C] It debates these suggestions with forms and in a phraseology which imply that it is only considering what counsel to give the king. It enacts nothing—it only recommends; and it holds its existence solely at the discretion of the great imaginary power which called it into being. These forms may, very probably, soon be changed for others more true to the facts; and the principle of election may be changed, so as to make the body represent more fully the general population of the empire; but the body itself ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... each hidden cavern stored, And turns their fury on their guilty lord. Deluded prince! how is thy greatness crossed, And all the gaudy dream of empire lost, That proudly set thee on a fancied throne, And made imaginary realms thy own! 210 Thy troops that now behind the Danube join, Shall shortly seek for shelter from the Rhine, Nor find it there: surrounded with alarms, Thou hopest the assistance of the Gallic arms; The Gallic arms in safety shall advance, And crowd thy standards with the power ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Whether in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing, although that one in infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in his library, and is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating tales to an amanuensis,—to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not deemed worth any one's trouble now to take down what flows from that once brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold and capable of being coined. Yet ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... V, cap. I-II), published in 1731, Schurig discusses further the anciently recognized signs of pregnancy. The real or imaginary signs of pregnancy sought by various primitive peoples of the past and present are brought together by Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and try to straighten the evils we know something about rather than invent new ones. If we had begun on that track and tried to utilize the waste materials on strictly economical principles, perhaps by this time our methods and machinery would have been so far perfected that the real or imaginary evils of modern plumbing would not have existed. It seems a pity to throw away all we have accomplished ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... it somewhat relieves the disgust with which we read, in the criminal records, the conviction of these wretches, to be aware that many of them merited, as poisoners, suborners, and diabolical agents in secret domestic crimes, the severe fate to which they were condemned for the imaginary guilt of witchcraft. ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... mind pictured the long, lancet tooth sinking deep into the skin, and the blood pumping up. I even began to feel the hot rush of my vital fluid over my arm, and then found that I had dozed for a moment and that all my sensations were imaginary. But soon a gentle tickling became apparent, and, in spite of putting this out of my mind and with increasing doubts as to the bat being still there, the tickling continued. It changed to a tingling, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... for the real rights of their ancient colonists, the English prided themselves on protecting the imaginary rights of ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... broke and the ragged land leapt into full view with magical abruptness. It was as though Nature had grown her forest within the confines of a field embraced by an imaginary hedge. There were no outskirts, no dwindling away. It ended in one clean-cut line. And beyond lay the rampart hills, fringed and patched with disheveled bluff, split by rifts and yawning chasms. And ever they rose higher and higher as the distance ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... operated upon him. As a mortal, you are privileged to say unpleasant things, just as a child may say things to his elders with impunity which merit extreme punishment. Christian Science is all right when you are truly well—in good physical condition. It is a sure cure for imaginary troubles, but when you are really sick, it is not of Olympus, but ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... bottomlands of the river. We, Zachariah, are out here in the fertile prairie land. Our west line extends along the full length of her property. So, you see, the only thing that separates the two farms is an imaginary line no wider than your little finger, drawn by a surveyor and established by law. You will observe, my faithful fellow,—assuming that you are a faithful fellow,—that as we draw farther away from ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... nobility, formerly so powerful, cheerfully accompanied their sovereign in his wars, or, on the civil changes of the state, courted the approving smile of royality. The crafty policy of the crown had created a new and imaginary good, of which it was the exclusive dispenser. New passions and new ideas of happiness supplanted at last the rude simplicity of republican virtue. Pride gave place to vanity, true liberty to titles of Honor, a needy independence to a luxurious servitude. To oppress ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... one man at least has understood him, Walter Pater. Readers of his Imaginary Portraits need not be reminded of A Prince of Court Painters, that imaginative reconstruction of an almost obscure personality. "His words as he spoke of them [the paintings of Rubens] seemed full of a kind of rich ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... There have been too many attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to oust the jurisdiction of the King's Courts in Ireland, for this new attempt to be viewed with equanimity. The United Irish League has set up courts which try men for imaginary offences committed during the exercise of their ordinary civil rights, and pass illegal sentences and inflict illegal punishments. Under the reign of Liberal Governments the writ of these courts runs where ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... numbers who obey, the greater the chance of mutiny. Sedition is the progeny of assembly. Even where grievances may be real, if there is no contact and no discussion, there will be no insubordination; but imaginary grievances, canvassed and discussed in assembly, swell into disaffection and mutiny. When, therefore, numbers are collected together, as in the vessels of the East India service, martial law becomes indispensable; and the proof of it is, that the ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... imaginary work was there; Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles' image stood his spear, Griped in an armed hand; himself, behind, Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind: A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, Stood for ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... inhuman wishes that a ship would only come and be wrecked. How often had he watched, through sounds like these, for a minute gun! Nay, he had once actually called up poor Arnaud in the middle of the night for an imaginary signal. Redclyffe Bay was a very dangerous one; a fine place for a wreck, with its precipitous crags, its single safe landing-place, and the great Shag Stone, on the eastern side, with a whole progeny ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... calls upon them of others, and great and terrible have been those calls. The beloved king is in the best state possible for his present melancholy situation; that is, wholly free from real bodily suffering, or imaginary mental misery, for he is persuaded that he is ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... having prepared, to some extent, at least, his closing address to the jury. He has thought about this for weeks and perhaps for months. In his dreams he has formulated syllogisms and delivered them to imaginary yet obstinate talesman. He has glanced through many volumes for similes and quotations of pertinency. He has tried various arguments on his friends until he knows just how, if he succeeds in proving certain facts and the defence expected is interposed, he is going to ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... nature they out-distance the boundaries of parish and diocese, for they affect the Church as a whole. Without wishing to disparage the value of parochial and diocesan activities, we claim that the issues we have placed before our readers are not confined within the imaginary lines of the parochial unit or the boundaries of jurisdiction. They will not be met with rightly and successfully, if the Church as a unit does not agree on a uniform plan of action. For, to prevent ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... with that imaginary personage," said I, "strange as it may seem." And then I related the mishaps of the morning. For desert, we had some preserved fruit and cream, and a hearty laugh over the burnt puddings ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... without a sort of school-boy satchel at his back, containing a small hammer and other useful tools, which, it was believed, had actually carried his lesson-books years ago. All the villagers knew his strong-and-weak point, and he rarely appeared amongst them without having various stones and imaginary curiosities presented to him, particularly by the young people. Many of these stones found their way into his bag, and it was not to be wondered at that he had a somewhat round back, as he frequently carried a load upon it, that a beast of burden ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to the ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... some ingenuity to discover the cause and cure of those long and loud fits of crying, which frequently arise from imaginary apprehensions. A little boy of two years old, used to cry violently when he awoke in the middle of the night, and saw a candle in the room. It was observed that the shadow of the person who was moving about in the room frightened him, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... them over, picking out favorites here and there and excitedly extolling the merits of the imaginary properties they represented. There were the repudiated bonds of Southern states and municipalities of railroads upon whose tracks no wheel had ever turned; of factories never built except in Doc Barrows' addled brain; of companies ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... and drew imaginary circles on the floor, one small and one large, just as the boy had ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... put out the light, lest the moment I lay down some "monstrum horrendum, informfe, ingens" should blast my sight with his hellish aspect! I had a double sense of sight and sound; one real, the other visionary; both equally strong and apparently real; so that while I distinctly heard imaginary footsteps ascending the stairs, the door opening and my curtains drawn, I at the same time as plainly heard any actual sound in or outside the house, and could not remark the slightest difference between them; and while I saw an imaginary assassin standing ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... that not merely holds its insane child in its arms, but enters into the chaos of his imagination, and sees every wildest horror with which it swarms; if, I say, the conviction of such a love dawned on the disordered mind, the man would live in spite of his imaginary foes, for he would pray against them as sure of being heard as St Paul when he prayed concerning the thorn from which he was not delivered, but against which he was sustained. And who can tell how ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... Du Bellay's Olive, a collection of sonnets in praise of a half-imaginary lady, Sonnetz a la louange d'Olive, that these characteristics are most abundant. Here is ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... hadn't finished striking, and the convulsive little Hay-maker at the top of it, jerking away right and left with a scythe in front of a Moorish Palace, hadn't mowed down half an acre of imaginary grass before the Cricket ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... spiritual beauties of Mary: vol. iv. 87). I do not think that the name was "manufactured by the Arab story-tellers after the pattern of their own names (e.g. Nur al-Din or Noureddin, light of the faith, Tajeddin, crown of faith, etc.) for the use of their imaginary Christian female characters." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... brother's bride having been forcibly borne in upon him—combined possibly with the certain knowledge that the elder brother himself would be hunting all day—compelled him to stop at home and devote himself to Vera. Mr. Herbert Pryme, however, had no such excuse, real or imaginary, and yet he stands idly by the corridor window, idly, yet perfectly patiently—relieving the tedium of his position by the unexciting entertainment of softly whistling the popular airs from the "Cloches de Corneville" below ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... through the "short cut" with her, the two children used to render this with appropriate dramatic action. Emma Jane always chose to be the woodman because she had nothing to do but raise on high an imaginary axe. On the one occasion when she essayed the part of the tree's romantic protector, she represented herself as feeling "so awful foolish" that she refused to undertake it again, much to the secret delight of Rebecca, who found the woodman's role ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... carefully divided, and half had been taken! But near it lay the little memorandum-book, open, with the stick of pencil lying across it. A deep line was drawn across the page on which was recorded their imaginary extravagant gains and losses, even to the entry of Uncle Jim's half share of the claim which he had risked and lost! Underneath were hurriedly scrawled ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... journey much as a provost-marshal leading his brother to prison.[936] Now the imaginary resemblance was turned into a sad reality. On Thursday, the thirty-first of October, the Bourbons reached Orleans.[937] Their reception soon convinced them that they had placed their heads in the jaws of the lion. None of the courtiers save the cardinal, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... of the human organism. Those who do not know from actual experience the miseries of a malarious country, think only of combating the acute forms of infection, which often place the patient in danger of death. But this danger, though great, is for the most part imaginary, provided that assistance be obtained in time. But that which desolates families, and which causes a physical degradation of the human race exposed to the attacks of malaria, is the chronic poisoning, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... is the notion that the Toltecs were the originators of Yucatan culture. I hope I have said enough in the previous chapter to exorcise permanently from ancient American history these purely imaginary beings. They have served long enough as the last ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... it was that superstition was the greatest blessing which Providence, in mercy, could bestow on mankind; for it effected what the wisdom of the learned or the efforts of the active were alike unable to effect; it restrained the violence by imaginary, which was inaccessible to the force of real, terrors; and spread that protection under the shadow of the Cross, which could never have been obtained by the power of the sword. Robertson was wholly insensible to these early and inestimable blessings of the Christian faith; he has admirably ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... had come, not a quarrel, but a coolness. The two ladies did continue to see each other occasionally, but there was but little between them to console misery. Miss Altifiorla had attempted to resume her position of equality,—unreasoned and imaginary equality,—with perhaps a slight step in advance to which in their present circumstances she was entitled by their age. Cecilia cared nothing for equality, but would not consent to be held to have lost anything. ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... as spirit—or, if you will, as mind. An abandonment of the puerile concept of Him as a sort of magnified man, susceptible to the influence of preachers, or of Virgin and Saints, and yielding to their petitions, to their higher sense of justice, and to money-bought earthly ceremonies to lift an imaginary curse from His own creatures. And with it will come that wonderful consciousness of Him which I now begin to realize that Jesus must have had, a consciousness of Him as omnipotent, omnipresent good. As I to-day read the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... fear because of coming duties or trials which you cannot but anticipate? Trust God, and fear not! "Cast thy burden"—however great—"the Lord, and He will sustain thee." Experience tells us that the evils which we once most feared never came, but were purely imaginary, while the things really appointed to us were never anticipated. Let this help us to appreciate God's goodness and wisdom more in commanding us to "take no anxious thought about the morrow," because "sufficient for the day is the ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... Channels, through which several Philosophers teach, that the Sea discharges it self into the Rivers, are not only imaginary, but useless, in regard 'tis impossible for the water to rise from the Subterraneous places up to the Mountains, where commonly the Sources of ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... never given me any trouble," said Mr. Phillips, "and to my mind, Mr. Dempster, the revelations, such as I have heard at least, are very puerile and contemptible; but that there must be a singular excitement attending even an imaginary conversation with the dead I can easily believe, and I do not care for exposing ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... the Elegy that it drifts into an elegy on the writer, who becomes lost in the pathos of his own sad end. Yet, knowing the man as we do, we can understand his motives and forgive the seeming selfishness. He is not the only poet whose own sorrows, real or imaginary, were his greatest inspiration. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... special operation in the arts often show ingenuity as great as that manifested in any of our devices.[172] This ingenuity is of the same kind as that shown by many animals. Intelligent experiment, however, is not wanting. It is reported of Eskimo that they invent imaginary hard cases, such as might occur to them, and, by way of sport, discuss the proper way to deal with the case.[173] Operations similar to this in play show a mode in which ingenuity must have been ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... (interspersed liberally with tinned stuff) and drunken fish and thought and spoken and dreamt fish ever since I arrived. But don't pity me for imaginary hardships. I like fish better than I do meat, and for that matter our winter meat supply is walking past my window this minute. He goes by the name of "Billy the Ox"; and I am informed that as soon as it ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... represent the unknown proprietor, about whom there had been the liveliest speculation. The "Courier's" rivals gave much space to rumors, real and imaginary, as to the new ownership, attributing the purchase to a number of prominent politicians in rapid succession, and to syndicates that had never existed. It was an odd effect of the change in the "Courier's" ownership that almost immediately ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... power of the body will seem to be gradually drawn to an imaginary centre in the lower part of the trunk,—which simply means withdrawing superfluous tension from every part. The exercise to help establish this equilibrium is graceful, and not difficult if we take it quietly and easily, using the mind to hold a balance without effort. Raise the right ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... those on the other hand, who censured him did so because, obsessed by their hate or dread of him, they failed to eliminate their imaginary tyrant or dictator, their fixed idea of the man from consideration of the immense value and far-seeing statesmanship of his act. To such men it was but another example of the brutal and colossal selfishness of the Third-Term Candidate. For did he not welcome to his Convention ...
— The Ballotless Victim of One-Party Governments - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 16 • Archibald H. Grimke
... examples: "The circular motion is the most perfect motion," "Fire is more worthy than earth," "Ten is the perfect number." He wrote nothing, but is supposed to have said that the earth, moon, five planets, and fixed stars all revolve round the sun, which itself revolves round an imaginary central fire called the Antichthon. Copernicus in the sixteenth century claimed Pythagoras as the founder of the system which he, ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... repeated attention, especially in these climates, where strong liquors so fatally and so frequently produce those very distresses they are designed to remedy; and if I am not misinformed, even among the ladies themselves, who are truly much to be pitied. Their condition of life makes them a prey to imaginary woes, which never fail to grow up in minds unexercised and unemployed. To get rid of these, it is said, there are who betake themselves to distilled spirits. And it is not improbable they are led gradually ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... stretched out his long, slender hand, as though he were plucking out the very heart of some imaginary enemy. ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... and coo in-doors. There are many things which every fool knows, which people of sense do not know. First among these things is, "What will you have for dinner?"—a question not to be answered by detailed answers,—on the principle of the imaginary Barmacide feasts of the cook-books,—but by the results of deep principles, which underlie, indeed, the whole superficial strata of civilized life. Did not the army of the Punjaub perish, as it retreated from Ghizni to Jelalabad, not because the enemy's lances ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... gives a sketch of an imaginary comet furnished with tails of the three different types. The direction in which the comet is moving is shown by the arrow-head on the line passing through the nucleus. Bredichin concludes that the straightest of the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... force him to do anything inconsistent with his character, neither the wickedness of daring attempts nor the expectation of similar events to follow as the result of pardon. To such an extent did he refrain from inventing any imaginary conspiracy and concocting any tragedy that had not taken place, that he released even those who most openly rose against him and took arms against him and against his son, whether they were generals or heads of tribes ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... Bridge, in the neighborhood of Chelsea, I remember seeing a distant gleam of the Crystal Palace, glimmering afar in the afternoon sunshine like an imaginary structure,—an air-castle by chance descended upon earth, and resting there one instant before it vanished, as we sometimes see a soap-bubble touch unharmed on the carpet,—a thing of only momentary visibility and no substance, destined ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the nerves, being in violet; the climax of electrical action, which is soothing to the vascular system, being in blue; the climax of luminosity being in yellow; and the climax of thermism or heat being in red. This is not an imaginary division of qualities, but a real one, the flamelike red color having a principle of warmth in itself; the blue and violet, a principle of cold and electricity. Thus we have many styles of chromatic action, including progression of hues, of lights and shades, of fineness and coarseness, ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... North avoid the negroes with increasing care, in proportion as the legal barriers of separation are removed by the legislature; and why should not the same result take place in the South? In the North, the whites are deterred from intermingling with the blacks by the fear of an imaginary danger; in the South, where the danger would be real, I cannot imagine that the fear would be ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... diligently with a farm gang, though frequently dilating upon the fact of having the responsibility of the whole gang on his shoulders. On several occasions he gave evidence of being of a highly sensitive make-up, becoming readily insulted, but he always reacted to these real or imaginary insults in a mild and kind sort of way, always preferring to go out of people's way rather than retaliate. Hallucinatory disturbances ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... casuistic question would hardly ever come up at all. If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the best imaginable system of goods he would indeed have an easy task; for all demands as {202} such are prima facie respectable, and the best simply imaginary world would be one in which every demand was gratified as soon as made. Such a world would, however, have to have a physical constitution entirely different from that of the one which we inhabit. It would need not only a space, but a time, 'of n-dimensions,' to include all the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... engaged in conversation that would not brook interruption, or, perhaps, judging from what might be his own wishes in similar circumstances, he turned his back suddenly on them, and, stooping down, addressed himself to an imaginary creature ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... pour forth long disjointed rhapsodies, wild speculations, hopes, and misgivings; his mood changing from solemn to gay, and round through gusty passion to morbid gloom. But never did he address his words to Nurse so much as to himself or to some imaginary interlocutor; and she for her part never answered him a syllable, but sat in silence through it all. Yet was she ever alert to listen, and sometimes the subdued trembling would come on and the obstruction of breath. But when the talker, in mid-excitement of speech, snatched his violin and ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the ends solid and shaping them. A different and very buoyant timber, according to him, was used for the out-rigger. This boy had travelled. He had seen the canoes further north as well as those of New Guinea, and it was found on investigation that his description of the local craft was quite imaginary. Captain Philip P. King, who came hither from Sydney in 1818, anchoring at Goold Island, thus describes the canoe of the period—"Their canoes were not more than five feet long, and generally too small for two people; two small strips of bark five or six inches square ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... just passed, every word, every look; she finished by persuading herself, that his calmness was affected, that the best method she could possibly take was by a show of resistance to bully him out of his indifference. She little knew what she hazarded; when the danger of losing her husband's love was imaginary, and solely of her own creating, it affected her in the most violent manner; but now that the peril was real and imminent, she was ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... artist can be born. But they come to us in such a rainbow of glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in comparison. We were all artists; almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were happy! But art, of whatever nature, is a kind mistress; and though these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness, others succeed, graver and more substantial; the symptoms change, the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this: and, in his confessed forgeries, failed to invent anything? Would not the fertility of his genius have hurried him into fresh developments, and characteristic details, appropriate to the imaginary correspondent whom he addresses? These considerations may seem a mere leaning on 'internal evidence,' and 'literary instinct,' broken reeds. But the case is buttressed by the long and, on any theory, purposeless ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... of rings are numerous and, as a matter of course, founded on imaginary qualities. Thus the wedding ring rubbing upon that little abscess called the stye, which is frequently seen on the tarsi of the eyes, is said to remove it. Certain rings are worn as talismans, either ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... advancing and moving, it is impossible to imagine happiness. It cannot dwell where, as Plato says, continual Becoming and never Being is all that takes place. First of all, no man is happy; he strives his whole life long after imaginary happiness, which he seldom attains, and if he does, then it is only to be disillusioned; and as a rule he is shipwrecked in the end and enters the harbour dismasted. Then it is all the same whether he has been happy or unhappy in a life which was made up of a merely ever-changing ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... visit Niagara fifteen times before I succeeded in getting my imaginary Falls gauged to the actuality and could begin to sanely and wholesomely wonder at them for what they were, not what I had expected them to be. When I first approached them it was with my face lifted toward the sky, for I thought I was going to see ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is, which (for the use and benefit which these and the like exotics afford us) I would take hold of, as upon all occasions I do in this work: Namely, to encourage all imaginary industry of such as travel foreign countries, and especially gentlemen who have concerns in our American plantations, to promote the culture of such plants and trees (especially timber) as may yet add to those ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... human being with his ups and downs of patience and temper and passion. But, bless his battered old soul, you love him none the less for all that. You no longer fret about him being unco guid, and you comfortably give up trying to match his imaginary virtues with your own. You still love him, but you love him differently. There's a touch of pity in your respect for him, a mellowing compassion, a little of the eternal mother mixed up with the eternal sweetheart. And if you are wise you will no longer demand ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... statement, properly understood, corresponds to a simple logical canon too often neglected in historical and political reasonings. It means, I take it, in the first place, that every man is a product as well as a producer; that there is no such thing as the imaginary individual with fixed properties, whom theorists are apt to take for granted as the base of their reasoning; that no man or group of men is intelligible without taking into account the mass of instincts transmitted through ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... foolish," Peter Ruff said. "You are harboring a grievance against me which is purely an imaginary one. Now listen to the facts. You employ your wife—which after all, Dory, I think, was not quite the straight thing—to try and track down a young man named Spencer Fitzgerald, who was formerly, in a small way, a client of mine. I find your wife an agreeable companion—we become friends. Then I ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the President may learn, through the only medium by which his elevated station admits approach, that those evils which were anticipated from his election, have not proved to be imaginary, and that the advantages by some expected to result from it, have not yet become apparent. It may be right also to state, that whilst many of the inconveniences, which have been experienced by the President ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... Bell. 'I have made the getting into a hammock a study. I first open it very wide at the top with both hands; then, holding it in that position, I gracefully revolve my body from left to right as upon an imaginary swivel; meantime I raise my right foot considerably from mother earth, with a view to passing it over the hammock's edge. Every move is calculated, you perceive, and produces its own share of the perfect result; the method is the same that Rachel used in rehearsing ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin |
