"Impractical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fully aware that as far as we know this is the only scientific system evolved up to date, also that there are a number of breeders of the American dog who maintain that this is an absolute impossibility, that breeding for color is as absurd as it is impractical, but we can assure these honest doubters that we have blazed a trail, and all they now have to do is simply to follow instructions and ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... the gutter says, "I'll never reach it." And he is right. He never will—of himself, alone. Yet that's truth, true truth. "A hopeless case" you say; "utter impractical idealizing! Case ruled out of court." Just wait, that's only half the case, and not ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... kindly feeling toward these unsophisticated representatives of by-gone days. They were so simple, impractical, and unsuspecting. He was glad that he happened not to have a gold brick or a block of that western Bad Boy Silver Mine stock along with him. He would have disliked to unload on people he liked so well as he did these; but there are some temptations ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... erudition, while his mind had a tendency, in the midst of a variety of inconsistent doctrines, to leave the conclusion undetermined. He brought everything to a practical standard; he admired the exalted purity of stoical morality, but he feared that it was impractical. He believed in the existence of one supreme creator, in his spiritual nature, and the immortality of the soul; but his belief was rather the result of instinctive conviction, than of proof ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... moods, and now dreams." He seated himself comfortably at her feet. "You would cause me to believe you a most impractical person, Miss Naida." ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... brought to understand that successful politics demands a "machine." Each of its individual members is a boss. They have been derisively termed "goo-goos," which is a contraction of "goody-goods." They are youthful, sanguine, patriotic, impertinent, impractical and self-sufficient. Their idea of conducting a campaign is nebulous. They believe that a number of voluble young men, clad irreproachably in evening dress and touring the city in carts after nightfall, ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... impulse, though impractical, was shared by all his comrades. For the moment the destruction of the grass became secondary to the rescue of the trapped tankmen. If field headquarters had bustled before, it now turned into a veritable beehive, with officers shouting, exhorting, complaining, and men running backwards and ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... how some things happen in the nick of time. Father sent me the money, but told me to try to be as practical as possible, knowing I am given to doing impractical things; and I took it to Miss Polk, and nobody but she and I know where it came from. And then she invited Mrs. Stafford to be a guest of the hospital for a month. I happened to be at the house when the note came. I thought it best to be ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... purpose tonight to outline a scheme of self-education, which if consistently followed out I am sure will help you, though I am aware that to a certain order of mind it will seem highly mystical and impractical. If it commends itself to your favor ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... bother a mayor, not to help the woolen-goods business. There was old Hon. Calvin Dow, a pensioner of David Morrison, now passed on to the considerately befriending Stewart, and Mac Tavish was deeply disgusted with a man who was so impractical in his business affairs that, though he had been financially busted for ten years, he still kept along in the bland belief, based on Stewart's assurances, that money was due him from the Morrisons. Whenever Mac Tavish went to the safe, obeying Stewart's word, ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... (1795-1854).—Poet, b. at Berlin, Conn., was a precocious child, and a morbid and impractical, though versatile man, with a fatal facility in writing verse on all manner of subjects and in nearly every known metre. His sentimentalism appealed to a wide circle, but his was one of the tapers which were extinguished by Lowell. He had also a reputation ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... had led eighteen hundred years ago. I thought that if I took the example of the Saviour's life for my guiding star, I would certainly get along very well. Undoubtedly this would have sufficed in a spiritual sense, but I found that it would be impractical as applied to my temporal welfare and the requirements of the present time. For I could not perform miracles nor could I live as the Saviour had done, roaming over the country and teaching the natives. And then, ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... banker's receipt for two hundred pounds, placed to the credit of Miss Swancourt, which the impractical girl had totally forgotten she carried ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... that come with the higher awakening, have been dealt with somewhat fully, to show that the matters along the lines of man's interior, intuitive, spiritual, thought, soul life, instead of being, as they are so many times regarded, merely indefinite, sentimental, or impractical, are, on the contrary, powerfully, omnipotently real, and are of all practical things in the world the most practical, and, in the truest and deepest sense, the only truly practical things there ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... not grudge the hardship, for he carried on his back a bulky bundle of clothes for Lovin Child; enough to last the winter through, and some to spare; a woman would have laughed at some of the things he chose: impractical, dainty garments that Bud could not launder properly to save his life. But there were little really truly overalls, in which Lovin Child promptly developed a strut that delighted the men and earned him the title of Old Prospector. And there were little shirts and ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... addresses he puts aside the materialistic dreams of the social reformer as impractical ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... I was the first to introduce rifles into Ceylon, which were then regarded by the highest authorities in the island as impractical innovations, too difficult to sight, whereas an ordinary gun could be used with ball more quickly in taking ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... telephone he had entirely neglected his school of vocal physiology, which was now abandoned. Georgie Sanders and Mabel Hubbard were his only pupils. Though Sanders and Hubbard were genuinely interested in Bell and his work, they felt that he was impractical, and were especially convinced that his experiments with the ear and its imitations were entirely useless. They believed that the electrical telegraph alone presented possibilities, and they told Bell that ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... in those delicious days that followed, I wandered down Sixth Avenue to New York's then most correct shops, buying clothes and clothes and clothes. I bought practical and impractical gifts for the twins back in Wisconsin and for all the family and those good friends who had ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... Barrington Erle, from whose hands he feared to accept even the gift of a vote. Parliamentary hermits were distasteful to him, and dwellers in political caves were regarded by him with aversion as being either knavish or impractical. With a good Conservative opponent he could shake hands almost as readily as with a good Whig ally; but the man who was neither flesh nor fowl was odious to him. According to his theory of parliamentary government, ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... reflected, as he leaned back in his chair and tossed aside his pen; "there, that is foolish enough to satisfy even my impractical small kinswoman, bless her! A thousand dollars isn't much, but it's—a thousand dollars; and when I double it by another thousand, which has never been buried by any ancient ancestress, it makes a tidy sum for a foundling lad. Poor ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... the Himalayas." My suggestion one day to Dwarka Prasad, the young son of our landlord in Bareilly, fell on unsympathetic ears. He revealed my plan to my elder brother, who had just arrived to see Father. Instead of laughing lightly over this impractical scheme of a small boy, Ananta made it a definite point ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... demands of the previous day, still slept on. That strain in him which had made his maternal ancestors gentlemen-adventurers in Tudor times, and cavaliers in the days of Charles the First, and Jacobites with James the Second, and roysterers with George the Fourth—loyal, swashbuckling, and impractical, daring, dashing, lovable, absurd, bound to come to grief one day or another, as they had come—that strain lying dormant, Ashley was free to wake in the spirit of the manufacturer of brushes. In other words he woke in alarm. It was very real alarm. It was ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... like Ellis," reproved his father. "Boyee, I don't want you to get too much under his influence. He's an impractical will-o'-the-wisp chaser. Just ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and nights poor Alora constantly planned an escape, only to abandon every idea she conceived as foolish and impractical. She looked forward to fifty days of this life with horror and believed she would go mad if forced to endure her confinement ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... the practical or impractical suggestions implied in the quotation above, which is from the last paragraph of Thoreau's Village, is the same transcendental theme of "innate goodness." For this reason there must be no limitation except that which will free ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... fellows out of an entering bunch of six hundred, and developing the thing each is best fitted for, father steps in and the boy who would have made a first-class professor is put into business and blamed for being impractical. The fellow who has been handling thousands of dollars in college management and running twenty assistants—the man who could have taken the place—has no father to give him the boost necessary, and the other man's failure has queered his chances. He has to go to work as a mere clerk ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... you here alone with these cutthroats, and you certainly can't venture into the jungle with me; yet someone must go in search of your father. He is more than apt to wandering off aimlessly, regardless of danger or direction, and Mr. Philander is only a trifle less impractical than he. You will pardon my bluntness, but our lives are all in jeopardy here, and when we get your father back something must be done to impress upon him the dangers to which he exposes you as well ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... animals with their own rank diseases, or cut out other animals' organs, or kill and dissect them, hoping thus to learn how to offset their neglect of themselves. Conditions among them will be such that this will really be necessary. Few besides impractical sentimentalists will therefore oppose it. But the idea will be to gain health by legerdemain, by a trick, instead of by taking the trouble to ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... impulsive seventeen-year-old girl, who is suddenly required to fill her mother's place at the head of a household, with a literary, impractical father to manage. ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... intellectual activity, Douglas was not a reader. I had found Emerson through Abigail; I read the North American Review, and Cooper's novels as they appeared. But Douglas had contempt for the moral idealism of New England. He thought it impractical. "You can't have a brain without a body," said Douglas. "Let the country develop its bones, its muscles, attain its stature. These men think the world is run by righteousness, especially if you let them prescribe the righteousness. But it isn't. It is run by interests. Roofs, clothing, and food ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... time in talking about it," he told the grateful members who sought to press his hands. "Go home and organize. I've got your name. Get your neighbours into line, and keep me informed. I'll pay for the postage-stamps. I'm no impractical reformer, and if we're going to do this thing, we'll have ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I convinced her that she was smarter than I was—then she threw me over. Said I was critical and impractical, you know. ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... that impractical librarian," she declared. "Why did Dorothy marry him? She might have known what the ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Brown laid down cast-iron rules for punctuation, but most of them have been broken long since and thrown into the junk-heap of disuse. They were too rigid, too strict, went so much into minutiae, that they were more or less impractical to apply to ordinary composition. The manner of language, of style and of expression has considerably changed since then, the old abstruse complex sentence with its hidden meanings has been relegated to the shade, there is little of prolixity or long-drawn-out phrases, ambiguity of expression ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... accorded me certain pecuniary assistance as to their publication—though I must admit that to accept it of you was very distasteful to me. Ah!" Felix Kennaston cried, with a quick lift of speech, "impractical child that I am, I had not thought of that! My love had caused me to forget the great barrier that ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... It is impractical for the manufacturers to make complete foundation drawings, as they are not familiar with the lay-out of pipes and the relative position of other apparatus in the station. All that the manufacturers' drawing is intended to do is to show the customer where it will be necessary ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins |
